I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder

A courtesan would receive years of training in literature, etiquette, dance and music before she was

allowed to make her first public appearance. Courtesans have played quite a huge role in enriching

our country’s traditions in music and art, you know. And sexuality – that too was considered an art,

an ancient art…”

What did it mean for the courtesans to have to make themselves available to the colonizer? To lay

their bodies open to sex, to medical inspection, to laws? And all this to keep the military virile and

marching towards the expansion of Empire! What happened to the women afterwards, that’s what I

want to know! In fact, I don’t think it was very different from slavery in America – Black women

eroticized, abused, discarded. No, the real story must have been far, far worse. Before the British,

after the British.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Let those who love me follow me'Cora Pearl, on being the very first person to dye her hair red in 1864

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.