on the ill na na tattoo on my thigh
By Shaina Phenix
“They [Foxy Brown and Lil Kim] were just everything I did not feel I had the space to be. At 23 years old, I did not have the space to say, ‘I will f--k the shit out of you.’ I didn’t have the space to say that and own that, and not care about what anyone had to say about it. That was for a different type of woman to say, not women like me, not women who were supposed to go to the right schools and marry the right man—and have the right job.”
— Aliya S. King
Today, my best friend and I—painted in bikini tops and short-shorts—sipping frozen margaritas from Styrofoam cups, lift our denim flaps, expose the sun-licked, pussy-parallel thigh meat. The guy with the needle asks what we’d like there, in unison we thrust our bulky bottoms towards him, we hymn, ill na na, like church mothers might, steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus! He lets out a small giggle and a jubilant, “okayyyy,” approves, gloves his warm cinnamon fists, and prepares a needle for each thigh.
I should tell you a few truths—
we had been drinking, we had synthesized what other black inks we’d etch onto our skins, we were saying, “protect your magic,” or other things about healing and bodies. We were scantily-clad, bikini tops for shirts, and reeking of a freedom fruit that spoils only in black girl pH. We sashayed loudly through Fort Lauderdale streets sprinkled in sand from the beach just five-hundred feet away, spewing possible tattoo options, first jokingly with Lil Kim’s “I used to be scared of the dick,” and “queen bitch, supreme bitch.” Finally, in front of the tattoo shop, I suggest “Ill Na Na” to which we both burst into laughter and acknowledge my suggestion as the last leg of our playful live lyric shuffling that had begun on our walk. Like a switch lifted up, something in us both clicked. We fell silent and pensive. It got heavy—the asking we were doing of our mouths. We granted ourselves permission to engrave in our skin the raw and sex-soaked languages of women the likes of Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, who for us, tasted like what liberation for Black femme bodies might be in a utopic America. Women—whose languages I can’t say that we had always tasted in this way—now finding permanent homes in stencil font on the highest, meatiest chunks of our thighs; the skin closest to our pussies.
I first heard both Foxy Brown and Lil Kim in my mother’s living room. My mother, my host of play, and real aunties could rap you through any song either of these women had ever written. They were a coven of Black women so full with sound and wide hips, scared of seemingly nothing at all, feened after amongst the men, and probably women too, all through Harlem. (And I say coven to mean tight-knit group of magical, sexually liberated women who met often in my mother’s living room for blunts, fuzzy navel slush brimming with Bacardi, fried-fish, and spaghetti before the club — because of everything I’ll say here about my mother and these women—mentions of witchcraft might be the only thing they’ll indubitably clutch their pearls at, because for the most part they love Jesus. ) And still, to cookout outs and group ski trips, my mother and the rest of the coven wore their fitted spray-painted t-shirts, tagged with the letters “FGG.” In those moments, when I was able to bear witness to their getting ready processes, I’d ask what the acronym stood for, the origins of the group, its other members. They’d snicker, look goofily at one another, and ooze that it stood for “Friends God Gave.” I later found out that FGG had a double meaning—which was fitting for the mosaic of women who’d gather at my mother’s house. “FGG” was one part, “Friends God Gave,” and one part “Fuck‘Em Good Girls.”
Two things I thought I’d never admit: I was fucking terrified of these women and their gall to be so loudly alive. As a tween sporting sun-smacked skin, awkwardly moving through her body—its shape and its inability to protect itself from unwanted attention and touch, I thought these women dirty. I thought Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, my mother, and all of my play aunties were asking a world for things on behalf of us all without woman-girl-wide consultations first. I thought them women who made men or boys or just people who were stronger than us sex-crazed and lusting after us little girls in house shorts and training bras. I thought nothing safe came of waving the wet, hot, and snatchable earth in the middle of me around like a flag.
These women weren’t afraid of their pussies. My mother yielded her fleshy axis like mango trees in spring. For a long time, I wanted to be like anything but my mother—for a long time I didn’t want to be if I had to be if I had to with Black skin and pussy.
At 25, my best friend Toni and I drunkenly call my mother on Facetime, in a tattoo parlor, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to inform her of our new skin scribbles. My mother lightly chuckles at the stenciled “Ill Na Na” on my thigh. My mother’s chuckle says, “I love you, crazy girls, you remind me of myself at your age, you deserve this happy, this free.” At 25, I thank God that my mother is mine. I do this often; sometimes very loudly. I recognize here that girls wish for mothers like mine—unapologetic in a glory that society never truly recognizes for Black women, giving no fucks what anyone believes about what she has shaped into a kind of life, smiling, cackling, smoking her weed, worshipping her God, and alive. And what a gorgeous model to have. At 25—my mother was, Toni and I are—the women with space to say, “I’ll fuck the shit out of you,” and “I’ll do it good.” We get the degrees, get the jobs, get the loves—all at once.
My ex-lover once told me that I always make things deep— “everything is not that deep, Shaina,” she’d taunt. And I mean maybe, but I’m a poet and by definition, shit is always deep. I tell her about the tattoo, to which she responds, “that’s ratchet.” To which I want to say as I always want to say to her— “who the fuck asked you?” And I don’t—instead, I came to this essay to reclaim the-many-times-taken body that I exist in by proclaiming a term coined by Inga Marchand, better known as Foxy Brown, that I undoubtedly have some of the best pussy on the planet and all that other volatile shit could not shift or shake that out of me. In the way that I do make things “deep” this reclamation is less about what is between my legs; more about my overall existence being an alchemic, deity-ordained existence. Almost not about sex at all, even if that was the entry point, to remind me always of who the fuck I am and am not. “Ill Na Na” does the same work for me as India Arie’s, “I am not my hair,” and “Private Party,” as Mary J Blige’s “Just Fine,” as Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything,” and (somebody's church granny is going to pray for me for this) even Vickie Winans’ “Long as I Got King Jesus.”
In the song “Ill Na Na,” Method man petitions a beat against Brown’s periodic grunt—who got the illest pussy on the planet? And if we know nothing, we know Brown likely acrylic nail magic wand waved between her near-jet thighs using Method’s query as the invocation prayer for a spell she’d cast on Black and budding bad bitches anywhere. Have you ever seen the women entranced underneath strobe lights, shrining the meeting spaces adorned beneath the sequin mini dress? Ain't it like a church revival?
Everyday—naked and shea-buttered—I peek at this tiny proclamation on my thigh, carry my best friend in it, my mother and play aunties in it, Foxy, Kim, all the Black femme bodies who have loved me into life—all there—rapping—Love thyself with no one above thee, cause ain't nobody gon' love me like me, it’s the Ill Na Na.
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About Shaina Phenix
Phenix is a queer, Black femme poet, educator, and Virginia Tech MFA poetry candidate from Harlem, New York. Before pursuing her MFA, she taught middle and high school humanities for three years. She is—her work is—obsessed with and possessed by many sounds of black and femme existences, the passing down of stories, ocean, the body, mothering, acts of loving, and home(s). She has poems in Crooked Arrow Press, West Branch Wired, Glass, DIALOGIST and Puerto del Sol.