When Words Have Curves: What Cardi B. Taught Me About Me

About 9 months ago, I fell in love. It came out of nowhere. I certainly wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t looking for it…as these things go, it just sort of happened. When I heard the first lyrics from the opening track from Cardi B’s debut album Invasion of Privacy, I immediately fell in love with her.

Now my love was secret at first. Cardi hardly seems like the likely object of a 40-something lawyer/preacher/chaplain/mommy club founder’s affection. It is an incongruent pairing at the least. Crude and flat out inappropriate at best. I was afraid to let folks know. I was conflicted. It was a love that I didn’t quite understand myself, but the more I listened, the deeper it grew. Cardi, a 25 year-old, Dominican-American former stripper from the Bronx, New York, had captivated me.

Her flow, her delivery wasn’t smooth. In fact each word seemed to tumble forward with a kind of in your face awkwardness that gave her an undeniable power. Her word choices, clever, but not sleek or refined;they were full-bodied and curvaceous…sexy even. I never watch those lover and hip hop sagas on the cable “music” stations so I didn’t know her. Apparently her curves were one of her claims to fame. I had never seen her before I heard that opening track, but her rhythmic, curvaceous flow introduced her appropriately. I saw her before I saw her.

She sounded unlike anyone I’d ever heard. Lyrically, not complex. Content, wise but not deep, not pretentious. But her voice carried her story so fluidly, so effortlessly through my car speakers, I was hooked.

“I look myself in the mirror/say we gone win/you knock me down 9 times and I get up 10,” she rapped. My head nodding rhythmically in agreement.

“I like provin’ niggas wrong/I do what they say I can’t,” my head nodding.

“If I see you I don’t speak/that means I don’t fuck witchu,” my arms swaying.

“Be careful with me/my heart is like a package with a fragile label on it/be careful with me,” I sang. And I nodded. And I sang. And at one point, I caught tears forming in the corners of my eyes. And it was at that point that I realized what Cardi B. meant to me.

I realized why I was so in love, so drawn in to these full-bodied lyrics laid over simple beats. I realized why my unforeseen love had formed so quickly and drilled itself so deeply into me. Cardi wasn't singing my life experience with her lyrics but her lyrics were the shape of my life. All my life I'd been curvy, full bodied...and ashamed. The older I have gotten, the more I realize that what's beautiful is the truth. What's true is that that as a curvy woman, I am beautiful. My story, the words that tell the world who I am, bend and curve to form the complex contours of my self-hood. My curves tell stories.

I fell in love with Cardi B.because she is a storyteller; one who tells her truth without regard for who likes it and who doesn't. One whose voice is undeniable. Those curvaceous, full-bodied lyrics that seemed to sometimes almost stumble from her lips didn’t flow slickly or smoothly because they were all pieces of her truth – and truth isn’t sleek or smooth; it’s weighty and has rough edges. Even the truth we tell about seemingly shallow stuff. Listening to that weighty truth tumble forward from her lips was a gift. It helped me fall boldly in love with the rough edges, the hard spots, in the incongruent lines and the imperfections in my own story; in my own body. Through Cardi I began to understand what it means to embrace both the raw parts of who I am and the refined parts. The spirit warrior and the intellectual. The South Side and the Suburbs. The curves and the curls. I fell in love with Cardi B. because Cardi B. helped me to fall in love with me. All of me.

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