HEAVY BURDEN -- Essence Magazine
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mercifulserpentHEAVY BURDEN -- Rosemary L. Bray
Is there a woman among us who is not haunted by how society tells her she should look? The reality is that the thin `ideal' body is a myth. Who come in all sizes, and our true beauty shows only when we cherish ourselves. Here a writer comes to terms with that simple truth
One summer afternoon when I was about 11, my parents took us kids to the 57th Street Beach. Quiet as it's kept, Chicago has lots of public beaches, and we went often when I was a child. I couldn't swim--still can't--but I liked splashing around with my brothers and sister and lying in the hot sun.
This particular afternoon I had gotten out of the water, but I couldn't find my towel. As I was rubbing my eyes, someone offered to lend me one. It was a boy, maybe 17 years old, dark-skinned and friendly I took his towel and wined my eyes, and I would have talked to him except my father was suddenly there, snatching his towel from my hands and chasing the boy away. I was embarrassed. I heard my mother say that the boy meant no harm, that both of us were just kids. And my father answered, low and angry, that I looked grown. I remember being afraid then, and terribly ashamed. I didn't know what I was ashamed of, I just knew I was ashamed.
Those feelings have never left me. I buried the body that frightened and shamed me, and I've kept it buried for years under the hundreds of pounds I have gained and lost and regained, under the bags and boxes and cans of food eaten in secret and in public. I have dieted, and I have refused to diet. I have mutilated my body with surgery and starved myself in hospitals. I have weighed and measured food with scientific precision. I have eaten food I could not even remember chewing. There were days I wanted to die because I felt disgusting and ugly. There were days I wanted to die because I couldn't bear the idea of being fat my entire life. There is probably something I haven't done out of rejection of my body, but I would be hard-pressed to remember what I've missed.
And so l write this article because I am tired of being ashamed all the time. Tired of having the way I think I look become the major factor in whether or not I'm having a good day. I am weary from all those years of pretending I wasn't hurt when some one decided I didnt "look right." I am angry about all those times when being fat made me absolutely invisible, especially to men. And I am tired of the refrain that runs through my head like a Billboard: "Now if only I were thin, life really would be perfect."
In most magazine articles, this is the part of the story where I'm supposed to reveal the miracle curt, tell you about the day when I finally "got it." This is my cue to tell you the things I did, and the food I ate to become thin and glamorous and acceptable at last. This is the time for me to launch into the pep talk about taking control of your life and getting rid of the weight that's killing you.
But I can't do that. I've lost some weight and kept off about 30 pounds, but at 205 pounds I'm not thin by any stretch of the imagination. And I can't reveal tile miracle cure, in part because I'm not "cured," and because my weight is the very least of the issues at stake. The real issues--for me and probably for you--have everything to do with how we feel (as opposed to how we often pretend to feel), with who we are as women in general and as African-American women in particular. The bottom-line question is: Can I be the person I really am and survive? And the bottom-line answer for today is: I don't know.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie's grandmother warns her that Black women "are the mules of the world." I remember reading that line, noddling with the recognition of all essential truth, then moving on. But my mind has come back to that phrase a hundred times. If the body is metaphor on some level, and if we often express physically what we can't or won't express in other ways, then it is no woder that an estimated 35 percent of Black women between the ages of 22 and 44, and half of us between 44 and 55, weigh more than the charts say we should. When you consider how many Black women are raising children alone and how gleefully social commentators lay every problem Black children have at the feet of their drained and exhausted mothers; when you think about the disproportionate number of us who are poor and have no idea what having enough means, you begin to get a sense of the emotional weight we carry.
Dr. Lalita Kaul is a nutritionist and associate professor of community health and family practice at the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. She has spent more than a dozen years working with clinically obese Black women--women whose weight exceeds recommended guide lines by more than 20 percent. Many of these women have health problems that are not caused by obesity but are exacerbated by it. These are women who they would feel better if they lost weight, she says, hut who face internal and external obstacles. The neighbor they live in aren't noted for their well-stocked super markets or their safe brightly lit streets.
Exercise is very important for these women Kaul says. "Walking is the best exercise for many of them; it doesn't take any special equipment it doesn't cost anything. But many of the the women in my clinic are afraid to walk outside. The neighborhoods they live are too dangerous to walk around in." So she tells them to walk around their apartments If they are young women, she encourages them to turn on the radio and dance and some of them do, but many of them don't.
Yet there are many of us are not poor who understand the idea of abundance, who are not in a daily war with the most virulent forms of racism and sexism. Yet don't we, too, carry burdens? Those of us working in near isolation, bearing the responsibility of race as we step into our offices each day--we have a lot of weight to carry. Those of us living with the daily pressure of making a mistake, the need to pick our fights and bite our tongues--we have a lot of weight to carry.
Those of us with the often pleasurable tasks of caring for someone we we love, of being wanted and needed by someone, also have a lot of weight to carry. Black women have assumed so much responsibility in this culture I often wonder how we can still stand up. Who and what supports us? In truth, it is most likely food that sustains us. Even when we turn to those supports most traditional for us--on families, ours churches, one another--much of that very system of support revolves around the preparation and sharing of food
I am beginning to believe as I ponder all this for myself that Black women are public property, to be shaped and moldded and curtailed and expanded at will. We are forever working, loving, volunteering, scolding, nurturing and organizing--but nearly always for others. And we do all this not because we are stupid or mindless or weak, but because we are human, and because there is no one the planet who does not want to feel they belong somewhere even if that somewhere is the wrong place.
So we act as seemingly endless sources of strenght, wellsprings of endless love, towering symbols ol patience and outrageous endurance--and soothe our overtaxed selves with food. At the same time, we torture ours bodies to meet a standard of beauty that is genetically unnatural for all a few women. Some of us are just contrary, enraged by the intrusion of society, the demand that we look a particular way, so we turn to our rage inward absorbing it with food.
Kim Chernin is a writer and the author of The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (Harper and Row). At one time anorexic herself, she found her way back to a normal relationship with food and has since become a counselor to other women with eating disorders. Her personal history is an interesting one: A native of New York and the daughter of Russian Jews, Chernin grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. "It was mostly Black, and later partly Japanese; we were among the few white families that remained there," she remembers.
Her ideas about body image and acceptance as a child and young adault were typical of those found in Black communities of the 1950s: Women's bodies were substantial. They had breast and hips and curves and softness. But Black communities were becoming increasingly atypical in their attitudes toward the female body. And Chernin's own eating disorder began at age 17--precisely the time at which she left her old home and her old friends.
Chernin herself sees a real similarity between "the images of disgust" that pepper racial hatred and the negative images of fat women. "A lot of the imagery of disgust has to do with body disgust: They--whoever `they' are--smell, they're dirty, they're lazy and self-indulgent," Chernin says. "This culture feels the same way about large women. Poor people are seen that way by those on an aristocratic level." And Black people have been seen that way by many whites for hundreds of years.
So imagine what it is like, then, to be a fat Black woman--to be, all at once, three of the worst things you can be in contemporary American culture. Something Kim Chernin said stuck in my mind: "The further you experience yourself as being outside of the culture, the more terrible you feel." And it is gradually becoming clear to me that I am immensely hungry for much more than food. I am hungry for the things all of us are really hungry for: hungry to be truly seen and known, hungry to be accepted the way I am. There may be no more difficult desire for an African-American woman to fulfill.
Big Black women are the caricature of excess. We are just too much to be tolerated, so excessive that we should be hidden, kept from view, trotted out only to be laughed at. And that is a contagious attitude, an attitude that makes every woman who hates her body a little more filled with self-hatred, a little more disgusted, a little more intolerant of herself. I realize now that I tolerate a level of disrespect from people about being fat that I would never, ever permit about being Black or female. It is a tolerance born of shame, an undercurrent so pervasive that I have trouble even typing the word fat.
Some of my struggle is clearly cultural and political. But some of it is personal, an endless need to prove myself worthy of being on the planet. I am excellent at the silent rebellion of self-sabotage. I developed my skill at this long ago, in response to an angry and intrusive father to whom, as I grew to womanhood, I must have seemed like a visitor from another planet. It's clear to me now that my blossoming body frightened him; in time it frightened me. And as I gained weight steadily in each year of high school, his verbal and physical abuse of me increased. I could not keep him from hitting me, from calling me names, from threatening to kill me. But to eat and to gain weight was both an act of protection and rebellion.
How long before I acknowledged that I was a woman who can't help taking up space in the world, and that my choices now must center on how to do that other than doing it physically? How long before I learned to separate what is my problem and what is the world's problem'? How long before I could own all my complicated feelings about everything in my life without eating to cover them over?
I am still learning all these things.
When I am by myself, feeling lonely or sad or tired, I long for the illusionary perfection of the thin life. I can still be persuaded, when I'm not in my right mind, that thin people are happier, prettier, more focused, more balanced. At those moments I can still be persuaded that thin people have richer lives, that they're better people than I am.
But that is the wounded me. And I am learning, at last, to love and care for her as best I can. I am trying to stop her, the way you grab a child headed for a hot stove. Sometimes the pain of life makes her ravenous, and I watch her eat, and I worry about both of us. And sometimes I can calm her, remove her from the fray, look after her until she is stronger. These days, the two of us are in grudging negotiation, after years and years of war with food and with each other. For today, there is no miracle. For today, we are simply standing watch, biding our time until peace breaks out.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
~~~~~~~~
By ROSEMARY L. BRAY
Rosemary L. Bray, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, is completing a book of essays on African-American identity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright of Essence is the property of Essence. The copyright in an individual article may be maintained by the author in certain cases. Content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Source: Essence, Jan1992, Vol. 22 Issue 9, p52, 4p
Is there a woman among us who is not haunted by how society tells her she should look? The reality is that the thin `ideal' body is a myth. Who come in all sizes, and our true beauty shows only when we cherish ourselves. Here a writer comes to terms with that simple truth
One summer afternoon when I was about 11, my parents took us kids to the 57th Street Beach. Quiet as it's kept, Chicago has lots of public beaches, and we went often when I was a child. I couldn't swim--still can't--but I liked splashing around with my brothers and sister and lying in the hot sun.
This particular afternoon I had gotten out of the water, but I couldn't find my towel. As I was rubbing my eyes, someone offered to lend me one. It was a boy, maybe 17 years old, dark-skinned and friendly I took his towel and wined my eyes, and I would have talked to him except my father was suddenly there, snatching his towel from my hands and chasing the boy away. I was embarrassed. I heard my mother say that the boy meant no harm, that both of us were just kids. And my father answered, low and angry, that I looked grown. I remember being afraid then, and terribly ashamed. I didn't know what I was ashamed of, I just knew I was ashamed.
Those feelings have never left me. I buried the body that frightened and shamed me, and I've kept it buried for years under the hundreds of pounds I have gained and lost and regained, under the bags and boxes and cans of food eaten in secret and in public. I have dieted, and I have refused to diet. I have mutilated my body with surgery and starved myself in hospitals. I have weighed and measured food with scientific precision. I have eaten food I could not even remember chewing. There were days I wanted to die because I felt disgusting and ugly. There were days I wanted to die because I couldn't bear the idea of being fat my entire life. There is probably something I haven't done out of rejection of my body, but I would be hard-pressed to remember what I've missed.
And so l write this article because I am tired of being ashamed all the time. Tired of having the way I think I look become the major factor in whether or not I'm having a good day. I am weary from all those years of pretending I wasn't hurt when some one decided I didnt "look right." I am angry about all those times when being fat made me absolutely invisible, especially to men. And I am tired of the refrain that runs through my head like a Billboard: "Now if only I were thin, life really would be perfect."
In most magazine articles, this is the part of the story where I'm supposed to reveal the miracle curt, tell you about the day when I finally "got it." This is my cue to tell you the things I did, and the food I ate to become thin and glamorous and acceptable at last. This is the time for me to launch into the pep talk about taking control of your life and getting rid of the weight that's killing you.
But I can't do that. I've lost some weight and kept off about 30 pounds, but at 205 pounds I'm not thin by any stretch of the imagination. And I can't reveal tile miracle cure, in part because I'm not "cured," and because my weight is the very least of the issues at stake. The real issues--for me and probably for you--have everything to do with how we feel (as opposed to how we often pretend to feel), with who we are as women in general and as African-American women in particular. The bottom-line question is: Can I be the person I really am and survive? And the bottom-line answer for today is: I don't know.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie's grandmother warns her that Black women "are the mules of the world." I remember reading that line, noddling with the recognition of all essential truth, then moving on. But my mind has come back to that phrase a hundred times. If the body is metaphor on some level, and if we often express physically what we can't or won't express in other ways, then it is no woder that an estimated 35 percent of Black women between the ages of 22 and 44, and half of us between 44 and 55, weigh more than the charts say we should. When you consider how many Black women are raising children alone and how gleefully social commentators lay every problem Black children have at the feet of their drained and exhausted mothers; when you think about the disproportionate number of us who are poor and have no idea what having enough means, you begin to get a sense of the emotional weight we carry.
Dr. Lalita Kaul is a nutritionist and associate professor of community health and family practice at the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. She has spent more than a dozen years working with clinically obese Black women--women whose weight exceeds recommended guide lines by more than 20 percent. Many of these women have health problems that are not caused by obesity but are exacerbated by it. These are women who they would feel better if they lost weight, she says, hut who face internal and external obstacles. The neighbor they live in aren't noted for their well-stocked super markets or their safe brightly lit streets.
Exercise is very important for these women Kaul says. "Walking is the best exercise for many of them; it doesn't take any special equipment it doesn't cost anything. But many of the the women in my clinic are afraid to walk outside. The neighborhoods they live are too dangerous to walk around in." So she tells them to walk around their apartments If they are young women, she encourages them to turn on the radio and dance and some of them do, but many of them don't.
Yet there are many of us are not poor who understand the idea of abundance, who are not in a daily war with the most virulent forms of racism and sexism. Yet don't we, too, carry burdens? Those of us working in near isolation, bearing the responsibility of race as we step into our offices each day--we have a lot of weight to carry. Those of us living with the daily pressure of making a mistake, the need to pick our fights and bite our tongues--we have a lot of weight to carry.
Those of us with the often pleasurable tasks of caring for someone we we love, of being wanted and needed by someone, also have a lot of weight to carry. Black women have assumed so much responsibility in this culture I often wonder how we can still stand up. Who and what supports us? In truth, it is most likely food that sustains us. Even when we turn to those supports most traditional for us--on families, ours churches, one another--much of that very system of support revolves around the preparation and sharing of food
I am beginning to believe as I ponder all this for myself that Black women are public property, to be shaped and moldded and curtailed and expanded at will. We are forever working, loving, volunteering, scolding, nurturing and organizing--but nearly always for others. And we do all this not because we are stupid or mindless or weak, but because we are human, and because there is no one the planet who does not want to feel they belong somewhere even if that somewhere is the wrong place.
So we act as seemingly endless sources of strenght, wellsprings of endless love, towering symbols ol patience and outrageous endurance--and soothe our overtaxed selves with food. At the same time, we torture ours bodies to meet a standard of beauty that is genetically unnatural for all a few women. Some of us are just contrary, enraged by the intrusion of society, the demand that we look a particular way, so we turn to our rage inward absorbing it with food.
Kim Chernin is a writer and the author of The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (Harper and Row). At one time anorexic herself, she found her way back to a normal relationship with food and has since become a counselor to other women with eating disorders. Her personal history is an interesting one: A native of New York and the daughter of Russian Jews, Chernin grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. "It was mostly Black, and later partly Japanese; we were among the few white families that remained there," she remembers.
Her ideas about body image and acceptance as a child and young adault were typical of those found in Black communities of the 1950s: Women's bodies were substantial. They had breast and hips and curves and softness. But Black communities were becoming increasingly atypical in their attitudes toward the female body. And Chernin's own eating disorder began at age 17--precisely the time at which she left her old home and her old friends.
Chernin herself sees a real similarity between "the images of disgust" that pepper racial hatred and the negative images of fat women. "A lot of the imagery of disgust has to do with body disgust: They--whoever `they' are--smell, they're dirty, they're lazy and self-indulgent," Chernin says. "This culture feels the same way about large women. Poor people are seen that way by those on an aristocratic level." And Black people have been seen that way by many whites for hundreds of years.
So imagine what it is like, then, to be a fat Black woman--to be, all at once, three of the worst things you can be in contemporary American culture. Something Kim Chernin said stuck in my mind: "The further you experience yourself as being outside of the culture, the more terrible you feel." And it is gradually becoming clear to me that I am immensely hungry for much more than food. I am hungry for the things all of us are really hungry for: hungry to be truly seen and known, hungry to be accepted the way I am. There may be no more difficult desire for an African-American woman to fulfill.
Big Black women are the caricature of excess. We are just too much to be tolerated, so excessive that we should be hidden, kept from view, trotted out only to be laughed at. And that is a contagious attitude, an attitude that makes every woman who hates her body a little more filled with self-hatred, a little more disgusted, a little more intolerant of herself. I realize now that I tolerate a level of disrespect from people about being fat that I would never, ever permit about being Black or female. It is a tolerance born of shame, an undercurrent so pervasive that I have trouble even typing the word fat.
Some of my struggle is clearly cultural and political. But some of it is personal, an endless need to prove myself worthy of being on the planet. I am excellent at the silent rebellion of self-sabotage. I developed my skill at this long ago, in response to an angry and intrusive father to whom, as I grew to womanhood, I must have seemed like a visitor from another planet. It's clear to me now that my blossoming body frightened him; in time it frightened me. And as I gained weight steadily in each year of high school, his verbal and physical abuse of me increased. I could not keep him from hitting me, from calling me names, from threatening to kill me. But to eat and to gain weight was both an act of protection and rebellion.
How long before I acknowledged that I was a woman who can't help taking up space in the world, and that my choices now must center on how to do that other than doing it physically? How long before I learned to separate what is my problem and what is the world's problem'? How long before I could own all my complicated feelings about everything in my life without eating to cover them over?
I am still learning all these things.
When I am by myself, feeling lonely or sad or tired, I long for the illusionary perfection of the thin life. I can still be persuaded, when I'm not in my right mind, that thin people are happier, prettier, more focused, more balanced. At those moments I can still be persuaded that thin people have richer lives, that they're better people than I am.
But that is the wounded me. And I am learning, at last, to love and care for her as best I can. I am trying to stop her, the way you grab a child headed for a hot stove. Sometimes the pain of life makes her ravenous, and I watch her eat, and I worry about both of us. And sometimes I can calm her, remove her from the fray, look after her until she is stronger. These days, the two of us are in grudging negotiation, after years and years of war with food and with each other. For today, there is no miracle. For today, we are simply standing watch, biding our time until peace breaks out.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
~~~~~~~~
By ROSEMARY L. BRAY
Rosemary L. Bray, an editor of The New York Times Book Review, is completing a book of essays on African-American identity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright of Essence is the property of Essence. The copyright in an individual article may be maintained by the author in certain cases. Content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Source: Essence, Jan1992, Vol. 22 Issue 9, p52, 4p
