craving a doppleganger /deconstructing me

We often overestimate the degree to which exploitative behavior has been normalized and the degree to which we’ve internalized these norms. It takes, then, a commitment to an acutely self-conscious practice to be able to think and behave better than we’ve been taught.

Toni Cade Bambara quoted in bell hooks’s Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem

My mother has repeatedly said the following to me:
We are subject to an enormous amount of prejudice and discrimination in this society. We are fat, black, women and Muslim. Girl we got it bad.

She typically ends this statement with a boisterous laughter. A laughter that cuts through the enormity and profundity of her statement. We usually continue on with whatever activity we are engaged in- walking the park or preparing a meal. My mother speaks the truth.

I have spent most of my life fighting a simultaneous battle against a gross hypervisibility and a painful invisibility. In the case of the former, I struggle to not let my fat blackness be reduced to the banal, the painful, the stereotype. As for the latter, I struggle to find a coherent voice even if no one will listen.

I assert that I am not mammy. Large bossomed and only built to absorb and reflect the hopes and passions of those deemed more desirable. A bellow of deep throated chuckles that mask and evade. Never really speaking. Never really heard, either.

Yet, I do tend to nurture those around me -sometimes compulsively. I do often retreat behind my laughter. Sometimes I hide so much I cannot locate myself.

I assert that I am not asexual. Even when I am wearing a scarf that hides my hair, long sleeves down to my wrist or a skirt hem that falls to the ankle. I breathe sex. I make love with so much intensity that walls shake. I can imagine things that would make you blush. I can do things that “nice girls” shouldn’t do.

Yet, sometimes I loathe my belly swinging like a pendulum-even as it is caressed. And I confess I have only shared this part of myself with one man. And I question if chastity wasn’t enforced by the fat phobic zombies that policed my youth or dictated by religious code would I have played it this safe?

What daring choice have I made after all?

What bravery is there in such contradictions?

It is sometimes lonely standing here. It is sometimes liberating touching all of these contours of a self-always becoming.