Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (31 page)

The old mantra “You can never be too rich, or too thin” may have been associated with the excessive eighties, but some of that ideal still holds true today. Obesity is associated with poverty and in our society, poverty is not pretty. Being ghetto-fabulous is all about going from rags to riches. It includes having the money, house(s), car(s), clothes and throngs of high-maintenance women at your disposal. An ironic twist to the American Dream, considering many of these rappers claim to have attained their wealth not with a Puritan work ethic but through illegal activity.

Overweight women of color aren’t included in these videos because they aren’t seen as ghetto-fabulous, just ghetto (Not that I’m waiting for the day when
all
women can wash rappers’ cars in cutoffs with twelve of their girlfriends, but you get the picture). Talented comedienne Mo’nique, star of UPN’s
The Parkers,
is representative of this idea. She is a full-figured woman whose character, Nikki, has a crush on a black, upwardly mobile college professor who lives in her apartment building. Through his eyes she’s seen as uncouth and out of control. For the audience her sexual advances are funny because she’s loud, overweight and can’t take a hint. He squirms away from her at every turn and into the arms of some slim model-type.

The professor in
The Parkers
views Nikki the same way that many middle-class people view overweight people, greedy and out of control. Instead, we get to see it through a black lens—ghetto women with no class, talking loud, wearing bright colors and tight clothes. I’m sure in true sitcom fashion, the professor and Nikki will eventually get together, but well after we’ve had our fun at Nikki’s expense.

For the past few years a popular black R&B radio station in Washington, D.C., has a contest where they give away free plastic surgery every summer. You know, to get ready for thong season. Needless to say, the average contestant is a woman. At first it was just breast implants and reductions, but now they’ve expanded to liposuction and even pectoral implants for the men. That hasn’t had much impact on the demographics of the participants. Despite the expanded offerings, the contestant pool remains overwhelmingly female. In order to win the “prize” you have to send in a letter, basically pouring out all of your insecurities to get the DJs to see why you need the surgery more than the other contestants do. Sick, isn’t it? Anyone who thinks that black women are oblivious to body insecurities needs to listen to some of these letters, which by the way pour in by the thousands. The one thing they have in common is that all the women really want to “feel better about themselves.” Even in this black middle-class metropolis, somewhere these women got the idea that plastic surgery is the way to go. Clearly, it is not just white America telling them this.

Sexism has played a starring role in every facet of popular culture, with men by and large determining what shows up on TV and in the movies, and the fact is that they’ve fallen for it, too. I have male friends and relatives who buy into these unrealistic beauty ideals and feel no shame in letting me know where they think I stack up, so to speak. Just yesterday, for example, my grandfather decided to make it his business to know how much weight I had gained in the past few months. Now I’m old enough and secure enough to know that his and other men’s comments have nothing to do with me, with who I am. But growing up, these comments shaped the way I saw myself.

 

I’ve consciously decided to treat my body better by not being obsessed with diet and exercise and not comparing myself to anyone (including my former self). When I’m eating well and exercising regularly, I’m usually in the size 12 to 14 range. This is OK with me, but I know for a fact that this is another place where many white women and I don’t connect. As much as we get praised for loving our full bodies, many young white women would rather be dead than wear a size 14. They nod their heads and say how great it is that we black women can embrace our curves, but they don’t want to look like us. They don’t adopt our presumably more generous beauty ideals. White women have even told me how lucky black women are that our men love and accept our bodies the way they are. I’ve never heard a white woman say that she’s going to take her cue from black women and gain a few pounds, however. In a way it is patronizing, because they’re basically saying, “It’s OK for you to be fat, but not me. You’re black. You’re different.”

In this society we have completely demonized fat. How many times have you had to tell a friend of yours that she isn’t fat? How many times has she had to tell you the same thing? Obviously, when people have unrealistic perceptions of themselves it should not go unnoticed, but in this act, while we are reassuring our friends, we put down every woman who is overweight. The demonization of fat and the ease of associating black women with fat exposes yet another opportunity for racism.

If we really want to start talking more honestly about all women’s relationships with our bodies, we need to start asking the right questions. Just because women of color aren’t expressing their body dissatisfaction in the same way as heterosexual, middle-class white women, it doesn’t mean that everything is hunky-dory and we should just move on. If we are so sure that images of rail-thin fashion models, actresses and video chicks have contributed to white girls’ poor body image, why aren’t we addressing the half-naked black female bodies that have replaced the half-naked white female bodies on MTV? Even though young black women slip through the cracks from time to time, I still believe that feminism is about understanding the intersections of all forms of oppression. It only works when we all speak up and make sure that our voices are heard. I don’t plan to wait any longer to include young women of color in a larger discussion of body image.

 

 

Patricia Justine Tumang

 

 

 

 

 

Jamila May Joseph is the name of my biracial daughter who was never born. She has dark brown crescent half-moons for eyes and a fiery tongue like her mother. Like her black Kenyan father, her skin is the color of midnight sky. She crawls toward me on the knotted rug and smiles briefly, exposing two white knobs for teeth. Her spirit talks to me in waking dreams. I see her grow up. She learns how to walk and utters her first words. Whispering “Mama” into my ears, she rejoices in love, forgiving me again and again. Sometimes I stop seeing her, a blank space of clarity replacing memories unmade. I look in the corners and underneath the pillows. I call her name but only hear the faint gurgling of wind. I remember then that she is dead, a bloody mass of tissue flushed down the toilet. The abortion was an act of desperation. The malicious guilt never brings her back.
Nasaan ka anak ko?
Where are you, my daughter?

The name Jamila means “beautiful” in Arabic. During my senior year of college I studied abroad in Kenya for five months. While learning about Islam, Swahili civilization and Kenyan culture, I became pregnant. George, my lover, was a Methodist black Kenyan—a rarity for the predominantly Muslim population on the Kenyan coast. I met him at a small guesthouse in Lamu where he worked as a houseboy.

When I returned to New York City after the program ended, I was nearly two months pregnant and had no financial means to support a child. My first intention was to keep it, so I told my middle-class Filipino mother about the pregnancy and she threatened to withdraw her financial support. I was in a bind—emotionally, spiritually and financially. I was in a spiritual turmoil, not because of my parent’s Catholic beliefs, but rather because I felt connected to the baby’s spirit. However, I could not envision myself giving up the middle-class privileges I grew up with to become a single mother and work two jobs while finishing school.

My mother and I fought about it constantly. She wanted me to finish my education without the burden and the responsibilities of raising a child at my age. I couldn’t believe that my devoutly Catholic, Filipino mother was urging me to have an abortion. Several months after it was done, my mother revealed to me that she was pro-choice. She equated the idea of pro-choice with pro-abortion, but I understood what she was saying. I was not in a position to have the baby.

My mother never spoke to me about sexuality when I was a little girl, let alone the topic of abortion, and it was assumed I was heterosexual. When at twenty-one I came out to her as bisexual, she immediately dismissed me. “What do you mean,” she asked, “that you are bisexual and that you are attracted to women? That’s not natural!” Because she perceived heterosexuality as inherent to my sexuality, she never lost hope that someday I would meet the perfect man and reproduce for our namesake. But a poor black man from Kenya was not what she had in mind.

When I got my first period at the age of eleven, no one talked to me about my body and its development. Instead, my family made jokes about the female children and their impending womanhood. When my younger cousins and I had our first periods, we became the center of jokes at family reunions. Tita Leti, my father’s cousin, embarrassed us during Christmas time by giving us gift-wrapped boxes of little girls’ underwear. Decorated with kittens or puppies on pink or yellow cotton, my cousin Vinci and I dreaded the thought of wearing them. Periods, we reasoned, were a sign that we were women. Tita Leti joked with our parents, “Now you have to watch out and make sure they close their legs like good girls!” We cringed at their laughter, yet it was only in these jokes that sexuality, always in heterosexual terms, was ever hinted at.

I learned about sexual development from school textbooks and discussed it with my high-school female friends, all of whom were Filipino and straight. We talked the topic of heterosexual sex to death, and had unprotected sex with men. Many of my friends became pregnant and had abortions, though they didn’t speak about it. They were perfect Asian girls, they couldn’t. They acted calm, collected and recovered. Until I experienced it myself, I didn’t realize how much the silence burned my insides and that I too was in denial about the trauma.

My own model minority expectations influenced my decision to have an abortion. I wasn’t sure I could cope with my family and society’s prejudices against my half-black child. To me, being the model minority daughter meant assimilating, speaking perfect English, adhering to a middle-class lifestyle and establishing a successful career after college. Not being heterosexual, having a biracial baby and being a single mother were not a part of these expectations. Having internalized my parents’ expectations and the United States’s views on what a model minority is, I felt even more pressure to have an abortion. Not having any financial help from my mother pushed me to my final decision. I took the RU-486 pill and hoped the worst would be over.

For the next couple of weeks I endured a living nightmare. The first dosage of Mifeprex, a medication that blocks a hormone needed for a pregnancy to continue, was given to me in pill form at the clinic. When I got home, I inserted four tablets of Misoprostol vaginally. These two medications combined to terminate the pregnancy non-surgically. Heavy bleeding for up to two weeks was expected.

I didn’t realize the horrible truth of that statement until I lay awake at night in fits of unbearable pain, bleeding through sanitary napkins by the hour. When I was in the bathroom one night, clumps of bloody tissue and fetal remains fell into the toilet. I was overcome with tremors, my body shaking with a burst of heat resembling fever. My cheeks flushed as sweat bled into my hairline. Dragging my feet on the cold alabaster floor, I went back to bed and hid under the covers. Eyes open and bloodshot, knees to my chest, I felt tears sting my swollen cheeks. After hours of pure exhaustion, I finally fell asleep.

Returning to the clinic several days later for a scheduled follow-up, I learned that the gestational sac was still intact. The doctor gave me another dose of Mifeprex and Misoprostol. That night, I stared in horror as a clump of tissue the size of a baseball escaped from my body. I held the bloody mass in my hand, feeling the watery red liquid drip from my fingers. The tissue was soft and pliable. Poking at the flesh, I imagined the life that it embodied. The sac looked like a bleeding pig’s heart. For several months after, I couldn’t look at the sight of blood without vomiting.

As I was going through this experience, I remembered the subtitled Asian movies from my childhood that featured abortion scenes. In these films the Asian female characters drank exotic herbal concoctions to terminate their pregnancies, then jumped up and down on the stairs. Scenes showed their mothers holding their hands while their fetuses became detached. In one film, a woman in desperation took a hanger and mutilated her body, plunging rusty wires into her uterus. “Did that really happen?” I now wondered. Where were those young Asian women bleeding to death? Were they real? Were they alive? How did they heal from such a trauma? Watching these images, I wondered if I could heal from my experience. Was I alone?

Deciding to have an abortion was the hardest decision I have ever made. I made it alone. Without my mother’s support and in George’s absence, I felt I couldn’t have a child. George was very supportive despite his pro-life Christian views. Communicating over sporadic e-mail messages and long-distance telephone calls, he said he valued my safety and understood the reality of our situation. For a moment, however, I imagined what it would be like if I could marry my poor Kenyan lover and bring him to the United States to be a family. The “American Dream.” George would work at a deli or be the black security guard on campus while I finished college and attained a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies with a path in Race, Ethnicity and Post-colonialism. I would engage him in a postmodern discourse on the white supremacist patriarchy of America and the productions of multiculturalism in the media and art, while he brought home his minimum-wage salary. Our daughter would live in a world that would exoticize and tokenize her for her kinky hair, brown skin, Asian eyes and multilingual tongue. What does it mean that I had the capability of giving birth to new possibilities but chose to bleed her away?

I thought of my mother. A young, vibrant and hopeful Filipina immigrant who came to America many years ago, determined to make a decent living in the land of “equal opportunity.” She was twenty-two years old when she gave birth to me. I was twenty-two and bleeding away. Feeling utterly dehumanized, my body an unrecognizable, grotesque monster spitting out blood, I wondered about the possibility of spiritual rebirth from experiences of trauma and dehumanization. I thought of loss and survival and what this means for many of us raised in immigrant families from “developing” countries. I thought of my parents’ transition from being working-class to middle-class and remembered clearly the losses we paid for assimilating into a racist culture. Society gave us capital for becoming model minorities yet systematically berated us because of our differences. We lost our mother tongue and shed our rich cultural histories as we ate hamburgers and spoke English like “true Americans.”

During this time I longed to read writings by women of color for inspiration. I scanned the libraries and searched on-line for feminist narratives written by women of color on abortion and found none. Most of what I did find documented the political history of abortion, as it impacts the lives of white women. A friend suggested I read Alice Walker’s
In Search Of Our Mother’s Gardens.
Choking on tears, I read about Walker’s abortion in the mid-1960s when she returned to the United States from a trip to Africa. She had been a senior in college and discovered that she was pregnant, alone and penniless. Thinking of Walker’s time, when safe and legal abortions were a privilege, I counted my blessings and buried my pain into the depths of me, far from eyes that see, to a solitary place where whispers mingle and collide in silence.

In the culture of silence that was pervasive in my Filipino household, children—particularly little girls—were not allowed to speak unless spoken to. I learned at an early age the art of keeping silent. I knew to keep quiet when my father’s expression became stern and a hardened thin line formed on his forehead like a frowning wrinkle. All the pains, the joys and the heartaches of my life festered inside me, creating gaping wounds between the silences. My tongue was a well, containing words fit to burst and flood the Pacific Ocean. Yet only English came out. In short. And polite. Sentences. At home and abroad we sang in English, raged in English, loved and dreamed in English.

As a child I found unexplainable joy in singing Tagalog songs that I had learned by listening to my parents’ Filipino audio tapes given to us by visiting relatives. They were played only on special occasions. Although I couldn’t understand a word, I sang unabashedly. The act of singing Tagalog was dangerous and daring. Rooted in a desperate aching to speak a language other than English, I felt like a mischievous child stealing a cookie from the forbidden cookie jar, and I slowly savored every bite. In this hunger I realized the power of voice even while I couldn’t speak. At a later age I realized writing was another way to emerge from the silence into a place of healing.

I looked to writing as a means for what black feminist writer bell hooks has termed “self-recovery.” I wrote for survival about the physical and emotional abuse I experienced as a child in a sexist household. And later, I wrote to recover from my traumatic abortion. I found strength in the words of Alice Walker, Cherríe Moraga, Nellie Wong, Audre Lorde, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Angela Davis and Mitsuye Yamada. I read until my vision was a blur. The battles and writings of these women inspired me to heal. I too wanted to break the silence.

 

When considering abortion options, my friends in New York encouraged me to take RU-486. They told me it would be easier, a quieter trauma. Finding information on the pill wasn’t difficult. It was introduced to the American market in September 2000 but had been available in Europe for many years. I conducted research on-line and realized I had to make a quick decision. It was only prescribed to women fewer than seven weeks pregnant and I was a budding eight weeks then. RU-486 appealed to me because it had an efficiency rate of 99 percent and was non-surgical. I contacted a small primary health-care clinic in Brooklyn that offered the pill for women pregnant up to nine weeks. It was the same price as a surgical abortion and was advertised as “less traumatic.” According to my research, RU-486 was given commendable reviews by women who had tried it.

If I had known how traumatic my experience with the pill would be, I would have opted for the surgical method. Not that it would have been less disturbing, but anything would have been better than the three weeks of horrendous bleeding and cramping I endured. My friends’ support helped me through the difficult moments, but those who had urged me to take the pill had known nothing about it. Those who had had surgical abortions just thought the pill would be “easier” by comparison. The doctor who had prescribed me the pill told me that although she had never taken it, she had heard that the procedure was only slightly uncomfortable. I had no adequate aftercare or education about the side effects, except what was written in small print on the pamphlets. My doctor had informed me that all the information I needed to know was right there. I felt so terrifyingly alone in the process.

Much of the pro-life debate in the United States has centered on the protection of life. Not just any life, but the lives of white babies. My baby wasn’t white. Reproductive rights are not just white women’s issues. When I researched abortion costs at various clinics in New York, I found that only a few provide a sliding-scale option. The
Roe v. Wade
decision granted the right to abortion but not the access. The time has more than arrived to discuss the racism, classism, homophobia and heterosexism of some doctors and clinicians regarding abortion and health-care. I align myself with the pro-choice movement, but that does not mean I advocate abortion. Instead, I believe women of all backgrounds should have the right to a clean and safe abortion by a licensed practitioner if that is their choice.