Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed

  I know. That’s ridiculous. I wish I could say that I heard some sound bite of Hillary saying something profound, but I can’t. What I can say is that six-year-old Julie was infatuated with headbands and Hillary Clinton seemed to be a fan, too. Not only that, but the color and texture of her hair appeared to be identical to my mother’s hair, the same hair I’d spent hours running my stubby little fingers through. Neither of those are very good reasons to pledge devotion to someone, especially politically, but I do believe it was the reason that on the morning of my classroom’s mock election I found myself voting for a Clinton. Just not the one on the ballot.

  I’d like to say that one single moment turned me into the politically obsessed Thanksgiving-dinner-ruining monster that I am today, but I think that my love for politics was somehow more subtle, yet simultaneously fated, than that.

  Because beneath all that is one enduring thing: my body. My fatness.

  Before I move on, I should say: people often cringe when I use the word “fat.” Please understand that when I say I’m fat, I’m not insulting or demeaning myself, but am instead merely using the word as a descriptor. I love my body and am thankful for all the ways it serves me. Me calling my body fat is no different from saying someone else is tall or freckled. Or that Hillary Clinton has blond hair!

  That said, we live in a world where very clear messages have been sent about the kinds of bodies that we are allowed to have. I can barely even check my e-mail in the morning without seeing a thin, white woman on the Internet telling me how I should look and live and strive to be. I can’t look through the popular search page on Instagram without seeing what my #bodygoals should be, and Pinterest is just a breeding ground for thigh-gap obsessions. But my body has never been what is considered acceptable.

  In high school, I was never a very good student or much of a reader, but I was definitely fat and I was also a total theater kid. 100 percent show trash. Whether I was doing tech on a show, stage-managing, rounding out the chorus, or playing a leading role, you could find me with either my high school theater crew or backstage at one of my local community theaters. The theater world was a safe haven for me to come to terms with my body in a really honest way and to also make connections with other people who felt like they didn’t quite fit for whatever reason.

  But few things are ever exclusively good or exclusively bad, so theater came with its own issues. My main beef, however, was this: fat girls are almost exclusively cast in one of two roles, which meant my options were either the maternal figure or the unruly homeless woman. And this was fine . . . for a while. But by my senior year, I was exasperated with my limited options and had pretty much resigned myself to only doing costumes for shows, because when I did get a big role with some serious lines or even my own song, I had most definitely been cast as one of those two archetypes.

  I didn’t pick up writing until much later, and now looking back, it all makes sense that this is where I’ve ultimately ended—creating my own stories. But at the time I was tired of being everyone else’s supporting cast in everyone else’s shows, when in real life I had always been the main character of my own story. What was even more difficult for me to understand was that my high school drama teacher was a fat woman and always had been. If anyone knew how much it sucked to never be the girl in a show who gets to fall in love or go on an adventure, it was her.

  It all came crashing down for me when my high school put on the play that my drama teacher had written herself. I won’t lie; it was totally cheesy and self-indulgent on her part, but when it comes to the spotlight, High School Julie was like a cat in a patch of sunlight—totally and blissfully relaxed. If there were ever a play where I could win the role of the leading lady, this would be it. I mean, my teacher—a fellow fatty!—wrote the damn thing. There was no predetermined standard here like there were with other shows like Annie or The Sound of Music. This was my moment. I was sure of it.

  To be honest, in my real life, I always did everything I could to buck against the stereotypes of the fat girl. That was for lots of different reasons—some of them really good and some of them really bad. But for the purpose of this essay, you should know that I had all kinds of friends and had gone on dates and adventures. The life I’d lived thus far did not reflect any fictional fat girl I had ever come across. So I knew from firsthand experience that the fat experience could be so much more than the aging matriarch or the panhandling woman on the corner.

  But my fat drama teacher, who had lived so much of my struggle and more, cast me as the grandmother—the only woman onstage whom the audience could possibly forgive for being fat because she already had one foot in the grave anyway.

  I took the role. And I cried. I cried for a whole weekend, and then after the show was over, I stopped auditioning for school plays and musicals. And then eventually I stopped auditioning for anything at all.

  It took me a while to find my way back to the arts—in the form of writing—but when I did, I knew one thing for sure: after years of crash dieting all through high school and college, I wasn’t changing for the world. The world would have to change for me.

  Over the years I’ve discovered there’s something about fat bodies that really pisses people off. That anger manifests itself in many ways. Sometimes it’s a silent sneer. Sometimes it’s a comment on the Internet. Sometimes it’s things that don’t even feel like anger at first. Like when I’m eating a salad—because, SURPRISE, fat people can enjoy “healthy” food—and someone tells me what a good job I’m doing or how proud they are of me. Or when someone tells me how brave I am to love myself or to wear a swimsuit in public. (Because how dare I have the audacity, right?) But every once in a while it really is someone acting as a plain old-fashioned bully. Like when I’m on a plane and some jerk says just loud enough for me to hear that he hopes he won’t be so misfortunate as to have to sit next to me.

  When I really think back to the why and how of what got me so political in the first place, it always comes back to this: my fat body gave me no choice in the matter. The reason why society—men especially—are so easily upset by fatness is because it’s a giant (no pun intended!) middle finger to every dude who thinks that the female body exists for nothing less than the male gaze (or dude eye candy if you’re not familiar with that phrase). It’s a blatant and unapologetic reminder that female bodies do not exist for the sole purpose of male pleasure.

  Something about being fat made me loud. I think there are a couple different tendencies when you’re fat—some days we wake up and think we can conquer the world, and other days we feel like the “before” picture from a weight loss commercial. But most often my tendency is to be loud. Not loud in an obnoxious way, but in a way that guarantees I’m heard. Sometimes I’m loud out of anger or passion or even just self-preservation. Regardless of my motivation, I gathered pretty early on in life that people were looking at me, and so I decided that if they were looking at me, I might as well make them listen, too.

  The problem is I’m still figuring out what I want to say. I’m still learning all the ways the color of my skin gives me privilege and how that privilege will always overrule the other parts of myself, like the size of my body or my bisexuality, that might define me as other. I’m learning that acknowledging my privilege as a white lady means understanding that just because something is not a problem for me does not mean it is not a problem. I know that the best way for me to use my privilege is to examine the ways it intersects with someone else’s oppression. So when I get loud about being fat, I am sure to make room for women to be loud about being fat and Black or Asian or Muslim or whatever other thing makes them different. And sometimes being loud means knowing when to be quiet. Sometimes it means sitting back and listening to the experiences and needs of others around you.

  I think that in every person’s life there is a pivotal world moment that defines before and after. For a lot of people I know, that moment was 9/11, or for others the war in Iraq. For my dad it was the Nixon administration
. For my mom it was Woodstock. (Yes, my mom was at Woodstock. Yes, the stories are amazing.) And for me I think that moment will always be the 2016 election. The results of that election forced me to closely examine my life up until that point and to also decide how I would move through the world from that moment on.

  I’m a pessimist by choice. Choosing to always expect the worst-case scenario protects me in many ways. I’m a prickly grouch who cares too much about almost everything and cries out of anger and explodes inside any time someone tries to comfort me. So trust me when I say it’s always best if I’m prepared for the worst.

  But the 2016 election defied all logic for me. Donald Trump was too outrageous—too orange!—to ever be a real contender. And he was running against Hillary! Headband-wearing Hillary, who is by no means perfect but felt like the type of person who always turned in her homework early and didn’t even need to use the book during an open-book test. Those sound like ideal presidential qualities if you ask me, but maybe smart women make people uncomfortable for the same reason fat ladies do.

  I was shocked on November 8, 2016. (Which unfortunately also happened to be my thirty-first birthday. Boo.) I barely slept for days. I dreaded traveling for work that weekend. I felt betrayed by this country—a country I loved despite her many flaws. Suddenly America was an ugly place.

  Except that nothing about America’s ugliness was sudden. The only sudden thing about it was my realization.

  Here is my truth: I am a fat, white, bisexual, cis lady in a hetero relationship. I’d always thought parts of my identity demanded that I be political, that I had no choice. And to an extent that was true. My fatness made me loud. Like many others, I spent the months leading up to the election being very loud. But I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t hearing when friends of color told me that Trump was nominated for a reason. Enough Americans believed in his vision of America for that to be the case. I wasn’t listening when people said that white women were choosing their race over their sex in the ballot box. I wasn’t listening.

  In the weeks after the election, liberals everywhere took turns pointing fingers at one another, searching for the root cause of this catastrophe. I took a few days to be sad and mourn the fact that HRC, my headband-wearing problematic fave, will most likely never see her dream come true. I licked my wounds, but not for long. Instead I’ve spent most my post-2016-Election-Day time calling my representatives and being more active than ever before, because if this is the reality many Americans have always lived with, then my ignorance has made me complicit. Most of all, though, I’m listening. I’m making room for voices that aren’t always white or cis or hetero. Because my resistance is intersectional or it is not at all.

  Since the election and as of the writing of this essay, there have been lots of protests happening across the country and in return lots of media coverage. And because fat jokes are low-hanging fruit, there have been endless comments from media outlets, pundits, and even lawmakers about how Trump got more fat women walking in one day (the day of the Women’s March) than Michelle Obama did in eight years. (Side note: The first lady is always put in charge of the “war on obesity.” That nonsense is another essay for another day.)

  When I saw those jokes crop up, I sighed. Business as usual. Fat ladies. We’re used to being the butt of the joke. Then I thought back to what had made me such a political person to begin with. My body. My fat body. My big fat middle finger to the patriarchy. And I could not have been prouder.

  Things are happening. Conversations are turning into action. We, as a country, are being forced to look at our own reflection in a way many of us never have before. It’s uncomfortable and it hurts. And if some dumbass people on the Internet want to say that a whole bunch of fat ladies led the charge, well, then count me among them.

  MYTH MAKING: IN THE WAKE OF HARDSHIP

  Somaiya Daud

  When I was six, my sister and I got into an argument about what (who?) we were. I can’t remember which sides of the argument we fell on but that the options seemed to be Black or Arab (we’re not Arab). In an effort to have it decided once and for all, we turned to our father. His response has stuck with me my entire life: “Those things don’t matter,” he said. “You’re Muslim.”

  * * *

  Identity is a tricky thing when it’s something that matters, when your conception of self is built around it, whether it’s hidden or slapped onto your skin for people to comment on and react to. When I was a child, I wanted the easy answer—I am this or this, not both, and certainly not three things; categories aren’t messy; history is a straightforward narrative arc with no steps back or sideways; how you look and act matches who you are or who people expect you to be. But the older I got, the more the lines blurred, the more I realized there’s not really a hierarchy of identity but a strange constellation within myself. Some stars shone brighter than others depending on where I was or who I was with, and some are pole stars and no matter what happens, they don’t change.

  “Writer” is not an identity, or rather, not an identity in the ways that “Black,” “Moroccan,” and “Muslim” are. But it’s always been a deeply embedded part of me, impossible to separate from the ways I see the world and engage with it. I wrote a collection of alliterative poetry in the fourth grade and never really looked back.1 After that I wrote wherever I was, no matter the circumstance. I sketched out stories for my kid cousins, wrote poetry (of the angsty lovesick variety) all through high school, experimented with most forms of prose (short story, novella, fan fiction), and in my senior year of high school started a novel I never finished. When people ask me what I write now, I say, “Spec fic. Only.” As a high schooler I wasn’t so rigid. I wrote contemporary short stories in verse, fantasy, and science fiction, and there was a short six-month window when I tried to be a graphic artist.2

  When my mother realized I was writing, she was ecstatic. Above all she wanted me to be a doctor (and in that, I only half disappointed; being a doctor of philosophy is better than not being a doctor at all), but her family had a strong literary tradition. When I was eighteen she asked me why I hadn’t tried to get anything I’d written published. By then I was a “Writer,” capital W. When people said “Oh, you’re a writer?” I’d beam and say, “Yes! I’m working on my novel right now. So if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  Being a Writer was uncomplicated in a way my other identities were not. No one ever looked me up and down and said, “Wow, you don’t look like a writer,” the way they did when I said I was Black or Moroccan. No one ever squinted at me and said, “Quick, speak a fantasy language,” the way they asked me to speak Arabic on command like a parrot. And no one ever looked at me sideways, hummed thoughtfully, and said, “You look more like a painter to me,” as they did when slyly suggesting I was lying about my heritage.

  * * *

  When I was in the fifth grade my teacher gave me a copy of The Hobbit. I don’t know that I’d read very much fantasy by then. My dad had fed me on a steady diet of Star Wars (which, until Ewan McGregor, had given me nightmares of Jabba the Hutt eating me), and I think I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the same year. But The Hobbit was my first introduction to high fantasy. I dove in and never looked back: elves, goblins, magic, dangerous and dark forests; after a while I didn’t want to read anything else. All the non-fantasy reading I’d done fell to the wayside in favor of places that didn’t exist and creatures that lurked in my imagination.

  From there it was only a short hop and skip to writing fantasy. In the real world I had to wrestle with how people saw me, but in my fake Tolkien worlds (because that’s what they were, no matter how much eleven-year-old me bristles) there were no such demands. Categories were easy, history was fluid, and every character was who they were because I said so.

  I grew up in a community that was predominately populated by immigrants. It was a weird mix between college town (literally called College Park) and suburb. The local Muslim community bought some property and turned it into a mosque-sla
sh-school, which I attended through sixth grade. I didn’t realize how lucky I was that I grew up and went to school with people who looked like me, worshipped as I did, and had the same third-culture problems. And I didn’t know until I was an adult how much work went into a community like that. We didn’t just have a school and a place of worship. There was a small indie publisher that published picture books, books for young readers, and young adult books. I grew up hearing Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, English, and Pashto. I was never the Weird Muslim Girl because we were all Muslim girls.

  I say all that to frame how I read. For the most part, it wasn’t a huge leap for me to envision the characters I read as people who looked like me or my friends. Most books’ physical descriptions are vague, and even those that weren’t never felt binding. I can’t say with any firmness if I believed all the characters were people of color, or if I did the extra mental work knowing that they weren’t. But either way it would be dishonest to say that I felt like a cultural vampire during my childhood. (Boy would that change.)

  Then, of course, came Tolkien. There’s a lot to be said for Tolkien. He rescued Beowulf from obscurity. He’s a master world crafter, and the number of materials published posthumously are a testament to that. The world he created was a lifelong project, and the depth and breadth of it shows. Despite reading more like nonfiction than a novel, The Silmarillion is still deeply compelling and moving. But the inherent racism of that world is really difficult to miss. From orcs and goblins to the ways that “men of the east” are assigned to evil, even eleven-year-old me noticed. Everything beautiful, everything I loved about the world of Arda, the world The Lord of the Rings takes place in, belonged to people aggressively coded as not like me. The few women there were all fair skinned, often fair haired, and light eyed. One of them literally has the appellation “the White.” The whiteness of Tolkien’s world wasn’t just in the way he populated it, but deeply embedded in its language and signs. Heaven is “the True West,” the sound of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth is the horn, while orcs and goblins are heralded by drums,3 and so on.