When I was nine years old, I was bullied by a boy a year ahead of me in school. I remember dreading closing hours because that was when he would target me and start calling me names. It got so bad that he made up a song in both Hausa and English, saying, ‘Martha is so fat the earth would shake if she fell.’
That experience hurt so much that I can remember the song's words and tune to this day. He tormented me for a year, but I can remember the song word for word. In fact, I just stopped for a minute while writing this to hum it to myself and be sure that I remembered. I still do.
The only reason the song stopped was that he graduated. But before graduation, the boy who spent the better part of the year making my life miserable wrote and handed me a letter wherein he told me he had feelings for me.
I never saw him again after the letter, but the confusion I experienced after I read the letter lingered in my mind for years.
I barely got through primary school as a fat kid before my parents sent me to a boarding school where things worsened. No one sang songs at me in boarding school, but many girls treated me like shit, made it a point to leave me out of shared activities, and went out of their way to make my life miserable because I was fat.
By the time I got to university, my outlook on life could be summarised in two ways: ‘I hate people,’ and ‘the world can burn’. However, I still carried a flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, I was not doomed to a life of shallow friendships. Maybe one day, some young man would find me desirable enough to make me his girlfriend and eventually his wife so I wouldn’t be alone forever.
My hope wasn’t entirely in vain. I finally made friends at my expensive private university, where I learned that rich kids won’t spend their energy bullying you when they can simply act like you don’t exist.
Given my previous experiences, not being seen felt exponentially better.
I would rather have Aisha not wave back at me even though I helped her with her assignment just last week, than have her singing about how I might make the earth shake. The only time any students in university commented about my weight to my face, it was my closest friends implying, through truly insensitive and even rude comments that were supposed to be ‘kind’, that they were worried about my wellbeing. Since these were my ‘friends’, these comments were made only among two or three of us, never more than five, because I guess that would be too embarrassing.
When I became a working adult, I secretly hoped people would have the decency to respect me and leave thoughts about my body out of their mouths, especially in the office. Unfortunately, however, that has not been the case. Even though I was their colleague, not their child or even their subordinate, I discovered that many of my coworkers had no boundaries regarding my body.
All I have ever done throughout my life is mind my business, trying to get through life like everyone else. However, being in a fat body has consistently meant that I have been exposed to people's gazes and judgements about who I am.
Fat, Fearless, Free
I hear you thinking, if it’s this much trouble being a fat person in the world, then why not just lose weight? Well, here’s why I will be remaining fat. Even though the world holds much disdain for fat bodies, being a fatty has been liberating for me. How can I be fat and free? Well, for one thing, I am now no longer afraid of being fat. After 32 years in my fat bodysuit, I have embraced it with its cellulite, stretch marks, and wobbly bits. In a world hyper-fixated on body size, my fat body grants me the opportunity to move with one less fear; the fear of being fat.
Releasing the fear of being fat has also helped me release other fears.
I love food, and I enjoy cooking. However, until a year ago, I was ashamed to call myself a foodie because I feared that it would confirm what society believes about fat people; we are a bunch of gluttonous folks who cannot put food down. As a result, I never called myself a foodie because I was sure I would have to add a caveat saying I was not a glutton (which no one would believe anyway because I am, in fact, fat and eating or being a foodie is one way it’s believed that people get fat).
My liberation from the fear of calling myself a foodie came once I realised there was no basis for it in my life. I am simply a person who is interested in food, in a similar way that people are interested in music, for instance. I enjoy the art and the science of cooking and could easily spend the rest of my life working with food, so being ashamed of that simply because I am fat just stopped making sense to me.
Pito nou led nou la! We are ugly, but we are here!
In The Politics of Ugliness, a book that explores ugliness through the lenses of gender, race and sexuality, Ela Przybyło writes that “ugliness is political in the sense that it serves as a marker of a set of binarical hierarchies [e.g., fat and thin] and inequalities” [e.g., fat and ugly, thin and beautiful].
The world thinks fat people are ugly, and this belief is fuelling the weight loss industry, which is expected to grow from $254.9 billion in 2021 to $377.3 billion by 2026.
Whether for aesthetics or health reasons, people are willing to part with big bucks to “stay in shape” or simply just shed some weight. The growth in popularity of the health & fitness industry inadvertently comes with an additional pressure for fat people to get their asses to gyms and try to lose some weight. Why shouldn’t they? After all, everyone is working out now, and fat people need it more than anyone else, right?
But the rat race to lose weight and appeal to Eurocentric standards of beauty enforces the idea that people generally, and fat people specifically, are only worthy of love, respect, and kindness when our bodies fit what is considered socially acceptable. I disagree with that. Struggling to change how my body looks would be consenting to my oppression, and this is simply unthinkable.
I have been surrounded by women my whole life, from my family to an all-girls boarding school to living on campus with other young women, and eventually working with women. So I know that body image is one of the most prominent topics women talk about. And in a fatphobic world, many of these conversations are often about how to avoid getting fat, what supplements to use, what exercises give the best and quickest results, and what the most effective diets are. All of these are discussed mostly with little to no concern their impacts on actual wellbeing. It is deeply worrying to see the lengths women are willing to go to maintain a socially acceptable body size.
Harper’s Bazaar recently described the Brazilian Butt Lift, popularly known as BBL, as the most popular yet deadliest plastic surgery. The BBL is dangerous because fat sucked from other body parts and injected into the buttocks can sometimes travel and cause blockages in the heart and lungs, resulting in immediate death. Notwithstanding, there is a growing interest in the BBL because, first and foremost, it removes excess fat in the body. The bigger butt is an added bonus. However, the BBL is a fairly new contender on the list of outrageously dangerous things people have done to shed fat. Alternative practices like intermittent fasting, arsenic diet pills, Sleeping Beauty, and Cotton Ball diets are also in demand.
On the personal front, I have learned to rise above the fatphobic noise and realise that my power as an individual lies in my ability to pay attention to what my body needs at any given time. I finally understand that I do not have to meet society’s standard of beauty to be a full human being with inalienable rights. I am already valuable, even as a fat person. It’s true that society continues to be fatphobic, which means people like me have to navigate the world with considerable difficulty. However, I no longer reject my body nor feel the need to apologise for it.
In March 2021, I tweeted about realising that my body is not only part of the resistance, but my body itself is the resistance. I am fat, and I am here. My body has always resisted society’s demands to shrink to a size considered more acceptable. And now, I am deliberately choosing to stay fat because people like me do not have to bend and mould ourselves into socially acceptable shapes just to be treated with respect. We certainly don’t have to change our bodies to prove to others that we can live healthy and happy lives. Some bodies are fat, and that’s perfectly okay. Anything that tries to deny this fact is just fatphobic noise, and there is simply no room for that in my life anymore.
PS: It’s November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. May we be safe, may we be well.
I have a huge scar on my lap and series of stretch marks from when puberty hit me , and whenever I wanted to wear a singlet or a bum short out of my lodge in uni , my “friends” were always like ahh your stretch mark is showing ,cover up or your scar is showing 😂 then they’d go ahead to thank God that they didn’t have stretch marks , one day I looked up to see one of those “friends” looking at my arms in disgust ,I confronted her and she tried to deny it but I knew what I saw, something in me died that day , I am really grateful for growth and how far I have come
Lovely write up.🤎🤎