a little of everyday

fat is beautiful (but the process is ugly)

i remembered watching a programme on tv a long time ago and seeing a tribal african man embrace a fat woman, proclaiming that she is beautiful; this, as opposed to the slim woman who is standing beside the former.

so i googled and came upon some interesting discoveries: the various tribes in Nigeria, as well as the Hima tribe in Uganda are some of the places which support the notion of fat is beautiful.

i hope that this will not disappoint the fat black woman because in these societies, her poetry would be something rather ordinary instead of shocking. and she may not make as much money as she would out of them should she decide to strut her stuff there.

before you go out and tell your friends that you have finally found a place where women can be what they want and eat what they like, let me elaborate on their cultures. for the tribes in Nigeria, women before their marriage would have to undergo this "fattening" ceremony where they are enclosed in a fattening house to, simply, get fat. (sounds like something that we have/ought to have read?)

the process of fattening up is rather long and ritualistic, and i have chosen to extract a passage from the site which explains it in detail. this description applies to the Efik tribe:

After reaching the age of puberty, the girl is clothed in an embroidered cloth cap, a loin roll of bright coloured cloth, a correlate ornamented with beads and cowry shells, headed shoulder braces and leglets of gaily coloured cloth or coiled brass rods, necklace and armlets of bead work. She is taken to the fattening hut called Mbobi by her mother. The huts are situated on the outskirts of the village. Her period of seclusion may extend from six months to two years. Whilst in the hut, she is called a woman of seclusion (wann-kukho). During the fattening process she is compelled to eat vast quantities of fat producing foods including pounded yam cooked in palm oil. She is not allowed to exert herself in any way. Her face and body are not washed and she is rubbed with clay. White cloths are tied round her neck, wrists and ankle to prevent evil spirits retarding the process.

While she is in Ufok n-kukho she is not allowed to touch anything in the hut and she must avoid all possible contact with the ground. When she has occasion to leave the hut and go into the yard of the compound, she calls out "Onukhomi, nukhofio". During her period of seclusion she undergoes the operation of clitoridectomy (Circumcision) usually at the hand of her mother.

How the circumcision is done: A piece of coconut shell perforated. The glans of the clitoriclis is drawn through this hole and cut off with a sharp knife or splinter of glass. It is believed that the operation has the effect of making the girl sterile.


all right. so it is not very empowering. in fact, the tribe is still patrairchal in nature, except that these men have opposing tastes. the interesting, as well as disturbing, part in the extract is how the girl undergoes clitoridectomy before she is released from the hut. although the passage explains that this is to make the girl "sterile", the other (underlying) reason for doing it is so that the women relinquish their sexual desires and assume the role of baby producing machines for their husbands, and their husbands only.

apart from the bodily afflictions and mutilations, the women also undergo a mental brainwashing where they come out as subservient wives (yes, polygyny is the norm in Nigerian tribal societies) who will take and accept the pushing, beating, and abusing of their husband-kings.

now would you rather be slim and Singaporean or opulent and Efik?

for those who would like a little more detail of these ceremonies and the lives of these women:

http://www.nigerdeltacongress.com/earticles/efik_ibibio_ibo_in_the_fattening.htm
http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/wmp/wmp08.htm

not a few of my friends and i have asked and discussed about the idea of the "body" and how it should be figured in this module. from another module that i have done, we were told that sex and human sexuality has always been the site for power contention throughout history. the dominant elites of any civilisation would therefore be the ones who have won in this power struggle. think, for instance, of the Islamic sanction for men to take on more than one wife under special circumstances. it is no coincidence that the religious elites are predominantly males. but how do we get from sexuality to the body? perhaps it is best bridged by an extract from Ann Rosalind Jones' article, albeit the opinion is not quite what the author supports: "if women are to discover and express who they are, to bring to the surface what masculine history has repressed in them, they must begin with their sexuality. And their sexuality begins with their bodies, with their genital and libidianl difference from men."

to think of that would make definitions, as well as the ability to define, tools of power. yet, this can only be possible if you can articulate/speak what you are, and what you speak is heard and understood by others. something like Louis Althousser (and his idea of interpellation or the act of hailing) and the Patriarch working together to rule the world.

so now we know why a woman wear the things (or the lack of things) she wears and to what ends she wears them. indeed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what the men want to see in women are the defining features of beauty they have constructed - high-heels, halter-tops, micro-minis - never mind that they hurt and itch and make you breathless.

i was listening to the radio the other day, and the DJ mentioned that studies have shown that while men look for physical attributes like bust-size and the buttocks in their potential partners, women tend to look at non-bodily attributes like handphones, watches, and (esp) car keys. i think that this is very interesting when related back to the whole idea of definitions and who gets to define the "body" in today's society. because men in patriarchies get to decide what is beautiful and pleasurable to their eyes, and because this happens to be visually stimulating "images" of the Woman, women are made to identify with and play out these images by assuming them themselves. so who says all's fair in love and the mating game?

the other interesting thing is how women are willing to overlook the "flaws" in their male partners. (or should we even be calling them flaws in the first place? think about the character lines on men's faces which are mysteriously transformed into wrinkles - unforgivable wrinkles - on a woman's.) perhaps they are "conned" into thinking that a paunch on a man symbolises wealth. but yet it may have some truth. Helen Fisher in her book The Anatomy of Love came up with a solid argument which explains why men are polygamous while women are generally for monogamy. the former is merely acting out his biological urge to sire as many children as he can; for the latter, it has got to do with sercurity for her offsprings and a conducive environment for the kids to grow up in. in today's context, this may translate into status markers like watches and car keys. so apart from the social (mis)definition of beauty there may also be a fundamental, biological motivation behind women's criteria for choosing her partner.

unless you are talking about a tai tai with enough wealth to suffocate you...

i suppose there you would see a shift of power and definitions (of beauty). i leave the rest up to your fertile imagination.

i was talking to a friend the other day, who, incidentally, is also enrolled in the same module, and we came to a film that we have both watched, albeit at different times.

Japanese Story tells the singular but strangely beautiful love relationship between an australian woman (Sandy) and a japanese man (Hiro). in many ways, the film celebrates the empowerment of the new career woman - Sandy - and the female protagonist is fleshed out to be confident, assertive, and even domineering at times. and it is these mis-matched attributes that shock - remember that japan is predominantly male-dominated - but draw the japanese man towards Sandy.

the climax of the film sees Sandy wearing Hiro's black trousers and straddles him while they make love. throughout the scene, the male protagonist remains the passive actor.

this reversal of gender roles is refreshing, but you cannot help but wonder if the same would have happened if the man was White instead of Oriental. the question that is left unanswered in the film is whether or not the director casted a japanese for the male lead in order to bring out the superiority of the caucasian woman. if so, skin colour and ethinicity still remain a major factor when we define who gets to rule, and while there is a re-appropriation of gender identities in the film, it is only made possible by another subordination - the colonial idea of the Occident against the Orient. that in order to re-write the woman's body and meanings, we have to give her a foil/man who is socially inferior to her - in this case an Asian man. to the fat black woman, the stratification might go like this: White man - White woman - Asian man - Asian woman. perhaps it has to do with the residue from colonialism and the White man's rule in his colonies.

i guess, as Grosz has mentioned in her article, we can be made aware of these binaries and their gaps, but we may never truly remove them permanently. and like the end of her article, there can be no real conclusion when it comes to an issue as grey as that; only different views.

for the next 13 weeks or so this site shall serve one of the modular criterion for one of my literature modules. as part of our semester assessment we are to discuss/think/image/invent/debate about the body and the underlying implications that you can get out from it.

i look forward to a semester of philosophising, interacting, and ecstasy.