January 27th, 2006
From "the real fat womon poems" by elana dykewomon
IV.
There is being fat,
and there is eating.
There is eating, and
then there’s the food.
There is fat and
there is aging
There is aging
and there is disability.
None of these things
are the same things
though they are used,
often, interchangeably.
Who did that?
Who did that to us?
And with each of these words
is the word: ugly.
Even with the word
eating, the word ugly is paired
by womyn
in north america
in the late 20th century.
V.
Now there are politics
for these things.
Unpopular politics,
but there are some.
We live in a country
that consumes,
that needs consumption
to continue consuming,
and what gets consumed
are the resources and the lives
of dark skinned and poor people,
the lives of women in sweatshops,
of women carrying rocks on their heads
in india to build american hotels.
We saw a lot of newsreels in the ’60s.
Some of us stopped watching the news
but the news doesn’t change.
Even if I choose carefully,
don’t want my “major purchases”
to contribute to the evil
done to people in soweto,
some woman in a factory
compromised her eyes or her lungs
her back or her labor
for my computer
for your vcr
for the stereo, hell, for the music.
When did we let ownership
purchase our analysis?
Consider it: they don’t have to buy us out
we pay them.
It would be nice to have a target
an easy simple target — who could take
some of this unease
about our consumerism.
The fat womon, she’d do.
She moves slow, and she’s wide.
It’s her who starves children
across the globe
it is her hideous appetite
that makes us ashamed to be americans.
All those fat cats living off the fat of the land
we don’t have access to,
the fat cats who are
lean men in limousines.
We call them fat
because we have been taught
that fat means eating
means consuming
means taking the rights to what is not yours
and these things which are not the same things
become the fat womon’s fault
it’s a shame she’s so out of control.
We hope she stays indoors.
IX.
I am a fat womon
I can speak for myself
but what would I say to you?
Why do I think I need
to tell you how much
sugar, how much meat
I eat in a day, in a year?
Why do I think I need
to tell you how often I go swimming
or how, if my feet hurt,
it’s a problem anyone can have,
fat or thin, why
do I want to tell you
the statistics about dieting
the fact that it’s thin people
who suffer most from heart disease.
And why do I think
no matter what I tell you
you will think I’m lying.
Unless I tell you I spend all my time
eating chocolate cake in front of the tv.
That I eat three chocolate cakes a day
and two six packs of coke
in between my six meals
and I get up in the middle of the night
to eat pancakes.
You’d believe that, wouldn’t you?
And I remember
when they called all
fat womyn fools.
X.
I am a lucky fat womon.
If I lie in bed and have a fantasy
about eating six chocolate cakes
of being fed six chocolate cakes
by six fat womyn
who are admiring my six new rolls of flesh
I can get — pleasure from my fantasy
and know that it’s resistance
to this ridiculous persistence of shame
thrown at me.
I can get up and go about my business
without too much pain,
struggle with how I eat like every womon I know–
does wheat give you arthritis,
do the chemicals they inject into apples
give us cancer in our apple juice?
How do I balance my years of anger and deprivation
with my desire to eat what’s “good for me”?
How do I know, when they say it’s good,
it isn’t this year’s medical fashion hoax,
another way to hate fat womyn?
I like to eat.
I like to feed other womyn
and be fed
when I can bear that intimacy.
I like intimacy when I can bear it–
when I can trust you.
I have appetites in my mind
that I cannot express in my body
at least not yet,
I work on it.
But I hear what’s been said
when I look in the mirror
and I’ll be honest
I have the words fat and ugly
paired in me.
The pairing of the words
makes me turn away faster
than what I actually see.
I touch myself and I
feel good beneath my hands
Sometimes I have lovers — sometimes
they enjoy my body and enjoy me
enjoying theirs.
When I don’t have lovers
I feel good beneath my hands.
This makes me a very lucky fat womon.
If I believe the evidence,
the testimony of other fat womyn,
it makes me an extraordinary fat womon
and that’s a tragedy.
XI.
A very thin womon, disabled
tells me how she spent a day crying
because she was afraid to get
on cross country skis
afraid of her own fragility,
afraid to be physical in the world.
She tells me because I would understand
and I do.
I know womyn who are fat who vomit.
I know womyn who are thin who vomit.
Womyn close to me hate their bodies,
womyn who know everything in this poem already
hate their bodies.
Womyn hate our bodies.
We have been working for justice, out of love,
in the different ways we understand it,
for years, in a hundred movements.
We have been going to twenty therapies
bodyworkers and twelve-step groups–
and remember — we’re lesbians
we lust for one another in our good moments
we tickle and rub
and — we — hate — our — bodies
What keeps you from understanding
what you do to me?
What did they pay you to do this to yourself?
Who does this to us?
Where is our courage?
And what happened to our resistance
to our simple stubbornness
not to let our enemy win
not to let our enemy win inside us.
_________________________
the real fat womon poems, in Nothing Will Be As Sweet As The Taste by Elana Dykewomon (1994, Onlywomen Press Limited [UK])
