Belonging to Me

A man’s body has meaning by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the woman’s body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the male. Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man.

—Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, quoting Le Rapport d’Uriel by Julien Benda, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier

My Body

1. It is afternoon on a Saturday. The weekends are usually long, hot, and boring, and you’re always looking for something to do. The neighbors call all the kids over to watch a movie, and you’re excited because at least now you won’t be bored for the rest of the afternoon. There is a skinny man you have never seen before in their house. Their uncle, they tell you. When all the kids are sitting on the floor in front of the TV, the uncle tells you to come upstairs. He puts you on his lap, and a hot, slippery thing is between your thighs. He asks, “Does that feel good?” You say yes because you don’t know what else to say, and you don’t want to get into trouble. You put your small fingers in your mouth. You will not remember this incident until you are thirtysomething years old. You were probably six or seven when it happened.
2. “Oh wow! Your breasts are growing!” This is said by one of your half sisters. You had just taken your evening bath before bed and hesitated at the door of the room you share with three of them. As you stood outside, their laughter carried to you, and your heart constricted. You did not want to enter and draw their attention to you. How they treated you! You are the firstborn of “your mother,” the only woman your father had married then brought home to live with all his kids under one roof in the suburbs of Kampala city. Their attention swung like a pendulum from indifference to mockery. Nothing in between. The eldest of them had found the Lord recently and now her attitude also swung to mild affection on some occasions. You know that when you enter they will all fall silent as always, but you have nowhere else to go. Your clothes are in there! You take a deep breath and gather your wits about you, then enter. Your towel is wrapped around your little body, and you have to stand in a corner to try to change. Your towel slips, and the second eldest sees your breasts. When she makes her comment, you pull your towel close and pray for the ground to swallow you. Or God can maybe make you invisible so they never have to notice you. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   You remain silent. Then, to your horror, she gets up from the lower bunk where she was sitting and says, “Let me see…let me see!” You pull your towel tighter, but she insists. They are now all looking at you, and you close your eyes and drop the towel to your waist. They all stare and ooh and ahh while your eyes remain closed. Then the eldest puts her palm on one of your breasts and starts to pray. She asks God to keep your breasts “nice and small.” You sigh when it is all over and dress up quickly, exiting silently as they return to their conversation. You are ten years old.
3. The boy next door wants to play doctor. He has cornered you in the empty garage of the neighbor’s house. You have never “played” this before, and he instructs you to show him yours, and he will show you his. It occurs to you then that he wants you to remove your clothes. But you don’t feel like it, and you’re not sure what it means because you only take your clothes off when you’re going to have a bath. He steps closer. There’s a weird feeling in your chest. You want to cry. There’s a sound outside the garage door, and you use that opportunity to slip past him and run back home, your heart beating hard against your chest.
4. The new neighbors have a son, and he likes you. He always calls your name, asking for you to come outside to play. So you do, and you like playing with him. Then he keeps coming around when you’re alone in the living room. He makes you lie down on the couch, and he lies on top of you. You’re wearing a sleeveless tank top, which he pulls down. He “plays” with you, fondling your little breasts. The auntie from the village who helps around the house walks into the room, and he jumps off quickly and stands on his head on the sofa, pretending that you were both playing the somersaulting game. But you are slower than him, so you just lie there, and the auntie stares at you with your top down. You look away, and she leaves the room without a word. You are eleven years old.
5. Other neighbors move in one house away from yours, and they have a sixteen-year-old son. He seems nice and sometimes plays with you and the rest of the kids during the day. He tells you to come to the back of his house when the nine o’clock news is on. You think everyone will be there, so you agree. You like the attention because you are the one in the house that nobody wants to talk to. When you get there, it is dark because there are no security lights on that side of his house. You’re a bit scared, but you don’t run back home. He pushes you against the wall, and then he sticks his tongue down your throat. It is so weird.
6. During the holidays, when your elder half sisters are back from school, they tell you that you have to know how to “pull” your private parts because it is important if you are to get a man to marry you. You think it’s a miracle that they have actually included you in one of their conversations. Usually they become silent when you walk into a room, but today they tell you about what it means to be a woman. They tell you that a woman is a person a man wants to marry. They say that men want a specific kind of woman who has something growing on her vagina. You’re not even sure if you know what the word vagina means, but then they tell you that it is where you pee from and that the husband is very interested in that part of a woman. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx They tell you that there are specific parts of the woman in that area that she has to pull. They ask if you know what to pull. You say no. They give you a mirror to go to the bathroom and look at yourself so you can locate the “pullable parts.” You spend thirty minutes in the bathroom and see nothing of note. You return the mirror and say you didn’t see anything to pull. It was like looking at a steam engine, old and foreign parts, yet they are attached to you. You wonder why the husband is interested in that part. But you never ask, and nobody explains. So you climb up into your bunk bed and pretend to sleep like you usually do while listening to your sisters continuing to talk about men. You are eleven years old.
7. The “house boy” is actually a man. His name is Sam, and he calls you to the back of the house one night and tells you to bend over. Something hard, hot, and slippery is put between your legs again. It feels odd. You don’t know what to think, and it doesn’t happen again. You are twelve years old.
8. The boys in your class are taking girls to the rocks, the secluded area behind the school where no teacher dares to tread. You think you have a crush on more than one of them, but they never ever look at you. The other girls seem to be much more fun than you. Most of the time they are all just laughing at you and calling you “fat bombola” as they leave you behind. You heard they are kissing each other way up high behind the huge boulders, but you never will know as no one takes you there. You wonder if it is because your breasts have not stayed “nice and small.”
9. In class that day they talked about male and female anatomy. They talked about this act called sex, and they said that your parents were supposed to have told you about these things. For the rest of the lesson, you stare blindly outside the window and wonder why no one has ever told you about these things. When you get home and find your mother alone in her room, you tell her that the teacher said that parents are supposed to tell their children about sex. You ask her why she has never told you anything about sex. Your mother, as usual, doesn’t say anything. The next day she finds you in your room, and she gives you books about sex. “Now you can read about it and not say that I have not told you anything.” She walks out of the room and leaves you holding the books.

This body is unwieldy and unyielding. It doesn’t listen.
I will it to be like the others, to squeeze itself into itself and not make any noise.
It will not listen. It occupies space. Expands in ungainly ways. It makes them notice, touching it when I don’t want and refusing to when I want.
I drape scarves over my chest, wear baggy sweaters to keep the boobs away so maybe I will seem as normal as the other girls. They refuse. They announce to the world: we are here and we are not going anywhere.
This body is a traitor that I cannot escape.
I am stuck and my heart sinks every time I wake up and find that the dream of living in another, as another, is just that—a dream.
This body is not my friend.

Their Bodies

1. You are a teenager in boarding school reading romance novels with white women on the covers. Their breasts are nothing like yours, and their hair is long and blonde while yours is black and coarse. You realize that you are not the kind to be swept off your feet by a billionaire CEO or by a man whose body looks like a painting. Those women are not you. You realize there’s a special kind of love that those women have because of their bodies, and it’s a love that you cannot experience because you do not have their bodies. You start to look into the mirror and wonder why you can’t have blue eyes and long blonde hair. Perhaps then someone will also love you in the same way that those olive-skinned muscled men in those books love those women. Maybe for the first time in your life you will get to hear the words “I love you, honey,” if only you look like them.
2. Your good friend’s mother took her to a doctor who stuck something up her legs to find out if she was still a virgin. She tells you this with tears in her eyes as you take an evening walk, kicking random stones on the road and hearing the other students’ laughter wafting from the surrounding dormitories of your boarding school. You don’t know if she is still a virgin. You don’t know why her mother would have thought she wasn’t. All you know is that she hates her mother, and on visiting Sundays she lets her boyfriend come to see her, and they kiss in the toilets. You are fourteen years old.
3. It’s another day at school. You’re in class and from your seat you can see the dormitories across the well-manicured lawns. All of a sudden there is commotion in the class, and the girls are pointing to something outside the windows. It looks like the older class prefects are searching the dormitories. Whispers reach you. It seems that they are looking for test tubes that are vanishing from the chemistry labs. They suspect that the girls are using them in bed. You wonder what they are using them for but are too afraid to ask. The rest of the girls are giggling, and you still don’t know why. Many years later you will hear that those girls who used to share beds at night right next to you were not doing so just to keep warm. You will hear that they were doing much more with the test tubes. Things so strange that the Irish Catholic nuns who ran the school were looking for grounds for expulsion.
4. The famous Namasagali College comes to perform a play at your school, and the main character is a boy who makes your insides feel funny. He must be a man because he reminds you of those men with muscles that you have seen on your romance books, except his skin is more like caramel. That night, as you read your romance novel, you think of him. You are not the only one. The rest of the girls are also saying that he is a kind of man that they want to “play” with. But now you know what that means. You wonder if that is a kind of man who would want to play with you. You go to sleep; you are still dreaming about his muscles.
5. Later that term, you will rub the center of yourself against the edge of your panties as you pull them tight against yourself. It will feel so good that you keep going until something in you explodes. You do it as often as you can. You had read about those women “exploding” in the novels, and now you know how to explode by yourself. You hide it from your friends and wonder if they know about it. They must, no? They also read about it. But no one says anything. You are fifteen years old.
6. You are invited to a nearby boys school to present a divinity paper. You and eight other girls are put into the back of a truck that is used for ferrying school kitchen supplies. When you arrive, one of the boys offers to help you down. You put your hand on his shoulder and find it rock hard. An electric shock moves from the palm of your hand, up your arm, and straight to the center of your legs. You can’t look at him after that. You wonder if he felt it too and are filled with embarrassment at the thought. You had heard of electric shocks from touching a cute guy but had never known it could happen to you. You are sixteen.
7. You discover that your half brothers and sisters are watching “blue” movies. You sneak one VHS tape to watch when they are gone. There is a line of men putting their “things” into a line of women who are bent over. It is a strange sight, but it makes your body feel a certain way. All warm and tingly. You start to watch those movies as often as you can. The women’s bodies are so lean and beautiful. You are short and fat. And you are not the same color as them. You will never get a man to stick his thing in you.
8. Years later you will realize that, indeed, the guys do not go for bodies like yours. Fat Bombola. You look down when you walk to class and put on the headphones that you use whenever your neighbor, a beautiful Greek guy, loudly plays his music when yet another girl comes to visit. You listen to Christian songs and forget about being touched between your legs.

When they look at us, they see things. There is no person here. There is only
property. This body is land to be grabbed. It is the space on which they can build their
lives. It is the foundation for their esteem and pleasure. This body is not ours.
They have claimed it and silenced us.
We are powerless to
reclaim it.

Our Bodies

1. Another good friend from Catholic boarding school is now married with three kids. She tells you that she didn’t know how much she would love sex. You are shocked. She was the last person you would have thought would share that information with you. Now, she thinks her husband is cheating on her. You think she needs to be like those women on YouPorn—wanton and unafraid. Isn’t that the way to keep a man? You say this even when you know that she is the last person to be like that. Shouldn’t he love her as she is? Who are we kidding? We know what we are taught—that women have to be a certain way so that the man can stay. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx She tells you one day that she was invited to a bachelorette party. The kind where they get an auntie, traditionally known as a senga, to talk to the bride-to-be. The whole time the woman just talked about how the new wife should be in bed with her new husband. It was explicit and crude, she says. “But that’s the kind of woman they expect us to be, isn’t it?” you ask her, and she gets silent. On another occasion she will ask you what happens to the women who don’t become what a man wants in bed. A man should know who he’s marrying, your friend says. He probably does, you tell her. And he knows that he can get whatever he wants from another willing woman.
2. A woman at work tells you that there is a woman she knows who is married to a prominent lawyer in town. The man comes home drunk every night and tears the clothes off her, then forces her to have sex. Afterward he gets a bottle and pushes it up her ass. This happens almost every night. Once, she was bleeding and was sick. When the husband realized that he couldn’t have her, he started going to the room of their three-year-old daughter. The woman went to her parents and told them everything. They sent her back to her husband because this is real life, and no woman in her right mind can leave such a rich man over such things! Let her keep quiet and guma—bear with it! Your friend says if her parents can’t help her then no one can. You don’t know the name of that woman whose story has remained with you. You think about that three-year-old girl, and your heart breaks. Their bodies are not their own, and they cannot defend themselves against those who own them.
3. Your good friend is working at a big government agency, and when they travel for work, her boss, a “big man” in politics, comes banging at her hotel room door and demands that she let him in. Your friend sits on the floor in a corner, shaking in the dark, and praying for morning while hugging her Bible. Eventually the man goes. One day he calls her into his office and tells her that she would have gone “far” in the organization if she knew “how things worked” and just “allowed” it. But because she thinks she is better than everyone else and will not be “nice” to him, she will never be promoted. My friend doesn’t tell anyone. Not even her husband. Just me. She says that even though she knows what that man is like, she still must go on these trips because it is her job. She doesn’t know how to manage that man except to avoid him. You wonder how a woman so beautiful and prominent can fail to defend herself against this kind of person. You marvel at the open secret in this organization and others—that promotion is obtained through giving up your body to an inescapable oppression.
4. At your own workplace, the boss’s wife follows him on foreign trips to make sure he is not sleeping around. You wonder when she ever gets anything done. All your coworkers know who he is sleeping with, and no one will tell her. She is rich, after all, and the man married her. In fact, she stole him from his first wife. What does she want from us? They all agree that someone else with a better body will come in and do to her what she did to the other wife.
5. You hear this about a woman who was crying on her daughter’s wedding day. Everybody thought that the woman was crying because she was happy for her daughter. But later on she told someone that she was crying because her daughter was now entering into a phase of her life that was so painful. She was crying because her daughter would never have a life of her own. You couldn’t imagine how a mother could watch her child enter into something that could mean misery yet let her walk into it blind. You wondered why she never said anything to rescue her daughter. All this pressure from society, all this demand that’s placed upon us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of appearances.
6. Now, as an adult, you look and see the bodies of your friends that have been given over to ideas not their own. You are all trapped in a judged physicality. Contested territory. You wonder if you would have chosen differently had you been given more choices. In a society where you’re meant to be one thing and not allowed to question it, how, then, do you just get to belong to you and you alone?

A silencing. A stifling. An unvoicing.
Here are the things only we know.
The scratching of a concluded record,
The static after the TV channel closed for the night.
So many years, still the silence stretches.
How to tell even my own mother of these secret truths.
She has navigated her own stiflings. She has granted me the blank page.
These words are my friends.
Teaching a reconciliation to my body.
This body is.
It simply is.

My Body

1. I walked past a mirror the other day. I paused, not with the familiar dread, but with something like curiosity. I traced the curve of my hip with my palm, not measuring or judging, simply acknowledging. This body that has carried stories not of my making now carries words of my own creation. This belongs to me.
2. My friend is a single mum, and she calls to tell me her daughter started her period. “What do I say to her?” she asks, voice trembling. Her mother left my friend when she was a child, and she learned about menstrual cycles in class and in whispered conversations with friends. My mother simply handed me a book. We will not be like our mothers. I tell her to say what no one said to us: “Your body is yours. It will change and grow and feel things, but through it all, it belongs only to you even when nature takes its course.” The silence on the other end stretches until she whispers, “Is that true, though?” I don’t answer immediately.
3. I write these words and feel my body respond. The language of my body is becoming legible to me. Not always, not perfectly, but in growing moments of clarity. Each word a reclamation, each sentence a homecoming.
4. The books on my shelf no longer feature white women swept off their feet. Now they hold stories of women who found themselves beyond the gaze of men who would claim them. I read them and recognize pieces of myself scattered across their pages. I am not alone in this unlearning, this remembering of what was always mine.

This body.
Once contested territory,
Now sovereign land.
The silence breaks with quiet recognition.
I am the cartographer of my own terrain.
The sole author of my story.
This body is.
It simply is.
And finally,
It belongs to me.