A Personal Narrative Essay

Sara Ezzat – April 2020

In the spring of 2018 I was watching the Academy Awards there was a moment when I found myself weeping. There was a woman on stage who looked a little like me, more precisely was shaped like me. Keala Settle is a large woman, as I am, and a person of mixed race, as am I. She was singing the song “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman, a song about self-acceptance, sung on that most public of stages. The Oscars are a touchstone of modern culture, a celebration of film, but also of who society deems beautiful. It is similar in this respect, to the advertising Jean Kilbourne examines in her film Killing Us Softly 4, or magazine culture Heather Brooks describes in her article Feed Your Face. In Western culture, as in the Oscar stage, large bodies are usually absent.  More than that they are banished. For women of colour there is another dimension added to this, to be beautiful is also to be fair-skinned. To be thin and fair is to be beautiful, so we are told, and beauty is a woman’s obligation. To be anything else is a failure.

Brooks and Kilbourne present this phenomenon through images and research, I would like to explore it from inside a fat woman’s perspective. I am taking as my model Petra Doan’s personal narrative The Tyranny of Gendered Spaces- Reflections from Beyond the Gender Dichotomy. I will look at the intersections of race and colonialism with gendered idea of beauty and health and how these intersections have shaped my relationship to my own body, particularly my fair skin and my size.

I was supposed to be beautiful. Not simply in the way most people assigned female at birth are judged on their looks and expected to be beautiful. I was supposed to be a great beauty, it was a foregone conclusion almost from the moment of my birth. And why, because I am fair. Because I am an Egyptian with light-coloured skin and blue eyes. The lightness of my skin is perhaps not surprising given I am only half Egyptian, but my British mother had three children, two daughters; one dark, and one fair.

One might assume the preference for light skin is related to Western beauty standards brought by the British colonizers, and that is part of the equation, but there is more to it. Fair skin is uncommon in Egypt and blue eyes even more so. The specifics of genetics are not my forte, but fair skin and blue or green eyes happen in some families, remnants of enslaved men from the Caucuses imported when Egypt was an Ottoman colony. What is uncommon is often valued. Also, there is a colour bias that associates darker skin with outdoor work, so lighter skin is an indication of class. These are some of the wider that factor into colour preferences.

In my Egyptian family particularly, there are particular expectations around having lighter features. I have a male cousin with green eyes and we were both frequently compared with (great) Uncle H who had blue eyes and was a successful judge. Great things were expected of my cousin and me; gendered greatness, of course, he was to be great in a profession and me to be beautiful.

So, I was supposed to be beautiful. This expectation was a part of my reality for as long as I could remember. My aunts would compare me to Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, and an early teacher called me Snow White. My appearance was what people focussed on in a way they did not with my sister. My gender mattered more than my sister’s with her olive skin and dark eyes.  I was supposed to be graceful and ladylike. I was supposed to live up to the meaning of my name, “princess”. I was supposed to be these things simply because I was born female and fair.

That was what I was supposed to be; but in reality, I was not graceful and ladylike, I was awkward and clumsy. I was not growing into the expected beauty, and most disappointing of all I was fat.

I started getting chubby before puberty and it dawned on me fairly early that my body was not acceptable. If the media I saw portrayed fatness in women at all it was a thing to be mocked or to be fought. This was the 80s and 90s, the age of Buns of Steel and Jenny Craig. The advertising I saw was similar to that Brooks describes in her article. As she says “Health and beauty are conflated as readers are encouraged to ‘eat your way to a more beautiful body’”(Brooks, 2008, para 12). Fat was the enemy. I received that message most clearly as a child from the way I watched my thin mother obsess about her own weight, punish and torture herself for the slightest bulge on her size 8 body.

There was another layer to my mother’s struggles too; not racial in her case, but culture. My mother was raised in a Quaker family, and Quakers are not supposed to be humble and not value appearances. So, I watched my mother torture herself to fit society’s beauty standards, while also berating herself for the vanity of her actions.

This was the setting into which I entered puberty. Understanding that I was supposed to be beautiful but being fat, I could not be so. My appearance had been set up as the defining aspect of my identity, but also caring about appearance was vain and bad. Above all, I had learned that my looks and my body were not mine alone. Beauty was not about whether I liked my face or even if others did. Beauty was an expectation I owed others and one that I was failing at.

So, began the war over my body. A war I fought with my father at every meal and later with myself. The battles would be familiar to many young women even if the terrain is a little different from each.  My sister had her own struggles with weight, but she never had to fight the war at home. If the world had expectations of how she should look, the family didn’t. My war went on for a long time, and I carry the scars of it. Some visible, the place where I cut myself as punishment for taking a second helping of rice. Others are less literal. This war still echoes through my life to this day.

The messages I received from the wider culture told me this war was right and good. That it was my duty to shrink myself, whatever the cost. Kilbourne covers this in her film, the pervasive idea that a woman must take up as little space as possible. Must erase those parts of herself that aren’t pleasing to the eyes of the world. Whenever I succeeded in shrinking I was rewarded. I was hailed as a conqueror, so long as no one had to know how I lost the weight. My body may not have been my own, but the costs of it, those were private.

A war like mine couldn’t be fought forever, and in time, I surrendered. I stopped trying to lose weight, but I didn’t know how to be healthy either. There were other issues too, but in essence, I surrendered myself as a failure in the obligation of beauty.

That was many years ago, now I have a very different relationship with my body and the weight it carries. My worries are more functional, concerns about how my weight affects my health and abilities. When I take up arms in this struggle it is because I want to move better, not to fulfill other’s expectations. Though the echoes of those expectations are still present, I am able to deal with them. I can tell my aunt that I will not look like an American actress’s version of a Greek ruler of Egypt and I am comfortable with that.

The cultural dialogue about fat bodies has changed in that time as well. There is a movement for body acceptance that is changing minds and trying to bring peace to wars like mine. Fat acceptance “is a social and corporeal justice principle, founded on the revolutionary idea that it is not productive to spend every waking moment of every day actively hating your body” (Geissler, 2010, para 1). It is an important movement.

Of course, the consumer culture we live in will try to appropriate any movement for itself and repackage it in a more acceptable form. Kilbourne’s next iteration of her film may include some of how body acceptance is translated into a more polished body positivity. Commercials from the likes of Dove now show larger women, but only a little larger. With this kind of positivity, there is often an expectation that just by being positive all the negative impacts of fatness will disappear. The social impact, emotional impact, and physical impact. Again, women are being asked to shrink our experiences to what fits society wants. To quote Roxanne Gay “I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t yet reached a place of peace and self-acceptance” (Gay, 2016). I am not at that place of peace yet either, the reality for me is a complicated armistice negotiation.

But then there is Keala Settle singing that song on that stage. It is a song about acceptance, but not the tidied up right-sized kind. Her voice is full of the truth of life in a body the world wants cut down to size. There is self-acceptance that I can see myself in with all the complicated bits left in. And she wasn’t beautiful, she was glorious.

Works Cited

Heather Brook (2008) Feed your face, Continuum, 22:1, 141 157, DOI: 10.1080/10304310701750866

Gay, R. (2020, April). 2016 Pen World Voices: The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. 2016 PEN World Voices: The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. New York. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl63ivu0kAw

Geissler, C. (2010, May 25). Fat acceptance: a basic primer. Geez Magazine, (18). doi: https://geezmagazine.org/magazine/article/fat-acceptance-a-basic-primer/

Killoy, A. Earp, J. Alper, L. Jhally, S. (Director). (2010). Killing Us Softly [Video file]. Media Education Foundation. Retrieved April 13, 2020, from Kanopy.

Petra L. Doan (2010) The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy, Gender, Place & Culture, 17:5, 635-654, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2010.503121