Grace Nichols The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping

The Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols is among a growing network of Afra-Caribbean writers who
articulate their unique heritage of double colonization as women in a postcolonial community. Like Faybiene above, these women write in part to reject the social and mythological roles within which women in the Caribbean have long been confined, and in so doing to help loosen the sexual and economic constraints of women in their communities. As Faybiene insists, "When I lay sleeping in your rib / You called me no name // I am that I am"; these writers claim the Adamic role by naming themselves powerfully, attempting to crack the silence with which they have worn the names imposed by others. Moreover, as Faybiene names herself in words that echo the Judeo-Christian Yahweh's "I am who am," Afra-Caribbean poets may reforge myths that uncover the power of black women as queens, leaders, or goddesses. The poet and essayist Marlene Nourbese Philip emphasizes the special necessity of this project for the black female: "It is imperative that our writing begin to recreate our histories and our myths, as well as integrate that most painful of experiences - loss of our history and our world."(1) Grace Nichols uses such revisionary mythopoesis in her volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems to engender a new heroine, a woman who revises the esthetic of female beauty, challenges oppressive societal forces, and emerges as a powerful queen, founder, or goddess Like many Afra-Caribbean writers, Nichols infuses her poetry with the spiritual energy of the tradition of women before her, a tradition that has little written record. For although the strength of foremothers who were cultural protectors, social leaders, and family heads has recently been more widely examined (for example, by studies such as the 1995 Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective), it is a strength that has often been strategically hidden by women themselves or obscured by others who fear it. 

The Caribbean offers a particular challenge to the fashioner of a women's mythology. As Carol Boyce Davies reports, "In at least three categories of the earliest material available - the proverb, the folktale, and the major song form, the calypso(2) - woman's image is almost uniformly negative."(3) She cites a long list of images that demean women: "witch-spouses, gullible wives, dumb wives, unfaithful wives, wicked mothers, murderous mothers, cruel old women (hags, sorceresses, witches, soucoyants), vulnerable daughters, and almost no heroic women."(4) Strong women have thus been cast as evil or cruel, as the Obeah woman, for instance, often is. Until lately the one major exception to the negative image of women seems to be the often-invoked folk heroine, Grandy Nanny of the Maroons, called a "mytho/legendary ancestress"(5) and credited as being an excellent Obeah woman, healer, and military leader of a group of free blacks. Nanny's story begins with her importation to Jamaica from Africa as a slave, at which point she "rebelled and fled to the mountains from where she waged war against the British."(6) Lucille Mathurin Mair asserts that written records verify Nanny's status as a leader in the 1730s who made a reluctant peace in 1740 and got a patent in 1741 for land which her people still inhabit.(7) 

Though the heritage of this single female leader is necessarily limited, Grandy Nanny provides a valuable figure of resistance for the Afra-Caribbean writer who looks for mythological or literary models. Her myth is even more useful and poignant, perhaps, if we examine Nanny not only as a political rebel but also as a woman refusing to allow the colonization of her body through slavery and its attendant horrors of physical brutality and rape. Although Nanny is figured more often as a (grand)motherly (and hence stereotypically asexual) woman, contemporary knowledge exposes what was long recognized by victims and survivors: rape is not a violation reserved for the young and "sexy" woman only. The colonized woman's body is itself seen as a new world to be penetrated and harvested for sexual satisfaction and for the economic gain of children born into slavery. Nanny's escape is therefore not only a political rebellion but a flight to personal safety and control of her own body. In fact, her supernatural abilities are intimately tied to her body; it is said of Nanny that she could attract the bullets of the white soldiers to her buttocks where they were caught and rendered harmless!(8) She thus emerges as a precursor to the mythological woman (re)imagined by Nichols, who takes what Nourbese Philip has called "the inner space," the vulnerable female body, into ideological battle.(9) The body taken into battle may be fully loaded, to pun on that word, for, as Kadiatu Kanneh expresses it, "What is complicated is the simultaneity of suffering and power, marginalisation and threat, submission and narcissism, which accrue to Black and women's bodies and their representation in racist cultures."(10) As Nichols also realizes, the body is a site on which numerous linguistic and social constructions place their foundations. 

With the radical body of Nanny as a precursor, Grace Nichols turns to the process of mythopoesis to create another similarly vital and rebellious woman in her poetry, a woman who can stand alongside Nanny as founding mother. I will examine here the first section of Nichols's volume The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984), in which the title character is metamorphosed from a figure of ridicule or a representative of the Jemima stereotype into a self-celebrating quasi-goddess. Nichols's powerful writing has received little critical attention, and most has concentrated on her volume i is a long memoried woman, winner of the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In that volume Nichols leads the reader through an archetypal Afra-Caribbean woman's history, from African to slave and mother to revolutionary victor, painting the portrait of a woman who suffers, dreams, works, loves, triumphs, and ultimately gains "the power to be what I am / a woman / charting my own futures."(11) As Gabriele Griffin says of that volume, "Nichols's Black woman uses her body, her voice, her song to maintain her sense of selfhood, to support others and to subvert the structures that oppress her."(12) 

While the same could be said of the poet's next volume, the verses collected in The Fat Black Woman's Poems take on a more contemporary frame and also assume a certain playfulness in their remythologizing, what Nichols describes as "a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman doing exactly as she pleases . . . taking a satirical, tongue-in-cheek look at the world."(13) As the title announces, it is a book in which the racialized and "weighed" body is of foremost importance. Recuperating the body signals as well the recuperation of identity; as Bryan Turner explains, "The body is an important surface on which the marks of social status, family position, tribal affiliation, age, gender, and religious condition can easily and publicly be displayed."(14) Nichols redefines the standards of beauty which exclude the fat black woman and, perhaps most radically, posits the fat black woman as herself a sort of colonizer, a founding mother of a new civilization, a new Eve, and even a creator-goddess, at the close of this sequence.

شرح اخر                                         

Grace Nichols, ‘The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping’

Shopping in London winter
is a real drag for the fat black woman
going from store to store
in search of accommodating clothes
and de weather so cold
Look at the frozen thin mannequins
fixing her with grin
and de pretty face salesgals
exchanging slimming glances
thinking she don’t notice
Lord is aggravating
Nothing soft and bright and billowing
to flow like breezy sunlight
when she walking
The fat black woman curses in Swahili/Yoruba
and nation language under her breathing
all this journeying and journeying
The fat black woman could only conclude
that when it come to fashion
the choice is lean
Nothing much beyond size 14

Analysis:

It seems like that our poet is using her sarcastic sense of humour to complain about the difficulties in finding clothes of her size in cold winter in London.  However, it is clear that London does not sell clothes of her size although she is a British.  Moreover, sales girls are making fun of her appearance. 

Language:

Nichols’ language is colloquial which sounds like a daily conversation.  It is also dramatic and jaunty which is close to Stevie Smith’s ‘the jungle husband’.  She deliberately typed ‘de’ instead ‘the’, labelled her identity (diction).

Techniques:

Rhyming: the frequent use of whispering, sibilant words like ‘sh’, ‘s’ created an unpleasant atmosphere and produced a reflectively regretful tone that almost masks the anger.

Also, the repeated use of ‘ing’, ‘in’, ‘b’ effectively conveyed her mind state.  Angry but she is trying to put it under the control.  Negative feelings come from prejudice and discrimination in terms of sizes, cold weather and pretty face salesgals’ slimming glances but she is still trying to ignore and stay positive.

Repetition:

Fat black woman appeared 3 times in this poem.  Her image is impressive, as I would like to think that she represents black women in the UK.

'Store to store’ is responding to ‘journeying to journeying’, effectively delivering the sad truth is that she lives in London but it does not sell clothes of her size.  In a cold winter, she must have worn a lot in order to keep warm but as stores don’t have her size, her clothes may look outdated and perhaps shabby.  The reality made her feel sick, exhausted and tired.

Journeying to journeying may offer a double meaning which renders the fact that racial prejudice and discrimination has existed in London for a long time, and ridiculously, this journey has no end. 

Her conclusion is polite and sarcastic, open to multiple interpretations.  Of course, poet just chose fashion as a window to articulate discrimination but it is not limited to fashion…

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