encased, not entrapped

The Fat Black Woman.

Words that fill up your mouth. Seriously speaking, I like to play around with words. Sometimes I use them wrongly (like in weird sequences or funned-up neologisms) on purpose. The point of this is that I can feel the roundness of her, the protagonist, the person declaring her emancipation, her total acceptance of whom she is, to the world. I envy her confidence in her voluptuousness and her pride in overcoming her tormented history. Having watched two seasons of Dim Sum Dollies, I would say that Selena Tan is the Singaporean equivalent of this poetry persona we're currently studying, she projects herself to be utterly happy with her God-given shape, even to the point of flaunting it in her audience' faces. Why can't we all be like this? Happy to be what we are, and blind to what the world and the society around us perceives as "hot", as the "perfect body shape". If only we could see through all that. I don't think the Fat Black Woman hates the beauties in "Looking at Miss World" (although she wonders when they will ever really burn), I think she hates the socially-constructed notion that slimness equals beauty, that the outer skin is all that matters though it covers up a shrivelled soul beneath.

There was a time ... when Yang Gui Fei was considered the epitome of beauty.

I would say that in Singapore, I'm considered a middle-to-big sized girl. Sometimes it gets to me, most times it doesn't. In the States, however, I gained a big boost in confidence, seeing as how all the people around me came in different sizes and shape and shade. Because there were so many, people didn't bother to scrutinize. OR perhaps I didn't notice them scrutinizing because the crowd just enveloped you into its welcoming anonymity. Here, though, I get the sense that Asian women just LOVE to look, and comment, and criticize, despite the way they themselves look, which may be perfectly acceptable in most peoples' eyes. (I think I am just unhappy about my mother and aunties' nagging but yeah, indulge me for a second here.) No way can we Asian girls "drift in happy oblivion", instead, the slimming industry's "profitsome spoke" is happy welcome in its intrusive presence. I am unhappy about this fact, but I do not deny that occasionally, just occasionally, I entertain a small thought or two about what would happen had I the financial resources to actually sample their services.

another thought: the protagonist's identification with her kind and its past

There is something in Grace Nichols' poetry that I cannot identify with. How the Fat Black Woman is so connected, seamlessly intertwined with the women of the past, of her like kind. How one woman can speak for the whole, can speak confidently as an immense presence encompassing her ancestors past and present, looking forward toward the future as a beacon of hope. How an individual, revelling in her uniqueness, can still be part of the genealogy. I envy the Fat Black Woman for her past, her collective experiences, her tumultuous history. This is something lacking for the Skinny Chinese Woman. Perhaps the clamour to be "thin and gorgeously-slim", this fanaticism that has been driven into our minds from the West has so easily pervaded our sense of what the body should be, BECAUSE we have no idea of whom we really are. We have none, or not much, identification with the women of our past. Maybe because we do not want to (it being very unglamorous to associate oneself with samsui women for example), or maybe because we are largely apathetic and too susceptible to the influences of the West.

I DO wish we invented some dance, like the foxtrot or the tango. =)

And like Ann said, I too have a headache.