Grace Nichols, Fat Black Women & Other Real Women of the World

As a woman it can seem as though you can’t go anywhere or do anything without having some ridiculous and unattainable standard of beauty shoved in your face.  Our culture is and seems to always have been inundated with messages to young girls and women that we aren’t enough.  Our skin isn’t smooth enough or appropriately hairless enough.  Our eyelashes aren’t thick enough.  Our teeth don’t gleam bright enough to be seen from outer space.  Our stretch marks from carrying say a kid or five can never be masked or surgically altered enough.  And we are never ever thin enough. 

Should you happen to be of a minority race and female, be prepared for a multitude of other ways in which you just don’t quite measure up to what’s most desirable and fashionable according to television, magazines, movies, billboards, etc.  Grace Nichols's poem The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping (1984) addresses the plight of a "fat" immigrant woman facing such criticisms in London.

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 a size 14

                On its surface, the poem appears to be simply about the difficulties of a plus-sized woman shopping for clothes in fashionable London.  She trudges from store to store where she is mocked not only by “pretty face salesgals” but also the “frozen thin mannequins” in the stores that offer nothing in the way of something either “accommodating” or better yet “soft and bright and billowing” for someone of the speaker’s size.  With further analysis, however, one can also deduce that the poem is also a criticism of how minority women in particular were treated by London society during the 1980’s. 

                The language of the poem does much to convey to the reader that the speaker is an immigrant to England.  For example “de” is used several times instead of “the” and the speaker talks about cursing in “Swahili/Yoruba and nation language” under her breath.  Additionally, she refers to a desire for clothing that is “soft and bright and billowing to flow like breezy sunlight” giving the impression, at least in my mind, that the speaker is African or Caribbean and longing for their native climates as opposed to the frigid English Winter.

                Written during the 1980’s when London had seen riots caused by racism and social discrimination, The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping was part of a compilation called The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, and  has been seen as criticism of the conditions that black women, especially immigrant black women, found themselves living under.  (http://www.swopdoc.com/the-fat-black-woman-goes-shopping-by-grace.html)  The message in the poem doesn’t speak to me specifically in that way, though.  I understand that an English standard of beauty may have differed vastly from an African or Caribbean standard of beauty, but I think the last line of the poem also makes the discrimination the speaker feels universal to other women of her size.

                In the consumer culture in which we live, we aren’t likely to hear any messages from the media that the average American woman at 5’4” with a waist size of 34-35”, weighing between 140-150 pounds and wearing a dress size between 12 and 14, is the picture of feminine perfection.  (http://www.blogs.webmd.com/pamela-peeke-md/2010/01/just-what-is-an-average-womans-size-anymore.html)  The producers and manufacturers of the world will never stand for us feeling happy and comfortable in our own skin for very long—no matter how slightly flabby and probably utterly fabulous that skin really is.  Poems such as Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping can help us see size discrimination for what it is:  unfair and mostly unattainable standards of beauty that have little if nothing to do with what the average real woman of the world looks like.