Shame and Hate

The first time you will learn the intricacies of self-loathing is when a man slaps your face. You will search your insides for words to describe what you feel but you wouldn’t find any word. So, you’ll settle for hate. You will choose to hate your body and yourself for being helpless and inadequate. You will convince yourself that if you were enough, if your body was worthy enough, you wouldn’t have had to live in this misery. If you were enough, this man wouldn’t have plastered his huge palm on your cheeks. It is on that day that you will learn that to effectively self-loathe, you must find an accusing finger and point it at your forehead. The blame has to be yours to carry. The fault is yours. If your body was worthy enough, the man wouldn’t have slapped you.

The second time a man slaps your face, something breaks but not something on your face, something inside you and as you watch the movement of the vehicle where the violent hand emerged from, you see the broken thing dragged along with the vehicle’s tyres. The broken thing is your self-esteem.

The first time, you cry. The second time, shame envelopes you like a stinky towel as you walk to your bus stop. You hate yourself.

It’s 2016. You are in senior secondary school and you and your colleagues had just been appointed prefects a week ago. You all had been assigned posts to stand and coordinate the movement of the junior students back to their classes after the morning assembly. On this morning, you are carefully situated at your duty post; the top of the stairs on the first floor of your school building, you adjust your pretty little waist coat and the prefectship badge that clung nicely to it, ready to say, “walk in a single file,” as many times as it took to these kids eager to run, hurdled against each other through the narrow stairway to their classes. You are situated there, doing just that, saying, “how are you?” issuing warnings, coordinating the students and screaming, “in a single file, in a single file.”

Then comes this teacher renowned for his quick temper, quicker hands and hilarious dance steps at school parties. You see him at the bottom of the stairs in one second and greet him, in the next second, you hear him shout, “go to your class,” and while you are transfixed at the top of the stairs wondering why he ignored your greeting and was shouting at you to go to your class when you were on duty, the next second came and it emerged as lightning against your left cheek. In the last second, you remember standing at that spot, his hands on your arms, on your face and the strings of words dropping from his mouth which you later figured out were supposed to be apologies. “I didn’t know you were a prefect, why didn’t you talk, sorry…”

When you walk away from him to find your desk in SS3 Orange with eyes blurred by tears, your classmates gather around you worried about your crying and you make them wait when they ask you why. You have never known how to put into words the things that draw tears from your eyes. Eventually, you tell them that “the” teacher slapped you while doing your prefectship duties. You get uncomfortable with how like wildfire, the news will spread around the school, from lips to ears, from ears to lips and then to the principal’s office. You find comfort in the sorries your peers tell you, in the hugs they offer you but mostly in the army they form to get justice for you, and the way Mrs Lawal, your PHE teacher, vows to “treat his fuck up” when she hears the news.

Eventually, the news dies, people stop asking you to narrate what exactly happened, your parents come to school and make sure the teacher gets suspended, the mark imprinted on the skin of your cheek leaves but the scar from the incident never truly leaves. The scar inside.

You had always known that something was wrong with you, your height. All of your peers towered over you literally. Your classmate in primary school had once walked up to you to say, “Ruka, why are you short?” So, you knew. You were constantly reminded all your life that you were not enough. Why were your mates a certain height and you were, well, not close? Why were you not enough? Why was your body not enough? Now, someone had slapped you because he mistook you for a junior student aimlessly standing at the top of the stairs instead of going to class. You blamed yourself. If you were taller, he wouldn’t have mistaken you for a child. The blame was on you for being short.

When one day, as you walked back from school, and were about to take the turn leading to Bashorun road, a man reaches out and slaps you from a moving bus, you stand there for a moment, shocked and you curse him under your breath. You assume he thought you were a child walking carelessly on the road. Till today, you don’t know why that happened but since that day, you took the last strand of compassion you would have offered to yourself and flung it away. You would choose to not like yourself instead, you would choose to not like the body that brought you this shame. You would choose self-loathing. Since that day, you learned to carry your body like a weapon; your face the trigger ready to fire at anybody even before they attempted to approach you. Frowning was how you could guard yourself from people. If you could stop them from coming close, then maybe you could stop them from throwing remarks about your body and you could prevent yourself from hurting.

But when in 300 level, your lecturer looks at you, asks you what you are doing in her class and when you say you are a student, she says to the entire class, “I thought she was in JSS2,” and laughs, you wonder if wielding your body as a weapon is any good. So, you resolve to sharpening your voice, your wit, your pen but none of those could give you what you quite wanted. What you wanted to feel was anger. The kind of anger that could make you stand up for yourself and break a bottle simultaneously, the kind of anger that could make you hit those men back when they hit you, the kind of anger that could make you throw down the PC in your proprietor’s office those years back when a school administrator said to you, “is it your type that wants to go to university?” making you feel smaller than you already were. You wanted to express all the anger fighting to be set free.

 

Not your body

While you battle with the anger that threatens to rip from inside this body they have made you dislike, you could sense a predatory longing for this body almost everywhere you turned by men who wanted to snatch access to it. Access you were not willing to give to them.

When a round faced man, you are squeezed in a danfo bus with, touches your thighs endlessly and after politely asking him to stop several times, acts dumb, you get forced to forfeit your bus fare, tell the bus driver to stop halfway through Ojota and walk to Ketu. When at a buka in Ilorin, you feel a hand hit your bum and you turn back, you see a lanky guy clasping his hands together in what seems to be an apology while he and his friends struggle to hold back laughter, you turn away, there was nothing you could do. When a man stops you and your sister in the middle of the road to “toast” you and you refuse to entertain him, he grabs you by the wrist and says he won’t let you go and there’s nothing you can do about it, you wriggle your way out of his grip and hold hands with your sister in hurried footsteps all the way back home. When you refuse to give a random guy with a scar across his face your mobile number, he flares up and resorts to threats while trying to grab you, you become scared for your life. While seated and doing your laundry as a teenager, a bricklayer working on a building almost opposite your parent’s house, tries to show you his penis and whistles at you to come and meet him in the uncompleted building he was working at. You do not yet understand how the world works but you think he must be mad and scream at him in disgust, “leave me alone!”

You dread the gaze of men and their tendencies to want to snatch access to your body. Access you do not want to give them.

 

Anger

All your life, you have taken all of the bullshit the world around you had to give and made it digestible. You swallowed it. Pretended it didn’t hurt and pushed it further down you. But everything bottled against its will always find a way to escape, to explode. So, it explodes and your anger comes down like wrath whenever you discuss gender inequalities, gender-based violence, misogyny, body shaming, the anger comes down upon the people and the topics it meets with. It comes down as conversation or confrontation with:

People who were making it a habit to say to you, don’t dress this way or that way because of the men around.

Rape apologists on Twitter (X) who desperately wanted to rationalize and justify rape.

Anybody who showed misogynistic tendencies in conversation with you.

Unkind people.

You become angry at the world, at the news headlines, at the upholders of the patriarchy, at religion, at culture, at people, at everything that broke you, at everything that broke the world, at everything that breaks you still, at everything that breaks the world still.

 

Self-work

You are living with a lot of anger and hurt inside of you deposited by forces that cannot be named and although you let it out in writing, in conversation, you will still do the self-work. You will look at your body and say thank you for being, for staying, for carrying me through all of these years. You will take one hand in the other and promise to learn, to learn to accept your body and appreciate your body. You will fold your arms against your chest in a hug and whisper, “I’m sorry, and I forgive you. I will carry you gracefully as you have carried me,” and you will say eventually, “I will do the continuous work of learning you, and loving you.”

Then you will take your body into the world, sharpen your voice and speak for the bodies like yours that haven’t yet found a voice.

But the lines will still be blurred. So, when your lover says the ice cream container is small “just like you,” you wouldn’t know if to take it as a joke or as an insult so you would laugh and say, “it’s not your fault,” because it’s not his fault but it’s not your fault either. You have learnt now that it’s not your fault.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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