Pretty
girl
I am 20.
I am walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea in London. It is the 1980s. Three
men are coming towards me; they are clearly together, though the foot traffic
on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. They are white,
dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts. The first man, as he passes,
looks me in the eye and says: “You’re a pretty girl.” The second one smirks,
but says nothing. The third one leans into my face and breathes: “Nigger!”
My final
year at university and I had a part-time job working for an American foreign
correspondent. One of my tasks was to pick up the broadsheets each morning, and
in those pre-Internet days I would leaf through them and clip and file any
articles on the stories he was covering. That day was a Saturday in summer. I
generally came in later on the weekend and the street was already busy with
people. I was on my way to his house with my haul of newspapers when I passed
the three men.
You’re a
pretty girl. Nigger.
The
first remark did not seem designed to offend. You’re a pretty girl. It intruded
on my thoughts, got my attention. Then came the complicity of the second man.
Then, “Nigger!” What happened afterwards? Do you imagine that the first man
berated the third man? Do you think they argued? And whose side did the second
man take? None of that happened. I know it didn’t. You know it didn’t. The
three men carried on walking down the road. At some point one of them likely
turned to the others.
And they
laughed.
Walking
A child
learns to walk. The child hauls herself up on a chair or her mother’s knee,
finds her balance and takes one tottering step and then another. The parents
murmur sounds of encouragement, spread their arms. Come! Come! The father
catches the child and swings her up in the air. My mother tells me that my
approach was a little different from most infants’. I would crawl into the
empty middle of the room and there I would take a breath and slowly rise. And I
used my growing independence not to run towards her but to run gleefully away.
I grew
up in the compounds of developing countries, in West Africa, where my father
was from; and Southern Africa, the Middle and Far East, where my stepfather’s
career as a diplomat took us later. The hazards of the compound were snakes
mainly, and army ants. As children, my brother, my sister and I didn’t leave
the compound alone much except to go and buy sweets or when we broke out in
search of adventure. Around the age of five I began to borrow my brother’s
clothes. Boys’ clothes afforded a greater practical freedom, were better for
sliding down banisters, climbing trees, even the simple act of sitting. There
was a lot of focus when I was growing up on making sure I sat properly, that is
with my legs closed. My brother didn’t have to sit that way, which seemed odd
to me, given that he had something far more prominent to display. I wondered
why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we
were the ones to wear skirts.
I went
to boarding school at 6 and left at 18 for university in London. The enclosed
worlds of compound life and British boarding school left me unprepared for the
streets of the capital, the act of walking, specifically of walking alone and
female down a street. Yet in my tomboy/cross-dresser days, which lasted until I
was around 14, I had already begun to understand viscerally something I
couldn’t articulate. I didn’t want to be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw
belonged to boys but not girls.
2017. I
am standing on the platform of a London tube station, I’m back in the city
where I lived for 30 years, before making my home in the United States. A young
man is looking at me. I ignore him, but his stare is intrusive. When we board
the train he stands very close to me, and at one point his hand touches mine. I
am twice as old as him, which makes this situation somewhat unusual. But
everything else about it is familiar, and I’m old enough now to recognize
exactly what is going on. The next stop is mine and so I move to stand facing
the door. He follows and stands right behind me; I can feel his breath on the
back of my neck. The train is crowded, it’s unlikely anyone else has followed
his behavior closely enough to think it out of line. What the young man doesn’t
realize is that I am facing the wrong door. This is my old home station, and
the doors behind us will be the ones to open. At the last moment I swing round
and exit.
A week
or so later, on the tube again, I catch the eye of a man sitting opposite me.
For a few moments I hold his gaze and then I look away. In the moment of
turning I see him smile and it is a smile of triumph. He has won something, he
has defeated me. Like the first man he is very young, around 20. In that moment
I realize something chilling. My God, I thought, he’s practicing.
Nobody
tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze. My mother never told me
that men may look at me but I may not look back. That if we do our look can be
taken as an invitation. Men teach us that. Over the years we train our gaze to skim
men’s faces, resting for only a split second, shifting fractionally sideways if
our eyes happen to meet. The man on the other hand, if he so wishes, will look
at your face, your breasts, your legs, your ass.
In her
1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey described how
films are created to be seen from the point of view of the heterosexual male.
Their female characters are presented to him as objects of desire. This is the
“male gaze.” The gaze is power. Men own the power of the gaze. White people do,
too. A white friend tells me of the time she took her adoptive daughter who is
black to a small town in Maine and found her daughter the object of stares. “I
guess there aren’t too many black people in that part of the country,” she
suggests placatingly, because already I am visibly irritated. “And they don’t
own a fucking television?” I say. “And they’ve never laid eyes on their
president or his family?” (This was early 2016.) They stare because they can,
by the gift of the power vested in them by their membership in the ethnic
majority. They stare because her daughter’s discomfiture is nothing to them,
may be the whole purpose.
When a
man stares at a woman in public her sensitivities are, at the very least,
immaterial to him. He owns the power of the gaze and he will, if he cares to,
exercise it. The real mind-fuck is that enfolded into the action is the
defense. The woman who complains may well find herself being told she should be
flattered, that she is lucky men find her attractive.
“Where
you going, baby?”
“Smile,
little lady.”
“Sssssss!”
“Want
some of this?”
“Look at
the ass on that!”
“You
wouldn’t be able to walk if . . .”
“’Til .
. . it . . . bleeds.”
In the
early 90s I shared an apartment in London’s Chelsea with a friend. One week,
while repairs to the roof were being undertaken, we had scaffolding erected at
the front of the house. My room was on the top floor and faced the street, and
from there I could see the roofers go up and down the ladders. At certain times
throughout the day they would take their breaks sitting on the scaffold deck
right in front of my desk unaware that I could hear them as they took turns
yelling comments at the women passing in the street below. The excitement each
opportunity provoked was astonishing. “‘Here comes one, here comes one! Your
turn!” One man in particular was actually jumping up and down on the
scaffolding. The more evidently humiliated the woman, the greater the delight.
From where I sat I noticed several things: Firstly, yes, the young and
attractive women drew more aggressive attention, as if the men were intent on
denigrating what they could not possess, to punish the woman for being
desirable and also unobtainable to them; secondly, no woman who was walking
alone was exempt; and thirdly, they especially liked to pick on women who were
dressed for work, who almost certainly earned more than they did. The women
were metaphorically stripped, just as women were in earlier times and still are
publicly stripped in some parts of the world, for transgressing the boundaries
of womanhood, for stepping out of their place. They were being shamed, stripped
not of their clothing, but of their dignity.
As a child I was taught to ignore aggressive
dogs, to keep walking. Once you’re out
of its territory, the dog will leave you alone, so goes the conventional
wisdom, and mostly it works. The same is supposed to be true of men, except it
isn’t. They walk alongside you, they kerb-crawl you. If you tell them to leave
you alone they will call you a bitch and ask you who the fuck you think you
are. Every encounter, however seemingly benign, contains the possibility of
violence. By the time it is over (you have entered a shop or a subway), your
breath is coming quickly and your heart slamming against your ribcage. Why do
men do this? Nobody asks the question and when I ask, I don’t get an answer.
Sometimes it is said or suggested that this is simply the nature of men. What
is interrogated more often is my response. Submissiveness is what is demanded. Women
are taught not to answer back, for if we do we will escalate matters and
then—the subtext—whatever follows will be our own fault.
Except I
do, I do answer back. For, you see, it is in my nature. In London in those
early years, I get into fights. In South Kensington a man threatens to punch me
after I tell him to piss off. I say I am going to fetch a policeman and if he
is still there I will have him arrested. He swears at me, but he goes. A man in
Camden Town pulls out a knife and threatens to stab me in the stomach. A crowd,
mostly white, gathers around me and watches to see what will happen. The man is
black and so am I. The stand-off goes on for long seconds. “Do you want to fuck
with me? Do you want to fuck with me?” Even then the ghost of a joke crosses my
mind. Well, I thought I’d made it perfectly clear. Another man, also black and
wearing dreads, moves through the audience. He walks up to us both, looks at
the man with the knife and says: “What’s the problem, brother?” I never see
that man again, not even to thank him, because the friend with whom I am
walking has found a policeman and my harasser flees. But he is caught, and he
goes to court and I am there, and I see him. His hair is braided and he wears a
shirt and suit; he looks so different I wonder if I would have picked him out
of a line-up. My statement is read to the court. He is found guilty, not of the
sexual harassment which began the whole altercation, although the judge tuts at
this part of my statement, but of possession of an offensive weapon. The case
is over in minutes, my assailant is sent away to be sentenced at a later date.
The girl I was walking with and her father attend the case. They both make it
clear, though not unkindly because I have now learned my lesson, that this is
my fault.
Later,
when I tell the story I will discover that in the eyes of many of my white
friends, the fact that I am black and both my harasser and savior are black
makes this a “black thing.” Something in which they have no stake and in which
the mostly white onlookers are now exempt from interfering; the courage of the
dreadlocked man is suddenly not so great.
On the
streets race and gender intersect, the dominance of men over women, of white
over black, of white men over white women, of black men over black women, of
Hispanic men over Hispanic women and so forth. Layered upon that is the
relationship between men, the sometime competition and sometime complicity
between men of all colors, the upholding of male power. This can play out in a
variety of ways. For a woman of color, men of the same ethnicity may be ally or
foe.
In
London men view street harassment as an equal opportunities occupation. I’ve
endured sexually aggressive behavior from men of every color and class. In New
York I am rarely publicly bothered by white men. How to account for the
difference? In America the edges of racial politics are sharper and more
bloodied. Human motivations are often hard to fathom, but I’d give a good guess
that white men in New York City are scared to be seen harassing a woman of
color. To be seen. In public. There is also this—that within the codes of
heterosexual masculinity, black men have ownership of and therefore power over
black women. In some places this code is more strictly enforced than in others.
On one of my last visits to the city I had to pass a group of workmen on a
narrow sidewalk as they stood leaning with their backs against a building. In
London this would be an inescapable moment. But we were in New York. All the
men were white except one black man at the end. I was dragging an overnight bag
and so my progress was slow. The men went silent and watched me as I passed.
The unspoken rule, I sensed, was that the job of calling out to me belonged to
the last man, the black man. I walked towards him and it seemed we both knew
what the other was thinking. Would he betray his race or his place in the
patriarchy? As I passed he leaned forward and, audible only to me, whispered:
“I like your jacket.”
Officers
stand by in 1955 as religious leaders from Chicago demonstrate outside the
White House in Washington over the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Emmett
Till was murdered. Emmett Till did not own the power of the gaze, at least not
as far as Carolyn Bryant was concerned. 50-plus years on, white women friends
in New York complain of the behavior of some black guys there. They worry about
being thought racist if they complain. This is the power play between men, the
revenge exacted by certain black men upon white women but in reality upon white
men. Payback is the pickup truck bearing a Confederate flag that cruises me
twice on a long, lonely run in Western Massachusetts, the white guy with the
baseball cap who turns his head and licks his lips on each pass.
#NotAllMen
At some
point most women come to the silent and terrible realization that the men in
their lives—fathers, brothers, uncles, boyfriends and husbands—are not
especially outraged by their experience of sexual harassment.
Late one
evening when I was in my mid-twenties I had a row with my then-boyfriend. I
decided to go home until I remembered the time of night, that I didn’t have a
car and would have to call a taxi if I hoped to execute my walk-out. I had very
little money at the time and I’d have to weigh the cost of the taxi against the
level of my outrage. A few months later, arguing with the same boyfriend
(things didn’t last too much longer) while on holiday in Southern France, I remained
walking on one side of the road while he crossed to the other. We were headed
for the beach and the road was more or less empty. A man driving by, assuming I
was alone, began to proposition me. I ignored him for a few moments and then I
told him to get lost; finally I crossed to walk with my boyfriend and the man
drove away. I remember very well my boyfriend’s reaction. He laughed at me.
Writing
about South Africa, where the incidence of rape is among the highest in the
world, the feminist activist, poet and academic Helen Moffett has stated:
“Under apartheid, the dominant group used methods of regulating blacks and
reminding them of their subordinate status that permeated not just public and
political spaces, but also private and domestic spaces. Today it is gender
rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated. This is largely done
through sexual violence, in a national project in which it is quite possible
that many men are buying into the notion that in enacting intimate violence on
women, they are performing a necessary work of social stabilization.”
In other
words, rapists are the shock troops of male power.
The more
I think about it, the more I come to the uneasy conclusion that, whilst
#notallmen are rapists or sexual harassers, equally #notallmen are too unhappy
about the status quo either. The relative vulnerability of women in public
spaces limits our freedom of movement and our choices. Good practice in
personal safety—telling someone where we are going, allowing ourselves to be escorted
home and not walking alone at night—all add up to an effective form of social
control. “The necessary work of social stabilization.”
Only in
the second half of the 20th century did middle-class women in many Western
countries acquire some degree of freedom outside the home; before that, to walk
unaccompanied was to be taken as a prostitute, a “woman of the streets,” a
“streetwalker.” Walking, for a woman, can be an act of transgression against
male authority. When a man walks aimlessly and for pleasure he is called a
flâneur; a certain louche glamour attaches to the word. One rarely hears the
term flâneuse. In her account of women walkers, itself called Flâneuse, Lauren
Elkin observes that: “narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman’s experience.”
Historically the free-ranging woman who dispensed with the domestic to claim
ownership of the streets was a rare creature. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, George
Sand, the flâneuses who recorded their flânerie were women who all defied male
authority in other ways, too. George Sand wore male dress so that she could
move more freely around Paris.
Only
once has a man ever stood up for me against harassment by another man (with the
exception of the dreadlocked man, though he did not know what had started the
trouble) and the man who did so was gay. We were standing outside a bar in Soho
in London smoking cigarettes when a young man passed me and made a remark to
which I responded with a put-down. His rage was instantaneous. He was smoking
too and he threatened to burn me with his cigarette, holding the lit end close
to my cheek. My companion intervened and in doing so drew fire away from me,
literally because now the burning cigarette tip was being held to his neck. The
scene ended when a friend of the assailant pulled him away. Afterwards we
talked about it. I observed that a straight man would almost certainly have
reprimanded me for my comment but he, notably, had not. No, he told me, because
he grew up having much the same fight on the streets: the sexual insults, the
shouted provocations. As a gay man he had learned to stand up to bullies.
Yet when
I have talked to straight men about what happens to me on the streets I have
consistently been met with looks of blank innocence. They insist they know
nothing of it. I have seen the same conversation played out extensively on
social media where the men most devoted to the use of the hashtag #notallmen
always claim ignorance, are “surprised,” so “surprised” they’ll go as far as to
insist that what women are telling them cannot possibly be true, that invention
or exaggeration on a global scale must surely be in play. Talking to a straight
man about street harassment can be, as many black folk including black men have
pointed out, like talking to some white people about the daily indignities of
racism.
Somehow something enacted in broad daylight thousands
of times in the lifetime of virtually every woman has gone entirely unnoticed
by most straight men. At some point you have to ask: How can it be so?
How can it be so?
A
lithograph of George Sand dressed in men’s clothing by Paul Gavarni, circa 1840
On
Matriarchy
I am
driving down the road from my home in Freetown when a youth makes a kissing
noise at me. I brake hard, bringing the car to a halt. “Did you hear that?” I
ask the friend I have with me. She says she did. “I don’t believe it,” I tell
her. To the young man I say: “Come here!” I expect this kind of behavior in
many places, but I have not experienced it in the city where I spent many of my
formative years. The youth, in his late teens or early twenties, is leaning
against a wall in the company of four or so friends. One of them nudges him and
points to me, telling him he is being called. He pushes off the wall and
approaches the car; he saunters over but his cockiness has already lost its
edge. People are watching, not just his mates but the women stallholders on the
other side of the road. A couple of passersby, too, have stopped.
As I
have said, I grew up in several countries in the world and as an adult I have
traveled much of it. In every city and country I have ever visited I make
tactical decisions before I step out of the door. Time of day, clothing, route:
these things must be considered. Often this is done at a subconscious level; at
other times advice might be sought or given. There is a constant tension
between the desire to look one’s best, to be noticed, and the price that will
exact. I want to dress for my destination, the person or people I am going to
meet or the event I am headed for, but I must also dress for the men I do not
know who I will encounter along the way. Anonymity is something I can only
imagine, to walk unguarded an impossibility. Certain places, though, are better
or worse than others.
When I
start in on the young man in Freetown he apologizes almost at once. “My name is
Aminatta,” I tell him. “And the next time you see me you will remember that and
you will use it when you greet me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes
what?”
“Yes
Aminatta.”
“No!”
The
youth looks startled.
“Yes,
Aunty Aminatta.”
“Yes,
Aunty Aminatta.”
Sierra
Leone is what some anthropologists have called a “matriarchy posing as a
patriarchy.” It is also a gerontocracy, and deference is expected of anyone
younger towards anyone older, even if only by a few years. Over lunch I tell my
stepmother what has happened and she laughs. “Oh, it’s those little dresses you
wear. They think you’re younger than you are.” My mother, sitting sideways on
her chair like a Victorian lady riding side-saddle, is dressed in robes
arranged in swathes around her. I am wearing a cotton shift dress and sandals.
Then: “Anyway the NGOs brought all that here with them.” She waves a hand as
she sips her ginger beer. Freetown then was home to hundreds of Western aid workers,
newly arrived in the wake of war. There’s a tendency to blame unpalatable
social behavior on outsiders—and yes, everything about those young men (the
sagging jeans, the backwards-turned baseball caps, the sullen expressions)
spoke of an enthusiasm for American rap—but my stepmother is saying something
different. She is saying that they were treating me as if I were a Western
woman.
On my
first visit to Ghana a couple of years later I have a series of similar
encounters: In a hotel a young man in baseball clothes murmurs suggestively as
I pass by. I stop and I yell at him. His companion, an older man in a business
suit, turns and looks at the young man open-mouthed and orders him to
apologize. As they walk away he continues to gesture angrily. The porter with
my suitcase asks me what the young man said. He shakes his head: “They send
them to America, you see.” A few days earlier I had taken a walk down the beach
at another hotel. There were men working on the scaffolding of a building, and
one of them called out to me. I stopped and shouted at him: “Is that how you
talk to your mother?” A local friend who I tell later on will smile at this
point in my story. “So they realized you are an African.” On my way back I had
to pass the men again and I was a little concerned about how the next encounter
might go, but the men were silent.
I won’t
make a host of claims about the position of women in West African society and
nor will I say that a man will never speak or behave insultingly to a woman in
a public space. But I will say this: if he does and if she makes it her
business to reply, she can expect the crowd to have her back.
Whose
Space? Loos, Queues, And Other Places
When I
was still at college I read in a newspaper of a study purporting to show that
when a man and a woman are walking towards each other on the sidewalk, the
woman invariably steps aside for the man. I told my flatmate about it, and the
next time we went out she announced
gleefully: “You’re doing it! You’re doing it!” Ever since then, whenever I
think about it, I try to hold my ground and have often found myself
nose-to-nose with men who are evidently so used to the path clearing ahead of
them they can’t figure out where I have come from. In the last year or so the
discussion has resurfaced and now the behavior being described has its own
portmanteau, “manslamming.”
In July
of 2017 New York Times reporter Greg Howard, a black man, accused white women
of doing exactly the same, writing: “When white women are in my path, they
almost always continue straight, forcing me to one side without changing their
course. This happens several times a day; and a couple of times a week, white
women force me off the sidewalk completely.”
Earlier
in the same year I was standing in line for the ladies’ in a theater in
Baltimore. The theater was under renovation, some of the facilities were closed
and the line was about 50 people long. Women were making way for very old women
and women with disabilities, allowing them to jump the queue. The crowd that
night was mostly white and by chance I found myself standing next to the only
other woman of color in the line. A white woman, older (but not so old she
might have skipped the queue) and evidently wealthy, walked down the line,
stopped halfway and inserted herself just in front of me. I looked at her. I
looked around. I caught the eye of the African American woman next to me. “Did
that just happen?” I asked. She raised her eyebrows: “Don’t say anything,” she
mouthed. But I did, I said: “Do you just do that then? Stand wherever in the
line you want?” and eventually the white woman slipped out of the line and
walked to the back. I asked the African American woman: “Was it just a
coincidence that she stood in front of us?” And she replied: “I’m saying
nothing,” and gave me a look like I had been born yesterday.
I return
to Helen Moffett, who pointed to how, during apartheid in South Africa, the
dominant group, whites, had used methods to regulate blacks in public spaces in
ways which reminded them of their subordinate status. It’s all about power,
people endeavoring, consciously and subconsciously and through myriad daily
encounters, to establish dominance over those they consider less worthy. During
the Jim Crow era in the United States, white Americans forced upon African
Americans the same ignominies as white South Africans did upon their black
populations, reserving certain public spaces and privileges for whites. When
black people challenged this orthodoxy, it’s no coincidence they did it, just
as black South Africans did, by walking, by marching, by crossing into those
spaces barred to them.
Greg
Howard asked an Asian friend, a man, whether he was forced off the sidewalk by
white women on the streets of New York. The answer was no. It was the white men
who plowed through him.
Many
months ago at a friend’s book launch I was standing talking to a man I always
liked to talk to whenever we met. He was tall, six foot two or three, and still
broad shouldered though he was then in his eighties. We were standing close to
the bar, and I was telling a story and turned at one point to find his face
suffused with rage. I wondered what could possibly have happened, and I asked
him if he was all right. “He would never, ever have done that 30 years ago,” he
eventually said in a low voice. A man on his way to the bar had shouldered him.
“As if I wasn’t there.” He’d been manslammed. I am as certain as I can possibly
be that this man had never cat-called a woman, probably was even the kind of
person who stepped aside for other people on the sidewalk. By the same token I
am equally certain he has never endured a carload of women hurling obscenities
at him, heard a woman hiss filth into his ear as he waited to cross a road, or
seen a woman waggle her tongue and clutch at her crotch. I remember his face,
the mix of fury and frustration, how taken aback I was that he could be so
angry, because worse happened to me on any given day.
As I write this I wonder about all those guys, of
every class and color, who have interrupted my thoughts in order to remind me of my place. For whom it was fun to try to unnerve or to humiliate
me. To them I say, Just wait. It’s coming. Too late for me. Too late for you to
learn much except a mote of what it might be like to be treated as if you don’t
matter. But it’s coming.
I’d like to say I wish I were a better person than to
feel that way.
I wish I could. But I can’t.
Power
Walking : Aminatta Forna on the streets
of London, Freetown and NYC. By Aminatta Forna. LitHub , September 19, 2018.
This
fall Freeman’s published Aminatta Forna’s essay “Power Walking,” a meditation
on what it means to occupy and move through public space as a woman of color.
It is a practical art form, Forna describes, that she had to learn. “Nobody
tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze,” she writes. “My mother
never told me that men may look at me but I may not look back.” This fall, Ms.
Forna exchanged emails with another walker and writer, Taiye Selasi, a novelist
who, like her, has had a home on three continents and notices the ways that
power dynamics shift in each place, depending on whom she encounters. Who
regards her and whether she can look back. Here is their conversation.
Taiye
Selasi: Your entire essay is—like everything you write—beautiful, honest,
insightful. Of the many, many things that strike me as deeply familiar and
heartbreakingly true, there is this line just at the end: “I wonder about all
those guys, of every class and color, who have interrupted my thoughts in order
to remind me of my place.” Those words made me gasp. Somehow, I’d never
organized my thoughts around those two sets words: “interrupting my thoughts”
and “reminding me of my place.” And yet they are the crucial words. They
contain all the violation, the violence.
First:
the interruption of thought. What I most cherish about walking is its
relationship to thinking. From the earliest age I’ve been admonished to “look
where I’m going” and yet I can never quite manage it. I look up, at cloud
formations; around, at passing strangers; down, at my own moving feet. That
steady stream of visual information has a hypnotic effect; invariably I find
myself lost in thought: about the clouds, the strangers, some lover, some plot.
I’ve never walked for more than ten minutes without starting to write in my
head. Those who interrupt me while I’m walking, just as you say, interrupt my
thinking—and they do so because they cannot imagine that my thoughts have any
value. They cannot imagine that I am attempting to perfect a paragraph in my
head. They cannot imagine—they most certainly do not imagine—that I am a
writer. A thinker.
Of
course, I am aware that I live in a body. I am aware that this body is received
by the world as brown and female. But to write, to be a writer, I think, is to
depart from the body. To drift away from it. To move within so many bodies that
one can so easily forget one’s own. To be harassed while walking—accosted while
thinking—is a violent reminder of male disregard for the thoughts of women, the
contemplative lives of brown people, interiority.
And
then: my place. To be reminded of my place. First to be interrupted while
thinking, then to be reminded of my place. Violence to greater violence. What
is my place? I have spent most of my life walking through spaces in which, on
the face of things, I have no place. A black girl moving, un-placed, through
lily white Brookline, Massachusetts; a West African immigrant moving,
un-placed, through African-American Harlem; a brown writer moving, un-placed,
through Rome, Berlin, Lisbon; a soi-disant Afropolitan moving, un-placed,
through Lagos, Accra. I have come to terms with not having a place. Perhaps
that is why I feel so exceptionally galled at being reminded that others have a
place for me.
The
white woman in Berlin who does not think that I belong in her building (where I
own a flat) has a place for me. That place is: NOT FROM HERE. The aunties in
Accra who click their tongues at my unprocessed hair: NOT FROM HERE. My black
high school friends who thought it absurd that I didn’t know what Kool-Aid was:
NOT FROM HERE. I can accept NOT FROM HERE. Everywhere I walk I am NOT FROM
HERE. What I cannot accept is: NOT HERE at all. The men who push past me on the
sidewalk, just as you say; the white women who do the same. For them I am not
here at all. Nothing in my upbringing prepares me to accept that place, and yet
nothing in my nature equips me to resist it, as you do. It is horribly
difficult for me to shout out, to shout back—and why is that?
Did I
make my peace with “NOT FROM HERE” by making the locals like me? Isn’t so much
of the African immigrant upbringing about being polite, being accepted, being
acceptable? How appalling, really, my hesitation to object to my own erasure.
Aminatta
Forna: I think they do imagine you are a writer, a thinker, that is to say a
woman with more on her mind than knowing her place with regard to men, a brown person
with places to go, people to see and things to do. That is precisely what
antagonizes them so. I have had discussions with my friends male and/or white
about the extent to which people are cognizant of their responses and
reactions. I’m talking about the men who call out, your neighbor in Berlin, the
aunties in Accra. Many would have us believe their behavior is reactive,
unthinking and, in the case of men, biologically driven. I don’t buy it, I
believe their actions are calculated and deliberate. How else to explain the
differences in the places you and I have traveled? In some street harassment is
endemic, in others rare.
In the
era of South African apartheid white citizens knew it was their job to keep
black and brown citizens in their place, for without their active cooperation
and if left entirely in the hands of, say, the police, apartheid would have
failed. It required the white citizens of South Africa to engage in the daily
enforcement of the minutiae of the system, the restrooms and drinking
fountains. Same goes for the United States, where we still see the legacy of
citizen enforcement in the white women who call the police when they spot a
black woman asleep in the university common room. Some actions may be less or
more harmful, consequences less or more grave, but the impetus is the same. It
is the desire to assert their power through control, which in turn is effected
through humiliation. For otherwise and without the self-appointed guardians of
the status quo, Taiye, women like our younger selves, might begin to believe we
could own the world.
I like
to walk and dream. I like to take a knotty problem of plot or character out and
unravel it on a stroll. For many years I walked alone around a ruined, Gothic
cemetery in South East London. Some women, when I told them I walked there,
were concerned. But the danger posed by the remote possibility of attack when
weighed against the impossibility of uninterrupted thought, became a risk worth
taking. I had a dog, which helped, I have found dogs to be a great deterrent to
would be harassers. To a writer a lost thought is a violation. Sometimes I know
I will never get that thought back, it’s gone, like a book stolen from a
library. Tens of thousands of lost thoughts over a lifetime.
I shout
back and in so doing I have doubtless lost even more thoughts. Still more
disappear into the smoke of outrage that persists long after the encounter.
Partly my response is a matter of temperament, I’m not quick to anger but when
anger comes it is instantaneous and huge. Also I was raised to believe
injustice must always be confronted. For the most part young women are taught
submissiveness—silence, at the very least—is the price of walking. And who
among us can insist that the woman alone faced by the one, two, three men
should antagonize them with her anger. Yet I have always had a feeling that
women, especially in the West, missed a moment. What if, in one unpremeditated
voice we had all shouted back from the start? What then?
You say
“isn’t so much of the African immigrant upbringing about being polite?” Do you
think that perhaps therein lies a difference. I have never been an immigrant.
Here in the US, according to my tax status, I am a resident nonimmigrant, a
visitor. In America I am “not from here,” but I couldn’t care less. I was born
of two nations, the Britain of my mother and my father’s country of Sierra
Leone. I have never felt that I did not belong, despite the assumption that I
should feel that way and the efforts of those who might like it to be so. I
begin from a different footing to you: these are my streets, this is my
country. How dare they?!
TS: What
you say is so interesting—and so true. So painfully true. “These are my
streets, this is my country” is something I’ve never felt while walking.
Anywhere. Your essay articulates an (admirable) intolerance of harassment on
the streets of “the Britain of your mother” and your father’s Sierra Leone. I
love the continuity of it: those countries belonged first to each parent and
now belong, both, to you. A question that comes to mind is whether you feel the
same anger, instantaneous and huge, on streets that feel less your own? Cape
Cod? Cape Town? Or is it perhaps the case, as I’ve long since suspected, that a
fully formed sense of belonging in just one context makes possible a deep,
unshakeable sense of belonging in any context?
An image
emerges: of you walking with your head held high, confident of your right to be
wherever your foot falls. And of myself, walking, watching my feet fall,
careful not to provoke the locals. It occurs to me that what I’d most wish to
transmit to a daughter, if ever I have one, is your certainty. Not merely of
where you belong, but of your right to confront injustice wherever you are.
Reading your words I became aware (and again I must say painfully so) that I’d
internalized the lesson you reference: submissiveness is the price of walking.
Avoiding confrontation—rather than courageously rising to it—the trick to
belonging.
In this,
I must thank you for your essay and for these reflections, Aminatta. These last
days I’ve tried walking as if I were you. I’ve had the chance to exercise this
new stride—these new eyes—in Lisbon and Algiers. Palpable the difference. To
maintain the manners with which I was raised without defaulting to submissiveness.
Not to give way on the sidewalk perforce. Not to avert my objecting gaze from a
man’s objectifying one. Not to receive the where-did-she-come-from stare by
smiling, demurring, but rather to return it with something like a wink. I
became aware, conducting this experiment, of the body’s ability to perceive
actual threat. As you say, we do not insist that the lone woman agitate the
pack of three men. But it’s become clearer to me that the performance of threat
is what I most often encounter: the adolescent boy playing at menace, the
airport official playing at power. Real power lies elsewhere, I’ve always
known. What I’ve learned from “walking like Aminatta” is how, moment to moment,
to summon it.
Power.
Perhaps
it is easier to believe that those who attempt to exert power over us do so
clumsily, blindly. That they are, essentially, ignorant. It is more
difficult—and more enraging—to understand that however narrow-minded they may
be, my neighbors in Berlin and my aunts in Accra are not fools. They intend
that I feel discomfort. Their goal—with their gazes, their sighs, their
asides—is my reaction: that I feel out of place. My weakness has always been
that I agree: I am out of place, yes, they’re right. Your reflections have
encouraged me to rethink the matter. If their goal is my disempowerment, what
is mine? And by what means do I intend to reach this goal? Then, I understand
why you may have chosen the title you did. “Power Walking.” A woman who has
ceased to consent in any way whatsoever to her own disempowerment, is precisely
that. She is power. See her on the streets of Freetown, Georgetown, Glasgow,
Gost—and you’re seeing power walking.
AF:
“Walking like Aminatta!” That tickles me. “You’re right, I do feel if not that
I belong everywhere, then perfectly at ease in most places. I’m not
uncomfortable with difference, including my own. And so I am probably all the
more outraged by the need on the part of so many to continually remind me that
a difference exists.
Let’s
talk about female anger. In my view Western women have been taught to swallow
their anger and to turn it inward in a way that is unparalleled in Sierra Leone
say or Nigeria. I’m reminded of Nigerian neighbors I had in London, a couple
with two kids who lived above a really obnoxious fellow, an Australian as it
happened, who was frequently drunk. One day the Australian swore at the man and
his children. Words were exchanged. The Nigerian told the Australian he was
rude and then added: “I’m going to tell my wife on you.” The Australian scoffed
at that, as you can imagine. I said to my husband, because we could hear the
whole altercation though our wall: “Oh my, he has no idea.” Half an hour or so
later madam drove up. We heard her go upstairs and then we counted, one, two,
three, four. Bam! A door slammed. She stormed downstairs, hauled that
Australian out of his apartment and yelled at him with such fury that he ran
back inside and hid. She won us all months of peace, I was sad to see them
move. When I told an English couple, they were confused. Why had the man left
it to his wife to deal with the neighbor? They thought the Nigerian man was lacking
in manliness. But I know that in Sierra Leone this would be an entirely
probable scenario. Female anger carries great weight, particularly coming from
a mother. The home is her domain and her authority within it counts. But not
just the home, I have become visibly angry three times in public in Sierra
Leone that I can recall and each time it has changed the situation for the
better, for me anyhow.
Yet in
the West from the youngest age girls are taught otherwise, to turn it in upon
themselves, to weep and not to rage, to seek sympathy, rather than demand
respect. Somebody asked me recently why female anger in Sierra Leone is more
evident and seemingly more effective, and I think back to the words of a
psychiatrist I know there, who described Western culture as one that
“internalizes” and West African culture as an “externalizing” culture. This is
a very general observation, of course. The impact on anger, on female anger, is
that a woman from Nigeria or Sierra Leone is far more likely to take it out on
the object of her displeasure than on herself.
In the
West women have swallowed their rage for so long one wonders what would happen
if it were put on display. And I mean full bodied, red blooded rage with no
evidence of tears. Here’s a story might amuse you:
Once I
was out with my dog when a man on the other side of the road yelled a crass
remark at me. I shouted at him to “fuck off!” He was astonished. His jaw simply
dropped open. He told me to watch my mouth and I retorted he was the one who
should watch his. I told him he could come cross the road and repeat what he
just said to me if he dared. This wasn’t how he expected the exchange to go and
he was confused, he hesitated and then decided he wasn’t going to let me get
away with this. So he began to cross the road, but after a few paces faltered.
My dog had recently defecated and I was holding a steaming bag of dog shit.
Suddenly the power was not his, but mine. I can feel it now like a warm wash,
the sensation of justified rage let rip. How many women and how many bags of
dog shit would it take, I wonder, for men like him to finally stop.
I wish I
could say I walked through the world with quite the authority that you ascribe
to me, but battles must be picked and I’ll just as often walk into a shop to
avoid a man or pretend I haven’t heard what he has said. And the vigilance
required of simply walking is so tiring. Yet unbelievable as it seems, if we
want the right to walk and dream while doing so, women are going to have to
fight for it.
Next
time I see you, Taiye, we must take a stroll.
Whose
Streets? A Conversation About Walking.
Aminatta Forna talks to Taiye Selasi. LitHub, December 20 , 2018
