Awakening
This was posted to the original Asnuma blog on June 30, 2016.
Today, sitting in a coffee shop armed with the latest notes from my (long-suffering) novel, I saw a beautiful woman. She was clad in a black t-shirt, her hair done up in a bun, her eyes bright and smiling. And she was fat.
I've heard the terms thin privilege, adipositivity, fat acceptance before, but something about this woman cemented a shame within me - the fact that I have used the word fat negatively, as though it were a bad thing to be heavier than a catwalk model. To every person who identifies as fat, I am writing a public apology, and, what's more, am committing myself to a new way of thinking and writing. And when I realized how beautiful this woman was, her obvious confidence and chic sense of style, I knew that the only person with a problem was me. Me, who is by no means thin, and who has long whined, "But...what about people's health?"
I am a writer - or I'd like to think of myself as one. Words spill out like self-contained oceans, so full of life and color, but to ascribe one like fat a sense of evil, laziness, hopelessness, stupidity, greed is morally reprehensible. If language knits the boundaries of our world, there is no point in using toxic thread to engineer our reality. Fat is a beautiful word, and it contains multitudes of beautiful people.
Therefore, as a poet, a swimmer in oceans and the life they contain, I am committing myself to writing fat characters with all the positive and negative attributes that I endow other, thin characters. In contemplating these characters and who they might be, I've chosen one I greatly admire, one by the name of Louisa, to begin learning about the intersections among fatphobia, racism, misogyny, and classism. This post is simply a public declaration of my intentions, but more importantly serves as a call to help. I need to be held accountable for the characters populating my work, and so, Internet, do what you do best and hold a person to a very high standard with public comments.
Do it.
