There are lots of great images and interesting language in Chimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, so I don’t know what it says that this one has stuck with me. But ever since reading it a few months ago, I’ve never felt quite the same way about myself.
There’s this boy, Ugwu, who keeps house for a professor. Every Saturday, the same group of a half-dozen or so intellectuals comes to the professor’s house to sit around and talk politics, and Ugwu makes them dinner. In the scene – I can’t quote it, because I left my copy in New York (where I hope my poor masters-projected-laden roommate is having a chance to enjoy it) – Ugwu takes comfort in the intimacy of knowing who sat where by their leftovers: one guy practically licks the plate clean, another doesn’t eat a certain vegetable. And Richard, the only white guy in the party, leaves the chicken skins. They’re supposed to be the best part, and Ugwu wonders if Richard can’t quite stomach the idea of eating chicken skin because it reminds him so much of his own.
Something about this image suggested the foreignness of my own body to me in a new way.
I’ve never exactly identified with my body – it sort of never occurred to me to consider my own corporeality, when there were so many other interesting ideas and stories with which to busy my mind. I’ve always lived mostly in my head, but ever since the book, I can occasionally pull myself out of my mind long enough to think about my physical self. My sister would probably say that, it’s just this sort of thinking, if I were being sincere, that should lead me to wear makeup every day, and not just on days I’m trying to make myself feel better. But mostly it has me thinking about how I really do have chicken thighs.
So in a way, I should be well-primed for all the stares my knee is getting lately. Two nights ago, walking down our rut-filled dirt road in the pitch black (and, stupidly, not using my little keychain flashlight from my mother, whose ability to anticipate, despite my denials, my most practical needs still irks me), I fell and skinned my knee. It’s not that bad – I mean, last summer I fell off my bike and skidded six feet on my left shin on the pavement, and my whole leg was bloody for a month. So this is nothing. But it hurts, at the moment, to wear pants, so I’m consigned to a skirt that exposes the wound.
When Rwandans catch sight of it, they slow down. They look, mouths agape, as if my leg had actually fallen off before their eyes. And they feel pity. A moto driver today stopped me to apologize, as if the road was his fault. He said, “You’re injured, you’re injured,” in Kinyarwanda (I learned this word real quick), and then made a sad face and drug his index finger from his eye to his chin, gesturing tears. I thanked him.
Then a random guy in a car stopped on his way down my hill, as I was walking up. He leaned his head out and called to me, after I’d passed him, “Sorry, sorry!” I turned and thanked him. He offered me a ride, anywhere I wanted to go.
But it’s the kids who really can’t get enough of it. They remind me of myself at seven or eight, before I internalized the lesson that shame and concern dictate you are supposed to look away from car wrecks. They ask what happened, and I say, “A la rue…BOOM!” It’s the best I can do in French.
It’s not that serious, but I guess it looks ugly. Or maybe it’s just the shock of seeing bright red scratch marks on chicken skin?
How to stand out in Rwanda even more than you already do when you’re white
