In my British-Nigerian family, there is a frequently-recounted anecdote, first shared by some auntie or another back in the village, which then made its way to countless family Christmases in Blackburn where my mother grew up, to be circulated for years to come. The story goes that, upon hearing about the desire of his bride-to-be to lose weight for their wedding, an uncle in Nigeria had kissed his teeth and said “Nonsense! What I want from my wife is for her to stay at home and be fat!”
I was reminded of this much-beloved family heirloom when reading the third chapter of the journalist Afua Hirsch’s latest book, Decolonising My Body. On a childhood visit to Ghana, she too becomes acquainted with a truth almost unfathomable in the Western world. That across much of the African continent, the prevailing beauty standard for women is not the size zero, heroin-chic figures that populate the pages of Vogue, but, in fact, the opposite – to be, as my uncle so delicately put it, fat.
“I never ever got tired, that first trip or since, of hearing older women telling me I was not fat enough”, she writes.
As women, how is it that we come to define what is beautiful? Whose standards are we trying to meet when we spend our hard-earned money on haircare, skincare and cosmetic procedures? How do we unlearn them? It is this that Hirsch attempts to tackle, looking for internal solutions to overcoming what she terms white supremacist ideals, a departure from her outward-looking, critically-acclaimed first book, Brit(ish).
Beginning with her fortieth birthday, the book combines memoir and research to tell the story of one year of her life – her “year of adornment” – in which she actively reconnects with her heritage to overcome what she terms “ancestral deficiency syndrome”, reclaiming her body from the colonial ideas of purity, ageing and beauty she absorbed while growing up in the white and affluent suburbs of Wimbledon.
Among the various personalities that Hirsch meets during her journey are a professional “holder of shared space” whom she encounters at a puberty ritual, an artist in Marrakech who installs her in a physical display dressed as a 19th century bride, a jinn-believing wax technician, a Coptic nun at the Ethiopian church believed to hold the Ark of the Covenant, and Oprah Winfrey.
Hirsch’s writing is warm and disarmingly honest. While at a wedding in Ghana, she is struck by the bride proudly sporting visible chest hair. She begins to wonder where her valuation of pure, clear skin that has prevented her from getting tattoos comes from. She questions why she has never worn waist beads. Whether, while making a career espousing anti-racist ideals, she has subconsciously shunned these traditional practices for fear they were “uncivilised”.
Even as a sociology graduate, three pages dedicated to decolonising napping, for example, were difficult to take seriously
When she grapples with thorny issues like so-called choice feminism, (“can cultures that have developed to objectify women become tools of their empowerment?”, she asks, in reference to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit WAP), she does not pretend to provide answers. Instead, she gently invites the reader, with the help of those who have gone before us, to look elsewhere for potential solutions.
It is an ambitious endeavour, and there is a heavy dolloping of woo-woo. At times, it does risk slipping a little from the sublime to the ridiculous (even as a sociology graduate, three pages dedicated to decolonising napping, for example, were difficult to take seriously).
There is also an important balance to be struck between looking back and loving, without falling into the trap of romanticisation. It is, for example, not lost on me that while my uncle wants his wife to be fat, he also wants her to stay at home. While the importation of Christianity to many African countries has wrought devastating consequences for their social attitudes, the pre-colonial continent was not a feminist nor an LGBTQ+ utopia. Aside from a couple of sweeping remarks, Hirsch does walk this tightrope well. We can choose to leave some parts of our heritage behind that don’t serve us, she says. That’s okay too.
For the best part of a decade, Hirsch has been unafraid to be loud. An outspoken voice for racial equality, she has tirelessly waded in, raised her head above the parapet. Here, we see a different Hirsch. In this love letter from the diaspora to our ancestors, she is quietly radical.
