It is your sister’s wedding and you are wearing a pink dress. The dress is made of the itchiest lace that stretches across your bare shoulders and flows toward your ankles, hugging your body, keeping you together. The lace is embroidered with tiny, luminescent stones that refract light when you move across the room, drawing more eyes to the body you wish to hide. You do not exactly love the color, but it is what they picked, and your mother had it sewn for you. The stitches are tight and dig into your flesh, forcing you to shift from leg to leg, fidgeting. The heaviness of your body has always angered your mother; you wonder what she is punishing you for this time.

Eleven years ago, on your ninth birthday, in a crowded clothes shop in Ikeja, your mother screamed at you to lose weight so she can find clothes for you to wear for your party. Nothing you tried on covered the circumference of your body. And you were not even so fat then. Maybe your cheeks were a little full, but what is childhood if not the joy of endless sugary treats? You had not begun your obsessive scale-climbing expeditions, so you do not know how much you weighed. Or how much she wanted you to weigh. What you do remember is the feeling of praying to disappear. Praying to shrink. Willing your belly to concave so that the buttons of the damn shirt would fit around you. When you fall ill a few months later and lose some weight from the incessant nausea and your inability to keep anything down, you will be secretly happy. You will hope for the sickness to return so you can lose even more.

You will never forget that day.

Seven years later, when you are graduating from secondary school, the shame you felt in that store deepens. This time, you are in the changing stall at the Primark on Oxford Circus in Central London. Nothing you try on for the ceremony fits. This time, your mother does not yell. Instead, you see exhaustion in her eyes. She is tired of you. She is tired of this body her daughter inherited. You wish she would yell instead of resembling one who has resigned to a curse.

You find an outfit on your own this time.

You register the shame, anger, frustration, and pity that your body inspires, in yourself and in others. You question your body’s worth, your desirability drenched in doubt. When people stare and whisper and snicker, you look down at your belly, up at your folding neck. You are overwhelmed by feeling displaced. You are not at home in your body. But you cannot leave.

To be a fat Black woman is to settle into a life of discomfort. To enter every store already knowing it cannot accommodate your abundance. To accept that public mockery comes with using public transportation. To anticipate romance means men who convince you to be grateful for even a glance of desire.

To be a fat Black woman is to negotiate your worth, your belonging, with a world that hates your corpulence.

We are always fighting for home.

When you are fat, you are only flesh.

This is why you hate going to the markets. They are an open invitation for your body to be observed, dissected, humiliated. Even though Lagos is as hot as the devil’s asshole, you wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts to hide yourself. As sweat gathers in the rolls of your back, dripping down the convergence of your thighs, you feel an irrepressible desire to disappear.

Your mother marches ahead. Her skin is already thickened against epithets hurled from passersby, but you squirm every time someone shouts “orobo!” in your direction. In your native language, Yoruba, orobo literally means rotund. Like a ball, or, as your cousins once nicknamed you, a watermelon.

The word hits you like warm saliva spat in your face. On some days, the word is a hardened palm, colliding with your tender cheek. To you, the word is violence, trauma, a body hoping to be caressed but instead met with blows.

In order to protect your name, you will pay back violence with violence. Like that time you take a new knife and bury it in your cousin’s knee, the same way he buried your name under the ground when he shouted that word. You do not cry as the blood flows from his leg and as his face contorts in pain. You are not sorry. You hope that he will feel the pain.

All the members wonder what demon possessed you to such violence. They tell you to kneel and apologize, and you force the words to tumble from your mouth. You feel no remorse. What explodes in your chest is pride. You feel the rush of success pounding through your veins. Your aunt tells you he cried when they stitched his knee. Thirteen stitches. One for every letter of my name.

Months after your sister’s wedding, you have finally gathered the courage to wear sleeveless clothes. The heat in Lagos singed your skin so much that your desire to hide yourself is overrun by the need to remain unburnt. You sit with your aunties, picking beans underneath the shade of corrugated aluminum sheets that have been beaten by humidity. Your fingernails are painted deep red, the most beautiful contrast against the brown beans and the golden ring on your index finger. You are lost in the symmetry of color when a voice startles you. Your auntie’s eyes bore into the wide expanse of your shoulders and her blowfish mouth opens.

“Ah ah, what are we going to do about these stretch marks?”

Thick bronze tributaries trail up and down your body, starting from your shoulders and heading down your arms, meandering over to your breasts and belly, converging at the expanse of your behind. You know this. She knows you know this. And yet.

In some Nigerian cultures, upon the birth of a child, marks are carved into their faces, marks they will carry to the grave. Nothing wipes away tribal marks, and it is similarly nearly impossible to wipe away your stretch marks. You would know; you’ve tried.

You started with rubbing shea butter into them, which gave your brown skin the most luminescent hue but did nothing to erase your body’s calligraphy. You moved to BioOil, which had glowing recommendations and a three-month stretch mark removal guarantee. In your fifth month, your stretch marks stood as gallantly as century-old iroko trees. Going nowhere, immoveable.

You graduated to snake oil mixed with herbs. Opening the bottle, you were hit with the most intense wave of nausea, but foul odors would not stand in your way. As you stood in front of the mirror, slathering yourself with the questionable substance, angels were weeping.

This is the first lesson in the persistence of your body. Your body will not move for you, will not bend to societal standards. It will spread, bountiful; your flesh will be copious and dark and bear the marks of abundance. You must call it home. You must find comfort folded in the creases of fat in your back.

‘When you become a [fat] woman, you will forget the number of boys you let climb over you, just because they called you beautiful.’
‘Conversations with Your Mother’ – Wanawana

While you are still coming home to yourself, you will beg men to visit you. You will grovel at the knees of these men, and they will only love you in the darkness, where no one can see them with you, and only with the thing between their legs. They will hide you and you will not complain because you assume your destiny is to be hidden. They will send you weight loss tips, and your spirit will shrivel. You will only want to make love in the dark, so that they cannot see your belly rippling as you come. You will never get on top because you fear you will crush them and then people will say that man deserved to die anyway, for being with a fat woman.

One of these men will look at you and see more than flesh. He will hold your hand as your belly sprawls, you in your blue bikini. He takes a thousand-thousand photographs of the sun-kissed splendor of your body. People congratulate him for doing the most noble thing; loving a fat woman. They praise him for doing what other men will not do.

The first time you make love to this man who sees you, all of you, the light shines in the gold waist beads that intertwine with the flesh of your belly, resplendent in their adornment of your body. Your skin is wet with perspiration; you look into the mirror in the corner of the room, and your breath is stuck in your throat. Your heavy breasts sit atop your folding belly; not an inch of you is hidden. That day, on his wrinkled, blue sheets and with the faint aroma of coconut oil in the air, you swear an oath. You will never hide again.

You have given away the pink dress you wore to your sister’s wedding because it no longer fits. The first lesson you learn in abundance is how to let things go.

Your neighbor is getting married, and this time, the fabric is yellow. You will have it sewn, and the stitches will not dig into your flesh when you attend the wedding. You love weddings now. This time, when they stare at you and snicker, you will smile and settle into the body that has become your home. You will run your hands over your belly and the skin there will bear grooves in the shape of your fingers, a belly worn from your caress of love and acceptance. Your favorite lesson in abundance is kindness. Kindness to your body that houses your divine spirit. Kindness to your soul on this journey home.

The sisterhood of abundance is an immeasurable gift. On the days you cannot lift yourself, your sisters can lift you. You can look at Ahunna, who has your arms, who has shoulders thick like yours, and admire her sensuality, and therefore, your own. On the days that you cannot bear to look in a mirror, your sisters will become your mirror, beaming back your glorious image. A sprawling army dedicated to upholding your beauty and strength. When they are harassed, you must stand up for them. When they doubt their magic, you must reaffirm them. Speak back the fire into their bellies. Speak back the light into their eyes. Speak her crown back unto her head. We are all together you see. Bound together by the abundance of this flesh. My sister in abundance, your arms are my arms. Fat, jiggly, wide arms gallant with stretch marks. Your belly is my belly. Sprawling out of crop tops and dresses, resplendent, pouring forth from you. This body, your body, is always ready — for love, for affection, for pleasure, for decadent songs of praise.

Remember me telling you this. On the days you stare at yourself in the mirror, bitterly wishing your belly away, remember me telling you of its beauty.