Author Fariha Róisín pens a heartfelt note on learning to view yourself differently

I was raised by a mother who was beautiful, breathtaking in an old-world way, a blend of Bangla and the West. At parties, her beauty was revered and praised. She was regularly compared to Bengali actress Sharmila Tagore, with her smiling eyes and rapturous dimples. When I was younger, old photos of her would strike such a chord, her cheekbones perfectly lining her face. My mother had a very specific idea of beauty, but also propriety, which was the standard in Bangladesh, where she spent most of her early life. For the longest time, my mother was the epitome of beauty for me: a blend of grace and mystery, a symposium of all the things I wasn’t.

I was reminded of that regularly too. Watched for what I ate, how much I ate; monitored for how heavy my steps were. My body was surveilled by both my parents, but particularly my mother, who believed it her duty to harass me as I began to develop. She would call me dhumshi, which in Bangla translates to ‘fatty’, but maybe a bit more egregious: the one that dares take up too much space. Everything from my panties to my backpack was in her domain to search and attack. If I wasn’t wearing a bra, she’d touch me inappropriately to shame me; if the bra strap could be seen, even an outline, I would be accused of prying for attention.

My body was abhorrently wrong, I was told. My hips too wide, thighs too fleshy, calves too muscular, stuck inside a body too short. Against the backdrop of my family, I was raised in Canada and Australia, where I was surrounded by whiteness, and thus felt doubly limited in my reach of being beautiful. I never truly understood how so many of us adopt and uphold white supremacy toward ourselves and others until I read Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings. She helped me recognise how white supremacy, on every level, has been normalised. Being agile, small, slim was desirable—these were white attributes, the litmus test of beauty.

Every magazine—including, over the years, this one—reinforced what my mother reiterated day in and day out. What she had told me my whole life was true, or why else was I here, struggling to feel good about myself, to survive. I felt embarrassed by the weight of how much I loathed myself. But as I looked around at my peers, friends, and sisters, I noticed not everyone seemed to care as much as I did about the pursuit of beauty. Some women knew they weren’t necessarily ‘conventionally’ attractive, and yet loved themselves, believed in their inherent value as human beings, regardless of how they looked. That’s how I began to learn that there was a way I could shift my relationship to myself.

It wasn't until this past year that I realised that the voice I have with myself, the one that I use to reprimand myself, is a parental voice that constantly watches for my own slip-ups and is eager to remind myself of how disgusting I am. Smallness, embedded in shame, is such an easy place to slump back into. Unlearning narratives—the stories we tell ourselves to stay alive—requires consistent work, but are necessary steps to survival. I'm realising that there is no other way to heal. You have to face the things that have happened to you, and then figure out how to liberate yourself from those patterns that determine your unworthiness.

Tattoos have helped me reclaim my body and recover from the physical and sexual abuse I have experienced in my lifetime. Now I have 40 in total—and whether it’s the sacred fire that guards my left hand, or the two spirals on each forearm as a reminder of cyclicality and flow, or the Bismillah (which means ‘in the name of God’) on my back—they are my own protection charms. Even something as simple as moisturising myself helps, a small act of daily tenderness. Understanding that my body is worth honouring has been a major breakthrough. As a child sexual abuse survivor, it’s helped me build a more honest connection to my physicality. On the clearest of days, I can see that I’m trying to recover myself from under the fractured image of my mother. The abuse she inflicted is a result of her own complex abuse, tied to colonisation. Liberating myself is also about liberating my mother, and the mothers that came before her. It’s about healing a lineage of abuse. I’m hoping that as I do this for myself, shifting the way I witness my own body so I can see myself clearly, it reverberates and helps heal my mother too.

Fariha Róisín’s debut novel, Like a Bird (Unnamed Press) is available online.