THE BIOLOGY OF SHAME

I

The first time I said the word ‘vagina’ in public, I was 23 years old. It was a cold evening, and we, the people of the PurpleSilver, a community of artists, thinkers, and poets, were gathered. I always tried not to miss the gathering because it felt like a cocoon where I could exist and express parts of me that seemed too much for the outside world. That evening, we had chosen to discuss the importance of sex education in schools.

Nothing significant happened to the world around me when the word tumbled out of my hesitant lips. A let-down from the expectations my mind had set around it. Opinions continued to be shared, the cars kept moving outside, but something inside my body had changed. I had felt the weight of this word that should have been mine to use freely, pull down my bottom jaw, and when I let it go, it seemed to have lifted something in me. It shouldn’t have mattered, but I think I was glad that no one was uncomfortable, and that the reaction I had gotten wasn’t the one I had expected to see when women talk about their bodies or sex. On many occasions, when men throw casual sexual jokes, something shifts in the atmosphere when a woman chips in.

When my period started a little after I started secondary school, the only thing that was passed down to me was how to properly cleanse my body during the Islamic post-period ritual bath. I had to learn to wash each part with great concern, so I could be clean enough to pick up a complete copy of the Qur’an, fast and pray again. Alongside it, I was also given the gift of shame.

My womanhood became defined through eyes other than mine. Will men feel uncomfortable when they see a sanitary pad? Will their world crumble when they hear the word blood? Will their eyes fall out if they see a young girl of fasting age shoving down piles of food during Ramadan? What would my budding breasts inspire these men to do?

For many years after, when I had to buy pads from shops, especially if they were run by men, I tried not to drown in the floor beneath me, and sometimes, I would ask for another bag to ensure that no one walking around could sense that there was something shameful hidden inside it.

One morning, during a long holiday when we had travelled back to our hometown, my sisters and cousins gathered in my aunt’s sitting room to gist. As the two of us who weren’t fasting sipped on cups of tea, one of my male cousins knocked. The shame took control of our bodies, forcing us to run quickly into the room, worried that he might have seen us and know that we were bleeding from our vaginas.

In Islamic school, I had sat through male teachers telling me how best to take care of my body through my period, the religious obligations of what I can do and what I can’t do, men who, perhaps like me, for many years of my life, thought the urine and period blood came from the same hole. But still, even as they laid out the rules and regulations, I could only let my questions burn my tongue.

This shame grabbed everything I was and crumbled it into a useless sheet of paper. It told me I didn’t deserve space, and I did not have the right to talk about my own body. 

II

For many years of my life, I never really saw myself in the mirror. My body existed as a catalyst for men to stumble, a pile of smoke, and an unreadable tablet that I sometimes catch glimpses of, like when I wear a pretty dress and try to line my lips perfectly. It existed, yet it didn’t; something always seemed to be holding it hostage.

I saw my body through other people’s eyes. They talked about my skinny frame and advised me to eat some more. I was told men preferred more flesh, and so I should try to gain some weight. It didn’t matter if my body remained the same then, no matter how much I ate. My body was a vessel of other people’s opinions and a tool to make some random man’s life easier.

It was to be used for learning how to cook the perfect meal, keep the house clean, and make sure that I knew how to babysit, even though every inch of my being was running from those tasks I was told were my purpose. My mistakes were punctuated with ‘Is this what you will do in your husband’s house? No one wants a dirty wife.’ I wondered why it was okay for my brothers to not clean their room for weeks at a time, but forbidden for me not to miss cleaning for a day. Why was it okay for them to find excuses to get out of their chores, but mine were enforced with an iron glove? My body was a tool, and I learnt to see it as such. I cleaned it and fed it, and didn’t feel any connection to what had never belonged to me.

No one prepared me for the thorny ride that is womanhood; I was set into the wild and allowed to navigate sexuality and adulthood on my own. No one gave me a map or a flashlight to light my path on dark days. It only seemed that I had one purpose: to be someone’s something one day. My biggest companion was shame for my natural body changes, shame for being born a woman, for the way my body is and moves through the world, afraid to touch anything that never felt like it belonged to me.

III

The first time I learnt that women too could feel sexual pleasure was on Wattpad, mostly in books written by sex obsessed teenagers who, just like me, were getting their information from the wrong sources. Prior to that, I had caught glimpses in Hausa novels, but like everything I had been taught growing up, these stories had the men at the centre. Sometimes, women did not consent or have a voice. They made the concept of being married off to a much older guy look so attractive — these men who often had to take their ‘rights’ as husbands. Alongside that were graphic details about how ‘painful’ the first time is, of women bleeding; a different kind of blood than what was familiar to me, and how happy those men were to discover that they had married virgins who had kept themselves for them in this crazy world.

Wattpad opened up a new world, even if most times the stories mirrored the ones in the Hausa novels. Still, I found that I could be the centre of this story. There were no other stories around me to corroborate what I was told, so I held to them as the truth.

Despite this lack of education on sex, there was an obsession with my virginity. I was careful to be around men. And when they touched me without consent, I learned to blame myself. Maybe it was the way I carried myself, or what I wore. If I weren’t there at that time or I didn’t smile, they wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to. Slowly, I learnt that my body didn’t belong to me because it belonged to the men around me, who whistled at and catcalled me on the streets, and grown men who stopped me with cars. When my sisters and I were sent on errands to the closest shop to our home, which was around a huge car wash where men liked to gather, we knew to wear our longest hijabs, but the men always seemed to find ways to dig into us with the claws in their eyes.

Despite all the silence around this topic, I knew what women did to themselves for the pleasure of men. The way they whispered among themselves and ate and drank strange-looking concoctions, some of which were offered as gifts to new brides. Sometimes, it poured out from the way the women talked about those who sold those things to them, those women who had learnt to talk about sex in loud voices without metaphors, enough for us to hear. There are two categories of women here, and those who bought the aphrodisiacs from the others wanted everyone to know that they were not like the women who sold them. They are proper girls raised in proper families; they do not talk openly about sex like loose women. They only exist for the pleasure of their husbands, and that is why they interact with the other kind.

I have been a witness to the confusion and trauma where women are made to believe it is wrong to shake hands or hug a guy, only to suddenly be told that they have to let a man touch them every time he pleases.

I watched as a family member was fed concoctions to ensure her future husband’s pleasure months before her wedding and witnessed how she was given a small book written by a man just days before. I snuck a glance through the book and was disappointed with the bunch of rules it contained, made to control her autonomy.

I watch as young women transition from single to married life, where they are expected to magically understand everything about intimacy. Women with little or no sex education often lack understanding of how their bodies function, how to experience pleasure, or how to maximise their sexual relationships. Again, whether they are married or single, women in conservative communities are frequently left to navigate these challenges on their own.

Shame is a powerful weapon wielded to put women in their place. Our choices — on what we wear, who we date, and even our violations are used in an attempt to turn us into rotten sacks of bones in order to control us. Someone once said that ‘every woman is a whore, she just has to piss off the wrong man.’

Was it then unfounded to believe that the act of shame is reserved only for women? I have come to learn that to talk about sex is to acknowledge yourself and the fact that you deserve to feel, and that makes people uncomfortable. The right to feel is not reserved for women. Men, however, are sexual creatures who can’t control themselves at the sight of open flesh, and we know better than to tempt them with our skins.

And for a long time, I couldn’t recognise desire even if it hit me with a brick across my face.

IV

Shame has always been a part of my life, whether talking about my body or acknowledging that I even know what the word sex means, or simply by my mere existence as a woman caught in between being viewed as an ‘extremist’ and being ‘too liberal for Islam and not good enough’. It feels like our lives are constantly under scrutiny. ‘You can’t be Muslim and feminist.’ ‘You can’t be Muslim and wear the hijab differently or not wear it at all.’ It’s as if you have to choose between being Muslim and being human.

It always felt like no matter how much I covered up and how hard I tried, I couldn’t be Muslim enough. There was always something wrong with the questions I asked or in the opinions I held. I was too much of everything to belong, and I learnt to exist in the shame of not belonging.

It was with shame that I moved through the world, consuming Islamic lectures after lectures, hoping that maybe I would find my place. When I was in university, I once woke up early to finish my weekend chores, so I could attend this Ramadan lecture with a group of friends in a neighbouring mosque. The scholar in question was considered a ‘champion of women’s rights,’ even though sometimes his lectures made me ask which women he was championing. Shame and fear froze my tongue, so I closed my mouth when he said that it was more important for a girl to be taught how to cook properly than for her even to learn the Qur’an in its entirety so she can be a better wife.

That particular day, the women came in droves, and we sat through the lecture. The man had come along with another scholar who spent most of his time reminding us of our place. He accused some of us of probably dragging our ‘filthiness’ into the mosque if we were on our periods just to see a popular scholar. He said women could not understand the translation of the Qur’an enough to teach it, and the champion of women’s rights did nothing but laugh as the other women laughed along with them, as if he cracked the world’s funniest jokes. I felt something break in me. When we walked back home, my friends talked about how insightful it was, but all I could think of was how my attempts to be closer to faith had taken me ten steps back. I stopped listening to Nigerian preachings after that.

In my third year as an undergraduate, my Islamic Family Law lecturer openly said in his class that he would rape his wife if she denied him sex, and throaty laughter filled the room, mostly from men, their shining canines digging into my skin. What was scary was the fact that he was comfortable enough to use the right name for this heinous act in a classroom, and people still found it funny.

Being around hyper-religious people has taught me how to shrink myself every time conversations about religion come up.

I’ve been dismissed in religious discussions because people assume I am ignorant. Once, I wrote a poem about God, and someone told me she didn’t know I loved God this much. I’ve listened to my then friends mock my perceived lack of religiosity and my love for ‘Western education’. Over time, I learned to feel ashamed of trying to be myself. I realised that to belong, I just needed to prove my humanity, but only on their terms, and that was not a privilege I could afford anyone.

Now, I own my bad Muslim label and find belonging with those who had to learn to swallow their shame alongside their hope of fitting into spaces too small to hold them.

V

Recently, I was blasting I Choose Violence by Jax, a song about grooming and taking back autonomy. My nine-year-old sister, who was present at the time, asked me what the singer meant by violence and I tried my best to explain it in the context of the song, telling her why grooming was bad and violence was necessary.

Prior to that, I had made a habit of saving Instagram posts relating to teaching children consent and autonomy. In one reel, a woman in a hijab teaches her young daughter the differences between good touches and bad touches. In another, a teacher tried to teach her students how to passionately name their private parts and what they should do when they get violated.

My sister and I watched on my bed, the awkwardness thick across the red-and-black bedsheet. I asked her what she understood, and she hesitated before responding, the shame pulling her small hands across her face. But slowly, she relaxed and the conversation got stronger. An hour later, I heard her humming to the second video.

This inheritance of shame is something I do not want her to carry. Her body, unlike mine, should be hers from the start. There would be no room for silence in the shelter of her belonging.  

I found out the hard way that the only way to break free from shame is to allow yourself to relax enough to start a fire. It is dark, cold, and scary, and it will choke the life out of you if you let it.

Unlearning shame was a gradual process; everything we have internalised has a way of becoming part of us. Before I was able to say vagina, I first had to learn to be comfortable with the parts of womanhood that used to make me uncomfortable. I first had to start with talking openly about menstruation and ignoring every urge I felt to stop. I first had to learn how to stop hiding and starving myself during Ramadan out of the fear that the men around me would know I was bleeding from my vagina. I first learnt how to buy pads and shaving sticks from male shop owners without shrinking.  And most of all, I had to understand that just because I am ashamed does not mean I have to beat myself up for it.

There are nights I shrink myself instead of standing up straight, and days I bury words deep down my throat because I am scared of being seen as not enough or too much. I still hesitate when I have to share these things with my sister, and I wonder if there will always be such days.

My shame was not ‘biological’ just because they said it was, and with every angry voice telling me I can’t be, I look in the mirror and let my hands run through a skin that is mine. I peel off the layers of what doesn’t belong to see all of me, and this is enough.