The Fact of Womanhood (Rephrasing Fanon)

(Česká verze zde.)

 When I was young I was reading adventurous stories and was dreaming they had been being written about me. I was experiencing Indian, scout, sea, and knightly adventures and was looking for the true friendship sealed by blood. There was the courage in my mind and the strength in my hands and the speed in my feet. I was building shelters, setting up flagpoles, carrying people and wiping off their tears.

"And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. As a woman I encounter difficulties in the development of my bodily schema."

I have always been the second one, the derived female sex, and one of the many spheres of the man's world. "I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a WOMAN."
I was looking for my feminine energy, tenderness, empathy, kindness. I was touching my body and finally learnt to love it. I was longing to devote myself to its fertility and to enjoy it. But soon I understood my power of fertility to be insufficient and that no-one cared for its remains.

I was looking for women of power in the past but I found out their womanliness has been being rejected. I struggled to put my body to virile performances but they showed me as a monster. I was pushing my mind to the heights but they wouldn't listen to me, they would touch me.
I am cover from head to toe, without make-up, short-haired... I am walking on the streets and there are philosophical books and textbooks of dead languages in my bag. Men are undressing me with their eyes, smacking, whistling, and addressing me. What gives them a right to make a claim to me? Where does the desire to shout at me come from? From my deeply hidden genitals?

"I used to feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers. I was a master and I was advised to adpot the humility of the woman."

Yesterday I was sitting at the window until late at night, I was talking about my confinement, and feeling how much he was longing for me. And that had I been a man, he wouldn't have been there with me. I was watching the night traffic and envying the people who knew what they were heading for. And now in the morning I am not being heard, I am calling into the corridor, grey with cold, and you are leaving me behind. As a guarantee of your home and human warmth which is waiting for you till you come again sometime.

Idleness

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