A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly.

We’ve been taught to silence ourselves, that our silence will save us.

She often wondered how many people felt this way, spellbound by words, wishing to be tucked inside a book and forgotten there.

And yet Deya still felt alone in the end, no matter how many books she read, no matter how many tales she told herself. All her life she’d searched for a story to help her understand who she was and where she belonged.

She knew she had to teach them how to love themselves, that this was the only way they had a chance at happiness. Only she didn’t see how she could when the world pressed shame into women like pillows into their faces.

It was more important to honor her own values in life, to live her own dreams and her own vision, than to allow others to choose that path for her, even if standing up for herself was terrifying.

She thinks about the stories stacked across the shelves, leaning against one another like burdened bodies, supporting the worlds within each other. There must be hundreds of them, thousands even. Maybe her story is in here somewhere. Maybe she will finally find it.

She runs her fingers along the hardcover spines, inhales the smell of old paper, searching. But then it hits her, like falling into water. I can tell my own story now, she thinks. And then she does.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche has said, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

That, in order to finally feel worthy of love and belonging, I needed to be seen for who I truly was and not who I thought I should be. And that meant I needed to tell my whole story, even if things went wrong, even if I failed.