Zikora

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was disgracing her now; I was not facing labor with laced-up dignity. She wanted me to meet each rush of pain with a mute grinding of teeth, to endure pain with pride, to embrace pain, even. When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.

“I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.

Donna was “child-free,” an expression she used often; she was thin and vegan and did yoga and wore dresses cut for flat-chested women. She watched me with the eyes of a person willing you to stumble. “Do you need anything, Zikora?” she asked often, especially when the men could hear, her eyes hard and bright.

If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

“I don’t understand how we could have unprotected sex for so long and then when I get pregnant, he reacts like he never knew it could happen.” “Zikky, have you considered that maybe he didn’t know?” “What do you mean?” “Men know very little about women’s bodies.” I felt betrayed by her. I was annoyed, and wanted to tell her that not everyone was her Emmanuel, warped and stunted, raping her while she slept.

On the blog, I read about men who as boys were separated from the girls in sex ed class, and were never taught about the bodies of girls. They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done. The blog annoyed me, and I resisted it while also seeing its sense. It was possible that a sophisticated, well-educated man with a healthy sex life could still harbor a naivety, a shrunken knowledge, about the inner workings of female bodies.

I was reading the news online, and I looked up and said, “Can you believe an elected US official actually asked why women can’t hold their periods in?” I laughed, and so did he, but I remembered now his first fleeting reaction, the slightest of hesitations, as though he was holding back from saying, “You mean they can’t?”