Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 346

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Love is an Ex-Country: A Memoir," by Randa Jarrar.

The following weekend, my mother saw the navel ring as I was coming up the stairs from the basement. She shouted at me, asked if I was trying to damage my body. It was strange for her to ask this, since she had stood by while my father had beaten my body so many times. I said to her, as calmly as I could, “It’s my body.”

The thought of another woman being jealous of my body was alien to me. Why would a slim woman envy me? In a year, I’d know: because I was confident and gorgeous in my rejection of mainstream beauty standards.

For a very long time, I intensely disliked the word naturalized. It made me feel as if my family’s very existence was unnatural, and would only change once they became citizens. I looked up the word to avail myself of this feeling, and I enjoyed the biological definition—that to naturalize a plant was to make sure it could live wild in a land where it was not indigenous. The wild part was the part I adored. We were living wild in America. Until we were not.

A little over ten years later, I was back in my parents’ home, standing in their basement and doing a load of my parents’ laundry. I was standing right by the water heater, right by the spot where my father had beaten me twenty-four years earlier. He was upstairs now, his left leg slightly shaking, his bones bruised from his disease, his hands curled in his lap. I laundered his undershirts and socks and my mother’s things happily, wanting to help. For some reason, there was a baseball bat just a couple of feet from the washing machine. I wanted to feel something, anger, bitterness, revenge, self-pity—anything at all. But all I could feel was sadness, both for the man my father used to be and for the powerless girl I once was. It was perhaps the seven years that I spent away from him that helped me reach this destination in myself. The fact that by the end of the seven years, every cell in each of our bodies had turned and changed, so that not a single part of him had ever beaten me, and not a single part of myself had ever been beaten.

No one can touch you here, unless you ask them to. No one can hurt you here, unless you beg them to, negotiating the level of hurt and a safe word, if “stop” does not suffice. 

You may not touch anyone here, unless they ask you to. You may not hurt anyone here, unless they beg you to, and negotiate with you the level of hurt and a safe word. 

You may ask anyone to touch you and you may ask anyone if you can touch them. 

You don’t have to touch anyone or be touched by anyone. 

You always have the right to say yes, to say no, and to change your mind. 

If you don’t accept someone’s no, you are kicked out immediately. 

In kink, consent is queen.