Female Blues

She scrubs hard, scrubs and leaves not a trace of skin untouched, loosening the dirt, hoping that as the soap suds rinse away with
the flowing water, her skin pales a hue, growing sallower, lighter than the earth-tones she’s worn all her life. How hypocritical,
she thinks in midscrub, suddenly relaxing from the taut concentration of rubbing her skin raw. This is the nationalist, eh? This is
the idealist still caught up with such a colonial mentality. She smiles bitterly at the contradictions, at how these two persons,
these two desires have interlocked to make her who she was. Raised in a liberal family home, freedom and indigenity forms her inner
sphere, but having grown up and moved away from the axis established by her progressive parents, she faced the scathing judgement
of a society of Western sympathizers. Growing up she had harbored a revulsion for her brown skin, a color which reminded her of
men and women toiling in the fields with their scythes, burned earth-brown by the searing tropical sun, skin chapped and streaked much
like the mud lands come the seasonal droughts. This color reminded her of ancestry, a bloodline that establishes her identity, a kinship
she had looked for long and arduously, that sort of clannish loyalty that had never been part of her childhood because her family,
her parents, had always been aloof, never present at gatherings, never taking part in the subtle intrusion of kin on the lives
of their relatives, never taking part in dividing the harvest of overseas relatives and growing dependent. She had enculturated
herself with the wisdom of the jungle and yet here she was scrubbing away the earth off from her being.
If only she could be pretty even if she were black as coal. But she looked inconsequential and irrelevant with her brown skin and
mediocre features. The genes for deep, sunken eyes and long graceful lashes had skipped her, instead her eyes were huge, her brows
thick. She was big-boned, athletic, a masculine woman. Even her breasts were not big enough to boast, and it didn’t help that she
was self-efficient. Not being petite and fine, she lost all chances at bearing a certain feminine fragility, instead she looked
capable. In short, she negated men. She intimidated them and stripped them of their machismo just by looking the way she did without
even opening her mouth. And if she had opened her lips to spout her philosophies, she came off as strange, eccentric enough to be scary,
undesirable.
And this is the feminist appraising herself like a man? she thought to herself. Curse these contradictions. When was the last time you bathed for the love of water and not for the reason of socially expected behavior? Consider the things you do with that line of thought and you’ll truly despise yourself more than you already do!
Screw the scrubbing pad! She wanted to throw it down and stomp on it to demonstrate her rebellion, but the figures of their purchase value suddenly popped into her head and she was ever more irritated. Too many things that weigh down upon the common woman, too many things to worry about at the day’s awakening.