I love language. How we choose to communicate shapes our world view, from our tone of voice, to the words we speak and the sentence structure we use. Moran talks about this a lot in his section on feminism. “At the same time, she suggests that there is an intimate connection between physiology, psychology and language which cannot be understood within traditional disciplinary divisions” (107). One aspect of language use and how it informs (others of) our opinions that we saw during the semester was in Zulus.
I couldn’t exactly put my finger on what was so strange about Alice. She was kind enough, and I felt empathy for her, but something was just weird about how she was presented as a character. I realized that Everett pays close attention to Alice’s fat body, something we tend not to do as a society. Rereading as far as we had gotten in the book, I realized that it was everywhere. Whether referring to Alice as “the fat woman,” or her “giant body,” Everett calls attention to her body (35, 34). Everett even makes an effort to focus on Alice’s folds of skin throughout the novel. The book also focuses on visual imagery of Alice’s body. When the reader has an idea of what Alice looks like, Everett seems to focus on the more mundane: ” she adjusted her dress over her legs” (35). Even though this is an action done by most folks when wearing a dress, picturing someone described as giant was odd to me.
This realization helped me to confront my fat bias. Why did I think it was so odd to have a fat person be a main character? Why was it stark to have Everett’s imagery of Alice imposed on me, as a reader? I thought Everett was doing important work by making someone invisible so integral to the story, but I knew I had a ways to go. I learned that part of it has to do with body image and our societal repulsion of fat, but also on a fiercely individual level. As a woman, nay person, I am exposed to images that say being fat is an illness, fat equals lazy, fat is repulsive, only thin is good. I realized that even though I love some people who happen to be fat, I still have a long way to go in the way of not policing them or their habits, not deprecating my (still thin privilege-getting) body, even when I feel badly, and not making character judgement on size. Being fat-positive and body-positive is work that we all have to do, and Zulus helped me with mine.