Yesterday I found myself playing dress-up with five elderly African women in a remote village of Sotouboua, a long, long way from, well, anything. They were a group of weavers who hand spin yards of a specialty “pagne” worn by what they call the “big mamas.” I was there to evaluate their request to receive one of the U.S. Embassy’s Self Help grants. After hours of holding on for dear life in the back of a Land Cruiser, we walked into a semi-dark mud building with partial walls and rusty manual weaving machines. Everything around blended into the rust colored dust that covered everything in the village except for me, my giant white 4x4 and bolts and bolts of colorful, sparkly fabric.
I let my Togolese coworker start asking stern questions about how they finance their business, who’s in charge of taking product to market, and what they plan to do with U.S. money, while I started quietly snapping photos of my surroundings to take it all in. Once questions got to the actual product, one of the elderly women started to model how the fabric is wrapped and worn in different ways for special events. She began to strut her stuff, swinging her hips a little wider and moving her arms like the aforementioned “big mamas” and laugh from the fun of it all. I snapped away and showed her the best portrait.
Her response? Utter glee and, "je suis jolie!", a statement that translates simply to “I am pretty!”
Soon we all found ourselves talking at once, swapping colors, laughing and eventually wrapped up in various pagne. More photos were snapped and each of the women was delighted to see themselves on camera.
Let me be clear that none of these women are pretty by any standards of beauty familiar to us. They’ve lived hard lives and it shows. But they loved seeing themselves in photos and not one of them flinched or cringed the way women in our culture do.
I suddenly felt foolish and shallow for all of my self-judging every time a photo is opened. I can’t imagine a single woman I know responding to a self portrait with such carefree happiness. If anyone ever did we’d all think she was a stuck-up, good-for-nothing-but-her-fake-(fill in the blank) bleep-bleep-bleep. Or something like that. We all secretly hate our own images in some way, and hate any women who doesn’t hate hers! It’s messed up.
I know that moment in Sotouboua won’t change my own ingrained Western perception of beauty, perhaps beyond biting my internal tongue when I inwardly groan at the site of tiny wrinkles around my eyes. But I admired those women in that moment, even envied them. And envy is not a feeling I’ve experienced, well, ever, since moving to Togo. It caught me completely off guard, and for that I am touched.
