Harassed

 You get the call in the mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. It’s one of your best friends here, but it’s too early for one of your “how are you doing?” chats that often happen at night when you feel like you’ve already spent too much time that day watching television and you’re feeling the need to reach out to an actual human because while watching Captain Mel does pass the time, he’s the not the best listener.

You answer and, unfortunately, she’s not just asking you for a quick piece of information, but, instead, needs a moment to tell you one of those stories that happen too frequently when you live in a society that is obsessed and captivated by foreign women.

You listen and respond and try to make the situation better, but after 22 months, you think that you should be better at this conversation. This is not the first time you’ve had this conversation and you know that it won’t be the last. It won’t be the last time when you feel a friendship or work relationship take a completely different turn when he illustrates to you that he would like to be more than friends or work colleagues.

You realize that you haven’t gotten to used to it. Each time you get propositioned, you still feel violated. You know that the culture is different from your own. You know that it’s supposed to be flattering. You know that you can say, “no.” But each time it happens, you can’t stop your mind from momentarily going to those who didn’t have the chance or knew they had the right to say, “no.”

In which I get unreasonably angry at a four-year-old

The neighbor kids were all playing in my house. They, as usual, were managing to take everything off my shelves and to find everything that I had tried to find. (See: iPod Touch, Cocoa Puffs, back issues of Esquire) I, as usual, was trying to find my happy place, this time, with a Christopher Hitchens anthology in the corner.

I was interrupted by shrieks of laughter and Modeste (older and speaks French) asking me if I had heard what Migdel (the four-year-old in question and doesn’t speak French) had just said.

“He said, Madame,” Modeste explained to me, “that he was going to come to your house tonight because you’re his wife.”

This is the second time in two days someone less than 5 years old has called me his wife, (in French here it’s literally “his woman”) and it’s the second time that I’ve wanted to smack a kid for it.

I deal with sexual harassment on a daily basis. I’ve been proposed to at the market; I’ve had men try to pull me off my bicycle while riding and one man, who had just come back from the fields, tell me that it was now my time to get to work while gesturing to his crotch. I used to not be able to get my mail without the man who stands between me and my Crystal Light packets stroking my arm until I told him that I was married to my postmate.

What gets to me most about these interactions is the feeling that I’m a thing that someone is allowed to claim. That what I want has no relevance in these situations. That my job is to serve as the needs of someone else.

I will never be anyone’s woman in any language.