How Much Do You Weigh?

A question asked often by old men or young, friends, strangers

on the road. How much? I didn’t know how to answer. Certainly

 

not a question you’d ask of a woman—not in America where

I’d come from—but common in the village where I lived, deep 

 

in the Land of the Lozi, people of cattle and sand. Zambians 

living twenty miles from Angola. Twenty miles from civil war. 

 

Tins of cheese from the United Nations, vividly marked Not for Sale 

gathered dust in our nearly empty market. Exorbitant price. Unobtainable.

 

When a fat campaigning politician came slick to our village, 

gaunt mothers with emaciated children gathered and pointed, astonished. 

 

Admired his weight as if wealth. Look! He can eat and eat, 

more than enough! What to make of a man who is fat? Unimaginable 

 

fantasy to anemic mothers with brittle-boned children, bellies swollen

by hunger, legs weeping with sores. What a relief just to eat not defeated

 

by dry empty fields, crops gone to dust. Such ease to eat and eat

what you please and not stop. How much do you weigh? No longer

 

unseemly, no longer a goad. Compassionate. Tender. Driven by hunger,

rendered by need. A question which reconfigured might just as well ask,

 

do you have enough? Have you eaten today? Will you sleep hungry? 

Tell me. How much do you weigh?

 

Jill Kandel, Rattle #75 Spring 2022