I was hurrying home through the Financial District today after I had closed my stall, when I saw Jane Watson. I glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye, and it was as if an electric shock went through my whole body. It’s been weeks since I asked anyone about her, and months since I hoped to see her ever again.
Her face was on a bank of television screens in a shop window, flickering and discoloured. She was talking to someone in a yellow studio, seated on an elegant red chair. Jane Watson was speaking in her own language and there were subtitles underneath the picture, so that even though the sound was turned down, I could read what was being said. The interviewer said she was a famous scholar who had spent some months in our country, researching the traditional folkways of our people. Jane Watson looked very serious and said that an ancient way of life was under threat. She talked about the cotton fields and the problems with the River. There were tears in her eyes as she spoke about how a beautiful way of life was dying, and how the simple River people didn’t understand what was happening to them.
I felt a lurch in my stomach when she said that, as if I were going to be sick. My people are not simple. There are things they don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean that they are stupid or even ignorant. I watched, fascinated and repulsed, waiting for Jane Watson to mention the Book: but she didn’t talk about it at all.
Jane Watson had written her own book. It was called The River People of the Pembar Plains. The interviewer held it up so everyone could see. On the cover was a photograph of me, taken on the day that she came to our village. I went hot all over with embarrassment: I was wearing my best clothes that day, with my hair carefully braided, but in the bright yellow light of the television studio I just looked quaint and poor, an ignorant peasant. The interviewer asked who I was, and she told him I was one of the daughters of the headman of the village, and that she had become friends with me while she stayed in our home. I felt my stomach clench with rage: my father was important because he was married to a Keeper, not the other way around. I had thought she understood that. She said the photograph showed the dignity my people maintained, even though they lived in such poverty. She didn’t tell the interviewer my name or my title, and she didn’t mention my grandmother at all.
For a while I was so angry that I forgot to read the subtitles, and when I started paying attention again, the interviewer was talking to the camera and Jane Watson had disappeared and the television flickered to advertisements.
I don’t know how long I stood outside that window as people pushed past me in the twilight, cursing me for blocking the footpath. My whole body was shaking with fury. I wondered how she dared to put my photograph on the cover of her book, knowing what she had done to me. I wondered how she could cry over my village, when she had stolen its most precious treasure. I wondered what kind of person could lie like that and not feel ashamed of themselves. I wondered if she even knew that she was lying.
In the shantytowns I have spoken to women who have been raped, and they told me how they felt, how the most intimate and fragile sense of themselves had been torn open and violated. I think it is wrong of me to take their terrible experiences and compare them to mine, but I can’t help it. That is how I felt when I saw Jane Watson on the television. I felt as if my soul had been violated.