The Djinn in the Nightingale's eye

Love is a wonderful thing, but who is worthy of it. What if you could simply make a wish, and bypass all the requirements? 
In today's episode, I take a sharp left, with talk of sexual assault woven into the narrative. If that's not for you, join us next week.

Transcript

3000 years of longing

Growing up is a scam. As an adult, it would appear that all the magic seems to have been drained out of daily life, and we are stuck with the grey of overcast skies and sensible clothing. Between the worries of making life happen with all the associated money making and life admin, relationship management and associated worries, there is nothing to make one think of believe that wishes could come true. Even our hustle culture tells us that every good thing comes at a very high price- but what if you could have – for the price of a gift shop souvenir, a wish, your heart’s desire? What would you ask for, and if you got it, would it truly make you happy?

Introduction
Hi I'm Rumbie. Welcome to “there's a book for that”, a podcast in which I, a bookworm, talk about different books I have read and apply lessons or themes from those books to social issues.
Today's subject is the Djinn in the nightingales eye, or as it was in the movie adaptation featuring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, 3000 years of longing. I watched the movie before I read the book and I loved the movie so much that I read the book to kind of compare, and honestly, it’s quite an event. When the Djinn offers her three wishes, she starts small, in the movie, it’s a throwaway wish, in the book, something weightier, but then she makes another wish. “I wish, said Dr Gillian Perholt to the djinn,
Quote  I wish you would love me.”

The main reason why I wanted to read the book is that I so loved what Gillian wished for, but as I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but feel that something that was off. As I watched Tilda Swinton, who we know to be a slim, very slim, tall lady, I couldn't help that but think, that’s not right, that woman, in that body, with those looks, does not need to wish for love. To wish for love instead of World Peace, instead of money, instead of good health or a trip to Barbados or, I don't know, myriad of things, she asks for love, and it just seems so fat. Her wish was so personal, so lacking in utility, it’s so not dinner with Jay-Z or financial security. She asks the djinn to love her, and I just thought, this is a fat woman’s wish. If, as I suspected, this was a fat woman’s wish, where was the fat woman? And so, I went to the book. And yes, just as I suspected. The woman in the book is Fuller figured.
Described as, Quote “an ample woman, a stout woman, with a soft clear skin, clothed in the kind of draped linen dress and jacket that is best for stout women”,
Dr Gillian Perholt, our heroine is a fatty, a fluffy girl, a traditionally built lady.
Let’s rewind and talk about how we got to wishes. I got a little ahead of myself.
Context and Background; çesm I bülbül, The Nightingale’s eye.

Written in 1994 by A.S. Byatt, or Dame Antonia Susan Duffy according to her Wikipedia page as part of a collection of short stories, the subject of our discussion is the title piece, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s eye and it is a beautiful little story, well worth a revisit.
The name comes from a scene in the story in which the heroine meets a Djinn, in a glass bottle, which has the name “The Nightingale’s eye” in Turkish.
Described as Quote “largely irrelevant, and therefore happy”, End Quote
Dr Gillian Perholt, was
Quote, “a narratologist, a being of secondary order, whose days were spent hunched in great libraries, interpreting, decoding the fairy tales of childhood and the vodka-posters of the grown-up world, the unending romances of golden coffee drinkers… etc”End Quote
From what I can understand, she analysed stories for their deeper meanings. Listeners, it may well be that by joining me on this journey, you too now put on the cloak of a narratologist. We will see.

So, finding herself finally free after her husband ran away with the 26-year-old Emmeline Porter, this vibrant woman in her 50s, whose two children are adults living far away, spends her days hidden in the joys of academia. Gillian has an opportunity to share her wisdom at a conference of narratologists,  Quote “Although she was now redundant as a woman, being neither wife, mother nor mistress (I assume here that the author is being satirical rather than giving us the three uses of a woman) Quote continues, “she was by no means redundant as a narratologist, but on the contrary, in demand everywhere”. End Quote.

 One of the joys of scholarship, is the opportunity to travel, and on this trip to Turkey, adventure finds our heroine.

She is thriving, living her best life, with old friends, and new. During her presentation, she has an odd “vision”, for want of a better word, of a cavernous female form, a large, strange “flat breasted” creature which stops her in her tracks and causes her to think that this is what she fears. We later learn that as a child she was prone to such visions, laying the foundation for our story, blowing the grains of magic dust into our eyes, weaving us into the enchantment. The encounter vision/intrusion leaves her unsettled as it to be expected, but she manages to shake it off, finish her presentation, and enjoy her time with her friends. The next day, on a tour of a museum, she meets an ancient mariner, who takes her on a tour of the museum of Anatolian Civilisations. Here again, we encounter a recurring motif of our story. The Ancient Mariner, harnessing his knowledge of the museum in his role as a guide points out an image of a goddess,
“She was, look at her, the little fat woman. They loved fat, it meant strength and good prospects of children and living through the winter, to those naked people, they were probably thin, and half-starved with hunting and hiding in holes, so they made her fat, fat, fat was life to them. They worshipped the fat woman; we think they thought everything came out of her hole”.

A day or two later, nearing the end of her trip, she visits a souvenir shop with her friend, where she finds
QUOTE “a very dusty bottle amongst an apparently unsorted pile of new/old things.” END QUOTE
As a collector of glass paperweights, she was drawn to this interesting bottle, which her friend tells her could be “çesm I bülbül, nightingale’s eye”. She must have it, and have it she does, and later that evening, after a shower, she remembers that she has a dusty glass bottle in her bag, and decided to run it under running water, and give it a rub.
Yes friends, this is that sort of story. It is a magic bottle, and out of it flies a djinn, larger than life, larger than the room even, but as he shrinks himself to fit the room, we discover that he is a hottie, anatomically correct and generously proportioned. I am not sure why this is necessary, but it is alluded to more than once so there you go, I have to mention it. In the movie, the hottie is Idris Elba, so peak hotness, if a little hairy, green, and golden. He quickly learns English from the TV, a handy trope, thus saving us from her broken French, and they begin to talk, he wants to know about her, he has been in the bottle a while, and knows that the world has changed. For the kindness of setting him free from the bottle, she has earned three wishes, and with the final wish, he will be free completely.

Make cake not war!

Thus, we find ourselves in Gillian’s hotel room, with a beautiful giant djinn in front of her, offering her the world. Gillian makes two wishes and it is this woman, whose husband fulfilled a cliché and proved himself a coward, whose children flew the nest and never looked back, whose ample body is showing the ravages of age, the lines of experience. It is this woman, not some thin woman who has been fighting ageing with lotions, potions and botox who makes the wishes that we will now examine.
A fat woman is the one who wishes for love. In my view, to wish for love when one is offered essentially the world, is the behaviour of someone who says yes to seconds, yes to desert, chocolate in bed, pancakes for breakfast. The wish of someone who believes in making cake, not war, even though there are times when she should perhaps choose war. It’s the wish of someone with secret hopes and desires, the fulfilment of which those around her might not think she deserves. It’s the wish of someone who doesn’t care if they deserve it, she just wants it, and considering we are talking about magic, is brave enough to ask. It's a decadent wish. It's a wish without the misery of self-denial and continuous discipline. Please note that I'm not saying that that fat people are undisciplined because I as a fat woman, completed a 30-kilometre swim in three weeks earlier this year, which took a lot of discipline and stamina, but this is one little area, where the food is involved, one chooses to say yes to oneself. You will note I did not mention greed, for I do not equate or associate them.

In this book, this woman says yes to herself and in that and that act of saying yes to one’s desires, instead of doing another bone broth diet or eating air or whatever today’s fashionable diet involves, she chooses love. In a world in which being fat is so undesirable that people seem rabid when they see a fat woman being loved out loud, our Gigi asks for love. (I’m speaking only about heterosexual relationships here. I’m here for the heterosexual fat black girls, poor things.)

In this context, we know that there's a lot of movement about fat women being desirable for sex. They are sexualised and fetishized, but also reduced to warm bodies instead of full beings. Even when they find love, there are plenty of people who think that they should not. So, to be a fat woman, and to ask for this one thing that everyone else is asking for, to push to the front of the line and say me first, when everyone around is grumbling, seemed to brave, until I read the book. In the movie, Gillian starts out sceptical, wishes are not to be believed, there are no such things, it’s silly, unintended consequences etc. She wishes a silly wish, and while the djinn grants it, is understood that it is silly. Then she asks him to love her. It’s pretty simple. Cute. Lovely.
In the book, things are markedly different, and heavier, darker, and the wishes are not simple, even though they are granted.

In the book, she asks, QUOTE “I wish, said Gillian, for my body to be as it was when I last really liked it, if you can do that. The great green eyes settled on her stout figure in its white robe and turban. I can do that, he said. I can do that. If you are quite sure that that is what you most desire. I can make your cells as they were, but I cannot delay your Fate. It is courteous of you to tell me that. And yes, it is what I desire. It is what I have desired hopelessly every day these last ten years, whatever else I may have desired.
And yet, said the djinn, you are well enough as you are, in my opinion.” For the next line, imagine it’s Idris Elba saying it to you, “Amplitude, madame, is desirable”. Let’s take a little break. Drink some water.

The scene continues, “Not in my culture” said Gillian, “And moreover, there is the question of temporal decay. That I suppose, but do not wholly understand sympathetically. We are made of fire, and do not decay. You are made of dust and return to it.” The next bit is important- He grants the wish with a lazy swish of his finger, and immediately, “she felt a fierce contraction in the walls of her belly, in her loose womb. I am glad to see you prefer ripe women to green girls, said the djinn. I too am of that opinion. But your ideal is a little meagre. Would you not care to be rounder?”
Gillian doesn’t respond, instead excusing herself, and retreating to the bathroom where she examined her new old body. “She saw in the demisted mirror, a solid and unexceptional thirty-five-year-old, whose breasts were full but not softened, whose stomach was taut, whose thighs were smooth, whose nipples were round and rosy. I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and still be recognisably who I am, in my free and happy life; only I shall feel better, I shall like myself more. That was an intelligent wish, I shall not regret it”. END QUOTE

The first reading led me to the “fat to hot montage”, you know the one, all the big changes as a fat (it’s the movies, she is barely average sized) woman, (who is apparently only ugly BECAUSE she is fat) decides that she will show her detractors, or that guy who scorned or rejected her by getting beautiful, (read- thin). In one of my favourite movies, the Mirror has two faces with Barbra Streisand and which we're told that Barbra Streisand somehow is fat and unattractive. Barbara Streisand. She’s like a UK size 8. I won’t even bring up my good friend Bridget. We are constantly told that we have to change in order to be acceptable, attractive, valuable. We are told that there is an acceptable body for love and in order to be loved, you have to be in that acceptable body. If you are not in that acceptable body, you are a figure for ridicule and hate. You are also invisible, unless you are chosen to be the object of ridicule and hate for the day. I sometimes joke about how I could probably rob a bank, or you know, commit a crime because as a fat woman dressed up as some kind of cleaner, I don't think I'd be noticed. It's very easy to be invisible when people don't want to look at you because you're not attractive. Your aesthetics are not pleasing.
To be thin is to automatically be attractive in this world, which is why I did not buy Tilda Swinton as someone who would wish for love, and why I guess they left that bit out of the movie. 

Sturdy body, safe body
With the second reading of the book, I overcame my disappointment, to focus on the story within the wish, which led me down a different path, because while Gillian asked for a smaller body, it was not just a smaller body, but the last body SHE liked.
The skinnification montages always have, as a singular aim, getting women to the smallest size possible, whether or not they look good. Just being the same size as the girl in the magazine is seen as being enough, “you’ve made it girl”, whether or not it makes you look like you have a Megamind head or will be unable to sustain such extreme weight loss.

Gillian asked for a body she was happy with, not just a smaller body, because she wanted a safe, but more comfortable body. This realisation, and how close it hit home led me to another book (BOGOF- Lucky you,) Roxane Gay’s memoir, Hunger. 
I must be honest here and give those of you who need to a chance to get out while you still can. I started out, wanting to make a more surface point that all bodies deserve love, whether or not their conform to societal expectations.  I remember speaking to friends and noting with shock that they would not date someone who was disabled, just because and thinking that was more than a little gross, but this is more common than I perhaps realised. People whose lives are lived out in bodies that do not conform to the standards set by Western beauty standards, darker skin, bigger, disabled, the larger noses, smaller eyes, butt that looks big in everything have long been the objects of mockery and horror. I wanted to invoke the magic of the Djinn and invite love into the lives of everyone who doesn’t “meet the standard”, but that second reading messed me up. I took a deeper dive than I wanted, and so now, I would like to remind you, that this episode will deal with some difficult subjects, and the last point to turn back is here. If hearing about sexual assault might ruin your day, please take the first message, watch the movie, and absolutely do not read the book.

If you are still here, then put your seat belts on, and let’s dive in.
So, Gillian, before asking the Djinn to love her asks that he would restore her to the body that she was last happy with, and he does. Then, with that level of trust established, the djinn says,,
“Tell me something about yourself- something you have never told anyone- something you have never trusted to any lover in the depth of night, to any friends, in the warmth of a long evening. Something you have kept for me”.
 I have expressed my disappointment about the first wish, but a continued reading leads us to an interesting story. This is a book about stories, and we all have stories to share, and it can often be difficult to talk about some of the things that hurt us, but when we find a kindred, or a listening soul, it becomes easier.
And so it is that our Gillian, lover of stories tells a story that will ring true for many. I will read all the main parts of the story, to maintain an unbroken line of thought.
“Tell me said the djinn.
It is insignificant.
Tell me.
Once, I was a bridesmaid. To a good friend from my college, who wanted a white wedding with veils, and flowers and organ music, though she was happily settled with her man already, they slept together, she said she was blissfully happy, and I believe she was. At college, she seemed very poised and formidable- a woman of power, a woman of sexual experience, which was unusual in my day. She was full of bodily grace, and capable of being happy, which most of us were not, it was fashionable to be disturbed, and anguished for young women in those days and probably for young men too. We were a generation when there was something shameful about being an unmarried woman, a spinster, though we were all clever, my friends and I, we all had this greed for knowledge.
And my friend- whom I shall call Susannah, it wasn’t her name, but I can’t go on without one- my friend had always seemed to me to come from somewhere rather grand, a beautiful house, with beautiful things. But when I arrived for the wedding her house was much like mine, in a row of similar houses.
The marriage went off beautifully. She had a lovely dress, like a princess out of a story. Those were the days of the princess line in dresses. On the day she looked so lovely, out of another world. I had a big hat with a brim, it suited me. You can imagine the dresses, I expect, but you cannot imagine the house, the place.
If you say I cannot, replied the djinn, obligingly. Why do you tell me this tale? I cannot believe this is what you have not told. The night before the wedding said Gillian Perholt, we bathed together in her parents’ little bathroom. It had tiles with fishes with trailing fins and big soulful cartoon eyes-
Cartoon?
Disney. It doesn’t matter. Comic tiles.
Comic?
It doesn’t matter. We didn’t share the bath, but we washed together.
And, said the djinn, she made love to you.
No, said Dr Perholt. She didn’t. I saw myself. First in the mirror, and then I looked down at myself. And then I looked across at her, she was pearly white, and I was more golden. And she was soft and sweet.
And you were not?
I was perfect. Just at that moment, just at the end of being a girl and before I was a woman really, I was perfect. She remembered her own small, beautifully rising breasts, her warm, flat belly, her long slender legs and ankles, her waist, her waist.
She said, some man us going to go mad with desire for you, said Gillian Perholt, And I was all proud inside my skin, as never before or since. All golden. She thought. Two girls in a suburban bathroom, she said, in an English deprecating voice. The djinn said, but when I changed you, that was not what you became. You are very nice now, very acceptable, very desirable now, but not perfect.
It was terrifying. I was terrified. It was like- she found a completely unexpected phrase- like having a weapon, a sharp sword, I couldn’t handle.
Ah yes, said the djinn. Terrible as an army with banners.
But it didn’t belong to me. I was tempted to love it- myself, It was lovely, But unreal, I mean, it was there, it was real enough, but I knew in my head it wouldn’t stay. Something would happen to it. I owed it, she went on, searching for feelings she had never interrogated- I owed it some sort of adequate act. And I wasn’t going to live up to it. She caught her breath on a sigh. I am a creature of the mind, not the body, Djinn. I can look after my mind. I took care of that, despite everything.
Is that the end of the story? Said the djinn after another silence? Your stories are strange. They peter out, they have no shape. It is what my culture likes or liked. But no, it is not the end. There is a little bit more in the morning, Susannah’s father brought my breakfast in bed. A boiled egg in a woolly cosy, a little silver-plated pot of tea, in a cosy knitted to look like a cottage, toast in a tea rack, butter in a butter dish, all on a little tray with folding legs, like the trays old ladies have in Homes.
He suddenly leaned forwards and pulled my nightdress off my shoulders. He put his hands rounds my perfect breasts, said Dr Perholt, who was 55 and now looked 32, and he put his sad face down between them, he has glasses, they were all steamed up and knocked sideways, he had a bristly little moustache that crept over my flesh, like a centipede, he snuffled amongst my breasts and all he said was, I can’t bear it, and he rubbed his body against my counterpane/ He snuffled and jerked, and twisted my breasts in his hands, and then he unfolded the little legs of the tray, and put it over my legs, and went away to give his daughter away,  which he did with great dignity and charm. And I felt sick, and felt my body was to blame. As though out of what she said lucidly, was spun snuffling and sweat and three-piece suites and artificial silk and tea cosies.
And that is the end of the story, said the djinn (he has been interrupting this whole time, but I saved you his irreverence- you’re welcome)
That is where a storyteller would end it, in my country.
Odd. And you met me and asked for the body of a thirty-two-year-old woman.
I didn’t. I asked for it to be as it was when I last liked it. I didn’t like it then. I half worshipped it, but it scared me- This is my body, I find it pleasant, I don’t mind looking at it-
Like the potter who puts a deliberate flaw in the perfect pot.
Maybe, if having lived a little is a flaw. Which it is. That girls ignorance was a burden to her.” End Quote

Sorry for the long reading, but I wanted Gillian to tell her own story, in her own words. She took a rather circuitous route, but when people tell difficult stories, it is often difficult for them to tell them head on. One deserves the chance to take the scenic route if the destination is MORDOR.
So, as we have seen, for some of us, our smallest bodies are not necessarily our happiest bodies. Those small bodies come with problems that we find it difficult to overcome, problems that we do not invite, but which follow these little bodies, drawn to us, like a shark to chum. For Gillian, her small, perfect body, was dangerous, and this is really the crux of our story today.

Roxanne Gay, in her memoir, Hunger, speaks about her own sexual assault at the hand of a trusted friend and his friends, when she was 12. She did not say anything at the time, because at 12, one often does not have the words to explain such a horrifying experience. But, as a direct result of that, she began to hate her body, and made a conscious decision to change it, to make it less attractive, so that she could be safe, and as a result, put on weight,  QUOTE “I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was wilful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men awa. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt. This is what most girls are taught- that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.” END QUOTE
I wondered if this was normal, part of me believes that this is a very sensible strategy, though we know that those who attack people, those who rape and assault are not acting out of pure attraction, but to exercise power, so even this is no protection.
At my smallest, as adult, I had lost weight through anxiety. I had a lot going on at that time, and so I lost 20 kilos in three months, just because I wasn’t eating. I had butterflies in my stomach all the time. I did not feel hungry. My then boyfriend won his way into my heart by asking if I had eaten that day, and when at 6pm, I replied no, he took me to Nandos, where I tried my best to eat a piece of chicken and some grilled pineapple. There is one day I remember struggling with an almond croissant. The whole day, I was trying to finish that thing. I was smaller, smaller than I had ever been but I didn't feel cuter because I had so much else going on I didn't even think about my body at that time. I didn't think about whether it was an achievement. I wore smaller clothes, everyone paid compliments, but I don't remember it being a thing where I was like, oh, wow, look at me because I was so distracted by everything else.

Yet, it was in this smaller body, that I experienced sexual harassment at work. The only time that I was sexually harassed at work, I had never been sexually harassed at work before or and have (knock on wood), not experienced it since. And so, there is a part of me that associated that experience with a with smaller body.
Growing up, I used to boast about not being kidnappable, I am not portable and it’s not worth it, because if you see someone carrying a fat woman down the street, you're going to pay attention, you're gonsta Stop, you're gonsta to pay attention. Why? Because the bodyguard wasn't made with a fat woman, and fat women don't get romantic stories, so you would be suspicious about some sweaty grunting man carrying my unconscious body about.

Unless the assailant was dressed like a fireman, lifting me out of the building like the mum in What’s eating Gilbert Grape, it would just attract too much attention. So, I was very confident, walking about at night coming from the library, my body in itself, was a deterrent. When that man at work felt confident leaning into me in full view of the office, whispering about giving me six children, my smaller body must have contributed to that. My smaller body made me fit the standard of beauty more closely, but it also made me more vulnerable. I felt safer in the bigger body, but when you feel small, you are vulnerable. And when I was at my smallest at 80 kilos, I was vulnerable enough for this man in my workplace to make all these inappropriate comments and make me feel even smaller. Perhaps one day we will talk about why financial independence is important, because if I had the money, I would have left and never come back. My smaller body was not safe, but this was not the first time.

In an even smaller body than Roxanne Gay when she was raped, and my small body when I was sexually harassed at work, my tiny little body was violated. While walking through the paradise that was the Trade Fair in Zimbabwe in the late 90s, surrounded by rides such as the Octopus and the Big Wheel, and candy floss machines, a man, a grown man grabbed me by my pussy. I remember being shocked when Donald Trump said this and the recording was making the rounds, because I literally knew what that meant.

A grown man, in public walked past and grabbed my weewee, and kept walking. I turned around, why did this man touch my weewee? I was so confused. He was looking back, he wanted me to know that he had done it, done something to me that I would not have the vocabulary to describe until years later. Perhaps that vulnerability was the attraction. The smallness. Small bodies are not safe bodies. I was 8, maybe 9, and this man, with his practiced predatory hand ripped away my innocence through my little weewee, whose only function then was to weewee, because I was just a baby, and kept walking. He did not stop. He is probably out there someone, a husband, a father, a respected member of the community, much like Susannah’s dad- living his best life, my sullied weewee a dusty trophy in his brain’s cabinet of perversions.

Small bodies are not safe.
In the US, the CDC reported that while most children do not report sexual abuse at the time, or ever, research shows that about a quarter of girls, and a sixth of boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. That’s 3-5 children per classroom of 20-25 students. Small bodies are still vulnerable, and so it would make sense that people might look for ways to become less vulnerable. In an article titled “The second assault” published in the Atlantic in 2015, Olga Khazan interviews different people who have experienced of both being sexually assaulted and being overweight. According to the article,  QUOTE “research shows that in general, childhood sexual abuse might be an important predictor of obesity and overweight in adulthood”. END QUOTE
She tells the heartbreaking story of Christine White, who experienced sexual assault as a child, quote “When White was an infant, her mother began dating a man 26 years her senior, and he lived with the family until White was 10. Though to outsiders he seemed affable, the stepfather was largely unemployed, according to White, and he had a boorish streak. “He was the kind of guy who would beep at pretty women walking down the street,” she said, “even with his kids in the car.”

At home, his immaturity had a sinister element, White said. A number of times, after White showered, he’d make her parade in front of him naked so he could “inspect” her. During games of Yahtzee, he would force her to sit on his lap for longer than was comfortable. He’d grab her behind and make flirtatious comments. Occasionally, he’d put a treat in his pocket and cajole her into fishing around for it.
“I knew that I didn’t like what was happening,” she said, “but I didn’t know what was appropriate.”
To her teen self, White’s body was criminal. “I felt like I was always in a battle with food,” she said. “I just thought, this body needs to be tamed. It makes terrible things happen.” END QUOTE. She is careful to point out that this did not lead to Christine becoming obese, but Christine’s fear of her own body as a magnet for danger is understandable. Much like Gillian and Roxane Gay, the smaller body attracted danger and the larger body was a refuge, a way of becoming invisible, so that wicked eyes with cruel hands stayed away. 

I don’t want to leave the impression that I am making a causal link here between sexual abuse as a child as obesity. I am absolutely not. While there are quite a few studies showing a correlation, the research is not yet enough to give us a real picture. Most of the research started in the past 20 years, I suppose as people started to think more about the causes of obesity, rather than assuming that fat people were just greedy piggies, but when we read hear from people like Christine White or the other people interviewed in the Atlantic article, when we hear from  practitioners working with people working towards healthier eating patterns, or read stories such as Roxanne Gay’s it should be enough to make us think a little deeper about the surface issues. While this area of research is in its infancy, with few causal links established, doctors working with overweight patients in a bid to help them get smaller found in multiple cases that there was a high incidence of sexual assault among their patients who struggled with their weight. I have put some of the links in the for anyone who wants to follow up.
Additionally, I must point out that I am not saying that all fat bodies are the product of trauma, of course not. We also just like to eat, but it’s significant enough to talk about. I am also someone who finds larger bodies attractive, so in analysing these books, and pulling up these stats, I want to make it clear that any potentially causal link aside, were it not for social stigma, I believe that more people would be on the happy fat side, traditional built subjects of Rubens’ artwork, like fat goddesses spilling out curves and fertility, happy eaters, proudly eating and walking and thus being healthy instead of hiding in their closets, feeling too ashamed and fat to be outside, to go to the gym or for a swim.
When I started out with the planning of this episode, I wanted this to be a story about love, about wishes, about wishing for love, and finding it. About receiving it as ourselves, even with all our sad stories and imperfections, so I feel it is only right that I end with Gillian’s wish, which so entranced me, and the Djinn’s response, which floored me. 
QUOTE, “I wish, said Dr Perholt to the Djinn, I wish you would love me.
You honour me, said the djinn, and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it way well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, sharing our life stories as lovers do. 

Love, said Gillian Perholt, requires generosity. I found that I was jealous of Zefir, (you have to read the book to find out who that is), and I have never been jealous of anyone. I wanted- it was more that I wanted to give You something, to give you my wish, she said incoherently. The great eyes, stones of many greens, considered her, (again imagine Idris Elba) and the carved mouth lifted in a smile. 
You give and you bind, said the djinn, like all lovers. You give yourself, which is brave and which I think you have never done before- and I find you eminently lovable. Come.” END QUOTE I find you eminently lovable, even in the body which is not perfect, and I find love in you as we share our stories, our rights and wrongs, our histories, and difficulties. I love how easy it is. How intentional. In the movie, and the book, there are no games, there is no coquette hiding their intentions behind half-truths and mood changes. There is only honesty and bravery, and I love it. I loved it then, and I still love it, but having taken an unexpected turn in our little story about love, where do we go from here?
I think we stay hopeful. I really love this story. I of course love the idea of sharing stories with someone, of being seen, being heard even if one is not entirely understood. I like the idea of magical things, of finding something good and holding on to it lightly. 
Gillian’s final wish, is to give the Djinn a wish, and of course, he wishes himself home, free, among his people, and I think we have a lot to learn from that. We knew already that Gillian was essentially happy in herself, with herself. She also knew what it was to be imprisoned to someone. In fact, when her husband sends a fax, letting her know that he has run off with a young lady and won’t be home, she feels a sense of freedom. 
QUOTE, “She felt, she poetically put it to herself, like a prisoner bursting chains and coming blinking out of a dungeon. She felt like a bird confined a box, like a gas confined in a bottle that found an opening and rushed out. She felt herself expand in the space of her own life.” END QUOTE.

In much the same way, she grants the djinn his freedom, accepting his love, open to more of it, but also very aware that she cannot hold him to her, because as he says, he is fire and she is dust. Even if she held on to him in life, she would lose him in death. So, she sets him free, to come and go as he pleases- which is also nicely done in the movie by the way. For those of us with difficult stories, I suppose much of the task of our lives will be to find a way to set ourselves free from the bottles in which we find ourselves trapped, the walls that close in, the histories that bind, so that we can be happy, in unassuming, but satisfying ways. I think I have made some decisions which have led me in the right direction, which have allowed me places of rest and comfort, in which I can take shelter and learn and grow and become more than my sad stories. Roxane Gay, in her memoir, indicates that she is on a similar path.

I wish this for those among the listeners of the podcast who need those places of solace and succour, but really, I have one wish for you, and it is love. The wish that brought us here, that led me to read this book, watch the movie more than once, hope for magic, even if I do not believe in it. I wish that you would experience that love that fills your heart and makes the world seem more magical. We need more than tax returns and daily commutes, Zoom calls and diaper changes to keep us going. I hope you get a little magic dust in the wind and find time to read about the Djinn in the Nightingale’s eye. 

Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Join me next week, when I will be talking about Szymborska, and the aftermath of war. 
Ciao