How Dare the Sun Rise

Sandra’s pride in her culture and her tribe does not inhibit her awareness of its misogyny. The Banyamulenge did not believe women should be educated, and a woman’s value was determined by her fertility. Thus, the miscarriages that Sandra’s mother suffered shortly after she and Prudence wed were regarded as personal failures that reduced her social value in the tribe. Girls who were not married were vulnerable to rape and kidnapping, tools that local men used to shame them and their families and force marriages. Sandra never internalized this devaluation of girls and women. This is partly due to her father’s insistence that she ought to get the same education as her brothers, as well as her observation of her mother’s self-sufficiency by operating her own business out of their home.

After moving to the United States, Sandra learned that even more progressive, industrialized nations contend with sexism. She observed the hypersexualization of girls, which was encouraged by the images of femininity to which they were exposed. Sandra marveled at the Barbie dolls she saw at her neighbors’ home. She took in their large busts, made-up faces, and impossibly tiny waists and wondered why children would be allowed to play with toys that seemed more suited to adults. The dolls seemed to impose a particular idea of how a woman should look. The little girls who played with these dolls might have internalized the assumption that, if they wanted to obtain all the things that make Barbie special—her clothes, her car, and her boyfriend—they would have to look like her.

This pressure to be thin is reinforced in television and music. Sandra’s peers learn to twerk by watching female pop stars. Recalling how both boys and girls twerked back in the Congo, Sandra draws a clear distinction between the sexualization of twerking in the West, where the dance is performed almost exclusively by girls and women, and its popularity as a dance that anyone could perform in her homeland. In this recollection, there is a reversal of expectations. Many Westerners assume Central Africans are more likely to engage in the objectification of women. While Sandra is candid about the ways in which women from her home country are discouraged from developing their minds, the hypersexualization of women and girls is nearly nonexistent in the Congo, based on her account. On the other hand, there are disturbing parallels between the Congo and America: the tendency to shame on women and girls who are raped, and the feeling of failure women develop after miscarriage. Sandra’s juxtaposition of conditions for women and girls in the two countries help readers realize that not all the countries’ gender norms are as disparate as they seem.