The body is a powerful and sometimes dangerous thing. We’ve all heard of how important first impressions are, and how people make snap judgments based on what’s on the surface. Not only can people judge you but they can own you, claim you, by using the body as a tool of manipulation. If the black man weren’t blacck, if his face structure were akin to a white man’s and if his skin color were lighter, he would not be defined through the white man’s eyes because he would be a white man. Fanon says that he is responsible for his own body and, at the same time, does not own it. “My body, he laments, “was given back to me, sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (113). He continues, “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116). Lucy’s body does not bellong to her anymore, either. It belongs to Petrus, to her rapists, to her father–and to her unborn child. Lucy’s identity or being is defined now by her baby; she is the white mother of a black child. The fetus, in turn, doesn’t own its body either–the stigma of the stereotypical violent, sexually aggressive black man is imposed upon it. Not only is the child a product of rape, it is a product of racial friction, of the aftermath of the emotional scars of apartheid.
Lucy is the mother of a black baby. Her body and the baby’s body are connected, are feeding into and off of each other. Because of the baby’s race and because of the identity of the baby’s father, Petrus and David are allowed to justify their personal claims on Lucy’s body. David thinks the child was “meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine” and is shocked to learn that she will keep the shild. Petrus uses the pregnancy to manipulate a union between Lucy and himself–he wants to make a lesbian woman his third wife. In doing so, he guarantees himself a stake in her land. Lucy is forced into a binding contract, an unwanted exchange because she needs to survive. “I am without protection,” she admits, “I am fair game” (203). As a woman, her desicions about her body are molded by the male-dominated society she lives in.
