The book ‘Ugly’ by Constance Briscoe highlights the devastating impact of being made to feel worthless and her fight to create a successful life. Tell us when you were made to feel ‘Ugly’ and how you positively dealt with that experience. Andrea Enisuoh starts us off with a personal comment on the book.

February 2007

TOPIC:Ugly by Constance Briscoe

Comment by: Andrea Enisuoh

Ugly is one of the few books I wanted to rush out and buy as soon as I heard about it. Written by successful barrister Constance Briscoe, it tells the story of the early years of her life, a period that - she says - was marred by systematic abuse (mental and physical) inflicted by her mother.

Regularly beaten and starved, at one stage she says she was so desperate she took herself off to social services and tried to get taken into care. One of the most moving parts of the book is when she recalls swallowing bleach "because it kills all known germs and my mother always told me I was a germ".

Though at times it was quite a distressing read, I can honestly say that I didn’t regret a moment of the time I spent on this book. This is, in large part, because I could relate to the story. I know so many people whose childhood was blighted by verbal or physical abuse. At least this story seems to have a happy ending though as Constance soared in the legal field to become one of Britain’s first black female judges.

Although it isn’t the best written book I have ever read in terms of style, the heartbreaking story is enough to carry you through.

Responses

From: Niki

At a time when black people are afraid of talking about abuse within the home Ugly is a breath of fresh air. This story, and similar stories like it, is repeated in homes time and time again, yet no-one talks about it so the cycle of abuse continues. I think this book is a wake up call to many to look inside themselves to address the issue of being abused or of being an abuser.   The main reason I love this book is because it shows determination and a willingness to succeed. Rather than be a victim of circumstance, Constance rose above her adversity to be Britain’s first black female judge. That inspires me during times when I feel everything and everyone is against me.  

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From: Jackie

Some commentaries have questioned the validity of Constance’s story in Ugly, but I don’t believe she is seeking validation.  Her intentions are quite plainly to translate her scarred past into the most powerful tool of an advocate - words.  It is no coincidence that the book closes with her exit from the past and her entry into a new life of law and advocacy.  

Constance writes about the unspoken – an abusive black family in 20th century Britain.  Whippings or ‘beats’ as we would say, with the belt, shoe, slipper or bare hand if a tangible was not in reach were disciplinary norms and arguably still are.   

Through  Constance’s account we witness regimented child cruelty and it is her sheer resilience and courage that you admire and feel humbled by (she initiated court proceedings and won a restraining order at the tender age of 12 – hello!). 

I think most people have been made to feel ‘ugly’ at some point in their lives and to varying degrees.  I was an overweight child; however my weight was misconstrued with muscle power and physical strength so it evoked a natural weariness in my peers despite the fact that I did not have a physically aggressive bone in my body.  Some might call this a saving grace because I wasn’t teased or ridiculed, but I fought a personal battle of my own in my early childhood, which I overcame in secondary school with puberty, age and maturity (natural progression).

I don’t believe Constance is seeking literary acclaim; this is a personal mission. Ugly speaks for those precious Angels like Victoria Climbie who did not survive to share their story, and the book should be remembered and treasured for this reason.

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From: Jackee Holder

Reteach A Thing its Loveliness

I was standing fixing my hair in the mirror of the staff changing room of the Marks and Spencer store I worked at in London’s West End. I was a young woman around the age of 17. As I continued - half looking at myself - out came a tirade of self-hatred, self-talk I had grown accustomed to ranting at myself with.

‘I’m so ugly’, I said out loud, enough for Vera my friend who was standing next to me to stop in her tracks and turn to face me full on. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re not ugly at all’.

That evening Vera opened me up to a new possibility. I doubt she even knew the impact her words had on me. But they swam deep inside of me so that even today as I write and retrieve this long buried memory the excavation of it brought tears to my eyes. What Vera didn’t know was that I really believed I was ugly.

Sexually abused at the age of seven, told repeatedly by my brothers how ugly I was I really believed that what they said was true. In his poem Saint Francis and the Sow, Galway Kinnell’s lines speaks to the notion of ugly when he describes the beauty of the Sow.

‘For everything flowers from within, of self blessing though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.’

Describing the Sow, Kinnell reminds us of its beauty in a way that exposes it, naked and raw on the page. Kinnell’s words travel the body of the sow from the its, ‘earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow’.

Back then I knew very little of self-blessing but even in the apparent ugliness of the Sow Kinnell’s words trace the sheer beauty of the Sow that had me spinning on the page.

Writing about Ugly reminded me of the man who used to travel the tube on the Victoria line in the early-eighties when I was a teenager. I would often see him when I boarded the train at Brixton on my way into work on Saturday mornings. He would be sat there alone. People looked away or moved seats. Eyes would turn, shunning him. But when we could we would stare out of curiosity and pity at his face. I can only imagine the pain that these very overt actions caused him.  We viewed him, myself included, as some sort of freak.

I remember the hugeness of his face, the bulges protruding like huge mountains from his skin, too many to mention. He had at least three small heads giving you different views from a range of directions. The grotesque distortion of his face was a revelation many of us had never come face to face with in person. The large bumps that soiled his face weathering and aging his skin to look like a mass of craters reminded me of the Moon’s surface. If this was ugly then in my young eyes there he was.

I saw this man many times. To begin with I stared away, and then gradually I peered cautiously not wanting to offend, searching for what I did not know. Sometimes without really thinking about it I would send him love, hoping that somehow my kindness would be felt in the smallest of ways. Back then my young mind had not formed the language to describe what I was searching for. I was trying to make contact with something much more valuable and profound beyond his face and the body he lived in. I was I think searching for his soul.

I wish I knew his name. At the time of writing this piece I trailed the internet and could find no reference to him, but he looked similar to the Elephant Man. Nonetheless this man taught me about ugly. He taught me that when my brothers tormented me calling me ugly at the age of 14, I was young and vulnerable; taking it to heart, but turning the knife in on myself was not the only way. The skin we are in is just that, a skin, an outer layer. But our skin is not who we are. As I have grown into new skins and clamoured my way out of the older ones I have come to realise that what’s on the inside matters more than what we wear on the outside.

Many of us spend most of our lives re-teaching ourselves about our own loveliness and the loveliness of others. Ugliness is the art of loveliness for it calls for us to see beyond and beneath the surface of how someone looks or even to the ugliness of their and our own actions. To look beyond the limited eye of beauty to penetrate the dark blue wretched world of our experiences in search of the sparkling, shining light that lies within each person’s soul, is an expression of essence and divinity. Ugly is the presence of divinity. When ugly is in the room either in my thoughts, feelings or in person, then I know it is really a sign that I am in the presence of God.

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