A. M. K

In an interview on Beyoncé in Harper’s Bazaar on her self image through the years, she is quoted as saying that it is an absurd misconception that Black women are angry. In my own limited interaction with ‘black’ people in America through the telescope of television and my years of experiencing ‘black’ people in South Africa, I found that they were indeed, easily aroused in anger and ever on the verge of a fight, verbal or physical and I think I can understand why.

To be seen and coded based on skin alone is an experience we cannot appropriate just by word of mouth. Black, a political mastermind concept used to efficiently implement social injustice and economic inequality is a different kind of marginalization from what most Africans have lived- one in which the black is forever the Other as contrasted to the Norm(al) white. It is a discrimination that plays out directly, persistently, intentionally, continuously, systemically.

Growing up in a (sub-Saharan) African country, my first concept of self was made up only of family, tribe, clan and finally, a nationalistic finishing varnished at primary school. There we were taught through flag, emblem and anthem that we were Ugandan. Colour was just a colour and therefore I was brown.

My first contact with ‘blackness’ was at University where we were forced to congregate under either ‘black, white or coloured’. I realised then that I did not and could not share the lived experience of what it meant to be black in an apartheid state (or post apartheid state). In the same way, I cannot truly know what it means to be black in a post slavery America.

We Africans, from the softer version of oppression, an indirect colonial rule, have a kinder outlook on the Bazungu. Before we knew them as expatriates, they were just the people who wore flapping kitenge-print pants and Umoja slippers in public, attracting overt attention and the highest price at every merchandise bargain.

We are the ones who keep watch of the British monarchy as if they were distant relatives, have fond memories of our white matronly headmistresses from our secondary school education, police ‘proper’ English with a badge of pride and can still sing the words to the set piece song, ‘The Merry Month of May’ from our music, dance and drama days.

Black people though, are less fond of the things of their oppressors, having grown an incredibly tough (and rough) skin in the fight for their own identity, they are not willing to harmonise in song. Black women particularly unknowingly wear the psychological scars of their society, keloids of overcompensation for lovelessness, a famine of gentleness and dignity stripped and pain unshed. The black men who were supposed to love them were yoked beasts of burden and some became like the savage that their oppressors branded onto them by name.

An angry woman is like a raging fire, a small flame on the leaf of one tree, glazing the branches, smarting and torching the leaves and branches of the next tree and the next and the next until the entire forest is on fire and there is nothing left to save.

It is nature I suppose, that upon the handing down of the mantle of motherhood, a fierce need arises for the grace of your own birth handler to guide you into your first toddling steps. Without this, you might stumble, clutching onto all or any who can be found. The first months are a maddening passionate repeat of crying and feeding, an absolute reliance on a mind devoid of sleep, a head full of problems and a body in reconstruction and in need of constant replenishment.

It dawned on me as I stood in the doorway of the corridor watching you fast asleep, your head falling forward, phone in hand, black out tired from a day of work, having done some of the domestic chores around the house and it still not being enough, that a husband is incapable of mothering his wife.

The air of anxious fragility doused in immense strength is overwhelming. You throw everything at it – money, work, whisky. You are a pedestrian passing through these walls; asleep when here, awake and full of life anywhere else.

I understand why you would run away. If your schedule 24 hours a day, months on end- sleep, food and rest, were undetermined and not guaranteed, it would be theme park ride-bungee jump scary, wouldn’t it?

I shake off the fight, freeze, flee pendulum in my mind that has chosen the flee option, to disappear over the balcony- my life, like a passing figment of the imagination- unseen, unheard, rejected, abandoned.

We were supposed to share our lives…

A baby’s smile is a thing that brings you to life and so I’m back to life, back to brushing this carpet with ridiculous precision, using up the arches of my broken back.

This reminds me of my life at 19; alone with myself – a solitary confinement; endless hours of me versus me, no referee, no time out. Talking to ants like Winnie M? I thought I would never be here again.

He walked up to me in the open waiting room in his lab coat. He looked both apprehensive and relieved to have found me before I left. I could see that he was a man who usually kept to himself behind the glass screen peeping through glass microscopes.

“He will help you”, he said to me. “He helps the animals in the wilderness.. It will all go well.” On the day I had insisted someone else, other than the obviously flustered attendant on duty draw my blood, he had been kind. He had treated me as if he knew, as if he knew that I had come in a piñata of emotions. But he didn’t know. I nodded – because I saw how much it had taken for him to tell me. “Oh, I’m coming back. It’s not yet time,” I mumbled.

…

He is being reintroduced to me. They all are. He doesn’t know who I am ever since he heard the news. His intention, of course was good, very good, just like me- too good, too cowardly, too sensitive, too serious, too introverted. This morning, he does not know where to begin. His hesitation and awkwardness as he walks towards me lying in the hospital bed, catching my eye in a hiccup of a glance, feigning rejection because the nurse told them that I, we, needed at least fours before outside contact. One of us has just arrived and the other has just transitioned through a death and resurrection.

Transition was like being between four walls of pain with no where to turn. I tugged, pulled, hit. Then, I reached out to the one place in my memory which had saved me once, the shores of the Atlantic below Table Mountain.

“Do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” the nurse had asked me frantically as she searched my eyes and shook me gently.

I stood in the sand and looked at the water, the ice cold blue water flowing endlessly and waited for relief but it was all a blurry picture. I went inward, to a place of nothingness; but every time I thought I would hide and get lost, the pain shook me back to life. There was nothing left. Screaming is for shallower pains.

I had just gazed at her, unblinking. I commanded my hijacked accomplice to give me the only physical pain relief I could get that I had managed to get free off YouTube. I commanded my body to make the last maneouvres I could. It was cold. The hypnobirthing instructor had advised not to have cold feet and I had wondered when, in our weather I would ever have cold feet. These days every time my feet get cold I remember that cold Monday morning. Only the earth knows what it feels like, tectonic movements creating fault lines in my hips, the bones in my back, once again, realigning.

9 hours later, the one who had shifted high and low, side to side, slurping, scratching, shoving his foot or hand against my ribs throughout the night started pushing out. On Åsa Holsteins’ podcast where the clear image of my birth’s soul had first taken form, they had said it sounded like an animal. For me, it sounded like a bellow. I had known that with every push, the mountain of emotion that had piled up inside of me would come out and nothing else would matter.

He was slapped onto my chest – bloody and corded to me; immediately he looked up and smiled. I knew then what I had found out before, when had been on a quiet descent to the bottom. Alone with a newborn in a chair, sore breasts, staring ahead at nothing in particular, I had momentarily looked down. His brother had stopped feeding, tilted his face towards me and smiled. It was a real smile, an intentional smile, just like this one. There was a real person in there, not just a baby; had known from then on, that I would be okay.

3cm dilated and the pain had started setting up its tools, my heart dared someone to bind me up. I wanted someone to try and hold me down, someone to try and hold me back. I just wanted one more person to tell me who to be, to tell me who I was and what I could not do. It has never been clearer to me, exactly what I wanted or rather what I did not want, more than it had those past nine months. I had never been more certain of exactly what I did not want as I did that night. Only once before, only that time, for another life decision. I just needed a tap on the shoulder. I was ready for a fight. I had been preparing for this for three years.

He hadn’t seen me for who I was, only for who he is- his anti thesis. A life of pleasing had left me watered down and contained- but this, this force within me… It begged to come out, draped itself over me and overwhelmed me. I knew then, that it would not come out through a surgical knife under fluorescent tubes. It would come out like an avalanche.

…

“Do you remember that moment when I looked at you and you believed me?”

“I do.”

When I had mouthed, over the doctor’s reprimand and wagging finger, over the nurse’s crossed arms and armored pose. “Help me. Don’t let me go through this nightmare again.“

It was all procedure. I had to do it or else.

“What are these?” I asked as the nurse shoved a number of papers in my face. I read it. She had not thought I would. My years of reading documents had come in handy. It was a consent to all necessary procedures.

“If you refuse to sign this, then you have to sign that you have refused to listen to medical advice and if anything happens to your baby…”

In the file, the doctor had listed a number of cautions and explanations that he had supposedly taken us through before our stubborn refusal.

“Nothing will happen,” I cut in as I signed the declaration of refusal to accept. It was 3:00 a.m. on the morning of my baby’s delivery and I was racing out of the specialist women’s hospital touted for its life saving procedures not sure of where we were going to next. I was only sure of one thing, that I have been sure of a few things in my life, and that nobody was going to hold me down again, not again and not this time.

…jasmine oil, spinning babies, sarah devall, bridget teyler, åsa holstein, forward leaning inversions, side lying release, hypnobirthing by anja, dr. anne akello, hip dips, acupressure massages in the night, crying out in despair- asking for a sign- meet me half way, meet me half way, a small cloud in the sky- give me a sign- visions of faith...

you will not labour in vain.

Author: A. M. K

Angry ‘Black’ Woman

TRANSITION