Baby – PurplePretoria

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.

It’s a morning like this one. It’s cold and breezy and I’m up early. The panadol has worn off and I’m fighting the nurses. I’m reaching out to hold one of them so I can shake her. The askari comes in and tries to hold me down. They are pulling me away from the balcony where the din of my mother’s guests was rising and falling just outside of my room several hours ago.

I had thought it through; about how long it would take me to walk home. The paling deep sea blue sky reveals that it could be early morning, maybe 5:00 a.m. I’m in a town hours away from home in distance if I walk on foot. Even if I’m not killed by iron rod clad men on the roadside, I won’t be able to climb over with my new born.

He is awake and in my double bed of this special room; a bed too low and too wide for me to slip out easily from. I should be on the small metallic raised one my mother in law is sleeping on. She’s been asking me the same question for hours now. “Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do this?”

“I have never had a child before, how would I know?” She’s the only one remaining. I have kept the protocol this long and now it’s broken. She says nothing and calls the nurses when I run to the balcony.

“This one is a stubborn one. What is she doing now?” one of the nurses on duty asks in a comic tone- in the same way one would speak to a child. The nurse has been seated in the corridor for hours talking to another nurse. The water dispenser is next to them and I have been there once, and then couldn’t make it half way back on my next attempt and they had ignored me; in my starched faded yellow-flower hospital apron tied behind my open back staggering through the corridor at night.

“You have been giving her panadol. Why would you give her panadol? You should have given her something stronger,” I hear my mother in law tell them. The ground is further down than I had estimated. If I could just climb down, I could run. I see them rushing towards me. And now, I want one of them to reach me, just one of them, any, and I will tug at their dark blue uniform and pull them down to the abyss with me.

My head balances on my shoulders like it’s not my own. A sharp stinging heated claw curls around my neck and races down my back unrelenting. I can’t tell whether it’s resting in my shoulders or my bones. I can’t remember what part of the hospital I’m in or how I got here. I woke up in a bright room with fluorescent lights. I called out and there was nobody there. I had asked them to give me my baby, twice, but they had dressed him and taken him away to show him off. And then I had gone, somewhere- to the unconscious- and woken up in the white light room. Then there was the sound of wheels and I was here in this room, surrounded by murmurs.

“Eehh, bambi. Yatidde … C-section… anti bambi…” Somewhere in the room, a baby cries with a shrill little cry.

I don’t want the askari to touch me and I’m too weak to wring his neck so I get back into bed. Technology is cold comfort but it is still comfort. I ask my mother in law to help me get my phone. There’s no one on the other side. Blood rushes through my body. There’s one last person but she’s 8 hours away by time. I hope and plead with life that she’s awake. She picks up and I talk without waiting for her to answer. I talk until morning when I see the nurse coming in with a pessary.

“Eh ono yasuze kusimu?” she says sarcastically. The she speaks to me. “Don’t fear. This will not hurt a lot.”

I am briefly amused by the shallow magnitude of despair that she considers pain.

The doctor comes in a few hours later and observes me from the door way. In the dim light of the room from behind my mosquito net, I look back at him. “Oh! You’re awake? How are you feeling today?” he says. He has been briefed.

“Is the baby breastfeeding?,” he asks sharply. He walks straight towards me and twists my nipples matter of factly and then he is gone. There is no one else in the room. For a second I feel almost numb. I stare straight ahead. The first time a stranger walked towards me and grabbed my breasts, I was 14, in S.2 walking with a friend at prep time, from the girls’ toilets. It was an A level boy, a prefect and just like that day and twice afterwards, I had frozen. I felt empty inside.

My body reminds me, even if my mind says it is time to let go. The baby who was crying that day is up with cough. I’m awake under the covers of a warm douvet looking straight into the darkness. This time I’m not alone.

“It was a morning like this,” I say, but only in my mind. The shade of the night and the breeze passing by whispers a memory of another day when I could not sleep.

Tag: Baby

Angry ‘Black’ Woman

Three Years ago In October