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Week 14: Friendships made in the Ratty

Friendships feel like home to me. I notice I am a different person with each friend, and each person seems to draw out a different part of me. I wonder if this is because I show each friend that part of myself that I think would be most palatable to them. It may be true. 

I have a friend of mine that I have been losing. We met in a writing class which he immediately dropped because he said it was a lot of work. We didn’t meet again in a while. The second time we met at the Blue room. He said hi. I said hi back. The third time we met in the Ratty. He saw me sitting alone eating a bowl of cereal and he approached me and asked to join me. We had an hour long conversation that was cut short because I had to go to class. From then onwards the Ratty became the place we would meet to share different parts of our lives. We like to share our personal experiences. It is as if we are trying to rummage through our memories in a quest to make sense of the persons that we are becoming. 

Most of my meals last semester were spent with him. He introduced me to his friends and some became my friends too. We would sit around big tables in the Ratty and talk. I began to associate the Ratty with conversations in front of  plates and plates of food. 

This semester we grew apart. I was mentally ill. He said he didn’t like to see me like this because it would remind him of his own episodes with his own illnesses. I was hurt. How could this friend who would help me think through things not want to help me think through this tough time? When we would meet he would ignore my hurt and act as if it wasn’t there and he would proceed to talk and talk and talk. His talk didn’t feel the same anymore. 

I started to avoid him. I ate at the dining hall less, and when I would I would sit at some secluded corner eating cold cereal on my own. Then I stopped staying completely. I would go and get my food in a take out box and eat it in my room. I ran away to the comfort of other friendships that did not ignore my turmoil. 

Towards the end of the semester, I started feeling better and I started to eat meals at the Ratty, but it wasnt the same anymore. I would find myself eating alone. I would look around for familiar faces, but there would be few. Most of my friends graduated or they were not the same when my friend wasnt there. The Ratty went back to being grey. 

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Week 13

When I was younger, I would wake up in the mornings and my father would tell me that because I was a girl, I was supposed to wash my face and brush my teeth before anyone else saw me. And so I would wash my face everyday, and apply plenty Vaseline on my face until it glistened. Sometimes my dad would comb my hair, and remove the little knots that I never really cared to remove. Afterwards, I would walk into the house and have breakfast with the family. Sometimes I would have it outside while sitting down and basking in the morning sun. It was on one of these sunny days with my face glistening with Vaseline that my grandmother came and quickly said;     

                                            Your father is dead.

I remember seeing the sun differently then. I noticed it for the first time; much like the times that I get high, and those pieces of furniture that are usually I had taken it for granted before. It did not stop shining. Life did not stop. I had thought that life would reflect that which had happened, but it didn't. We still had to eat, people still talked and laughed and it was as if nothing had happened. 

Now when I hear people say they lost people close to them, I have nothing to say. 

But to wait it through.

Because death is so definite.

There is no going back. 

I am reminded of death when I break a glass 

Or when I fall.

The glass is gone.

 You are on the floor before you know it.

Father was a gardener. 

He planted trees around the yard. 

I would pretend guava leaves were money (Explain some more) Mango leaves too

 Peach leaves wouldn't do because they were so small and the tree was much taller anyway

Paw paw leaves were too big and those we would pretend were umbrellas when it rained

The apple tree never really had leaves 

Im sure that tree had a disease of sorts 

Later there were orange trees and naartjie (tangerine) trees

After Father died, termites started to ravage the peach tree and we had to take it down. The paw-paw tree stopped bearing sweet fruit, the fruits were still large, but they didn't taste as sweet as they did when we were young. Mother planted another paw-paw tree next to it and this one bore fruit.  The only fruit tree that remains as sweet as it used to be before he left was the tree under which I used to sit and play with pots and pans.  It is the fig tree that grew by one of the corners of our durawall. 

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Week 12

This is a story based on the humor and imagination in Candy Girl. From when I was born till when I was about seven we used to have live-in house helps. We would call them house maids. They were always young women who were born in the rural areas and would come to the city in search of jobs. I decided to reboot a story I once wrote about two years ago. I was home and there was a power cut, then I decided to write about it. 

                                               PHETHOKUHLE

Another power cut!

“Lab’ abantu basijwayela kubi… Nxa!”

“MaPhi! Please make a fire, I will have to finish cooking outside.”

MaPhi is my house maid. Sometimes (read always) her presence brings me so much anger I just want to slap her across the face, but I haven’t. Not yet. There is a law against that, and I really don’t think I would do well in prison. However, I would so love to slap that permanent smile off her face. She never gets angry! 

MaPhi is a 22 year old, education-less, boyfriend-less, style-less, everything-less girl. She fills her time off work with church and if you ask me I would tell you that that excuse of a church brainwashes women into things like MaPhi. She has even ruined her posture. She is permanently hunched for life. Maybe she thinks that stooping is synonymous with humility. Well its not!

I think life sucks and once in a while you have to let loose, and go berserk. But not MaPhi. She has been working for me for about eight years and in all that time she has never done any wrong, never stolen soap and sneaked it to her relatives, never eaten the baby’s Cerelac, never gossiped about me with the neighbors, and never cut her uniform; applied lipstick and tried to steal my husband. My neighbors think I am lucky for having found her given most of them have changed from one maid to the other. MaPhi, on the other hand, is the definition of a perfect human being. I am pretty sure she farts bubbles that smell like air freshener.

My husband and family love MaPhi, but I loathe her. I loathe her for having less than I have and still being happy with it. She nauseates me. I have tried to break down her reserve countless times. Once, I told her to rearrange all the small gravel stones around the yard from smallest to biggest and guess what? She simply courtesed, woke up at 4am the following day and when I came home from work the yard was as I had asked. And because I was feeling particularly generous, I gave her more chores. She was to also mow the lawn, but I told her not to use the lawn mower, so she wouldn’t use the much precious electricity that our stupid country doesn’t seem to have. I want her to break down, but she won’t give me the satisfaction.

Simply put, I hate MaPhi, but I would never fire her. Giving her hell is the only way I can survive this excuse of a life. 

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week 11

Nkulumane 12 is a high density suburb in Bulawayo. Most houses have five rooms. A living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. The houses are made of red brick. The relatively older ones, those built in the 90s, are built of thick red bricks, each stacked on top of another. Then there were ones built with much smaller and much slicker red bricks, and as the economy deteriorated some houses were built with huge ghastly white bricks which most house owners would plaster over with cement. As a child I liked to look at the bricks in our house, even write on them, until my father bought paint, painted a part of our durawall blue. That was my first board. I would write there and pretend to teach “students.” My students would one day be clothes hanging on the clothes line, or some stones that I would line in front of me. I seemed to have an active imagination, and an ability to be by myself and find all games to play, most of which were teaching games. With me teaching my students what I had learnt in class. sometimes, like the teachers who taught us, I would beat the students for answering a question wrong. I can remember myself holding a stick and vehemently beating stones that would be placed in front of the board. Later, there were no physical stones, but I would still use the board to teach some imaginary students some things that I had learnt in class. When I got into high school, I stopped having extra time after school and so never used the board except during school holidays when I would use it write down the number of points I had in some game or another. Now the blue has worn off, there are patches of durawall that are starting to show, and it is abandoned now. No one else uses it, and I don’t use it anymore, but it remains as a reminder of my childhood and my affinity for teaching, and writing things down. 

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week 10: The Rap Year Book

seThis book was easy for me to go through, but afterwards I was left with a heaviness. I do not actively listen to current rap music. It will find me and when it does, I will listen to it. But I do not actively seek it and have it on my playlists. I also try not to look at the videos too much, but because rap is everywhere, I see them. I came to this decision after going through a period of self hate. I hated the color of my skin, and my body size. I have a big booty so I guess my body is not all that bad, but my waist is not small at all, with my butt comes fat that collects around the waistline. My skin color is dark. A lot of my dark skinned black woman friends on campus do not feel appreciated, and we would share these stories. I would collect the stories and I would internalize them. After a while, I found my peace with it, and am still working on getting rid of the internalized nonsense. It was when I stopped actively seeking attention from men that things got better, however it doesn’t change the fact that I am still attracted to black men. Black men look like my father and my brother, who are black men. I love these men, though they brought a lot of hurt. They also love me, but the love is always tainted with a deep misunderstanding of my humanity. I loved my father, and I love his memory, but he was very misogynistic. I may not have done some of the things I ended up doing had he stayed alive. He was a very proud man, and his masculinity was very fragile. And in my house, I would hear things like “Why are you sitting next to your mother like that? You will become a sissy. This was directed at my brother. And my brother won’t wash dishes to this day. These are women’s duties. 

Watching time and time again, women being reduced to commodities in rap videos and elsewhere is very tiring. And for these videos to come to the classroom and us not have an active bashing of the misogyny the same way we would bash racism was very disappointing. We would never accept racism, why do we accept misogyny? Or even tolerate it? Young MA is a queer rapper, but she still carries the misogyny with her, which seems to be the currency in the rap videos. It is very disappointing. Women who are masculine of center bring this misogyny and fragile masculinity into relationships with other women, and it leads to intimate violence and the same problems that fragile masculinity brings in heterosexual relationships. 

The places I have inhabited make it such that being a black woman is very difficult. I have been in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and Providence, USA and there is no escaping the amount of emotional and mental work I have to put in to love myself and value myself and see myself as no lesser than anyone. 

There is need to actively speak against the continual degradation of women, especially women of color in this beautiful genre. 

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Week 9: Veronica

I apologize the pictures are not upright. 

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Week 8:

Home is where I feel safe, where I feel approved and where I feel I am doing just fine. I feel safest when I am at home in Bulawayo and I am with my sister. When we are in a kombi signing to each other,  gossiping about the people around us, because very few people know Sign Language, and the likelihood of us being understood is very slim. However, the time that I have spent in the U.S has changed me. The last time I went home, I was no longer going to church. This was a very drastic change given that I used to be an avid church goer. I used to read the Bible with fervor, and preach. I used to tell my mother that most of her problems were because she didn't talk to God enough. I used to think that I knew it all, and that whatever I didn't know I would be able to find in the Bible. But there was so much judgement in the Bible, so much judgement in Christianity and I felt that I would never be good enough. God did not approve of me. 

Authenticity is important to me now. Home is good, but you carry the dirt from it too. Loads and loads of dirt. We dig and dig and dig and put the soil in our pockets and then we walk with soil from home with us. But I don’t want to let go of the soil. I am faithful to my country, and to my people. Ungasikhohlwa. Ungazikhohlwa. Uzazi ukuthi wena uvelaphi

Kombis are vans used for public transportation that look like this http://www.automart.co.za/cars/vw-kombi/

in Ndebele 

Ungasikhohlwa: do not forget us 

Ungazikhohlwa: do not forget yourself 

Uzazi ukuthi wena uvelaphi: know where you come from 

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Week 7: Times Square Blue

Honest documentation is the aim, trying to document without passing judgement is difficult because we pass it anyway. 

This book was a recommendation from a friend and I planned to read it after reading “Down these mean streets,” which was also a recommendation from the same person. I really enjoyed “Down these mean streets,” because of its descriptive nature and strong lack of judgement. It is also a book that is descriptive much like what “Times Square Blue” aims for. 

This is my attempt at the same. 

We had come from a party with my friends and we were both intoxicated. We went to his room and when we got there we started kissing. The kiss lasted for a short while. I neither enjoyed nor hated it. There was not enough time to decide. Then he put his hand on my head and lowered my head toward his penis. I put his penis in my mouth and he guides my head. I sense a lot of discomfort in my body. I do not want to do this. I tell him. “No it’s ok, you are doing well,” he says. At this point he is forcing my head up and down his penis. Use less teeth he says. I feel like I am choking. “Lets stop”, I say shyly. “Its ok,” just keep going. Then he comes and I can not bring myself to swallow any of it and I turn away. Before I know it he is sleeping, and I am in a room with someone I barely know. I am half naked and deeply unsatisfied. 

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Week 6: NYC in 1979

Stop! Please stop. 

I begged him to stop, and he only stopped after I begged. 

I realized that he only stopped because there would be consequences for his behavior and his future was important to him. 

The misogyny that exists in the societies we live in is great. 

They taught me to wash dishes not because everyone should know how to clean after themselves, but because I was a girl. 

They taught me to make sure to look beautiful, not because grooming is a good thing, but because this will be convenient in the future. 

Who wants a wife who doesn’t know how to look good? 

How to look good? 

A teacher said that ugly girls are good at Math

I was/am good at Math

They taught me not to be too free with my body around boys. 

It was not safe! 

And now you wish you could fight it. 

because they succeeded to instill the culture in you. 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! 

You take so little space. 

You give so much.  

Leave so little for yourself.  

And they get so used to taking from you that when you don’t want to give they are outraged! 

You have changed.  

You do not know how to want and like for yourself.  

I didn’t need to come to America to believe that we needed feminism. 

It is not because of some Western influence that I think that my brother should do his own dishes. 

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Week 5: If the body could talk

A body is a home

A home of sorts 

it hoards

It carries trauma 

It stores beautiful memories too if they are remembered

It shows to the world the types of conversations that we have with ourselves 

In the hunched backs 

The tensed muscles 

The quick looking away 

Never meeting any eyes

There are no lies 

The lies become silence here 

If the body could talk 

Will it run out of words? 

Will tears run down instead? 

Will it say

You used me 

You just stayed in me 

You just moved me around 

I had no say 

You were violent

You abused me

In not acknowledging that I exist 

In not appreciating me 

In being too quick to compare me with others 

And never appreciating me 

You abandoned me 

And here we find ourselves not liking being together 

And here you find yourself not liking me as a place to inhabit 

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Week 4:

I wonder how the languages we speak influence our understanding of ourselves or of the places that we inhabit. I am failing to concentrate for long periods of time and so find it hard to read. I started listening to the books through software I was able to access through SEAS. It doesn’t help much. The voice is annoying and a lot of words are skipped through or not read right. I wish for my own internal voice that I use when I read. At least when I get through this I will be able to read well, but definitely these services, which are supposed to make learning accessible, need to be improved. 

In the stories that we tell of home, a lot of people fall through the cracks. When stories are written, it is about those who made it. Those who don’t make it, when written about are not given live and active characters. With all the racism, homophobia, transphobia, intolerance, lack of job opportunities and inequality, what happens to those who buckle under the pressure? 

What happens to them? What happens to those with disabilities whether mental or physical? They are definitely ignored. The majority is hearing, the majority can see, the majority can grit their teeth and keep going, and the majority can walk. What about the stories of those who, because the system is so broken, do not make it? I empathize because right now I do not feel like I am one of those who will “make it.”

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Week 3:

I watched a documentary on Marsha P Johnson and my heart was broken. I was very inspired by her, and very disheartened to hear about her death. It is supposed that Marsha committed suicide, and yet the people around her said she was too full of life to have done any such thing. The person in the documentary believed she was murdered and working a case to prove this and was met with a lot of resistance. Unfortunately the documentary did not show case a lot about Marsha’s life but rather about her death and the unsuccessful investigation on its circumstances. 

The person that I resonated/empathized most with was Sylvia Rivera. Sylvia once stood in front of a host of cis gay people, mostly white, who had taken over the gay liberation campaign to remind them that she and other trans women had been the ones who started the revolution and yet now they were being cast aside. She was booed and yet she kept talking. Maybe it was because in the end she was homeless and seemingly broken and alone. In that time no one was there for her. Being true to yourself can be very scary to the outsider, to the viewer, to me. Sylvia and Marsha were true to themselves and they were brave, and because they were so different in a whole that did not know what to do with them, they died sad deaths. 

Home? Places? 

The possibility of a life of pain is scary for me. And, yet this is a reality for a lot of people around me and it scares me greatly. I wish for better, I want better for myself. I must think I am special to think that the things that affect other people will not affect me. What makes me special to deserve a life better than that of many others? I have a lot of guilt that I carry around because there are people close to me who do not have the chance to have fun, or even envision a better life, and I always wonder who I am to deserve better. Knowing that I can't help, that I am limited in the amount of help that I can give makes me feel a lot of guilt. It is a weight I carry, and sometimes I do not allow myself to be happy because of the guilt. My whip, my whip, my whip that allows me to feel a little better, so that I do not feel like I forsook my people, like I am not a traitor.

I wish to be authentic to find a place that feels like home; a place where my authenticity does not threaten other people, but that is never guaranteed. I still desire it though. 

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Week 2: Providence: August 25 2013

3.45PM

I arrive at so called Brown University dragging two suitcases. There is a lot of green here. It is because of the lawn. Lots and lots of lawn! The green, though dark, glistens in the sun offering a sharp contrast to the dull browns I am used to. I am even a little blinded by it all. Everything looks so clean. The first building I notice is the J. Walter Wilson building. All that glass! It adds onto all the other shiny things, and I feel like I am having a sensory overload.  My brain shuts some of it out. I have to find a place to sleep tonight. 

12.00PM 

I arrive in Boston Logan International Airport. There are so many people here, most of them white. During this trip, I have seen more white people than I have seen in my life. I do not think I registered this, it is my mind that recalls it this way because I have been exposed to the the race discourse in America and I am now more acutely aware of race. I get out of the airport, and get into a bus with the words “Providence” written on the front. Brown University is in Providence. The bus fare is $40. The passengers are advised to keep their noises to the minimum. When they have to answer a call, they should make it as quiet as possible. The bus will also be a switch from something else to electric at some point. Customers are being alerted of this. We are told to have a safe trip. I dose off. 

2.12PM

I am woken up by the bus driver. There is no one in the bus. I am the only one left. Is this Providence, I ask? Yes this is Providence. Do you know where Brown University is? Yeah, it’s up that hill. I get out of the bus, and am hit by a wave of heat. I am used to it although this heat seems a little different. I am given my bags. I take a deep breath, and drag my suitcases up the hill. 

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Week 1: AfroPunk

This past summer, a friend of mine and I attended AfroPunk in Brooklyn. It was my friend’s first time in New York. It was not my first time, but it may as well have been, because I remembered very little from my first visit. 

This was my general impression of New York and its people;

The subway system is not first timer friendly.

My friend and I had a difficult time using the subway system to navigate the city. We were living in Roosevelt Island and we had to find our way to Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn where AfroPunk was being hosted, and for some reason we would find ourselves in places that were further from the Park than were had started from. It turns out it was because of some construction or something that resulting in a change of routes and such. 

      2. Style is no joke. 

Most people at AfroPunk were so stylish it was a sight for sore eyes. Maybe this was because of AfroPunk, but even on the streets, I would spot someone with a very unique style

     3. People people people. 

There are a lot of people in New York.

     4. Homeless people on the streets.

     5. Definitely more black people than in Providence. 

     6. Worth a second visit!