Monsters sans masks

My eyes
were stitched
closed
so that I could
not see
the perpetrators
of the wounds

A thousand
paper cut
lacerations
stung
deeply -
everywhere

Confused -
unable to
make sense
of where they
came from

Not realising they
were there
until I felt
them come
alive with
the lifeblood
of a hot burn
days later

Bathing them
in salt water -
solitary - until they
would heal. It
became ritual -
Recovery

Then one day -
body
piercing all over -
My hands reached
up of their own
volition

And picked each
stitch carefully
from
my eyes - Pus
oozing out through
scabs and crusts

Lids heavy, my
retina adjusted.
The slime
coagulated
to the bottom

And for the first
time I saw their
truly
hideous faces
and set myself
free

Rage (Part I)

Head heavy. Cranium
full of lead. Frontal
cortex bursting
with pressure.
Rage.
Fills my body.

Rage. From the
numbness in the tips
of my fingers to
the roots of the
ache in my lower
back.  Rage. Is the
sound of the scratched
echo that plays
inside me.

Rage. At the thieves
who've stolen my
emotional land. At
those oblivious
to the difficulties
of our condition.
At those who
dare to be
their authentic
selves without
consequence.

Rage. At the
injustice of this
affliction.
Rage. At it all.

Except
there is
no rage
towards
my melanin.

The Opening

I have
never
felt
a
vulnerability
like
this
before.

A listless
ache
behind my
eyes
and a raw
opening of
every
door
inside me.

People
wandering
through
the corridors
of my soul
while I watch
from below.
Mute.

Emptiness
follows their
footsteps as
I float
ceaselessly
through
space.

Thighs

They spread theirs
    like scissors
in every photograph
    and pose
not once
does does it cross
their minds
that the stick like stalks
holding up their
narrow
hips
have
so much
power.

Scrolling - it is the first thing
we notice
and our
hearts break into
a hollow song
we pine,
yearn,
cry
for ourselves
to occupy
so little room
but have
such immense
reach.

They
then
have the
sheer audacity
to shake
what they
don't have.
To try and
scintillate
the way
we
do.

At the end
we
are
left
empty.

Love and Whiteness (Part III)

When the choice
  to live
  - in this world -
  becomes
     an ultimatum
 between
    love
    and
    dignity

It takes
 only
\ a split second \
to realise
that
   love
is but
   a luxury.

Hair There, How Are You?

Hair for a PoC is political.

There is no way around it.  Every PoC I know has a hair story.

Here's mine.

I was lucky enough to be born with European looking "straight" sleek hair and for the first few years of my life I don't have any recollection of hair associated trauma....

But you see my paternal grandma was a curly. Not a wavy, but a corkscrew tight and frizz-ful curly. And when puberty struck things changed for me and they changed drastically.

I never understood what was going on when all of a sudden the girls at school started commenting on how "bushy"  and frizzy my hair looked. "When last did you brush it?" the snide girls would ask, and then laugh. "It wouldn't look so bad if you just kept it wet all the time" others would say.

I stayed at school during the term, and when I'd go home in the holidays my mother did not take well to this newfound bushy hair her daughter exhibited. I'd be whisked to the salon and it would get chopped off on the regular, then blowdried pin straight.

Every-time I'd come home from school this was the case - I learnt that my hair was not beautiful unless it was in a tight bun or blow dried straight... I tried relaxing it when I was twelve... to no avail. At school the coloured girls would ask me "What's wrong with your hair?" and my cousins (who were Indian) would tell me I looked coloured and had black hair (to them that was the ultimate insult).

I hated my hair. Every time it would grow I would take to it with scissors and chop and chop but it would grow back. (This wasn't something I would do as a teenager. I did it as early as a few months ago.) When it grew long enough I would ask the girls at hostel with me to iron it with a clothing iron, which they would. I would keep it straight for as long as I could then go through the process again. When ironing was infeasible I would pull it back into a tight bun so that the back of my neck would hurt and it would never be perceived as bushy.

All the guys I dated always told me how beautiful my hair was, but they didn't know it was fake. It was ironed straight. It was in a straitjacket. I convinced my dad to buy me a higher end hair straightener when I was 17 and spent an hour each time I washed it to get it straight and pristine. Every time I would wash it and it would coil I would recoil in shame. I did this for years - until I was about 24... And then I put my foot down. I said to myself: enough.

This didn't come easy. I had a friend who was a curly who told me I would be beautiful by just letting my hair be. And the reception was great... I had long luscious curls and they were well received by the world. My look worked: it was wild and free. And so was I.

But this didn't last. I still secretly resented my hair. It was so thick and heavy and my friends all coloured their hair and floated through life with their sleek halos. I dyed it blonde and hated it more. Then I cut it all off. All of it. I shaved 2/3rds of my head and kept a hipster type top knot.

This didn't help either. I started romanticising the long hair... but told myself this exercise would be good for me, I would learn of who I am and have to accept my hair as it grew out. Guess what? You got it... this didn't work for me either. At each phase of growth I found something to hate about it.
It doesn't listen to me, it doesn't conform, it doesn't mould to what society says it should, and I hate it. Throughout all of this I felt no legitimacy talking to other natural hair girls because they  perceived my hair to be fine and "beautiful" and their difficulties seemed so much worse.

I have no resolution to this tale..... Except to say that I still have to live with it. I have questions I ask that I am scared to answer?

What am I projecting onto my hair?
What does my hair represent?
How do I come to accept it without my acceptance being dependent on what society deems beautiful?
Who taught me how to hate my hair?
Why do I feel gut-twisting hatred when I look at it in the mirror?
How do I find help?
Will I ever be a natural hair queen?

If you are reading this and you know, PLEASE, I beg of you, let me know.  Share your story with me so I can share it with the world.



https://www.facebook.com/indoafrikanqueen/

Will you be my ... SLAVE? Women as marital objects and reflections on Haritha's story.

Lastnight I read a post on Humans of Amsterdam, about Haritha, an Indian woman, who had to do outrageous and dangerous things to escape an arranged marriage because her agency was taken away from her (Link Here). It was a highly triggering and brought up some intense, traumatic and non-trivial emotions surrounding the way women are treated in conservative, religious and patriarchal societies -be it Hindu, Muslim, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Indian, Coloured or African.

There was something about this post that is deeply real for me and so many women who have to live under the confines of extreme conservatism and patriarchy. It transported me back to a time when I myself was a young woman under the confines of a (still) extremely religious and patriarchal society. 

I remembered being about fourteen and feeling an intense frustration at the fact that it was expected of me to be flattered that men more than double my age were interested in marrying me then and there. I was angry at the women in my life that tried to convince my father - a single parent - that the best thing that could happen to me and the best way for me to secure a good future would be to marry the best suitor. I felt angry, trapped, afraid, unheard and more than anything disempowered.

For instance there was a point where an aunt via marriage arranged for her daughter to marry some relative, but when her daughter met a more eligible bachelor he was shoved my way. I had no say in this. 

Then at the age of fourteen I found myself at a marriage proposal - where I was the bride to be, and I was transported there under the pretense of having dinner with a friend of my father and uncle. The potential groom was in his mid thirties. And he looked at me like I was prey. When I left his mother slipped a R50 note into my hand... As if that would change my mind.   I didn't even know it was a marriage proposal until I realised that the focus was on me and I was being interrogated about my values and what I want out of life. 

I was angry at my father for entertaining this. While he never explicitly forced me into any kind of arrangement, from the time I started menstruating he began mentioning marriage. I don't know what he expected. If he expected me to just get married? To drop out of school? To have a child? He mentioned marrying cousins and the sons of strange men, rich men abroad or poor men who had a strong link to "our culture".

The situation was so precarious that I had to keep my plans to go to university secret for months for fear that they would be jeopardized. People in these communities are not there to help you succeed. They are there to ensure that you abide by the rules that define your worth as a woman. Which is - if you haven't gotten the gist - as a glorified slave , serving, cooking, sexing, in submission to some man, all in the name of god. Ugh.

Like Haritha I had no voice. Every womxn in my family would ask when I am going to get married from the time I hit puberty too.

You see in these communities you are worth nothing if you're not married. You are the property of your parents when before marriage and the property of your husband and his family after marriage. From the moment you're born your whole life is positioned to turn you into a commodity that can be sold off to the highest bidder. I.e: the best suitor, the  most prestigious man or the most esteemed (economically and politically) man. 

Women in these patriarchal and religious communities are the property of men.  All men. Any man. BEFORE you are your own property. Other women are complicit in this and buy into it too. If this is not slavery that lives and breathes then I don't know what it is.

It's easy to discount how far I've come because the success and independence have become second nature. What I don't realise is how lucky I am - I literally mean that I had good fortune - in all of this.  That every step was mammoth and held together by a string which at any point could have snapped. 

I realised what a close call I had. Just how much of the trauma coming from a community that strips you of your dignity and agency to be your own person stays with you. I could not sleep after reading Haritha's story. When I did I dreamt about trying to rescue her from her family in India and trying to find her a job in the Netherlands. Her story was so personal because I myself lived in the Netherlands... I got the opportunity to study there through a scholarship and felt the same sense of liberation that she speaks of when she got there. It was there that I dropped my heavy indoctrination and had the space to start the journey towards becoming the person I am today. 

What Haritha's story did was remind me that there is a whole community of people out to ensure that we don't live a liberated life just like this woman's direct family and her in-laws. For me it was a lack of support in believing I could study, an active discouragement from pursuing an education and earlier than that it was as if I would amount to nothing if I was not some man's wife. I was born and raised in South Africa and still this is what I faced. 

Like the author Ama Ata Aidoo shows so clearly in her book Changes: For women things like marital rape are par for the course and if a woman wants to leave a relationship just because it is not working for her she is "not allowed to" and will be met with resistance from those she loves the most. Men and women alike. Men will call her a whore and women will call her a failure. She will be shunned. Acid might be thrown in her face. She may be killed. 

Often being explicitly beat and battered means there is an excuse to leave. But more often this is also overlooked. And for most women in the world, in 2016, this is still their basic reality...

When will women have basic human rights? 

When will we shout from the rooftops unanimously:  

#PATRIARCHYMUSTFALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How we walk the line between two worlds - A tale of the educated brown girl.

This week has been interesting for me. I was somehow caught up in the pleasure of my yuppie success. It was the first time I did some work for my boss who is this amazing womxn, and one of the first people I have met who has the ability to influence policy directly as a result of years of tireless work, her boundless wit and charisma.

Being caught up in the glitz and glamour of working late nights and the self-importance of waking up and rushing off to meetings, where your work is presented to the media in front of really influential people can give you a really nice buzz. The kind of buzz that makes you feel like you're on top of the world. Like; "Mmmm I am doing things right - now this is what I studied so hard for!"

Coming back to the office after my little voyage into public policy brought me back to reality in no way other than the way life does. It fucking grounds you man.

My sister texted me. Looks like I forgot my mum was going to have an operation today and aside from me feeling exceptionally guilty for not texting her, my sister alerts me to the fact that her husband is in hospital too.

"What? why?" I ask.  She tells me that he broke his fingers. I immediately assume it is because he injured himself at work.
To which she replies in the negative.
His brother tried to stab him.
I am perplexed.
The only reasonable explanation is drugs.
To which she responds in the affirmative.
 I then robotically ask why he is not in rehab.
To which she responds: "he ran away".
Of course.

For a good few seconds I stop and think. I don't feel like something has blown over me, instead I feel like I've come back to reality. Back home, dare I say. Because I have. This is what reality has always been for me. This is what reality is for those of us who walk the line between two very different yet very closely knit worlds.

We are chameleons, constantly moulding to the environment that we are in. Not because we are striving to be something we are not. And not because we long to be anything other than what we really are. But because what we are is a strange amalgamation of dysfunction and chaos coupled with a rare and lucky deep sense of social awareness and the ability to maneuver life skillfully (atleast this is how I perceive it to be).

I can think of countless other friends in this position. I have a friend Lindiwe* who is an investment banker in the U.K, and she has said to me that she feels like a wild card time and time again. Imposter syndrome doesn't get more real than this. She's told me about times when she comes home and her cousins have invited her to street bashes and it's so hard to couple a life in the fast-lane of Canary Wharf with the life of street bashes and bootlegging. These two bizarre worlds are hard to unify when you live in both of them.

It is a heavy burden to bear, because "dual-worlders" (if I can call it this) are often seen as outsiders by one of the many worlds they inhibit from time to time. More importantly dual-worlders feel like outsiders in any one of these worlds from time to time.

In my case, hanging out with rich friends who have trust funds and holiday houses in exotic locations is a kind of mind-fuck. I think about where I grew up and where I am now and I can't calibrate the two. Similarly, integrating an extended family life that consists of violence, drugs, extreme conservatism and plain old emotional stupidity is taxing and one soon forgets how to relate. Fortunately I have learnt to detach from my parents and my extended family - reaching out is often done only on my terms.

For many dual-worlders this is not the case. Strong family ties compel many people to be bound to their families - with their own growth not being accommodated by the constraints of age-old family boundaries. More pertinently, as we continue our day-to-day existence in a primarily western patriarchal and white-washed world, it becomes harder to remain grounded and tied to the roots that we began with.

Roots that are usually not even slightly white. Roots that were not strong in the first place, that were almost kind of rotten, by their nature, and in the process of trying to heal we actively try to strengthen these roots while new ones are being born, and as the new roots become grounded the old ones get reinfected and we have to keep remembering to water the new roots lest the old ones infect the new ones. All through this we live in perpetual fear of the old roots rotting away or ceasing to exist forever...

My sister later tells me that her husband has been retrenched and is starting a new business. This happened last year. I don't know any of it. I say I should visit. She says I'm too busy. I reluctantly agree.  She asks if I could look at the financials of her husbands' new business plan because "Maths is not her thing".  I more than happily agree, as I do I feel a little spark lighting inside me. My worlds overlap once more, this time for the better. I hope.


*Lindiwe's name has been changed to conceal her identity
**If you would like me to share your story about walking the line between two worlds email me at indoafrikanqueen@gmail.com

Where do we belong? One voice for many brown womxn.

Writing is daunting. Writing as a woman of colour is umpteen times more daunting.

What will I say? How will I be perceived? Is what I say sensical and rational? Will it be read? Will it resonate? Will it be accepted?

Emotionally intelligent people will tell you that it shouldn't matter. That it all lies in the process and that all that matters is that you get what you have to say out there. But if you are like me, then this is definitely not the case. It does matter.

It matters because I was taught, from the time I was born, to second guess everything I think and say. To feel less than because of the colour of my skin and what's between my legs. To hide the lumps on my chest lest they detract from any debate yet at the same time to display them like ornaments to attract attention from potential mates - but not too much - just the right amount.

Mixed messages are all I received my entire life; growing up in a conservative community, not having the support of family around when needed, but having their judgment when uninvited was par for the course.

After a lifetime of socialisation leading to subconscious self-deprecation and chastisement I one day decided to start exploring who I am after all these layers are stripped away. A strong quest for egalitarianism and equality led me to various junctures that are changing my life. And this blog, is a story of what I have found, and what I am finding.

This is not dissimilar to what is happening around us, with our contemporaries increasingly taking a strong and vehement stand against societal bullshit, and demanding a rebalance of power and righting of past wrongs. This social awakening, or reawakening, is part of us all coming together to find out who we are. Demanding what is right. It is what I am doing on a micro basis, and what many people in much harsher situations than me are doing too - feeding the fire of the revolution. Finding a place for who we are. This process of finding a space, and carving it out is not an easy one.

I can sum it up for you in one sentence if you like. It is something that is age old and obvious -
A sense of belonging is hard to find when roots have been trampled, widespread and lost. 

You might be curious as to my roots after I have chosen to go by the title "Indo-African Queen". Is this person Indian? Are they African? Are they a mix between the two?

I will say that in this moment this does not matter (it obviously does matter), for I myself am not sure of the answer to this question. There are issues of biology and heritage and there are factors of culture, life and exposure. This is a question that I am still answering through my very existence.

The space I have created to explore the issues surrounding this quest is complex, multi-layered and messy. It is a space that has required minimal courage up to now, but will require increasingly more courage as I choose to write, share and expose more of my living experience. More of my perception of reality as a (black) marginalised member of a male dominant society. More of the systematic destruction of the storyline that tells me what I have to say does not count.  This is a space that will require tears, laughter, vulnerability, strength and humility. All of which I am sure I possess in some limited measure, but that I hope will grow as I explore the issues I face as I try to make sense of the fuckery that is existence in this context of vast and inhumane inequality.

This blog is for women faraway coming to terms with an identity that is shaped by the choices of our forefathers and foremothers, that we had no say in adopting.

My place is as an Indo-Afrikan Queen whose daily struggle is existing under the burdens of oppression, racism and patriarchy trying tirelessly to make it through each day.

What's yours?