Tag: Love

That Feeling Place

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Sunday evening 10/23

My first reading of Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” left me feeling totally confused and inadequate, and it took some years for me to realize those feelings had more to do with the environment in which I read the essay and less about some lack of insight or deficiency on my part. During the first semester of my sophomore year, I took an introductory Women’s and Gender Studies course to see how I felt about declaring it as my minor. The main text we studied throughout the semester was something by Maria Shriver about the wage gap (framed in the usual white feminist ways that flattened all women’s concerns into something we can “lean in” our way out of), and Lorde was one of three texts by or about Black women. The other two were “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens” (the essay, not the book) by Alice Walker and an extract from the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

That same semester, I was trying to make up for  my homesick first year by overloading on activities, saying yes to almost any and all friends and whatever they wanted to get up to, and taking classes towards the psychology double major I would eventually drop when I realized the humanities did not need a science to legitimize their study. So, it’s possible my encounter with Lorde was more like taking sandpaper to bare hands washed with lemon and vinegar and less like loving because I didn’t give myself enough time to do the readings and write the response paragraphs as thoroughly as was required of me. But I also think there was something more visceral about the way I experienced that essay in that classroom, something that made me feel confused and outside of my self for completely missing the point of a piece of writing that was supposed to be “for” or “about” me. I’m telling you I had to write a response to that essay and I could not assemble a single coherent thought, but neither Audre Lorde’s vocabulary nor the structure of her argument were to blame. 

When I read Sister Outsider in grad school on my own a few years later, it was like someone had reminded me of a name I used to be called at home where I was safe, and I understood it well enough to teach from it towards the end of my time as a grad student. I first assumed the light that clicked on had to do with the passing of time and presumed maturity I had acquired, partially through the trauma of certain experiences that compelled me to harden and sharpen in ways that protected me and also…maybe I didn’t say no, maybe that didn’t happen.

Turning towards my self to try and find some of the blame for my lack of understanding within is my default posture. Only a few years had passed, and I don’t think I believe that I had to experience certain kinds of gendered violence firsthand in order to understand written works about it. I think part of the problem was located in that classroom where the only other ways Black women appeared were in graphic, lyricized descriptions by Eve Ensler of her putting her hands inside the wounds and fistulae of Congolese women who had been raped. I’m still so horrified by this detail that part of me hopes it is only a half-memory, though the detail of the horror and the depth of the disgust it still elicits tell me I didn’t dream this up.

I also have vague memories of an exercise where the professor wrote and underlined the words “black” and “white” on the board and asked us to add words we associated underneath each, and a white guy said he didn’t understand why “beautiful” would be under black because he would never feel compelled to add such an adjective for “white.” Less vague is my recollection of the time a Black man—a student minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies— in class said breastfeeding in public was inappropriate because “what if I just took my dick out and pissed in the middle of the street?” The more I write, the more comfortable I am saying the problem was the class and not me and my being an over-extended, less than diligent student at the time.

I’m thinking about “Uses of the Erotic” again because the author Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote a really insightful thread in response to a tweet that was a only a little tongue-in-cheek about the dearth of the erotic in media, “Why is nothing EROTIC anymore. Whatever happened to the slow uncovering of a shoulder? A knowing glance shared between lovers? A gentle kiss on the corner of the mouth? What the fuck guys?”[1] Greenidge wrote, “eroticim requires a level of emotional vulnerability, directness and commitment to pleasure that is anathema to most media being produced today and honestly, most audiences consuming it.”[2] She adds that our current algorithm-driven media landscape and mass/hyper-consumption make it so that it is almost impossible to tune into the “eroticism of the individual imagination/life,” [a lot of people’s versions of “romanticize your life” à la Tik Tok looks oddly similar, with the same beige couches and beige lattes[3], but I also think this romanticization is more about the simplified, easily recognizable gesture than it is about deep, individual desire] when our glowing screens are encouraging us to consume our way to a persona that will eventually have to shift when the aesthetic at hand is no longer on trend.

And then there is everyday surveillance that is any given somebody with a camera phone who could record your public moment of euphoria or crisis, “The generation that won’t dance in public anymore for the very real fear some random person will record it and upload it to social media for ridicule is fighting an uphill battle to get comfortable enough for full on eroticism.”[4] I think there’s also something to be said for following along as people live out milestones you think you might like to have for your self. I’m not suggesting that social media invented wedding, promotion, or “just bought a house” announcements (have you heard of testimonies in church or the newspaper’s weddings section?), but church bulletins and special print columns are discreet and confined to the moment right after you leave the pew or close the newspaper, which might be less jarring, less humbling, less like an ambush, than seeing an ex or a former co-worker you didn’t particularly get along with having the destination wedding you never thought you wanted until this very exact moment, one that finds you alone on the couch on a weekend or at work on a shift that threatens to never end with no such joyful prospects on the horizon.

The thread ended with the following quote from Audre Lorde:

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self respect we can require no less of ourselves…”[5]

…a very timely reminder that all these months I have been searching for the words to try and explain the connection between my writing practice, pleasure, and a deep sense of self-fulfillment and satisfaction, I was looking for a Psychology Today post or an article with “nih.gov” in the URL when Audre Lorde had already given us the words.

I’ve been grasping at thoughts like dragging my hands through something spilled and scattered, trying to explain how well [I think] the novel revisions are going (only when people ask, for fear of becoming the insufferable artist friend, and also because I don’t expect people to be interested in something so narrow and so personal to me), where writing I do for other people and for work comes from a place of knowing that feels hollow. I wouldn’t even compare it to writing lists of groceries or tasks to complete, because even those have elements of ritual that can be sacred, because I am precious enough with my self to write down things like “altar flowers” and “loose leaf tea” and “plant care” and “text back” so that I not only remember these tasks, but can also celebrate their completion.

It doesn’t feel like schoolwork because I have always loved school from kindergarten through my graduate program, and there was nothing empty or soulless about the frustration I would feel trying to decipher even the subjects I didn’t enjoy [Ask me about the 2009 IGCSE Chemistry exam. I still haven’t recovered]. Writing on the behalf of another person or an organization feels sort of like writing by numbers, like internalizing rhetoric and turns of phrase that are not my own in order to produce something appropriate and slightly bland, supplanting my memory with that of the institution, like mimicry, without the bend of the accented voice or Ghanaian English discursive twists, like I’m moving my mouth and a language I only learned how to speak yesterday is coming out, in a voice much higher-pitched and slower talking than my own.

In “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” which also appears in the Sister Outsider anthology, Audre Lorde writes, “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free…[The same white fathers who told me to look to Psychology Today or the NIH for answers I already knew?] For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men.”

The tension is not between the unfeeling, knowing place I work from as the realm of what is presumed logic or rationality versus my creative practice belonging to emotion and sentimentality, nor is it solely about my creative practice bending and taking a subordinate position to what I do to keep the lights on. If anything, my creativity and capacity to love and be loved take precedence in all ways except for time or the lack thereof, and even then, it is only my physical self spending the majority of her time between buses, office cubes, conference rooms, and back again. Anything I write for my self, even on days like this one where the words are coming out like pulling teeth from tough gums, is coming from a place so far within and so complicated that I don’t know if there will ever be words to explain what it means to write from a seeing-thinking-knowing-feeling place, but thankfully I don’t have to, because in a letter to Black women published in Essence Magazine in 1985, Toni Morrison said: “You had this canny ability to shape an untenable reality, mold it, sing it, reduce it to its manageable transforming essence, which is a knowing so deep it’s like a secret.”[6] 

This secret place is the psycho-spiritual manifestation of Gloria Naylor’s “other place”[7] where all that is “dark, ancient, and deep” and “unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling”[8] are guarded from the grasping hands and roving eyes of the uninitiated. When Yejide’s distant mother, Petronella, dies in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel When We Were Birds, the two of them sit in the garden of Yejide’s mind sharing a cigarette and staring into the unending green, and Petronella tries to show Yejide how to step into their family’s ancestral duty to be custodians of the restless dead, both ancient and new, trying to call her attention to this seeing-thinking-knowing-feeling place by pressing hard on her pelvis until she feels:

“And then Yejide see it, or rather feel—how to see when is not your eyes working? When something in you seeing in a way you never see before?—sharp, shallow needle blues, placenta edges of pink and red and gold, flare then flicker and fade, like a bulb in a dark room.”

Even in this moment, with her mother talking to her from the afterlife while they both sit suspended between Petronella’s deathbed, Yejide’s subconscious, and the afterlife, Yejide still tries to see with her eyes and know with her mind as if these are separate experiences:

“Yejide squint past the garden and the mountains, past the figures in the room, try to pull back the colours to her—the blues, the pinks, the dark purples.

“Not with your eyes, child,” Petronella snap. “Some things spirit, and some things flesh. She press low on Yejide belly again, rougher, hurting her now.

“Here. Look with here.”

This “other place” might be inaccessible to Leonie, another complicated, difficult-to-love mother, in the novel Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, because even though she is able to see her deceased brother, she can neither sing to nor hear the natural world the way her children and her mother can, maybe because her grief and her addiction have built a dam blocking the way to her other place that grows more impenetrable the harder she tries to forget. Her inability to access what Lorde describes as “self-connection, as the knowledge of oneself as “capable of feeling,” as the demand that knowledge places on the self to live as though know you know “such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife” sends her deeper into despair and into longing for that connection anywhere else she can find it outside her self, in bad drug trips and in her boyfriend and the father of her children, Michael. I can no longer find the link to the recording, but I remember an interview where Jesmyn Ward described Leonie as “a walking wound” of a person, but I’d like to think that somewhere beyond the end of that story, she is closer to wholeness, because she is able to find her way back to the inner resources she has inherited from Mam’s ancestral veneration and Vodou practice, and also that she is living in a material reality where she is not vilified and shunned for being unwell and unable to care for her children the way they need or at all, but rather able to access the care she needs to be well.

Because I am an artist with an art form[9] and so [hopefully] not a danger to my self or to anyone else—I can pour all my fury and my hurt and my lost and my lonely and my glimmer[10] onto these pages, though I wonder if the pages are enough[11], and I’m trying to keep the way open between my present and my other place and my “ungloved hand” turned towards all my creative impulses and desires, in the face of daily life that offers only two options: endless work (“stripped of its erotic value, its erotic power, and life appeal and fulfillment”) and self-denial in exchange for a place to lay one’s head, or abjection and death, and the even worse third option which is most common, endless work, self-denial, and abjection and death anyway, because the yield you were promised for all your labor was not enough to make the living you were promised.

Audre Lorde defines the erotic as follows:

“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives…In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

My evocation of Audre Lorde here is not to simply suggest that spending hours with my creative work feels sensual or romantic, though it does to a large extent. This is more an acknowledgment that new perfume; playlists full of songs about longing and lust and love; endless re-watches of Moonlight, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, In the Mood for Love, and specific episodes of Queen Sugar; listening to the When We Were Birds audiobook on an endless loop for the story’s beauty as much as for the Trini accents; and digital moodboards full of lush and lovely imagery are more a means to an end, what I listen to and look at on the way to my my other place, or, more actively, what carries or drives me there, meaning that even when I am completing the “necessary” paid work that sometimes makes my soul crouch low, I know that nothing is more powerful than the creative force of that seeing-thinking-knowing-feeling place, slices of the black femme sublime laying in luxuriant wait for Monday evening or Wednesday at lunch or Saturday morning when I can visit the garden of my mind and tend to all that is green and alive there, pruning all that is not, singing songs I have tried and failed to render in plain words, and cultivating secret knowings I may never tell.

Note added 10/25: I forgot to mention that poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd has a book coming out this winter titled Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought, and just like Wicked Flesh by Jessica Marie Johnson, I’m breathlessly waiting, because I can tell that it will be what I need personally and for my creative and writing practice. A snippet from the blurb: “…feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work.” December can’t come soon enough.

[1] I wanted to cite this tweet properly but can no longer find the person’s account.

[2] Greenidge, Kaitlyn. [@surlybassey]. Twitter, 10 October 2022, https://twitter.com/surlybassey/status/1579646092874240000

[3] Have you seen the 2001 live-action film adaptation of Josie and the Pussycats?

[4] See Kaitlyn Greenidge’s thread.

[5] Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” pp. 43. Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press, 2012.

[6] Morrison, Toni. “A knowing so deep.” Essence 230 (1985)

[7] This is a reference to Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day (1988). The other place is the site of Mama Day’s childhood home where she goes to reclaim memory or actual items she needs for her ritual and care work.

[8] Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” pp. 25. Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press, 2012.

[9]Morrison, Toni. Sula. Grafton Books, 1982. This is about to be the longest footnote, because it was only when I went to look up the passage I’m referencing here that I realized that Toni Morrison’s description of Sula’s preoccupation with “her own mood and whim” sounds a lot like Audre Lorde’s erotic, except that maybe she didn’t have anywhere to channel this force that was more fruitful than her relationships with men could ever be. The passage is long but worth quoting in full:

“They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand towards it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.

In her way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

[10] The first time I heard that the opposite of a trigger was a glimmer was on my favorite podcast, QueerWoc. Listen to Episode 83: Glimmers, Caramelows & Collins.

[11]I’m often lonely for meaningful human connection, because besides in-person work, I’m still trying to avoid falling ill with COVID as much as I can, and because pre-2020 [and now when it’s possible to stay outdoors] I’m inclined to choose and enjoy my own company at bars, concerts, cafés until I look up and realize that it’s been weeks and I’d like to share the experience with someone else, especially someone who actually sees more of my humanity than they see the idea of me or the way I can make them feel. Do I sound like an egomaniac lying to themselves and other people by claiming to be an “empath?” I promise I’m not. This would probably make more sense in the context of a conversation I was just having with one of my uncles about a returning ghost who said to me that beyond being aware how upsetting his unceremonious disappearance would be to me, he was devastated at the possibility of “never getting to hear Zoë’s voice again.” Something about that third person…can you tell Casper was also just full of it? I’m not as profoundly lonely as I felt years ago, ironically when I was in grad school and living with roommates, but the line between alone and lonely sometimes seems nonexistent in these eternal pandemic times.

Personal Use

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Here is my latest paradox: I work full time and recently went from a fully remote job to one on a hybrid schedule, leaving only narrow slivers of time for long, laugh-full phone calls; moving my body, long, tear-full phone calls; endless voice memos; my writing; and shame spirals about how the amount of effort one puts into work never seems to quite align with material gain or stability. In this money-mad, murderous matrix[1], doctor’s visits cost, lunch costs, and rent costs 27.5 times more than both combined, and somehow the ends remain the twain never to meet, no matter how many hours one puts in to work. [Did the bootstrap theorists lie? The answer is yes.] Because I am a full-time cubicle-sitter and a less than part-time artist, I feel less deserving of room to be still, to be left alone with my bibliographies and research rabbit holes and the nagging, joyful, enticing, desperate voices of the characters I brought forth into being. Classic upside-down thinking that only makes sense in my anxious brain: I have limited time to do my work because capitalism calls, and somehow that means I don’t deserve the solitude necessary to immerse my self in the kind of work that feels more like loving, that keeps me alive, because I’m not a “real” artist. This is particularly absurd and unnecessarily harsh on my self in this current reality where I’m getting reacquainted with some approximation of pre-pandemic work life at a new job and where I’m experiencing all kinds of unpleasant side effects—nausea, dizziness, itching like being bitten by insects moving too fast for you to catch, something that isn’t dizziness but feels like you’re falling for a split-second, fatigue, generally feeling out of sorts—from getting off the anti-depressant medications I’ve taken for the past four years, no matter how slowly I try to take the tapering process.

I am also always reminding my self that I am a person first before I make art, and I have convinced my self that being a person means being readily and consistently available to touch, commiserate, cry with, calm down, and cheer up the people dearest to my self. One of my biggest nightmares is being the sort of person who is so single-minded and takes their art so seriously that they are unreliable or absent, with no room to turn with love to other human beings who exist beyond the blinking cursor and the lined page. Even bigger than that frightful thought is the possibility of not being useful or not being needed or not being light in spirit and presence whenever the situation demands. Eight years and other relationships have passed, but the echoes of “you are selfish and use your emotions as an excuse for behaving badly” are faint but not dead. It’s been four years, and any time I call someone with tears instead of a joke or a reassuring word, I still feel the slight sting of “things are great when you’re funny and we’re having fun, but when you’re down it feels like carrying a burden because no one else is there for you the way you need, so I have to be” or “when you check in it feels like you care more whether I’m upset with you than about how I’m doing.” I feel a little ashamed for remembering these and other painful words so clearly all these years later, because I should be “over it” by now, because sometimes I think my mum is disappointed that my upper lip isn’t a little stiffer.

When I wrote about falling silent [and here] in the summer following my master’s program graduation, it was in part because I heard “I prefer when you’re fun and funny,” resulting in the overwhelm of anxiety that my mental state was a tremendous void waiting to swallow anyone who accompanied me too close to the edge of my life, that I wasn’t hiding my tears as well as I thought I was, that I was taking up too much space just by being, and most importantly, that lots of my other friends felt the same exhaustion with me and just hadn’t said so aloud. The part of me that tries my hardest to be careful on the page with people whose words or actions have hurt me feels like it might be unfair to present these memories with no context, but honestly, the full stories from my perspective would probably make those people sound worse, which I’m not interested in doing. What would be the use? This is just a small part of my ongoing efforts to excise the harsh voices that have become part of my inner chorus.

There is also the issue of the posture I take towards my self, one of punishment and self-denial, because various friendships and relationships that twisted away from sweet and turned bitter and sharp made me feel like I needed to do penance for the fact that I was [just was, and was the way I was]. In my mind, I’m still atoning for the time I spoke green-tinged snark behind the back of a younger schoolmate who I’m pretty sure overheard my comment, or all the times I missed office hours and appointments because I could no longer get out of bed, or some others of my most shameful moments where I was not behaving like my best selves. According to some of my closest friends, the things that keep me up at night are so tame, I might need to consider living even a fraction as wildly as my aesthetics and poems about knives suggest I do.

This punitive posture looks like not being able to fully enjoy New Orleans or New Year’s at a hotel in Accra with my mum because of some unspoken vow of austerity that means blaming my self for any financial precarity because the cost of that ring or roll-on perfume oil could have paid for about 1/5 of a grocery trip, or probably even less, the way these prices are looking. [Considering my undergrad and my current place of employment, can I blame Saint Ignatius for this? The answer is no, because since when did I listen to saints, but I thought this was kind of funny.] It also means taking being an ethical and responsible person and artist to the furthest extent, because I should not be able to sleep soundly or lay on a beach when so many other human beings must starve and die to make my leisure possible.

Any small niceties I allow myself cannot be fully indulged or enjoyed without lengthy considerations about why I’m not deserving or whether this momentary pleasure is worth all the horrific consequences rippling far beyond my little life. Is it a sign of hubris or self-centeredness to obsess over the fact that the cost of the palm oil in my beauty products are the lives of women laboring on plantations in Indonesia every time I line my eyes? Am I casting the Ivorian cocoa farmers and their children who have never tasted the chocolate that is the product of their work as unwilling background characters in my circular, neurotic thought processes? Without having read too much about why people take on vows like silence and austerity, my first inclination is to ask what the use is of denying one’s self pleasure if that denial cannot necessarily guarantee the alleviation of other people’s suffering? What is the use of symbolic solidarity? I’m not talking about strategic boycotts called for by the people or groups most harmed by the production of a good, like BDS for example. I’m talking about making a monastery out of a one-bedroom apartment you can sometimes afford on a good day…And again, it wouldn’t be just symbolic if enough of us committed to consuming and accumulating less so that someone else might breathe a little bit easier, would it?

What I’m trying to get at is that I lose sleep over the high price that capitalism exacts for small luxuries we don’t actually need but are told we cannot live without, and there should be enough humanity in the world so that we should all be losing sleep, and we should all come to a complete halt any time there is a person in tears asking for money outside a store in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood or any time a child dies mining for the metal we use for our soon-to-be obsolete gadgets. Every time the police gun down a Black child at home or at the playground or in their front yard or in the earliest bloom of their life, the sky should not be so blue and there should not be so many people strolling with dogs and grocery bags down a street, and there should not be money changing hands and work meetings to attend.[2] [But such humanity would demand a completely new way of organizing the world that would make it possible for us to stay home from places of commerce—without losing livelihoods—and pleasure to keep each other safe, to hold each other, and to mourn millions of lives lost to a pandemic.] So. This oath that I did not realize I took means that to me, missing out on the bar or the beach or the spa is a miniscule price to pay for someone else’s life, and that I do not “deserve” rest more than the person who would serve me my cocktail avec too much water, syrup, and tiny toothpick umbrella.

If nothing else is clear, I can plainly say that years of being underpaid for work I love and that felt important when I was doing it and the story I have told my self about the use and utility of my humor and touch and calm mean that I am terrified of withdrawing those things even when I am depleted or even when I want to give more than thin slices of attention to my writing, the thing I am so thoroughly in love with and need most in this world. I have a little over three months to submit my second round of novel revisions, and so far it feels like it’s going well, it feels lush and like ritual (or at least the idealized, flowery, and fragrant way I imagine ritual to be—sometimes, I wonder if my ancestors are satisfied with fruit and cups of tea), like a trance-like state where I have to loosen up and surrender enough to let the words arrange themselves how they must. And it also feels like shame, because that severe part of my self—at total odds with the part of my self constantly seeking beauty—doesn’t think I should be indulging my self so much by enjoying the process of making my art.

I’m not just writing about writing and how much I wish I could do it, nor is this post about refusing the urge to put one’s self on display in ways that prioritize the luster over the pain. I don’t feel that way about social media, because alongside the tattoo thirst traps and the group selfies are as much vulnerability as I’m able to share about the times I wanted to walk over the edge and keep falling. It’s more about releasing the need to avoid or disperse other people’s disappointment if I am slow to answer the phone or if I say I can’t meet at whichever place at whichever time because I am with my work or because funds are tight until my next payday, and about letting go of the fear that the people I love will no longer have any use for me if I am a little less present than usual.

I’m inviting you to bear witness to me taking my self seriously enough to take Michaela Coel’s advice to writers to be unafraid “to disappear and see what comes [to me] in the silence.” I need witnesses who will remind me that my sole purpose is not to be of use in all the different and at times conflicting ways that other people may need, that I don’t need to punish my self so stringently to be a kind, ethical person, that trying to do work that might be of use to a reader somewhere also looks like sitting still with my words, even if it feels like love and not like that soul-bowing-down feeling that most work brings. I am always available to those I love, but/and I know that I am loved even when I am not. And, I must be wholly available to my self first before all else.  

This feels like it needs a sign off, though it is not an ending, just giving in wholeheartedly with all the fear and shame and relish and uncertainty— 

[1] This alliteration feels extra and a little corny considering what I’m trying to describe and considering what “literary” writers are supposed to do, but I kept it in for the 14-year-old me who learnt about the “punchy 3” and alliteration in English class and became obsessed with spotting and coming up with examples of both. I think she would be really proud of grown us.

[2] This is about more than empty, useless guilt and DEI committees and 30 seconds of silence preceding business as usual. We should be so maddened by exhaustion and grief that we tear the world to pieces in hopes of pulling something better out of the wreckage. And many people already are. But also, what am I doing materially towards this/these end[s] beyond this page? I don’t know that I can accept that my job is to say the words that steal your sleep at night in the hopes that you “act,” the implication that making art is itself not a worthy way to “act,” more overly harsh, upside-down thinking?

Breaking Open

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A few things about how turning 30 feels (I can’t say “being” since I’ve only been here two weeks):

It feels like gold paper crowns and glow in the dark beads strung together by my six-year-old hands, eight spheres, then a star, eight spheres, then a star;

a neat tear straight down from frilly collar to lacy hem to flowery sock because dresses that puff out like iced cupcakes are ideal for bouncy castle jumping down and tumbling up;

uncles who carry you on their shoulders until you don’t fear falling, and aunties who paint your toes purple with red dots on one foot and red with purple dots on the other and aunties who sew you clothes covered in a pattern of your favorite fruit to match the slippers they bought you;

a full set that stays looking neon and new three weeks after your salon visit, and continuing to practice the patience that warns against ripping through week-old braids with the square tips of said set, reminding you instead to take oil and water from a spray bottle and a tail comb to the ends of your hair and be gentle, precious even, even if it means being a little or a lot late;

trying to bite back the self-loathing and feelings of defeat that froth to the surface of your consciousness every time a letter comes in the mail labeled IRS or due soon, whether or not you can afford to pay; 

waking up to more and more of your mother’s face in the bathroom vanity every day;

realizing that being generous with your spirit and your time does not or should not necessitate self-betrayal, and that not everyone who cannot care the way you crave wants to rend you to pieces (except for when they do);

when will you stop stepping on your self, how much harder do you think you can possibly work your way out of a trap with a jaw full of teeth jagged and lethal and fanged like the worst things you have ever said about your self and how much you’re worth;

 was there ever a little girl as loved and as loving as you.

It feels like trying to eat the guilt of all the times you have and will hurt or offend other people and finding peace in knowing that nothing said about you in malice or misunderstanding (including the worst things you have ever thought or said about myself) rewrites who you believe and know your self to be;

meeting your self with gentleness so you can remind your self: put that thing down that you’re hitting your self about the head with;

encountering the self in multi-dimensions where all the most afraid and most exuberant and most compassionate selves you are and have been have each gathered to place a candle on the cake baked in all of your honor;

wanting and yearning and craving like you truly believe that desire is never a mistake;

singing the praises of the sharp-edged, brittle parts of the self that have dimpled and rounded, turned full and soft beneath hands, the parts that have grown as you’ve grown, without excuse or justification (and with patience and the most tender of touch even when shame threatens to propel you forward to excuses) about how medication working alongside all the people that see and love you and the yoga mat and 8 mile walks across town and city lines and two-week notices brought you back to the side of the horizon where you are alive, so that now you live in the part of the story where you keep living, where you are still still, and where you remember what foods you like to eat and eat them until you feel full because you know the roof will not collapse if the cupboard runs empty and you have to go back to the store;

giving thanks to any of the ancestors who might still be listening after your thousandth wail that you are no longer in a place where the atmosphere shifts whiplash-fast and your fun and funny are preferable to your needy and confused and where the bathroom never feels clean no matter how much baking soda and vinegar you throw at it;

every song in a major key and some minor ones too if they remind you of the giggling infatuation of the feeling right before;

wondering when you will finally be able to turn down the volume on the voices much more cruel than you would ever be to another person, those voices asking when will you stop with the self-aggrandizing fluff like what you have just written on this page, when you will stop seeing rigor as contempt for self and fear of judgment for your lack of seriousness in times such as these, and when you will refuse the impulse to see any writing with your self at its heart as such unless you are hiding in “fiction.”

If I’m honest, the euphoria of this milestone is less about the roundness of the zero in 30 and more about the fact that I come from people who cut cake with your name on it whether or not you have been home in a year or five and pop champagne for odd number birthdays and school admissions not yet confirmed, who have “a drop” of wine just because it is Sunday and the sky is or is not grey. And each time it turns seven minutes past midnight on the 24th day of the 7th month, that is a reminder that my mother brought me into being for my heart to be at peace—Dzifa—and that I have chosen to stay.

I am my self, in bold.

Photo of a dark-skinned black woman holding a set of pink balloons above her head and open-mouth laughing, with gold balloons and streamers behind her.
Photo taken on 7/23, the day before my birthday, by my dear Mel

My initial intent was to introduce the next movement in this post with the usual self-diminishing irony, pointing out how cliché and almost too good to be true it is that this particular development coincides with this birthday of all birthdays. Then, I gave my self an inch more of breathing room, some grace, some space in the waistline for wiggling and adjustments if necessary. Besides, it would only be too obvious if one believed that this news is the pinnacle of success rather than one indication out of many that the life of my own design is indeed possible and continues to take shape. Why am I stalling?

My first novel, Blue Futures, Break Open is being published by West Virginia University Press. I have been submitting my work to agents and publishing houses since around the fall of 2020. At the time, I knew my work wasn’t quite ready to be considered for publication, so that the pitch or query looked more promising than the actual mess of a book that was the finished draft, but I desperately needed some good news or some reassurance that all that work had not been a waste. I got a lot of no replies and a lot of really thoughtful rejections, including some agents who gave me the chance to revise before ultimately passing on my work, and I was discouraged because I had started to see my writing as the easiest way out of the discomfort and frustration that characterized my day job. Or, more realistically, I knew that one published book does not a fortune make, but my work existing in the world could reveal more possibilities beyond that job, or at least would make it easier to bear if I knew the thing I loved the most was actually moving from aspiration to material reality. As trite or, to use my therapist’s favorite word, “Pollyannaish,” as it may sound, it was only when I paused submissions for some months, sought out more feedback from loved ones patient enough to also be readers, and did countless more revisions that I started getting more positive feedback and ultimately a contract offer.

Without the characters and the place where the book is set waiting for me every evening after work, I feel lost in the world. I won’t flail for long, because I still have much more to add and to revise between now and the end of this year. And anyway, it is not that the characters ever left me, they are still there with their lives unfolding before them, and I am still compulsively saving images and articles and book titles and videos for “research” every day.

There is something else I need to write (or process internally first) about how much my writing process parallels desire, so much so that the “end” of this book and the long inhale before what I hope will be the next one feel like I broke up with someone who is patiently waiting for me to come to my senses and call them back. Surrendering to dead-end crushes on virtual strangers sent my hands flying across the keyboard, as did listening to music heavy with bass and longing and playing the web series “First” and episodes of the delightfully naughty Thirst Aid Kit podcast in the background while I work. I think surrender is what makes the process feel like desire, loosening a tightly wound self enough for all the words to flood in.

I also considered the possibility that watching and re-watching Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty so many times throughout the years I worked on my novel had created a pathway in my mind that forced an association between desire and artistic pursuit. But then, I felt this link so viscerally, and it seemed so intuitive that I realized there was no way I was the only one experiencing this creative infatuation and even tried to look up some psychological or spiritual knowledge to help me make more sense of the feeling. Saying that this practice, this craft, this obsession is my first love may sound like a throwaway shorthand, because I haven’t yet found the words to describe adequately how terrifying and exhilarating it is to realize that there is something I love so wholly and in all ways that any romantic feeling or yearning I might feel for another person would only be a usurpation. Too dramatic? Too extreme? Or maybe, it feels easier and safer, the prospect for pain lower, if I sublimate all this want into the cursor’s blinking rather than someone who might break me in the process of breaking themselves. Does this mean that any love poem I’ve ever written is less about the subject themselves than it is about my love affair with the actual words? If so, sorry to every egomaniac who ever puffed up their chest at the prospect of being my muse. You were always just a bystander or a spectator, a side fling, at best.

I’m proud of my self for flinging this body and soul towards and around the sun 30 times and living to tell the tale, and for committing tens of thousands of words to the page over years of overwork and mental and physical shattering from school and day jobs that paradoxically were meant to help me make something out of life. I don’t wear the misery with pride, and I can only imagine how much ease would be at my fingertips had those jobs and other challenges not threatened to squeeze my creative world out of the way into non-existence. But I’m here, and so is this first offering of what I hope will be many books to come. I hope you will find some use in it.

For Miss Freda, and for all my Lilians

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A lot of my recent writing has been an attempt to gain understanding of Ewe and Haitian Vodou, without being disrespectful or misrepresenting these already maligned and misunderstood religions. I’m Ewe, but have not been initiated into nor do I practice Vodou. I didn’t grow up listening to our creation myths, or folktales about why certain animals behave a certain way, and so on. One of my most persistent fears is to turn these beautifully fearsome spirits and gods into glossy and easily consumed half-versions of themselves, or to co-opt imagery with little care for its origin or significance. I haven’t yet been able to get over the discomfort of trying to tap into a heritage that I know mostly in name and phrases mixed with English only. I’m also careful not to idealize pre-colonial ways of being and of understanding the world as some sort of utopia as yet unsullied or destroyed by European colonialism.

I feel as though I’m always seeking approval or permission to be curious about these things, even though they are the very things that have made me and my imagination possible. So, I’ve been reading and researching as much as I can about Anlo-Ewe spirituality, and about life before and during European conquest in my part of what is now Ghana. I’ve been asking my relatives a lot of questions, and trying to be as careful a student as I can be. I’ve been writing characters and settings, as well as praise songs and prayers that seem authentic to these spiritualities, while making a conscious effort to avoid copying elements wholesale into my work. I’m trying to write a world that appears as though it would fit into the universe my forebears imagined and created for themselves.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about love, partly because of Erzulie Freda– lwa of love, luxury, and sensuality– who is always trying to take up more space in my work than I have given her. The rhetoric around love being a superior response to rage, and a cure-all for oppressive structures has also been on my mind a lot, mostly because it frustrates me so much. Most of the “well-meaning” people who try to bludgeon the (rightfully) enraged with this sort of rhetoric do not usually mean love in any meaningful or transformative way. They simply mean “Lie down and die quietly; your protests are a nuisance and make me uncomfortable.”

In an attempt to keep writing in spite of my current anxieties about the general state of the world/career/debt/life/relationships, I’ve been picking quotes or passages as prompts for my posts, and it’s been a pretty productive exercise. Here is a praise song/prose poem in response to two quotes, one from Sula, and the other from Terence Nance’s 2012 film An Oversimplification of her Beauty.

***

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My beloved and beautiful Grandma Lilian. I’m named after her– I have two middle names– but I don’t think the name suits me that well. I don’t have the requisite kind eyes and pleasant disposition, I feel.

“Love: an art form slightly removed from its intended context.”

-from an Oversimplification of Her Beauty

“Like an artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”

-from Sula

And so Erzulie Freda’s lastborn sings:

Love has chosen my own head as a seat for her crown.

I am gilded fury hardened in the heat of clenched fists, and I am sweet joy whispered in your ear on the night side of dawn. I come from beyond the Universe’s horizon, sweeping across the sea in a hot wind, troubling the water, and the sand, and the flimsy cloth in your windows, and the tufts of hair and dust in the corners of your room.

Love has lent me her face and the better one of her eyes that shines mischief and liquid silver when I laugh.

I am everywhere you look and, and especially where you hide. I live on your heaving shoulders after a healthy cry, and in the curves of your ears where the salt from your tears turned crystal.

Love has blessed my hands with enough power.

I am firm fingers scrubbing stubborn sweat and grit from your scalp each evening, and I am lifting your work-weary arms to tie your sleeping scarf­ –careful like– so my nails won’t catch on the threads that have fallen loose from its weave.

careful

I am of Erzulie Freda’s dangerous charm.

I am of colossal proportions.

I am everything.

Killjoy

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IMG_5271“Youthfulness

Peace of mind

Feeling free:

Knowing you are a rare article

Being

Loved.”

(Our Sister Killjoy, Ama Ata Aidoo)

***

Sister, you’ve been dancing across your world with some pieces of my self rattling in your pocket

–half pair earrings turning more green over the gold

cracked glass buttons cutting up all the light

dry flowers wasting into dust–

I really need me back

Sister

You play your hands over my shoulders and down my arms when I lean closer to laugh along with you, sister

I think it’s best I keep me to myself

At the other end of arm’s length is where you must put you if we are to remain some sort of sane

I reach for you still, sister

Sister

Killjoy

First, the Fire

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“Eva looked into Hannah’s eyes. “Is? My baby? Burning?” “

“…Eva said yes, but inside she disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.”

-from Sula by Toni Morrison

***

So, I’m writing.

I’ve been giving myself writing exercises in an attempt to free myself for this frustrating halt that I’ve been feeling each time I’ve tried to resume working on my thesis project recently. The way I see it, if I keep writing around and around, I will eventually write towards my actual work, as long as I’m always writing pieces that exist in the same universe as the one that I’ve created for my novel. With that in mind, I’ve invented a series of plagues that are sort of “biblical” in the sense that Christianity and a lot of its symbols and imagery have been fused or absorbed into Ewe and Haitian vodou (This is related to the research I’ve done for most of my time in my MFA program, and I wrote about it briefly here).

I didn’t grow up with the ritual of burning fallen hair after braiding or combing, but I’ve grown fixated on that image after encountering it repeatedly in Black women’s writing across the diaspora. Someone is always burning shed hair immediately before some sort of tragedy, or before the next “strange thing,” as Toni Morrison puts it in Sula.

I re-read Sula a few weeks ago, and it was not the more spectacular instances of burning that stayed with me, not Eva setting fire to Plum in his bed, or even Hannah going up in flames in the yard and Eva leaping out of the window to try and save her.

Rather, it was the smaller, the seemingly more ordinary; Nel’s grandmother using a burnt out match to darken her eyebrows, or Sula’s return, marked by birds, and by Eva burning her shed hair with her back to the same window she once leapt out of. In Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, we are to believe that it is Cocoa’s fallen hairs, those that didn’t get burnt, those that end up in the jealous Ruby’s pocket, that lead to her painful deterioration. (There’s something I think Sula and Mama Day are saying to each other, and I wrote about that here.)

My first plague is fire.

***

There is oil hissing and spitting inside. It’s possible that it is frying on too high heat until whatever you had wanted to eat is shriveled and burnt, stuck to the pan’s deep rusty belly, forevermore resistant to any scrub. It could be that the stove’s heat is too great, or, that the whole house is burning, and I am going with it.

Don’t you want to see what you can salvage

 There is something frying inside, but you are still and always slim legs, not crossed, but rather arranged one next to the other, grey dusting where your ankles meet from too many dry afternoon hours exposed to the air. Something is on fire, and your skirt is bunched up in messy fistfuls high on your thighs. Your feet are in the dust next to mine on the lower step and something is on fire. Yet, you just sit.

You have gathered the fallen hair from my head into a feathery ball and set it alight, three clicks of a lighter and a curse. There is something burning inside–I am sure– and yet, you sit, with my shed strands flaming first between your pointer and your thumb, and now in the palm of your hand.

Maybe the whole house is burning, or maybe it is just my scalp is scorching sweet mercy. I told you not to make the parts so small this time,

I told you I am something tender–

(Image by Hannah Firmin, from the cover art of the Grafton Books 1982 edition of Sula)

 

My Secondhand Lonely

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I’m so grateful that my professor in the fall non fiction workshop, Jerald Walker, recommended my essay to be published in the May issue of Slice Magazine. My bio is just casually on the same page as Edwidge Danticat. I had a few more thoughts, because unfortunately the essay is as true for me today as it was when I wrote it in October. I’m doing alright for the most part, even though it may not necessarily seem like it. I’m grateful to be alive, and to have had the chance to focus completely on my writing in a way that I may not have done so easily had I not gone the MFA route. I’m just trying my best to navigate this thing called my 20s, along with everything else happening in the world right now, while still finding room for a little joy and some rest.

***

My favorite kind of message to receive is from people who read this blog and tell me that my being open about my mental health, anger among other things resonates deeply with them, or that my words have expressed their own personal experiences in ways they hadn’t been able to do before. This has nothing to do with any potential massages to my ego, but is completely about the relief I feel that I am not as alone as I may think, and that this writing practice, this thing I love to do the most out of anything in this world, has been helpful in some small way for others. I had recently started to think that I got such a positive response on posts about all these raw emotions because people love to consume others’ pain, particularly if the writer or artist is a Black woman carrying many things on her back. This may be true to some extent, but mostly people genuinely appreciate seeing themselves reflected in art, and it brings me such joy to be a part of that process.

I still feel isolated, because “opening up” in writing and in person, and setting boundaries for what I can and can’t take from others doesn’t seem to have changed much of anything. I’ve tried to shift from cries for help buried in jokes and sarcasm to speaking plainly about my needs and my hurt, but somehow the resounding response seems to be “You’ll be fine. You always are.” Loneliness seems to be the best way to describe the resulting state of being after the “just checking on you” messages stutter to a stop, or the person in need of my care or advice has found their solution or someone else to lean on. As I’ve said before, I don’t resent at all being called on at any hour to put out a little fire, but it would be amazing to hear from people just for the sake of a pleasant chat, or “just thinking of you.”

There’s this phrase in Ewe my mum says regularly, whenever a friend or significant other begins to take one for granted. Loosely translated it means “loosen the rope” or “loosen the thread,” as in, begin to distance yourself. She’s always reminding me that life is too short to endure more heartbreak than is necessary, when one can just uproot oneself and leave in pursuit of contentment and more equal and nurturing relationships, platonic and otherwise.

I understand where that advice comes from, but I used to wonder, if I start pulling away the minute someone disappoints me, won’t that mean I’ll eventually have no one left? If we all take this approach, where would that leave us? Self-absorbed and unable to see past our own noses, and miserable and unloved all at the same time? I find myself wishing that people would just actually listen and be a little more gentle, so that we wouldn’t have to resort to coldness and withdrawal in the hopes of getting our needs considered more seriously. (It hurts even more when the “loosening of the tie” goes unnoticed, almost as if you’ve ceased to exist unless to offer some humor or a word of advice.)

Which brings me to the essay I had published in Slice Magazine in May, “My Secondhand Lonely,” The title comes from one of the most painful moments for me (among many) in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. My piece is about keeping up the kind of performance I’ve learnt from my mother, to always pretend to be well-adjusted and available for others, no matter the pain I’m going through. The timeline of the essay ends right before my first visit to a therapist and learning about PMDD. I also talk about recognizing this always-on-top-of-things performance in Molly from the HBO show Insecure. I wrote this essay before the point in the TV series where they turned Molly into a walking think-piece and began using her character to showcase what felt like every problematic worldview possible; homophobia, classism, respectability politics, you name it. There was just something about her strutting her flawless self around the office, paralleled by her crying alone in the bathroom at her office that felt so familiar.

Ultimately, the essay is about feeling ashamed for yearning for the company and care of others, because according to Sula the fearless, and the trope of the independent Black woman I see everywhere, I should be enough for myself. On some days, I do feel like enough, unstoppable and self-sufficient. Mostly, I’m still human and in need of connection with others, just like other human beings, but unsure of how else I can make this known without becoming irritating or repetitive (I fear I already am the latter.)  I don’t think it’s sustainable to live this way, to weep privately, like I did while writing this post this evening, to grin and joke in public, and to keep loving and caring with little reciprocation while deteriorating on the inside. At the moment though, I don’t know how else to be.

You can read a preview of the essay and get a copy of the magazine here.

[The full essay was republished on Longreads in December 2017. You can read it here.]

(Image: Cover of Slice Magazine Issue 20: Corporeal. Artwork by Jenny Morgan, courtesy of Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York. Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis.)

(The Final) Inventory

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For some reason, I keep coming back to this piece I wrote in 2015 called Inventory, and the short story I tried to make out of it (here and here). I’m still not interested in finishing it, nor am I any more inclined to start writing *that* immigrant student story that so many African literary critics and readers have declared self-indulgent, tired, and geared towards the “Western gaze.” These critiques of others work aren’t a deterrent for me at all, partly because I hate being told what to do, but mainly because I’m just far more excited by being able to set stories in Accra or in some other magical African diasporic elsewhere that only exists in my imagination (shout out to the thesis I should be working on!) I think i’ve returned to this old story again because I’m finally at a place where the real events that inspired the writing aren’t as upsetting to me as they once were (and I mean both the things I did and those that were done to me). I left out the most hurtful parts that were a little too real, and altered certain details to make the protagonist feel a little less like me. I can’t claim to know what “letting go” really looks like, except to say that for me it’s a continuous process that feels more final and successful on some days than others.  

***

assorted lingerie

I think the store assistant called them “periwinkle.” I couldn’t be sure, because she was evidently uninterested in my stuttering inquiries; the novelty of mocking nervous first-time shoppers had long evaporated and she blinked slow lids up and down as though she was minutes from falling asleep. “So, do you want these gift-wrapped, or not?”  I liked this particular pair of panties because their color was somewhere between purple and blue. The white lace trim reminded me of the heavy porcelain jewelry box a distant aunt had given me as a gift at a time when I was far too young and not pretentious enough to appreciate faux Victorian-era trinkets with November dust permanently stuck in its crevices. I already had a bra to match, and I stood in the crowded hall at Union Station grinning like a birthday girl because I felt as though I had a secret destined only for your discovery.

You were going to be visiting family in Maryland for the summer, a 30-minute drive from where I lived in DC, and I found it to be the perfect opportunity to make poor attempts at hiding the bitterness which I spat at you on a video call.

Ugh. I just– I hate to be selfish or to even bring this up at all, but I’m the one always coming up to see you though I know you can afford the trip and then some. You know I’m on work study, and this summer my campus job only gives me four days off, but my roommate is away, we can have the place to ourselves and I just–

I have to admit that I didn’t do a good job of concealing the manipulation I had fooled myself into calling I-just-want-to-spend-time-with you and It’s-only-fair. Emotional blackmail was only  if you looked closely and a little too long at the shadows behind words and the pauses between them.

“Hmmm. Ok you…I’ll see what I can do.”

Yesss alright! So here’s what I was thinking. There’s a Ghanaian restaurant in Adams Morgan–

“I’m not making any promises though, so don’t get too excited.”

I had been fidgeting with the pink tissue paper my new underwear came wrapped in, but for some reason your response made me want to rip it between my jaws and stuff it down my throat. I was getting what I  wanted, what was my problem now? I wanted you to come and visit me, but I also wanted you to want the exact same thing and to be happy about it. Be happy, whatever it takes.

I stood at the station with one hand behind my back, just above the point where the blue lace began, pulling imaginary puppet strings so that when I spotted you walking the yellow-lined maze of the parking garage, I could almost pretend that you did not already have a strained expression on your face. We would act out a scene from one of those novelas that used to bring us to the point of tearful laughter, because the characters had pale faces but had been dubbed to speak English just like we did, complete with “oh” and “ei” to show alarm.

You would set your weekend bag on the ground next to your feet and sweep me up into the air in a ridiculous spin of euphoria, and old women pushing babies in strollers and young couples sharing ice cream cones would smile at us indulgently as we said hellos set to background music of whiny guitar strings. The reality was that the ground was spotted with puddles of engine oil and dirty rainwater and you would never set down your expensive suede duffel on it, and the lovely grandmas and picture perfect couples were actually frustrated travelers with curved pillows dangling from their necks and toddlers screaming their exhaustion as they trailed behind.

“So are you gonna move? Goddam disrespectful kids…”

I don’t know why you’re angry. It’s not my fault the bus was delayed.

I don’t know why you’re even here. Nobody forced you to come.

Now my hands often wander to the part of my hip where the bone juts out, and it feels rough and unpleasant, as if someone has filed it down in an attempt to make it softer, less obtrusive. I realize that it is the imprint left from the lace scratching me in the same place every time, imprinting on my skin with its curling patterns intended to look like flowers. I am wounded in the same spot where your persistent hands burnt through the fabric with urgency like latent heat, so that the scar now looks more like the inside of a dead tree, each swirl and crisscrossing lines showing just how long this excruciating process of “getting over it” is going to take.

I begin to rifle through the underwear folded in my top drawer, checking the seams and frills, ripping out loose threads every so often. I even used my teeth to pull out the cream lace from that bra you liked. I didn’t realize those were the same threads tying the muscles in my face together to keep myself from slipping sideways and away.

1 ring finger (loosely jointed)

I’ve taken to cracking the ring finger on my left hand, so I’ll take out the knuckle and place it beside all my other things. It’s relatively easy to do, but the difficult part comes when I try to pry the residue of back-when-it-was-different from underneath my fingernails. I’m trying to sift through all the mistakes to find out when the gap between what I thought and what I actually said began to widen, until I learned to fill it with what you wanted me to say. I’m taking stock of myself today. I’m digging through empty chewing gum wrappers at the bottom of my handbag and scrolling through unanswered messages, trying to locate the moment my weight threatened to snap your back, or the moment I realized that with you I was the worst possible version of myself. Was it when the formerly steady stream of phone calls dwindled to a reluctant drip? Or when you were very clear that I was “stuck in the past, acting like we’re still 17 and 18 in high school” and didn’t I know that we had left the “honeymoon phase” behind? Or maybe it was when you started assigning “points” to rate my performance as someone who was supposed to love you; thumbs up for driving to your house late at night in a car I’m still scared to drive, and for performing remorse for all the self-centered monologues I forced you to endure about school, friends, the weather. Penalties for refusing to drive you to town for dinner, for bowing my head and letting you call me out my name and “call me out”–

“Shame on you. You don’t try. Are you…crying? You know I’m a bully, right?”

Is that a smile? Is that the sound of you enjoying this?

I hope that one day we can meet at one of those over-priced restaurants close to my job, where bright red umbrellas stand next to storefronts almost entirely covered in gold paint and stamped all over with the same designer logo. We can pass empty conversation back and forth between ourselves.

“I finally got the investment bank job I’ve been sweating for.”

That’s nice. Happy for you. I’m thinking of applying to grad school. Can’t work retail forever. At least I can say I really understand people now? Should help with psych, right?

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Actually, let’s not. I still have a lot of self-cataloguing to do, and your “bullying” has set me back much further than I may ever be able to catch up. It’s taken me so long to discover that I may have been asking the wrong questions, how can I be better, instead of when did you give up? Or when did you start talking to her again? When did it start feeling like cheating? I just found a scratched mix CD and a coupon for a free dance class. I’m shuffling papers for the trash and shuffling selves until I find the original one that I cracked

when I tried to fit it into the right self for you.

Dutiful Daughter

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I’m starting to worry that people who are close to me will start to peace out when they realize that they could be written about in a not so favorable light at any time. Still, this blog continues to be an outlet for me and I had to get this out.  The main “character” of this post has been forewarned, and there are quite a few aspects that I have decided to keep private. At the very least, I hope someone who shares similar experiences will feel some sort of catharsis after seeing themselves reflected in my story. I have returned to this quote from Anne Lamott several times in the past few months, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

***

One of the more unsettling things I have found out about writing honestly about my personal experiences without the disguise offered by the label “fiction” is the potential to manipulate, or to put it in less sinister terms, to guide the reader to have a particular emotional experience. With the right word choice and sequencing of events, along with a subtle push from the readers’ own taste and prior experiences, a writer can work towards ensuring that one laughs or is outraged almost exactly on cue as the text demands.

For example, I could have chosen to start this post with a description of a younger me in my yellow and white gingham dress with the square neckline, hair cornrowed into two bunches on either side of my head, waiting on my grandma’s couch all Saturday afternoon for my father to pick me up. I could go on to show how my grandma bustled about, unusually busy for a weekend, trying to act like she wasn’t waiting as well and attempting to distract me with errands like walking down the road to buy sugar or some other thing we didn’t need. That may be leaning too far towards the cliché TV movie genre, especially since the story of an absent father isn’t exactly groundbreaking material.

It is possible that it would be a little more poignant to explain why it is that I still don’t know how to ride a bike even at the advanced age of 24. My father gave me a bike with a neon green frame, accompanied by a set of crooked training wheels when I was 7 and a promise to teach me how to ride it that was never met. For years my uncle tried to convince me that it was really easy and that he could teach me if I wanted. I’m still not sure why I haven’t taken him or any of the many others who tried up on their offer.

At this point, it might be appropriate to list many milestones that he missed or was not invited to because I did not want nor expect him to come. The more generic ones: school prize giving days, piano recitals, the time I caught mumps from the boy I sat next to in class, dance shows, birthdays, Sunday School plays, the time I sweated my way through my high school valedictory address, two graduations. To add some personal color with bolder traces of nostalgia, I could also include; black and white French films at Alliance Française, the time my mother started buying me notebooks to fill with my little scribbles that would turn into journals, long walks to the part of the neighborhood with the huge houses blinking their bright lights behind full hedges, not to mention the fact that I didn’t realize until I was much older that I was supposed to miss the presence of a father figure because I was surrounded by five incredible mothers and uncles that more than made up for the expected “gap.”

I probably sound quite cynical, and I am to a large extent. I tried forgiveness and openness once, because I felt ashamed for holding on to my anger for such a long time after someone I used to know and care about told me that I was only doing so because I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t “the girl whose dad wasn’t there.” I agreed, especially because what I’ve come to see as a mundane piece of personal information since moving to the U.S. was still relatively rare in most of the families I knew. So, I would try. Never mind that when it came time to apply to college, he refused to fill out his portion of my financial aid applications because it would look like we had more money than we did, and I would get less financial aid as a result. It was for my own good, you see. Never mind that he stood in the doorway to my mother’s bedroom explaining that he couldn’t fill in his half of financial aid forms in case he was expected to give up some money. This disclaimer hovered over me for the entire application season, “Unwillingness to fill the forms are not grounds enough to waive the requirement,” as did the persistent ticking of the ceiling fan that filled the awkward silence between my father’s abandoning of responsibility (once again) and my mother’s disdain.

No, there was no real reason to continue keeping my father at arm’s length. I should give him a chance, let bygones be water under a bridge that we would build and all kinds of other metaphors and platitudes, because he was trying. Trying looked like forcing relationships with my step –siblings with labels like “big sis” that I still don’t claim, and waiting expectantly for me to respond “I love you too” at the end of phone calls and at the gate to my grandmother’s house on the weekends he actually showed up. Is it obvious that my cynicism is an act? I actually don’t enjoy parading my father’s absence just to make myself more interesting, mainly because I would like to think that there is an unending list of things about myself that are more fascinating, and also because there is nothing new in this world, and a father who isn’t around is among the oldest of things.

Maybe I will appear more sincere, or my bitterness a more palpable, if I address him in the second person, you the reader, to make you feel uncomfortable, to compel you to occupy his position for just a moment as you read this. You, my father. My hurt is complicated and deep, and not just an unsettled score or a grudge. It pushes itself further into my self in spite of everyone’s efforts to dance gingerly around the truth. There is also the anxiety that comes with the suspicion that your care comes on the condition that I keep succeeding in a way that will permit you to point proudly at the last name I wish I didn’t have. My memory is crystalline in its accuracy, and I can recall that the times your requests to see me have been most stringent have immediately followed some kind of public achievement of mine. I graduated from college and you posted photos of the widest grin I wore that day on Facebook without once inquiring how it was all paid for. I posted some of my writing online, and you shared the link, proud father. I was in Accra reading some of my work the radio, and you raged and demanded to know why no one forced me to call you to let you know I was in town. Are these the only times you think about me?

I understand that you may have been able to trick yourself into thinking that you’ve done the best you can, that I’m picking up one out of every five phone calls, that up until recently I have responded promptly and politely to one text message every few months. It was almost easy for me to smile tight smiles across a stained tablecloth at a Chinese restaurant no one goes to anymore, to even pose for a picture afterwards because I wasn’t really there, I was floating somewhere above your head, dodging all your jokes, wishing the afternoon away because at least I was doing my duty as a daughter. I am only a few years older, but my hurt has turned into resentment, and any desire to engage, to mend, to try, to be “dutiful” has dwindled to zero.

Your reaching out is a few years too late and I can’t imagine how I could catch you up, or how to even carry on anew by putting all the missed opportunities behind us. That may be possible for others, but I don’t know how any relationship we could begin now could be successful if you don’t know that at a point I was so self-conscious I couldn’t wear my hair up and away from my face. Or that I spend far more time living in my head than I do actually allowing people to see me, and that I’m terrified of being unlovable and being rejected by potential friends and romantic interests alike, to the point where I just exist and hope that the other person will say something first. Or that I’m constantly fretting about money but would rather maintain my bank balance teetering on the edge of an overdraft than ask for help from my mother because she has done more than enough for me. Or that I’ve kept 2-3 jobs since I started grad school so I can be as financially independent as possible, and being the kind of self-sufficient person my mother would be proud of. I’m very stubborn, but you wouldn’t know that about me either. You also don’t know that the quickest way to push me away is to crowd me, and to give fatherly directions and commands with authority you haven’t earned because I absolutely hate being told what to do. Or that I am fiercely protective of my mother and so you have broken the last few links of the rusty bridge that hung between us by trying to blame her for being “spiteful,” from trying to keep me away from you.

I can admit that I’m a little frightened of the amount of animosity I’m still holding within, while simultaneously taking note of how little remorse I feel for speaking to you like I have done over the past few days. I hope you see that we actually do have problems, contrary to your insistence that father-daughter relationships are “natural.” It may be more convenient for you to point fingers at my mother or my aunts for turning me against you, but the truth is that if you knew me at all you would know that for years my cool politeness has been all I’ve been willing to give, and even that I have done grudgingly. I should have been honest all along. You haven’t been there, and I don’t know how I’m going to get over it, if I ever get over it at all.

(Image: I have been so loved by these amazing women: my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.)

A Kind of Woman

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She, the kind of woman who curses around other people’s children and smiles and sticks her tongue out when they tug their innocent ones away from her evil. A Sula kind of woman, collarbones jutting out threats yet to be spoken, squinting eyes and trusting of no one­– you thought you were special– the daughter that slipped through Mama Day’s hands so she could cradle the dreams of others, nurse them to health, hand them cups of punch, and candles, never got the chance to be the child that went astray, brought shame to the steps of the silver trailer

She, torturing sleepless souls she doesn’t plan to love, you the woman she left behind in Miami in the small house with yellow walls and white metal curling around the windows, veins in a vanilla-scented neck pulsing in fruitless craving for the kind of woman who never looks back– she hasn’t called in months but her hair is still knotted around your hairbrush bristles

The kind of woman who has ground up any pride you thought you had and sprinkled the powder first over her right shoulder, then over the left, she has walked away wearing your possibility of future love around her neck held high, metal pendant heating the thin skin stretched across her breast bone, she is the kind of menace you were warned to avoid and now you pay