Diary of a mothering worker. May 20, 2013

Post 98.

Just as you think that fourteen years of relationship has led you to that point where the original excitement has settled into routine, your husband buys two turntables and you remember what was insanely cool about him in the first place. You remember that even though you were both surviving on virtual shoestrings, the guy could mix music into a cocktail that made you thirsty for more. You remember that although there was barely enough room, in fact, not enough room for a desk, a cupboard, a bed and a chair, there were still two turntables, and in even in cramped conditions, music flew free around the room and out of the windows. You remember, as you now dance with Ziya while her daddy throws tunes and you watch her make her first, totally two year old scratch, that CDs were once scratched, filtered, remixed and pitched in DJ sessions played just for you.

You thought it was the toasted cheese sandwiches brought to you at midnight during those tough years of working full-time while finishing a PhD or maybe the Monday morning mix tapes sitting by your keys and ready to turn up as you turned on the car or maybe just some one-on-one connection that felt calm and safe, but really it was the two turntables, because now that they are back, you realize you only married the guy to get the DJ, put him in house and have him for yourself.

With fourteen years of hindsight, you look at your life now and wonder if that was shallow or youthful or such a typically girl thing to do, and despite age, maturity and present lack of a social life you still understand why all good DJs  - even bad ones – have groupies. You had it bad for a boy with two Pioneer turntables, and you wonder if it was him or them, or both, that made you fall in love.

You sit looking at those two Pioneers with their blinking lights on either side of the mixer, while Ziya’s daddy puts her to sleep in the next room, and you think that all those books about keeping romance alive in marriages and all those TEDx talks about the psychology of long-term love really miss the main point. It’s not so much about planning dates or remembering to communicate or making sure not to take the other for granted, it’s really just about finding that one thing that you knew and then forgot did it for you. That thing that might have gotten lost amidst work and bills and mortgages and traffic and tiredness. That thing you wanted to take home, turn on, rock out to, feel young with and love.

I remember now. It was a DJ, two turntables and music sets so smooth that, like the songs, everything seemed to happen right on cue, one year seamlessly blending, in pitch, bpm and key, with the next. Funny how two turntables that took you back fourteen years could do what no conversation and mutual effort was now going to do. I guess there is that one thing in every relationship. Imagine when you see it spinning in front of you.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 13, 2013

Post 97.

More than a decade ago, when Lauryn Hill’s first solo album came out, she was my heroine. The woman could write, fling lyrics and vibrate your heart strings with her voice, and her music blended the personal, emotional, feminist and political with a head-pumping mix of passion and power. A whole global generation of us in and out of relationships, in long term love affairs with beats and rhymes, and searching for inspiring female icons in mass media, re- and re-played that Mis-education album to articulate youthful heartache and healing, and to survive coming of age.

I have flat mates from UWI who I’m still apologizing to for running that album on continuous rotation while I dug myself out from weakness to strength and from despair to confidence. There are songs from that album I can’t listen to anymore because they can’t escape that time that I managed to. There are also songs that still say exactly what I would to people in my life today.

That time in music followed an era of unapologetically feminist bands, singers and musicians, who broke through sound-proofed ceilings and walls that kept women’s music off the radio.

The turn from politically-radical rap to gangsta hip hop, and Britney and Beyonce pop, mostly let in those female artists willing to shake some ass rather than those who knew that unless women shook down Babylon, only race and class would be rocked free while we remained everywhere garlanded in chains.

Mainstream music gives girls too few resources for remaking the terms of what it means to be smart, sexy, good, bad, angry, emotional, vulnerable and even ahead of the game. We have to search beyond the radio dial, actively remember and even invent the soundtracks for running tings our own way.

At that time, the Ten Sisters poetry movement, a group of us singers and spoken word performers, came together to, like Lauryn Hill, interrupt air waves with women’s words that were more complex and critical than what we hear. Ten Sisters included feminist and non-feminist women, straight, lesbian and bisexual women, mothers and grandmothers, atheists and Catholics, Indians, Africans, part-Chinese and full calalloo. From Lisa Allen’s ‘Isahvibes’ to Paula Obe and Annessa Baksh’s ‘Ten Sisters’ to Dara Njeri’s ‘Speak Easy’ to Gillian Moor’s ‘Songshine’ to Sister Ava’s tireless commitment to the Rapso movement, these women mothered Trinidad and Tobago’s vibrant spoken word culture for more than a decade. Yet, like Lauryn Hill and that earlier phase of US feminist music, it’s easy to forget their impact and to wonder what happened to them today.

Hill made six children, confronted continous adultery, fought for her artistic freedom against the music industry, and had to live in a world where racial stereotyping about Black women makes them easy prey. Separately, each of those could be too much for any sane person. Together? Are you going to judge? Being powerful can be hard. Being a mother can be overwhelming, Backstage beyond the microphone can be unforgiving. To see someone so path-breaking not be able to hold her family and her struggle together is terrifying. It’s any woman’s everyday nightmare to publicly appear to fail.

Hill remains my heroine because real life heroes are also only human. Maybe she went crazy like gossips say, maybe the world makes us all crazy sometimes, maybe women are more easily labeled crazy for not handling societal and patriarchal downpression the perfect way. For me, there’s no vicarious juice in her imprisonment. She’s a voice from a time when I came into my own power. As they learn the rewards, risks and re-education of conscious girlhood, that album still remains one of only too few for our daughters.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 8, 2013

Post 96.

People like to see you when you are out and say, ‘how come yuh didn’t bring de baby?’, but be assured that the question is only rhetorical. People want to see the baby and like the idea of waving hello as she walks about, but they also expect the baby to be a quiet, well-behaved, obedient and unnoticeable at whatever meeting, function, panel discussion, awards ceremony or other event you are attending. In short, they want to see the baby, but not be disturbed by the baby. What you need to do is bring a hologram of your baby with you, someone that waves and smiles with the volume on low and with a pause button and a set projection space on the back wall.

I’m not exaggerating; other moms of two year olds know exactly what I mean. In a Caribbean society ruled by the tyranny of manners and respectability, even sweet grannies, loving friends and empathetic feminists don’t want your child talking too loudly in the corner or running about too much if the event requires some level of decorum and propriety. I’ve experienced this time and again, until now I don’t take her places where I know that I’ll get a combination of sympathetic and stern glances if Ziya behaves in public like, well, a two year old.

The other day I was at an event discussing Caribbean writing, Ziya was walking up and down the aisle, eating food in my lap and asking for snacks to carry around as she explored the space. She was all ‘children should be seen but not heard’ par excellence. Yet, every time she walked toward the front where people sat on a podium talking, there was a panicked rush to shoo her to the back again as if a two year old walking about in front the speakers, dead silent, is too distracting for adults having a conversation with themselves and the audience. As if the majority of what people do in our lives is not done with children running around us, as if in earning awards through our life work or writing Caribbean books or meeting to plan world change, our lives are nonetheless intersected by and even inspired by children; ours, our families’ and our communities’.

Women hardly had the luxury of literature without having to write with children around them. Virginia Woolf rightly knew we needed a room of our own, but women got on with it anyway. Mothers who earned their livelihood baking or sewing did so with their young about them, that’s why Caribbean women’s poems talk about mothers at the sewing machine both working and nurturing their families. Caribbean people can, in fact, talk about whatever – whether it is politics or literature – with children being children around us.

We do it fine every day and we should figure out how to do it even in fancy moments and settings because that’s how both we and children learn how to live in all aspects of the world together. I get not taking Ziya everywhere with me. Some women can function at work with their babies and more power to them because I can’t, but until I get that hologram version, I’d be nice if people either accepted that even a ‘good’ child is not a still and silent being or stopped asking ‘why yuh didn’t bring de baby?’. Moms like me know it’s impossible to have it both ways.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 29, 2013

Post 95.

Like a sizable section of the country, I watched Jack Warner’s nationally televised speech until late in the night after a long work day. Ziya was playing around me, pretending that the bed was a bus she was driving to the grocery and trying to get me to strap in my seatbelt while sharing the imaginary food she had enthusiastically prepared for dinner. She was spoon-feeding me, saying, ‘eat, eat up’, and beaming with pleasure as I did so. After our meal, Zi became obsessed with washing her hands, which, like any toddler, is her strategy for getting to turn on the tap and play with the water, and eventually I had to take her downstairs to the sink and soap to stop her from complaining, falsely, about her hands being dirty.

Ziya is two years old, Jack is seventy, but what they were doing was not so different. Jack was also dealing in the imaginary, trying to convince his constituents and the national community that he is in the driver’s seat and that his destination has certainty. Ziya had some idea of a grocery in her head, a collage of the ones she’s visited incorporated with sites drawn from other memories. Jack was creating a collage of his power and efficacy, narrating the world as he saw it from his leadership in FIFA, CONCACAF, past ministries and his constituency, also mixing in selected memories. Simultaneously, both he and Ziya wanted me to buckle up for the ride, with Jack’s fiction involving admittance to gravely unethical decisions without recognition of wrongs, discomforting contradictions escaping in every direction, open display of patronage’s power to twist politicians and voters into supplicants, and threats to show us all his excellence at revenge and love.     

‘Eat, eat up’, they both said, Jack, like Ziya, needing us to agree that the plate we already know is empty is yet the food we really need. Both were spoon-feeding me, beaming with pleasure and invented possibilities. Yet, all was thin air indeed. Action man that Jack is and savior to our nation’s souls long abandoned by non-functioning state institutions, his declarations of party loyalty and Cabinet despair, of personal autonomy and subordination to electoral rules, of international deal-brokering and photocopied paper-trails gleam like gold-spun strategy rather than the straw of ethical accountability. Ziya’s fantasy was charming, but Jack’s left me uneasy. The difference between his and my politics, and UNC politics, came through the TV clearly.

Maybe that’s how it was for others watching, maybe my generation could view his theatre skeptically, maybe we are fed up of truths never intended to reveal, and maybe as a society these moments are how we come to conceptualise the kind of politics in which we can actually trust. Or, maybe not. Maybe Jack leaves us willing to play along though we know not what to believe and are not sure what end he has in sight.

Maybe at the end of the night, when all both Ziya and he is want their hands washed, we will be too weary to insist on differentiating clean from dirty. As she grows up, all I can hope is that Zi learns to distinguish childhood creativity from adult charades that conceal reality. 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 22, 2013

Post 94.

Recently, a river in Balandra told Ziya this story:

Once upon a time there was a little river who wanted to be a linguist. She knew that only fancy people at the United Nations or in stuffy universities got to be linguists, but she didn’t care. Even if she was only a small river on a small island, she was ambitious beyond anyone’s expectation.

Little river had already begun to make her way all over the island, rushing out of rocks, flowing slowly through settlements, leaping off little cliffs, bubbling through forests and meandering her way along villages. She did this because she loved to listen to the languages of her world as they were being spoken by all the people who lived on her island, and even by the birds and animals.

Soon, she learned all the languages that there were to know, from Yoruba, Urdu and Bhojpuri to English and French Patois. Little river also came categorise the sounds of many hundreds of birds, the buzz of thousands of insects and the day and night-time calls of mammals. Yet little river felt that there was so much more for her to learn.

One day as she was running quickly along the edge of the island, humming to herself in six languages, she heard the most remarkable sound. It was like many different words were being said, all at different pitches, all with different accents. She slowed in wonder and wound her way closer, listening as the noise got louder and more jumbled, like a Saturday morning market. Just as she thought she discovered their source, she hit a wall of rocks too high for her to reach over and too deep and solid for her to flow under or crack through. Little river sank back, stared at the rocks for a long time and could not figure out what to do. She began to cry, thinking her dreams had ended. Even the flowers’ whispered consolations could not stop her tears.

She cried so much that the sky, who usually minds nobody’s business but her own, noticed little river’s broken heart, wrapped her in her arms and began to wail for her. Their weeping continued until river began to realise that sky’s tears had filled her and made her tall. Through her sorrow, little river became powerful and strong. She lifted her wet eyes to the rocks and, without pausing to feel fear or doubt, leapt over them, cascaded over a cliff, skidded down a hill and tumbled in sharp curves toward the sea. Breathless, she plunged head first into the vast ocean.

‘Hello, little river’, said the sea in ten thousand tongues. ‘Hello’, said little river, proud that she knew a few. ‘So, you are a linguist?’ ‘Yes’, said little river, ‘and you know all the ancient and new languages ever spoken. How can I learn them too?’ ‘Simply drink me’, said the sea, ‘and I will drink your island’s languages from you’. Each opened her mouth and began to fill with the other. Little river twisted in currents she never knew existed, and heard the sounds of people and animals who no longer roamed the earth as well as those who still visited the world’s oceans and rivers. She wove through them all, soaking up knowledge beyond her dreams.

And so, today, whenever people, birds and animals want to learn languages and knowledge, they visit little river’s mouth, where she still fills with the ocean and where the ocean still drinks her in, and in these visits, it is best to just sit quietly and listen.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 3, 2013

Post 93.

Every year for my anniversary, bridal mehendi is etched on my hands and feet. It’s a ritual symbolizing more than the marriage. My wedding mehendi was first done at my matikor, organized and attended by women of all hues and mixes, religious beliefs, sexualities, feminisms and politics. This was no ordinary matikor, though it did draw on the divine and feminine in Hinduism and in the ceremony itself, and it did feature women and sisterhood, song and rhythm, ritual decoration, invocation, fire and, of course, educational dancing with a baigan. The women who attended all came as goddesses and warrior women from various mythologies and histories. Athena, Gaia, Poolan Devi, Oshun and more descended in dress and spirit to mark my transition.

 That night called upon more than one tradition, and did so in ways that were creative and invented. While some might look askance at such unorthodoxy, it also brilliantly showed how cultures combine and emerge with new meanings as each generation makes them their own in relation to their time. In no way do these inventions replace those enactments that seek consistency and continuity, but they do open spaces for resistance, reinterpretation and even rejuvenation, which are how we have formed the sacred practices that distinctively represent Trinidad and Tobago today, whether it’s the hybrid blessings of Siparia Mai or the high mass of Jouvay.

 What followed was a wedding whose rites equally combined the old and authorized with the imaginative and unsanctioned. At ten am in the morning and wearing a wedding kurta suit and a red sari, Stone and I were married in our back garden by his godmother, who is a Reverend in the Church of the Nazarene. Muslim blessings were also given. Because he’s a music producer and I’m a poet, we walked down our aisle to our own beats and rhymes, which we hoped would remind us that after nine years of bliss, promises kept don’t need a wedding to be declared.

 In the evening, we held another service whose steps I devised for no other reason than they mattered to me, like amulets strung around not only the bride and groom, but the whole occasion. One Wicca sistren drummed as we joined our friends and this time I wore my aunt’s sari from her wedding thirty-five years ago along with my great grandmother’s earrings. Another Carib sistren lit sage and chanted, mentioning all the corners of the country that hold indigenous value and within which we live today. Our friends wrote our vows and then read them to us, giving us the blessing of their collective hopes and wishes. We jumped over a cocoyea broom, hand-made with cowrie shells by another sistren. That’s when it all became complete.

 Maybe it’s being feminist that makes me feel empowered to choose the traditions and rituals that feel right regardless of whether others agree. Maybe it’s being just sort of contrary. Maybe it’s being from a country where our greatest legacy is our inventiveness, which has enabled us to not only survive, but also to thrive. Maybe it’s being an anthropologist and knowing that culture is always being made anew. Maybe it’s learning from a generation of women around me who draw on every religious and cultural resource of the land regardless of their race or creed. In sweet T and T, you can have a dougla matikor and wedding which draw on diasporic and local beliefs, generations of female collectivity and generous amounts of love. Beyond being a bride, this is what I remember as the mehendi is being drawn on my body. All histories are ours to claim and make sacred, uniquely.

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 25, 2013

Post 92.

The only thing stopping me from burning down billboards is the fact that I don’t drive around with gasoline and a flame-thrower in my trunk. I’m talking about billboards with images of women lying with a bottle opener by their open mouth (is she the bottle or is the opener a penis or is it that if you open the bottle you get to open the woman?) or sprawled across a shower with tiles over their breasts (as if that’s what tiles are for) or lying topless next to car batteries (because this is something women actually do when they go to the mechanic).

I’m not a violent person. This is a rational response to the violence being done to my daughter who I see watching these billboards as we drive by them, the same violence that was done to me by these entirely inescapable images.  It’s a rationale borne out of being a survivor of such violence and knowing exactly how Ziya will have to learn to survive amongst it and with it within her, despite everything I try to teach her and almost no matter what I do.

I was not given a chance to grow into womanhood without having to learn that women should be sexy and what that ideal means, that only some bodies are considered really beautiful, that some skin colour and hair are more valued, and that being a well-adjusted woman means keeping calm in a world ruled by others, who define your worth through their eyes and define even your resistance, because one day you can no longer see yourself free from how they see you.  

Every woman knows the effect of growing up in this world. Every woman knows what that has done to her sense of self, to her confidence, to what she now loves and totally hates about her body, to the fact that when she looks in the mirror, she is evaluating herself in terms of these standards, ones most women cannot ever meet nor should ever have to. Sometimes for years at a time, sometimes for her whole life, every woman battles with her body and her beauty as if they let her down. Every woman knows the damage done, the secret insecurities she carries, her feelings of not being good enough if she is not attractive enough, of wishing to have another body besides her own or look like someone she is not. Every woman knows.  Every girl learns.

In a world that didn’t constantly churn out airbrushed, narrow images of women, maybe Zi could grow up just valuing herself because she is, not devaluing herself because of how she looks, not learning first self-loathing and then, with age, difficulty and concession, something approximating self-love. Maybe she wouldn’t learn to try harder than she needs to simply to be loved for who she is, to spend more money on make-up than helps her be beautiful, to fall for the myth that high heels empower. Maybe I wouldn’t have to try so hard to remind her that a pedestal may look seductive, but what it ultimately does is make you afraid of stepping out of place. Why not let her grow up in a world where these images have been burned to the ground, rather than being burned on the minds, bodies and psyches of women? Don’t Ziya and a generation of girls like her deserve that chance? Fire bun these billboards and their violence.