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She needed frequent reminders she was more than a vessel for the ancestors’ memories. She wouldn’t let herself disappear.
One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.
Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams. She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.
Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?
“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.
She didn’t want them to think they could hurt her just because she was in a vulnerable state. She would not let them forget she could tear them apart if she wanted to.
“What should I have done instead? Not provide what is necessary? Don’t take it to heart. I fed my mother till the day she died, and I despised her. Good-bye.”
“If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?”
“I know who I am now. All I knew before was who they were, who they wanted me to be,” said Yetu. “And it was killing me. It did kill me. I wasn’t Yetu. I was just a shell for their whims.”
“You’re always wanting answers to why I do the things I do, but when I try to give them, you cannot fathom it. Is this my curse? To be unfathomable?
What kind of deep-sea creature prefers a shallow death pit to the infinite ocean?”
They’d not asked for the emptiness any more than Yetu had asked for the History.
