Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

I too longed for a mother, but I think I was already steeled to the reality that I would not have one, not in the same way all the other children I knew had one. But, my father was, I believed, mine. Mine and Yasmeen’s. I did not want to share him with anyone else.

was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

If I could not find belonging in my story of my father, in my grief, where could I find it? If I belonged nowhere and to no one, then what was I? Who was I?

When I was a child, I often felt like an outsider among my own family. Between me and them were borders—geographic, spiritual, cultural, linguistic.

No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

My delusions were not so much apparitions, but rather feelings of impending disaster paired with the certainty that I would be the one to cause it.

Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization.

History is a story, my grandfather said. I offer a friendly amendment: history is many stories. Those stories are written, spoken, and sung. They are carried in our bodies. They billow all around us like copper-colored dust that sometimes obscures everything. In those stories, we grasp at meaning. We search for ourselves, for our place, for direction. We search for a way forward: a woman warrior, a complicated man, an invitation home, a meteor, a lake, a child landing with a splat. Destruction and creation. Changes in light, terrain, and atmosphere. Delicate new freedom. Hope.

As for injuries, pain is not always felt when and where it is inflicted. Grief is slow internal bleeding. And it turns out that my father was right, or almost right, about trauma being in the blood.

The consequences of a disruption or deprivation of maternal nurturing can result in serious and irreversible mental health consequences ranging from despair and detachment to an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt.

We color in the outlines of our memories with our beliefs.

We would not sleep because we had to stand sentinel over our father’s life. If we did not sleep, we would not wake up without him. This did not make sense, but we did not care.

What could my mother possibly have to say? I did not want to know. I still don’t. What could be contained in that letter other than another act of jettison? I was not interested in apologies. There was no offer that would make up for what she had declined to offer. She hadn’t offered to claim me. She hadn’t offered a home.

When I encounter strangers from my tribes, they are startled by my attempts to communicate. They do not recognize me as one of their own. They laugh, charmed and perhaps a little disturbed by the discrepancy between appearance and sound. When I explain myself, they think me a curious hybrid. They speak to me, always, in English.

Race matters in England. So too does class. So too does voice. My race was what it was. It could not be changed. Class was not something I intellectually understood yet. But I understood there were “right” voices and “wrong” voices. I understood this had something to do with the value of whiteness and also of houses. People who lived in the biggest houses were said to be posh, and their voices were to be respected and minded.

I understood enough about England to know I would never be a proper English rose. White English people could say they were English, but black and brown people called themselves British, even if they were born and raised in England, even if their parents and their parents’ parents were born and raised in England.

People of color know that not all of the safety and spoils of whiteness are available to us. Yet we can speak in the voice of whiteness if we so choose. Some of us know no other voice. It was born in us. It is the voice colonization left us. Some of us adopt it later—in childhood or early adulthood—and lose our other voices. Some of us never allow whiteness into our throats. Some of us code-switch.

The little girl does not stop crying. She does not care that the soldier finds her beautiful. She knows now that she can be made invisible.

The girl wonders if she has ever really seen her body through her own eyes. She cannot remember. She can remember what she has been told: angel, beautiful, dirty black whore. “Me,” she says to her body in the mirror every day for years. “Mine,” she says, and “I.” She repeats me, mine, I until, finally, she catches a glimpse of her body that seems unfiltered. She learns, gradually, to shift her focus, to find her true reflection. Seeing herself in this way requires intention. It is not always possible.

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me; nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the back roads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. I never did get to know my body that way.

As an adult, when I think about the story, I wonder if I tracked her with my eyes because I could feel her, already, leaving me. I wonder if I already awaited disaster. I have felt that waiting in my body for as long as I can remember. It feels like tension, like restlessness, like shaking.

Sometimes I think my memories are more about what didn’t happen than what did, who wasn’t there than who was. My memories are about leaving and being left. They are about absence.

Knowing and accepting the inevitable are two different things.

And happiness struck me as a ridiculously high standard in the first place. Who in the world was happy? Who in the world was happy together? The question was: Would I be unhappier without him? The answer was yes. I loved him. And stronger than my love was fear. Without him, I would have to contend with myself. Against myself, I would make a merciless opponent.

My souls are many and so, I believe, are yours. Some of them are quiet, watchful. Some are ravenous beasts. We need them all. They live behind our flesh. They rumble with one another and with the outside world. Our souls fight for survival.

I did not fear for my life because I knew my life would be protected over the lives of others. I was the child of diplomats, an American citizen. I did not consciously do this calculus. It was obvious.

We used the word expat casually then. We did not question why our parents were called expats while other people were called immigrants or migrants.

The dorm smelled like a pyre. The city smelled like a pyre. I was horrified because the dust in our nostrils contained particles of human beings. We were inhaling pieces of fathers and mothers and lovers.

No story, no metaphor, is innocent of theft, omission, obscuration, or violence.

Like an earthquake, the future is hard to predict, but like a seismologist, I analyze risk factors. I feel destabilized, not worried. I don’t hide my feelings, I seal cracks.

An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking. It is frictional forces and literary device. A fault is a weakness. A woman’s body is a weakness. A wound is a weakness I can’t help but pick at. Some wounds never heal. A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.

As I waited, my mind filled in the blanks, envisioned the future, wrote a nightmare of a story. Every black mother, sister, and wife in America has written some version of that story in her mind. In that story, our promises to take care of our sons, brothers, and husbands turn into lies. This is a daily heartbreak. For too many, that story has become real. That story is an American terror.

Black people are expected by the white world to be strong but not angry. Pain must be hidden. Daily slights are to be borne with grace, humility, even gratitude. Weakness is intolerable. Vulnerability must wait until the day is done and the mask can come off in the privacy of our own homes. And by then we might be too tired or too stiff to feel it.

My father knew the time would come when my questions would threaten to overwhelm me, when the answers available to me would be unbearably insufficient, when harmony would be out of reach. He knew that when that time came, the only thing left to do would be to lose control. He wanted to open me to the beauty in abstraction, in complexity, in wild things.

Judgment and shame are used to stop people from poking their fingers into the cracks of sacred stories, from peering into what is hidden underneath. We all have sacred stories, whether we like to admit it or not. The present is a wilderness. The future is a wilderness. The past is a story, is a haven. We build our havens on shaky ground.

No doubt, my father hurt my mother and Anabel. Perhaps he had affairs. Perhaps he lied to me. I have hurt people, lied, withheld truths. My father never extolled perfection, so who am I to demand it of him?

Let me show you my home. It is a family that used to be five and is now four. We are built of love and hurt and rage and silences. We have not yet found the right material with which to patch the roof, to stop the absence from trickling in.