Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"When you first go into business there are so many things nobody tells you. That’s especially true when you’re two young black people, a secretary and a mechanic, coming out of a time when blacks had never been allowed to own businesses at all."

"That’s when I realized the police were not who I thought they were. They were men first, and police second."

"My mom kept insisting that they take a statement and open a case, and they actually refused—they refused to write up a charge sheet. “This is a family thing,” they said. “You don’t want to involve the police."

"The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. “He’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. “He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”"

"His family was him, my mom, and the new baby. My family was my mom and me. I actually appreciated that about him. Sometimes he was my buddy, sometimes not, but he never pretended our relationship was anything other than what it was."

"The other women would bow before men with this polite little curtsy. My mom would go down and cower, groveling in the dirt like she was worshipping a deity, and she’d stay down there for a long time, like a really long time, long enough to make everyone very uncomfortable. That was my mom. Don’t fight the system. Mock the system.""

"The whole tradition of women bowing to the men, my mom found that absurd. But she didn’t refuse to do it. She overdid it. She made a mockery of it."

"I’d always been fine with my mom dating this guy, but I’d never considered the possibility of him becoming a permanent addition to our family. I enjoyed being with Abel the same way I enjoyed playing with a tiger cub the first time I went to a tiger sanctuary: I liked it, I had fun with it, but I never thought about bringing it home."

"I’d always been fine with my mom dating this guy, but I’d never considered the possibility of him becoming a permanent addition to our family. I enjoyed being with Abel the same way I enjoyed playing with a tiger cub the first time I went to a tiger sanctuary: I liked it, I had fun with it, but I never thought about bringing it home."

"He liked to be liked by the world, which made his abuse even harder to deal with. Because if you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he’s a saint, you begin to think that you’re the bad person. It must be my fault this is happening is the only conclusion you can draw, because why are you the only one receiving his wrath?"

"“Now who’s the best-looking person in the family, eh? I hope you enjoyed your week of being the pretty one, ’cause the queen is back, baby. You spent four hours at the salon to look like that. I just took a shower.”"

"“Why don’t I take medicine,”I said, “and then pray to Jesus to thank him for giving us the doctors who invented medicine,because medicine is what makes you feel better,not Jesus.”“You don’t need medicine if you have Jesus. Jesus will heal you.Pray to Jesus.”“But is medicine not a blessing from Jesus? And if Jesus gives us medicine and we do not take the medicine, are we not denying the grace that he has given us?”"

"My mom and I had different ideas about how Jesus worked. She believed that you pray to Jesus and then Jesus pitches up and does the thing that you need. My views on Jesus were more reality-based."

"If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”"

"“I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at you,” she said, “but you forget the reason I ride you so hard and give you so much shit is because I love you. Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love.""

"It had been only a week, in a cell that wasn’t terribly uncomfortable with food that wasn’t half bad, but a week in jail is a long, long time. A week without shoelaces is a long, long time. A week with no clocks, with no sun, can feel like an eternity. The thought of anything worse, the thought of doing real time in a real prison, I couldn’t even imagine."

"I walked out of court and the light of day hit my face and I said, “Sweet Jesus, I am never going back there again.”"

"It was like the high school cafeteria, only it was the high school cafeteria from hell because if I picked the wrong table I might get beaten or stabbed or raped. I’d never been more scared in my life. But I still had to pick. Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side."

"I was with these people for only a brief window of time, but in that moment I saw the difference between prison and jail. I saw the difference between criminals and people who’ve committed crimes. I saw the hardness in people’s faces. I thought back on how naive I’d been just hours before, thinking jail wasn’t so bad and I could handle it. I was now truly afraid of what might happen to me."

"The more time I spent in jail, the more I realized that the law isn’t rational at all. It’s a lottery. What color is your skin? How much money do you have? Who’s your layer? Who’s the judge?"

"He takes shit. He becomes a petty thief. He’s in and out of jail. He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from that, and a few days later he’s in a shop and he sees some PlayStation games and he grabs them, but he doesn’t even know enough to know that he’s stolen something of no value."

"He finds his way to Johannesburg, looking for work, trying to feed his children back home. But he’s lost. He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it. So what does he do?"

"He told me his story, a South African story that was all too familiar to me: The man grows up under apartheid, working on a farm, part of what’s essentially a slave labor force. It’s a living hell but it’s at least something. He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid. He’s told where to be and what to do every waking minute of his day. Then apartheid ends and he doesn’t even have that anymore."

"When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”"

"Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” He was so right."

"I was so afraid of the ass- whooping waiting for me at home that I genuinely considered going to prison."

"In South Africa, everyone knows that colored gangsters are the most ruthless, the most savage. It’s a stereotype that’s fed to you your whole life."

"Because there were some black parents who’d actually do that, not pay their kid’s bail, not hire their kid a lawyer— the ultimate tough love. But it doesn’t always work, because you’re giving the kid tough love when maybe he just needs love. You’re trying to teach him a lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life."

"They’re trying to discipline you before the system does. “I need to do this to you before the police do it to you.” Because that’s all black parents are thinking from the day you’re old enough to walk out into the street, where the law is waiting."

"That camera made me confront the fact that there were people on the other end of this thing I was doing, and what I was doing was wrong."