It feels so strange to call you Ms. Morrision, you’ve been part of my life for so long! I want to call you Aunty Toni, Big Sista Toni, Grandma Morrison even, but that would be really really weird I guess…
For months now I have trudged along: a miserable, bowed, broken mess. I suffocated under the weight of heartbreak and fear as well as the horrible conviction that I failed. Failed you. I know you don’t know me but I know your expectations. I’ve drunk from the nectar of your books, greedily swallowed your words and been an ardent disciple to your fount of wisdom. But now I’ve failed. Fallen way below your expectations for us the next generation, bearers of the flag and even for myself such is the power of your words.
I was 12 years old when I stumbled upon ‘The Bluest Eyes’. I was an anomaly in my life. My parents, in their wisdom, sent me to boarding school in the Midlands, an ugly redbrick town in England, where I was The Solitary Black girl. Then the Solitary African. Finally the Solitary Black African. By the time I left the school, five years later, I think there were 5 of us ‘coloured girls’. In my third year, a much older, much lighter West Indian day student, joined the sixth form. I palpitated with excitement. “Finally!”, I thought. Solidarity I mused. Maybe she would smile at me. Maybe, in my wildest moments, even look out for me. Well she paid me no attention. Ever. Whatsoever. I swear this, not once in her two years did she ever deign to notice me. She studiously avoided any direct eye contact. I never told anyone, not even at home about her existence; inside, in my head, I reeled from the rejection. Looking back she was probably too busy trying to survive herself, and being too closely aligned with the African kid wouldn’t have done her campaign any good.
That first term I spent at boarding school was the most foreign experience of my life, even to date. I had been so excited to be going to boarding school, fed as I had been on a diet of The Famous Five, Mallory Towers and “lashings and lashings of lemonade”. I imagined midnight feasts and best friends made for life. I could barely contain myself as we headed for the St. Pancras station with my school trunk, loaded up with a Tuck-box filled with goodies from Harrods. The best days of my life would start at the end of that train journey.
I thought I spoke English. In fact in Nigeria, I was always being commended for my excellent command of the language. Well I was soon disabused of that notion. I found out what I spoke was actually Nigerian something, something. I retreated into silence until I figured out how to round my vowels. But the girls also spoke a strange dialect. They spoke of tans, tangles, greasy hair, rounders, cream buns. What were they talking about. Inside my head, panic reigned. I existed in a world where I understood words but pieced together they held no meaning.
They also told me I was black. Nobody had ever told me that before. Strange to say in this caucasian centric world, but in my world in Nigeria it wasn’t a value that was part of my everyday life. People might point out that someone was dark but this utter ‘otherness’ that was being imposed confused and perplexed me. I was a shade of brown. Neither dark nor light; at least that’s what I had always thought. It wasn’t a reference point where I grew up. Unworthy of comment. But not here. Here I was BLACK. I was no longer judged by how bright or funny or pretty I was but by my Blackness and “Africanness”. I had never realised before the importance of this skin colour. Stupid parents. Why didn't they warn me about this blackness before loosing me into this world? I felt wrong-footed as I was forced to redefine myself through their eyes.
Then they asked to see my midriff. “Why?” I asked. To confirm that it was the same colour as the rest of my visible skin, of course. They reached out to touch my hair at every turn, to feel its texture and asked me what I washed my hair with? When I reacted with anger, they labelled me aggressive. Then they asked, with faces free of guile, to tell them about my pet lion or monkey. They wanted to know if I lived in a tree in when I went home to Africa. Not Nigeria, Africa. Because even though we had studied Africa in geography, Africa was less than a country worth you see, not like THE UNITED KINGDOM. When I refused to answer their questions, accusations of surliness followed.
At school my teachers asked if they could call me ‘Joy’ because ‘Tosin’ was too difficult for their tongues. I bowed to this pressure. When I took home my first-term report, my teachers had changed my name officially from Tosin to Joy. My father sent this report back, saying he didn’t know this child whose report had been sent to him. Reluctantly they started calling me Tosin again.
And then I was rendered the expert on all things black. “Do black people eat cheese? Do they swim? I hear black women like sex, Do you like sex?” I was twelve! How the fu*k was I supposed to know how all black people felt!
Then I learned that my voice was guttural. What was this guttural? Too loud. Too Bold. I learned to speak in whispers. I became Hesitant. Uncertain. That’s better they said. Thank God they told me. I might have done something really awful. Made a fool of myself in polite society. I learned to be quiet. I grew ashamed that I hadn’t had the sense to question nor notice my blackness before. Foolish Girl. Idiot. God bless these white people. I shrunk. I became quiet. Better.
I see now the girls were not malicious. Not intentionally. Truly. Just ignorant. And thoughtless. They wanted to be my friend but I turned away from them in shame and anger. They weren’t trying to hurt me. They didn’t pick on me. They just made colour the basis for every interaction we had. I was so happy when Caroline Crawley, a pretty plump white girl, first approached me to be her best friend. Then she killed me by adding how brave and liberal she was being for choosing a black girl for a best friend! As if I were a wild untamed animal or at best a sub-species of human, needing delicate handling. I remember the hot flush of shame that course through me. This constant rendering of me as other was exhausting and I didn’t have the tools to fight it. Wary of being considered aggressive, I just replied that I didn’t feel ready to commit to a best friend.
I saw myself through their eyes, found myself wanting and suddenly, out of nowhere, I longed to be white. I yearned for it. I wanted to fit in. To toss my hair off my shoulders and ask my friends for tanning lotion. Maybe if I prayed (secretly) hard and long enough it would come to pass!
Then Aunty Toni (I’m calling you that!) you wandered into my life.
When I realised I was going to be stuck in that school FOREVER, I made an (obviously) botched suicide attempt. My parents mantra to every complaint I had made was “toughen up” and I grew increasingly desperate. After my little farce (which also inadvertently saved my life but more on that another time) I was forced into a prolonged Easter holiday while I recovered so that the melodrama of my actions could cool down in my absence. My mother was very comfortable with me. What I had attempted was anathema. It was so shameful that my parents never brought it up with me, neither to reprimand or commiserate. In a place where people went to great, often diabolic lengths to stay alive, here was I, this demon-filled child obviously, trying to take my own life. There was a silence which grew fetid but it remained unbroken. My father distanced himself even more the fold; I think, but since we never spoke about it, that he blamed my mother. Once she told my great-uncle about it and his solution was that I hadn’t been beaten enough; “cane her and beat the devil out of her”, he encouraged. I think my mother just thought him ridiculous and that was the end of sharing with family members. My mother was unsure of what to do with me while I was at home and I couldn’t, didn’t know how talk to her. My parents were Nigerian and simply did not understand and had no experience of what I had tried to tell them.
My mum cried often and I was impatient with it, so I took to wandering aimlessly around central London by myself filled with existential angst. With a tenner in my pocket and no purpose, I drifted in and out of shops and one day, randomly into a second-hand bookshop in Piccadilly Circus, Central London. Flicking through the pile of books in a wooden box, I stumbled upon ‘The Bluest Eyes’. I liked the cover: a black girl on a book cover. She was the same age as me. This was different. Novel. I’d never seen that. And she wanted blue eyes. Ok, so I wasn’t the only black kid wanting to be White. Someone else knew how I felt, a secret so shameful that I have never shared it to this day. I bought the book but I had no idea what it contained. I had never heard of Toni Morrison and this book was so far removed from my usual staple of ‘Mallory Towers’ and ‘Famous Five’, books which increasingly made feel more lonely every time I read one. I didn’t know who Toni Morrison was, nor any African-American literature and no-one said go read Toni Morrison. There were no pointers, just crazy good luck.
In the epiphany that followed, you saved my life. Not metaphorically. Literally. I started the book on my way back on the Tube and I read it non-stop until I devoured the last words late into that fateful night. There and then I resolved never to be Pecola Breedlove. (http://www.shmoop.com/bluest-eye/pecola-breedlove.html) You yanked the scales off my eyes. You showed me the silent, unuttered conspiracy that lay barely below the surface construed to diminish and destroy me. You told me if I didn’t hold myself precious, nobody else would. You told me I had to shirk off the disregard in which they held me. Be Proud. Hold myself high: less risk being driven mad by self-loathing like Pecola. Oh Aunty Toni, you gave strength and you changed the direction of my life.
I resolved to like my kinky hair, my black skin, my broad features, my prawn-like eyes. Madness would not own me. Eurocentric ideals of beauty were not going to define and destroy me. This externally imposed inferiority complex which demanded to be internalised wouldn’t have its way with me. I wouldn’t let people tell me, that the God created me wasn’t good enough. I owned my blackness. I relished being African. And I resolved that to do that I would laugh longer, speak louder, be more! I was going to be the kind of person people were scared to mess with. I longed to be a bitch cos nobody messes with a bitch.
Before you get angry Aunty Toni, let me explain. I’m not saying that you are a bitch but I was 12 years old. I didn’t know the difference between being strong and being a bitch. I just didn’t want to be a victim anymore. I misunderstood your intention so my twelve year old mind deciphered strong as aggressive and abrasive and ‘whatever-Sive' I needed to be survive and thrive! You freed me. Your work spoke to me in an emotional language I had never heard of. You were the woman I wanted to grow to be and you showed me a woman I could be.
When I was fifteen, returned to the school and now a badass I had another pivotal moment. By this time I didn’t take any prisoners; I had attitude and plenty of it. I spoke loudly; laughed often and revelled in my blackness. In fact I took great pleasure in telling them about my love expl But I fell in love: with Shakespeare. Specifically ‘Macbeth’. Something about the play resonated with me and I cared. I also thought my English teacher, Mrs Molan was just amazing and so I wanted to impress her. So I wrote an essay which didn’t take 10 minutes and poured my heart into this text. The next week, I looked eagerly forward to the English and at the end of the lesson, Mrs. Molan called me to the front to have a word. I was so excited; I knew my essay was the bomb.
“Where did you copy this from?’, asked Mrs. Molan. I was confused. Sure I hadn’t heard right. “Where did you copy this from? There is no way this is your work.”, she said, her voice hardening. I was so shocked at the accusation, I just stared blankly at her. “I won’t fail you but don’t you dare give me work like this again. This is obviously too good to be your work.” I took my essay and walked away from her, my heart squeezing with the physical pain at the injustice of this accusation. The subtext here being that a little African girl would never understand the nuances of Shakespeare to write anything of importance. I never bothered to try again.
Until I became a woman and forgot who I wanted to be. Who I am.
“There are women in the world who get divorced and that’s what they do,” she says. “Their conversation is about it. He or she didn’t, or I used to, or therefore, and all of their emotions, all of their activity is about that one break-up. Why it happened, what was involved – they never move past it.” She pauses. “It’s a big thing, I guess, but it’s not that big.” (Toni Morrison, Telegraph interview).
Those words wounded me to the core and felt like a cruel illumination of my shortcomings. My days and nights were filled with dark thoughts and there was no respite in fitful sleep.
A couple of years ago I read, of Gwen Paltrow “ Conscious Uncoupling” and nearly keeled over at the absurdity of the concept. But I was also dizzied with the conflicting emotions that assailed me: I guffawed at the ridiculous therapy speak, “These Hollywood Peoples sef!”! But in a secret place I admired, nay envied that she and her husband could so casually jettison a pivotal relationship. I admired ‘her strength’ to move on or at least appear to! Even then, I wanted on my own to be Enough.
I am not like you nor Gwen Paltrow. I wish I were. The knife twists in my gut as I hear more than a smidgen of contempt for women who are defined by their divorce (or separation in my case) and I am further humiliated by my pain and dependency.
I so badly wanted to do a ‘Toni Morrison’ when my marriage collapsed; move on and do even bigger and better things. But the harder I try it seems, the harder it becomes to haul myself to my feet. I just want to lie down where I am and let it all be over. I am exhausted by my worthlessness and the pain that overwhelms me.
My husband didn’t leave me; I left him. By the time I left, I felt there wouldn’t be much more of me left to leave if I stayed. I was diminished, eroding away by the constant deceit. I thought my husband as my best friend but with hindsight I totally misunderstood the basis of our marriage. I wanted a best friend; I think he just wanted a hot salivating lover. I’m sure it’s possible to have both, be both but we it wasn’t our reality.
Our troubles had begun three years earlier, when I found out that he had made a pass at one of my friends. I was angry and humiliated by his ineptitude at not only propositioning a woman who wasn’t interested but who was also my friend. But I thought I understood that he was seeking comfort in the arms of someone else because I had been emotionally absent as I grieved for my dead family members. But as with all secrets, once one comes out the trickle turns into a steady stream. Out of it all emerged a man I didn’t know or recognise. Yet still, despite all my words I was ready to forgive, to start over. In that time as we had or I thought we were fighting to save our marriage; I was wrong. Even when we had made promises to each other, I found out that he had promptly broken those promises with total disregard and disrespect for me. He made a fool of me, over and over again and frankly nobody likes to be made a fool of. In those last few days together, I wanted to kill him. I think I was capable of killing him, I was so filled with murderous rage. That is not a sign of a healthy marriage.
The first few months were actually easy. I was fuelled by anger and outrage. Then as does flames began to subside, it was just pain. Everywhere pain and shame. How many people had known what was going on and never told me? How many of my friends had he propositioned? How many pitied or derided me behind my back? I couldn’t hold onto anger just cloying, suffocating, nauseating shame. Perhaps I am paranoid but I suspect many thought me a fool both for my ignorance as well as the decision to leave. Perhaps I am.
I distanced myself from friends.
As the dying embers of my marriage cooled at my feet, it filled my nostrils with the sickening, festering stench of failure. I was desperate to be sardonic. I was not. For them, for myself I wanted to be urbane and sophisticated, to say with a wry but self-conscious smile that my husband and I had agreed to ‘conscious uncoupling’, brush aside seventeen years as but a wisp of time and wax lyrical about how my newly enriched life. I couldn’t.
A friend recently accused me of being bitter. Actually I think her intention was to shame me for being bitter. For being too consumed by my emotions. And I felt shamed. She succeeded. Because I am. Or was. I was ashamed and sad and angry and deflated and bitter. But damn it, I have a RIGHT to be bitter. I have a right to sad and to be depressed and devastated. This is my Life, not some reality TV show. I don’t get to rewind and redo the last twenty years.
My new reality terrified me. Involuntarily tears welled up, my heart thud uncomfortably in my chest and I mourned for the future I was having to bury. Reminiscing at our 20th anniversary, at our renewing of vows, squabbling easily knowing you will be forgiven and wrenched from my own personal chronicler as he stepped back into the shadows and took our shared past with him.
I mourned my ignorance, my illusions or delusions of our history. I mourned the camaraderie we shared. I mourned Belonging and of being a team. I mourned the trials we had shared: Despair, Sickness, Grief, Financial crisis, Unemployment. And for what? So that I could I mourn the loss of Hope and Laughter?
Unlike you, Ms Morrison, I don’t have a career nor even a job to fall back on; a not unusual scenario for stay-at-home mums like me who face divorce as they enter their fifties. It is scary. No relationship, no money, no nothing, as we say at home. Plus single parenthood.
I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life nor how I will survive even in practical terms. At a quarter to 50, it seems I have a better of chance of winning the lottery than of getting a decent paying job … and I don’t even play the lottery!
Ms Morrison you are Talented, Powerful and In Control. Special. I want to be like you instead of the helpless, redundant being I ofttimes feel I am. I was ashamed not to be the arse-kicking role model my daughter deserved because I thought being strong was what it was all about. Now I see that watching me break into tiny little pieces, then piece myself together slowly, gingerly is probably one of the best gifts I can give her. Inevitably she will have bad times in the future but I hope my example means that she knows that she will also survive them.
Even though it seems much harder this time round, no book, no single truth to bring about an epiphany that I so desperately want, I’m going to keep going. Investing in someone else and watching all your dreams and hopes disappear IS devastating and frightening. For each of us going through a divorce/separation, there is no unique path to healing. A year ago I was immersed in so much pain, I didn’t think I could survive it, a year from now I may be in so little pain that all this … will be like that a bad dream.
Already I no longer hate nor despise him; I have even forgiven myself. Perhaps it is another form of self-deceit but I tell myself the last few years were a symptom of man in crisis and I remember the honourable and honest person I met twenty years ago. I think only of the good times and of the gorgeous child we made together. I won’t go back but I can stop hating.
For me, for now “It’s STILL that big” and you know what, that’s OK.
Once I read a book and it changed my life.
