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Searching for my family truth
Thuli Nhlapo
Kwela Books
Prologue
| women shedding tears may be overrated |
It seems that as far as women and issues are concerned, a lot of emotion is involved. ‘I feel’, ‘I really feel like’, ‘I think’ – that’s all one seems to hear when surrounded by so-called real women. What nonsense.
One particular day springs to mind when I forgot to ‘feel’ but rather decided to exercise my right to know the truth. I called in sick at my place of employment – I was a practising journalist for a daily newspaper, but there were no breaking stories on that day and I wasn’t going to be missed in the downtown newsroom.
I took a bath, got dressed, ate breakfast, grabbed my handbag and was off to the parking lot and into my car. There was no fuss really; I don’t even remember saying a prayer about it. To me it was the most natural thing to do, to drive for forty-five minutes to what was then the East Rand (now called Ekurhuleni Metropolitan after all the democratic name changes). It was a weekday when school-going children would not be at home. I counted on the fact that the dearest husband would not be home either, because he drove big trucks for a living and was likely to be on some long-distance trip to deliver something for his employers.
I really took care to make sure there would be very little distraction because I considered my mission to be crucial. The matter had been bugging me for many years. While others in the family had shed some light on what they knew, the only person who knew the whole truth had stayed mum, not once volunteering to talk. The closest she had come to it was when she said: ‘I hated being pregnant with you. I used to cry the whole day. I hated carrying you in my stomach. It was such an embarrassment for me and my family.’
Of course, the woman was only seventeen or eighteen years old when she was pregnant with me. I understood the embarrassment bit, but the hatred? I didn’t understand that. Over the years I had perfected the trick of shutting down completely – emotionally, that is. If for one reason or other my head refuses to process some information at a given time, I don’t waste my time trying to reason it out – I just shelve it.
Well, to say I wasn’t shocked by Mother’s words would be an understatement, but did I show any emotion? Absolutely not. My brain couldn’t program the magnitude of that piece of information since I was barely a teenager at the time, so I did what I do best – I saved it under the To Do List somewhere at the back of my mind with the hope of revisiting it when the time was right.
The thought of not having dealt with Mother’s unfortunate statement did cross my mind as I drove pass Spruitview Shopping Centre, crossing the set of traffic lights that would see me closer to the house – it’s not my home, never was, never will be. As I drove past cheerful hawkers at the roadside, the thought that I had been the hated pregnancy threatened to wreak havoc in my mind. After so many years with the people who were supposed to be my blood family, I’ve learned a few lessons; there are things they prefer to do differently and most, if not all the time, no explanation is given.
After Mother told me I was an embarrassment to her and her family, she never once mentioned the subject to explain what she meant by it. The adult me, with two children of my own, needed urgent answers.
I should think I greeted Mother when I arrived at her house for I am polite – maybe not always, but most of the time. I don’t recall discussing the weather to break the ice. All I remember was asking the most important question in my life and waiting patiently for an answer.
‘Who is my real father? Did you have sexual relations with a certain white man on that farm where you lived? What’s my real surname?’
To my utter disbelief, what followed were ugly emotions and a screaming match. Had I been a proper woman with a healthy bunch of feelings, I may have reacted differently, but I was far from being impressed.
‘How can you insult me like that?’ Mother said, weeping and making sure her voice caught in her throat. ‘You have really hurt my feelings.’
That was the response from the woman who gave birth to me some years back. I should call her Mother but I’m not too sure the title fits. After all, she hated being pregnant with me and I was an embarrassment – validating my existence by saying ‘Mother’ may upset her or, worse, invoke more hateful feelings. I called her many names but ‘Mother’ wasn’t one of them. To be precise, as a child I called her ‘malume’, meaning aunt, because that’s how my cousins referred to her. When I was a grown-up with my own kid, I’d refer to her as my son’s grandmother. More recently, I have called her by her name or, depending who I’m talking to, I use the title that person would have used to refer to her. If it’s her brother’s kid I’m talking to, I’d say ‘ukgari yakho’ (your aunt). When I was being myself, honest to the point of being blunt, I called her ‘that woman who allegedly gave birth to me’.
And now: ‘He is such a good husband. He’s been very good to me. He’s treated you so well all these years. You ate Nespray tinned milk just like white kids and you wore white and pink vests from Woolworths stores, now you want to insult us like this?’
My question had nothing to do with her husband. I could have sat there and disputed every quality she attributed to him but that was not the reason I was there. I wanted to know who my real father was. I wanted this good woman who goes to church almost every day of her life to tell me the truth, once and for all. I tried to calm her down, volunteering to share my own questionable love life.
‘Look, I’m an adult now. There really is nothing to be ashamed of. I have two children from two different fathers. I didn’t plan it that way but it happened and my boys know they have different surnames. They know how that little mistake happened. Really, at this stage, your being embarrassed to tell me the truth isn’t necessary.’
Those who say women are the best liars aren’t too far from the truth. And, yes, all is covered with a barrage of emotions.
‘What makes you think my husband isn’t your father? Look at your brother and two sisters – you have similar features. You look alike. No one can doubt he’s your father.’
There we went on that slippery road – the road I wanted to avoid at all costs – discussing and talking about her husband, the man I had to call Father, the man who had nothing to do with what I had come to talk to her about.
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘if you look at my two boys, don’t they look alike? They do. You know why? I’m their mother. They inherited some of their features from me. Therefore, it’s not too difficult for me to look like your other kids even though they are all darker than me. Let’s assume I inherited my light complexion from you and only you.’
None of this was the answer I had come for. It was ‘my husband this’ and ‘my husband that’. All I got were accusations and more tears. But did the strategy work? Yes, it let her off the hook, gave her a chance to concentrate on searching for piles of tissues to blow her nose. But so many years later, I’m still hungry for the truth.
And now that I recall that day, there’s one thing I forgot to do; I didn’t cry. All I did was leave the kitchen, walk around to the main gate, open it and get back into my car and then drive back to my home – answerless from Mother dearest, but made to feel guilty and disrespectful. You know that stage when you’re past being angry and you’re ready to spit on anything and everything that gives you grief? It’s the type of anger that could see you empty the entire magazine of a gun into some moron’s body. Yet I manage to smile without anyone noticing the internal anger. In my book, that’s not pretence but being polite, showing the spirit of Ubuntu, as Africans would say when mainly covering up crap. How do they explain the spirit of Ubuntu again? They say, ‘You are because I am.’
I’ve been gatvol for a very long time even though I haven’t had the time to express it. My not weeping actually has nothing to do with my feminine side but with the scary possibility that if I start crying what happens when I find I can’t stop? Who will be called