Colour Me Yellow - Thuli Nhlapo

Скачать книгу

1970s.

      ‘I cried daily when I was pregnant with you because I hated it.’

      Mother never missed an opportunity to share this crucial piece of information with me. I was born when I wasn’t supposed to have been born. And she wasn’t thrilled. Even though she’s never given reasons for her disclosure, I gathered that she wanted to make sure I didn’t forget.

      As a result of my having been born ‘too early’, my youngest aunt on Mother’s side still doesn’t like me very much. Apparently, she had to sacrifice her share of cow’s milk because Maternal Grandpa made sure I was well fed, even if it meant his last-born daughter had to be weaned off cow’s milk a bit early. Why fight over cow’s milk? Anyway, why was I not breast-fed?

      Had my birth been registered in Standerton or Bethal soon after I was born, you might know me as Khabonina Mtsweni. Mtsweni is Maternal Grandpa’s surname, which he was willing to give me. Even during his last days on earth he had no qualms about sharing his surname with me – all he wanted was for my ‘parents’ to tell me the whole truth in front of him. Unfortunately, the ‘parents’ didn’t think it was necessary. Since God has recalled Maternal Grandpa, I can’t have his surname even if I were to cry for it daily. Who would sign the affidavit to give me permission to use it? That’s what our Home Affairs Department would want – an affidavit from those who own the surname.

      I’m known as Thuli – which is short for Thulisile. That’s the name on my birth certificate and on my identity document. Since there are few things that are known for certain about my childhood, circumstances surrounding my acquiring the name are also different. It all depends on who is telling the story and what their motives are, which is mainly to be polite and not hurt my feelings.

      One version is that lobola was paid for my mother before I was born, so the family of Father (her husband) was supposed to give me their name but they didn’t.

      A second version, which is as creative as the first, makes it more difficult to decide which is the accurate one. It is said I left Maternal Grandpa’s home where I was born on a farm known as Khabonina but when I joined Paternal Grandmother’s home near Pretoria, she decided not to endure further embarrassment by keeping a name that would raise questions. Paternal Grandmother changed my name from Khabonina to Thulisile after revisiting the events surrounding my birth.

      She was told I had been quiet all day in my mother’s womb, showing no signs of being ready to emerge, but all of a sudden I was born without problems but in total silence. I understand Mother’s agitation about the fact that her husband’s sisters came all the way from Pretoria by train to see her before I was born with only one basin of baby clothes. This was another factor contributing to Mother’s dislike of me because there she was, a pretty new bride having given birth to a so-called first-born child with the greatest womaniser in a small town and his family didn’t share the excitement. Had Mother known better, she would have run away from the marriage because those were troubling signs. But, as they always claim, love is blind.

      The third version about my naming sounds plausible, but the others also seem true and believable, which is why I just choose whichever one I want, depending on the weather and my mood. It was said that in naming me Thulisile, Paternal Grandmother was giving me the name of one of her daughters. Apparently Thulisile was the name of one of the aunts, the second from last, who turned out to be Mother’s main competitor in spending her husband’s money and in child bearing.

      In an African way, it is said that a name follows a child, which is why care and thought are applied when naming a baby. Even though you meet Matlakala (dirt), Nthofela (a thing), Tlhoriso (suffering), Goodknows and Guilty at shopping malls and in soccer grandstands, those African names mean something to those children. Someone added that the names follow those children if, and only if, the children themselves believe them.

      Since I have many names, at least my choice is not limited – I can choose which one I like any day and certainly which one to live up to. There seems to be more than one name that was passed over. The aunt I’m supposed to be named after also shares a name with Mother. Mother Johanna and Aunt Johanna. It seems it was written in the stars that those two would be lifelong competitors. But that’s where similarities between us end. She has three children, two boys and a girl – all out of wedlock and all from different fathers, and she didn’t know either their families or surnames. After a string of failed relationships and failed attempts to appease ancestors, she was growing older as a single woman.

      I have been told that during the old system in South Africa every person had to have two names, a traditional name and a Christian name. That meant I wasn’t going to be just Thulisile, I had to have a Christian name. To that effect, Paternal Grandmother gave me her own name, Ennie – perhaps pretending that this yellow little thing was now a full member of her family with Nhlapo as her surname. I was legitimate in the eyes of all and on paper – the problem was that the Nhlapo family refused to accept me in their hearts. No matter how hard I tried to belong, they made sure I remained an outsider.

      I grew up feeling that I was always an intruder, first in Mother’s womb, then in her decent family home, and later in the family of Mother’s in-laws. After years of trying to extract bits of information about myself from Mother dearest with minimal success, I’ve concluded that if a mother didn’t want to be pregnant with a child, she would make a concerted effort either to forget everything about that child or to bury the information deep down in a place that she knows she won’t ever visit. The unwanted child, even if it was born alive, ceased to exist in its mother’s mind the day she made up her mind not to want it.

      What has taken me a very long time to grasp is that no matter how hard the unwanted child tries to be good in life, his or her efforts have very little or no impact at all on the mother’s feelings or actions. In the mother’s mind, an unwanted baby remains an unwanted problem, something to be swept under the carpet and hidden from the eyes of society.

      Some say that women are born nurturers. Our societies want us to believe that when a mother sees her baby for the first time, even if she didn’t want it, some instinct kicks in and she’s immediately filled with this flowing and amazing love. It might have happened sometime in history but not in my life. And, having met other unwanted babies, I’m convinced we could form Unwanted Babies Anonymous with no difficulty at all. At our meetings, where I’d make sure I was voted founder and president, we won’t refer to ourselves as unwanted adults because what was unwanted was the babies that we were. These babies need to heal before growing up into happy and wanted adults. In some low-budget American movies I’ve seen, some unwanted babies do turn out to be loved by their mothers in the end – but then that’s a movie. The ending always has to be positive so as not to upset viewers.

      As someone with ambitions of establishing Unwanted Babies Anonymous, I can tell you that Mother may be in her happiest mood, but let me walk through the door or try to take part in the conversation and her mood changes so quickly you’d swear I’d got the control button to her emotions. Unless there’re people from the church visiting, my appearance signals the end of Mother’s happiness. If you have a mother like that, you learn to walk on eggshells all the time because you have no idea what’s going to trigger her irritation with you. It becomes even worse if her husband has a short fuse because you then believe that it’s your sole duty and responsibility to fix everything and everyone and try to ensure there’s peace in the home. Sadly, in the process of making peace, you learn to forget about yourself.

      You learn to move on when you are a young adult facing life’s deeper questions that only more mature adults can help you answer, but none is willing. You try to move the puzzles in your life in such a way so that the pieces all fit in; crooked as they may appear, you try to fit them in to look nice and orderly. The only challenge you face is that, deep down, the longing persists. It’s like someone inside you keeps reminding you of what’s missing. Nevertheless, to keep the peace and live a normal life as expected by society, you carry on with your inside void properly concealed from the outside world.

      * * *

      I must have been a peculiar child because I do not have any recollection of events from the time I was born up to the time I started school. There is no picture of me

Скачать книгу