I have a particular theory on death. I believe the dead aren’t really gone but very much alive and very much present. Ancestry for me is timeless. I never got a chance to bury my grandmother. My pain is the pain of every person who left home and cannot go back because the state considers them as an enemy for denouncing its crimes. Even though, I never mourned my grandmother, I recently accepted that she never really left me. Every day, I see her existence tied to my everyday life. My grandmother loved to smoke. Every day, she would sit on the balcony and light her cigarette. The quietness in her eyes, was a mix of the smoke and the memories she would relive as she smoked one cigarette after another for hours. I would always find her , alone smoking. My first instinct as any teenager who would be getting home after 8 hours in class was to run inside the house, to watch TV while I eat. She would sometimes asked If i could sit with her. Very often, she would stare at me and say nothing. Other times, she would carry me on her lap and would tell me stories I didn’t understand.
Yesterday I missed my grandmother. I felt her embrace and remembered all the years I had a chance to walk straight into her space and ask about her womanhood. The conversations we would have had if I had known how to ask her about choosing yourself as a woman in a society where you are told to put everyone first and not yourself. Today I would have loved to know the mistakes she made and the ones she isn’t afraid to make again. My grandmother was UNAPOLOGETIC. She was unafraid to make the terms of her own life and she would move UNBOTHERED. It was a lot for the society she lived in, especially in the Burundian culture where a woman is expected to be respectable and perfect. She created a carefree life for herself and made me taste freedom from afar. There are different opinions about her, that I now can interpret on my own ways. She wasn’t selfish, she had reached a point where she cannot come and kill herself. She wasn’t bitter, she was just a woman who has lived in an era where she was married at 16, then had to raise her daughters with all the dreams she never reached for herself. So she failed to hold her tongue when her descendants took for granted her lived experiences which made their existence easier. But today I am because she existed in all the multilayers that made her
” I want women to make mistakes” . I said to myself this morning. There is a constant patriarchal pressure for women to be perfect. We are conditioned to go above and beyond to please everybody. The narrative of the nice girls. The ones who can’t say no. The ones who never put themselves first because they are busy serving everyone. We fail to grant ourselves the same kindness, mercy and empathy we so dearly give to others.
I love to say that feminism made me a better person and that’s simply because it gave me a space to just be. A space to be myself entirely and learn everyday to embrace that person and thrives to exist with the full awareness of who I am. But feminism also allowed me to analyze the chains on my neck. The unnecessary burdens we carry simply because we want patriarchy to like us and accept us.
The perfectionism associated with womanhood, is something we must dismantle. I have always found the idea of women being superbeings, very gaslighting and so problematic. The unequal labor women perform or the struggles, we are forced to carry simply because they can tolerate the worst, is oppression.. Women deserve the privilege to be messy, make mistakes loudly and publicly. Women deserve to fail, to be weak , to be lost, to exist authentically. Very often the most radical thing we can do as women, is to allow ourselves to be humans and reject the idea that we have to constantly be super beings.There is really nothing glorious in killing ourselves to be superbeings. Dismantling patriarchy, requires that the same empathy, generous space given to men to be humans, is also granted to women.
As for me, I will continue to freely be messy, imperfect and still demand we access fundamental rights.
With Love,