Written
by
Tambu Kahari.
I am turning 39 at the end of this month and instead of my usual celebration of self, I am crying inside. I am exhausted with this life that I chose. I wish I could take it back to the store where I bought it from.
I am devastated by my life and the regrets of roads not traveled. I know what led me here. They were not all my choices. Destiny had a lot to do with it too. At the beginning of this journey called my life, I knew what I wanted and how I was going to get it. How is it that I have got nothing. I never get what I want and I never get what I worked hard for. Perhaps at the beginning, I asked for too much.
I wanted to be free. I wanted to be in charge of my life. I wanted to be my own government and my culture left no room for a woman to self actualize. In fact, I was a slave and I couldn’t live like that. Shona culture to me was oppressive.
As a little girl, I disliked having to eat after all the men had eaten. I thought it was unfair. After all, we did the cooking. When my aunts tried to tell me that it was the way of things. They told me that I would have to get used to it because if I didn’t, I couldn’t be a good wife. I would get so angry. They wanted to make me subservient and that wasn’t going to happen. I questioned culture relentlessly. I made a list as I was growing up of what I was never going to do.
• I was never going to go on my knees to serve a man, any man, food.
• I was never going to be told how to dress, how to talk, what to think, when to eat or when to breathe.
• I was going to earn my own money and control it too.
When I decided to be a journalist, my aunt went to my father and begged him to stop me from joining the profession. She said all journalists were whores that men didn’t take seriously and I would never get married.
She was anxious that I would end up not having a family of my own in good old Zimbabwe if I broke too many cultural rules. Her concern only made me feel like I was in bondage. When I did become a journalist, a boyfriend remarked about my unusual career when he picked me up from an assignment. He asked me, “What does your brother think of this job of yours?”
That relationship didn’t last.
My writing worried my family. They wanted me to stop it. What I wrote about embarrassed them. It made them uncomfortable. They couldn’t openly support me and so they ignored it altogether. No member of my family owns a book I have written. About two cousins out of possibly one hundred have even read a book I have written. My family hoped that if they pretended I wasn’t a writer and never spoke of my work, I would see the error of my ways and stop writing, period.
After my first novel hit the bookstores of Zimbabwe, my editor at the time asked me to have sex with him. When I refused, he looked at me, puzzled. How could I write about sex and not be promiscuous? As far as he was concerned, I had to be promiscuous because no decent woman would ever go there in literature. Even though I knew this was what most men in Zimbabwe thought, I proceeded to write two more novels with lots of sex. At least one of those never saw the light of day.
My family wasn’t that wrong after all.
When a marriage of convenience presented itself, I turned it down. That could have been an amazing marriage and lifestyle. I would have wanted for nothing. But,I couldn’t stomach the man. I spent very little time with him, but when I did, I was always trying to avoid him and any intimate situations that arose. I was not attracted to him. Why lie? I found him nauseating, to say the very least. He made my skin crawl just by touching my arm.
He was also very chauvinistic and abusive. Oh hell, I wasn’t having that. When I decided to break away, I was hounded by family, friends, colleagues and those who mind other people’s business in our society. They tried to tell me over and over that I was making a big mistake by refusing such a great match. As an African woman, they told me, I had to grin and bear it. I had to think about stability and the future.
Clearly I thought of those things and I sprung free.
Many years later, this is the life I have.
This life has left me so far away from home that I don’t even know how to make my way back. Even if I could make it back to that culture, to “the people” the truth is I am no longer one of them. I have changed drastically. I had to. How else could I survive?
This life has left me so lonely. I am surrounded by strangers. I have moved more than eight times since I left Zimbabwe. I am always looking for a better city, or a better state. I convince myself that I will be happier in another state. I tell myself that this time I will meet great people. I will create friendships that will last a lifetime. I will actually fall in love and have it reciprocated. I will do something different from what I have been doing for the last few years. I tell myself that I will discover new places, new ways of enjoying life. I will finally beat this emptiness.
I convince myself that this time will be different. I will be happy. After about a year in a new state, I prepare to run to another.
There have been years when I have spent every holiday with my son, just the two of us. On those holidays I don’t bother to cook or decorate a Christmas tree. I just let one holiday blend into another.
I change jobs on a regular basis. Sometimes I leave a job because I am moving out of town, but on rare occasions, I get fired. It doesn’t matter though because I fill my life with activity. I start writing like crazy. I take on more assignments than I can handle. I book my son into numerous activities so that I am running around ragged with him. I eventually find my way to the local university where I pick up some classes. The idea is to be so busy that I never think about how alone I am. If I open that door and step through it, I can never go back. I know my limitations. Eventually, it is not going to work. I move. It stops me from completely losing my mind.
There is no doubt that living overseas has brought me many gifts. I have been happy, some of the time. I have made some amazing friends and whenever I leave, it tears my heart out that I will probably never see them again. I have seen terrific sites and enjoyed Mexican food! I have laughed and I have partied.
But, it doesn’t take away the need for a home. Somewhere along the line, I lost my home. Once upon a time I used to ask a friend to walk with me to the bathroom because I didn’t want to go alone. That friend would go with me and wait til I was done, talking as if accompanying an adult to the bathroom was normal. It was normal, in our world. When you are born in Africa, you never spend a day or even a second alone.
I made choices that forfeited my right to have company in the bathroom. I forfeited my right to a cultural marriage and having a family. I forfeited my right to respect and stability and a life that continues to grow every year.
I wanted to be free. I wanted to write. I wanted to marry a man who respected me,loved me and considered me his friend. I wanted 2.3 children. So, I sacrificed what was for what I thought would be. At 39 years of age, the “what would be”has become “what could have been.” All of a sudden, all those things I thought were stifling me are looking so good.
This is a beautiful post. You stood strong for what you believed in when everyone was against you. That is incredible. You have achieved so much. I think there is always a trade off in life. If you had stayed behind and tried to fill the shoes your family wanted you too, you would ALWAYS have wondered what if would have been like to live life your way.
Tambu, as usual, you shoot straight from the lip. Everything you say here resonates, because it is real. However, like the comment above pointed out, there are trade offs. Don’t think of what might have been. Rather, think of yourself as a trailblazer. You are an example. Be proud of what you have achieved. It cost you a lot, but you remained true to who you are. That’s something to be proud of.