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The Patriarchy Paradox

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  The Patriarchy Paradox: How Older African Women Both Challenge and Support Patriarchy Recently, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about patriarchy, its seeming inescapability, this looming towering giant that pulls at the fabric of our lives, and the women that weave this fabric, that support the patriarchy’s dismissal of our humanity, and help it steal away our happiness. I know of a couple that got married not too long ago, a Shona one, and when they had their roora ceremony I knew immediately that theirs was a marriage destined for disaster. The husband’s family was very ‘traditional’, in the sense that they viewed women as nothing but glorified mops, and I couldn’t name off the top of my head one woman who had married into this family and was happy. They had all struggled in some way, and in order to truly make it in that family, a great deal of sacrifice was required; sacrifice of joy, of time, of self. Now, the woman who had married this man seemed to have had somewhat of ...
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Growing Pains (I don't fit into my jeans anymore. I don't fit into my life anymore.)

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A Collection of Miscellaneous Thoughts A s I grow older, I struggle not to fall into the doom and gloom of the twenties. Life comes at you fast, and I find myself internally retreating to when I was 4, pigtails and butterfly clips, and my parents got me a cake big enough for my full name to be written on it. I find myself wanting to relive my life, and I have to tell myself to simply allow myself to exist . It is essential to practice slowing down, hitting the brakes, and allowing yourself to take a break: to be here, and not there, in some other place, some distant land, some imagined future. As my friend Claudia wrote in her recent blog article, “Sometimes life is quite simple.” It is essential to take a few steps back, and see things with the simplicity of a child. Rediscover the world and my place in it. How can I be good to other people? How can I be good to myself? Often when I try to navigate my adult life, I try to imagine myself as being the guardian of my younger self...
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The Art of Mothering Men

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The Art of Mothering Men I often wonder why breakups seem to be much harder on women than on men (most of the time.) After a breakup, it's commonplace to hear a woman speak of ‘finding herself’ but it is rare to hear of men embarking on these elaborate spiritual and emotional journeys, to find themselves again, to learn self-love, to learn their value outside of romance. There is this common phenomenon in women that I will call ‘wife-ication.’ I would describe this as the gradual loss of self, and the phase when one makes their male partner quite literally their entire world. It begins like this: You’ve gone out to the club, it’s girls’ night and everyone is having a blast. Your friend’s phone rings, it’s her man and he wants to see her. Goodbyes are said and she leaves to be with her man. Over time you hardly ever see this friend, she is always with her man, but funnily enough, he isn’t always with her. He still hangs out with his friends and maintains a healthy social life....
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The Question of Love

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A collection of my miscellaneous thoughts about love When I loved, it was almost as if I experienced a rebirth. I had gone through a metamorphosis almost overnight and quite suddenly within the short space of time it took me to fall in love, two very different versions of myself existed; who I had been before I met him, and who I became after. I do not think I experienced love at first sight, rather that I experienced the sensation of seeing him for the first time and knowing that I was going to fall in love with him. After poring through the internet trying to a find a word that describes this particular feeling, I finally found the phrase I had seen once before, years ago, and tried to find. ‘Koi No Yokan  –  恋の予感 ‘Koi no yokan’ refers to the sense that we have just met a person with whom we will inevitably fall in love. Japanese speakers think of ‘Koi no yokan’ as a premonition of love, solely based upon the feeling that you get after you have met someone and imagi...
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Breakups Suck.

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  Breakups Suck I've probably been broken up with about 3 times now. My first real heartbreak was in 2019 when this boy I was insanely besotted with dumped me the day of our one month 'anniversary.' I cried at school the very next day to the point that I looked feeble and sickly and my Geography teacher had to ask me if I was okay. During my O Level exams, English Language to be specific, his name appeared in the exam paper and I literally broke down during the exam, but because success is fueled by pain I got an A* in that subject. Navigating heartache while I was in school was probably a lot better than trying to heal out of it, because at least I was forced to go to school and focus on studying and be distracted from my pain. Outside of school, as an adult, there's nobody to push you to get up, exercise, drink water and be productive. It's easy to just waste away and let grief totally encompass you.  During my first heartbreak, it took me months to really g...
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What Kind Of Black Person Are You? Part II

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  On Race, Identity and Relationships In our previous chapter, we established a background and a history about myself, private school, coons, and the one guy I met who I thought was a real coon before I got to know him.  This guy was the type of black guy everybody just naturally assumes likes white girls only. Even though he had been blatantly been flirting with me, this all flew over my head because I couldn't even fathom that he was attracted to me. Everybody, me included, still has this impression of him. I screamed myself hoarse during our relationship and like a week after it ended, that everybody had gotten him wrong and misunderstood him, and that I really knew him, and he did like black women. But there was never really any public proof of this, and I couldn't pull out conversations where he'd said he likes Tems, or that he "doesn't discriminate" and finds any woman attractive regardless of race. A friend of mine said on the day he dumped me, "Th...
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What Kind Of Black Person Are You? Part I

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On Race, Identity and Relationships.    When I was about 15 years old I started going through a bit of an identity crisis. I was a black girl, going to a predominantly black institution (PBI), and I didn't like almost everything that the other black girls liked. I hated Afrobeats, and could only tolerate it in small amounts. I was not big on Gqom or House or eventually amaPiano. I liked 'sad white girl' music and a lot of alternative indie stuff. For context, I was simultaneously going through a pick me crisis but I grew out of that quickly, thank god.    Anyway, I liked Pink Floyd, The Beatles, BRONCHO, Atlas Genius, Tame Impala, Cage The Elephant and so on, you get the gist, liked reading (but not Nora Roberts, Harlen Coben, James Patterson etc, think more Lev Grossman, Neil Stephenson, Neill Gaiman) and was into stuff like fantasy. I could speak and understand Ndebele, which was the dominant language quite perfectly, but because I have and had anxiety I was too af...
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