The Awakened Woman

by Tererai Trent

  Then she got an email. It was a volunteer request forwarded from a neighbor: a local organization that helps refugee families adjust to life in the US itself needed help. It turns out my friend lives near one of the largest Syrian refugee communities in the nation. “I realized that I did feel disempowered without even knowing it,” she reflected. “I assumed I couldn’t do anything to ease the pain in my heart and the pain in communities so far away from me. I was wrong. I had way more power than I knew.”

  Today she has a whole family of new Syrian friends whom she takes grocery shopping, helps learn English, and job search, among other things. She has eaten the best Middle Eastern food of her life, and even hosts potluck dinners to inspire others who would like to help but don’t know how. All this happened by naming an unnamed longing in her heart. This is the awakening of our consciousness. When we listen to what makes us ache and breaks our hearts, we find our Great Hunger, our sacred purpose.

  If an answer doesn’t arise, here is a practice to aid in your asking. Find a quiet place free of distractions, someplace where you can close a door and shut others out, or a space separate from the busy noise of everyday life; this will be your masowe, your praying place for your sacred dreams journey. Sit or lie down in a comfortable position, feeling attentive and awake, but also calm and relaxed.

  Take a few breaths to wash off the cares of your day so that you are truly present. Take three breaths in through your nose and out through an open mouth, and then a few more, which will aid in circulation, relax the nervous system, and increase oxygen to your lungs.1 Hear the sound of your breath and notice how your body moves. Notice your chest rising and falling, perhaps even your stomach expanding and softening.

  Feel the breath expand into the front, back, and sides of your rib cage as your breath deepens. Let the skin on your forehead melt down toward your nose and let your inner eye and your outer eye sink back.

  Notice where your body meets the ground, floor, or chair beneath you. Allow the ground to support you, trusting that you are carried and held by its strength. Breathe into that trust, that support, allow your heart to expand up and out of it, your back straight, your chest slightly open to the space in the room.

  After a few moments of quiet, deep breathing in this position, ask yourself: What breaks my heart? If it helps, you might also ask: Where do I look in my community or in the world and feel my heart aching with some lack, pain, or injustice?

  What does my heart long for?

  Repeat the questions if you need more time with them:

  What breaks my heart?

  What in this world makes my heart ache?

  What does my heart long for?

  While still in your comfortable position in your quiet space, take a few moments to say your answer aloud, even if only fragments or phrases emerge. You may not know what to make of the answer. You may have two, three, or more answers. The answer may not make complete sense to you at this time. All of this is okay. The answer, even if only partially formed, is the beginning of your sacred dreams journey. Be open to anything that surfaces.

  No matter what arose in you this is a time for celebration. Take a few breaths of gratitude for the opportunity to explore these questions.

  Before returning to your day, I encourage you to write down what you have discovered. Now is a good time to start a journal or keep a notebook to chart your revelations as you read and practice these awakening rituals.

  Over the next couple of days, read or state aloud what you discovered in response to the question What breaks your heart? Allow yourself to let the responses turn over and float through your daily thoughts and feelings. Begin making connections between your heart’s longing and your life. How might your heart’s desire become a dream you can achieve? Do you see a connection to something beyond your own personal goals? How? Can you explain it to yourself and to a friend?

  Most important, ask, “Do these desires not only heal the past but also uplift generations to come?” Remember, you are not an ordinary dreamer, you are a sacred sister and you dream with a purpose for the greater good.

  You will know if the desire in your heart is the kernel of a sacred dream, because it will energize you, invoke your spirit of resilience, un-silence the once silenced voice, speak to issues that matter most, and implore you to encourage other women to do the same. The Great Hunger expects you to honor the greater good with your gifts. This is what gives meaning to life.

  Your unique gifts are longing to be expressed, and the Great Hunger will keep on nudging (or pestering) until you respond to the call. The whispers of the Great Hunger are always encouraging us to unlock what is within. Release your Great Hunger and you will be led by it with grace.

  * * *

  I. The Shona I use in this book is old Shona. It is still spoken but cannot be found in today’s dictionaries.

  2

  THE WOMEN THE WORLD FORGOT: RECLAIMING YOUR VOICE

  Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.

  —TONI CADE BAMBARA

  A woman in her late fifties followed me into the restroom after a talk I gave at West Virginia University. I’d talked about family cycles and the pain and shame that poverty, abuse, and poor education disproportionately bring to women and their children. “You brought it home,” this woman, Nikita, told me. “That cycle of shame runs deep in my family.”

  Nikita then tearfully traced for me her matrilineal heritage of poor, uneducated women. Denied an education, Nikita’s great-grandmother married young and gave birth to a daughter when she was just a teenager. That daughter, Nikita’s grandmother, dropped out of school after eighth grade, married young and also birthed a little girl, whom she raised mostly alone while her husband spent many years in jail; after his release he abandoned his family altogether. Nikita’s mother, like her mother and grandmother before her, grew up in poverty. She dropped out of school in seventh grade, barely able to read or write. She eventually turned to selling drugs and prostitution.

  Into this cycle of poverty and poor education, Nikita was born. Her script, and that of her children and her children’s children, was written for her: before completing high school, Nikita told me, she gave birth to two daughters. Both daughters are serving five-year sentences for dealing drugs. Nikita supports four grandkids, the children of her incarcerated daughters.

  Nikita said that my talk opened up a deep stirring in her, a place she had not wanted to visit before. This was the first time anyone had openly named the legacy of lost dreams that brought shame and grief to the women in her family. It had long been a guarded secret, a burden she carried all the time.

  “We were really smart people,” she reflected. “My mother could listen to a blues song and the next thing she had created something similar, but deep. Both my daughters were math wizards,” she remembered with a glow of nostalgic pride and more than a strain of sadness.

  At fifty, Nikita’s dreams weren’t much more than a memory, her longings haunted by the lost dreams of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother before her. We hugged, and as I was about to leave the restroom, Nikita whispered through her tears, “I come from generations of silenced and forgotten women.” And before I could recover from how she had combined those two words to define herself, Nikita continued, “Though inside, I do not feel broken. Deep down inside me, I can still feel my hopes and dreams.”

  Silenced yet unbroken; the fire of resilience remains.

  Not all women grow up in homes like Nikita’s, of course, but most of us grew up in a world that in one way or another stifled our dreams. As girls we have so many ideas and dreams and we are filled with such promise, a hunger for something more than what our ancestors or our mothers had. And whether it’s through an impoverished childhood, abuse, or the bias and discouragement of a culture that disapproves of feminine power, women get very good at putting those dreams on the shelf. We promise ourselves we’ll come back to them, but often they
become distant memories, faded and cracked like old photographs.

  I meet these women all across the globe; they tell me their stories in the hopes that someone will hear and see them, at last. A career woman who worked her way up a male-dominated corporate ladder only to discover that what she really wants is to move out to the country and spend time with her kids. An intelligent African grandmother thrilled to see her granddaughter learn to read, but secretly harboring shame because of her own illiteracy. A mother of four who is repeatedly told that she is “too old” to finish her college degree yet yearns to learn. A forty-year-old teacher who has achieved her professional and personal goals but can’t help wondering, “Isn’t there something more?” A thirty-seven-year-old writer who wonders, “At my age, am I still allowed to change my mind, to shift my life course?”

  Every day I hear of stories and experiences like these, stories that merge and weave into my own story. Although it looks different at different times and in different places, and they emerge from the realm of religion, politics, education or lack thereof, or even our own families, the problem of women’s silencing is a global one.

  There are messages coming from all directions that say: you are not good enough as you are; you are not of much use to the world; you do not have the resources to be empowered; you are too old to be in the public eye; you are too ignorant to understand the world around you—even things that concern your own life; you are not pretty enough to be useful. “The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,” as Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote.1 But as far and as confidently as it roams, searching for a world willing to meet it in its full glory, a woman’s heart returns in the night, Johnson tells us, dreams deferred, breaking against the bars of injustice, or invisibility, or fear.

  And you, sister, what are the words that define or limit you? What are the words you do not yet have? What silences your dreams? Are there deafening silences in your life? Where have you hidden your girlhood hopes and dreams? Can you still hear them? What is the “more” buried deep inside you that you are afraid to ask for? What is your Great Hunger?

  Many of us have lost touch with our dreams. We are afraid to speak them, as I was, because we feel certain those words will fall on deaf ears, or worse, that we will be mocked or sneered at. Perhaps no one bothers to ask us our dreams anymore. Or we are afraid to proclaim that the socially sanctioned dreams we have achieved—the big career, for example, or a glamorous wedding—are not as satisfying as we were told they would be.

  We might be more silent than we were built to be, but we are certainly not broken. In the face of doubt and questioning our voice, and in a profoundly divisive world, we can create a global choir of transformation, unity, and healing if we gather the courage to speak our truth.

  Our Silencing

  I am intimately familiar with how it feels to be a woman forgotten: devalued, dismissed, and disempowered by social forces beyond my control. My story may be very different from women across the globe who have also experienced silencing, but I hope that from telling my story, and the stories of others who have shared with me, I can shed some light and try to make sense of what our collective silencing looks like so that we can give shape to our absence and heal our voicelessness. It is one of my passions to investigate the root causes of this silencing because it is through understanding that we can imagine ways of reclaiming our voice.

  At the end of 1979, just as the War of Liberation, the civil war that had raged for over fifteen years in my country, was coming to an end, I was pregnant and, in the New Year, when I was hardly fourteen years of age, I gave birth to my first child. My mother named him Tsungai, which means “persevere,” indicating the long road I was going to travel, the same pathway that generations of women before me had traveled.

  By eighteen years of age, I had given birth to four children, one of whom died as an infant when I was unable to produce enough milk to feed him. I was a child myself. I felt invisible in my marriage; the clinking of dirty dishes, the sound of rags scrubbing the floors, and water sloshing as I washed baby diapers were the sounds that swallowed my existence. I would clean the house, take care of the children, and do all the chores—things culturally delegated to women—as my husband did not help with such things.

  He would be away from the house for long periods of time, I knew not where. Rumors would reach me that he was having many affairs. Afraid to ask him for the truth, I would refuse to share a bed with him, which led him to beat me since he expected his conjugal rights, as he had paid a cow in exchange for our marriage and me. Although I despised my many marital obligations, there was also a part of me that wanted to belong, to be a good wife despite the silencing of my soul that my marriage demanded. Every time I yielded to the voice of belongingness, I felt myself slipping further into invisibility.

  In my culture, all people are known through their mutupo (totem), an ethnic clan identity represented by an animal or animal body part. Individuals within the clan are addressed by their totems, such as Nzou, the Elephant; Mhofu, the Eland; Shumba, the Lion; Hungwe, the Bird; Nyati, the Buffalo; Soko, the Monkey; Moyo, the Heart; and so on. Although men and women share totems based on patrilineal ancestry, male family members carry the totem while a woman adopts the totem of her husband’s family when she marries. A totem serves as a family emblem that encompasses social identity and collective pride, as well as a bond of unity within the group. It was a curse to have fatherless children or children with different mutupos, and so I felt stuck.

  The sexual trauma of my early marriage damaged me for life. My culture had a strong code of silence around such trauma. These issues were not openly discussed, although it was made clear that “good” girls remain in their marriages no matter what. Like many young women, while I did my best and tried to behave like a good woman, my husband’s promiscuous behavior was held to a different standard. When I shared my concerns with my in-laws or with his sisters, I was told that this was part of the marriage.

  I realized some of my friends accepted such marriages and that society expected women to remain in these relationships for the sake of the children. I quickly learned that it was expected for men to have multiple, concurrent sexual partnerships. Sexual abuse, rape, and coerced sex occurred frequently, and yet many in my society blamed women for this abhorrent behavior.

  Around this time, during the middle of the war, I got a surprise visit from my brother Tinashe, who had run away from the fighting. He arrived at my husband’s community in the middle of the night, slept at a nearby store, and showed up at my in-laws’ home early in the morning. He found me sweeping the yard, and before I could see him I heard his voice. “Tererai, is that you?” he said with tears streaming down his face.

  We spent the day talking about the war and the suffering it brought to communities and families. The following day he left without a word. I was later told that he took the first bus very early in the morning. I was deeply saddened. Little did I know that he had been so concerned with my situation that he rushed back home to tell my mother how he found me. My mother took advantage of one of my father’s many disappearances and dispatched my cousin, Sekuru Munemo, to bring me back to my home village. Sekuru arrived at the home of my husband’s family just a few days later to find a sad and skinny girl in a torn red dress. I will never forget the first words out of his mouth: “Sekuru Munemo has come to take you home to your mother.”

  Leaving my marriage cast me as a pariah. Even relatives and friends whispered behind my back, “Aiwa rangove gaba, nyuchi ne hunchi hwadzo zvakaenda kare”—“Eh, she is now an empty can—valueless.” Single women are considered unstable, with the belief that only marriage gives a woman stability and worthiness. “The bees and honey are long gone,” they say, meaning that I am no longer a virgin, and now I am called mvana or nzenza (unchastely, a slut). I had a ninth-grade education and no source of income, three young children, and the mark of shame upon me.

  Nevertheless, I believed that I could find work.
At the age of twenty, my first job was as a cleaner for a local bus company in Chinhoyi, a midsized town between Harare and Karoi toward the Chirundu border, an immigration border post that demarcates Zimbabwe and the Republic of Zambia. The Harare-to-Chirundu bus route is busy, which meant that I was at work in the early morning to clean toilets, dishes, and floors left dirty by night drivers and conductors. Because the owner of the company made constant excuses on payday, I hardly got paid. He was notorious for sexually abusing female workers, and many victims became his wives. I could not stand this man and stayed as far away from him as possible, but I was desperate to keep the job so I would tread lightly. Those who married him were hostile to new girls who joined the company. That there was so much mistrust among women seemed a pity to me.

  I had this job for almost a year when the owner told me that he could no longer afford to pay me. When I asked about being paid for work already done, he invited me to discuss this in his chambers. Instead, I packed my stuff and ran home to my children.

  Without a job, I began to feel desperate. Around this time I met a man named Zuda and we quickly became friends. Zuda seemed different, and as friends we confided about our past lives. He actually took some responsibility for his previous failed marriages and was understanding about my own past. After a year of courtship I thought he would be a great husband. It suited my patriarchal family fine that my second husband paid a bride price befitting a “damaged” woman, which was enough to buy a cow.