In marrying again, I was comforted with the knowledge that I had a place to rest my head, as did my children. But three months into the marriage I learned some difficult truths about my husband. He was prone to violent mood swings, using controlling behavior and demeaning language in order to get what he wanted.
When he told me I was worthless, I believed him. When he told me I would be an embarrassment to my family if I dare thought of leaving him, I believed him. When he whispered to me that, after all he had found me “used,” and not a virgin, and that leaving him would tarnish my image, I believed him. I put stock in stories I heard from older women about how their husbands changed over time. I bought into the traditional notion that children need a father and a mother living in one home. I joined with other young women as we prayed together, hoping that our husbands would change someday, too.
Then one day, I found Zuda in bed with a young girl. “How could you do this to me?” I asked him. He became enraged that I dared to confront him, flailing his arms in the air and shouting so close to my face that I could feel his spit as he enunciated each word.
“You have no right to challenge me,” he sneered. “You have no right to stop me from sleeping with any woman I want.” And then, as if to completely undermine me, he added, “I fulfilled my responsibility to you by paying a bride price to your parents. If it doesn’t suit you, give me back the cow I paid to your people.”
One morning, I went to the local clinic with some stomach pain only to be told I had a sexually transmitted disease. When I confronted my husband, he accused me of being promiscuous. Terrified and hurt, the painful warts further shaming me, I accused him of bringing HIV, a terrible disease that was running rampant in our community, into our family. He beat me until I could hardly stand. With blood pouring from my mouth and from the delicate skin of my thighs, which were already bruised from previous beatings, Zuda stood over me hurling insult after insult down at me. “My children,” I thought to myself, and my eyes scanned the room until I saw them. They were cowered up against the wall, holding tightly to each other, fear darkening their bright brown eyes.
Then the voices of our neighbors standing around outside reached my ears. They had heard us. It was a further embarrassment to me to have another woman witness my own beating. Women are supposed to preserve the sanctity of marriage at all costs and remain proud to be married. As though reading my fear, Zuda kicked me so hard that I was hurled outside for the world to see how despicable and unworthy of a wife I was. The neighbors gawked at the sight of me as they witnessed the insults. My daughter, Sibo, hardly eight years old, walked slowly toward me with an old dirty cloth. She leaned down and wiped away the tears, which were now mingling with blood from a forehead wound.
Overwhelmed with the task, she sat down next to me, crossed her arms over her tiny knees, and let her head fall forward onto her arms. She was so close that I could smell the dust on her dress. I longed to reach out and curl her into my arms, but I was afraid I might further infuriate my husband and place my daughter in danger. Shame and isolation made its way into the pit of my stomach and settled there.
Hurting and too embarrassed to seek help, I tried to nurse my own wounds, but the gaping slash just below my knee would not heal. In the days that followed, I developed a fever that I could not get rid of. Then the wound below my knee began to turn green. One morning, my neighbor found me lying outside in the sun, shivering and sweating with a pounding headache. She immediately found me a car that took me to the hospital. As I sat in the hospital being cleaned and sewn back together by the nurse and a doctor, my mind wandered back to my public humiliation, the insults, and the faces of my children. I left the hospital with antibiotics and, having nowhere else to go, I returned to my abuser.
A few days later, I woke up nauseous and vomiting. It was a struggle to focus. Food tasted different and I developed a terrible craving for the residue created by bark-eating termites on nearby trees. “Oh,” I moaned. “I must be pregnant.” Part of me thought having children with this man might make me a good wife. As I sucked soil from a termite mound, I wondered how on earth I would support my children. Deep down, I knew that with each pregnancy, I slipped further and further into poverty and dependence on a man.
In that moment of grief and hopelessness, a story I’d recently heard about a woman who ended her own life surfaced and took hold of my thoughts. After years of enduring backbreaking labor growing cotton, the woman learned that her husband used all of her earnings to bring home a third wife instead of supporting his existing wives and children. Shattered, the woman killed herself by ingesting the same toxic pesticide commonly used to control cotton bollworms.
I pushed my body up against the tree, the taste of soil still fresh in my mouth, and considered ending my life, too. Another toxic marriage, another child brought into a world of violence and pain, another life that I could not support on my own—it was too much to bear.
Much to my surprise I felt a stirring in me for my own mother, Grandma Gogo, Shamiso. My longing was not for death, I realized, but for the woman who gave me life. Instead of suicide, I would go to the only place I had left to go: back home to my mother.
I knew I had had enough.
I did not sleep at all the night before I left. I was too nervous. My neighbor helped me by holding on to a few of my belongings like cloths for my children and myself. In the morning, she sent her young kids over to invite mine to play at her house. As soon as Zuda left the house for work, without even a chance to bathe, I ran to my neighbor’s, retrieved my children and my few possessions, and we ran all the way to the bus terminal. I could see my own fear reflected in my children’s eyes as they looked back, afraid that someone might see us and alert Zuda.
The journey was long, even though the bumpiness of the ride suggested the driver was in a hurry, too. In order to avoid the large potholes on the tarred road, the bus driver swung the tires out left and right, and the knot in my stomach twisted as we careened through the traffic. After almost three hours, the road became dusty and we left paved roads behind us. The bus gathered speed and a thick red dust flew through the vehicle’s broken windows, painting the passengers’ hair and eyelids red. The dust on the road made it difficult to tell where we were, but almost an hour later, we knew we had arrived at our destination when the bus conductor shouted the name of the homestead adjacent to the terminal, “Noti, Noti.”
My rural childhood home is not far from the bus station. I could see both my mother and Mbuya Mafukeni, my surrogate grandmother, winnowing bulrushes for grinding. The kids ran to greet their grandmother and I followed more slowly behind, limping from my wound. Both women stood still looking at me as though rooted in one place.
I made my way to them; unable to keep my composure as they walked toward me, I felt tears begin to stream down my cheeks. We approached each other and my grandmother reached out her hands to me as she said, “Yahwe, usacheme, misodzi yako unoshungurudza vana nevanga risingapore”—“Child, don’t cry, please don’t, your tears will trouble your children and leave a permanent mark on their heart, please don’t cry.” I fell into my mother’s arms while my grandmother took my bags from my shoulders. I held on to my mother’s shoulder as I listened to my grandmother telling me that just this morning my mother told her of a dream she had about me. Both women suspected something was wrong. “In my dreams, you were crying” is all my mother said.
We settled in my mother’s kitchen. Mbuya Mafukeni went outside and came back with some aloe vera leaves, guavas, and other herbs. She quickly boiled the concoction and then applied it first to my wound, then giving me the rest to drink. I didn’t have to tell the story, as the kids had already shared what had happened to me. I could tell by the look on my mother’s face, as she listened, that the news of my treatment brought her unbearable pain. “This is home for all of you,” she said, comforting us, her voice soothing and firm. “Stay as long as you want.”
Over the next few weeks, my leg began to heal, bu
t although I was in the presence of my mother, my grandmothers, and my aunts, my spirit remained troubled. My situation had improved, but I was still stuck in many ways. Poverty, lack of education, too few jobs available, and children to mother—these things still weighed heavily on me.
One afternoon my mother and I went off to fetch water together. It was springtime and the forest made many offerings of fruit and nuts. Our fingers ran across the familiar stems and berries, gingerly harvesting as we walked.
From above us, grebes, freshwater diving birds, swooped down for food in the river where we collected our water. We talked as women often did, of our situation as women, of the changes we had begun to see in our newly independent country, of the past and our hopes for the future. “You are following a path that has existed for generations, Tererai,” my mother told me. “It comes from a blindness shaped by ignorance, ignorance that grows out of poverty, war, and lack of education.”
I nodded my head as I listened, too deflated and hopeless to say anything in response. “We all know this,” she continued. “My mother knew it and her mother before her. We speak to each other and we stand up for ourselves when possible, but for the most part, we are silent. We say to ourselves, ‘This is our culture and our tradition. It is just the way things are.’ But this is not true. It will not always be this way. Someone needs to break the cycle.”
The river gurgled powerfully by as we paused for a moment in the shade. “Who will break the cycle?” I wanted to ask, but remained silent.
Soul Wounds
We might think that the easiest thing to do in the face of so much silencing would be to put our hope in future generations. But this struggle does not end with us. The vicious cycle of silencing women is not only in Nikita’s or my ancestral village, it’s global, and it forces women to make drastic decisions that further marginalize them, which in turn seals their fate at various levels of trauma to the soul.
Dr. Bertice Berry, an award-winning comedienne, motivational speaker, and sitcom star of The Bertice Berry Show, crystallized the viciousness of intergenerational family cycles when she said that with no intervention we stay trapped in these negative cycles, as our parents and their parents before them were. In her book The World According to Me, Dr. Berry describes this generational curse: “Your parents were running a relay ’round a track and when you came along, they passed you the baton. You never really got to ask if this was your race. . . . The pressure to keep going in the same direction, as fast as possible, is intense.”2 No one can end this race without a powerful intention to change direction.
My mother realized that if someone in our family and community was to break the cycle, she was going to have to achieve an almost impossible dream, a dream that would right the wrongs of generations and tear down barriers for girls. It was going to take a bold dream. And I had one—an insatiable hunger for education and for change to come to my village. Perhaps the most important gift my mother ever gave me was this: she made it clear to me that I had the right to dream, no matter the circumstances of my life.
The truth is, if we don’t make it our mission to speak our truths in the face of so much silencing, we may not be putting our hope in the next generation, but instead passing down our silences to them. Lakota social work professor Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart calls this “historical trauma”: “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations.”3 She also uses the phrase “soul wound” to explain this phenomenon.
Researchers have long thought that descendants of people who have lived through hardship are likely to pass on their trauma by way of socialization cues like sharing their own fears, anxieties, and depression. But cutting-edge research now shows that this intergenerational wound is also an embodied one. Science is now helping us see that trauma is not only transmitted through social and cultural expressions, but that social experiences of suffering actually permeate our biological makeup—past traumas of our families are stored in our cells. Experts call this “epigenetics.”4
If science is right, certainly my body and thus my mind got my share of a full load of traumas from both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. While these women were strong in their own right, they came from their mothers’ wombs carrying some deep wounds, some more visible than others. While the women on my maternal side seemed to have more resilience, a drive to improve their lives despite the silences, the suffering of my paternal grandmother and her mother before her felt more visceral to me. My father’s mother, Ambuya Muzoda, was a very quiet woman. She was married to my grandfather, VaKabayashe, an emotionally abusive husband, and my paternal grandmother learned early to assume a submissive role during her many years of suffering.
To understand the depth of her struggles and why she allowed this level of abuse in her life, one must understand something about the man she married. VaKabayashe came from a polygamous family with many sons. He only married six times, but because a man is expected to inherit the wife and children of his deceased brothers and nephews, it is said that he fathered approximately forty children with as many as ten different women. Coping with a polygamous life is never an easy thing. Jealousy among co-wives and backbiting to seek attention from the man is rife. Ambuya Muzoda’s pain was unbearable, and as a young girl and mother, I would often hear her say, “Maivavo-inga barika moto unopisa”—“Hear me, mother, truly polygamy is like a hot charcoal that burns your soul.”
From Ambuya Muzoda I learned that gender inequality has the power to crush a woman’s spirit. She firmly believed that young wives will only get into trouble by speaking out. She often said, “It is best to keep quiet and avoid saying things that trigger insults or beatings from a husband.” Ambuya Muzoda suggested that I pretend to have a mouthful of holy water that cannot be swallowed and can only be spit out at the end of an argument. In other words, keep quiet! She says this is the best way for wives to keep the peace at home. After all, one wouldn’t want an abuser to have the satisfaction of seeing a woman’s tears. To my grandmother, the suffering of women was a curse with no solution.
I did not agree with my grandmother’s water strategy, but I also refused to let a husband see my tears. Early in my own first marriage, my husband encountered my stubborn refusal to cry. During fights, I wouldn’t speak or fight back. I showed no emotion at all. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, I’d bite my lower lip to hold back tears just as I did as a child working in the fields. This infuriated him and caused such incidents to escalate into assaults. And then blood and tears would begin to mingle. But to me, blood was better than Ambuya Muzoda’s approach. Although I admired her dignity, I did not want to live a passive life if I could avoid it.
My grandmother was a beautiful, dignified woman, but she passed down to me the trauma of being a woman in a patriarchal culture. She passed down her soul wound. She did not know any other way to protect and guide me.
Perhaps we haven’t all experienced such profound trauma, but I’m willing to bet that you’ve suffered silences, indignities, sexism, or lost the pull of your girlhood dreams. What are your soul wounds? Can you afford to give those wounds to the next generation? “Our ancestors dreamed us up,” writes educator and poet Walidah Imarisha, “and then bent reality to create us.”5 What can you dream up for yourself and the world for the good of generations to come?
What all of these stories and experiences of silencing show is a world in which we are too often stripped of our full humanness—our dignity. I know that the women in this chapter do not struggle in exactly the same way, nor do all of you who are reading this book struggle in exactly the same way. Yet I feel a deep connection with all women living in patriarchal cultures (and that’s pretty much all of us still). Even though we come from different circumstances, I recognize the pattern repeating in its various incarnations, whether on social media, in boardrooms, or even on the floor of the US Senate.
Any message, whether overt or subtle, that tells you that it is your job to be pretty, to rem
ain young or else stay out of the public eye, to stay in abusive relationships, to stay subordinate in relationships, to be quiet, to focus on your clothing and hair at the expense of your political and economic and intellectual power—this is the status quo biting back at your emerging empowerment, trying to make you feel smaller and weaker and incapable. We might think that things are getting better and that without our active involvement the world will still become a better place for our daughters and little sisters and nieces. But if we do not claim our full human dignity, do not find our purpose and awaken our sacred dreams, we will pass the loss of ourselves down to the generations that come after us, as my grandmother tried to do with me.
Whether you are a wealthy, highly educated female politician in the US, an Iranian woman lawyer, or a poor illiterate woman in Zimbabwe, there are forces telling you: stay quiet, be meek, focus on your hair or your weight rather than your wisdom, your creativity, your intelligence; be young and pretty or be invisible. Isn’t it a shame that men’s worth is measured by their intellectual acumen, how much money they are making, or their contributions to society, while women’s worth is measured by their physical appearance or their reproductive capabilities?
The messages are there—in the form of sexist words from colleagues, or from invisibility in the media, or poverty, or religious ideology, or sexist partners, and in many other ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it—in fact, as an older woman, I feel it is my responsibility and that of others like me to do our part to stop the intergenerational trauma of feminine silencing. You do not have to march in the street (but if you do, I’ll see you there!). You do not have to have a lot of money. But you do have to do the work it takes to awaken—to be courageous enough to name the Great Hunger within you and to claim your right to give voice to your sacred dream.
The Awakened Woman Page 4