The Hot Topic

by Christa D'Souza

  As we all prepare for the daily tuber-foraging expedition, Herta takes the baby from her daughter and straps it onto her back with a kanga. In single file we head into the bush, Tausi at the front, me at at the rear. On the way berries are picked and stored in kangas or eaten on the lam (my favourite are the green kongorobi from the Grewia bush, tangy but also oddly creamy, a little like condensed milk). Crucial to foraging for tubers, starchy yam-like vegetables that are one of the staples of the Hadza diet, is a ts’apale, a special pointy-ended digging stick which each woman makes for herself and which is initially used to tap the ground. A specific sound is produced, apparently, when there are tubers underneath the surface, and the older you are, the better you get at recognising it. Eureka! We come across a shady Commiphora africana tree with an ekwa (tuber) vine winding up it. Time to get digging, and goodness, is it harder and less fun than it might look, having to constantly shovel the earth away from the hole and pulling with all your might to separate the recalcitrant stem from its source, sometimes buried two feet underground.

  From an evolutionary point of view, the fact that tubers are a bugger to forage, unlike fruit and berries, is important. Though a crucial fall-back source of food, and far more nutrient-dense than fruit and berries, tubers can only be foraged by adults (little kids try; they’re just not very good at it until they get bigger). So when the environment started changing all those millions of years ago, and the fruit and berry-rich forests started receding and giving way to bare grasslands, mothers with newly weaned infants had two choices. They could either stay in the diminishing forests where their infants could pick berries and fruits on their own, or go pick tubers and keep feeding their kids, which limited their chances of producing more kids and therefore adding to the gene pool. This is where females who’d stopped reproducing could prove their usefulness, according to Professor Hawkes and her team. They could forage for the tricky tubers in the increasingly dry, hostile environment, allowing their fertile daughters to wean their children earlier and therefore produce more offspring. Those who weaned their children late, taking their offspring with them while foraging, forcing them to become adult the moment they were off the breast, stayed ape-like. The ones who weaned their children early and ‘exploited’ the elder females’ help – well, they evolved into human beings.

  Amply supporting Hawkes’ hypothesis is Herta, whose collection of tubers is far larger than anyone else’s, including that of her daughter Elena, who is hampered by her toddler’s steely determination to take her digging stick away.

  But it feels as if it’s not Elena’s responsibility to forage anyway, as long as she’s breastfeeding. Being a young mother, in an extended family situation like this, feels a lot less pressured, a lot cosier and more supported, than being a young mother in a modern nuclear one. And it is grannies like Herta who make it all work. (As Cambridge anthropologist Frank Marlowe noted, older women bring in more daily calories than any other age-sex category).

  Oh, but I bow to all of them, what with the insistent sweat bees buzzing in our eyes and nostrils and, actually, any orifice they can find. I notice Hadiya has bits of leaf stuck in her ears to keep them out, and I think, what a good idea, if I come out again, to bring some beekeeper helmets with me. We don’t wait for the men. The tubers are roasted on a fire, lit in about 30 seconds by swiveling a chiselled stick or ‘fire drill’ into a piece of wood with a hole in it until embers are produced, and are immediately consumed. How to describe: like a very large fibrous radish, or maybe a swede, slightly sweeter when cooked, and for me (though not the Hadza) completely inedible when raw. Much tastier is the baobab fruit, which is like a cross between a coconut and unripe pear and can be pounded to make porridge and flour.

  On the last day we head for Sengele, the next camp over. It is much bigger than both Mukengelko and Bukulu, with little children and mothers carrying babies randomly sprouting up out of the long grass as our Land Rover pulls up into a clearing. The menfolk are in a clump under a tree, doing some serious chilling after going out on a dawn hunt. Nothing caught today, but yesterday someone bagged a dik-dik and there was much dancing and singing at the feast, apparently until midnight. That’s another thing – the Hadza, they love to sing and they love to party.

  We have managed to procure a small amount of weed and give it to one of the young men, Mwapo, a bit of hero as he managed to bag a pregnant bush hyrax at our camp yesterday. Everyone, including the mothers and grannies and even great-grannies, demand their share as is custom, and Mwapo diligently metes it out.

  Fifty or so metres behind some trees is a cluster of huts where the women and children congregate in the heat of the day. Among them is Mwapo’s mother, who is known for having a lot to say about everything, but is uncharacteristically quiet today. Mika jokes with her, tries to ingratiate himself with her – it was with Mwapo that he was sent out into the bush by his father at the age of 13 and he thus treats her a bit like his Hadza mum – but she won’t budge, sniffing dismissively and refusing to be placated. Apparently we have not brought enough weed to go round.

  More amenable is Mbeke, the oldest female in the group and a great-grandmother. She sits on her heels, takes some weed from a knot in her kanga, rolls it into a cigarette and lights it with an ember from the fire. Although Mbeke is obviously well into her eighties, bowed and skinny with one eye missing, Mika explains that she is still very much part of the community, foraging, dancing and partying. When she dies, however, which cannot be too far off, there will be no sentimental ritual. The Hadza have a god called Haine, but they do not believe in life after death.

  Then there is Maria (thanks to the missionary influence, a lot of Hadza have European-sounding names and are happy to wear European clothes), who is the ‘Big Mama’ of the group, according to Mika. A mother and a grandmother and somewhere between 45 and 50, she has also adopted two orphans whose own mother recently died. A lot of the children in camp, she says, treat her as a mother figure, even if their own are alive. One of the orphans, Amina, keeps darting in and out of the hut, and shyly plays with Mika’s dreadlocks while we are talking. Life was easier, Maria admits, when she was a young mother, because she got so much help from her parents. She says she works harder now than she has ever done before, but does not begrudge it at all. Yes, she has experienced hot flushes, and says that is how women know they cannot have babies any more, but the idea that this signals the beginning of the end, or that women should try to hold onto their youth, pretend they are younger than they are, rather stumps her. Why fear the inevitable? When you still have such an enormous role to play? When, without you, the whole system would collapse?

  She’s right, of course. But how does this relate to me – Christa, of London W14, who never left her children with either grandmother, not once? It’s a double-edged sword, all this, isn’t it? If it weren’t for primitive grandmothering, we wouldn’t be here – we’d be dying soon after having our last babies, just like our closest relatives, chimpanzees. On the other hand, the presence of grandmothers means that we’ve got to cope with living way past our prime… and with the grim spectre of the dreaded younger model. (To spell it out, the existence of menopausal women, i.e. grandmothers, makes younger, fertile women scarcer and therefore more prized. In that mathematical simulation I mentioned earlier, the ratio of fertile males to fertile females when grandmothering was added in jumped from 77 males to 156 males per 100 females in 30,000 to 300,000 computer years.)

  Interestingly, it’s the other way round for chimps; males prefer older models – well, doesn’t experience count for something?

  ‘And this is the really important question if you can tackle it,’ laughs Hawkes, herself the picture of elegance at-any-age with her pixie-ish silver crop and Carly Simon-like features. ‘You see someone like Gloria Steinem who’s been such a tireless worker for women’s rights – yet there she is in the New Yorker magazine in this beautiful sexy posture and you think, is that what women are supposed to look like at 80?

&nbs
p; ‘Do I think she is a traitor? Well, in a cultural context, yes! We all know that looks matter, and there is this whole industry which ensures we keep feeling it matters; but shouldn’t we be shifting these attitudes? What do we actually mean when we say Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda look good for their age? We mean they look like they could still be fertile. But when you think of some of the components that make us human, the components that are consequences of this post-fertile stage and that allowed us to think and be the way we are, why shouldn’t they be attractive too?… An attractiveness outside of fertility [my italics] is way more interesting to me. Now if you could set your cap at making that shift, you’d be doing a very big service indeed.’

  * http://archive.unews.utah.edu/news_releases/

  grandmas-made-humans-live-longer/

  † Supported by Hawkes but originated by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (Ballantine Books, 2000).

  ‡ Frank W. Marlowe, The Hadza: Hunter Gatherers of Tanzania. (University of California Press, 2010) & Nicholas Blurton Jones, Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza Hunter Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  6

  THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST HORMONES

  At the end of last summer, my mother, my younger sister and I went to Puglia, in southern Italy, for a week. The idea was to leave all the kids in London, take hand luggage only and sneak in some more baking by the pool before term started. As it turned out, it rained solidly for six days, inside and out, with all the slugs of Puglia, it seemed, taking shelter in our dank little trullo. Our trullo with no wifi and no TV. Just lots and lots of slugs which we kept sweeping out and which kept grimly coming back in. The only thing to do besides reading our books (and sweeping the slugs out) was to eat and drink and talk. And goodness, did we talk. I had no idea, for example, that my mother suffered terribly during the menopause, can’t even remember, in fact, when she had it (which was around the age of 53, the time she split up with her second husband). This is my mother who sailed through childbirth (always likening it, unhelpfully, to bad period pains), my mother who once lived up a treehouse in Borneo and during the 80s travelled around Afghanistan with the Mujahidin.

  ‘Whole nights would go by where I wouldn’t sleep, so I’d get up at five in the morning and just go into work. I felt this new mixture of fear and sadness, the kind where there was no bottom, no depth or safety net to it. I remember being too terrified to even let myself think about it because what if it never ever ended?’

  The hot flushes, she recalled, did not last long, but they were ‘intense’ and debilitating. Once, she remembered, while having a walk by the sea, she became so uncomfortable she actually walked into the water with all her clothes on. Which makes her sound a little mad, I agree, but she is so… not. Adventurous, brave, unerringly optimistic, but not mad.

  Looking back, she described it as a perfect storm. Our cleaning lady of 25 years left. The bolthole cottage she had been renting for years in Devon suddenly became unavailable, she was broke, more broke than ever before, being saddled with a mortgage and, yes, there was the break-up of her marriage. It was also when, after years of being 8st 4lb, no matter what, she got fat.

  ‘I began to wonder if becoming menopausal had caused the break-up. Had I become less attractive? Is that what had happened? I went into this complete downturn for four years, wondering which was which.’

  My sister Heloise, 53, another non-fusser, was similarly hit sideways when ‘it’ happened.

  ‘I’d always thought, I’m not going to be that person who conforms to the complaining menopausal stereotype. I was the same when I was pregnant: I worked up until the night before with Polly [her first child, now 23]. My feeling was it wasn’t going to affect me, because nothing affects me.’ And then it happened. The debilitating hot flushes in the middle of meetings (‘weirdly I didn’t associate this with being menopausal, I must have been blocking it out’), the inability to sleep and, maybe most importantly, the plunge into nihilistic despair, from which she has not yet, she admitted, quite climbed out. Example. She went to the dentist recently because she had a toothache. ‘He told me it was possible to save the tooth, but I just thought, what’s the point? I’m old. I might as well just have it taken out. So I had it taken out.’

  Quite a few of us are facing that dilemma at the dentist’s: whether we are worth the hideous expense and/or bother or not. Take Orla, a 50-something account manager mother of two, who found herself unable to justify the cost of the Invisalign braces her dentist strongly recommended to mitigate the bad orthodontic work she was subjected to as a child in the 70s.

  She likens herself to the ‘old family Volvo, which we will keep as long as it runs well, fixing the indicators and such but don’t worry about the fabric on the seats getting torn a bit and we certainly wouldn’t bother with replacing the carburettor. Just no point in throwing good money after bad.’

  ‘It’s not that I want to duvet-dive or eat chocolate exactly,’ my sister explained, ‘but I feel if I got cancer that was inoperable, well… I’ve done my thing, I’ve lived my life. A bit like the way women thought of themselves 70 years ago, I suppose.’

  Yes. Just like the eminent psychoanalyst and author Helen Deutsch who authoritatively described the menopause in her 1945 book The Psychology of Women as ‘a partial death where everything [a woman] acquired during puberty is now lost piece by piece; with the lapse of the reproductive service, her beauty vanishes, and usually the warm vital flow of feminine emotional life as well.’ Or what about iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir and her nihilistic approach to getting older: ‘Suddenly I collide again with my age…’ she writes soon after her 50th birthday, in the epilogue of Force of Circumstance. ‘That ultramature woman is my contemporary. I recognise that young girl’s face belatedly lingering amid the weathered features. That hoary-headed gentleman, who looks like one of my great-uncles, tells me with a smile that we used to play together in the Gardens of Luxembourg.

  ‘“You remind me of my mother,” I am told by a woman of about 30 or so…’

  And then, the horror at having to confront herself in the mirror. ‘I understand La Castiglione, who had every mirror smashed… I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down towards the eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring. Perhaps the people I pass on the street see merely a woman in her 50s who simply looks her age, no more, no less. But when I look, I see my face as it was, attacked by the pox of time for which there is no cure.’

  De Beauvoir is quoted extensively by second-wave feminist Germaine Greer, who herself, in her 1991 book The Change, wrote that the menopause was a time for ‘mourning’. It’s a great book, one of those books that should be in every school library, but boy, is there a lot of misery before you get to the chapter entitled ‘Serenity and Power’. Feminism, it seems, provides no immunity against the profound sense of loss menopause can trigger.

  Back to the 21st century and my sister, though, who has always had a proclivity for ‘negative fantasising’. We both have; it’s a trait we inherited from our dad, but it was a shock to hear just how useless she genuinely felt. And how she wasn’t doing anything about it. My mum, I could understand – HRT was not really part of the British vernacular back in the early 90s. But my sister, I felt, was different. What was this thing she had about suffering and bearing it when she didn’t have to? They had hormones in Chard, for goodness’ sake! On the other hand, perhaps she was right. Perhaps those of us on hormones are only delaying the inevitable. Isn’t the only way to tackle any problem to go through it rather than around it? Maybe, dare I say it, we need to grow a pair?

  A case in point is my friend Samira, 52, of Indian parentage but born and bred in the UK. ‘Who knows whether my Asian genes helped me, but there will always be those women who just have to make a huge big feminine drama out of what is essentially one of the most natu
ral things in the world,’ she says. ‘I’m not saying I’m not sympathetic to those who truly suffer but, if you are going to do anything in life, do it with grace and style. It’s a private affair and hot flushes do not need to be announced and apologised for. And there are practical solutions. Can’t sleep? Take Stillnacht, that’s what I did, and because I knew sugar exacerbated menopausal symptoms, I cut out alcohol too. And I got through it with no problems at all. It’s important that women who do have an easy menopause are not barred from saying so just in case it makes other women feel inferior. Another thing is to be a bit of a Brownie about it and prepare ahead of time. The big M can be okay, in my experience, if you don’t let it sneak up on you and grab you from behind…’

  ‘Menopause is a little like childbirth in that you know people who have been through it but you have no idea what it is really like until you are in it yourself.’ So speaks graphic artist Deana, 57, ex-pat American and mother of one who, like Samira, chose not to go down the hormones route even though her symptoms were much grimmer. ‘I was having hot flushes every night and they’d wake me up every damn cycle, so I’d be exhausted and cross every single morning. They came in the day as well, triggered by wine, coffee, food (yeah, pretty much everything) and any slightly stressy moment. My face would go red and it felt like I was on fire inside, but my skin would be cold. My libido went out the window, and I experienced what a lot of people talk about – a kind of disembodiment: I didn’t feel in my body.

  ‘The most upsetting thing was my brain switching off. I’ll never forget one horrible moment at the butcher, when he told me he didn’t have lamb mince. Oh my God, my entire world fell apart. I made it home and the moment I walked in the door, I burst into tears. My husband and son thought something horrific had happened to me – well, yes, it had! But I remember the look on their faces when I told them why I had been crying. Men do not understand, I guess. I would say I’m a fairly calm person, I try to take a breath before reacting and I try to go with the flow, but this little episode was so unlike me – I’ve certainly never sobbed like that at something so trivial. I felt utterly thrown off my mark – I couldn’t work out a new plan for our dinner party, I couldn’t stop crying, I felt helpless and I simply wanted to give up, crawl into bed and keep crying.’