Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (16 page)

 

Lourdes-marie Prophete

 

 

 

 

 

I joke that my mom’s and my aunt’s problems all stem from the Trinity: the omnipotent rules that they accept faithfully without question, the savior man who will marry them and save them, and the Holy Ghosts—the men who are actually in their lives. I came up with that insight on the No. 3 subway train, leaving my mom’s home after a visit. In transit between my mom’s world and mine, insights like these pour out. If feminism is in the water I drink, my mom’s herstory is the dry land that pushes me to swallow.

The actual men in their lives were helpful but more in the background: the Holy Ghosts. My mom grew up in Haiti, where she married my father and then moved to New York. He left her and returned to Haiti shortly after I was born. He sent me letters and money until he died. My aunt came to live with us a couple of years after my grandmother came. My aunt was “waiting” for a husband. Boyfriends came and eventually left. My grandmother came closest to the ideal—she married once, stayed married until her death, had children and grandchildren. She was the matriarch who raised seven children as well as nieces and nephews in Haiti. When my mother was growing up, my grandmother was effectively a single mother because my grandfather had to live far away from her and the children in the isolated country, farming and sending her money. She came to New York to help my mother raise me. She prayed a lot. She rarely talked about herself. She died when I was young.

My uncles would help out doing “manly” things, like driving my mother, grandmother and aunt places and fixing things that my mom would not even let me near because I was a girl. I noticed men were given more space and authority and took it. My mom said that men drink beer, so we had beer in the fridge just for the suitors and our male relatives. I was told that if I had had a father, I wouldn’t have rebelled so much because he would have beaten it out of me. Some of the men in my extended family were kind and gentle, while others were hard and authoritarian. They were all in the background, peripheral to the women.

My family raised me to wait: for Catholic Armageddon, for a husband and, once I found the husband, to wait on him. I balked at this. But even as I rebelled, I was afraid I wouldn’t escape from the future they projected for me. I lump all of their self-defeating ideas that no amount of discussion and reasoning could change with the first part of the triumvirate—the omnipotent rules, a hodgepodge of beliefs that were often contradictory but sacrosanct. According to these rules, the ideal for a woman was that she stay at home. A woman cooks, cleans and takes care of the children while her husband works. A woman should be obedient to her husband. They argued women shouldn’t be allowed to be priests because they were too frivolous and weak. I wondered who in this network of strong women, extended family included, was frivolous and weak. Yet, these women also demonstrated their respect for females with beliefs such as that girls take better care of their elderly parents than boys do.

The strange thing about my family is that most of the time they were feminists in action. The life I have now and the choices I enjoy are due to my mother’s sacrifices and her faith. Even as I condemn my female relatives’ sexism, I realize they were fighters, surviving and doing things on their own every day. My mom got up and went to work, her example telling me that I could do it as well. She immigrated to America to give me a better life. The women in my life told me I had to do well in school. My mom taught me to read before first grade, which was probably the determining factor in my later academic success. When I graduated from high school, my mom and aunt got uncharacteristically emotional, remarking that it looked like I was going to make it. I have inherited from these women a very pragmatic way of looking at the world, because they did whatever was necessary to get the job done.

 

It is hard going and coming from my mom and aunt’s home. In that journey, I leave the world I’ve created behind—a world that is flourishing, full of goals, joys, challenges and possibilities—to enter a very desolate world. They worry about this, they suffer from that, but even when there isn’t anything pressing, there is still the dead air. Although they have pushed me to incredible heights, they themselves are stuck. I help but I haven’t solved the problem. On the train to and from, I’m looking for understanding.

One of my cousins who grew up in Haiti told me I don’t know Haitians. I know my family in New York, and they are a pretty unhappy bunch. She had a point. The calmest and happiest I have ever seen my mother was when we visited Haiti together. There, my extended family seemed to have lighter hearts and more everyday joy. I realized that my mother sacrificed her emotional health coming to the United States. It is hard to be a single mother and an immigrant. It is all speculation how culture, sexism, racism, classicism and personality played a part in my mom’s life. What I know is that my mom’s sacrosanct belief in the inferiority of women and their role in the world didn’t help. It is still not helping. She survived and is surviving. However, I feel she would survive better and, more importantly, happier without that noose around her neck.

When I visited Haiti as a nine-year-old, I noticed that people spent time in each others’ houses. It was very social. One of the games was to tell stories. It is hard to believe my aunt’s stories of my mother going out dancing when she was young. Living in the United States made it easy for my mom’s life to become small. She never made New York her home. My experiences in France and West Africa have given me a better appreciation of how hard it is to create a new life in a foreign land. People who are able to make a foreign country their home have to be bold and aggressive. My mom was bold and aggressive when she had to be in order to care for her family, but she never put value on
“pleasi,”
pleasures. Putting effort into making her life in the United States more pleasurable would have seemed extravagant to her. Pleasure is nice if you get it, but you don’t fight for it. In Haiti, knowing the language and the culture, she would not have felt isolated. It would have been easier to make connections with new people. Now, all of her friends in New York are people she had been friends with in Haiti. She has never had much of a social life in New York. She spent a lot of her free time praying, watching TV and sleeping. Religion was her succor. It also fed her tendency to keep her life small, with its concentration on passivity and the afterlife.

My mother is living for the afterlife. Once, when she found me crying about something, she said that we’re not meant to be happy, that this life is about suffering, and we’ll have happiness in heaven.

 

An important difference between my mom’s personality and mine is the value I place on my own wants, needs and feelings in the here and now. She put an incredible amount of energy into raising me but none into herself. I grew up with a greater economic stability, so perhaps that is why I insisted on creating a life that met my emotional and spiritual needs in the here and now. I carry some guilt about this.

My aunt is currently suffering from many maladies, but everyone in my family agrees her trouble stems from depression. She’s never married in a culture that teaches her that it is her job to be a wife. In her world she has had few choices. I wish she’d grown up in a place where she was encouraged to make up her own path and look beyond the choices presented to her by family and culture.

It frustrated me when I was growing up that if something broke in the house they’d lament that if only we had a man in the house, “he could fix things.” I did not want them to feel helpless or feel helpless myself. So I’d go over and fix the TV or VCR or put the fan together. But they’d still go on: “Our lives would be so much better if we had a man in the house.” When I’d present the fixed item to them, they’d put on a surprised smile but I knew I hadn’t solved the problem. Years later I surprised them with a career playing with computer technology and the Internet.

I can understand missing male companionship, but that wasn’t the way they talked about it. They talked about the “savior” man specifically within the context of social security and economic survival. I understand that when two people share a life together there are economic benefits, but those benefits were at the forefront of the way the women I grew up with talked about men. This wasn’t just limited to discussions about husbands. I noticed that whenever we got into conversations about family, my mom said she wanted children because she wanted someone to take care of her when she grew older. I was ten when I asked Mom, “What does a husband do?” In her words: “He would advocate for me. People take advantage of you when you are a woman alone. He would know of opportunities and fight for us in the world.”

I understood her answer better after I visited Gambia and Senegal in West Africa. The inability of most women there to achieve financial and social independence underpinned gender inequality in that region. Women were so absent from public culture in Dakar that they were hardly seen walking in the streets. I am sure they had their own culture and life separate from male society, but that male society is the one with access to the public space, the finances and the political power. A Western-educated Gambian man explained to me that there are some very strong Gambian women who become successful, and they can be very vocal, but there is a line and they will not cross it. I believe my older female relatives grew up in a similar atmosphere. They learned to depend on men to act for them. Even when they take care of themselves, they never stop emotionally or psychologically depending on men . . . like on the Holy Ghost. It seems to be another excuse to not live for themselves, to not create happiness for themselves.

I’ve had discussions with friends about whether people who grow up under oppression with no access to alternatives know that their situations are wrong. I believe they feel it even if they aren’t able to articulate it to themselves. They may not know how to attach this background of oppression to the cause of their current situations and therefore accept it as normal, but it is there. My mom’s and aunt’s adherence to the proscribed female role is like an invisible noose around their necks constricting their ability to reach their potential. They live out the effects of it.

The difference between my situation and that of my mom’s is degree. My mother’s access to information, wealth and power was disadvantaged, and she accepted this as the natural way of the world. Her ideas about family were bound up with the idea of economic and social security. But I live in a society that gives me choices, choices that men in other countries can’t exercise. It is easier for me to imagine independence without relating to family and husband. I owe a debt to the feminist movement that I can get a job, live alone and walk around in jeans and a T-shirt without getting harassed. My mom’s concern about economic security adds an urgency to conversations about family that I—with my Western, highly educated background—don’t relate to. At the same time, I’ve grown up with my own issues around gender, race and class. My access to information, wealth and power was also at a disadvantage, but I don’t accept that as natural.

 

My impression of life growing up in a working-class Caribbean neighborhood was that you had to be very worried about surviving. Life was hard and difficult, and you had to make as much money as you could to be safe. After moving into the white, liberal arts college world, I was presented with the idea that life is a challenge or an adventure, and you must find the work that will make you happy (notice the word “happy”). I did not want the unpleasant passionless future of my upbringing, however the other future of my well-to-do classmates seemed like a fantastic dream. There was a conflict in these two realities, and I did not know how to reconcile them. I took a leap of faith. I ended up living my life searching for and creating my own happiness, despite my doubtfulness of the workability of this path. It worked for me. Armed with a good education, I had more choices then the people I grew up with. It is doubtful I will ever have to clean houses like my mom or my aunt. I realized there is not one reality, many realities co-exist.

I am conscious of the distance between my family’s world and my mostly American life. I look for insight wherever I can find it to help me navigate that space. I hope to understand what happened with my mom and gain some wisdom. I get a lot of the “aha” factor when I think about how gender roles and sexism have framed my life and my mom’s. The “aha” factor is when you have always felt something but couldn’t articulate it until someone gives you a naming system that allows you to point at all the pieces. While in Gambia a couple of years after college, I was criticized at a market by a female merchant for being too aggressive when I negotiated the price. She said I acted like a man and I should remember that I am just a girl. I felt horrible and wondered if I had been rude when I realized her criticism that “I wasn’t acting like a girl” came from her acceptance of gender roles and male privilege. By analyzing the incident this way, I was also creating a mental world where things can be different.

 

When I was a child, I sensed my family’s fear and helplessness even when I didn’t understand where it was coming from. This was their reality. My tendency was to think the problem was with me and try to adapt. I thought that if this was my reality too, maybe I need to stop fighting it and just deal. Wanting something that isn’t possible hurts. But my growing feminist thought encouraged me to validate those feelings and find a way to honor them. Now when my aunt says that I dress too masculine and I won’t attract a man, I still feel cornered. I also feel grounded, however, because I understand where she’s coming from. I have decided on a way of thinking that puts my honest expression of self above the loss of social standing in my family.