I Shall Speak: How I learned that sharing my emotions doesn’t make me less of a man | View
“I don’t come to you with my problems because you’ll think I’m weak.”
Among the rubble of piercing words that spewed from my father’s mouth, many of them insults; these stung the most, because they gave me an awakening. They told me that something was going on - something I had not understood and yet it informed his way of life, his worldview, his self-perception.
Mother’s clothes and shoes lay scattered all over the bedroom floor. A stench of desolation hung in the house. I asked father why he did it. He said it was the anger. Anger made him do it.
I feared my 13-year-old sister would be scarred by the mess if she saw it. So I locked the room before she returned from school.
Mother had stepped away to her cousin’s, to breathe for a week, her heart heavy with the brutishness and ambiguity of an umpteenth argument. She was tired, but wasn’t leaving for good. I thought I didn’t want her to, but in my heart of hearts, I badly did.
I was exhausted too, and decided that when she’d return, I’d call them both for a meeting, which felt like a suicide mission. Because you don’t sit your parents down to talk to them about how they ought to run their house. After all, “what does a child know?”
This is a question society asks by making children voiceless in their homes. They are there to follow orders, eat, and go to school. They taught us in school that children were important in the African family because they were both a matter of pride for their communities, and a source of labour. But they didn’t say children had eyes too, and that their ears are razor sharp. They could cut words into emotions, perceive them deep within the abyss of their little consciousness, and create meaning. Children, they didn’t say, were the holders of a society’s purity.
We sat with dad on the dining table when he uttered these words - that I’ll think he’s weak. Something knocked in my head. I asked myself, what might have made him say that? How did he not think that all the years I’d spent living with him, I could count his weaknesses by the breaths I took? Did he think I viewed him as a human god who got everything right? That seemed to be the image he believed he was portraying all this time.
So I started speaking to my uncles about their childhood, and the stories started stringing together. Stories about how grandpa would hurl things at them. At everyone. How he had beat their mothers (polygamous home) in front of them, and had emotionally abandoned them from when they were very young. Trauma. It was all trauma. It’s the first time I saw my father as a human being. A boy screaming for help, but trapped in a man’s body. I also understood the anger that informed his violence, but I would never excuse it.
That was the onset of my healing journey.
