There Are No Spices in Caucasia
...truth through storytelling and controlling our narratives
In 2011 the reality of motherhood knocked at my door. It was mid-July, and the summer and all its debauchery was in full blast. I’d had an inclination that I may be pregnant, but I ignored it because I didn’t want it to be true. That summer I was a part of a team that planned a weeklong conference for the 800 employees at my organization. When we were not working 20 hours of the day, we spent much of our time in a corner booth at our local hole in the wall bar drinking pitchers of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This was the ritual, every night, and I was a loyal follower, even with the feeling that I was incubating my oldest daughter.
After the conference, when I returned home, I took a drug store pregnancy test – in my office bathroom – and had the first confirmation of the thing I already knew to be true: Everything about my life was going to change. This wasn’t a change that was going to be brought about because of the fawning and cooing over a baby however. This was a change that would be rooted in a deeper and, somehow, more intimate understanding of the world in which I inhabited - the world that I would raise a child. At that moment in time, everything about my being, my womanhood, and Blackness crystallized. It came into focus in a way that it never had before. I had been jostled, I had woken up.
Before this moment, I was in the infancy of unravelling the knot of self-hate and hate for my community that had been, so carefully, tied in me by the world and the stories I’d been fed as a child. I was, slowly, learning and beginning to process the realities of systemic and institutionalized oppression, racism, classism, and privilege. At this time I didn’t have a full view of the convoluted and well-oiled machine that kept people who looked like me second guessing their value and pointing fingers of blame at those who were products of their circumstance, but I had made up my mind that the world was not fair; especially if you were Black. And I understood that I was late to that party.
The month before I found out I was pregnant, I had decided to do ‘the big chop’ and shave all of my processed and chemically infected hair. I went to my partner and asked him if he’d take his clippers and give me the lowest buzz without making me cue ball bald. I can remember him asking me why, all of a sudden, I was determined to get rid of my hair. And I manufactured an answer that I thought would appease him, and anyone else who dared ask about my choice. It recited something like,
“I’m tired of having to conform and assimilate to the white man’s standard of beauty. It’s exhausting and damaging to my hair.”
This answer, while true and rife with larger societial commentary, was simple enough and sparked many conversations. Looking back on that moment, I’d had a small feeling that I was pregnant, and had begun making major (yes, hair is major!) life changes to step more fully into the person I was to be in this world.
In the new year, my belly grew and so did my frustration and anger at the world around me. The physical manifestation of both happened within a 24 hour time frame of one another, in what would be the turning point of my life.
At 2:10 A.M. on February 26th, 2012, I went into labor. After spending 17 hours laboring at home, I finally went to the hospital, exhausted and ready to deliver. During much of my time breathing through contractions, I found my mind wandering to the realities of raising a Black child in this country. I questioned my readiness for the task that was being put before me and as I labored and pushed through the physical pain, I found myself embracing the emotional struggle. What I didn’t know was in the hours I was becoming a mother and gaining a child, in Florida someone was losing theirs: At 7:30 P.M. on February 26th, 2012, Trayvon Martin was pronounced dead by the paramedics in Stanford, Florida. As I was seeing my child for the first time in the early morning of February 27th, Trayvon’s parents were filing a missing person’s report with the realization they may have seen theirs for the last.
It was in the wake of his death, and its aftermath, that my child was born, and so – the woman that I am was born.
Before this, I was the ever fun, get along with everyone, ‘if life is a party I’m the DJ’ type of person. You would have been hard pressed to find me engaged in a heated discussion about race or race relations because I was convinced that there was some self-inflicted wrong that caused the Black community to function the way it did. I never wanted to upset or isolate the white people around me; after all they were my best friends and couldn’t have biased or racist opinions, habits, or tendencies if they were in my life. I had lived my life in the mindset that if I denied and denounced behaviors that were deemed unworthy and could find myself being semi-successful among my white peers, then these talks of inequity and injustice must be isolated instances. That woman and her ignorance was no more. A new one had been born, free from the white-washed narrative of herself and the world.
I was reborn in the same moments that the Black Lives Matter movement was created. I was learning what it meant to be a mother as our country was being forced to face its ideological sickness in a real way for the first time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960’s. And, I knew – I could feel the match of consciousness flicker with a spark in my soul – I knew that my journey in this world was forever altered.
The insights I’ve gained from storytellers on my journey through our zeitgeist and understanding how we arrived at this moment in time; some of them profound, many of them humorous, the majority of them heartbreaking and infuriating - all of them have shaped how I approach the very real work of community building and dismantling the various global empires built on violent imperalism and fueled by dehumanizing capitalism.
Through much study, many conversations, moments of deep listening and reflection, and an underlying proclivity for fucking up the settler colony entitled mindset and raising the collective consciousness, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are in this mess of racial and class hostility, injustice, unrest, and inequity because thousands and thousands of years ago people of European descent were tired of wearing only wool, listening to bagpipes, and eating bland boiled foods. They travelled from their homes to find silks and other fine linens, to understand the beatings of a drum and how bass could move the body, and ultimately seek out ingredients like salt, cumin, and paprika to breathe new life into their meals with different styles of cuisine and spice. And, in order to find these things they had to steal from, destroy, and invade other lands. The people of the global south held the key to LIVING, and we’ve been pillaged of that resource since the story of the modern world began.
But that’s not how we are taught the story. We’re taught about European saviors, taming and saving savages of the many lands across the globe. I share my story, because, too often, our stories get buried under lies of violent whiteness. The person I am, how I care deeply about people has been lied on by police reports and superintendents and old friends who moved out of my good graces. And, if that’s the the degree that MY story is being re-written and then buried, we have to get serious about how it’s happening to larger demographics of our global community. As we look around: at Palestine, at the Congo, at Sudan, at Cuba, at Hawai’i, at Black folk, our Trans siblings, our unhoused community members - pay attention to who gets to tell the stories.
Who is holding our narrative and how is it being elevated and stewarded through the story of our world?
I’m reminded of a passage from James Baldwin’s My Dungen Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation:
“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine - but trust your expereince. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”
Look around and trust your expereinces. Trust what you are seeing. My hope is that we can stop taking the word of those who seek to dominate and conquer through deception and violence. That we can see the hopes, dreams, care, community, and brilliance of those of us who’s narratives are stolen and then twisted to feed our demise. The history of our world must include individual stories of radicalization via parenthood, like mine, and stories of collective rage at savage regimes seeking the modern equivelant of spices through unmitigated terrorism and grotesque barbarity, like what we are witnesses at the hands of Israel and the United States.
We hold our narratives and the future must be saturated with the realities of who we are and the resistance of those of us who refuse to ever be conquered again.
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