Living In Colour – #Nkateko

It has been six months since my last column. The earth has performed half of its periodic pirouette around the sun and I have not said a word to you in that time. Forgive me. The length of my absence is the result of significant changes in my life. I am still a practicing poet, so it is not a leap as huge as the one I made when I left my previous vocation, but there has been a shift nonetheless. In December 2019, when I last shared words with you, I was grappling with a looming translation of my poetry, which unsettled me because I felt that my identity was being written out of the work. These were my parting words in that column:

‘I was recently approached by an Indian writer who expressed interest in translating one of my poems to Bengali. It was all going well until he mentioned that he was struggling with my name (Nkateko) because in Bengali, the letters “N” and “K” are never used to begin a word. Failing to understand how this was possible, I told him to translate the poem from English to Bengali but to publish my name as it was because it is not an English word and does not form part of the translation. He then explained that Bengali does not have a symbol for the “Nk” sound at the beginning of a word, so it would be quite difficult to publish it, regardless of the poem itself being publishable.’

A month ago, the Bengali version of my poem, “Genesis”, translated by Anindya Ray, made its way into the world through an online journal called Tobuo Proyas. The translation was originally planned to appear in a print journal, but this was no longer possible due to several presses closing their doors in fulfilment of lockdown regulations. The day that the translated poem was published, I told my partner that Bengali is an anagram of Belgian and he laughed and said, “Of course you would notice that,” which is to say, You see Belgium in everything. I am surprised that he, with his Masters in Linguistics, didn’t notice the link between the words before I did, but I suppose it is true that you only find what you look for.

A few days ago, a friend shared a poem from my first chapbook, The Sin in My Blackness, on Instagram. It was a poem about racism in South Africa. I had a brief flashback of the painful encounters that had birthed that poem and couldn’t even read it until the end. I did not want to think about it. Racial trauma has accounted for a lot of the pain that I carry into my fledgling adulthood. In my poem, “I wonder if leaving home made me this way”, I consider the possibility of becoming a mother someday:

I am childless, yet I am wondering if I should raise my children here,
Or even have them at all
If they will grow up wishing that their skin was disposable;
With a label that reads:
To be peeled off when blackness becomes too heavy.

The truth is that I cannot peel my blackness off or lay it down so it can rest. My blackness is a permanent fixture. It is a part of me that I cannot strip off. When my partner and I traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, at the beginning of this year, I had a hard time coming to terms with how people looked at me. My partner, who is white, was looked at with interest, with a flirtatious curiosity. I was looked at with suspicion, with confusion, with disgust. I felt as if people were taunting me with their stares. I had flashbacks of my interactions with white people in primary school, high school and university: Look at her hair, so ugly, eww. What is she doing with a white guy? Does she work for him? Does she even know what she’s doing? All these black students are here because of affirmative action.

The first of the above taunts made me self-conscious about my hair, so I covered it with relaxer cream, then with weaves. The next taunt made me swear to never date outside of my race again. The last two taunts were the reason I left Medicine. I have never felt as if I was enough. All my life I’ve had to fight to prove that I’m worthy of a place in the room, a seat at the table. As a medical student, speaking up about racial injustice in South Africa’s public hospitals will only isolate you from peers and professors alike. The black doctors will tell you that it’s part of life. They will say, It’s not show-and-tell. Just shut up and get the job done. Words mean nothing. You need to show them that you can do the job just as well as they can.   

They were wrong. They are wrong. Words do mean something. And here I was, years after the gaslighting, in a country foreign to both my partner and myself, not finding the words for what was hurting me. When you are silenced once, how do you learn to speak up ever again? How do you tell the man you love, who looks at you with complete adoration, that this vacation, which should be a memorable experience for both of you, is taking you back to the ugliest parts of your past? How do you explain two decades of hurt? We had to wade through a lot of discomfort during those weeks, but we needed to talk about my pain if there was any chance of us surviving the trip with our relationship intact.

I am still not good at talking about this. Not even in therapy. For years I have let my poems do the work because these conversations don’t have the desired outcomes in real life. The people you expect to have your back will tell you that it’s just how the system is set up. Seeing this “system” collapse has been slightly comforting, but it is heartbreaking that so many people lost their lives for us to get here. People are still dying for this cause. At the end of it all, I’ll still be black. And my future children, regardless of my partner’s race, will be black. But maybe it will mean something different for their generation.

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