Bokang
The mangroves of the river almost swallow me when my grandmother christens me woman. The baptism begins with my body too deep into the waters, and my limbs contorting in agony for a fast mercy from the cherubs and seraphs that live along the riverbanks. They watch as I swallow every epiphany and every fact that I did not know about myself. These, however, are not revelations to her – my grandmother. She has known women like me for centuries. Women who carry tumultuous spells that wake the sea when they are near. Women who foster enigmas and perplexities that wreck lineages formed by the ancients with sapphire eyes and pale skin. We are the furnace that seeks to outwit the underbelly of the beast. We burn fortitudes. We harbour history in our mouths. Our dreams travel through realms where the feminine divine is wounded; where she seeks salvation and a release from the curse of women who carry mausoleums clad around her like an envelope. She is led by the spirit of women who live inside me. These women came before me, and some before her.
“Listen to the wind and the waves,” they caution, “you will always be led back home.”
Tumelo
When the cesspool of life does not swallow you, curse every motherfucker. Consider yourself unlucky, run amok at the strange waves that the wind blows at you for being burdened with the consequence of being alive. And when you learn to appreciate your destitute, when you find joy in it, rejoice! There will be things you do in the dark that will cast your shadows away. They will grimace with disgust, and once you come to light, all of your doings will shame you. These are growing pains, and they will make you numb, and sprout with regret, but you will learn to forgive yourself in the morning. And when the sun sacrifices itself for the night, you will be seduced to become the person you always feared during the day. Love will fade away, but you will always come back to yourself. You will always return home.
Bokang
Disgruntled by how the sea heaves in my presence, I give gratitude to the terrain of my anatomy. I appease every limb that was held at the mouth of the beast where the water gyrates. I put my hand on my stomach, to soothe it from the offering of calamity, and beg for forgiveness. My inner thighs, the fat that sheath under my arms and the sordid eyes that refuse to see the day for what it has been. Sometimes these are all myths. I will cavort with my swollen tongue that feigns riddles when gospel fails me, and we will rejoice.
Tumelo
We are stuck in an asylum where the food is insipid and the walls are empty and shrewd with a kind of sadness that overwhelms the stairways and the corridors. If one is not careful, everything will cave in on them slowly, with earnest contempt, and then ratio in the wild force that makes everything in life look murky. Everything here is white and with grandeur for pale hues that guard against the mentally-ill.
This is my second excursion here. The first time, I got off lightly; a minor transgression. A maximum of two weeks. This time around, two weeks turned into a month, and then four months, and now there is no telling of time or of how long I have been here. I don’t know if it is even sane to keep civilians away from themselves for that long. In their eyes, I am only a confused delinquent that they want to convert to normalcy. I am burdened with a name that I do not recognise: they want to weather the storm with my autonomy. To them, I do not belong to myself.
Bokang
Our bodies are pressed against each other and we find solace in the rhythm of our breathing. It culminates between us until we coalesce, absolving us of all our sufferings. We slumber in a dead garden filled with reeds that outlived autumn; it is grey and tiny, but we make it work. Even on the cold hard floor, the rays of the sun still scorch our skins.
My head is on his warping chest. I kiss him gently and whisper, “I hope love festers inside you,” and listen to his heartbeat to hear all of the chaos that goes on inside him. I try to imagine the horror of learning how to love in his body. I begin to fester, too, when the sun marinates our flesh and we bore into each other and become one flesh.
Tumelo
Anorexia: the consequence of me trying to alleviate my chest dysphoria.
This also happens to be the first offence that acquitted my original jaunt to Sterkfontein Hospital. Now guiltier aversions plague me. We lay, exiled from the world outside, longing for clemency.
“How are you feeling today?” the therapist asks, but not from concern; she asks out of pity. We remain silent.
Bokang
I stand isolated inside the black tent and watch as the casket is lowered to the ground. A mausoleum of women does a reed dance, and the only woman to foster every crevice on my body transcends into another realm. The congregation sings irremediable hymns, and I am coddled into secrecy by a cult of women who want to silence me.
The summer of my seventh birthday my grandmother becomes sporadically ill. It is unprecedented and the seers do not know how to diagnose her. So they throw her into the river, only for her to never come back.
The Congregation turns her into a pariah. They make up stories of how she roams atop the water at night.
The Coven confirms this by turning into wicked stalwarts with malevolent grace that need to be praised.
The Chorus envelopes me with profanities that claim that I will bring much more shame than I already have.
They cast me away – alone, to fend for myself.
********
The Congregation
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
The Coven
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
The Chorus
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
Dysphoria (n): the inability to know what survival looks like.
Dysphoria (n): the desire to escape one’s self.
Tumelo
In therapy, they always ask how we are feeling. I loathe this question because they often do not care; they just want to diagnose us. So, whenever I get the chance to avoid it, I do. And when I can’t simulate understanding, I shriek, silently. My eyes are usually dead. They move around seeking whatever answer that will please her, the therapist. “I’m okay,” I lie. I am disconnected from my body and the world. Everything feels like a myriad of consequences waiting to suffocate me, but I do not care, so I let them build up. The chair swallows me. I have been having out-of-body experiences my whole life. I am born with an ailment that has no desire to absolve all of God’s shortcomings, because if we were truly being honest, in ways people fear that we should be, He has flaws too. That’s if the theory of us being made in His image is actually true. People should stop professing Him as something without imperfections. Sometimes, we give birth to ourselves.
Bokang
“O tshaba eng haholo Tumelo?”
“That I will never make it to the age of Jesus at the cross.”
“Jesus?” I say perplexed, “I thought you didn’t believe in God”
“I don’t. But one has to weigh their options.”
“That does not mean that they have to sully the faith of others.”
“Well, we all have our own vices.”
Tumelo
“When did you know you were a boy?”
There, the prognosis— the subjugation. When did she know that she was not a boy? Has it always been a norm for her to never question deities and how they were moulded in the world? Never question how they come to be and how they ceased?
“I flipped a coin, and then said to myself: ‘heads, you’re a girl; or tails, and then you’re a boy,’ and to my luck, tails it was.”
She is not amused. She writes in her journal, moving the pen with meticulous precision, to catch every thought that conjures up in her head.
Bokang
“Do you know how you got here?”
I shake my head.
“You were found on the riverbank. You were doing some sort of paroxysm dance.”
“Paroxysm dance?”
“You were moving like you had some sort of seizure. You were communing with others in other realms. You spoke of a boy, Tumelo? And you kept saying you were a girl?”
Silence.
Beat.
“Do you know what we call you?”
“No.”
Silence.
Bokang
The river is always awake. I sink slowly into the abyss, heavily laden with the fears of people I do not know, coaxing me into my slumber. I hear the cries of women; their voices meander in the labyrinth of the river, and their sorrows make me defenceless. I want to escape this perilous sequence of illusions of unyielding death. Incantations are said to the river to pacify the monster that lives in it. There is a reed dance, and feet tremble on top of me. I laud myself for being a civilian of Babylon, but I do not know how I became the monster.
“You must go back!” the incantations crescendo from the Coven.
I pray for my grandmother’s resurrection. I curse everyone that refuses to leave me alone. My faith is an ebbing disaster that does not want reconciliation. I try to remember everything my grandmother taught me about the women whose spirits resided in me. I try to remember everything I read in the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, and Greek mythology. I bargain with whoever is in power to take the wheel – wherever it goes – except here.
“You have to return home,” the women command me.
Tumelo
“And when did you stop being Nthabiseng?” the therapist asks. I am not amused. The chair swallows me. It creases me up with discomfort when she commands me to visit places I lost along with who I used to be. Her tongue raves on graves and the ghosts echo my dead name: “Nthabiseng! Nthabiseng!” I am paralysed. The therapist and the ghosts want to crucify me with their sermons. Alas, I dance with them, even when they hang me with their tongues. Loneliness is a strange vice that eats at you.
The Congregation
“Why do you want to change your gender?”
The Coven
“Why do you want to change your gender?”
The Chorus
“Why do you want to change your gender?”
Bokang and Tumelo
We laugh meekly.
Beat.
Silence.
“We are not changing anything. We are coming into ourselves.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Joy, friends, that’s all it is.”
“So you can’t find joy in what God made you to be.”
“This is exactly what God made us to be.”
“How?” their faces are riddled with confusion.
“The soul returns home. It transcends.”
“So you transcend from being a man to a woman?” they turn to Tumelo, “and you want to be a man?”
“No, the soul returns home.”
“Do you believe in God?”
Tumelo
I wonder, what does this have to do with God? Does God believe in me? My conscience has never allowed me to forsake myself for people who incite much violence against me; especially this God. I know where they want to go with this conversation. “Yes I do, I guess. I don’t know. A High Power. The Universe. Maybe.”
The Chorus
“Do you think God made a mistake by making you a woman in the first place?”
The Congregation
“Do you think God made a mistake by making you a woman in the first place?”
The Coven
“Do you think God made a mistake by making you a woman in the first place?”
Bokang
“Do you think God made a mistake by making you a man in the first place?”
“I am not a man.”
“Y’know what I mean?”
“No, I do not y’know what you mean. I am exactly where I should be, living the exact experience I was meant to live. I am not asking you for anything, and yet here I am as your prisoner. You are callous with your scripture, and in fact your agenda doesn’t even make sense. Your god is not my god. Some people just give birth to themselves and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
I have always had a complicated relationship with God. We made a pact, and He betrayed it. Her God probably thinks I am a sorcerer who tricks the wicked into spells. He’s probably right. We agreed that He would only allow me to live until a certain point, and when he went against His word, I had to come to terms with the economy of surviving.
I retell my Grandmother’s story to my grandchildren now. The river is a strange companion that mirrors my Grandmother and women like us back at me. They tell me that the way back home is always to look within. All one has to do is silence the noise before they give birth to themselves.
When the cesspool of life does swallow you, consider yourself unlucky. You are now burdened with the consequence of being alive. Yet, when you learn to appreciate your circumstances; when you find joy in them, rejoice! You will always return home. You will always return to joy.
Tumelo
“No, I am exactly where I should be, living the exact experience I was meant to live.”
We stay silent. They do not know what to do with themselves. They are uncomfortable. Now they are making me uncomfortable. I brace myself, but I’m exhausted. “And I have never been a man, just assumed as one.”
“How?”
“I returned home.”
I wonder if they are anything like medieval sorcerers who turned the wicked into spells. If our anatomy or autonomy are just tricks that can dispel all of their curiosities about people like us.
I have always had a complicated relationship with God. He and I made a pact, and in the grand scheme of things, He betrayed it. We agreed that He would only allow me to live until twenty-one because I have been fucked over ever since I was able to make sense of things. I was coddled and put in straitjackets, and His Word was used against me to repent or I was promised damnation. It has been four years since I survived that betrayal. And now I have to contest with the fragility of my existence. My painstaking twenties. The miserable dysphoria. I am forced to come to terms with the economy of surviving. Again.
Bokang
My grandmother lathers my skin with scents of hazelnut and vanilla. She caresses my scalp with shea butter and puts daisies in my hair. I go out to fester in the company of Gomolemo. Every time I stand next to her I remember the shortcomings that come with this body. I remember that I will never be as graceful as she is even when we mirror each other. Spirit always knows. Almost always, even more than kin. It is uncanny how daffy Gomolemo and I are with each other, in spite of our differences, my grandmother adorns us in the same fabric of Seshweshwe, and, I, with my body, ridicule nature’s attempt of trying to separate us. In the grand scheme of things, the tapestry that held my bones is no different from hers. Between the two of us, we see each other as twins.
The mirror is a strange companion. I depend on it to be there for me no matter the condition, and it never fails me. Even the cracked ones that display all the different regions that I wish to never see because of how they make me feel. Broken mirrors reveal unbridled juxtapositions of joy and terror. They reveal the other world.
My body betrays me when I become an adolescent. I am forsaken with an Adam’s apple, broad shoulders and an abrasive voice. My hips and breasts do not grow in like Gomolemo’s. I am mortified by the cards that life has dealt me – even when I have laid all of them on the table – pleading and praying in tongues that I always fail to fathom. I envy how the world is kind to Gomolemo. Even God favours her over me.
Bokang. Tumelo. The Congregation. The Coven. The Chorus.
When the cesspool of life does not swallow you, curse every motherfucker. Consider yourself unlucky, run amok at the strange waves that the wind blows at you for being burdened with the consequence of being alive. And when you learn to appreciate your destitute, when you find joy in it, rejoice! There will be things you do in the dark that will cast your shadows away. They will grimace with disgust, and once you come to light, all of your doings will shame you. These are growing pains, and they will make you numb, and sprout with regret, but you will learn to forgive yourself in the morning. And when the sun sacrifices itself for the night, you will be seduced to become the person you always feared during the day, and love will fade away, but you will always come back to yourself. You will always return home.
About the author:
Mosa Neema Rabannye is a Black Trans Woman from South Africa. She is a writer, a theatre practitioner, and an aspiring language scientist.
Photo by Erick Butler on Unsplash
Isele Magazine 