A legacy of forced resilience

I want my child to know his origins encompass the forced resilience of Third World lived bodily experiences. Representation pic

I felt like dressing up for breakfast on International Women's Day on Wednesday. It's apparently a Traminer tradition to host a breakfast for women accompanied by a fundraising sale of early spring flowers to support an organisation for cancer patients. Of course, it is women who organise all of this for other women, and perhaps it is also fitting that all of us who are invited to partake of breakfast donate to charity. There is an inbuilt generosity premised on conditioned generosity that is worth celebrating. I was among the first few guests. Monika, my partner's aunt, was expectedly among the chief organisers.

When she asked me what I'd like to have, I felt spoiled for choice. There was a luscious looking Black Forest cake, a Zopf (a braided bread), three or four other kinds of cakes, including a Chocolate Roulade with whipped cream, and one fabulous bready pastry Maridl, my partner's other aunt, made with the leftover nuts and raisins from Christmas. I chose a slice of the Black Forest cake and sat alone at a table, though Monika and another woman whose company I enjoy, often came to entertain me and my little one. Steadily, the other Traminer women came in, all sitting on other tables until I began to feel a bit like the new kid in high school movies. I noticed, later, a Black woman who occasionally hustles outside the local supermarket, was peeping in. Monika waved her arms, eagerly inviting her in. She responded with a hand gesture suggesting she would come later. I wished she had come in then so that we could have coloured the room a bit. I am sure I would have had more in common with her than everyone else who was dining in the same room as me.

Yesterday, as I was re-reading Gloria Anzaldúa's letter to Third World women of colour, my attention was drawn to her citation of an excerpt from a talk that the Black feminist activist Luisah Teisha gave to primarily white feminist writers about Third World women's experiences. ‘If you are not caught in the maze that (we) are in, it's very difficult to explain to you the hours in the day we do not have. And the hours that we do not have are hours that are translated into survival skills and money. And when one of those hours is taken away it means an hour that we don't have to lie back and stare at the ceiling or an hour that we don't have to talk to a friend. For me, it's a loaf of bread.' It is not a coincidence that I should really notice this piece of anecdotal text at this moment in my life and not during my earlier readings of Anzaldúa's letter. Never before have I worked so hard at manufacturing time in order to have the hours to which I am not necessarily entitled by virtue of where I am coming from and the colour of my skin and my passport. My current state of friendlessness is a direct consequence of this struggle to locate spare time to nurture relationships. I am caught in a loop of earning a livelihood in order to sustain myself, building on my language skills without having the resources that would allow me to access a language school, and trying to keep up with the times and remain relevant within the cultural spheres in which I operate. It is frequently exhausting.

And yet it is not so different from the working life struggles of my mother, or her mother. There is a kind of lineage to this whole business of forced resilience. Sometimes when I share aspects of my life in Mumbai or university with people who have grown up privileged in Europe I come across as someone who has lived through their notions of adversity. The problem with sharing anything about my past life with the people who inhabit my present is that I appear context-less to them, nothing about me makes sense: the way I dress, the fact that I speak English, or that I teach in the university and earn more than my partner. Then I think that very little about my mother made sense, perhaps, to the worlds in which she lived. She also had to invent time and possibly didn't know what leisure could mean for the most part of her life.

I feel proud, though, to bequeath this legacy to our child. I want him to know that while he enjoys the privileges of our proximity to whiteness, his origins encompass the forced resilience of Third World lived bodily experiences. I suppose in not having the hours, I am obliged not to fall into a state of complacency. I am able to clearly see the systemic failures that force so many people to always operate in a state of survival. Oddly enough, when I do speak to most people here who do seem to ‘have it all', what they seem to lack is happiness or joy. What I miss most, I realised, between last week and this week, is not friends so much as feminist sisterhood. I felt it in my bones yesterday as the only feminist in the breakfast room and the only person of colour.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.