Aug 17, 2020
We can be okay, even when things are not.
One of my neighbours drives the same type of car as my ex-girlfriend. It is a car that makes a distinctive sound, three beeps in rapid succession, every time it is locked. In our year together, I learned to associate this sound with her. Three beeps in rapid succession outside my window, and my heart rate would rise.
At first, the spike was my excited anticipation of her spontaneous laughter whenever I rushed to hug her; the unique, incredible scent that lingered in my bedroom long after she was gone; the way she would crinkle her smiling eyes at me and say, “hello, my small baby.”
Eventually, the spike became anxiety. Dread in the pit of my stomach. An ache behind my eyes. Tightness in my chest. When I met her at the door it was because I wanted her to hold me, to make the bad feeling go away. I wanted her to call me ‘small baby’ again, with soft warmth in her voice instead of cutting, thinly sheathed mockery.
It’s been almost eight months since the last time she pulled up outside my window. I had ended our relationship over the phone, in a tearful, trembling panic. While I tried to take it back, to explain that I just wanted to know that she would stop crushing me — that she wanted to stop crushing me — she said, coolly, “I’ll come for my things.”
Beep-beep-beep.
The erratic staccato behind my sternum. My back against the doors of my wardrobe. We talked a little. I sank to the floor. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. I cried a lot. She pulled me to my feet. I buried my face in her neck. She always smelled wonderful. I said I was sorry, for the millionth to the million-and-fifteenth time in our relationship, for God knows what. I could sense that she was never coming back.
Eventually, I started worrying, irrationally, that she would suddenly come back.
It’s been almost eight months, yet every time I hear those three beeps from my neighbour’s car, my heart rate still spikes. My chest tightens, my breath catches. Then I remember it’s just my neighbour. I feel relieved, and also a little silly. I look around my room, remembering that I’m alone in it. Sometimes I laugh out loud at myself. Laughter can be a great remedy for pain.
***
Several weeks ago, I posted a funny tweet about my oblivious generosity to my ex, who seems to use the same tactics on the women she cycles through. The laughter made me feel better about the complicated grief I had woken up feeling. It was the week of the eighth anniversary of my mum’s passing, which my ex hadn’t cared to commemorate with me last year.
Not long after, a tweet from my ex’s friend of almost a decade, Xeenarh Mohammed, floated down my timeline. It was directed at no one in particular. “Stop obsessing over your ex,” it began. Xeenarh wanted this person, whoever she was addressing, to stop bashing their ex and get closure — or at least a hobby.
I tilted my head at the tweet. I could tell she was talking at me. I could tell she wanted to make it clear she was talking about me. It was…disappointing.
In June, I had sent a lengthy, detailed email to my ex’s friends, including Xeenarh. I told them: your friend is an abuser. And I’m not the only one she’s abused. Confirm from her other exes; you’re friends with them.
In that email, I had two asks. Support your friend in being accountable for how she destroys the women she claims to love. Do your best to protect the person she’s dating now. It could never have occurred to me to add: don’t be a disrespectful, cowardly dickhead on the internet. I blocked Xeenarh.
Two weeks later, someone sent me a screenshot of another tweet. Y’all’s fave queer writer/speaker/columnist keeps bashing her ex. But small “stop obsessing over your ex”, and she blocked me. Can dish it, can’t take it.
I don't know how Xeenarh’s mind works — nor am I remotely interested in finding out — so I have no idea how she decided it was acceptable to express these thoughts publicly, given the circumstances.
I was repulsed and enraged by her behaviour. I was also concerned about a bigger problem: Xeenarh Mohammed is the Executive Director of Nigeria’s most visible LGBTQ+ organisation. Xeenarh Mohammed is also manifestly incapable of responsibly handling an issue that far too many queer Nigerians face: intimate partner abuse.
So I wrote to the Board of The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs). The email was also addressed to the previous ED, and to the feminist elder at whose home Xeenarh had first introduced me to my ex.
This time, I had four asks.
- What is TIERs’ stance on intimate partner abuse in queer relationships, including its suggested processes for ethically catering to the needs of both accuser and accused?
- What is TIERs’ position on its Executive Director’s recent personal, yet public, conduct in contemptuously responding to allegations of intimate partner abuse in queer relationships?
- How will TIERs address its Executive Director’s contemptuous approach to intimate partner abuse in queer relationships, such that her demonstrably harmful personal conduct does not undermine the trust placed in TIERs by queer Nigerians for both extra- and intra-communal support?
- In light of the public conduct of its Executive Director, how does TIERs intend to demonstrate to the Nigerian queer community, who witnessed and are discussing this debacle, that it is interested in prioritising meaningful and constructive approaches to addressing abuse; or at least that TIERs does not condone, minimise or normalise intimate partner abuse in queer relationships?
I received a response almost immediately, and a decision three working days later. Xeenarh should apologise to you, the Board informed me. TIERs will also put out social media messages making it clear that the organisation does not condone intimate partner violence.
This was a week ago. None of that has happened.
***
one thing i don’t need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don’t know what to do wit em
they dont open doors
or bring the sun back
they dont make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didnt nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry
i am simply tired
of collectin
i didnt know
i was so important to you
i’m gonna haveta throw some away
i cant get to the clothes in my closet
for alla the sorries
i’m gonna tack a sign to my door
leave a message by the phone
‘if you called
to say yr sorry
call somebody
else
i dont use em anymore’
i let sorry/ didnt meanta/ & how cd i know abt that
take a walk down a dark & musty street in brooklyn
i’m gonna do exactly what i want to
& i wont be sorry for none of it
letta sorry soothe yr soul/ i’m gonna soothe mine
you were always inconsistent
doin somethin & then bein sorry
beatin my heart to death
talkin bout you sorry
well
i will not call
i’m not goin to be nice
i will raise my voice
& scream & holler
& break things & race the engine
& tell all yr secrets bout yrself to yr face
& i will list in detail everyone of my wonderful lovers
& their ways
i will play oliver lake
loud
& i wont be sorry for none of it
i loved you on purpose
i was open on purpose
i still crave vulnerability & close talk
& i’m not even sorry bout you bein sorry
you can carry all the guilt & grime ya wanna
just dont give it to me
i cant use another sorry
next time
you should admit
you’re mean/ low-down/ triflin/ & no count straight out
steada bein sorry alla the time
enjoy bein yrself
***
During the year when I learned to associate the beep-beep-beep of a locked car with the woman I called the love of my life, I also learned how “Sorry” can be used to manipulate, dismiss and belittle, rather than to repair. As such, it truly doesn’t matter to me that Xeenarh’s apology is genuine — or even that it happens at all.
What matters to me, where Xeenarh is concerned, is that she is no longer able to hide her hands. But more than that, what matters to me is that I underscore as often, as clearly and as firmly as necessary, that none of this is okay.
The abuse my ex subjected me to was not okay. Xeenarh’s response to it was not okay. The lack of accountability — on my ex’s part, on Xeenarh’s part — is not okay. They can find, and I’m sure have found, many ways to justify it. It’s still not okay.
All of it is unacceptable. And I refuse to accept it.
We live in a society that normalises — and even necessitates — abuse. Far too many of us have survived a heartbreaking range of destructions, at the hands of people from whom we shouldn’t have needed to protect ourselves. None of us deserved that.
None of us deserve that.
But our communities are wired towards silence. Don’t kick up a fuss. Our communities are wired towards shame. Everyone will think you are weak. Our communities are wired towards blame. Maybe it was somehow your fault.
I call bullshit.
This world is fucked up. And people are fucked up right along with it. We are socialised into too much power, or too little. So we flail and flop our way towards some sort of personhood, and fracture ourselves and others along the way. We are taught to dominate and call that love. We are taught to destroy and call that discipline. We are taught to denigrate and call that defence.
I call bullshit.
Far too many of you reading this are also survivors. Survivors of a variety of abuses, from a variety of abusers. Far too many of you have been broken into pieces perfect for breaking others. It has been this way for so long. It is this way in so many places. It will be this way forever.
Still, I call bullshit.
There is nothing inevitable about abuse. It’s not a law of nature. We facilitate it. We can interrupt it.
***
When survivors come forward with the pain that has been inflicted on us by people who are themselves fractured and flailing; when we finally find our voices inside what we have not been killed by so that the trauma can come out as words, that truth-telling is a sacred thing.
By naming what we have survived, we lance the wound and approach healing. We stand at the centre of our stories and offer our witnesses the opportunity to travel through time, to hold our hands through a thing that should never have happened — a thing that only happened because we were alone and afraid.
When survivors speak, we embrace our power. Past fear, past shame, past silence. We open ourselves up to the possibility of receiving what we should always have had: care, empathy, protection, the swinging blade of a bright and righteous anger that cuts down the abuser’s false hold over us. We tilt the trajectory of our lives away from destruction and towards wholeness. We reach up, like little children do, to be carried to safety.
This is a sacred thing. And it should be taken seriously.
This truth-telling should not be met with dismissal, mockery, or salacious interest. Survivors should not be left alone to defend ourselves from our abusers’ rage at being exposed; we should not be tasked with the responsibility of protecting our abusers’ future victims; we should not be required to flay ourselves for the possibility of being believed.
We live in a world where abuse is rampant. Why is that so easy to believe until it takes flesh in the form of people we know who have been abused, people we know who have abused?
The not-dying that survivors manage to do should be handled carefully. Yet, it is apparent that not enough of us know how to hold survivors — or their stories — with care.
***
Healing is a skill. Restoring trust and building safety; these are skills. We are force-fed algebra and the almighty formula, but not the particular math of holding space for another person’s recovery from systematised pain.
Nobody sits us down to show us how accountability is a practice, or that safety does not just materialise from our good intentions. Generating interpersonal care; communally compensating for personal failings; eliminating harm from our ways of loving and the communities we fashion for ourselves — these are all things that we must teach and learn.
Who are we learning from?
In recent times, I have found myself feeling increasingly thankful for the work being done by Mariame Kaba (Transform Harm), adrienne maree brown, Nnennaya Amuchie, @/theleilaraven on Twitter, Bilphena Yahwon, Sonya Renee Taylor and Eloghosa Osunde.
These women and people are all thinking out loud about what exists beyond the pedestrian paradigms of destruction: abuse; enabling; survival. They are showing us that we can envision wholeness, interpersonal safety, and freedom, as radically impossible as those things may seem. They are teaching how we can translate these imaginings into our material lives so that we are no longer always afraid, always bleeding, always breaking.
And we must learn these teachings, so that we can stop believing that safety is something that exists outside of us. It isn’t the case that justice can only come from strangers functioning within carceral systems that don’t know our names or our lives. It is a well-worn lie that abuse is only what happens when a body is broken or broken into. It’s just not true that we will never figure out how to protect one another from the whims of people whose rage and fear are bigger than their hearts.
This is the truth, for now: We are swimming in a sea of harm. It is worse for those of us who have to mute ourselves to survive. It is worse for us who have to break our own bones to fit inside suffocating closets — too often, coffins — built by a world that refuses to make space. We are swimming in a sea of harm, and there is current upon current of destruction that we must wade through as we try to survive. Some of us never make it. Many of us are tired, all the way to the marrow.
Where is the shore? Where can we rest?
How do we build ourselves life rafts? How do we find our way to dry land? Where will we find the ropes to pull one another from the depths?
How do we heal? How do we get free?
I don't have anything close to all the answers. But here is some holy work:
- to listen not only with the ears, but also with the eyes, the heart, the hands.
- to be gentle with ourselves, and also with the truth of other people’s lives.
- to do the terrifying work of transforming ourselves.
- to valiantly defend the borders of every safe place we can find.
- to share the load of love. To love. To love.
***
Love is responsibility. These recent events have brought this lesson home to me in profound ways. Responsibility to others, yes, and also responsibility to self.
Love is taking responsibility for making wholeness possible.
It is taking these things unwaveringly seriously: your life; your salvation; your two feet resting, at last, on a safe shore. It is keeping an eye and an arm out for those who are also swimming towards safety. It is making expansive space for all of the faces that healing, recovery, wholeness, can wear. It is also knowing, no matter how much we don’t want it to be true, that not everyone wants to be saved.
Not everyone wants to be safe.
Some people have no idea how to live on the shore. A sea of pain is a place, too, and some people don’t have the legs for land. Leave them to their drifting. If you are able, spare a prayer that they do not drown.
But you? You can get free. You can get saved. You can be safe.
Swim for your life. The shore is beckoning.
You will not be alone on it.
