learning, relearning, returning | Akuol Garang de Mabior

Nyïnyde thook kɔk ku liu thoŋde Muɔnyjäŋ, enaŋ të thiin dak ne nyïnydu yic… Ye buŋë anɔŋic akökööl ke Muɔnyjäŋ bïï mïth ke ya kueen ago thok cuɔk mär ënoŋ keek ku juεrkrɔt

To know the languages of other people, without knowing your own [Dinka], must mean that there is something small lacking in your knowledge… This book contains stories for children to read so that the language is not lost and is carried forward

(Ciɛɛm 1995, p. vi)

My name is Akuɔl Garaŋ de Mabior. I have always loved to read and written to myself. Always in English, because that is the only language I can speak, write and understand fluently. Not being able to speak or write in my mother tongue has been my great shame since I was a preteen. I was so young when I forgot it that I can’t remember ever knowing it. My mother still tells me with pride that I spoke it so well I would correct people. I remember once confronting my father after what felt like an epiphany. With wide-eyed realisation, I thought, “it’s not my fault.” I tried to rid myself of my guilt by blaming him. I said to him, “if I can’t remember ever speaking the language, then it can’t possibly be my fault that I forgot it.” My argument: how can you blame a child? My father, cool and calm, as he almost always was, responded, “you could always learn” and he was right. I hated that he was right and it took me over a decade to embark on the difficult and long journey towards speaking my language once more — over a decade to fully realise the magnitude of my loss. In this essay, I will write freely, as I write to myself, reflecting on my experiences as a reader and writer, focusing on reading and writing about colourism, the something small lacking in my knowledge, and remembering the lessons I learned from my father.

The British named us Dinka because they could not pronounce Muɔnyjäŋ, which is what we call ourselves or Thuɔŋjäŋ, which is what we call our language. I believe, as Janell Hobson asserts, “to name ourselves rather than be named, we must first see ourselves” (Hobson 2003, p. 89). She states, further, “for some of us this will not be easy… we may have forgotten how we look” (Hobson 2003, p. 89). After being introduced to intersectionality theory, after reading and writing about it, I began to name myself. In other words, to define myself and my experiences on my own terms and on my own behalf. From this, I have learned to value my particular perspective. I am a very black, black African woman.

One of the things I have been struggling to share with people, and so I choose to write about, is “colourism” as defined by Alice Walker (1983, p. 290). After I read the chapter in which she coined the term, I felt addressed in a way I had never before. In reading this chapter, I was able to write a truth I had long suppressed. I wrote freely starting with questions:

How do I speak about the hostility I receive from other black people and colourism? If it is not normal to be black in Africa then where must I go? I am not an alien. I am from this planet. Though, from the way people look at me, you would think I fell from the sky. My father once said, “we did not fall from the sky.”

I was 16 years old when he died. It was the summer after I had completed my O levels and I had been anxious and excited to get my results. My mother had sent my younger sister and me to the UK to visit family and to encourage us to begin thinking about University. We were at my aunt and uncle’s house when we received the news of a helicopter crash. My mother had been waiting to receive him in a camp on the border of Kenya and South Sudan (Sudan at the time) called New Site, which she founded in 1999. We spent many school holidays there, and though I have not been back in over ten years, I can remember, vividly, waiting for helicopters on the dry and dusty football field. Upon receiving the news, I went down to my auntie’s kitchen and sat alone on the floor to write what I later gave as a speech at my father’s funeral, in front of thousands of people. I remember standing there, waiting to hear my own echo in the heavy silence of those moments, waiting to breathe and continue.

I often think to myself that if my mother could survive losing my father and hold our family together against tremendous odds then I can figure out a way to make sense of my life, even or especially under circumstances that seem overwhelming and even or especially when things seem to be falling apart. For all the complex theories that I have struggled with, and hated, and loved, and rejected or consumed, my philosophy on reading, writing and navigating academia has been, as my father once told me, “you can always learn.” I chose to return to UCT based on this little seemingly unremarkable truth.

REFERENCES

Ciɛɛm, J. (1995) Kë Jiεεmë Buk. In Buŋ Tueeŋ de Cïεεr, J. Ciɛɛm, Ed. ECS/ New Day Publishers Khartoum

Hobson, J. (2003) The ‘Batty’ Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body. Hypatia: Women, Art and Aesthetics, 18 (4), pp. 87–105.

Walker, A. (1983) If the Present Looks Like the Past What Does the Future Look Like? In: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. pp. 290–312