African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices

Knowing Your Place

In the spring of 1980, a few months before my birth, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote a letter addressed to “Third World Women Writers.” This letter, published as “Speaking in Tongues,” has only just reached me. Perhaps I was not ready for it until now. Gloria writes: “Throw away abstraction and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass. Feel your way without blinders. To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked—not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat.” More to the point, she writes: “Put your shit on the paper.” This is a hard lesson learned. I have not yet thrown away the map and compass . But I have tucked them away, out of sight. And I will try not to reach for them until this piece is done. The man’s features have since become fuzzy in my memory. But I recall thinking that he looked sinister, despite the bright sunshine and the warm brick 281 Knowing Your Place Diana Adesola Mafe thoroughfare. We had already sized each other up by the time we brushed shoulders, walking in opposite directions along a university walkway in southern Ontario. A number of stereotypes had crossed my mind. Words like hick and redneck. I too was guilty of prejudice that day. I had taken in his overalls and his swagger, met his white gaze, and immediately become guarded. My expression blank, my heartbeat inexplicably fast and my gaze unwavering, I remember marching on. As we approached each other, he slowly removed the lollipop he was sucking, revealing a tongue stained bright red. Then, so softly that I almost did not catch it, he whispered a solitary word in passing: “Nigger.” To this day, I am hesitant to admit what was murmured to me as I strolled across a pleasant campus on a late summer afternoon. He spoke so quietly, almost gently, that I thought, indeed hoped, that I was mistaken. I replayed the moment in my mind and tried desperately to convince myself that I was hearing things. The wrong things. After all, people misconstrue meaning all the time. But that word is decidedly hard to misconstrue. And I was sufficiently rattled. My identity, my right to belong, had once again been called into question. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, I was in the midst of preparing for my doctoral comprehensive exams when this incident happened. And the postcolonial literature I was doggedly wading through came surprisingly alive after that day. Academic objectivity melted. Terms like subaltern and other jumped off the page. In true epiphany fashion, I became the subaltern and the other. On a more mundane level, I became pissed off. A complete stranger had seen me, labeled me, and dismissed me in one fell swoop. I felt like I had been stamped on the forehead (Nigger) and mailed off somewhere (Return to Sender). Although cultivated on the plantations of the southern United States, the notorious N word is clearly international in its currency. And this particular individual was not averse to adopting the word when “necessity”dictated. My intrinsic reaction, naive as it may sound, was utter bewilderment. Because only one thing mattered to that man on the walkway: he was white and I was not. And that simple equation, responsible for innumerable tragedies in human history, had triggered this unpleasant experience. That stranger clearly believed that I was out of place. I needed to go somewhere that would suit him and (he probably thought) suit me much better. Back to Africa? Yet there was a real possibility that I did not belong there either. After all, a few years ago I was affronted on another walkway, an African walkway—and not by a white man but by a black woman. The occasion was my cousin’s wedding in Nigeria, the woman was my aunt, and the walkway was smack down the middle of a massive Anglican church. In standard Yoruba style, the wedding was ostentatious. My entire family was dressed in traditional 282 Part Six. Writing from a Different Place clothing. Since I had reached that “end of adolescence” stage where rediscovering my cultural roots was “cool,” I donned a bright yellow buba and iro, draped the stiff aso-oke iborun over my shoulder and allowed a relative to tie the matching gele on my head, all with little complaint. The church was full of people milling...