FORTUNATE JWARA

It is right here where I do not have the precise words to describe what is going on with me. I have stopped looking for meanings. They are not fixed anyway. Not stagnant or pedantic as one would like. I do know that I am a mother. Of two people. A girl and boy. I also know that I am raising them by myself. On top of that is the realization that I am leading them and haven’t had sex in over a year. And this is sex with someone else because as bonding with one’s clitoris goes, I am right up there. Getting to know the organ. Snapping pictures of it to look at. I have not been touching anyone else intimately other than me. When my celibacy struck a year this month, I wanted to celebrate but I didn’t know what to commemorate or who. I remember reading somewhere that our cells eventually flush the person out of our system. My ex is out. This is not a declaration of loneliness or lacking. I am a student of Fernando Pessoa. Of the fragmentation in The Book of Disquiet. I am content in the deliberate decision to stay away. Although, the question remains: What does one do to be joyful about the fact that sex has remained a cognitive idea? And is there a thrill unhidden when one bumps into Spanish pornography and reads how the clip disrupts the seminal ideas of moaning archaically located within colonial syllables and musicality? “Si! Si, si!” I share with a very good friend of mine and he tweets about it and declares: Unlike my close friend, I do not watch pornography, and includes laughing faces.

I do not know what is going on with me. I am quite educated on feeling guilty about missing things. About the expected perfection in motherhood. For instance, should I have to feel bad about not pausing in touching myself when I hear my son cry? Another instance – Wednesdays. These are the mornings I forget to pack for my daughter accordingly. On this day, the morning routine is quite different from the rest. The fatigue has started to kick in. Wednesdays, as I do picks ups, are also the day I question if people can truly write children’s books when they are not parents. No questions are enough. I think the criticality comes from the fact that, on Mondays, my daughter has violin and tennis. It is the day when she is carrying her school bag, the violin, the sports bag with her freshly-washed clothes for tennis and her lunch bag. As I say goodbye to her at the drop-off gate, I watch her stumble for balance. Tell her she must have a great day. Monday is the busiest day of the week. So, I feel guilty about Wednesdays. I have forgotten to pack her swimming bag so many times on this day that the guilt grips on me and I wonder if I am cut out for it. If I am capable of being a mother. I am educated enough to not feel like this. All the gentle parenting stuff is memorized so explicitly that deviation becomes a point of reference, a citation you can’t miss. But the truth is, I am juggling so much.

Let me tell you about why I am here – raising the children on my own; being a South African statistic. I chose wrong. I mistook a personality given for actual character. I fell for the impression management the way voters keep putting charlatans in power in this country and making me hate it more and more. Desire to escape it. Find a nest somewhere, where my children could be protected from the decay originating because of their birth-skin. Although this could be the many of my daydreams about trying to make something for tomorrow. To create a room for the future. I am limited to that wonder because in the short film Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris, when James got asked if his “escape” to France from the Unites States was a fruition, he responded: “What have I escaped? Where, anyway, would I go to escape […] where would a fleeing Black man go to if he wanted to escape?” So, even today the skin politic becomes about the way what’s wrong as a discourse of a few, for those who have the data about power. Except that the power I am talking about in relation to me has to do with something about my genitals. You know, a cunt drawn. Lips shut and quiet. Untouched like those wines in the basement for display. Just existing. Though, know the rubbing of my clitoris is a delicious moment. The legs wide open and watching myself opening them wider. For myself. For the pleasure point. Not caring too much about the climax. It is nice to be in the trance, getting lost in it. I used to feel his sperms dying inside of me and creating that smell which quarrelled with all four corners of my cunt. You know, watching the sprint of his cum down my thighs to the leg, down to the ankles and knowing I can’t pee too soon if I do not want to feel pain. Delay going to sit. Especially because I hate any discomfort in relation to him entering and marking territory. I think that is how my children were made: passionate sex outdoors, careless about passersby and thinking cautionary measures after the fact would work. Pure disrespect to the power and mysteries of nature.

I am alone in this and I relish it. I do miss his hirsute chest. I do not feel obligated to mention his long and thick penis. Just the less mountainous chest I liked to rest my head on, usually with short hair. Non-moisturized because I have a bad hair routine. I am one of those who gets in the shower and feels the water from head to toe without thinking about consequences. I pull my hair compulsively when I am thinking or trying to respond to an email in the most professional way. I have never pretended to own a crown. My baby father and I thickened the pleasure without the association of him pulling hair or braids or cupping an afro. Perhaps that is why he pressed me down and came the way he did?

The cum was remarkable in the way that he expressed it. Collected it in a performance. The one difficult to forget, easy to remember. The hums he made as he got lost in the convulsions. Watching his body vibrate, vulnerable, in a composition exhaling. Yeah, that’s the baby father! Useless in many parts with just the strong phallus to show. In hindsight, that is all he could give. Jouissance, so self-centred in corporeality with the visceral so novice, unfathomed as a pathology for textured pleasures. I look back and see that I was a different person then, one of the many reasons as to why I do not know what is going on with me. He was always absent and drowning within himself, in his own shit so big it has no endpoint. In an argument, the ugly one, he carelessly mentioned that when he is in intercourse, he is there to pleasure himself. At first, I took it with a pinch of salt dousing in the delusion of validating lovers fighting ugly. Gibberish that in this structure saying hurtful words to each other is not unfamiliar. How could I have been seen as ugly when I told him he had became complacent for so long in just rubbing my clit and hoping that I quickly get wet for him to plunge in. In the face of repetition, the clitoris’ nerves reach a defect, run out of vigour, conk out. I told him this. I screamed this into his face. He wasn’t lying though – pleasure was only for himself, about himself.

I felt like death when we ended. Not in the figurative sense as Francis Bacon’s paintings I love so much. This brush was brutal, literally. Heartache steadfast. I wanted to make friends with anyone who could just comfort me. Strategic connections to try and get over your once best friend. I am not a social butterfly, but I found myself in bondages that could only do what was required, to pacify me and feed self-help junk to a sudden bubbling hole. Feeling better was part of my everyday mandate or I would perish. I was sick every other day; flu-stricken. Anxiety-associated like a chicken whose neck is about to be cut. Then, there would be stark pictures of my children in my sub-consciousness. And the drinking, slight spiralling. The losing my spectacles in an Uber after taking 3 half-full glasses of raw vodka and unable to see for weeks on end. Unable to think properly. Unable to analyse the sharp contrast plot elements. Thus, the impulse to disassociate and be anonymous. Disappear as an act of refusal, they say in conferences. Isolate and let pages be a piled fur about what matters. In unknown angles, attempt to visualize the truth of the matter in the body and let go. I feel sheepish thinking this, hence it can only be a confessional mode, about my daughter knowing this later in life as informed advice or my son immediately copying his father’s ways as a rubric. What if he follows the routes of toying with a woman’s heart and loyalty or her genuine musings and touch as disposable; a long stare to hawkers by the market because you are convincing yourself that they sell the same things. I love mothering for how it centres me to kill what I may want so bad because the children remain above the bullshit. All of this does not matter now.

I love being a mother although I can’t proclaim greater sexual freedom. I feel exploited by my kids as I am in a brief abeyance of exploring the self in generous amounts. Everything must be about them, bankrupting me afresh with a drawn breath for as long as I live. Therefore, to plan to fuck a man other than the one they know is unthinkable; an invitation to respond to deep questions also known as self-consciousness.

I want to be a female protagonist that’s an active character that also actively desires, but being a mom has managed to pin me to the established virtues and domesticity.

At least by what my situation is: not by implication but about the reality of raising my children by myself. At 8pm sharp every night, they are in bed and a memory of pre-kids age gets reinvented. Just for 4 hours every day before it’s my turn to retire. A time and space possible for me to imagine without my daughter’s endless inquisitions or my son’s tantrums. To laugh by myself. To make edits of others’ expressions towards me. To think about the different intercourse I have had. For example, the virtual sex I experienced for almost 3 years, watching sperm ducts on the screen and feeling like they were on my tongue. Their taste as a sensation in the bridge of my palette as I delved deep into his imagination of having fucked me without touching me but feeling me in the mind. We had a strangely fulfilling relationship. Queer love for sex. Fucking each other online and never caring about meeting because we were good actors. I did all the positions he requested so we could finish the story on time, as if we were chasing a deadline, a submission for remuneration and never for my physical hole.

Nobody prepared me for mothering. What could they have said? It is fundamentally subjective, an embodiment of differences – between you as different mothers with different notions of the world and our children responding differently to stimuli. A collapse in the permutations of what mothering should be. To my epiphany, a promising challenge to not iterate the canon. More to note here, is that nobody prepared me for in-laws. I am raising my children by myself and out of sex because of them. A group of jealous people and terrifying angry faces. Baby father listened to their evil whispers that I was too much, too strong, too tame for their group thinking. Their family is run like a cult with a cutthroat leader and other crack-brained siblings waiting to take up the turn. You obey or you are castrated. Acquire an independent stance and get labelled a problem. That is how lineage genocide is enacted; things get destroyed and friends go back to being strangers. He was weak as a fish spine, without alternative epistemologies. Never the one to choose a structure that works for him for the better. Not capable of choosing himself. “Mama’s right, Sister’s right, Obey! Obey! Then we would be alright.” He would charge at me, thinking elevating bloodline villains was going to do our union any good. To my shock, I began to wonder if this man ever heard me at all when I spoke. If my words were read as an alive text rather than a mainstream dump. He and I had so many sessions of defining the self for the other as heteromonogamy requires. Getting naked and witnessing toenails. I outlined myself and my intellectual way of life to him on numerous occasions – never mentioned I would imbibe an in-law’s corrupting nature and fly with it. He must have listened to the notes my cunt played graspingly, more than anything else of me… I am proud of myself. The last exchange I had with his sister via email I told her I do not come from a school of thought of mistreating a woman because she’s an outsider and that sisters like her keep brothers like my baby father as perpetual children who never grow. They only peep at manhood in a vision as narrow as a keyhole. This was before I came to terms with the fact that she couldn’t theorize for jackshit.

Here is a list of things I love about my kids. They are clingy! They are demanding! They are full of energy! They are challenging! They are gentle! They are possessive monsters! They are unreasonable! They are kind and clever! They are incredibly cute! They are perceptive! They mimic me! They are innocent in their acts! They finish my money! They are grateful! They give warm hugs! They think I am great! They do not know I am drowning! They think I am a hero! They use my teachings against me! They manipulate me! They do not know how I have contemplated dying early! They think I have a peculiar bravery! They do not see barriers! They believe me! They apologize! They acknowledge a mistake! They tell me I am the best thing that ever happened to them at the right time! They make me dream! They tell me about their day! They do not tear off books! They are expressive! They enjoy school! They call me out! They know I hate a white man who likes to reassert his dominance! They know control exasperates me! They respect my need to be left alone at times! They frustrate me! They tire me! They conversate with me! They know I like fruitful personal projects! They do not like swear words! They tell me I am beautiful! They are not afraid of me! They do not barge into my room! They are the best love! Over and over again, they are my experiment and self-referential. They are the reason why I am alive!

My children are mine even though they do not look like me. It used to bother me until I realised that senses complement each other. Why doesn’t she have my complexion? Why doesn’t he have my body-structure? I didn’t have the answers. They may not look like me, but their mannerisms are mine. I am raising them by myself and proffer them counsel from my current read. I may not know what’s going on with me. I may be in-between wor(l)ds. But I must unlearn in layers for as long as I am a mother to them. I am a teacher to them, about South African cricket, race and gender. I sing poems to them and play complicated music videos for them. When my daughter says “a black man neh, a white person neh” I feel the politic and know that she eavesdrops on my calls I take moving around the house. I become happy. I feel like I am doing important work. I am a mother. She has asserted that she will start having a serious boyfriend when she is 16 and the reason why she does not have one right now is because she is shortest in her English class, and I chuckle inward thinking that her body will avenge itself one day. She won’t crucify it or feel like it tells lies but see it as a magical labyrinth.

I have so many questions to ask. But that’s an emblematic feature of who I am. Let me rather not ask any more questions but say that experimentation with form is crucial.