Unwrapping the present, to find beauty within

I grew up in abject poverty. That is a fact. Yet lately when I say that, true as it is, I feel that I blur the lines between the poverty that was apparent on the surface, and the abundant riches that lurked underneath those layers of deprivation.

 Every time I find myself trying to tell my life story, I yield to the temptation to skip the tales of desolation, and tell instead of the wealth of experience that existed side by side with this force of lack, which often threatened to drown our hopes and aspirations. In retrospect, I feel as though my path was strewn with sharp nails for a reason. Those nails now hold up posters of ecstatic joys firmly against the walls of my heart.

A mention of where we came from used to conjure to the listener a sense that we as ghetto seeds possessed an irrevocable air of ugliness, which our home made soaps could never undo. We were so familiar with the ugly references that we got to a point where the shame tied our lips into a stubborn knot, and we found ourselves betraying our hometown  in public.

I remember in my teenage years I would cringe whenever girls asked me where I’m from. At age fifteen when my uncle invited me to stay with him (in one of the considerably plushy suburbs in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe), I felt like Pip in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Great Expectations’. I simply shrugged away the ghetto and mostly pretended I had lived with my uncle all along. The irony was that he grew up in Makokoba when it promised a more challenging experience than the one I was living through at that moment. He read from underneath a street lamp, which he shared with local gangsters discussing the shenanigans of the day. So I was lucky, in a sense.

Google Makokoba. The internet might give you images that do not testify of my people’s resilience and the joy that punctuates their beauty within. From Makokoba, I learnt that you could hold a thriving youth soccer tournament with a soccer ball made out of plastic. You could hold a wrestling championship with a belt made out of a cardboard box, shiny tin foil around it that we had rummaged from the dump site and washed to rid of dirt. (I always opted for the Ultimate Warrior for some reason, unless Hulk Hogan was really hot that season).

But the lasting euphoria always came around birthday time. Since we were too young to understand the sacrifice that mothers on social welfare would have to make to just plant a smile on our faces, we had no idea that we were actually seeds growing out of a garden of love that stretched itself to its limit to water our fancies. Looking back, I wish I owned a CCTV camera, following my mother wherever she went, so as to capture those moments when she agonized over how to make my birthdays memorable.

 Although I spent a considerable amount of time by her side as she sold fruits, vegetables and sweets by the bus rank or scones at the local trade fair, her dreams for me remain largely a mystery. African mothers are a mystery. Because we grow up in harsh, often violent circumstances, they have to hide their emotions from you, in case you become too soft to handle your own within such a tumultuous environment. So my birthdays are still an intimate memory up to this day, yet the source of the joy still irretrievably inscrutable . I still remember the t-shirts she got me on days when a children’s party or birthday cake was just too impossible.

But unwrapping the presents back in the day leads me to my current observation. When I was all too excited to discover what was inside the box or hidden underneath a clumsily ducktaped gift wrap, I was not aware I was re-enacting my future. I did not know that as an adult I would have to pause and unwrap my present societal circumstance,  in order to rediscover my own inner beauty.

The ugliness I talked about earlier, has transformed in nature. People no longer see the place I came from as denoting my own unacceptability.  They just prejudge me before they can allow me to unwrap the presents that prove I’m more than radiant inside. They do not wait long for you to untie the bow. They just walk away and carry their opinions of you as ‘angry black man’, ‘overly ambitious workmate’, ‘inconsistent partner’ or are just too ignorant to even say a word.

And sometimes I do acknowledge my inconsistency to a degree. We are all human. We have high and low moments and they do intrude in the path of well meaning people in our lives. They sneak up on them and interrupt their daily routine. At those moments, when I am tempted to feel ugly for my actions, I take time to unwrap those presents from the time I was a child, and realize they might have been more than just sentimental ornaments, but an unwrapping of the radiant beauty inside me.