Overlapping

I am guilty of apologizing. I don’t mean the good kind, the kind that shows that I was wrong or inconsiderate to someone (although I try to be a good apologist where that is concerned), I mean the kneejerk additive to my language when I have an opinion or what I have to say might disappoint. I mean the kind that reflects some internal need to take up less space.

It is funny to think of brash and opinionated me as suffering from such a thing but I do. I’ve noticed it recently in emails, “I’m sorry, but you missed the deadline…”, “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t fit with the plan…”. I considered it a courtesy, a politeness in a world that often forgets its manners. 

But I’ve been reading articles lately that speak to the over-representation of apologetic language in women’s speech and how we are perceived because of it. 

Without fail, the response to this observation is that "women are just wired that way. Women are nurturing." If that is how women are wired then why would I try to stop "apologizing" since I'm wired to do so? Doesn't that mean I'm trying to  adopt maleness?                     

                                                                 

I don’t believe that to gain equality women should have to adopt the mannerisms that have been labeled as “manly” to be successful. Equally, I do not believe we should adopt the ones that women have been saddled with because…women. Unfortunately, sometimes these behaviors are snakes eating their tails. Do women apologize because we are told, in a million subtle and explicit ways, that women should be polite and likable or are we polite and likable because we are women? 

We are taught to be quiet, and “ladylike”, and considerate, we are told to be compliant and chaste. The idea of our maternal instincts is pushed to the forefront to guide/shame us into behaviors that we may not possess, or if we do, we may not want to exhibit. It can ingrain itself. A few months ago I found myself in a middle seat sandwiched between two men on a packed flight. Neither yielded the armrests and I found myself reluctant to push the issue. And yes, you can insert here my own agency and personal choice not to voice a complaint, but I’m not alone.

I suspect our generalized behavior (of course there are women who do not fall in this category) comes from social indoctrination. Part of the reason I suspect conditioning over genetics is that I find I have adopted parallel behavioral tics as a result of my blackness. Society has strict definitions. For women, the "appropriate" behaviors are those that people are convinced are the very foundation of femaleness, the opposite holds true for blackness. With blackness, the acceptability protocol is a stricter and narrower definition of whiteness. 

Wade in here with me for a moment.

I know how blackness is received in this country (if you need a primer check here, here, here, and here) and as a result I am always aware of my language and demeanor. I am aware of the space I inhabit and how others might feel about the space I inhabit. I have adopted a specific way of being in the world based on all of those things. Would I have been this me if those rules weren’t thrust at me from every direction – I’ll never know.

The messages directed at blackness are not the same as the ones telegraphed to women but they share similar threads. Threads of "acceptability". To be acceptably black my use of language, my clothing, my posture, my ability to swallow insults - subtle and not- about people who look like me, are essential. I can (and do) move away from aspects of what people's idea of "appropriate blackness" is, but there are consequences for doing so. 

There are labels.  For women..."Slut," "Easy," "Stuck up," "Bitch."

For black people..."Uppity," "Angry," "Ignorant," "Ghetto," 'Nigger."

There are actions. For women, you are catcalled, paid less, raped.

For black people, you are less likely to be hired, arrested, murdered. 

The restrictive space that society "allows" my blackness, my womaness, can be stifling. The rules are limiting of the true expression of who I am, who I strive to be, the parts of myself that can safely flourish. Who I am permitted to be based on my interwoven demographics, both black and woman, sometimes feels like a tiny space. Like every step I take, every expression, is a revolutionary action. And, I suppose, it is.

Meklit Jazz

I was staring at her. I mean, I was trying not to stare at her, but she looked familiar. And once I scoured my brain for who I thought she was I felt the need to confirm that she was who I thought she was. To do that I'd have to get a closer look, and given that I was staring, a closer look also meant I'd need to speak. But I couldn't remember her name. Crammed into an overcrowded room in the Turkish airport awaiting my flight back to San Francisco, with time to kill, what else was there to do.

"Excuse me, you sing don't you?" I felt sheepish and probably looked and sounded a little crazy, but I'd started so what else was there to do but dig in. The woman, short afro with coils springing off in different directions and a guitar resting by her side, offered a small- and I imagine strained - smile and nodded her head affirmatively.

 "I  love your voice," I started and then raced quickly on. "And the lyrics to I like your Afro...'sweet as tej and delicious as injera'." I was paraphrasing what I'd read the lyrics (originally in Amharic) meant.  I had watched I like Your Afro before I left for Turkey and fell in love with the song as much as the video. It was all sexy and fun. And I knew Meklit- her name, I looked up once I had access to the internet, is Meklit Hadero- from Copperwire. I fell in love with her voice in Stories. It was like the coolness of a breeze on a sweltering day, you just want more of it. 

I walked away from her after my gushing moment, leaving my crazy level where it was and not ratcheting it up any further. Imagining how strange it must feel to have someone know who you are completely out of context. Seeing her inspired me though...more live music, more fun things that keep me grounded and happy like my trip to Turkey had been.

Last night I saw Meklit at SF Jazz Center. Her big smile and lilting voice accompanied by bass, trumpet, drums, and the occasional trombone was such a delightful treat. After I settled back into my non-vacation routine (once my sickness finally subsided and I stopped lamenting the absence of Turkish breakfasts waiting for me and hours to loll away on the Aegean sea) I had looked up Meklit's performance information and tried to herd my friends into going...to no success. I went by myself.

I didn't know most of the music. Some of the songs were in other languages. But her voice was still silken- still breezy - still nuanced. And her smile was still broad. She danced and fluttered her fingers in time- or maybe to subtly direct - the other performers on stage as they took turns in the spotlight. 

A few people up in the balcony area stood up and danced. I bobbed in my seat and rocked myself back and forth to the rhythm the group was laying down. But we dancing ones were few. I stared, mystified at the statue like heads, erect ad listening but not even the faintest sway in her breeze. Did they not hear her; were they not moved by the trumpet that conjured up memories of kissing my first high school boyfriend and almost made me blush?

They all clapped. When Meklit offered us her final song the crowd even moaned their sadness that it was over…but still they didn’t dance. We all experienced her in our own ways I suppose.

I stood in line to greet her in the lobby after the show. She must have been exhausted but she held actual conversations with people, took pictures, smiled brightly. I couldn’t decide if I should mention the Istanbul airport, would that be scary would I sound like a crazed fan? Ultimately, I offered in passing that I’d seen her in the airport a while back and her face, rather than darkening in fear, brightened in recognition. “That was you?” 

I nodded. 

“Well we’ve come full circle and now I’ve met you properly,” she said. 

I came home and listened to more of her music, deciding which versions I preferred. Comparing the arrangements they’d done last night to the older ones. And I was happy to have cause to revisit my time in Turkey and to cool myself in the breeze of Meklit’s voice.

Sweet on Demand

Peach turnover filling

Friends marvel that I’m not bigger than I am. I’m not svelte but given the sheer amount of energy I devote to all things food (talking about it, making it, eating it) it is easy to understand why someone would assume I would need a crane to get me out of the house. While I’m always at my biggest size when I live in the Bay Area, a region that shares my food obsession and indulges me in it on all fronts, the thing that keeps me within reasonable limits has been my preference for salt to sugar. 

Savory over sweet is my general declaration, with very few exceptions. I’m a sucker for Rice Krispie treats (cooked by me in excessive amounts of butter) and things with flaky crusts. Left to my own devices I crave salt and spice, I find savory satisfying. And for those rare exceptions, I’ve trained myself not to keep those things on hand. When I shop, I skip those aisles. That way, if I decide to eat sweets I have to have a full on craving worthy of me getting in my car and driving to the store. It is an extra layer between me and the things that are great for my health or continuing to fit into the clothes I already own.

In the last few years I’ve fallen in love with cooking. 

buttered figs with vanilla salt

My time living abroad taught me that I could cook but not necessarily that I loved it. It was something that passed the time and allowed me to suspend occasional bouts of homesickness when I could eat things that were my comfort foods. With the passing months in foreign places I added new things to my culinary arsenal with varied success. Spätzle was a pretty huge disaster but Pajeon was added to my list of things I could produce in a pinch. I learned cakes and cinnamon rolls but none of those things typically call to me in the middle of the night. I love flaky dough and my time abroad was typically, although not exclusively, in sweltering places that didn’t lend themselves to making pie doughs (not to mention I often had to fashion boot-leg Dutch ovens to cook at all). 

But these days cooking is my meditation. Now I scour through websites and recipes call out to me. I save them and plan and shop to be able to make them. I have new ingredients and spices added to my arsenal incrementally and I am learning to use them outside of the specific recipe(s) they were purchased for. I’m getting good at improvising. 

This has led to a problem.

All of a sudden I don’t have to go to the grocery store to purchase the sweet treats that I crave. All of a sudden, everything I want is accessible through my generally stocked fridge. Butter? I have salted and unsalted by the pound in my freezer. Cocoa? I keep unsweetened powder in my pantry. Most everything else can be produced with flour (unbleached and whole wheat) and sugar (brown, white, and powdered). In a pinch I can make brownies or cookies or cake or…most recently, peach turnovers (ugly though they turned out).

This week my CSA box presented me with fresh figs. Unlike dill, which I had no concept of how to use and had only experienced in its dried form in a recipe gone wrong back in my high school days, figs I’d seen a little more of. My fondest memory was a giveaway at Central market years ago when someone handed me a wedge of fresh fig slathered with mascarpone cheese and a pistachio. It was the most decadent piece of simplicity I’d had. Something I remember almost 15 years later. But I wasn’t going to buy mascarpone just for that (although I do have pistachios on hand) and so what could I do with them?

Zee gave me fancy salts for my birthday earlier this year. Aleppo salt and sumac salt and truffle salt and…vanilla salt. I’d never heard of such a thing and so threw myself into reading up. How would I use vanilla salt? Baking of course.

But my brain got to working the other day, the figs beginning to overripe on my table. I cut them into even slices, revealing their jeweled inside, and placed them in a pan sizzling with a pat of butter. Then I sprinkled them each with a tiny pinch of vanilla salt. The sugars in the fig caramelized a little and I flipped them each over and a few minutes later, slid them and the buttery juice they produced onto a plate. 

There it was. A marvelous sweet treat with a subtle salty counterpoint that I made without leaving my house. With no added sugar and just a smattering of butter, there are worse things I could make.

Not the prettiest but pretty tasty for my first attempt at lemon lava cake

Last week it was lemon lava cake (a recipe I’d been eying for months and finally had folks over to try it out on…nothing like the satisfaction of making lemon curd in advance and then seeing the whole recipe fall into place) and the week before that it was oatmeal raisin cookies.

Last night fresh peaches, all summer smelling and perfect, were the object of my attention. I wanted so much to bite into them directly but recently I’ve realized I’m allergic to stone fruits and consuming them immediately sets my Eustachian tube to itching annoyingly. So I knew I’d have to cook them; in some ways, such a waste. Still, I had puff pastry in the freezer (left over from an experimental meal gone wrong a while back). I peeled and sliced them, their bright orange flesh taunting me, and then mixed them with brown and white sugar and a little bit of cinnamon and a pinch of that delightful vanilla salt. And then I wrapped them inexpertly into the puff pastry. They resembled presents wrapped by young and well-meaning children. 

The finished product wasn’t perfect by any stretch but it satisfied my sweet tooth without having to leave the comfort of my kitchen. And therein lies the problem…sweet things on demand is probably not the best thing to happen to me, even if they are delicious.

The absence of "what next?"

The head space I’m currently occupying is frustrated or stuck or possibly just sad and I feel immobilized by it. I am generally a person of action, I have a problem and tackle it head on. I am nothing if not adept at crafting a two-year-plan and diving into what the next 24 months will look like. For most of my life I functioned that way, life carved out in two-year increments. I could do anything for two years, I conceded. And so I had one and two year stints (occasionally three) all over the world. I saw no reason to change my approach to life.

Oakland, CA- home?

But when I left Uganda in 2011, I left in part because the two year stints didn’t feel quite right anymore. A nagging desire to be rooted someplace emerged. A strange sensation for me to say the least, I have been a nomad since birth. Initially the consequence of my military family, the moving was a mantle I picked up for myself and continued to carry it forward to several states and countries over the years. 

There is something refreshing about being able to start fresh. Something cleansing about getting to reboot. Something challenging about starting from scratch and building a life anew. And I did that time and again. And I have sections of my life that trail behind me in journals and blogs and sometimes random memories of friends. Things I forget until gently reminded. Things that were possible because I was not married to a single location or even expectation for how my life should unfold.

But I came home from Uganda in search of something more familiar; and typing that now I can see the problem that has emerged that I didn’t foresee emerging, even though I should have. What the hell is home? More specifically, where the hell is my home? My entire life home has not been a place. I don’t really understand the affinity people have for hometowns or what that feels like. Home for me has always been at the foot of my parents’ bed. Not exactly the bed itself so much as it is the symbol for home that my heart conjures when people speak of their homes. 

When I’ve been away for a long time - back when I came home from college at break or later between countries- even back when I was in high school and maybe coming in after a night with friends, my sister and I would sit at the foot of my parents’ bed and we’d all talk. We’d talk until my mom fell or asleep or my dad was ready to settle in, and then I’d wander back to my bed feeling warm and loved because that was home for me. My family has always been home. 

My intention, upon returning to the United States, was not to return to the foot of my parents’ bed, or even to the city where my parents live…my intention was to create for myself the actual physical space of home that has always been mythical to me.

Oakland is as close as a physical manifestation of home that I can conjure. Oakland has a community of people that I care about, that care about me. Its architecture and coastlines and weather all appeal to me, the focus on food is in line with my own, the diversity of people feel right. Oakland, in a lot of ways, feels like my city. 

But home?

Home is elusive for me. Home falls into the category of seemingly simple and practical things that so many other people do and take for granted that are so elusive for me. Things like marrying and reproducing. 

This isn’t a lamenting of the life I’ve carved out for myself, so much as a realization that I don’t know my “what next?”. In the absence of a life partner and sans the desire to procreate, the world is limitless. Friends and family see it as wide open space. But right now…right now I feel small in it. Right now I feel untethered not in a freeing way but in a lost way. I am floating without a plan or even the simplicity of the spark of idea that, in the past, preceded the inception of my plans.

I have been discussing my lack of direction and confusion with my community for a while now. I’m tired of talking about it. Tired of holding the uncertainty and plan-less-ness in my own head, tired of unleashing it on those that love me. 

The truth is…I want to know what next? I’m not in flux but this state of mind feels very much like flux. I don’t want to be where I am forever and yet I don’t know where I want to be next. And in the absence of a “what next?” I feel stuck where I am…wanting but unable to send myself back out into the world.

I could blame Oakland, blame the desire to make tangible my intangible understanding of home. But Oakland is just a symbol. Oakland represents the first time in my life that I settled into the idea of where I am being the best place I could be. The first time I doubted the possibility that the unknown before me might reveal itself to me something not worthy of the effort of leaving. And so I cling to this place in a way I have never clung to a place before. Cling to the idea of this being the destination rather than simply part of my journey. 

Maybe I’m holding on to tight and what I need to do is loosen my grip…I’m attempting to loosen my grip.