Written piece
The Inheritance
Yvonne Namara
Uganda
About this piece
A daughter inherits both the strength and the silence of the women before her. As expectations close in around her, she searches for a way to carry the thread forward without repeating its pattern.
She is thirty-two. The relatives have stopped asking nicely. Now they say, “You are not getting any younger!” and, “Your mother wants to hold a grandchild before she dies.”
In Uganda, a woman of thirty-two is referred to as “yadiba!”—like something left too long on the shelf, waiting while others are chosen. Marriage is an accomplishment. It does not matter if the husband cheats, shouts, or raises his hand. The older women say, “Forgive him. Keep your marriage.”
She does not tell them what she learned watching her mother.
She watched her mother hold ice to her own eye for twenty years. She watched her apologise for things that were never her fault. She learned that her father’s belt had a favourite notch. She learned that love, in her first language, sounds like a door slamming and a woman learning to make herself small.
She has tried. Three boyfriends. One fiancé.
Each time the first argument comes, something in her watches from the ceiling. She hears herself apologising for things she did not do. She hears herself going quiet, the way her mother went quiet. The way quiet becomes a room you live in.
The last man was kind. That was the problem. She did not trust the kindness. She picked fights until he left. Then she understood: she had been taught love as survival. She does not know love as anything else.
Tonight, her aunt calls. “There is a good man from the church. Educated. Patient.”
Her mother sleeps on the sofa nearby. The old bruise on her cheekbone has faded to yellow, the colour of forgotten things.
She looks at her mother. Then at the phone. Then out the window.
“Tell him I am not well,” she says.
She hangs up. She does not cry. She goes to the kitchen, boils water for tea, and thinks: the thread I carry was handed to me by women who endured what they could not change. Their strength is part of my inheritance. So is their silence.
My stitch will be different.