new autobiography / African memoir

I have found that it was too painful for me to express myself in terms of how I had experienced things before I migrated. Whereas I had always wanted to speak innocently, sadly, and enthusiastically about the things I’d lost, about the things that had changed for me, about my courage or lack thereof to face the future in a new country, I had never been allowed to do so. So, I was not permitted to be debriefed regarding my experiences from before, and had to bury my mourning and sense of change, by keeping it private. If I was to express something of this order — something that was tender and tenuous and traumatised — I was generally retraumatised, because people would feel that they had to put me in my place politically. So I learned that there was a huge aspect of myself that was verboten. I couldn’t express it on pain of being injured further. I had to repress it in order to go along with the programme. So I suffered from ’soul loss’ during those days, and not until I was attacked severely did I understand how much of myself I had been repressing and how much this was like sparring with one hand held behind the back. I only began to turn the tables when I started to direct the energy that I’d been using to repress and limit myself out towards the world, rather than holding it close to my heart and allowing it to burn.