fetal madness?

With regard to my mother I did some things which would not have helped.

“This is a dinosaur,” I proclaimed to my first year painting class, brandishing an image of my mother doing the ironing. The shape I’d imposed on the panel of electric blue was reminiscent of the shape and form Dino, with a harsh expressionistic outline, and jarring intermittent spots on the red and yellow, that decorated the figure’s preposterous torso.

We had entered our second year in Australia, and I was reacting to things, I tell you. I saw the possibilities of feminism, of freedom, and I was expressing what I felt, without regard, without consideration. “Why is the woman so emaciated?” asked a fellow class member, at the production of a wasting female nude, straight from the Unconscious, on my first day in class. “Emacey… what?” I’d answered. It was a picture of my self, jauntily rendered, arms angled and outstretched to reveal a hanging garment of transparent batlike skin clinging to ribcage.

The fact is that my mother and I lost much of the depth and emotional resonance of our relationship since the “turning” when I was in Zimbabwe. This was when I was supposed to be when I had come of age, and when I was rendered into the condition of the typical female madness. I’d started to spend time alone – a sure sign to my mother that everything about me was going awry. I lay on the hay in the stable, and reflected. “Where were you?” she demanded to know.

“Getting some privacy, lying on the hay,” I uttered.

Whereas freedom in the past had been my birthright, my inheritance, right now that I was in danger of being afflicted with typical female madness, it wasn’t so. I had to account for all the hours of my whereabouts, so that it could be monitored and ascertained whether or not I was already going mad.

This was distressing. “Sometimes you sit in a fetal position and just hold yourself!” asserted my mother, brandishing her weapon of my certain descent into madness. “Fetal?” I queried.

It was all quite transparent that something was about to, or had already come over me. My female cousins on my father’s side have all exhibited one mode of madness or another around the teenage years, for instance by becoming suddenly unmanageable and going nuts and running away from home. In Masaai culture, I have since learned, the experience is similar. In this patriarchal culture, the villagers apply decoration to the young woman’s body and chase her away from the village she’s grown up in, with insults and abuse, designed to assure that she remains with her husband from the other tribe, never to return. Sometimes females needed a harsh and helping hand like that.

I heard my mother proclaim a few months ago that nobody can tolerate teenagers, because it is a stage at which the human mind goes mad. “But I was exceedingly tame for a teenager, wasn’t I,” I said, “because I did nothing at all.”

“Yes,” you were,” my mother conceded, without perceiving the contradiction between her ideology and the concrete and historical reality.