Before Dawn

One of my earliest memories is of my Mother warning me about love.

My mother warned me about the type of love that brings light only during the day

and suffocates you in the darkness of the night.



When I was seven she told me that women who break their backs for their husbands

then carry babies on those very same backs are the strong ones.

“That is a strong woman, kikazi” – That night I fell asleep to the muffled sound of my mother crying. My father was drunk again and threatening my mother with his usual incoherent babbling.There was something different in the tone of his voice that night, that I will never forget. It sounded broken. The type of broken that could never really be fixed. My father left my mother and I that night, I never saw him again.



I woke up the next morning and my mother was cleaning the kitchen, I remember this day so vividly because of the distinct smell of bleach that you could smell in the entire house. She had used 3 bottles of bleach and was slowly approaching her fourth. My mother was a neat freak, with a strong case of OCD if you may, but this was way too extreme for a seven year old girl to comprehend. “Mummy, You've used all the bleach! ” what are you trying so desperately to clean? “Cleanse,” she replied. “I'm trying to cleanse this house of your father.” I never quite knew what she meant by that. I don't think I wanted to. We never spoke of him again. It was like he never existed, he became a figment of my imagination, and honestly I preferred it that way. It's funny how the mind works, all the good memories I had of him wilted away as my hatred for him grew stronger with every painful memory I fell asleep to. My mother knew that I was bitter from a young age and that the scars my father left weren't only physical.We often engaged in conversations about broken women who did everything for their husbands and yet, they still left. She made me promise never to put my world in a man’s hands.

I spent the rest of my adolescence searching for answers buried in questions I failed to find. I was destined to hate every man that dared to see beneath my bitterness. So in exchange for the bitterness that shackled me to my past, I danced with the white devil until he completely captivated me and suppressed the broken girl in me I so desperately needed to forget. You see in my mother’s teachings she forgot to tell me that my bitterness would destroy me and that hatred only leads to self destruction. It's only through my own bitterness that I lost count of the different men I loved searching for my own love.





Kikazi- Runyankole word meaning sweet girl.