At five o’clock in the morning, the deepest revelations camp on your doorstep. It is time to become free and break the chains; you have realised it. At eight o’clock, you say that’s not it, my thoughts are fraudulent, but indeed you have been freed.
In a span of three hours, the self splits and you become a separatist, and you can do whatever you want, which could also involve putting your handcuffs on again.
It is extremely difficult to break free from stunning prisons, but there are always ways to go about everything in this cunning life: womanist ways, witchy ways, life-affirming ways. Alice Walker, in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, wrote both about the ways in which we can become more life-affirming, as well as how to exist without our chains, embellished or not.
One of the most alluring prisons is encapsulated within amorous relationships. Walker utilizes Beverly Smith’s journal, who observed as her beloved got married to another person. They had irretrievably lost one another (infinity exists because the lover lives in it during a catastrophe!); her beloved was off to marry another, she was sick; that was the essence. Her partner would transform her innocent beloved, make her into his slave, his child, his dog, and pulling a Nora was not on the horizon. Here we observe the same kind of prison, but in different forms: the prison Smith is losing herself in, waiting for a “wedding to come off, unfortunately,” and her beloved, who is in the shackles of another delirium that we will never know.
Now, reevaluating prisons and embellishing chains does not match Walker’s style (after all, Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life is just a chapter in a book of 393 pages), and right now, we are shifting narratives and trying to engage in a conversation between free people who would like to enjoy their freedom instead of condemn it. The key words here are “contrary instincts.” Your instincts warn you: freedom is bad, freedom is unfair, freedom is an obnoxious outburst, but in the contradiction, in the small door that remains open, that is where our truth lies. Our freedom is powerful; it is womanist, it is flexible and cultural, it allows us to become flowers with every color represented, it allows us to love silly music, laugh and get tickled, it is in the warm smile you see in the mirror, it is in the struggle, it is in her who loves herself.
Pieces about chains, heavy chains, embellished chains, will perhaps not soothe the pain of enforced freedom that clashes with your black dress and runny eyes, but, for the sake of its beauty and its spirituality, let us attempt, collectively, today, without knowing anything, to be artists, to fearlessly pull ourselves “and look at and identify with our lives, the living creativity,” and the breathing freedom that some of our “great-grandmothers were not allowed to know.”
Source: In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens- Alice Walker
Also read: Obnoxious women, laughable outbursts
