Mending a broken link
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tara June Winch
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Tara June Winch's biography and other articles by this writer
I’m celebrating my mother. Pink tissue paper and ribbon fold and tie over the gift: foot lotion. Lavender scented. A present for the Mother's Day I usually forget. The last few years have been celebrated with a phone call in the late afternoon, just scraping in. Though now I've felt the pain, I know the sleeplessness, the sacrifice – even though I'm only four months into it.
Someone passed comment the other day: "Hunger makes the best sauce." I liked the sound of that. It made me think of my mother: she did the best she could, and what she could do – was the best.
I'M DOWN THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE smoking a cigarette. I don't want anyone to know, so I'm crouched by the edge of the outside wall, by mint and dripping tap. The clothes line spins my daughter's nappies in the twilight. I blow the smoke in the other direction. It feels good, all my frustration silting out into the air. The river drinks the last slip of pink before night. I wish I could run to the river and swim downstream instead of up. Up here on the hill where now, inside, my baby girl cries to be held, to be fed, to be changed, to be bathed and to be rocked back to sleep. There's no one else to do it, and I've stopped considering that if I leave her for a while she'll forget about me. We cannot forget our mothers.
My mother had me when she was twenty-one; I turned twenty-two a couple of weeks before Lila arrived. My mother is non-Aboriginal; it is from my father that I get the olive in my skin and it is out of my father's shame that I get his pride.
I'm proud to be Aboriginal. My father wasn't allowed to be Aboriginal. He was best to swat away their questions about his physical appearance with something vague – "that's the wog in me brother". My father worked the taxi cabs; he'd bring home the lingo, chasing us around the house with his belt – "Get here ya bloody Gesepe – gunna clip ya round the ear hole", that sort of thing. But quietly, just to us kids, he'd tell us not to let them other kids call us coons. We had a little Aboriginal flag in the dining room to look at. When I was arrested a few years ago, I was wearing a polka dot red halter-top with a flag just the same stitched on to the front. I've always been proud to be Aboriginal.
The girls at school would sunbake at the beach in the afternoons and all day on Saturday and Sunday. I'd join them after a surf; I thought my skin needed to be darker. No one wanted to believe I was Aboriginal. No one still wants to believe I'm Aboriginal. The word "descent" is better fitted, half-Aboriginal, a quarter of Aborigine from my father, a little bit in the teeth, the ankles the dark brown eyes. A little bit of heritage from a mob that was supposed to be wiped out, and they wonder why my skin is light brown. Not brown. Not black.
I COOK ON WEDNESDAYS at Young Mothers Group. We're all Koori girls, most in dire situations, in our teens or not far off. Some girls are in emergency housing with a couple of kids, some still at home – hoping to go back to school soon and catch up. I haven't got a car and I live in the bush so I get picked up by one of the health workers. The other week she glanced at me in the rear-view mirror.
"So, what's the writing about anyway, Sis?"
"About growing up with light skin in an Aboriginal family, not really belonging."
"That's different, eh? I wanted to kill myself over my skin – I would never go in the sun, I was scared to get blacker. Always thought ... that'd be alright, being light-skinned. Then I had this Chinese lover, he loved my skin, and he wanted me blacker. Made me feel sexy being black."
I could feel her words. They cut just above the surface, a paper cut. The words were my imaginings that are real because the rest of society makes them real. What kind of fuckin' bleeding heart bullshit is that! Fuckin' poor little light-skinned girl!
But she turned to me as we pulled up at the lights.
"Good on you girl. We're so proud of you."