She stood up too fast. Too impatiently she waited for the head rush and nausea to leave. She paced softly on the smoothed cement floor and punched the wall. Unsuccessfully. Or I guess just unsatisfactorily and not dramatically at all. Pieces of white paint and wall fell to the floor and she wrung her wrist, squinting at her barely bleeding knuckles and indents from wall pieces. From the main town to her house was roughly 5km. Mango trees lined the way and farm stretches created landscape with bumps and plants. Drunken men however, can interrupt any landscape. No matter how pristine.
And they did continually, sometimes seeming so burdened by their unhappiness that sharing it with others was a valued and fine option. They flung out marriage proposals and questions about America, persistently pursuing, consistently wanting her responses. One man in particular didn’t offer up a marriage proposal and instead shunned her for not paying him any attention. Stopping her he insisted that her unwillingness to chat and to stand in the vicinity of his drunken breath was due to her whiteness and his blackness. Defending herself she noted out loud that clearly it was his drunkenness that kept her from stopping and not his race. He persisted with that heavy and obnoxious persistence, but she walked home.
The next day he was there again, but not ready to let her go, ready instead to follow her whichever direction she turned. She readjusted her feet in her flip-flops, turned on him and argued. She argued her love for Malawi, her village, her neighbors, and her willingness to work and chat with them, but how his abuse of alcohol put him for her, not in the category of people she wanted relationships with, but people she never wanted to see. Ever. He stepped towards her and put his face close to hers. She slapped him. He then stated the fact that she had slapped him; she confirmed and walked off as his spit hit her heel.
In college her thoughts on non-violence fluctuated. It’s easy to fluctuate thoughts and ideals in college where one is presented with so many ideas and where different classes become different bouncing boards for that alternate version of self that is sporting new ideas and thoughts. For the most part she would say she is against violence, as it had always seemed to catch people with destruction and in cyclical motion prompt them and others to other acts of violence until a point of too much destruction. But she had felt violence as a visceral reaction and she didn’t really regret slapping him, in fact she wished it were a punch. Not that her act was an extreme act of violence, but it was unlike her and therefore felt perhaps much more violent than it actually was. She was in Paris one New Year’s Eve when she pushed a man who made a grab at her sister in the subway station. She then pushed him again, though he had already backed off. The first just wasn’t enough; she had wished then that she had slapped him or maybe punched him. She needed him to know he was unwanted. Not only was his advance unwanted, he was unwanted, and that was why he needed the second push, or she did, she wasn’t sure.
And it was scary that all she really was sure of was that if that guy got in her face again she would be happy to beat him up. She was sure of that impulse and almost sure that she was at least mostly justified, she was just unsure how this fit into a pursuit of change and of peace and justice. I think she still is.
