Decolonising

I remember the morning I first saw them, running around over my body, crawling under my skin. Hundreds, thousands of tiny white men. Hard at work, they were running around on my belly, stamping down in heavy boots to make it flat. They had built some kind of apparatus to hoist my breasts up, and there were many of them with tiny scythes methodically removing every hair on my body except for my eyelashes, my eyebrows and on my head.

I looked in the mirror and saw them on my face, pulling out the corners of my eyes to flatten the wrinkles and pricking my lips then fluffing them like plump pillows. I felt them behind my eyes, in my hands, my feet, trying to direct me to my desk, to sit chained in the glare of a screen to work, work, work. I could hear the messages being shouted up into my brain.

‘Got to work’, the tiny men shouted. ‘You’re worthless if you’re not doing, not producing, not consuming’.

I could feel my heart being pumped in anxiety, carrying the messages into all the outlying regions of my body. I’ve got to be worthy, I must work to prove my worth. And look pretty and young while I do it. 
I shook my head and resisted the tiny men that had colonised my body and heart and mind. I went to sit outside, following the path down to the ocean. I laid down in the waves on the beach, letting the blood-salty waters wash over me. I could hear their frantic shouts, my tiny colonisers screaming for me to get up, work, workout, do housework, DO SOMETHING! But instead I closed my eyes and went within.

I saw so many of them. They had set up cities, all angles and straight lines, grey concrete and raw metal in my womb, my heart and my brain. The highways and byways of my body, my arteries and veins, transported the men to my voice, my mouth, my eyes, my hands, my feet, wherever they wanted to go. Always hurrying, scurrying, shouting instructions. I saw the colonisation spreading outwards like an infection, new settlements being built in my throat, my liver and my stomach. 

Horror threatened to swamp me, drag me under completely, to disappear under the concrete of their cities, but I felt the fierce and tender waters wash over my body and felt the panic of the tiny white men. They were scared. With a great effort I rolled myself deeper into the waves, deeper into the natal ocean waters, and I searched for the last wild, untouched place within me, the last vestige of my untamed soul.

There, there in my left elbow, an old injury that had made that arm weaker and tingle with damaged nerves. The tiny men had left it alone as a bad job after many attempts to fix it. Too broken and too weak to do anything with. This was the last uncolonised part of me. As I called out to the last spark of my wild self hiding in this fragment, I felt my blood start to sing.

My grandmothers and grandmothers and grandmothers sang to me through my blood, resonating through the ocean, which was now filling with the ghosts of hundreds and thousands of women. They sang to me, these women, my ancestors, their songs of freedom and joy and authority, their songs of slavery and humiliation and domination. I could feel their anger, their rage, their power and righteousness pulse through my blood as the ghost women closest to me reached out, spectral fingers sweeping drowning men from my skin.

I took a great breath, filled with the songs of my grandmothers and dived down to the darkness and pushed. I pushed and heaved and screamed, under the waves that crashed far above my head. I drew the waters inside me and flooded their cities and settlements, I drowned them mercilessly, these tiny white men that had taken my heart, my womb, my mind, my voice and almost my soul. Our rage burned so hot that it boiled the floods inside me and burned everything else, a jubilant festival of destruction.

I pushed and heaved and screamed, wrapped in the amniotic, salty, dark water, expelling them from inside me with my cries. And then, they were all silent, all dead, all gone. I heard no voices telling me what to feel, what to think, what to say, what to do, how to look, how to be pleasing and quiet and worthy.

The waves gently washed me back onto the beach, shimmering with the light of the sun playing on the firmament of tiny shell shards that made up the sand. I opened my eyes and saw the wonder of life all around me, a glowing, extraordinary abundance of existence. I opened my voice to the sky and out came the song of my heart, that was mine and my grandmothers. My feet started to dance on the shore, playing in the surf, feeling the kiss of the earth and the water meeting in frothy abandon. My hands traced the playful ease of the wind that blew fresh and clear, carried to me by the spiralling turquoise waves. 

My mind was clear and as wide as the cerulean sky above me and my womb felt wonderfully, expectantly empty. I was free.

© Elena Tornberg-Lennox 2023