Playing Hide and Seen.
Rosemary ma change e fun o? Sister-mum said. I responded, "Aunty mi, wait". She reached for my purse and grabbed my ATM since she knew the pin. I held her hand. She said, "If your light blinds them, tell them to get glasses. I won't allow you to shrink your self or light or adjust your life to people's temperature". She turned to the shop attendant and said, "Madam, give me your POS, and I will pay." I said I didn't want them to say I did too much yanga. She gave me that look that anyone who met sister-mum before becoming a witness knew; it is the look of "mio fe shi." That look that if you transgress with sister-mum and you run under that proverbial mother's bed, my sister-mum would follow you there and deal with you accordingly. Only sister-mum breaks our parent's rule of no public brawling and gets away with it. Sister-mum wanted to change it for me(a Nigeria colloquial that means letting you have it) because I said I did not like a particular dress and color for my 2018 Ph.D. thesis defense. I said, some people would say that I like Yanga too much. My sister-mum said, "That is the very reason we are buying it."
I prefix this post with this story because being a woman is tough but being a woman in academia is tougher because of social expectations of how you should look as a female academics. For instance, some people don't think you are intellectually serious if you have time for self-care and pay attention to your outlook. This is not only true of academia but also of other lines of work for women. I learned they even said I wanted to turn academic presentations into a fashion show.
In "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa," Lesley Nicole Braun examines the complexities of navigating visibility for female dancers in a culture that prioritizes less exposure for women who require visibility for success. Although the book focuses on Congo, what is true about dancers in Congo can be applied, maybe nuanced, when extended to other spaces in Africa and beyond. The author examines what I have termed the Bloom and Doom of Being a Dancer in Kinshasa.
Long before I read this book, I made a post on Facebook where I said that fame, class, and whatever status symbols do not exclude women from public surveillance. This causes us to self-regulate because we are aware that we are being watched (public panopticon) and more so by double standards and other complex issues. For women, visibility comes at a cost. Visibility creates a new set of vulnerabilities and valleys for women. In her study of visibility in Kenya, Dina Ligaga makes a similar yet different conclusion about the cost of visibility for women although Braun's research resonate and diverges from Ligaga in many ways.
Yet in this digital age, visibility is crucial. You have heard it said, "Ninety percent of success is just showing up." My note to self, and maybe something you should consider, is that you shouldn't just show off but show up. Show up with your skills, competence, style, smile, and everything you have been endowed with. Put your best foot forward, and talk about your competencies and capacities in ways that sell your strengths and not your weaknesses.
One of my watchwords for 2024 is a line from one of my beloved Black authors, poets, and advisors, Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou said though, "I come as one, I stand as ten thousand". To paraphrase Kizz Daniel, when I land, I will not land softly; I will land with all my ancestors and all who made the way for me to survive and thrive thus far. Get ready to see a crowd and a cloud of witnesses!
As Ligaga surmised, "Visibility as a feminist agenda is the desire for women to be seen, recognized, and acknowledged; for their choices to be taken seriously; for their contradictions not to be highlighted for purposes of shaming, but as markers of being human, and doing the work of 'living''.
Posted on Facebook on January 26, 2024
