By Blow

by Linda Ann Strang

After Rethabile Possa Mogoera*

Image credit: Davide Valerio on Unsplash

My great-grandmother beat her daughters with a stick, but my grandmother had the guts to steal away to a dance contest, a rebellious girl, on the cusp of the Second World War. The dance contest she won, but from this defiance my mother was born, out of wedlock – in a thunderstorm, Mom would say, with a touch of melodrama – in a stranger’s house in another town. And my grandmother’s name became an omen, overshadowing our lives.

Being Afrikaans and for the Nationalist party, my mother would have condemned the Basotho naming tradition, where the elders may christen the unwanted child The Rotten One, Garbage, Picked Up On The Street, or the village Machiavellian Whom Do We Praise? Imagine that on your LinkedIn profile. But my mother, named June for her birth month, followed this tradition, while knowing nothing about Basotho tribes, every time she called me a little bitch or a fool, behind my back or to my face.

My grandmother, when young, turned to alcohol, and June was neglected, often left without food. And when she had me, too repressed to unravel her own trauma, she knitted that trauma into my psyche, plain and purl. Therapy was practically scandalous back then. A crusading teetotaller, Mother took to Valium instead.

It was almost inevitable that she would be abusive; she mistreated me in more ways than you could shake a stick at, as if the registry had never happened, as if I hadn’t been summoned by her stopping the pill. June, I imagine, was never married enough, never married sufficiently to erase her shame, although she boasted of being a virgin on her wedding night. And that was almost her only accomplishment. She died of stress-related illness age 45. My partying grandmother made it to 51.

It’s too late to tell those who preceded me, we were not, in fact, garbage picked up on the street. We began as harmless as butterflies, Karoo dancers, or lambs, and we surely followed our naïve mothers, as if to slaughter, looking for acceptance. All the way home.

*This essay was inspired by Rethabile Possa Mogoera’s research article entitled ‘A bad name is an omen: stigmatising names amongst the Basotho.’ The article may be read here: http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/literator/v41n1/22.pdf.

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Linda Ann Strang

Linda Ann Strang’s published poetry collections are Star Reverse and Wedding Underwear for Mermaids. Star Reverse was shortlisted for the 2023 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Image, New Ohio Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. This is her first creative nonfiction publication.