The journey to loving oneself completely is a challenging one.
The earliest memory I have of grappling with the concept of love was at the age of 10 or 11 when I saw expressions of love different from those I had seen at home, where uthando (the isiXhosa word for love, although I think they differ in equivalence and expression) was never pronounced, declared or spoken of.
My mother used to drop my little sister and me off at our new multiracial school in the mornings, where a “bhabhayi mama’’ while rushing out to play before the bell rang was sufficient for our newcomer status.
As the months passed, and as we became used to the rules of a new language, environment and culture, we started to notice that the white parents kissed their children on the lips or cheeks before the children leaped out of the cars next to ours.
I remember feeling resentful about this, with a heady conviction that my mother clearly didn’t love us because she didn’t kiss us on the lips. In fact, neither she nor my father ever said they loved my siblings and me before bedtime and we only dreamed of get- ting tucked in or having stories read to us like the children in Hollywood.
At the beginning of our second year at the new school, we asked our mother to kiss us on the lips in the mornings and she happily obliged for the rest of our school days. I grew to realise, obviously, that our parents loved us deeply and uthando extended beyond the romantic Western iteration of love that we learned from soap operas, Hallmark cards, popular poetry and literature of the Sweet Valley High, Danielle Steele and Mills & Boon variety.
Like us, though, our mother had to learn new ways of being part of this new world that her children were navigating. One of the most crucial injuries about the process of learning new ways of being in a new culture was learning to shrink the importance of the things we already knew — in essence, learning to love English but to demote and negate ubuXhosa as a way of being.
The thing about indoctrination is that it’s seldom a painful process. Songs, films, music videos and books were excellent at creating ideals for “the lovable” and the “undesirable”. For example, nobody ever banged the concept of long, straight hair as desirable over my head, but I grew to learn that short, kinky hair was undesirable.
My parents named me Milisuthando, a name I hated in primary school because it was so long and unpronounceable. I didn’t even want to settle for the “Melissa” that the teachers and my friends called me. I wanted to change my name entirely. In my dairy, my name was Kelly. Nobody strangled me into the decision to dislike my identity.
Love your neighbour as you love yourself, the Bible says. Without painfully and laboriously decolonising my identity (as a black person, a woman, an economically privileged, heterosexual, educated person in racist, violent, unequal, heteronormative South Africa) to understand why there was a rotten well of self-loathing inside me in the past three years, I would have never arrived at my current understanding and a novel feeling of actual love for myself.
But there’s also this strange new sensation I didn’t expect to come with loving myself: that of compassion, patience and a potential love for humans in general.
It’s strange because during the active process of learning to love my identity, something I thought was inextricably linked to myself, I was only concerned with my black and feminist neighbours. I adopted popular terms like “radical self-love” and “black love”, wearing them with pride but without really interrogating the meaning of a bare, unprefixed Love.
One of the biggest mistakes I made about what I thought was black love was to think it a one-dimensional love that would ration my potential love for “other” people.
For a long time, I knew that black love had nothing to do with hating non-black people, but this was only an ideological knowledge, not a lived truth. In truth, as a form of insidious revenge, I was chewing on the easy, low-hanging fruits of cynicism, divisiveness and an absolute certainty that “other” people were automatically guilty of being racist and sexist until proven innocent, a conviction that made me function from a place of fundamental anger.
The day I learned that editing who I greet in the street based on their colour or problematic social media utterances was not the goal was the day I learned the difference between loving my identity only and loving myself, a precondition for loving others.
Love is more radical and a lot more difficult than being angry and divisive. Today I truly understand and embrace the meaning of my name, which means to embody, represent and uphold boundless love.
Iimbali, a regular column by Friday editor Milisuthando Bongela, is a space for stories and other narrative-based social analysis