5 Words
This entry is about my on-going project (be)longing which looks at themes of race, heritage, transracial adoption and estrangement. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.
I’ve always been fascinated by words. Our capacity to use them wisely or poorly, the tone we use when we communicating them, the impacts that they can have on us, sometimes forever. I had been thinking about whether to share these words or not, mainly because of the vulnerability of putting them out there. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem my worry to be concerned about - these words belong to others, and they should have taken the responsibility of thinking about them before these 5 words fell from their lips.
“I Never Wanted You Anyway.”
There are two occasions where I can attribute these words to my father, that I can remember. One is staying with him in Köln (Germany) where my father lived for around a decade and I visited often as a teenager. I was fifteen and as usual we were drinking in a gay bar in the city (my father isn’t gay, but I think as a Black man he found solace in being in environments that were generally more welcoming than the average white space). Despite only being 15 I had asked my father why he never took accountability for his painful actions and their consequences on our family. In a rage he shouted “I never wanted you anyway!” and then left me in that bar with some Deutschmark notes and his address scrawled on a napkin. I sat there stunned for a while, not knowing what I was supposed to do in a foreign city. I looked awkwardly at the barman, and the foreign streets outside, wondering how I would make my way back to his apartment to sleep uncomfortably on the sofa.
After an hour or so a group of men tentatively approached me, asking if I was OK in English. I explained the situation, removing some of the key details, but explained that I didn’t know how to get back to this address. They let me sit with them for a little while, I could sense very apprehensively about having an underage person sat drinking with them, before putting me into a taxi and telling the driver to call them if I wasn’t able to access the building. I often think about them and their kindness - the way they were genuinely concerned about a teenager on their night out as grown men.
Years later, and the day before I was moving to another city, my father got in touch to let me know that he was going to be in the UK (he then lived in France). I had explained that it wasn’t good timing - I was moving house in the morning and my mother was staying with me to help with the move. He ingratiated himself into that evening and insisted that we all go out to dinner together at a seafood restaurant. I could foresee the hell that was to come. The evening was stunningly predictable - his arrogant presence, his constant negative comments about my body or anything else he could pick at me for. “You look so fat!” he’d say, as if it was a compliment. “Look at your receding hairline!” They were, of course, all comments about his own insecurities, as a fat bald man. After the painful dinner we visited a bar where his behaviour escalated. I asked him, again, this time aged 24, “why can’t you take accountability for yourself? Why can’t you ever say sorry for your actions?” He launched a glass at me and repeated the same words: “I never wanted you anyway!”
I hadn’t thought about those words for so long until a couple of months ago when they just suddenly came to mind. What a cruel thing to say to your child, I kept thinking. The interesting part is that the statement goes both ways. Up until that evening I had spent 24 years thinking the same about my father - that I had never wanted him to be my father. Those 5 words can be so cutting but also so freeing, depending on if you are the receiver of deliverer. That evening I communicated to my father that it was the last time that we would be speaking and not to contact me again.
Here we are, 15 years and 16 days later.
Over the last few weeks I’ve returned to words, including his statement, experimenting with interchanging words like ever/never and wanted/needed. I’ve been questioning the expectations of a parent/child, playing with layers and turning 2D to 3D. I’ve also been experimenting with maps of places where I had never felt a sense of belonging.
