From Academia to Amani: Reflections on Privilege and Self-Care

"I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are."

Toni Morrison

There is a simple truth in the fact that I cannot escape my privilege. It is both without and within. Both societal and personal. It spans across continents, oceans, languages and peoples.

There is the privilege of whiteness. This I have known critically for over a decade, and subconsciously perhaps my entire lifetime. I have studied it. I have walked the halls of academia to receive a degree in the study of transnational feminist thought. One cannot pass through such halls without becoming frightfully aware of their privilege. And of course, there is my class, gender, sexual-orientation, ability; all winding through the web of my identity and the way I am perceived and the way I am privileged to move through spaces. I am not followed when I go into stores. I can easily pick out “nude” toned stockings, knowing full well that not all naked bodies are the color of my skin. Same goes for make-up. Though it is changing. We are beginning to realize that naked is not white. The absence of color is not white. White is not a baseline.

And yet, here I am living in a rural village in the Pare Mountains. This week I had to memorize the sentence, ngozi nyeusi ni nzuri pia – black skin is good too. Countless people have told me that they want mzungu – foreign/white – wives, or babies, or families, or that their skin is dirty, or my skin is beautiful. And sometimes we laugh, there is a dark humor in everything. But I cannot seem to shake this sense that I need to use my prestigious college degree to somehow atone for the history of colonialism and racism both in my own country and my current home of Mvaa. The refrains about black skin being dirty, about Americans being smarter, about white women being better is beginning to grate on me. When Muze tells me, ngozi yangu ni mbaya – my skin is bad, is it so simple as to tell him that black skin is good? How can I convey to this man that his view of whiteness has been shaped by hundreds of years of hegemonic racist ideologies. An ideology that puts whiteness on a pedestal for no reason other than whiteness can be connected with class and power. And those connected with class and power have the ability to shape perceptions about what beauty looks like.

Every day I wake up around six o’clock in the morning, the sun casting pastel pink through the crack in my window. I pray in my bed, thanking god for the day. I stretch, slowly moving and waking up my muscles. My arms reaching above my head. I listen to the various bird songs and the rustling of the banana trees. I have become a strong believer that any routine can be turned into a ritual with enough mindfulness. And thus, I slowly, mindfully make my coffee. In these moments my counter becomes my alter. I sit on my couch reading, listening to the children making their way to school. Laugher and bird songs. The swaying of trees. For an hour I read, maybe more. I indulge myself.

I go on long meandering walks. I feel my feet touching the earth. I pause and stare up at the ancient trees. I thank god for this moment. When I shower (and I use the word shower very lightly because my “shower” entails a bucket and a pail that I use to pour water on myself) I do face masks, coffee, honey, avocado, what have you. I smear juniper carrot seed oil on my face, it feels like silk and smells of home. Every evening I practice yoga and meditate. I lie on my yoga mat at the end of every practice and cry. I cry for everything. And in that, I am healed. Daily. Often times this is followed by a quiet evening of reading and chatting with friends and loved ones. But sometimes I eat entire packages of cookies and way too much peanut butter and watch old rom coms and fall asleep wrapped up in my wool blanket with crumbs forming constellations around me.

As so, this is my self-care. I have been ritualizing my life for quite some time now. I am on a journey of learning how to make space for myself. Self-care is not just face masks and bubble baths, or in this case warm bucket baths. But it is holding space, creating space, and self-healing. It is often times far from glamorous (see aforementioned snot covered yoga mat and sleeping in a pile of crumbs). The beauty of self-care is one’s ability to define it for themselves. When we begin to create space for ourselves to discover things that bring us into balance, things that ground us, things that bring us joy, we are able to curate a life that prioritizes self-care. But in this is a specific type of privilege. Sure, there is privilege in purchasing-power. Indulging in face masks, the extra special bottle of wine, those really expensive chocolates, what have you. But perhaps the deeper privilege lives in the ability to carve out time each day to care for your inner self. The process of self-care is a deep and ongoing practice. It calls on you to prioritize your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellness. In this I am beginning to understand the crossroads of surviving and thriving.

I remember a conversation I had a little over a year ago. A classmate and I were sitting in said halls of academia, and we were discussing the way in which self-care is an intrinsically privileged thing. The ability to take pause, to find mindfulness in the mundane, this is perhaps the ultimate privilege. We were discussing this because, at the time, I was dating someone who was working themselves into the ground. Having spent 14 years in prison, this person was in a mode of absolute survival. The strenuous demands he placed on himself were a direct result of his need to excel, progress and make up for lost time. Watching others around him thriving made his mode of survival all the more infuriating. Two steps for every one step. It was exhausting just watching him. I would attempt to encourage him to rest. From my privileged place of thriving I recall one time giving some half-assed lecture on self-care, which I’m sure fell on over-tired ears. Date nights turned into sleep because he couldn’t get himself out of bed after his day’s work.

And the details of that particular story are for another time. But here I am in Tanzania and I am remembering this. I am reflecting on this – self-care, survival, privilege, what it means to thrive.

Last weekend a friend of mine from ville rode his piki piki from Mvaa to Same for the day. He and I stood in the garden at Amani – our guesthouse/hostel in Same. The afternoon sun hot on our skin. The smell of rosemary and those strange little yellow flowers whose names I do not know hang in the air. He and I are watching as Throsby, Tristan, Rachel, Ammar, and Anna relax on the porch. We have joked sometimes about how many hours of our lives we will spend on this porch. On this porch we come together. We grow together. We cry. We laugh. We yell. We brainstorm ideas for projects. We drink Konyagi and eat cookies and drink so much coffee we often drink the kitchen out of hot water. We sit. We work. We don’t work. Perhaps the best word for what we do is, being. This is our communal self-care. This is how we come together. We come home to our strange government issued family in order to cope with the strangeness of living in this country, speaking this language, doing this work. To find solace, to find rejuvenation, to emerge anew.

And so, my Tanzanian friend and I watch my friends as the are in this state of being. He is mesmerized. He is watching as they laugh, smoke, make fun of one another and dance around. He is watching them the way I often find myself watching Tanzanians, both shocked and in awe. This is amazing, you are all so free. We do not do this – he says, the sound of English rolling off his tongue like honey. I attempt to explain to him self-care. I try to explain to him that living in a rural village in Tanzania, speaking Kiswahili for weeks on end can be exhausting for us, and we come here to refresh. I try to explain that self-care is related to one’s ability to afford the time to care for one’s self. But I cannot help feeling that my explanations fall short. That, despite my best efforts in both Kiswahili and English, I cannot bridge this gap. I cannot find the language to explain this strange smorgasbord of classism, racism, privilege, Western culture, mindfulness, community and spirituality. And perhaps, that’s okay. Perhaps I do not need to have all the answers. In fact, it is more than okay. I do not need to know or have all the answers in this moment. The process is one of constant discovery. Relentless pursuit of truth and understanding, perhaps sans answers.

And yet, I try. I stumble through languages in order to express myself to this friend of mine. And he smiles, and listens, and says – yes, it is very nice, I want to do this too. And we continue to watch the scene unfold, utterly alien to him and home to me.