Mbwiti on the grief mattress: an autohistoria-teoria voicing the grief of identities fragmented by whiteness

Abstract

In this research, I aim to explore my experiences of grief and racial trauma in a post-apartheid Namibia from the place of a mbwiti. In Oshiwambo (the language of the Ovambo tribe in Namibia), a mbwiti is a person who is immersed in the ways and experiences of the traditional Oshiwambo people but is also influenced and has integrated other - often - western ideas of life. I am a mbwiti because my parents were both Oshiwambo, but I was born and grew up with a Kavango tribe and I was – and still am - educated in a western setting. The positioning of being a constant “other” to these cultures has had an impact on how I engaged with the practices and rituals, particularly grief rituals.

In the Oshiwambo culture, when a relative passes away, a female member of the bereaved family must sit on a grief mattress to receive the mourning community for a period before the burial. When my father passed, my mother sat on the mattress and when she passed, I had to sit on the mattress. Having grown up at the edges of my culture meant that I struggled to engage with the ritual of being on the mattress and what I experienced to be a dismissal of individual grief. I did not understand the cultural significance of being the one to hold the grief of the community. And so, using that as a starting point of focus, I will explore grief and trauma from a decolonial stance by critically engaging with the impact of colonisation and western psychological theories on my way of creating and understanding knowledge and experience. I draw on the work of Frantz Fanon to analyse how I acted into whiteness as a way of surviving the social annihilation of my blackness, a remnant of the apartheid regime.

The aim of this thesis is to recognise the knowledge that exists around the olupale -the heart of the house where stories are shared- and to highlight the importance of allowing the cultural and spiritual personal to be storied as knowledge instead of dismissing it as is often done within western psychological theories. I use Autohistoria-teoría, a methodology created by Gloria Anzaldúa that argues for spiritual and personal narratives to be amalgamated into theoretical and political text and honour the knowledge that exists within these narratives. I follow the footsteps of the women of colour that have written into the dismissed, but not forgotten, knowledge that exists within our cultural beings and allow these to give voice to my silenced identities.

Through Autohistoria-teoría, I allow my different languages, cultures and experiences to intertwine with decolonial theories and examine where psychodynamic theories belong within this union. I use both the Oshiwambo and Rukwangali (a language of the Kavango tribe in Namibia) languages to demonstrate my existence on the borders of these cultures as well as limit the intrusion of the white gaze by knowing when to withhold translations and explanations of rituals. I tap into the Oshiwambo-Kavango beliefs of sharing our trauma at the olupale to allow for the healing and calling back of identities that were fragmented as a way of surviving racial trauma. Through this engagement with theory and experience I show the complexity of being positioned as a mbwiti, and how that leads to a constant negotiation of personal experiences to allow for my survival of the violence of whiteness and finding belonging in culture.