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Graduation

Koleka Putuma
 

As part of the readings for Climate Forum III – Towards Change Practices: Poetics and Operations, L'Internationale Online is delighted to re-publish the poem ‘Graduation’ by Koleka Putuma from Collective Amnesia (Cape Town: Manyano Media, 2nd Ed. 2020). ‘Graduation’ was proposed by the artist G and curator Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide for their Climate Forum session ‘We the Heartbroken’, Part II. ‘Graduation’ is re-published here with the kind permission of the author.


You will leave you parents' nest
Cultivate familiar traditions borrowed from your childhood
You will realise none of it is new or yours
You will work and send money home
You will work and not send money home
Earning money will earn you a seat at the grown-ups' table
Contributing financially will allow you to open your mouth at the
grown-ups' table
But you will still watch your mouth at the grown-ups' table
When you return home
You will slip into roles you have outgrown
Because it's easier than explaining
Your parents will get older
You will want to work harder so they can retire early
When your parents visit
You will prepare their room
And hide all the things they probably know or suspect about you
Your mother will offer to help with the cooking
The way she chops the onions is loaded with questions
You both have not mastered how to chop onions without crying
Chopping onions that way is how you have difficult conversations
You have both learned how to dance on graves
Without mourning what is dead or lost between you
Eventually
When your mother asks
Where you left the things she gave you
You will want to say, I am unlearning them
But unlearning is not a real place or destination
So you will choose to say you don't know and apologise out of habit
You will realise you lost some stuff between loving and leaving your lovers
You will realise your lovers gave you their mothers' stuff, too
And that maybe unlearning should be a place
And all the womxn in your family should gather there more often
Until unlearning is a tradition you can pass on to your children
Until chopping onions is not an occasion
Until you know how to hold each other
At funerals and inconvenient occasions
As you get older
You will attend more funerals
Than weddings or 21sts
You will attend more baby showers than birthday parties
At family gatherings
You and your cousins will do the things your aunties used to do
Your baby cousins who are not babies anymore
Will sit and drink ciders with you
Talking sense finally
Time will have bridged a gap in some places
And poured an ocean in others
The elders will ask you to help them understand what you do
What you do is another way of saying job
When answering
They will nod in agreement with confused eyes and pursed lips
Then respond with You know, in my time…
The elders will no longer send you out of the room
When unresolved family traumas ruin dinners
You will want to facilitate
Using a language of grieving that will be foreign to them
You will realise the elders in the room
Learned the alphabet of hurting and falling apart differently
For you, healing looks like talking and transparency
For them, it is silence and burying
And both are probably valid
And
Then
You will realise
That
Coming home
And
Going home
Do not mean the same thing

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