Chapter One
Silence
This thread of gold that ties me to my mother, my grandmother, and the women who came before looks a lot like the color purple. Like the purple hibiscus as it opens, entering a space that's never been seen before. It is yellow as the fruit of the lemon, it is yellow as the bus that we shall not be moved from, yellow as the lemonade that we make as we take one pint of water and half of a yellow sun and transform the sour into something sustaining. It is red as the umbilical cord that once physically held us, and red like the blood that we bleed. It is green like the gardens of our mothers that we are still in search of and black like the flags that we wave as we frown, buckle down, and plant: bending as we sow, reaching as we climb. It is brown as the soil left down on the ground from the trees that we lift, leaving space for the seedlings to reach to the sun and to grow and to glow as they bask in its shine. Golden. Gold. This thread of gold that ties me to my mother, my grandmother, and the women who came before looks a lot like the color purple.
I am my mother's daughter. I am raised by lionesses. Women as fierce and as mighty as they are brave, as vulnerable and sensitive as they are proud, and as beautiful as they are strong. Sometimes they speak truthfully to those with the power and sometimes they prefer to sit quietly and say nothing at all. Sometimes they say no to expectations and sometimes they say yes and break as they cry, down on the bathroom floor. They are ballet dancers, cat lovers, and video gamers. They are introverts, pioneers, and hopeless romantics. They tell it like it is, but sometimes they don't want to hear it.
I am indelibly linked to a tapestry, rich in its colors and delicate, complex detail. Running through each square is a thread of gold, spun from the silk of the sea-the salt of tears and the sweat that accompanies each loving, labored breath. This thread of gold seems delicate but it cannot and shall not ever be broken, for it holds the tapestry together and it belongs solely to womankind. It is our light. Without this thread of gold, the tapestry is just colors and squares, isolated patchwork cocoons. Without this thread of gold, the tapestry does not exist. It is nothing at all.
My grandmother showed me how to laugh-and keep laughing, no matter what comes my way. My mother taught me humility. My aunties gave me my self-worth, showed me that I was a rare and precious jewel and people should walk across hot coals for me. My cousins taught me how to defend myself, first with my words and then with my fists when necessary: right, left, right (rarely necessary). My sisters taught me when to say sorry, that I do not need to be right all the time. My friends taught me to take care of myself: to rest and to eat and to be gentle, that it mattered less what I did than who I was. These are the threads that are a part of me, woven into the tapestry that is mine, both of me and in me. I hang on to these threads. I cherish them as I understand that one day I will become matriarch of my own pride. I am because of them. They are and they will be because of me. And so, while any good story starts at the beginning, this isn't the beginning because I come from so many women. From the sky to the seabed and every little grain of sand on the shore, this is our story. It is alchemy. It is magic. It is the orchestra soaring in perfect harmony and it is joined together, piece to piece, by this glittering thread of gold.
I've noticed, as I've moved out of my teens and into the complexities of adulthood, that I have started to choose silence. Silence was never something that I chose before. I spoke frequently and loudly, even when I didn't have much to say. In fact, I have lost count of the times that a housemate or a family member remarked on what it is like living with an elephant (annoying, apparently) as I sprint around or thump my way about whichever house I happen to be living in. My mum likes to laugh at me when I go home now, rolling her eyes and telling me, "We do know you're here, Catherine!" And, as usual, after some time reflecting on it, I think she's right. It is as though I like to remind others and reassure myself that I. Am. Here. I can't be forgotten because look what a vibrant and dazzling human being I am. I want to be seen and I want to be heard. I demand it.
This is why I am perplexed by the fact that in recent years I seem to have stopped talking. I'm not trying to say that I'm suddenly shy. I don't think I ever could be; it's a part of who I am to thrive off human connections. And yet, there has been something subtle and gradual that has happened, leaving me feeling slightly more measured and perhaps a little more timid. I am more careful about what other people are thinking, wondering if they approve, and this has been transformed, somewhere along the way, into me stopping talking. Looking at myself objectively, as though I were a specimen in a test tube, I think there are a number of reasons for this. There was the manager at work who, as I shared my excitement with him about an idea that I'd had, cut me off mid-sentence and told me that I shouldn't speak so quickly or it would put people off because they would realize how young I was. Then there was the boyfriend who would draw me in close just to see how far away he could throw me, telling me disdainfully that I appeared to have ADHD as I was talking so much and couldn't I just "chill"? Then I had the long months on my own working and traveling, followed by the drama school experience that branded me a troublemaker for asking questions of an outdated institution in a space that didn't encourage them. You name it, I can see where it came from. Whether this was deserved or not and whether I should have listened to the requests that I button my lip and bite my tongue are different questions. What I am clear on, though, is that my newfound silence was directly and causally linked to the more space that I felt I was taking up. In a world that didn't really set out to listen, I was always flirting with the danger of being too loud. And so I learned to arm myself, to opt out and choose silence in certain spaces. The fact that the spaces where I found myself being silenced were both white and almost all male was, until recently, beside the point. Thinking about this now is uncomfortable. I had entered the world and been raised by the lionesses in my family to be exuberant-Catherine Joy White. I lived up to my name. Somewhere along the way I had lost that exuberance. In a world of black and white, I had adopted a decidedly measured shade of gray.
I often think about what happens in the in-between. In the space between infancy, childhood, and adulthood. How do we become? What forms us? If we are created by outside influences that are not our own, then how do they take hold? Where do they come from? Of course, to a certain extent this can be answered by the nature-versus-nurture debate. We are influenced by where we are raised, who we are raised by, and how they raise us. And yet it is far more complex than that. We are also influenced by what people expect of us: where they expect us to live, who they expect us to be, and how they expect us to be that. If we really tried to tune in and listen to all the voices seeking to lay a claim over who we are, it would be deafening. If we tried to answer back and defend ourselves against every misjudged assertion or claim, our voices would be hoarse. Inevitably silence is easier. And yet silence in this context-when it doesn't feel as though it has come around organically-can often taste an awful lot like defeat. It takes a great deal of bravery, and outright defiance, to hear the noise and yet choose silence or to embrace the noise and keep talking regardless.
This has been an ongoing dilemma for me in recent years. It is as though once I entered my mid-twenties the innate confidence of my youth seemed fragile. As I hesitantly navigated this dichotomy, unsure whether my own voice was liberating or choking me, I became more clouded, more unsure about who I was supposed to be. You can imagine my relief then when on September 19, 2021, Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson, more commonly known as Michaela Coel, spoke about silence in a way that felt as though it had been written just for me.
Coel, writer, lead actor, show runner, executive producer, and director of groundbreaking series I May Destroy You, had just made history at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards as the first Black woman ever to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Even before this accolade, Coel was ingrained on my consciousness. Her reflections on her time at drama school had sustained me through my own sometimes miserable training. Coel had experienced for the first time in her life being told that she was too angry and aggressive, observations that belittled her, brought her to tears even, for in her previous experiences working with Black theater companies she had always been praised for her positive energy. When I discovered that the school would cast her in parts to "help" her explore her soft side, I was immediately able to at least resign myself to (if not accept) my own similar drama school experiences. I was given the part of the servant or the narrator with songs to sing about heartbroken, rejected, and lovesick (or even just plain old sick) women for the very same reason: I was too fiery. I needed to explore my soft side. I would cast my mind back to just one year earlier when, among my many joyful student drama experiences, I played Rita in Made in Dagenham, the role of my dreams.
It was-is-the theater I am drawn to. Bringing to life women who are complex and complicated, and who get things done not by being superheroes, but by embracing the quirks of their own personalities, both their insecurity and their bravery, and doing it anyway. And yet, I arrived at drama school and was forced to sit back and watch other women harness their strength and navigate the limits of human emotion while I donned a servant's uniform and explored my "softness." I got the point. Sometime after that, I just stopped expecting anything different, letting the silence consume me again.
Fast-forward to the end of the year and preparations for our final showcase, the chance to let agents, directors, and producers see our work for the first time. It was a big deal. My friend Bella and I rehearsed a scene together from the film Belle, a period drama based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a British heiress raised in eighteenth-century aristocratic Britain alongside her white cousin Elizabeth. I was drawn to their relationship as an example of friendship-of sisterhood-across a racial divide. It was a hard-hitting scene, exploring how we can choose to wound with our words: jabbing here, stabbing there. But when we showed it to the teachers at drama school for approval before showcase rehearsals began, they asked us to cut the end reference to race. I didn't understand. "But that is the point of the scene. Otherwise it just becomes two young women fighting over a man. It is so much more than that," I argued. Bella was off sick that afternoon, so I stood alone, trying to advocate for what I knew was the story I wanted-needed-to tell. I wouldn't say what I saw in my teacher's eyes was anger. It was colder than that. She told me that my attitude was unacceptable, that I needed to learn some respect, and that she would not tolerate my "behavior." This all unfolded in front of a senior teacher and my entire year group. Every single person stayed silent as I tried to defend my reasoning for why the scene was important-and eventually just tried to defend myself. I left rehearsals that evening in tears.
The next morning that sadness had dissipated. I felt only fire. After a year of having my voice swallowed up, I realized that I would not find the words in a text already written that could convey what I wanted to say, that really encompassed how loud I wanted to scream. I gave up and wrote my own monologue. It was a little piece called What If?, about an eighteen-year-old finally daring to use her voice and talk back to her friend who minimized her achievements by telling her that she got into Cambridge University only because she was Black. It's fairly clumsily written and by no means a work of art, but I am proud of it because for the first time since opting for silence, I spoke back. Inspired by learning that Michaela Coel had also written her own work to perform at her showcase, creating a two-hander for her and Paapa Essiedu (who also stars in I May Destroy You) with characters who spoke like them, I started to write my own story. When it came to writing What If? there was no part of me that associated it with me being revolutionary. At the time, I just knew that nothing I was being given was speaking the words that I wanted to speak in the way that I wanted to speak them. Now, however, I give myself a little more credit, noting that this was an early example of me not seeing myself in the spaces that I occupied and so deciding to write myself in.
Because of all this, by the time Coel made her way on to the stage to accept her Emmy Award, in my mind our experiences were already intertwined. Her words were a part of me, imprinted onto my DNA. As she arrived onstage, she took a moment and then she began to talk. She didn't speak for long and every single word landed like a promise. I watched, holding my breath, as she observed the room filled with glittering stars and heavyweights of the film industry, finally deigning to welcome her in. She saw them and she acknowledged them. But her message was not for them. Michaela Coel looked beyond, raising her gaze and speaking directly to every single person who knew what it was to question the validity of their own voice.
Copyright © 2024 by Catherine Joy White. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
