Between Knowing
By Heather Emmanuel
My grandmother doesn't know who I am.
It isn't failing memory. There is no diagnosis to soften the fact. No script, no pamphlet. This grief has no origin. This grief is cumulative.
With her, I am known. In body—not in life. Whether I stand or sit or bend my knees to my chest. She recognises it. My body language, my mannerisms. How I twist my earlobe when unease finds me. She knows my build—never taller than hers. My limbs—not strong, but sturdy.
She often recalls how little I ate as a child. How little I eat now. She smacks my hand away when I reach for a second serving. Not by mistake. Grace is offered by a granddaughter pushing thirty, both verbally and in silence. I give it because I cannot give anything else.
She does not know this.
She knows my posture. My appetite. My restraint. She does not know what that restraint holds. How my hands shake when hers reach for mine. How they don’t fully stop, even when she folds her calloused hands over my own.
+++
My grandmother will never know I'm a lesbian.
First grandchild. Like Atlas’ burden, the weight of expectation presses into my spine. The efforts of my ancestors, their lives uprooted, show themselves in the life I now inhabit. A life that seeks repayment in milestones, heralded by a grandmother who speaks in certainties.
My grandmother mistakes my silence for agreement. She is eighty-one and offers rosary beads worn smooth by repetition. Her accent remains Bantu-rooted, my name spoken without its dental fricative. When she presses the rosary into my palm, she does not ask if I carry belief alongside it.
Belief—like marriage, like motherhood—is assumed.
I nod.
I close my fingers around the beads. Close myself around expectations I will not meet.
+++
My father does not answer questions he cannot clasp neatly. When his mother searches the outline of my shoulders for weaknesses, it is my father who clears his throat to quell the shame that threatens to surface.
It would confuse her, he says. It would kill her, he means. His grief sits on top of mine, mourning the daughter he thought he had, the mother he must shield from the truth. This knowing between father and daughter is not a bridge, but a border. It is him who has decided that his mother cannot know me, and I acknowledge this exile as yet another duty. He does not ask about the woman I love. He does not ask if I am happy. Happiness, as he knows it, carries conditions. His happiness depends on my compliance—a compromise for disrupting the narrative crafted so carefully.
But the family, he says.
But your grandmother, he means.
In the mornings, I sit with her on the veranda. Her voice unfolds among the baobabs, planting her version of generational certainty in the soil. Like the trees, I listen without interruption. I water her sentences with acquiescence. Lemongrass leans, aloe hoards more than it needs.
You made me a grandma, she says, as if it is a conscious decision made before birth. I'm a grandma because of you, so this house should belong to you, too.
Her voice leaves no room for permission. Greyed eyes meet mine, deliberate in their truth. When you bring your children here, she starts. Smiles. My great-grandchildren in my house, eh?
+++
Nightfall in Malawi is not kind. Sweltering heat dissipates, superseded by winter-sharp winds. Golden hues become navy, the sky sprinkled with silver spheres seen by the utter lack of light pollution.
I shiver under the thin sheet pulled above my shoulders, vision warped between the mosquito net and absent glasses.
The room, this room, is my claim. My grandmother’s words, her insistence. The bedframe is fixed where I attempted acrobatics at four years old, the wardrobe door rehinged after my weight tore it loose. Even across continents, across years stretched between language and limbs, my grandmother keeps me. The only photograph of me from 1999—before migration, before relocation—sits on the bedside table. Dusted, framed in oak, beside a Mickey Mouse plush faded by time. The rug on the floor is thin and knitted. Easier to wash, my grandmother says. You wanted a purple one. You know it’s not easy finding purple?
At the other end of the bungalow, she coughs in her sleep. The sound reverberates. My chest loosens, then clamps again. To locate the moment where love became conditional is to pierce myself with a blade accepted by my hand. Like her memory—honed, no signs of dulling. She remembers the same way she prays—daily, without deviation. Any truth given to her cuts once, then remains.
+++
I think about the woman I love not as an escape but as calibration. Her voice is steady on the phone line, screen dimmed and pixelated. I note the waver of her brows, her pursed lips when I can only nod or type my response. Even as my grandmother is routine in her morning bath, I tilt to avoid the window and keep my mouth sewn shut.
At least you’re getting some sun over there, my love of three years tries, gesturing at England’s slate sky behind her.
It is the first time I have been to Malawi since dual citizenship has been actualised. My grandmother has incorporated this into our plan—between market stalls and more memories. Her voice scrapes slightly as she urges me to scrub my face with cold water instead of warm. She chides when I reach for the sunscreen, then marvels at the smoothness of my skin, the roundness of my cheeks.
Malawi’s proximity to the equator means that most businesses operate outdoors. Women wear wide-brimmed hats, the men in baseball caps decorated with sports team logos they have never heard of. My biometrics are scanned in one smooth motion. Behind me, my grandmother nods and hums and raises her hands as my passport processes.
My granddaughter, a true Malawian!
Mwadalitsidwa, grins the underpaid staff member. With shaking hands, my grandmother dabs away beads of sweat from my forehead. Her handkerchief is purple—folded neatly, now damp at the corners.
I catalogue the colours of the market. The red of mangoes, the ochre of clay pots, the green cassava leaves. The kaleidoscope of fabrics wrapped around women who bellow prices of tomatoes and groundnuts. Many carry infants swaddled in cloth, on their backs or fronts, shaded from the sun.
Near a small supermarket, my phone buzzes. Her name is barely visible on my screen, brightness working against itself. I spare it a glance, read the first half of a confession I cannot yet absorb, and slip it back into my satchel.
This, too, is calibration.
+++
The crimson pickup truck pulls into the driveway before midday. Battered and mud-stained, wheels bearing the dust of dirt roads. My father waits by the car, arms crossed, eyes shaded by the brim of a decade-old hat. I don’t need to see the crease in his forehead to know that it’s there.
He asks if I slept well, a routine he clings to. He does not ask about my navigation between love and rule. He does not ask about his mother and whether my love for her outweighs my love for the woman in England. You can’t have both—he has accused me of being selfish, of not thinking long-term.
I don’t agree.
The two can be parallel; they can co-exist. They cannot ever meet. The restraint instilled in me from childhood aids me in my own erasure.
I am aware of my father’s gaze, his anticipation of my mistake brimming over the edge. We move through the yard, through the shadows of mango trees and baobab. Half a step behind, I do not stumble. Nor do I anticipate an extended arm if I do.
Remember when you ran away from the goats, he says, and hit your head on the brick stoop.
My fingers graze the ghost of a scar on my forehead. My body still remembers the heat of the brick, the sob in my throat, the warmth of my grandmother’s arms as she scooped me up.
Uncontained, he smiles. Intended to be brief, but the look lingers. Briefly, the years collapse. The weight of what can never be spoken falters beneath reminiscence. Even two decades later, my father warns me when goats are nearby. My grandmother pulls me close by the arm at the sound of hooves on concrete. My momentary childhood fear is preserved, palpable proof that they know me better than most. They hold the shape of what they know, what has molded in their hands over the years.
I understand this. Understanding does not make the weight lighter, but it is a small mercy. Letting them cradle a piece of me that no longer fits.
+++
I imagine telling her. Of course I do.
Not in a way that calls attention to itself. But in a moment of careful curation, a moment of me and her on the veranda of heat baked into stone. A correction of she when she says he. Shaking my head when husband is mentioned, the word wife slipping between my lips. My grandmother’s hearing might have debilitated over the years, but her mind stays as sharp as a fillet knife. If I repeated myself, it would be for clarity—not comprehension.
She would say, ah. Then she would be silent. Then she would slam her palms against the table, the way she would when I displayed any belligerence as a child. She wouldn’t run her hands under cold water—not immediately, not even when her palms throb from the blow. She would endure the pain the way she has endured the agony of her own life. She would see this as yet another pain, a collapse of all that she’s built. The thread of her legacy, stitched from her own blood, fraying at the seams sewn by her eldest granddaughter.
I grieve this moment, too. The heartbreak, the honesty. Being known, in whole, by the woman who sees me as the embodiment of her own making. I grieve the tenderness of being fully seen, with or without acceptance. In my grief, I refuse to let her experience any more than she already has.
So, I comply.
I trace the imagined wedding in Zomba, to a man who kneels in greeting and calls her Mayi. I massage her feet with coconut oil—I need to be able to dance!—and hum the hymns she recites between yellowing teeth. I allow her to wait for grandchildren with patience that has always rewarded her. I indulge her insistence on two middle names: one English, one Chichewa. I entertain Oyera, nod at Emmanuella.
My fingers move with practised precision, my motions devout in their repetition. I inhale lemongrass, sweat, dust and love. Between aching fingers, I complete the choreography of compliance. My performance does not miss a beat.
+++
When I leave, the weight does not. Atlas stays, bowed and strained and proud. The curvature of my spine adjusts to this tilt. The pulse of Malawi does not recede. When I inhale, England’s grey calm does not yet reach me.
The rosary digs into my hip for the duration of two flights. Before the third, when I am questioned about my travel intentions and my citizenship, I run the beads through my fingers as if they belong to me. My grandmother’s insistence presses against me, still—you need these, take this.
When I am gone—
The metal tray clatters. The scanner beeps. Momentarily, my body feels unanchored without the totem of my grandmother’s claim. Although I do not believe in its prayers, being reunited with this fragment of faith eases the guilt that follows my form.
I imagine the day of her death. Not in detail, but in distance. Not punctuated by grief, but underlined by it. I circle the hypotheticals the way she circles calendar dates: words never spoken, ink never spilled. A chance to see her oldest grandchild in whole rather than in part.
I picture her understanding, her downturned eyes. I picture her pursed lips and the table slam. Would I fold myself into her expectation to settle her solemn eyes? Or would the fullness of me unravel her, splitting the tether so carefully maintained over years of withheld truths?
I mourn her never knowing the way I mourn her eventual absence: guilt-laced, laden. Fluent in motion but foreign in language.
My grandmother does not know who I love. She does not know the life I lead. She will never know the woman who holds my hands until they no longer shake, who accepts my choice without condition.
These lives do not intersect. Instead, I move between them, leaving fragments of myself at each crossing.
END
Author Bio: Emmanuel is a writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Offing. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8