Illustrated by kaya joan
my
mother
was
my first country.
the first place I ever lived.
— Nayyirah Waheed
I’m in the parking lot of the Oxford Midwifery Unit, a clinic in Johannesburg, scrolling through my phone when the world breaks down. An image flits across my screen: a thumbnail of a young girl, no older than five, standing before a deep pit in bronze earth; her body is rag and stone, dirt and blood. A headline reads, “Congo’s silent genocide”. I am four months into my pregnancy, with five to go, filling the rise of my belly with cheese and tomatoes as statistics swallow me whole. Another ping of the cell phone signals a new message, a new image. In this one, three more children, a woman with a baby on her back, mud smothered and starving, more dead than alive. The subheading, “We live in war.” Which is to say we die in war. I think, maybe, we are born into it, too.
I was born in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not long after my birth, the country spat me out. About three decades ago, my family and I fled amidst political unrest as militant factions tried to overthrow the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. We relocated first to Cape Town, South Africa, then Abidjan, Ivory Coast, before returning to South Africa and settling in Johannesburg. Since the start of the first Congolese War in 1996 nearly three decades ago, more than six million people have died and over seven million have been displaced, including many members of my extended family.
The country I left behind faces some of the highest rates of maternal and neonatal mortality globally. Child-birthing women and newly born infants here die at rates that are 2.45 times and 1.5 times higher than the global averages.
Inside the clinic’s exam room, I think about my birth country as the midwife moves the fetal doppler across my pelvis. I try to imagine birthing at the end of the world.
Me falling into the mouth of the earth
Me beside a refugee camp floating on a river
Me near-gaunt with no exit plan
Me with a baby that smells of dirt and blast smoke
I ask my therapist if you can be anxiously attached to a country.
“Of course,” she says.
The idea of anxious attachment emerges from a psychological framework that explains how early relationships with caregivers shape an individual’s emotional development. Victims of inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving during childhood can become anxiously attached, growing haunted by a profound fear of abandonment.
My anxious attachment to the Congo is a pattern of emotional responses rooted in time; my temporality has been maimed. My exile began at birth; inside me, the past, present, and future breathe all at once. I continually try to forestall this catastrophic separation even though it has already occurred.
My therapist tells me it’s understandable that I feel this way. “In the context of forced migration,” she says, “your connection to your country of origin becomes fraught with loss and longing. The motherland is more than a geographical location. It is a repository of memories, traditions, and familial bonds.”
I am mother-hungry, mother-country-starved. I am a daughter who grieves a motherland. I am a daughter of a mother who also grieves, a loss, a longing that is profoundly shaped by history.
History is etched in my womb.
The next time, I am at my desk when my laptop opens to an image of a woman and her daughter breaking rocks at a copper quarry and cobalt pit in Lubumbashi. The soil, rich in iron oxide, is blood red, as though the earth were hemorrhaging. Somehow, every new image remakes the world into a cemetery for me.
Then there is another image, an older one. It shows an enslaved father, a man called Nsala, staring at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter. The image was captured in 1904, by Alice Seeley Harris – a British missionary and photographer known for documenting the lives of people in the Congo Free State during the early 20th century. Years later, Seeley recounted her experience with Nsala:
“He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too. And because that didn’t seem quite cruel enough, quite strong enough to make their case, they cannibalized both Boali and her mother. And they presented Nsala with the tokens, the leftovers from the once living body of his darling child whom he so loved.”
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Congo Free State, under King Leopold II of Belgium, was brutally exploited for rubber production. The colonial regime’s demand for rubber led to human rights abuses, including forced labor, as local populations were violently coerced into meeting rubber quotas.
The Congo’s vast wealth in natural resources, which attracted colonial exploitation more than a hundred years ago, continues to attract it today. Control over these resources has fueled corruption, conflict, and external interference in the country, exacerbating its political instability and hindering its development.
The DRC has the world’s largest cobalt reserves, estimated in 2022 at about 3.5 million metric tons, constituting nearly half of the global cobalt supply. The cobalt used in smartphones, including the one I scroll through looking at these images, is connected to the ongoing demand for Congo’s mineral resources, linking consumer technology to the broader socio-political struggles in the region. A report by Amnesty International reveals that all cobalt from the DRC is tainted by slavery-like conditions that often include child labour, forced labour, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, extremely low wages, and the contamination of the environment.
The Congo River was once named the Zaire River. The word “Zaire” was originally a Portuguese adaptation (or mispronunciation) of the Kikongo phrase “nzadi o nzere,” which has historically been translated into English as “the river that swallows all rivers.” Its name reflects the river’s immense size and the way it absorbs numerous tributaries along its course. When I first returned to Congo for a visit about ten years ago, I was stunned by its vastness and its depth as the world’s deepest river. It seemed to me that its waters could last for all of time. Now, pollution caused by copper and cobalt mining has not only poisoned a number of its tributaries, contaminating crops and devastating landscapes along the way – it has also caused widespread illness.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that long-term exposure to cobalt can cause “hard metal lung disease,” also known as cobalt lung. This condition can gradually damage the lungs, leading to serious breathing problems and chronic respiratory failure. Over time and in high concentrations, high exposures have also been linked to heart failure.
These photographs I keep seeing, the innumerable health statistics, environmental reports and historical accounts that I read, they all make clear that in the Congo, we have long been a people outsiders want to forget, a people always already thrown away, always already dying.
I don’t know if there were enslaved people in my family like Nsala or his daughter Boali, but their story haunts me, they haunt me. I sometimes feel like I carry their story here in my belly, as I carry this baby, now mine, now ours.
In an influential essay and later in a book, the Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe articulated a theory about what he calls, “necropolitics,” or how powerful entities, like governments or corporations, create “death-worlds.” In such places, people are forced to live in conditions in which their lives are controlled and devalued so thoroughly that they are kept in a state of perpetual suffering or imminent death, making them akin to the “living dead.”
These death-worlds can include places like concentration camps, colonies, or modern conflict zones, any place where survival is a constant struggle, and where people are systematically oppressed and exploited. In the DRC, this exploitation is obvious. Even as newspapers publish stories about a “silent genocide,” which doesn’t seem so silent to me, the dehumanisation and death of Congolese workers for Western profit continues, a grim reflection of such necropolitical dynamics.
There is an embodied aspect of necropolitics, too, for women giving birth in this context. For pregnant Congolese women, who live at the nexus of these death-worlds, the ongoing genocide is inscribed on their birthing bodies. The instability in healthcare services, limited access to facilities – especially in Eastern Congo – and the underdeveloped healthcare infrastructure create a social geography of horror. The control exerted over women’s birthing bodies – by preventing them from delivering their babies safely – constitutes a necropolitical and geopolitical maze of violence.
Under different circumstances, I might be among those women. Everything I write comes down to the fact that I left but they cannot, and I am haunted by survivor’s guilt. It evokes literary theorist Naomi Morgenstern’s exploration of, “responsibility to” versus “responsibility for.” She writes that the responsibility to “respond to the other is to recognize the other as a different and complete subject, a fellow sovereign center of consciousness.” On the other hand, she characterizes “responsibility for” as what literary critic Derek Attridge defines as: “assuming the other’s needs, being willing to be called to account for the other, surrendering one’s goals and desires in deference to the other’s.” I live torn between a responsibility to my mother country and a responsibility for my unborn child, and grapple with the ethical imperatives of both.
How can one work-through a reality so traumatic that its mere acknowledgement might lead to personal collapse? And how can such a reality be mourned?
Here, in suburban Johannesburg, I elude that world of the dead. My body is not there, but it still remembers.
In his seminal work, The Body Keeps the Score, Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, examines how trauma can lead to alterations in gene expression, which, even without altering the underlying DNA sequence, are passed down to future generations. The new field of epigenetics investigates such changes, looking at how they influence the inheritors’ responses to stress that might predispose them to certain mental and physical health issues. Epigenetic studies show that unresolved trauma has enduring effects well beyond pregnancy. These changes mean that descendants of trauma survivors may experience the effects of trauma even if they have not directly encountered traumatic events themselves. Infants simultaneously archive the past and become the future.
Studies on the mother-child dyad, the womb, and maternal behaviors draw attention to what sociologist Martine Lappé calls, “environments of consequence for the future.” Mothers, whose diet or behavior have impacted their fetuses, cannot be isolated from their broader social, political, environmental, and national contexts — thus, they remain socially-situated beings rather than individually responsible ones. This perspective shifts how we see the fetus by placing it back in the womb, the womb back in the woman’s body, and her body back in its social environment. A mother is both more and less than an individual, interconnected and instantiated through the various environments that encompass her and her fetus. Ultimately, I am what my mother (land) has endured.
A mother is both more and less than an individual, interconnected and instantiated through the various environments that encompass her and her fetus.
The narratives we craft about our collective history influence how we perceive, react to, and engage with the present. Similarly, the stories we tell about our personal histories shape our self-perception and ultimately define who we become. To tell a story, then, is to shape the world. Through storytelling and imagination perhaps we can challenge the status quo and disrupt established systems and cycles.
As a poet, I’m drawn to the power of words and stories as antidotes to death and the death-worlds that threaten us. I’m especially moved by the work of women writers from the Global South who use their poetry and prose as acts of resistance. I find inspiration in the words of Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo and Somali-British poet Warsan Shire—both writing in defiance of the genocidal narratives that surround their homelands. I trace a chorus of women’s resistance poetry, from Noor Hindi’s fierce declaration, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” to Fatimah Asghar’s defiant If They Come for Us.
Today, I feel a daughterly imperative to write back to my motherland, preserving what it means to be from the DRC now while also imagining what it might mean in the future. As I consider the stories I will share with my child, I hope we can envision a different Congo, to rediscover our homeland as a source of nourishment, of motherhood, and creation.
When my child is born, he will know me as a mother-poet — two identities that are inextricably linked. This is how I navigate the endlessly genocidal present, and I survive this era and the next. For me, writing is an act of resistance against erasure, especially as a Congolese woman whose people are caught in a disposable war that the world willfully ignores. Writing becomes a means of survival, a way to prevent extinction. I write to free our voices from the margin. I write so my people cannot be disappeared.
I write myself strong enough to carry our dead
to rearrange the frontlines
to die and return
rebirth over rupture
Congo,
I sing us back
to make us possible
In 2015, I moved to London to study for a master’s degree. Before I left, I visited my great grandmother, my kokolo, in the DRC. Those were the last long days of her life. In our home in Kinshasa, I woke to her blessing each day, hands that moved like sunlight in the late afternoon, traced a cross on my forehead, before she kissed each cheek. Kokolo’s hands were shaped by the earth — planting seeds, tending cows, feeding chickens, burying children. At thirteen, she was married to a husband who proved both abusive and unfaithful. In my memory, she holds a doll in one arm and cradles a baby in the other. Despite the harsh social stigma of rural Congo in the 20th century, she soon left her husband, took her children, and settled in a quiet village in Katanga. It was there that she raised two daughters, one of whom raised the woman who raised me.
Towards the end of her time, kokolo regularly spoke about and to death, regaling it, my grandmother, mother and I with stories of her life. She spoke herself out of bed and into markets and the homes of old friends, into nights spent hunched over the liboke pounding cassava leaves. My grandmother, mother and I featured heavily in her stories. She had dementia and moved between worlds. In her tellings, time looped and we were a part of her youth and aged present and unlikely future.
This is where the future lives in my body.
It begins with the past.
This bloodline of what once lived
and will live and live again.
She talked about my children, though I was a single and childless, twenty-three-year-old at the time. She conjured whole tomorrows into the room through her stories. It was a magic she passed down to my grandmother who passed it down to my mother and me. We inherited a way to bring the past and present into contact with each other in the service of imagining an alternative future, an alchemy that propels us forward.
Kokolo taught me storytelling as a tool for making sense of the world and shaping it—a means for creating meaning and building relationships across generations. The stories of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother root me in my history, lineage, and country, transcending geographical and temporal boundaries.
Though I am displaced, the Congo of my making—the one that exists in the terrain of my words—offers asylum and helps me defy dispossession.
My words are my homeland.
