Mourning Clothes by Michelle Chikaonda

           Marco Calabrese CC



Mourning Clothes


At the time of my father’s death in southern California last October—where he had moved along with my mother for what ended up being a two year course of treatment for colon cancer—I only owned about a week’s worth of black dresses. In Malawi, however, where my family are from, the recently bereaved are expected to wear black, or at least dark clothing, from the day of their family member’s death until a month has passed. If the deceased was an immediate relative—a parent, a husband, a child—this expectation can extend as far as a year, depending on the part of the country one is from. To accommodate at least the month that we would be at home in Malawi for the funeral and everything afterward, then, I packed, in addition to the week of dresses I did have, any dresses even remotely on the theme of black; in my wardrobe this turned out to be mostly floral prints against a black background. “Dark enough,” I thought as I folded them all into my suitcase.

By the time I returned to Philadelphia a month later, where I have lived for the last eight years, I was itching to get out of my mourning clothes. My father had always hated what he called “Malawi’s culture of death,” well before we’d even found out he was sick—the maudlin attire, the long days sitting at home waiting for visiting grievers, the self-consciously externalized despair. After a month of that, so did I; even the brightness of the flowers on my black dresses seemed now to be protesting against the dark. On my first real day back in my office in Philadelphia, I looked for the mostly starkly colorful dress I could find, and wore a light green dress with a white floral print. I was perhaps being less rebellious than I had thought, though: white floral arrangements are traditionally funereal on this side of the world, and my team at work had even given me a white orchid on my first brief visit back to the office before the funeral. Still, I reasoned—at least I wasn’t in black anymore.

There are only two pairs of shoes I have worn to my father’s gravesite, both for his burial and for visits in the following months—the blue-green Converses I was wearing the cool October night that he left us, and the black patent leather Mary Jane flats I wore three weeks later, the stormy November afternoon that we buried him. I avoided wearing the Converses for several months, and almost threw them out the week we returned to California to ship home his remaining things. But then one day I tested out wearing them again, not wanting to feel controlled by a pair of shoes; and then without thinking about it I wore them again, the day after and then the days and weeks after that, until the snow disappeared from the ground and the winter salt pressed into my shoes’ soles found itself replaced with the fallen cherry blossom petals of spring. On the few days for which I did not wear them, I found myself wearing instead the Mary Janes, or one of the floral print dresses, or one of the three pairs of earrings I’d worn over the three days between his casket’s arrival in Malawi and when we finally lowered him into the ground. 

Without my Philadelphia community knowing it, and, really, without me even realizing it until many weeks after I first started, I turned out to be performing my grief, just as I would have at home in Malawi: the invisible, stoically American version of a year in black. Wearing the things in my life that I associated with death, carving out the space I need for my grief in a world otherwise moving insistently on, every day reflexively robing myself in the mourner’s prayer. I don’t recall actively deciding to wear those dresses, earrings and shoes because of what they meant; they were nonetheless the the clothes I felt drawn to put on, that same rotation of grief, every day until the height of summer when the sun and heat—and perhaps also time—began to fade my sadness from something sharp like broken glass into something soft like a shadow, sometimes forgotten but always there, and I found, slowly, that I could more and more often wear clothes other than those that had so intimately known death. 

Soon I will not be able to wear these shoes anymore, even if I still wanted to—the soles of the Converses are starting to crack, and the straps of the Mary Janes are beginning to fray. They certainly will not survive to Christmas, when I will next go back to Malawi. While I still wear the same dresses from time to time, they do not resonate so much with the time of the funeral anymore, having now seen more light than rain. Next month it will be a year since I told Dad I would take care of my family, would try not to pick needless arguments with my mother, would work hard to do right by everything he had built for us, but never got the time to enjoy himself. It feels about right, thus, for those shoes to come apart now: I no longer need them in order to recognize the shape of my sorrow, to continue to walk with the memory of my father into tomorrow. My grief does not need to be performed, because as long as I am alive it is always here—even when my life is now mostly in the light again, wrapped in the fullest of colors.

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Michelle Chikaonda has won the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship for writers of color from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The Seventh Wave’s Rhinebeck Residency. She is a VONA fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop alumna, and a Pushcart prize nominee. She is currently published in The Globe and Mail, Catapult, Hobart, and the Kalahari Review, among others. You can read more of her work at www.michellechikaonda.work

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