Blog Post #19

The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman / Nisa

By- Ava Daniels

In this excerpt titled The Life and Words of a Kung Woman by Nisa, I was taken back to the introduction of The Norton Book of Women's Lives when the author, Phyllis Rose was referring back to her childhood and how she enjoyed biographies of women that were very descriptive and written with no censors. With that being said, this reading was exactly that. The detail of Nisa's childhood and life was definitely uncensored and very descriptive and made me feel like I was there.

In the first part of the excerpt titled Earliest memories, Nisa talks about her childhood and her relationship with her family. Because this takes place in Africa in the early 1920's, there was a huge culture shock when reading this. Nisa lived in a village in Africa where the men were in charge of hunting and gathering to provide for their families and the women were in charge of cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Nisa's younger years sounded like anything but happy memories. Her father would beat her and threaten to kill her for begging to be nursed by her mother. Her mother would also rarely do anything about her fathers behaviors towards her. It seemed like the only person who would stick up for her was her older brother. 

Even though Nisa talks about her early memories, which would be considered a childhood for some, these memories of being a child ended very early in life for her. Nisa married very early on, before she even began her first period. Her husband was very abusive to her and even forced herself on to her. I feel like this part of the reading was very hard to get through and somewhat emotional because of how much description was given and also thinking about how young she was. Nisa would also hear very bad things about men and husbands from her close female family members. "When a woman marries a man, he doesn't just touch her body, he touches her body and has sex with her" (649), was told to her by her own mother. Because of this, it is no surprise that her interpretation of marriage was not good from a young age. As time went on, Nisa began to lover her husband. 

Even though Nisa learned to love her husband later on in their marriage, life did not get easier for her. She got pregnant by her husband, still at such a young age. She was so young that when she was giving birth, she did not understand everything that was going on and was also left alone in the village woods to do everything by herself. "Then I thought 'Has my child already been born?' Because I wasn't really sure" (654-655). Throughout this whole excerpt  was shocked at what I had been reading.