Gabourey Sidibe's pain of growing up in parents’ abusive marriage
Actress Gabourey Sidibe attends the 71st Annual Golden Globe Awards held at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 12, 2014, in Beverly Hills, California.
What you need to know:
- Gabourey Sidibe's mother, Alice, worked in public schools as a paraprofessional, teaching in a class of differently abled children.
- Alice epitomised profound freedom and had a jovial, empathetic, enthusiastic, charismatic and infectious persona, quite the opposite to her husband's.
Hollywood actress Gabourey Sidibe was raised in Bed-Stuy, one of the roughest environs in New York City's famous borough of Brooklyn. She cannot remember her parents ever being happily married. Gabourey, her older brother Ahmed and mother Alice Tan Ridley, lived an entirely different life from her father, Ibnou Sidibe.
Alice worked in New York City's public schools as a paraprofessional, teaching in a class of differently abled children. She epitomised profound freedom and possessed a jovial, empathetic, enthusiastic, charismatic and infectious persona. In Gabourey's memoir, This is Just my Face: Try not to Stare, she illustrates how Ibnou was the polar opposite of Alice.
He was either at work, where he operated one of New York City's famed yellow cabs, or at home finding comfort in his solitude while reading The Times in silence. He was immensely impenetrable and self-absorbed. His children were not on his radar unless he was disparaging, scolding, yelling or corporally punishing them.
Ibnou descended from Senegal. His father was a politician who became the mayor of Thiès, the third largest city in the West African country, and Ibnou was his father's second son from his second marriage.
The cover of Gabourey Sidibe's memoir.
He was sent to study architecture in France and after graduation, he relocated to the United States. To acquire citizenship, he went in search of a wife and, through his colleagues, met a fervent Alice. He confidentially offered her $4,000 to marry him so he could obtain a green card, and she sympathetically accepted.
A trip to Senegal led Alice to fall for Ibnou. She became besotted, mesmerised and seduced by Africa's allure when she saw a sea of black people who resembled her.
Senegal had the most mesmerising display of exotic elegance she had ever witnessed, as she observed a population that comprised black accomplished doctors, lawyers, teachers and artisans, among others.
She was fascinated by Senegal's prideful environment and inadvertently fell in love with Ibnou. The excitement, however, reduced when he introduced her to his ex-girlfriend and first cousin, Tola.
Ibnou informed Alice he intended to marry Tola as a second wife and Alice firmly retorted that he had to divorce her first before achieving his polygamous ambitions.
Out of fear of losing Alice, Ibnou assured her he would shelve the idea. Shortly after they returned to New York, Ahmed was born. It turned out that Alice and Ibnou had the same bloodline. Alice’s ancestors were originally abducted in Senegal during the slave trade. A genealogical DNA test confirmed that Alice and Ibnou shared ancestors.
Further, they were both carriers of the same genetic blood disorder, haemoglobin C disease, which causes an abnormal breakdown of red blood cells. Shortly after their marriage, they were informed by clinicians not to have children together.
That was before Alice’s trip to Senegal and her subsequent disregard for the catastrophic medical prohibition of marrying someone whose mother resembled her. When Ahmed was born, they passed the abnormal gene haemoglobin C to him, but Gabourey was strikingly not affected.
Years later, Ibnou convinced Alice to write a letter of invitation to assist Tola to acquire a visa to travel and visit them. Alice was a natural-born American and she was the only one with the legal authority to issue an invitation.
Tola stayed with them for four months, before Ibnou eventually moved her to an apartment, a walking distance from Alice’s home. Suddenly, Ibnou stopped coming home at night. One morning, Alice visited Tola’s new apartment unannounced and found Ibnou. She spotted his clothes on the side of Tola’s bed, but he lied that he was too exhausted to drive home and opted to sleep over.
All along, Alice had perceived Tola as Ibnou’s secret wife. She had recently given birth to Malick in Senegal. Alice opted to patiently operate a reconnaissance to deter any legal confrontation.
Years earlier when Ahmed was seven and Gabourey was six, Ibnou and Alice had a fierce argument, and out of spite, he punished Alice, by calling the Bureau of Child Welfare, and falsely accusing her of abusing Gabourey and Ahmed.
The bureau took Gabourey and Ahmed to separate foster homes to live with their new adoptive families and reluctantly returned them to a traumatised Alice after three weeks of court proceedings. Demoralised by Ibnou’s lies, Alice was determined to leave her marriage, but she did so with an abundance of caution to protect her children from harm.
When Ibnou asked her to write a letter to invite Tola to the US, Alice finally saw a critical opportunity to covertly gather evidence for a future divorce filing. When Alice was invited to a Moroccan festival, she shrewdly invited Tola back to her house to take care of Ibnou and her children while she was away.
When Alice returned home after the trip, she and Ibnou had an intimate encounter and showered together. Tola had a nervous breakdown and sobbed uncontrollably.
Questioned about her sorrow by Alice, Tola clung onto the rehearsed lie that she and Ibnou were just cousins and not married. Alice then enquired about their bastard son Malick.
In Islam, the word ‘bastard’ is an emotional trigger and in a panic, Tola confessed that Ibnou and her were married and Malick was not a bastard son. Alice’s discoveries granted her the fortitude to corroborate her findings and successfully file for divorce as Ibnou went on to marry several other women and sired numerous children into his 60s.
The writer is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
