Marakana and Lonmin are all over the news.
When I was six feet under Johannesburg I felt as if I was moving through the world and the world was a dream. I could explore the surface valiantly but my thoughts were no longer precise. I was cut off from people even though thought traffic and crowds surrounded me. In the city I found a barren wilderness, fierce people, breathed it all in, and compared myself to others. It filled me with the bitter seeds of sorrow and I felt like a skinny bird again, a child in time considering all the spiritual in nature. It is cold and I hope that soon this cold will go underground. I loved the smoke. I loved the raw, electric smell of pollution in the air, the rubbish in the streets, the wretched poor. One way for survival in the city is to grow old (you will grow old quickly and weary, tired and hurt from what you experience). Wisdom will fill you from your head down to your toes as you observe everything around you; the weight of life and suddenly what seems familiar will no longer feel familiar to you in the way it once did. For survival lots of things will have to happen to you. You will have to lose that pure innocence about you. You will not age gracefully. You will forget and there are sometimes things that you won't forget.
For some people another person's misery is their ministry, and they believe that that is their journey and mission that they have been called up to act upon for the rest of their lives. Family should be close and a brother and sister closer. From there I always wondered where the dead go when they die. Is it enough to remember them in passing, lay flowers on their grave, or to let go of the thread of how simple life is when compared to the complex nature of physics, biology and mathematics.
The cemetery is paved with the flame of memory. I was always the girl, the woman who stood alone in the rain with a bunch of flowers in her hands. I can say this now. I am no longer opposed to it. In fact it makes me feel emancipated. I've turned the pressure on its head and called it something else, vitality. All my life I have felt connected to nature, the fog, and fields, the farms that belonged to my family. There were always faces of aunts and uncles at funerals that disoriented me because I could not place them. And I would say like a mantra as I stood at a grave or while I attended a wedding, 'To all the ghosts dead or living from my past in the spirit of writing this I let go of you all.'
As a child my brother retreated into sports and it was a luxurious time for him, being an athlete with his limbs taking on a life of their own. But for me that period in time glittered with falsehoods, formidable isolation and neglect. Writing had not become my religion yet.
Sometimes I could touch the silence that I held inside of my heart. It didn't have an ego (this shell made of glass) and it didn't tell me to go to hell. It didn't damn the precocious child in me.
It was from him that I learnt how not to compare myself to other people and to question whether or not it (raising comparisons) was an experimental construct from youth or the life and death of miracles taking place in front of me. Or was it the natural coexistence of human nature next to an animal one? There is something poetic, something about the futility, the loneliness of the latitudes and longitudes of shore life. I longed so much for it that I began to write about the ocean that I had come to know as a child. I would spend a day on the beach with the warmth of the sun sucked inside of myself. Port Elizabeth is not Athol Fugard's Port Elizabeth anymore. It's become a moral dilemma. The youth have their own song, ambiguity, and their own fired up intensity about politics and the police. We are still digging for bodies that went missing years ago during apartheid. We are still digging for bodies that went missing last week. Life and death and always the heartache of it and the genuine moving sensation of pain that comes with suffering has become as natural as breath. In my shadow stood lone Brother Wolf and in my head I found the source of therapy in his song. When he sang the blues (of course he was just playing his radio in his bedroom but that was just his subconscious talking, driven to face reality, the truth, all the letters in l-o-v-e, all the words, the sticky fingers of 'I love you') it reminded me of the ocean. How tranquil it was just to stand there in front of all its majesty, to observe the color of it, how it just seemed to go on and on and flow into infinity. It was magical and transparent all at the same time. The people seemed to be all patchwork and one-dimensional. When I took off my glasses they didn't seem to be defined anymore by their limbs. They just seemed smudged and blurry effigies. Children bent on building castles, standing precariously in and around rock pools while fishing in them. I haven't had an organic idea for a long time and by that I mean a fresh and new idea that had a sensibility of place and size. Everything happens in the city. People happen upon each other there. I did not see how I could love like our mama had loved us with her maternal instincts. Her love would come as a feast served up on plates instead of a therapist. Mama was formidable, a thinker and a doer. Her flesh felt like a hook, line and sinker, something brutal, otherworldly. I became a bird without wings, without a cage, without vital seed. In the light of the day was Mama's garden and the extraordinary work she put into it. Mama liked to kill every thought of the hard work that I put into anything, every collective thread that I wanted people to remember me by, my cultural manifesto, and the legacy of my creative gifts. But Brother Wolf taught me that perfection comes with hard work and separation anxiety. He never spoke in so many words. I had to watch and learn from his fixed and focused psychosomatic drive to achieve, to be brave, to see phenomena and vision indiscriminately where others could not. I have come to this beach today to remember, to see, to think, not to wallow even, not to drown as I once did with my head inside the development of a manuscript, divided siblings with their hearts raw, anguish bleeding figuratively into the contact they had with other people. In Port Elizabeth I learned to battle, sometimes weeping about the state of the nation and its upheaval and then came Marakana and Lonmin, the gold and platinum mines, workers striking for more pay. It had to affect me like any poet, writer, teacher or intellectual.
I tried to help. I put the potatoes in the bag as quickly as I possibly could before anyone in the house could see me. It could be a meal. The first and last meal the family could have for the day, the week. Bless them. I hoped they would bless this food to their bodies. So many people came today to the door. Hungry and tired, their feet sore and covered in blisters from walking so far. Where did they all come from I wondered? How did they live? Oh, I always wondered that. What were the dismal circumstances they found themselves in and why couldn't they tear themselves away from poverty and need, want, desire? Why were they treated as if they belonged in a leper colony and not society? I could feel the sun's rays penetrating my fingers as I held them up and studied them meticulously. These were my mother's hands. I could see the bright halo of the sun. I felt warm and bright as if a tidal force of energy was moving through me in a rush. It spun through me as effortless as a wheel, constant and I was buoyed with hope.
Mama knitting, always knitting, and at the end of the storm in this house this is the crucial debate. She is the spectator left to drown in what her son, (my anchor and shield) Brother Wolf does not say. The only proof of all our worldly possessions lies in the material, as the soul hovers between earth and the eternal feeling, the intense call of paradise beckoning, on the threshold of a heavenly home. For all of my life my brother was home to me with his brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin in his clean blue jeans and white shirt. The two of us were a family coming together in a deep soulful exercise, of restoring peace in the home.
The jungle is out there somewhere but there are no monkeys hanging on trees only vast green fields. Everything around Wren was art. Every day felt like summer and when it rained it felt like summer rain. There was even a poetic energy and beauty about the hail when it fell. But it was only a year and when the year was over she went home with her tail between her legs.
Home. The first thing that she knew was wrong was when she could not sleep. She was drained. She felt exhausted, tossing and turning trying to rest, frustrated yet she could not sleep. She would be up all hours of the night. Insomnia made her feel as if she was living in a glass house.
The television was on in the family room. My brother liked having the television on in the afternoon even though nobody was watching it. He was eating a packet of crisps and wiping his salty fingers on his jeans after licking them one by one. Wren stood in the doorway sipping a cup of lukewarm black coffee.
Do you want to see my scars? When and where I've come undone. Nobody wants to see the scars, only how I've been anchored.
Here I come. Just another visit from the drowned girl. She sits at the end of my bed while I read. She wants to give my comic books to orphans and street children but they do not know what the word 'Marvel' means in my life. Sometimes I wish she would leave me alone with her sad, soft eyes. I know when she's been crying and it's usually about something that happened in the past. Melancholia shudders through me. I can feel the ripple pass through my body like a current or an inelegant spasm.
What Africa must learn from wars is you must let the clouds see you. You must let the skin of the tightrope of the blue-sky sink into you. The world is not my home. It is only borrowed temporarily. I remember a burst of radiance and how nature must then have seemed like a green acre on the farms we passed when going to visit my father's family from every mile. And so I come to Vietnam. Some have said that war has a purpose. It pours maturity into a boy's heart. But they forget what will happen to his soul. And so the world moved swiftly towards morality with a knot at the base of my throat. And on the battlefields lies depression. A picture of power and survival where hunger is just a bomb made from chaos and absurdity. I am glad war was not my fight, my purpose. Whoever does it bring meaning and value to?
Iraq was a sky bright with stars. A burning voyage into the land of saboteurs and destruction, an ancient one built on flames. All this talk of war would just reduce Wren to tears.
In a most far off northern city my sister's come undone (women and hysteria).
So what if I come undone again.
This time I've the one who has come undone but nobody really cared.
My grandfather (Joseph William George) a war veteran. Posted off to Kenya at the start of the Second World War and when he came back he was never the same again (no hero's welcome). He was given a bicycle and a jacket for the Coloured soldier. I did not live to see any of that (I was not born yet) but my father did and I guess my grandfather carried that humiliation for the rest of his life. Men are changed by war as are the women and children they leave behind. We stopped throwing birthday parties for Wren when she turned twenty. Only my friends came over and we hung out in my room sucking beer out of bottles and left the empties stacked high in the kitchen. I could sense Wren's disapproval. It was acute. She was fragile. She always was. Her nerves on edge, raw, sharp, fierce. Our love was like a sonnet. Our fear and trepidation for a future we would go out into the world on our own a haiku. Life and death is very succinct in a haiku. Most nights we'd stay in, and watch the news and eat spaghetti (proper family stuff). When I was in that almost fatal car accident (that nobody in the family ever spoke about) and I could sense the face of the road's blackness coming out to meet me head on before I could see it, I was not afraid. The car was a complete write-off but I walked away from the crash with minor injuries, scratches. The car had wrapped itself around a tree. It is madness to drink before you get into a car but I did it all the time way back then. Not because I thought it was cool but because I could get away with it. Wren if she had her way would want me to be a Buddhist monk. And if her world were perfect she would brave the New World around her as a nun. She would remain in a pure state, the one she had carried with her from childhood. Wren would be charged with innocence. She wasn't always a poet. And she wasn't always very nice to me. Issues, issues, issues, burning ones, diaries and notebooks filled with scribble from top to bottom, pictures she painted, photographs she took revealed her genuine person. And so she became something much more authentic that I could relate to and I could love her again. I did not know about the love affairs she had. She never exposed that side of her. At home she was a killer Monopoly and Scrabble player. Maybe that's all we knew of each other, that we were killers when it came to playing board games and little else. I know nothing of the much older men she fell in love with. How lost she felt sometimes, that she created boxes in her mind's eye where she put their lone shadows at rest, her suffering in silence, storing tiny details about their beauty and strength that she accumulated across weeks and months of going from one relationship to the next. The sister I know helped me cook the Christmas lunch with velocity and there were plenty of smiles when the chicken came out perfectly. The roast potatoes, the pan glistening with fat and runny juices it was not just something for the two of us to do, to pass the time like any other family would on a special holiday, we spoke but not in so many words. She would watch me carefully with her eyes catching every move I made but that she was sometimes slow to react to. I think most of all she wanted to be seen as serene and graceful, a lady who had sky-high standards but sometimes she failed at that. We all became really good at composing ourselves and to project what the outside world wanted to see of us, which was a modern family. A family of productive thinkers, doers, intellectuals, connected to the culture of creativity and linked to charm, and charisma. Every year our holidays would turn into pilgrimages and those times were when the core, the heart of our family system was the strongest. When things changed for the worse, for the better, it happened like a swinging pendulum. Wren was at the centre of it, always at the centre of it. And there was nothing that anybody could do about it. If I do not write home about its adversity from my unique perspective then who will, that sweet, poetic stagnation of bipolar. Wren and illness, her illness, all the sorrowful angles staring up at the face of the sun but could she even feel it, that sensation of electrifying warmth on cool skin when you've just come outdoors to feed the dogs or throw a ball around. The word 'suicide' was strictly outlawed in our home.
I was always more at home at the end of the sky, the outdoors and by outdoors I mean stepping out into our mother's garden that smelled like jasmine and lavender and incense burning. It was years before we found out that not everyone lived, looked, thought the way we did. And by 'the end of the sky' I mean the world of her imagination. I think my sister Wren has always wanted to touch people's lives in a meaningful way and that even though our childhood was brutal in some ways we had to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind if we ever got lost on the trail in that dark forest at night.
Now I am a changed person, a changed woman. No longer a stranger or estranged from readying herself to take up her place in the world. There it was. What more could be said about the end of the damned affair. Love me. Choose me. But I did not speak those words, nor could I find it in my heart to bring myself to say them. I had enough of being left behind, being told what to do, think and feel. I was tired of being engaged in that useless interaction.
Our clothes had grass stains on it. The sun shone in our eyes while we blinked madly (maybe they were tears). There we were. Wolf and Wren playing together, laughing, talking, watching, observing the other 'patients'. What was wrong with them? They seemed to be perfectly all right. Daddy is smiling and he kisses mummy on the lips and we all say, 'Ooh, daddy and mummy is in love.' If mummy is sad she doesn't show it. It is me who is left to wonder at the complexities of grown up behaviour, human nature. It's Wolf who is perfectly normal here. We lay on our backs but there weren't any clouds. We played at making a fire. The rock, paper, scissors game. We had come to visit daddy. On the way to the clinic mummy didn't play the radio. The ride there was quiet. Wolf looked out the window and I sat up front like a grown up next to mummy. I don't want this for my brother's children and I don't want this for my own. Daddy says he is well. He is painting. He even finds time to read. I wish I could run away. I wished I could hold onto my brother's hand forever, that he could never, ever read my mind, and that I could protect him forever. Mummy wants another baby. She said that once. Daddy cannot see us waving. It's so heart-breaking. I don't want to be me. I turn around and look at my mother's profile. It hurts to breathe, to think, to mutter, or even to whisper anything. I do not know yet that grown up I will mostly have views of fertility and family, psychiatry and psychology in the world I live in. My sister will live faraway in another city, work hard in a bank and only come home once a year for Christmas or never.
All I see when I close my eyes is the flowers of night-time.
Their shade is black. Their eyes are black. Their shape is black. They're hideous with their claws clawing at me. They seem to want to drown. It is their livelihood. They've received our freedom and so must we. These have not been my best years so far. They seem all shriveled up as if they have died. I feel dried up inside up. I feel thirsty, let down, I need to feel the sun on my back, I need to learn how to cope, stand on my own and not feel let down by life, love, family, aunts and a sister all the time. I need to see you. How convenient for you that I have simply vanished into thin air. Your little doll, your plaything, your pretty baby doll. I have now some sizing up to do. I am marked for life or is it death. Hey, wait a minute now. There is more to this tale of loss and of love. There is no point in shortcuts babe, hey? (This is taken from a diary entry from that scene in Johannesburg where I caused many scenes).
After you left me (or is it the other way around) how do I justify misbehaving so badly? I was so savagely torn from what I believed in. I stood by my values.
Your cowardice up, no longer fastened on me, fascinated me. I wish I could say that I could love something. Stick to it.
Your words have always been a chicken soup for my spirit, my harvest, my shield, my river, my border, and the boundaries of the four walls keeping the good parts of my consciousness in. You have taught me to look the world in the eye. Your hands were the hands that were in the fire. And you were the one who pulled me from the wreckage (from the weight of a heavy burden of illness).
Now this city, Port Elizabeth is haunting. I miss Johannesburg. I seemed more at home there (curiously), more at ease, more myself, less exposed to the elements, the human elements and others. Swaziland is even further away. Now it just a memory. And I can't remember the pent-up desire to leave my childhood home. All this time I've been haunted by the past and while history surrounds us you move forward.
All my life I have imagined m brother lucid, intent on not struggling with your own identity. All my life I have imagined you as a luminous quiet treasure. The good toy soldier with war wounds a-plenty. Your dark hair that smelled of rain when you were a little boy eating fudge ice cream or a tuna fish sandwich with a serious and determined expression on your tiny curious face. And then there was still the architecture of the waterfall, the carnival, the splendid circus of my departed sadness, and that became my inheritance to you.
It came in a box, dry ingredients for the Red Velvet cake all the way from America from a cousin who was staying there now. A cousin who had two boisterous children under the age of five and an American husband, and it also came with a tub of frosting that did not have to be refrigerated. There had been a lot of cakes made, bought, and decorated in that house as well as memories that burned, that would send you to an early grave (I'll never forget the mass graves discovered in Herzegovina-Bosnia that I watched on television when I was in high school). But eating birthday cake you'd soon forget all about that. You'd lick the icing off the spoon, drink tea like a grown up out of teacups decorated with flowers and pink blooms. Kiss and greet family at your birthday tea party like you haven't seen them in years. Life gets heavy if you don't have them around you to protect, to keep you safe from harm. Why would I want to go to Alaska? It's cold for one. To be near something, some place that doesn't remind me of the sun but at the end of the day it isn't the destination that becomes important. It's who you are with the people you're with, the significant and important people you love. This feels like a distant and remote thing for me, love, and the art of loving. And the art of loving one genius in a family is never enough even if it is done from faraway. The ones left in the shadows they too have their roles to play even if it takes their entire lifetimes to realise it. Poetry is such a comfort and if I had a scarcity of it in my life I think there is a part of me that would not feel entirely whole. I would be the half-hearted experiment making an attempt to live an exemplary life like Ingrid Jonker, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Norma Jean Baker. Not just names and faces but also icons in their field. Women ahead of the times they were born into and who would lead the next generation. And I would be a poet, that poet with the seasons all a flutter inside her head while butterflies danced, nerves whirling into algorithms until both could not be discriminated. These would be all my rituals. To eat, to meditate, to feast, to remember childhood anxieties, what I anticipated around every corner, the fudge my mother used to make, how my grandmother's, the matriarch of the family cheek felt like porcelain, smelt like powder after I kissed her. I knew I had inherited some of that from her, cold, calculating recipes and the baking of bread that would turn into disasters in my hands. She taught me to realise self, selfhood and what would challenge me later in life and if it was going to be illness that I was going to live with it for a very long time my life had to be a wonderfully epic one. I had to make it a legend of flirting with falls, of standing up and of letting go of the world. Instead of wondering why half the time mental illness was so unquiet.
It starts with me first. The angel's tongue, volcano, fireflies, philosophy singeing my dopamine and me asking myself, 'Where are you going to,' and later, much later, 'How on earth did you get here?'
And then I met Julian and the origins of the universe tasted sweeter. Life can be sweet, bittersweet, taste like American fudge, caramel, butterscotch, or liquid vanilla. (He was beautiful). He had dark hair, long dark hair (and I can remember threads of it lying across his back), wearing blue jeans, a denim shirt and him carrying a guitar. For now he is my Saviour because we talk all the time for what seems like hours with the brushstrokes of quality not quantity. Our conversations, our heated debates about the food served in the canteen, even our silences take us both on a Zen-like spiritual expedition. I think we were both at a point in our lives where we wanted answers, elegant solutions as to why this had to happen to us. And then he opens up. Another passage, rite and pilgrimage for me. He decides to talk about his schizophrenia. He is my first friend in this hospital of both fun and hell and I want to protect him from the world around him, the world at large and me (some of me, the internal struggle that has no coherent voice, cohesive exterior). I want to shelter him from society that extracts and distils the intelligence of a child, man or a woman that has mental illness and calls it 'madness'.
I wanted to travel when I was younger but now there seems to be no time for that. I've read Tolstoy and Nabokov and now want to read Pasternak (all Russian writers). I wanted to study in Europe and America but what's the point when you really can't time or pinpoint when you're going to be 'flying off the rails', hallucinate disco beats in Technicolor, when you've imagined that you are not 'you'. 'You' are just wasting away in a room not far away from where people actually live. In a bedroom that your mother made pretty by putting flowers, actually roses now that you come to think of it, in a vase to make the 'sadness' pretty. After all you're still a girl and girls love pink and pretty, dresses and shoes, flowers, anything beautiful. It is your mother that comes to your room in the morning first thing and opens up your curtains. Who will tell you to clean your room when you're thirty something, that she's doing the laundry, 'where are your dirty clothes and I need those sheets too'. It is your mother who will want to lift your spirits, the same way you wanted to lift hers when she listened to the dialogue on the television when you were little. When you were thinking that she was tired and resting on the sofa, with her eyes closed while you watched the curve of her bottom lip and her mouth slightly open while she breathed in and out.
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