Womb loss

‘You need a hysterectomy. Immediately.’  The gynaecologist told me this morning that we will schedule the surgery within two weeks.

I’m in a mild state of shock. I don’t have any essentialist notions about femininity bound up with the womb or uterus. I chose not to have children many years ago and I am not especially maternal.

It is another passage of ageing. After the operation I will go directly into full menopause, and, as Adele the gynae said drily, ‘We will deal with that symptomatically.’  Invasive surgery and a major hormonal turnabout or cessation.

I don’t know quite what I feel. Overtaken by events, pushed into a dark tunnel. Light at the end of the tunnel, but still.

It could be worse.

Dreaming in oleander

Each week I drive back and forth from Cape Town to the Overberg via the congested highways of the N1 or N2. In the narrow central strips that separate the dual carriageways there are flowering oleander bushes. Drought-tolerant bushes native to Greece and the Mildde East, able to survive on a lick of water, flowering abundantly in cherry-red, pink, cream and white. Highly toxic plants with an irritant poison in the sap, people have been known to fall ill or even die from eating food cooked in the smoke of lit oleander branches, from licking the torn branches, from getting sap in their eyes, from chewing leaves out of ignorance. Skin contact may cause irritation and blistering. The oleander is best avoided.

Along the highways there are homeless people living under these bushes, sheltering with staked-out tarpaulins and corrugated roofing. Mothers with babies and small toddlers. Huddled under poisonous oleander bushes in the central strips dividing fast and lethal highways because they have nowhere else to live. Because it is safer to exist here squatting between highways under poisonous bushes than in the gangster violence of informal settlements. Safer is probably the wrong word. Like ‘choices’ would be the wrong word.

This year the oleander are flowering prolifically with their lethal beauty. From a distance you would think the entrance to the city is a pretty and orderly drive, with the mountain right ahead of you. Not so.

Return of the repressed

I suppose I thought that because I could keep the days slow and humdrum and even, the changes would stay small and incremental.

What has been frozen within begins to thaw, the sheets of protective glass begin to shatter. The memories take on taste and smell and newness and a sharp bitter quality of regret. The life put aside begins to re-assert itself with a vehemence that is at the same time thrilling, immature and acutely uncomortable.

Yesterday. Sitting in the midst of a gathering of friends. My tenderness towrds Hamilton and his brother Donny, two frail elderly men, their sons and daighter and grandchildren, their family friends all around. Loud, exuberant and affectionate luncheon with platters of food. The wine didn’t bother me. And after seven months, my not drinking was a non-event.

Al fresco under the vines, the sun coming and going behind clouds. Peter F, tipsy and laughing, teasing his sister over the table, leans across to me and ruffles my hair, then without thinking rubs and caresses my neck. Has Peter ever touched me before? The heat starts at my ankles and burns up to dampness. I can feel myself flushing, burning, the desire catches me off guard. I want to lean into the caress and moan softly, stretch towards him. I don’t move, I hold still, but my body tingles and burns with anticipation. It is so surprising I can hear my breath catch. I shift away slightly. Peter pauses and looks round, smiles at me. I smile back. Warm, familiar, reassuring.

Libidinal energies I didn’t know existed. Would I have this rebirth any other way?

Lucky Dube

The strangest weekend. To have South Africa exploding with jubilation over winning the rugby world cup.

And reggae artist Lucky Dube, known perhaps better outside the country, especially in Kenya, shot dead in Rosettenville as he dropped off his two teenage children. He was driving a simple grey Chrysler, a dedicated musical artist careful with his money, a loving father, a gentle man from all accounts. One of his songs is entitled  Up with Hope (Down with Dope) and he never glorified the drugs industry, sang instead about the hardships of people under apartheid and other oppressive conditions across Africa, the need to keep fighting, loving, dancing, hoping. The importance of recognising the value in any human life. The celebration of who we are despite our poverty and littleness in the eyes of others, the celebration of human possibility on this vast and misunderstood continent.

Five men arrested for his murder according to the latest reports. The music will live on, but the tributes come too soon for someone who still had so much music and so many years of living and creating in him.

Hambe kahle Lucky Dube.

Sobering retreat

The place itself a little scruffy and rundown. We sat out in the sudden warmth of the evening under old eucalyptus trees and were eaten alive by mosquitos. The woman next to me could have been in her early 30s but her face was scored and battered by alcohol abuse. She would sigh and apologise for her own self-loathing. The overweight black unionist talking about his sleepless nights. The gay guys teaching us killer bridge. Gentle men and women in recovery reaching for community and shared truths. Truths the hand can touch.

Sitting with a notebook and having nothing to write down. Nothing to say or offer. All my relationships when examined have the texture of cardboard. Alcoholism has made a travesty in me of what other people call ‘feelings’.  I feel emotions but they are chimeras. The nightmare comes and goes, the remembered horror of long hot empty days and longing to drink myself to death. Not to wake up in the morning. That is the strongest feeling that comes to me from the last 15 or so years, the longing to die, to drown in oblivion.

Elizabeth Bishop writes somewhere to Robert Lowell, ‘You might say I was the loneliest person who ever lived’.

Alcoholism destroys the capacity to relate. That is how I felt. Unable to be more than present as a shadowy body, a willing listener, a would-be human being. But not there yet. Nowhere near.

Golden Notebook Days

Doris Lessing , the ex-Zimbabwean writer, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88.

Like many others I began with The Golden Notebook. The angry women in a London flat talking, scribbling, dreaming of a better life. Women and men crashing into one another, sexual craziness. Mindfucking.

Keeping different notebooks for the unintegrated selves and wondering about madness and creativity.

Then discovering Martha Quest and the Children of Violence, the restless, sexually hungry and discontented young woman of Landlocked. The empty blue skies, the brutal politics, the unchanging face of a heartless society. Lessing, banned in the colonial Rhodesia of my childhood, was writing my mother’s life; the bitter futile days, the hedonism, the light and random affairs, the lurking violence and alcoholism. As in time I would understand that Lessing was scripting something too of my life, the determination to live differently while making the same mistakes.

It began with The Golden Notebook. Everything she wrote was for me about Africa, especially the fantasy set on other galaxies, utopias and dystopias of the anti-colonial imagination. Exploring the unfamiliar in the ordinary, the anger hidden deep, buried, in a woman sitting at a kitchen table, unaware her anger could remake the world, or destroy herself.

Back from KwaZulu-Natal

Spent the last week in KwaZulu-Natal doing research for a UN funding report, piggy-backed onto a media travel trip.

Pouring rain, the Tugela river valley a red, grey, black sea of mud, stranded buses, old trucks, mini-bus taxis with suitcases strpped to the roof, landrovers. Sat in crowded clinics, garages and post offices, doing interviews, listening, working with the gentle, patient interpreters; and fought despondency about what I was hearing and seeing. The absence of retrovirals. The exhausted Aids workers. The stoic mothers holding their ominously quiet dying children. The smell of shit. A nurse talking about the maggots in the bedsores. The loneliness of young men and women dying all alone in these sweeping brown hills, family too sick or frightened to come near them. The ancestors silent. The makeshift graves everywhere.

I hate this fucking plague so much I could break apart just writing about it. The report is very calm and careful, it needs to be. There is so much to be done and so much goodwill, but it is too late. Thousands of orphans, millions dying and the complications everywhere of tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, poor nutrition, endemic poverty.

To stay sober is to to begin to be of some kind of use in this world. And the courage I met with everywhere was infectious, the kindness, the understanding that I was seeing this for the first time and in shock, needed to go slowly and have hot sweet tea.

But I was shaking like a leaf inside. When I found a Postnet I sat an emailed a very kind man, a stranger in the UK, politically likeminded, just tried to connect without saying I was falling apart inside. Couldn’t speak to friends yet. I couldn’t ask for help because it wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about picking up a drink. Such a kind man, emailing me back, just keeping the lifeline open. Thanks Sean.

Towed out of the mud, the rain pelting down. Everyone laughing and waving. Funeral-goers laughing, shoeless and spattered with black river mud. Old grumbling buses, dented taxis, the long-distance haulage trucks. The journey continuing, the future unknown, the destinations uncertain.

Africa punches the shit out of us. That is why I live here. It keeps me Third World, it keeps me human. Fighting to stay alive and help others stay alive.