One in three

A lazy autumn morning, dry leaves tumbling in the streets. The foliage on the catalpa or Indian bean tree is the colour of butterscotch. Dog at my feet, a copy of Daily Reflections nearby, I am sitting and welcoming the morning. Neighbour proferring a clump of apple mint through the window, a gift to be potted out later.

Annie Lennox playing, a little strident but lively. I am reading news reports, thinking about ripe pears and making something later with wild rice and perhaps bok choy. Humming as I read.

It is the detail that captures my attention. The bathroom tiles were decorated with octopus and snail motifs. I stop reading and think of slimy tentacles, of reddening bathwater, of children running taps in darkness, the mocking absurdity of starburst octopus and seashell motifs put up to amuse children who would not see the ocean, children kept locked in a dungeon.

This is the case that has horrified readers worldwide. The Austrian father who locked up his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and forced her to bear seven children. Three of those children grew up in the cellar with her, trapped in a rabbit warren of dark rooms, their only view of the world a flickering television set. He was a sexual and authoritarian tyrant, beating his children, keeping his wife in ignorance, fooling neighbours and social workers, pretending his daughter had joined a cult.

Elisabeth his daughter is now 42, grey-haired and frail, very disturbed. She told police she was first raped at the age of 11 and drugged and locked into the cellar at the age of 18. Nobody came looking for her. One of the children to whom she gave birth died and her father threw the body into a household furnace.

In the house of incest, your point of view vanishes. There is only what he wants. There is no safe place. And everything is seen through his eyes, everyone outside the family is a stranger and a danger.

Some fathers do not need to construct an actual dungeon. The family home is isolated enough, the children terrorised into complete silence and obedience, the wife and mother a child herself and as helpless as the littlest one.

When there were unexpected guests, us children would be locked in the main bedroom and told to keep perfectly still. We would sit there unmoving for hours. When we misbehaved or disobeyed or misunderstood something, we would be locked up in the dark without food. Locked into the garage, into an empty spare bedroom, unfurnished. Locked into a shed in the garden. The locked spaces and the prison stayed inside us for many years, the need to keep very quiet and listen for footsteps approaching. Footsteps could mean more punishment or release. It was important not to fall asleep, to stay vigilant and not to feel anything very much.

And these children, the child and her father’s children carried by her, knew only that dungeon and the darkness, the narrow passages and tiny spaces, the crampd dark rooms and need to keep silent. No other life. Incestuous tyranny taken to its logical conclusion.

New figures released by the United Nations claim that one in three women in the world today experience violence, mostly sexual violence.

‘Violence against women and girls continues unabated in every continent, country and culture. It takes a devastating toll on women’s lives, on their families, and on society as a whole. Most societies prohibit such violence — yet the reality is that too often, it is covered up or tacitly condoned. ‘
— UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, 8 March 2007

Loaves and fishes, olives and jalapenos

Listening to the radio since dawn. An hour later. Still no news from Zimbabwe, no news from Masvingo, from Hatfield, from Harare, from Bvumba, from Gweru, where the recount shows Mugabe’s Zanu-PF still losing. The time for signing petitions and sending food parcels is over. UN embargoes cannot help a destitute country. I sit like others waiting for updated news reports. Thinking about baskets of wild string beans and mustard-coloured ndembe beans, gem squash, groundnuts and peanuts in red skins, maize cobs papery and rustling, the masasa and marula trees. Fruit of the wilderness, the roots out in the bshveld, the velvety grey pods of the baobab.

Feeding people. I think about the hungry queueing for food, my freezer with meat and frozen left-overs, soups. Anout feeding friends.

Sociability is a funny thing. I am not sociable at all. The alcoholism required hours and hours. days and weeks, months and years alone for drinking. Una is very sociable, loves people around her, is a great carnivore and bread eater, conventional but a very good cook. Anyone is welcome. I am offbeat and a good cook at very different dishes. Shy but warm and reaching out to others, eager that they feel at home.

Years ago when I was a student we had black activists coming in to camp out in the passage at Guildford Road commune and I began living in student communes about that time, in a tough political climate, the year of flight and hiding and exile. One Saturday morning I went down to the vegetarian Left commune, as it was known, at Bridge Street. Alison and Farieda were making a vegetarian stew on a Baby Belling stove with a Matisse poster above the stove, a nude spattered with what could not have been bacon fat. A tall pot with celery stalks and Swiss chard boiled to death and cabbage and old potatoes and no onions and browning heads of cauliflower, withering zucchini, unripe tomatoes, very sour, cubes of pumpkin, bland and no salt. We ate and ate. There were old sash windows in the kitchen, as tall as a ladder, original early 19th-century windows, with a pressed steel ceiling above and old tulip-shaped brass chandeliers suspended from the ceiling. No doubt all destroyed now. We sat around on piled pillows and rickety benches, laughing and eating, even having seconds.

I ate some of Alison’s veggie stew in a clay dish, handthrown and chipped at the rim, squatting or cross-legged, sun falling in oblong squares through the sash windows, wearing my blue wrap-around tie-dye skirt and white T-shirt with pink nipples showing. Long sun-bleached hair and hemp sandals. But the food was atrocious and I had eaten communal fish stew in Kenya on the coast and bean pots with toasted peanuts in Malawi, Italian casseroles in Piedmont, French pot-au-feu. I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, even I can do better.’

So I began cooking lentil and vegetarian stews and making moussaka and lasagnas and then doing dishes with mince as well as lentils. I didn’t know how to tackle any other meat. When people arrived I would get them to chop veggies with me and we would chat and drink Tassies red wine in two-litre flasks and some of the wine would go into the food. I learned more from a Polish housemate Laura C, from Amy G from District Six. from Beatie H. It wasn’t about my social skills, it was about hungry people. That is really still where I come from. Hungry people.

Then I shared a flat with Steph in the 1980s, who was Lebanese and classified as non-White so we had to pretend she was a visitor. From her I learned all about spices and the use of cinnamon and za’tar.

And when I began working in publishing I read food writers — I still do — and slowly began to experiment. I am not a smart dinner party cook or hostess at all. But I enjoy cooking for those I love and for the hungry. There is always somebody alone and unfed down the road, always somebody going hungry nearby, always somebody waiting for a cheque, who will welcome a hot plateful of roast vegetables or lasagna. Nothing expensive, but food for the soul. Some thing to warm you, something to inspire

more conversation.

After the storm

Now that I am living sober, the balance rights itself.

There are stressful days, ongoing anxieties, sleepless nights, conflict — but the compass swings true north and I sleep deeply at night and wake calm in the morning, able to take stock.

The years of political oppression still eat at me. The friends who died, the detention-without-trial, the constant threat and fear for friends on the run, the danger of exile or deportation, the abusive late-night phone calls. The friends who died. The police using live ammunition at Ashley Kriel’s funeral, smell of tear gas and women screaming. The friends murdered in the Eastern Cape. The torture and rape under interrogation, the broken spirits of so many brave people. At times it seemed to me the whole country was bleeding and howling with outrage under those States of Emergency, the armed casspirs patrolling the townships, the soldiers with military rifles deployed against unarmed civilians. The disappearances, the parcel bombs, the assassinations.

Memories have terrible power, but the present is simply what it is. ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruin.’ I go out and walk steadily up a mountainside, crush the leaf of roadside eucalyptus and smell menthol. I look out across a wide calm valley and sense inner spaciousness. Stop to greet friends and neighbours, admire magenta bougainvilleas, listen to the stream running like a gurgle of laughter through the undergrowth from the mountain above me. This stream ran from hidden rivers and waterfalls when the Khoi tribes were nomads following the eland into the valleys of sweet grass and aloe.

Balance is possible when the blood is not overheated, when there is no dependence, no alcoholic craziness. There will always be political oppression, prisoners beaten up in police cells, and there will always be the need to fight, to demand justice. But there is also time to breathe in the early morning air high on the mountain, pure and fresh, watching sugar birds on protea bushes. Time to regroup energies as a woman resisting the omipresence of rape in South Africa. I have come through and so will others.

Right now I am fine. Right now is all there is. And if I stay focused and sober for 24 hours there will be a tomorrow as there was a yesterday. Clear intention, clear purpose, solid ground beneath my feet.

Raw surfaces

It took some doing. She had to identify her attackers in a line-up. There would be 15 men, she would look at them. Just before they had attacked her they had murdered a woman in her 80s. She would need to point them out.

We went down to the police station. White officers from the Free State. They wanted her to go up and put her hand on the shoulder of each of the suspects. The men who had raped her and slashed at her with pangas. This is no longer police procedure. I was English-speaking and ignored by the police. Irrelevant, one of the enemy.

So she did it. She went up and looked at each of them and put her hand on their shoulders in turn. The police photographer took a photograph, She was calm as a stone. I had been afraid that the suspects would be aggressive or jeer at her. They were thin with AIDS, looked as if they had been beaten up, subdued, half-starved, sleepless. South Africa is a brutal country.

This morning she said to me she felt sorry for them. They will not see sunlight again. They must have suffered so much to make them so brutal, she said. They behaved so violently during the attack, like animals, she said. So young, so small now, she said. Shrinking as I looked at them, she said.

The police attitudes stayed with me. The same old nightmare. Anger like a choking bone in my throat. Anger like a burning knot in my gut, the anger of detention without trial, anger at dead friends, anger at the obtuseness, at lack of change, at the helplessness I felt 20 years ago.

The day at hand

A yellow-eyed Scorpio moon last night and when I let the dog out after mignight, the aloes and agaves, wild spiralling rosettes and thorny branched beasts, were dead white as stone, striped black/white like a harlequin and unearthly.

In her poems Emily Bronte, that very solitary and irreligious clergyman’s daughter of Haworth parsonage, talks about the presence she knew only as Thou. Alone in her bed at night, feverish with tuberculosis, raging and ill, Thou would come like a still cool hand. Out on the moors, Thou was wilder and unknown, a startling force mingled with the nature Emily loved so deeply. Thou would endure; Emily would not. She would die on a winter’s afternoon on a sofa in the cramped family living room, aged only 31. In her poems and the powerful Gothic fantasy of Wuthering Heights Thou would be found.

I don’t talk much about a Higher Power, not the way I used to talk. The more real, concrete and specific my life becomes, the more rooted I am in sobriety, the more aware I am of presence and the unspoken, of all I have to be grateful for, of the mystery of community and healing and hopefulness and a life restored and created anew.

The past is past. The future is tomorrow. Waking this morning to a chill in the room, resisting the temptation to snuggle deeper under the duvet and daydream, I could feel the day open up like a gift unfolding within. Difficulties, yes, but only the difficulties for today. I tackle what I can manage for today. And there are so many activities to look forward to: walks on the mountainside, flowering daylilies like fat gleaming pink and golden faces, friends coming around for coffee, fiction going reasonably well so far, new coriander seedlings thriving and chile seeds about to sprout. A novel by Amelie Nothomb next to my armchair in the study. My dog rolling on the wet but sunwarmed grass in the back garden, trying to catch a golden mole that has hastily gone to earth.

One day at a time, the instruction to simply stay in the present. Nothing more. Sacrament of the present moment.

A tractor mowing grass on the field across the road, great uneven swathes. Tiny sparrow darting around the cistus and lavender bushes. My housemate calls and tells me she has had a terrible dream athat I abandoned her and tried to kill her. I am very gentle on the phone, reassuring. But I will not be made to feel guilty because I am going over to England for a month. The trip scares me enough and I will need to deal with that fear when I reach the airport next month. I stand at the window and breathe deeply. It is her dream. I love her and will not abandon her. Her father left her mother who threatened to send the children to live with him and his new mistress. He didn’t want them. ‘Then they will be left on a bench in some park to die of hunger!’ screamed the outraged and abandoned wife, forgetting the small children standing all around her and listening to this. Later the father came back and said he had made a mistake. But children do not process trauma as adults do.

My life is changing. My nature itself is changing. I am entering into a new relationship. Not just one relationship, although there is one primary relationship that means a great deal to me. But there are new friendships. And I am allowing others to get to know me. I am listening, getting to know them, sharing myself. No hasty or impulsive moves. Gently does it.

A community is out there and I have come to belong within it. Recovery. Service. Sharing. Befriending. Growth. It is very hard to write about purpose because there is a difference in the way I go about my life now. As if I had learned to walk, found myself treading new earth, the way I looked at everything so differently when I regained my sight after the Yag-laser surgery. Walking firmly and with a new determination but not with eyes searching out a distant horizon.

I am here. That is enough. I am working towards a trip to Englnd. I am going to meet somebody I care a bout. I do not know what will happen next. I will work that out when I get there. We wll work it out together, if there is a ‘we’. There will be cow parsley towering over the country roads and bluebells in the woods in England. Right now there are autumn leaves like beaten copper and blue-black berries on viburnum bushes, the fruits of Ochna serrulata alongside the drive to delight the Cape mossies.

I missed out on so many years, my twenties and my thirties, I have memories like a handful of blackmailer’s snapshots. This you did when drunk. This you did when ashamed. This you did in despair. This was the last death but one. This was you picking up another drink.

And here I am today, with a pot of green tea and bunches of lavender for the bathroom, playing Vivaldi and letting the old house dnce in motes of sunlight and warmth. Just for today, just for this moment, to be alive, to feel the life in me. Thou in me.

Tagged

This isn’t something I usually do, but with love to Etta of http://depressionmarathon.blogspot.com, here we go

1) What was I doing 10 yrs ago?
Busy working in media, living on an old farm near Stellenbosch, travelling up and down from Limpopo Province and dreaming about the rain queen, the Modjadji. Drinking like a fish, blunted and depressed.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):
1.Sitting in my women’s liberation theology group
2. Making a deep-dish fish pie with fresh dill
3. Playing with my dog
4. Email a friend all about Emily Bronte and varieties of romantic love
5. Post on my favourite AA cyber site

3) Snacks I enjoy:
Gorgonzola, ripe, and cold white Genoa figs. Plump black kalamata olives in a small bowl.Torn chunks of fresh peasant bread dipped in dukkah spices.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Set up educational trusts across the African continent; fund democratic peace initiatives in Zimbabwe; fund research and development work to fight Aids and HIV in southern Africa; fund literacy projects in the Third World; set up trusts for struggling artists and writers and small publishers in Africa, with especial concern for Arabic writers battling censorship. That should help me dispose of any excess affluence in a very short space of time!

5) Three of my bad habits:
1. Unsociability
2. Snacking on cheeses and olives
3. Selfishness

6) 5 places I have lived:
1. Malindi,Kenya
2. Nyanga, Zimbabwe
3. Vila Machipanda, Mozambique
4. Cape Town, South Africa
5. Overberg, South Africa

7) 5 jobs I have had:
1. Organoleptic tester, fisheries research
2. Project designer in criminology
3. Women’s studies tutor
4. Lecturer in hermeneutics
5. Features writer in media

And I am not tagging anyone. Enough curious facts for now. I am going to make a large pot of tea, think about a fish pie and go back to my email on Emily Bronte and the puzzle of how a clergyman’s daughter came to know so much about sexual passion. Her sister Charlotte, who seems to have been a little afraid of her, says that Emily never had a friend in her life. But Emily knew something about desire and need and having her heart broken. God knows how, but she did. And her Gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights is full of that strange unearthly power of a love that never lessens its hold.

Making space

Pouring with rain when I awoke this morning. No chance of a walk, felt disappointed, standing with the equally disappointed dog looking out at the rain splashing down in the back garden, the grey shadow over the mountains.

Sat with coffee reading and rereading translations of Bolano and Cortezar, thinking about the failed revolutions of Latin America and the nightmare of tyranny in Zimbabwe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the successes and disenchantments that came afterwards, the forgotten ones who lost their lives fleeing from violence or resisting violence. Virginia Woolf once wrote in her great puzzling beautiful and insightful diaries that she wished she could find another word for her fictions rather than novels and oddly suggested something close to ‘necropoli’, citie of the dead.

Bolano himself writes: “I dreamed I was an old and sick detective who searched for people who had been lost for a long while. Sometimes I looked casually in the mirror and recognized Roberto Bolaño.”

Even in sadness the inner spaciousness grows. Compassion like a wide oasis, the well filling up. Able to hold losses for pehaps the first time, to acknowledge the grief and waste and separations. And to go on. Solitude so crucial, the time alone a private retreat.

As I have baked a Cantonese fish, scattering chopped spring onion like a benison, made soups and sat with mugs of hot coffee and a notebook, this spaciousness and quiet mind has been there. My dog with his head on my foot, snoring. He is not in pain but he is dying. A small triumph to know the ship bearing arms for Zimbabwe has been turned away from the port of Durban so there will be fewer rifles and teargas and weapons for Mugabe’s soldiers to use against those who oppose him. Outside I see Oom Hennie at 86 wandering up and down the road with his stick, a cape covering his shoulders against the rain, blind to the bright autumnal reds of the pin oaks and indifferent to the steady cold downpour. His wife Magritte died last week after a helf-century of marriage and he is lost in a dark meaningless world. He tells everyone that he is waiting patiently now to go.

Spaciousness within. The heart uncramping itself and trembling with new feelings, the tentative pangs of growth and necessary pain. Daring to dream again.

From the Australian aboriginal writer Alex Wright, who wrote Carpentaria:

“When you have a secure space, you are able to ask yourself questions about what might make it better. At the moment we haven’t got the space to dream a future for ourselves, or to imagine how we might want to be. A lot of our people are working so hard at the level of survival that we’re not dreaming, not imagining, to the point of feeling that it’s not even worthwhile to dream because we can’t make our dreams come true. My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams”

Au revoir, AIME CESAIRE

He was for me a leader of the black pride diaspora, a poet of the political imagination. A major thinker and French poet who was never a black Frenchman. A guerilla of the anticolonial and pan-African movements of the last century. He stands alongside Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko.

Aime Cesaire was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1913. His mother was a dressmaker, his father a tax inspector. He was a gifted student who went on to study with Leopold Senghor in Paris and was influenced by the work of Frobenius, indicating the cultural contribution of Africa to the world.

As early as 1935 Cesaire began to write tracts against assimilation, arguing for a black consciousness he called ‘negritude’. Homesick for his homeland, he wrote Cahiers d’un Retour au Pays Natal. On his return to Martinique Cesaire joined the Communist party and began to analyse colonialism firsthand.

He argued that colonialism works to ‘de-civilize’ the colonizer: that torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, dehumanising violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of so-called civilisation.

Cesaire was among the first to understand that the ideology of racial and cultural hierarchy, that ranking of master and servant, civilised and uncivilised, coloniser and subaltern, was as crucial to colonial rule as the police and the forced labour on Martinique and across the African colonies. He resigned from the Communist Party over his insistence that racism could not be subordinate to the class question.

Cesaire went on to write about Haiti and the Congo in the 1960s, the teething problems of emerging independent states, the need for revolution, looking to Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest for an ongoing dialectic of internalised colonial dynamics. He continued to write and teach and his influence has grown over the years.

He died yesterday in Fort-au-France, Martinique at the age of 94.

‘my negritude is not a stone
nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.’

Aime Cesaire

Challenging the status quo

An image of burned-down huts in Centenery in the north of Zimbabwe. Photographs of tortured, beaten and intimidated Zimbabweans. Food queues, desperate starving people clambering through razor wire at border posts in an endeavour to escape from a bankrupt Zimbabwe to another life in South Africa. And there is international criticism of Mbeki with his smokescreen of ‘quiet diplomacy’ that seems to shield Mugabe and his brutal  tactics.

 

But it is complex, it is a half-told tale and I am so aware of contradictions — the failure of the British government to honour the Lancaster House agreement, the debts owed to the IMF and World Bank, the refusal of Mugabe to pay lip service to the neo-cons of the West. And the peasants of Zimbabwe who voted Mugabe into power again and again because he had led the Zanu-Patriotic Front to victory in the hard-fought Second Chimurenga, had driven out the white farmers. Had defied the West and asserted African primacy and independence. The corruption and suppression of opposition, the censorship of the press. The tangle of rumours and histories and bitter exiles’ stories and detainees silenced and talks behind closed doors.

 

Threading my way through this towards understanding, political awareness and historical perspective. Filled with heartache and dread all the same. While some have the luxury to deliberate from armchairs and a safe distance, others are fighting for their lives and caught up in the struggle for civil liberties.

 

 

Walking up Berg Road, my face and lips numb with cold at dawn. Encouraging K to get up and join me, drinking hot water with fresh lemon juice. She cannot imgine I was ever as bad as she is. I talk about how drinking clouded my judgement but she hears my laughter and quick replies and thinks I am just being kind. She is amazed that I can think to identify with her. Listening, I know I am waiting for her desperation to equal mine.

 

And the police have called her to go to an identity parade to pick out the men to who attacked her with pangas and raped her, left her to bleed to death  on a Free State farm on a winter’s night, hands tied behind her back. She rang me an hour ago and I said I wuld go with her. She knows she needs to stay sober now. She is terrified and lost. It may be a turning point. It may not.

 

Violence is so close to us here in southern Africa. It is both a threat and an opportunity to learn something about who we are and what we are called to become.

Staying in the day

Up very early and glad to find the power on. My plans for housekeeping during this ongoing energy crisis revolve around purchases of firewood (black wattle and rooikrans), gas cylinders, candles and batteries. Bathed and dressed for walking, went out and climbed up the mountain roads, stopping to talk to Sophie about her health and her sister’s death from breast cancer.  There is always time in country villages for conversation. Why else live here? Tecomaria, the Cape honeysuckle, red and pale gold, heraldic colours. Leaves the colour of old pears, silver and freckled.

 

Came back down and watered my pots, admired the pak choi seedlings and the thriving coriander. Very pleased to have pequin seeds arrive from Texas in the mail. Planted them out in a fine tilth and watered lightly. I shall remove the ripe chile peppers very carefully from the little bushes in pots to ensure the seeds are not spread by birds.

 

Visit from H who showed me the figures of his PSA for cancer of the prostate, a steep decline after the radium treatment, good news. He had brought us fresh fish bought directly from the boats in Gordon’s Bay. Glossy, dark stippled, and scaled. A rare treat to have inland. Talked to H about my travelling to England. Mild interest but I could tell that for him it is still the far country over the water, the distant and crumbled Empire of his boyhood, not of our world. He wanted to know when I would be back in the Cape.

 

Listened to Chopin as I worked in my study during the afternoon, the dog asleep at  my feet. Listened attentively to the young woman raped a few weeks ago, sitting with her and bearing witness to her anguish and fury. So little we can do for one another but what we can do, we are blessed to offer. Another gift of sobriety, presence. To open the door and welcome others into my home, switch on the kettle in the kitchen for tea, sit down and smile deep into a visitor’s eyes.  Saying goodbye afterwards in the front garden amongst the old-fashioned Salvia leucantha and scented heliotrope, fragrance of cherry pie, mixed with resinous cistus and spicy santolina and helichrysum. Birds flying low over the fields.

 

Her life interrupted by violation. I smile but give no easy reassurances. We say goodbye and I watch her walk up the road, the long shadows of late afternoon like black rods across the road.

 

Chopin playing in the darkened sitting room, apples and quinces in a white bowl on the table. The play of light and shadow in the day, staying with it all. There is such a difference between acceptance and resignation, something I never suspected until I began working the Steps. The inner despondency has gone and with it the being resigned to circumstances, as well as the need to rescue or salvage or fix things beyond my control.

There’s an inner symphony at the heart of it all and if I pay attention I am attuned to the flow, the movement, the beat of what is happening, the pace of life all around me. As the zazen kids say, ‘Don’t just do something, sit there!’