Thinning of the veil

We are in the midst of Samhain, Beltane, Halloween. In the mid-summer heat of Africa, the pumpkins are still swelling in the fields and the ancient rituals of Western Europe seem a little inapposite. My Mexican neighbours three streets away are making sugar skulls for the Day of the Dead and that should scare the local evangelicals silly.

 

Tonight Una and I will have a fire burning as we sit out under the olive trees with the stars burning like raw white-hot fires across the skies. She has had a number of severe angina attacks in recent weeks and wants to talk about what will happen if she dies suddenly. She doesn’t believe she will ever die, but that is our human nature, to live in denial and shy away from the more brutal truths. I don’t believe she will die but I am living in terror. We need to talk.

 

Love hurts. It is easier to live without it in so many ways. Somebody who relapsed  sent me a heartbreaking  but incoherent letter and has vanished into the ether. It is one thing to say I am powerless over myself around alcohol but  quite another thing to live with the knowledge we are powerless over everyone else. Everyone else. My brother is drinking himself to death on a Hawaaian island, like some failed Gauguin on Tahaiti.

Or a wordless Robert Louis Stephenson: ‘Under the wide and starry sky/Dig the grave and let me lie’.

I only remember him as a child, tiny and scared, bullied into nonentity by my father. He was a small red-haired boy who cried to see hawks take smaller birds, would chase them with his bow and arrow.

 

Sobriety liberates us into relationship. All we tried to avoid while drunk. I look at others and have no way of not seeing what is happening. I live with my gross emotional immaturity, the disappointed peevish woman inwardly aged 27, her unlived life raging within me. My neighbours squabble with me. I have had my first sober love affair and known complete humiliating failure. I dream about him and in those dreams I am a small child offering myself like a wrapped present, handed back unopened.

 

But I stay sober and that makes all the difference. The habit of sobriety is all tenacity and amazement. For days and weeks, I just plod. Then the world cracks open and I gain insight into the lives of others, I feel compassion that extends way beyond pity, I let others into the hermetic circle, I break open and find joy. Friends hug me, the kindness of strangers leaves me wordless, the soil is pure rich loam under my fingers, I am grounded in the earth, putting down roots. I trust the process.

 

And little by little I enter into the Otherly, mystery, the giving up of self. With a dark moon and stars like white hot stars burning themselves out.

Bodywork

Discovered last night that after after a few happy weeks of perfecting Tuscan bean recipes I am unable to get into my favourite pair of denims. Got up early and trotted, then walked, then ambled up the hill to a spot overlooking the valley. I stood near a peeling eucalyptus tree surrounded with thorny acacia looking down on the sleeping village with spiralling woodsmoke and low mist like vapour trails, paused to smell the dusty acrid veld odour that is pure Africa, got my breath back and came down again to coffee and hot bread rolls. I’ll try again tomorrow and have grapefruit for breakfast. Gardening is not exercise, whatever they say. A good hard walk uphill is the best way to start the day. 

 

In December I will be able to swim in the ocean while we are on holiday and the idea of plunging into salty green waves and diving in clear rock pools makes me feel quite ecstatic. The beaches near Cape Agulhas are very unspoilt and lonely, so I shall probably see dolphins and a great number of sea birds. All along the sea front near Struisbaai, there are dunes, wild grasses and flowering salt-tolerant bushes to be viewed from raised boardwalks, perfect for long walks, stopping every now and again to swim. Hearing the mermaids calling each to each. I want to come back tanned and fit and re-energised. Playing beside the sea always brings out the Annabel Lee child in me, the longing for a spade and bucket and shrimping net.

Writing (like drinking), is a sedentary solitary occupation and it is always a reprieve to be able to get away from the desktop work and out of doors, to watch families picnicking on the beach, holidaymakers walking dogs, kids playing with frisbees or  having a game of volleyball. At night we can sit out under the stars enjoying the balmy offshore breezes, trying to spot Sirius, the Dog Star. And wake before dawn to go out and watch the sun come up over the ocean. Another gift of sobriety.

 

Enough daydreaming, time to get back to work. Before it gets too hot I have to go out and plant out a small silver-grey curry bush next to an old-fashioned Salvia leucantha. While I’m busy with that I can do a few hundred knee bends or at least flex my calves once or twice. Listen to the menopausal body talking back.

Advice to disregard

Some days I get emails from newcomers who have come across my blog and are trying to get sober.

 

‘Go to a meeting,’ I tell them.

 

If they’re anything like me they are not able to read the Big Book of AA with their befuddled heads and lousy short span of attention, and that folksy male chauvinism will make them run a mile. I don’t tell people to rush off and get a sponsor right away because they will probably pick the most controlling Cruella de Ville in the rooms or a fabulous airhead who is about to relapse. It takes a while to be able to listen to more than rhetoric and figure out who is talking sense and staying behind to wash up.

 

‘Your mind will grow back’ I tell them. None of those slogans made any sense to me in the first few weeks.

 

I just tell them to get to meetings and try to identify. I could identify with anyone who couldn’t handle liquor. Every person in AA was telling my story.

 

What I would like to say to a newcomer who wasn’t shaking with the horrors is that the war is over. You lost and the alcohol won. You are powerless over alcohol and you will never be able to drink again. That’s the bottom line.

Keep going to meetings. The AA meetings are not a politically correct community heaven. If you have had man trouble through the years, you will have man trouble now. If you hate large balding men explaining things to young women, you are going to have to learn to grin and bear it. You will be given endless copies of A Course in Miracles but have to replace your own BB. People will quote everyone from Fr Leo to byron katie until you want to scream. Hardly anyone reads the AA-approved literature but when they do it is very exciting and an event.

Take decent biscuits to the meetings because everyone likes decadent chocolate biscuits.

You shouldn’t fall in love until you have about a decade of sobriety and have regained adulthood but you wil probably rush off and sleep with someone quite unsuitable within a few months. Just stay sober and when it implodes think of the affair as a way of building self-esteem. Sober sex is amazing.

 

In fact being sober is a crazy kind of adventure and walk on the wild side. Once you start laughing out loud and can hear your own sober laugh for the first time, you’re over the worst of early sobriety. Sobbing in front of strangers in meetings is almost mandatory. Everyone understands. You will find you have something to offer,. This is astonishing for an alcoholic.

You’ll find you can do anything sober. Travel to dangerous places with minibars in the hotel bedroom and stay sober, get up at dawn and go out to watch herons in the Okavango swamps. Or lions sleeping it off after the nght kill. Or do cartwheels on a beach in Mombasa. You can study again, get a new job, move house, write a novel. You will make more friends than you know what to do with and learn to forgive the enemies. You will be able to contribute and reach out to others who are struggling. Even if you don’t know what to say or do and feel inept.

You can learn to waterski at 48, you can learn to fly small planes, you can start a political movement.

 

If you can beat alcoholism one day at a time, you can do anything. If you stay sober you will become unrecognisable to yourself. Your life will change beyond recognition. Just keep going to meetings and everything else will fall into place. Trust me and wear a seat belt for the roller coaster.

 

There will be so much pain you will want to curl up and howl. Everything you hid from is going to have to be faced. But nothing will be as terrible as what you have been through in the hectic skid of alcoholism. Every now and again you will wake up and that unfamiliar feeling in your psyche will be self-respect.

 

Somebody out there loves you.

 

Don’t drink one day at a time and life will come to you.

 

I could write pages and pages to someone who wants to get sober. But when I was newly sober myself and shaking like an autumn leaf, I liked simple sentences with no predictive clauses.

 

‘Go to meetings’ worked for me.

Summertime… and the living is easy

As I was reading my bashed-up copy of As Bill Sees It this morning (bashed-up because I dropped it into a bird bath in the garden, not bashed-up because I have read it to shreds, no indirect boasting here!) I suddenly remembered something. A random memory of a member telling us a story in one of the UK meetings.

 

One of those ravaged but forever attractive men with shaggy hair, sharp eyes and a lean wiry physique. Still in the habit of sniffing and rubbing his nose even though the coke habit was long gone.  Writing scripts for movies, a tormented creative, happily married and sober four years.  I’ll call him Bruce.

‘For years I had a favourite daydream,’ he said. ‘Whenever there was conflict or I had to fire an agent or confess something to my wife, I would go to my dream place.

‘My dream place was a rabbit hole, like the narrow deep rabbit hole at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland. I would crawl down into it. It didn’t pan out into some kind of brightly lit wonderland, it got darker and darker. I would crawl right to the bottom of the hole. Then I would curl up tightly into a foetal position cradling my bottle of Scotch and I would just stay there until I fell asleep. I didn’t have to drink the Scotch but I knew it was there.’

I knew what he was talking about, we all did. The desire for the womb, for darkness and oblivion. It is one of the most seductive and tragic aspects of alcoholism. That death wish. To go to sleep and never wake up. To clutch that poison as if it were the breast, the comforter, the cuddly teddy bear at bedtime. The chills run up and down my skin.

 

And the cardamom chicken last night was superb, everyone ate and ate. Buoyed up by compliments,  I am tempted to do something of a culinary masterpiece with duckling or a slab of beef today, but have to get back to lentils and beans because of budget constraints. I am not really a good cook at all, in fact I stick to what I can do in a monotonous kind of way. No souffles or pastry confections or even a decent fried egg, but within my limited repertoire, when it works it works.

 

When I was drinking, my cooking had a great deal to do with drowning everything in alcohol. Me, drunk in hell’s kitchen. I had the sense not to try and flambe anything, I just decanted a few litres of brandy into the dish (as well as down my throat) and served it up with  an inflamed imagination. The next morning I would feel depressed that so much of my food tasted overspiced and indigestibly rich.

 

Now I am amused to see the young celebrity chefs on television relying on liquor, cream or trendy herbs to mask their poor recipes. Cumin is not a staple of life. A clean vegetable stock has more flavour than half a bottle of red wine. A sprig of thyme has a haunting elusive flavour that a handful of thyme obliterates.

Conscious living is the way to go. I no longer feel I am missing out on my own life. In order to enjoy things deeply and sit outdoors under the stars of the Southern Cross laughing and appreciating my friends, I have to be able to tolerate the darkness within, the boredom and angst and difficulty of spending time with myself. Waiting for my damn inner child to grow up and get a life.

 

At least she can cook. One of these days she might even learn to clean up after herself, gracefully.

Running late

One of those days when I seem to be trying to catch up with myself. Watched  a small cat trying to catch baby birds near the stoep (porch) while waking up and blinking like a weary owl. Put down my cup of coffee and went out to shoo the cat away. That lovely tail-waving walk of hauteur and offended dignity in cats. Ungrateful baby sparrows squeaking at me.

 

Then a small thin council worker with a goofy smile sauntered around my garden scattering bags of live sterile fruit flies onto the shrubs and trees. This is some agricultural experiment  concocted by the lunatic town council. No point in yelling at the messenger. Life in Africa is stranger than fiction.

 

Stayed in bed reading the marvellous Junot Diaz on performative masculinity, so forgot to water the garden and turn on the sprinkler. Then stayed in the bath until my fingers wrinkled like prunes, making up sub-plots for the great unwritten Nanowrimo novel.

 

Decided to make a butterflied tandoori chicken for supper, so ground up spices using the pestle and mortar. Realised as I was squeezing halved lemons onto the spatchcocked chicken that I may not have enough yoghurt and will have to think about something involving coconut milk. Did a Keralan paradigm shift to include blanched almonds and green cardamoms. Had a disconcerting mental image of my guest saying, ‘But you know I don’t eat almonds.’ Perhaps I should disinvite the guest and ask somebody else. A good cook is selfish to the core.

 

I didn’t get enough sleep last night and I have that old harried and flustered the-day-getting-away-from-me feeling.

The solution might be to drink.

Just joking. The solution might be to curl up on the sofa and read more Junot Diaz and eat a bowlful of fresh macadamia nuts from Limpopo. Have a little nap and start the day over again.

 

The thing about staying sober for today, or any day, is that it makes all kinds of other things possible. Getting drunk narrows the options down to staying drunk and wrecking tomorrow. Which is what appeals to me so much about staying sober and reinventing my chicken with crushed lemon grass from the back garden. Nothing wakes up the taste buds like lemon grass in coconut milk.

 

And if my mind has been sufficiently improved by Junot Diaz I might even get back to writing fiction. Or making dessert with poached figs and honey.

Heat of the day

As the mist burns off, the heat is stunning, like a blow in the face when i go out to cut lavender from the bushes of Hidcote lavender, a perfect lilac blue.

 

I have been trying to change the design theme of my blog without success. I have deleted all my cookies in vain.

 

But I am sober and grateful for another day of sanity and that is all that matters. All kinds of wonderful things may or may not happen in sobriety but the big thing is that we stay sober. I had emails from friends who are struggling to get sober again and I hope with all my heart they make it.

 

 There is no mystery about getting sober and staying that way. Anyone who goes to AA and stays away from the first drink one day at a time and works through the Steps to the best of his or her ability and gets involved in service will stay sober.

 

I may be more isolated geographically but thousands of loners like me have stayed connected modem to modem and read the BB each morning and done the Steps and worked on relating to our Higher Power and that is somehow good enough. We want to stay sober more than we want to drink.

 

Made the mistake of opening a jar of honey, dark golden organic fynbos honey from the mountains,  and leaving it open on the kitchen counter. Now the kitchen is full of ferocious furry black African bees thrumming against the windows and crawling over the sink. I give them a wide berth because these are not your docile yellow honey bees from Europe. The stings are excruciating and I don’t have anti-histamines in the house.

 

Friends for supper this evening, so I am making a special wild mushroom risotto with truffle oil. And this morning I am going to pack Console glass jars with dried herbs that have been in a cool over overnight, then draft out another chapter for my Nanowrimo novel. I am taking Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a structuring device. My list of characters  includes a failed magician for Prospero, his child-wife Miranda, an androgynous dryad named Ariel and a Welsh ceramicist or potter  for Caliban. And there will be the mother of all storms as an opener. Oh how literary!  But I have no idea what to do with the characters once I have them trapped in the ruined priory/farmhouse above the snow line with spring breaking through in the white hawthorn.

 

More will be revealed, I tell myself. The trick with writing is to sit down and write. But first I shall lure the bees out of the kitchen and play in the garden for a brief while…

Papayas with lime

Overnight my grey-leaved culinary sage has thrown up starry blue flowers. I stood drinking coffee in the hot sunshine and admiring it. This tme last year I had a munificence of spicy green basil and this year the rains have drowned my seedlings and I have none. But the coriander is flourishing and my pelargoniums are a whirl of scarlets and mauves.

 

On the kitchen table there are blue and white bowls stacked with sliced papaya and wedges of small green lime. Another bowl heaped with the last lemons from the garden and the first summer tomatoes. Next to my place setting there are reviews of Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy, coming out as the US elections end. Ever since I first read The Bluest Eye, then Sula and then Jazz, followed by the dense, intricate Beloved, I have understood the significance of this woman, this writer,  looking at the empty wordless place where slavery should be inscribed in American history, the dark underbelly of democracy, what it means to live unfree.

 

Morrison: ‘Everybody remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. That’s a trauma. It’s as though I told you that your left hand is not part of your body.’

The gift of sobriety is the ability to begin thinking beyond the tiny circle of self. To exercise compassion and curiosity and empathy. All over the world there are conversations, debates, movements and struggles and triumphs. The world becoming, being remade through art and music and literature as well as through legislation, ideas, new experiments in human living.

 

My hunger for life is something in which I revel. Since I sobered up I have been able to really listen to music, to pay attention and remember the pieces that move me. Reading is more than self-referential. I am planning to spend more time looking at art and sculpture when I get through to Cape Town.

 

It is a time for catching up on a little of what I missed in those long dreary years of turning my back on life. Time to stretch the span of concentration and focus. Not unlike learning to fly all over again. Sometimes I feel like Rip van Winkle falling asleep in a hollow of the Catskills and waking to another age; like Briar Rose in the old Grimm’s fairy tale, pricking her finger on a spindle and lying unconscious for a century while the forests and wild hedges grew up around the abandoned castle. A young girl with a mouthful of poisoned apple lying asleep in a glass coffin as the years roll past.

 

What Sylvia Plath wrote in Mirror:

 

‘In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.’

 

But it is the present that matters, to be alive and awake here and now. The papayas delicious with a squeeze of lime, the herbs fragrant in the hot morning sunshine. Life beginning afresh each new day.

Staying neutral

Woke up to a tearing gale howling down the valley and knocking the village to bits. Unfortunate, because today is the annual garden ramble run by the evangelical church. All the roses and lupins and hollyhocks will be blown to petal fragments. Begonias blitzed and poppies shrivelled.

I should be more sympathetic. My garden is never included in the village garden ramble because I am not a reborn evangelical who believes in the Rapture and the preordained subordination of women. And my garden is full of ugly ordinary drought-tolerant South African plants like aloes and brown restio grasses rather than pretty English roses that use up gallons of water and need cans of pesticide to be kept looking like the pink and white roses in an English country garden. My neighbours around the village are not ecologically minded.

So let the winds blow, I think, uncharitably.

Yesterday a friend of mine posted a quotation from Chapter 6 of the BB and when I read it, the plain common sense made me realise that this means to me than any of the other Promises or daydreams about sobriety-enhanced success or romantic happiness in life.

‘And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone, even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.’

That is how I feel most of the time. Not complacent, not anxious, just ‘in a position of neutrality safe and protected’. It could all change tomorrow. But this is how I feel today and how I feel most of the time. This is the most complete understanding of sanity in my life now.

There are all kinds of other challenges and preoccupations and muddles. But none of them have anything to do with alcohol.

When I write or speak with the newly sober all jittery and grey-faced and with headspin, or the mortified chronic relapsee, this is the ‘fit spiritual condition’ I most want them to experience along with me. All kinds of things may be going right, or going wrong, and life may not be any simpler or easier. But King Alcohol has been deposed. The mad drunken ogre has moved out of the attic.

Now I am going out in the wind to pick some Italian wild rocket for a tomato salsa. Peppery wild rocket that I have been watching and guarding for weeks now. It is fiinlly mature enough to lose a handful of leaves. While I am kneading gnocci and slicing up tomatoes, I shall play Tosca, loudly. One of those rolled-up sleeves and floury apron mornings, another of those Visconti meets Marcelle Hazan meets Sophia Loren weekends in the cucina. Life is good.

Another Step in the Dark

I have been tagged by Hank of In God’s Hands to comment on Step 2, which gives me a chance to look again very closely at how I began to recover from alcoholism and how I understand this Step today.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

When I was 22 years old I converted to the Roman Catholic Church. I had lost my brother in the Chimurenga war of liberation or ‘bush war’ in what is now Zimbabwe and I thought perhaps God could help me find a way to go on living with my horror of war and my brother’s death. I didn’t really know how to go on. I had never been baptised, so Fr Guy R baptised me and I promised to ‘renounce Satan and all his pomp’. The phrase amused me. I had attended a Catholic convent for a few months wehn I was a little girl and I loved the singing in the chapel and the tall nuns waring their heavy black habits right through the dusty and hot summers. In those years we were staying in a small town near the Matopos Hills where Cecil John Rhoes lies buried, and each afternoon there would be bright green electrical thunderstorms. We could smell the rain approaching across the veld. Because I came from a Presbyterian family, the nuns did not talk to me about God very much, but I loved sitting with them when they were reading their breviaries under the marula trees in the playground. Their calm gentleness was in such contrast to my family life.

One of the nuns noticed one morning that I had blood on the back of my school uniform. I was six years old. She gave me a little soft cloth and told me to go to the bathroom and clean myself and rub salt onto the skirt.

She must have realised what she was seeing. It did not occur to her to report it.

Years later I found out more about the German Domincan and Franciscan missionary orders in that remote part of the country. Many of those nuns were young women who had entered religious life and fled to Africa after being raped by Russian soldiers advancing towards Berlin in 1945. They were women who believed silence would protect them, that speaking out or protesting would change nothing, that only God could heal the trauma of violation.

For many years I hoped that religion would save me, that God would do for me what i was unwilling to do for myself. I did not want to tell anyone I was alcoholic. I did not want to give up drinking. I just wanted God to take away the consequences of my drinking.

Alcoholism bankrupted my capacity for faith.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

When I sobered up, I had no idea who God might be. I had no idea what might constitute a Higher Power. But I did know I was powerless, that I had no faith in myself any longer.

I also knew I was unable to think clearly about anything, that my mind was addled. Sometimes people forget the second part of this Step. I wanted to be restored to sanity.

There were bottles hidden all over the cottage. Empty bottles wedged behind bodice-ripping novels of sex and intrigue on the bookshelf. Half-jacks of vodka jammed behind rows of shoes at the back of my closets. Bottles of wine opened and souring behind wardrobes in the bedroom. Bottles thrown out of windows into bushes. Bottles of brandy that were in reality empty but cunningly filled with weak tea, so that they looked unbroached. To my eyes anyhow. Half-empty bottles, precautions against a dry day, tucked away behind jars of beans and flour. A glass of sweet red cough mixture concealed somewhere under or behind a cabinet or bookcase. I searched everywhere. It surfaced six months later, covered in white floating mould.

I knew I was not in my right mind.

And I simply surrendered. To whatever Power out there might be able to help me come through this hell and not die of alcoholism. To whatever Power had saved other alcoholic women before me. To the Power found in AA.

I was ready to do anything, believe anything, go to any lengths in order to get sober. I did not believe in the God I had constructed for myself as an alcoholic, the God I had manipulated and tried to placate for so long. I knew that I was as incapable of relating to the Divine as I was incapable of relating to any living human being. I was all defect and no character.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

That gift of desperation saved me. I surrendered with no qualms or reservation. Today I know that there is a Power out there greater than myself. I’m not sure I know much more. As I slowly heal and begin to become human, ordinary and capable of authentic choices and the kind of love known as selfless eros, that Power may reveal more of life’s great mystery to me. In the fellowship of AA I have experienced tremendous love and been given the opportunity to serve others. My life and sanity has not just been restored but renewed. I did not have much of a life before I sobered up.

When we sing together in AA it is nearly always the song Amazing Grace, composed by the former slave trader who had thought himself beyond redemption. I choke up each time at the same line in that hymn. The phrase there says it all, the restoration that is like coming home.

‘I once was lost but now am found’.

Nature’s soft nurse

Had a long steaming bath and slept for nine hours.

Years ago when I was going through a bad time, feverish with drink and a disrupted sleep pattern, I would lie in the dark and think about lines from Shakeapeare on sleep and insomnia, his great insomniac kings troubled by guilt and premonitions of death in their medieval bedchambers with rats in the wainscoting. Macbeth and King Henry IV.

‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care’

‘where unbruised youth with unstuff’d brain
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign’

And my favourite:

‘O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?’

I am not a closet Shakespearean scholar, I Googled them to check what I had misremembered.

Sober, I sleep on plane flights, through emotional devastation, through political turmoil, through heat waves and bitter cold nights. Hot baths, sleep, green tea and taking life one day at a time. Those are my secret weapons against picking up that first drink. I would add ‘meetings’, but that is not possible right now. And blogging. Reading blogs and commenting, and writing blogs and reading comments. Cyber sobriety for the 21st century.

When I came into the kitchen this morning, there were small house martins and sparrows flying around and perching on light fittings. No sign of the semi-feral cats. I enjoy living with birds nesting in the eaves of an old cottage. The rooms have very high ceilings in yellowwood that date back to the begining of the last century or earlier. The original loft runs the length of the cottage and the rooms are spacious. All the windows look out onto leafy trees and flowering bushes with views across fields to the mountains at the front of the house.

It is not an easy country to live in, but it is very beautiful.

Two hundred years ago, the Khoisan tribes, nomads with small herds of cattle, wandered through this valley and watered their animals beside the streams, sheltered in the caves of the mountains. They followed the path taken by the graceful eland (buck) through the mountains, what is today called Elandskloof Pass. The Khoisan were nomadic pastoralists, farmers who composed poetry and sang and made beadwork.

The most famous Khoisan woman in South African history is called by a derogatory nickname, the ‘Hottentot Venus’.

Her real name was Sarah or Saartjie Baartman and she was born in 1789. She was working as a slave in Cape Town when British ship’s doctor William Dunlop persuaded her to travel with him to England. We’ll never know what she had in mind when she stepped on board –- of her own free will — a ship for London.

Dunlop wanted to display her as a ‘freak’, a ‘scientific curiosity’, and make money from these freak shows.

Baartman had unusually large buttocks and genitals, and in the early 1800s Europeans were arrogantly obsessed with their own superiority, and with proving that others, particularly blacks, were inferior and oversexed.

Baartman’s physical characteristics, not unusual for Khoisan women, although her features were larger than normal, were ‘evidence’ of this prejudice, and she was exhibited naked in London in front of crowds of mostly men.

Then she was taken to Paris. Once the Parisians got tired of the exhibit, she was forced to turn to prostitution. She died in 1815 at the age of 25.

The cause of death was given as ‘inflammatory and eruptive sickness’, possibly syphilis. She was known as an alcoholic. She lived and died thousands of miles from home and family, abandoned in a hostile city, with no means of getting herself home again.

The French scientist Cuvier made a plaster cast of her body, then removed her skeleton and, after removing her brain and genitals, pickled them and displayed them in bottles at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris.

When the poet Diana Ferrus learned that Baartman’s remains were still in this museum, she wrote a poem for her and in 1994 Nelson Mandela organised for the body of Sarah Baartman to be brought home and buried with dignity in South Africa, on the banks of a river in the Eastern Cape.

‘I’ve come to take you home –
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones. ‘

Women and alcoholism. Women and slavery. Women and racism.

On the wine farms around here, the women who work on the hot slopes amongst the vines are still paid on the old dop sytem. A dop is Afrikaans for a drink. They are given litres of cheap wine to supplement their meagre payments, as part of their wages. It is illegal to do this, but the system has been going on for centuries and the farmers ignore the law. They say that it keeps the workers happy at weekends and ensures they will not run off to the cities in search of higher wages. The Western Cape has the highest statistics in the world for foetal alcohol syndrome .

Maybe I should go and have another hot bath or drink some green tea. I am so lucky and grateful to be sober myelf and I feel so helpless much of the time.