I have often spoken about death.
Sometimes it comes like a loud shout, a big bang deliberately but sometimes it is strangely quiet as if there is a royalty to its element. And then there is the earth that we fold the body physically into, throw dust on it and pay our respects or the ash that we hold in our hands. And then afterwards when the family gathers to eat, to sup together, to break bread there are a lot of things I assume they surrender, that they let go of or don't. Head under water is the only place I can let go of all of these things. There is no echo, nothing to distract me here, evaporate me like smoke. And it is the only place where I find God. It is not rain pouring down, wires of serotonin, dopamine, electrolytes growing from my head, nightmares that come to me in the middle of the night that worries me so, and illness.
Its skin was red, orange and green, tasted like butter. A mango is delicious from the first time you taste it, I tasted my first proper mango in Swaziland (all that goodness came with its warmth, that sweetness on my breath, juice on my clothes, sticky fingers but shadows must meet somewhere and all I wanted to see was London). I remember the mangoes you kept for me until I came home from school (you would put it in the fridge until it was cool, the orange strings of flesh). We would have avocado on toast, or French toast with fresh coriander leaves fried in creamy butter or hotdogs and chips as only you could make them where Swaziland was my home for a year. You died before your time, my second mother. Your hands pale, hair dark and as you became more ill with the more weight you lost but you were still beautiful to me. Leaves shake and rot in autumn, spin around, and around. You were my bright star amongst all souls. I miss epic you every day. There is a loss that comes with breathing. However, the stranger in the ghost house has no voice. He does not speak of self-help, a shelf life. A double life, red dust, dead parakeets, sweat running down his wife's back, the madness and despair of Liberace. Something is unanchored yet still beautifully functions, is productive. It is called family and the awareness of coming home, a flag was planted here in the South's wilderness where a genocide took place, there is whisky in a glass, an afternoon cocktail. Books that are a sanctuary. An Eric Clapton record is playing. The red dust of this county does not speak of self-help. There is a suicide. A death in a river. In addition, the police have come. This is August: Osage County.
The police come in the middle of the night. Like the detectives in plainclothes that came to my house in the middle of the night when my brother took a knife and stabbed my father. Nothing romantic about it. About the onslaught of death, of it catching up to you like a thief in the night, a cat burglar, a cat drowning in a bag with her kittens, that is how I felt as if I was a drowning visitor. I saw guns that night I led a double life. I pretended I did not see or hear anything and inside I was numb. When I saw my father's blood. It had an oppressive quality to it like everything in my life so far. The drugs refused to work. So I took more and more of them slept all day and all night.
The double life of the romantic jasmine. It lives, it dies, it lives, and it dies like people. I can talk and talk and no one will be listening to my conversations, eavesdropping. Down the winter road, I came across men who stare at goats. Men who were good dancers or American soldiers who took German lovers during the war. Men who were good actors, some were heavy drinkers in my mind, and philanthropists. The knife was sharp. It struck air repeatedly and again. Then it was anchored in skin. I did not scream. I was a Scout's knot. I ran in my floppy sandals to the neighbour's house as fast as my feet could carry me. Outside the air felt cool as rain. How I wished it had rained? But there was no rain that night and they called the police.
There is no romance in death. Hair and flesh coming loose. Still daddy was left standing, unafraid. My brother was prancing around all of us, smirking, smiling with cunning deceit, high he was having his cake and eating it too. Pinned daddy to the bed with his arms like shark teeth. My mother had run away in the dark. I was left with notes of grief, a stem and a route to follow. A flowering bleeding heart making waves, beating fast. It was Christmas. However, there were no presents only a winter road to follow.
To hell with it if I do not ever fall in love. It is a case of much ado about nothing. I have lost my mind and recuperated in hospitals. Once again, become anchored to reality in recovery. I do not have a brother and I do not have a sister. I do not have a mother and I do not have a father. They live their own lives, so they amuse themselves, selfish people everyone. While I am kept sheltered in Pandora's Box. It is a box filled with romantic villagers of my own making. What a comfort they are to me. I am an orphan on Okri's famished road. I am Nabokov's and Kubrick's Lolita. Soon I will be forgotten like breath. The moveable a feast of sex, romance and death. Damaged, damaged, damaged but I must not speak of it. It will be the death of me and I must live without the disease, the stain of trauma a while longer, sit on my throne, collect bones like arrows that fall from the sky. Curiosity has killed me. Men have killed me extraordinarily. But I have nine extraordinary lives and am left smiling like the Cheshire cat.
This is the brother who I am supposed to love. I do not admire him anymore. I feel nothing for him when I remember that night from hell. House of hunger. House of hell, of madness and despair. If he had a gun, we all would be dead. I cut up the onion, seduced by its layers. And I cry for what has been lost, gems every one. There are diamonds in my eyes and I blink them back. My youth, my youth, my youth and there is no ring. No ring on my finger, all those chronic wasted years. Now he is Lucifer manning the gate to the wards of hell. My beautiful, darling boy what has become of you?
The secrets that we keep are committed to memory. They're lessons in the needs of people around us, a lesson in obedience, sometimes even wisdom. And it takes bold work for us to realise that the future is bright when sometimes we are challenged, when we have to mine glory. And make a ceremony out of it. There are profound ingredients that goes into making a spaghetti bolognese. Family is of course the first priority. Next the butcher, mint from the garden and limes for the cocktails. Footsteps on the stairs and laughter scribbling in the air.
Perhaps avocadoes were the first fruits (food for thought) in the Garden of Eden even before Eve was made from Adam's rib via the maturation of a human soul and a vortex in flux.
Sun and moon. They are miracle angelic beginners every one each day. Daughters nicknamed so for jasmine and yesterday, today and tomorrow. Then as if woken up from a dream, the day begins.
Head under water. Silently pushing off from the wall of the swimming pool doing lap after lap. Here is where I find my sanctuary, my second home and solace from the world outside. I am not like the other girls. They're all younger, thinner, and confident even though they're still flat chested, and flirtatious from where I am standing. Head under water again. I'm praying it won't be the house from hell again tonight. I'm watching films, reading books, wiping my father's bum (there are no secrets between us). We talk about our past lives, our nine lives, love and the measure of it, how the devil made work for idle hands during apartheid, during the Group Areas Act, the Nazi war lords, Hotel Rwanda. We talk about the women in his life, past and present, the first woman he ever loved and lost and the measure of it. I become distracted. He becomes distracted and I get up to make cups of coffee, lukewarm coffee. We discuss Valkenburg (the mental institution in Cape Town where he resided for a few months).
The first social worker he ever met. This is all for the book I am writing. Walking in his footsteps. Night after night, I make a casserole and the two of us sit down to eat at the kitchen table. He walks, he shuffles, he walks, and he shuffles. Sometimes he sits outside with Misty, the dog in the sun. He is forgetful, he stammers, he has a short attention span but then again I guess memory loss comes with age. Last night he wet the bed. There are people who would make a mockery of this situation but when you're knee deep in it with someone that you love, intimacy is nothing, acknowledging that he is becoming older is everything. I've become an old woman overnight. Suddenly I have grey hair, the wisdom of a lake, a slight tremor in my hands, I suffer from anxiety, and I can't sleep at night. He calls for me in the middle of the night. He needs me and so this teaches me that I am not cruel. I am a woman now. Something has replaced the darkness in my life. I have discovered the stem of meditation.
Its face, its route, my life's journey in this crowded house and tears. My mother does the laundry. Not such a terrible woman after all. If only all women could be like her. Tough. Made of holy guts, an insatiable instinct, almost a clairvoyant instinct. She lives like a nun and eats like one these days. She eats like a bird making soup, after soup after soup that only the three of us eat. As an adult, I have fallen in love with the terrific goodness of barley and the healthy protein of lentils. Split peas remind me of eating a home cooked meal at my paternal grandmother's house in the afternoons. My paternal grandmother's hands were beautiful. Wizened because she suffered from arthritis, dark brown. Warm with the texture of the sun and freckled. She was my moon, my moonlight and elegant. She offered us bowls of soup with home baked bread that tasted more nourishing and filling than the shop bought expensive kind. My mother promises us all a long life if we drink blends of herbs.
Dried rosemary, tinctures, tonics, homemade green smoothies with parsley, spinach from our vegetable patch and coconut milk. Head under water I reflect, I meditate, I breathe easy. I swim with the fishes, schools of them in this swimming pool. It lights a candle in my heart when I swallow water. My brother makes stews with his home-grown carrots and corn. All I can make is spaghetti. Frieda's spaghetti. It is so cold now. The world feels so cold. It feels as if Iraq has descended into my thoughts again. Sarajevo. Rwanda and the children of northern Uganda. I am a young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I must be strong to carry on, remain brave, act bold. Sometimes I can hear Tchaikovsky. My father has taken to his bed. He has depression again (the-William-Styron-kind). I wonder if John Updike ever suffered from depression. I know Hemingway certainly did. What about J.M. Coetzee, Radclyffe Hall, Vladimir Nabokov, Kubrick? And the filmmakers, writers, the poets who were heavy drinkers?
But I leave that in God's hands for his commentary, all those signals. I'm old before my time. I'm an old soul. Complicated, an empty vessel, envious of beauty like any woman, of youth, of the girl, of children in childhood. My babies are my books.
And sometimes I feel dead inside (not numb or cold). As if I have a subconscious mind that's crossed over. As if I am lame, pathetic, stupid and have one blue eye. Blue as the sky on a wild Saturday and the other green. As green as a mocking sea, mocking school of fishes carrying on, surfing along, swimming by on their own survival skills with their world occurring in an awful dead blue silence.
With the fingers of the sky so far away from them.
The page frees me in a sense, in a way I cannot describe. I write and that is my life. I am a mother and a wife, a lover, a poet, and I feel that is also just a part of my life. Sometimes the two meet and sometimes they do not. Sphere upon sphere upon another sphere. Poetry is a god to me. When I write I am a woman on her own. Reality is out of the picture and it does not seem to count for anything really. It is never enough for me. I stand and watch the busyness of life, observing nature and most of all human nature and I slowly empty out. It is a useful exercise kind of like transcendental meditation. I know nothing about it. It is just something I read as a girl in a book long ago when I was at school and at the time, it was just too much for me to handle. The thought of going out of myself made me go numb and cold. It gave me the shivers. If I was alone I would go mad with grief and rage and I would be that girl again.
When I enter the body of poetry a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction washes over me. There are explosions of tiny waves behind my eyes. My soul has made it thus far. I have to end the poverty in my mind but I find a cold comfort in the not knowing of things. If depression happened in nature, what would we call it then? Would it be organic in origin? In a marriage when it ends whom is to blame for its demise. Who is the culprit? On the approaching betrayal in any relationship, I have this to say. Lock down your heart dear and look away. It means that there may be something incomplete in the moving against the current of love. It means to love and die simultaneously. I think there is a theory behind light. When my body feels full of that stuff, the light, and the hidden energies in my aura, I feel as if I have free tickets to the centre of winter.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.