An Apology:

In my younger years, I wrote poems about the boy I loved, and named him ‘Parasite’.

Of course, we must take into consideration that in my younger years,

I wore shuffle socks and

followed soap operas and

learnt dance routines to Canadian pop songs.

 I’m muddling time now, memory betraying me so that everything up until this point is a custard of Sunday afternoons , my father’s hands, getting a rabbit for my 9th birthday, and my first period.

 As a child,

I believed my sister’s word gospel and hid behind my brother’s door while he rehearsed flirtations with girls from the neighbouring school, and learnt to sing his favourite tracks off our collectively-owned copy of Pop Shop 36.

 I thought my grandfather untouchable,

Before I noticed his bigotry and I battled with the truth of the man versus the obligation to only speak of the dead in golden terms.

 I expected to live with my parents forever,

took glee in spitting on mosquito bites,

obeyed commands from my older-wiser-impressive friend to practice French-kissing on my pillow.

 In my younger years,

I punished you for every moment received and unreturned.

I really did believe I loved you – it felt similar to descriptions in Sweet Valley High novels, snuck in shadow on late afternoons in the school library.

Presumed

Imposed

Coerced

you,

poor little thing, who wanted nothing more than to

laugh and

learn to jive-dance and

achieve a position on the cricket team.

 

I believed my dead grandmother a ghost, dead pets ghosts, Std 3 teacher…

Now you are ghostly.

 And I’m older now,

with more room in me for ghosts.

And I’m learning that a child raised on indulgence, dangerously called ‘romance’ in music, poems, adolescent pulp fiction

sullies

sulks

debases

her own chances at the entire affair from the start.

 

And I see that I was a bully.

That it was me doing the damn parasiting,

So that I was as impressed by my proclamations of love as I was by my new LP.

 

And all you wanted was to be a boy

who played with beetles,

and won at marbles, sometimes.

Finding Father II

A Memory of Rabbits

 

The day my father killed the rabbits was humid. Wet. Uncomfortable.

My parents are ritualistic in their waking. My mother sounds her arrival to the house deliberately, shouting to the animals, making mom-smells in the kitchen. But dad is softer. He paces. Opens doors, then closes them, and opens them again, searching for hypothetical intruders in the garden.

The sound of my parents talking in the early morning makes me feel home.

My father mumbled to my mother, made something clang as he moved, and moved outside. I watched him from my bedroom window, silent in the purple light of dawn. His eyes were tired. I remember turning away, terrified that, for the first time, my protector-dad may be afraid of something.

Mom was smoking in the kitchen. My pyjamas had grown moist in the heat of sleep, and my hair wormed its way across my childchubby cheek. She pursed her lips and clicked her tongue at me, trying to better my appearance. Then she ordered me to carry breakfast cereals through to the table.

We were put to work all morning. My brother, sister and I stole concerned glances to each other, each acknowledging, but misunderstanding the tension in our home.
We wanted to know why all the curtains were drawn. We wanted to play with our rabbits.

Finally, as the last surface had been polished and the sausages put out for eating, my father entered the house. He was carrying a shovel. His brow was sandy, crusted by sweat. He nodded to my mother and left the room.
She said they loved us, but the rabbits were sick. They had to go.

 

Anybody Wanna Waste Some Time?

Henry

While our mothers were taking tea beneath the oak trees overlooking the cricket pitch, we, that being my gang and I, would wait, pout-faced and aggressive, below the iron grate of Henry’s tuck shop window with our pocket money savings thrust out to stuff our mouths with niggerballs and cold Sparletta. Henry regarded us with disdain. Dressed up in our smocked-gingham-tulle-billowing party outfits, made and forced on us by mothers devoted to the fashions of Your Family magazines, we would glower at him as our mouths blackened around the edges in our sweet-sucking frenzy. His hands moved between sweet rack and cash tin, to the Niknaks and back again, and Henry would deliver his lecture on “the problem with little girls.” Knowing that to endure his preaching meant access to sweets, we tugged on our hemlines to mask our grazed knees and muddied sandals and grimaced through his contempt for our behaviour. Eventually, with the first team matches over, our mothers dragged our older brothers toward home to clean the grass stains off their pants. We followed, scooting our neon BMX bicycles away from Henry as he roared behind us, noticing the Chelsea bun which we had conspired to steal. We spotted Henry on the beachfront once, teaching his son to fish for shad on the shoreline, golf peak pulled low over his eyes so he would not be distracted by the pigeons and joggers and setting day around him. I cried as he spoke with my parents. The day had grown too long for a seven-year-old loaded with ice cream and a real-life meeting with Harry, my oversized dog hero from Harry’s House, the programme that introduced me to traffic rules and respect for my elders. Henry handed me a niggerball and wagged a finger in my face. It was in the years long after trips to the tuck shop, when I understood what it meant for a little white girl to demand a niggerball from an Indian man, that we learnt of Henry’s death. My brother, sister and I were taken to Henry’s home and as my father spoke with his brothers on the lawn, we were silenced by women who smothered us in their reams of sari material and fleshy arms and lashings of lavender oil. They shovelled food into us and fussed over my sister’s natural curl and green eyes. I recall sitting on a car tyre cut into a swing, mouth loaded with breyani and cream soda, as I watched my mother hold onto Henry’s wife while she wept over his coffin in the centre of their sitting room.

Everything is (not) Illuminated

“‘It’s so hard to express yourself.’
‘I understand this.’
‘I want to express myself.’
‘The same is true for me.’
‘I’m looking for my voice.’
‘It’s in your mouth.’
‘I want to do something I’m not ashamed of.’
‘Something you are proud of, yes?’
‘Not even. I just don’t want to be ashamed.’”
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

Finding Father I: Scottburgh

 

Seaside towns hold secrets. Something in my father changes as we approach Scottburgh. He speaks softly, with less authority than in our home. He is moving into his past. To his boyhood. He is searching his memories, and, it seems, leaving us behind. He is looking for his own father.

The gates to the Scottburgh cemetery have rusted over. There is no area to park our car, so we leave it straddling the roadside and grass verge. People visit their dead on foot here.

Dad unlatches the gate and ushers us in. We are afraid to break the silence, not wanting to offend those resting. We are the only visitors.

His father rests in a lot under the family name with his wife, as requested. They lie proud but not showy. No porcelain statues, no angels or banners to intimidate. Simply their names. Tasteful. Modest enough to know that memory is marked by the mind and experience.

We walk to his childhood home. It has been destroyed and rebuilt and he describes the original structure for us. Over here is where he and his cousin were put to work as punishment for stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s tree. Here where he was made to smoke an entire box of cigarettes, and then promise he’d never do it again. Here, where he broke his arm by falling over the verandah railing, practising his Elvis impersonation for the town’s Christmas pageant.

Here his mother sat by the record player and cried, listening to Billie Holiday on the day of my grandfather’s death, until they made the music stop and put her to sleep.

Here he hid bottles from her as she drank more and more in the weeks that followed the death.

It is time to leave. My sister complains about the heat. Mom wants to get home to the dogs. My father stands in his seaside town. His eyes narrow. He turns away and takes a breath. Then he returns his focus to us, with a smile. I smile back and wish I did not understand him as much as I do right now.

My Darling

Stumbled upon

From the Book Bag

Visited the library today.

 

I have a book bag now, exclusive book bag for library books. I like the way it slings over my shoulder and sits perfectly in the small of my back. My small of the back bag book bag.  The library. I’d forgotten; haven’t been a member since, when- my late school years. No, when university began and I moved to the city and started calling everything from home provincial, that’s when I stopped. My adulthood appears to be a considered undoing of everything I have been up until this point. I’ll say the same thing of myself in twenty years, or one, who knows. I find myself in the phase right now where I talk about all the phases I’ve been through.

 

To hold a book in my hands. To read, not to scan. To be here, here in the living of this moment, this one moment outside of windows which can’t be swapped and pop-ups which can’t be blocked. To smell paper, old sheets – which has become a contrived sensory sneak now, made mundane by all the chick lit which has come before, where gentle young women turn pages and take in the tea stain and old print of their books with the cracked spines and dog-eared sense of serendipitous things. My awareness has become such a scathing thing.

 

I treat my books like lovers. Obvious. The only romance afforded gravity must be laced with something sort of dangerous, violent barter; high stakes birth significance. Fiercely loyal to a group of writers and unwilling to try anything else. More interested in the later letters of the alphabet, rather than the early ones, with the supreme exception of Julian Barnes who writes melancholy so well, laced with a consistent awareness of self and hatred of his homeland, his Britain, which I similarly despise. I don’t know what the metaphorical sidetrack is there.  

 

In the bath this morning, I couldn’t reach a part of my back, and I thought of how many films use the washing of backs between lovers as something intense and representative of everything that lives between them. The semiotics of hygiene, I guess. And I imagined a woman who would spend her nights bathing, never able to reach that spot reserved for an imagined lover, and otherwise left untouched as she spends her days alone. Each evening, back to the bath, spot on the back unwashed. I imagined how she would die and be found, and examined, undertaker or surgeon taking note of a little mouldy spot just under her shoulder wing.

 

Then I thought of how kak and melodramatic I tend to become. I am often nostalgic for things not yet found.

 

Never felt so liberated as when I was openly termed ‘depressive’. Delicious, the relief which accompanied doctor’s declaration. I was, “grieving for my existence”, doctor said, which sounded to me suspicious plagiarism of Chekhov’s Masha who lived in mourning for her life and so I begrudged his qualifications as I did his Picasso wall prints; Westville hospital, see for yourself) – I’m not sure which words to choose, but they’re somewhere around the dread of an impending deadline which evaporates when an assignment is suddenly cancelled and you’re – hurrah – on holiday. Life was the assignment and I’d been given the permission to forfeit. It seemed that functionality was effort; I had become lazy and I knew, knew it was that simple and also that oafish; my arts education already teaching me that dark was not necessarily deep and anyway, all things were ultimately redundant. I was, for a short while, put on a type of in-house suicide watch, which comprised my father being too patient and my mother too afraid. The night I swallowed thirty five anti-depressants and half-heartedly nicked my arms, I’d gone dancing and, at the point when my drunken friends whooped along to the climax of some irony-laden indie pop track, I felt my equally drunken self identifying an inherent pointlessness to things, and in that instant, somehow, I equated their dancey, playful writhing as a symbol for everything great and I could find no reason. At the same time, my adult self, from somewhere in my distant future, was living with me and looking back, so that I was at once my present and my hindsight and she could not comfort me and I offered little back. We could not tell each other apart, my immediate and future selves, and we grew sad for each other then.

 

Sometimes, almost always when I brush my teeth, when I give in to my narcissistic tendencies and indulge a mirror-gaze, I feel my soul looking out from behind my eyeballs, clawing for some recognition with the reflection it sees. Some indication that they are the parts of the same whole, that abstract self and solid reflection. I cannot fathom it. They are like strangers wanting to escape an uncomfortable supper.

 

This is not therapy. Only, why I can’t write.

 

After that, the story goes as it goes. We heal and grow. Grow less panicked, less impressed by the hysteria of a painful life and begin to delight in countless strings of little things. Magical, ordinary things. Aircon units humming just so, chance meetings, projected profundities in our tea and biscuits. If we can only outlive our masochism, we grow up.

 

Amongst my regrets in life is, I’d guess, my crossing over that Freudian line when a baby discovers itself as ‘I’ and walks into his or her own ego. Accepts possession. If I could write with absolute omission of me, my ‘I’, there may be something.