Pain, the lines of beauty on the face of a lonely girl and her kindly cell, that furious secret place of depression, frustration, suicidal illness, (having otherworldly beauty was not enough for her, mouthing foggy love poems, progeny at her hip, North American prairies and beaches, Paris, her younger brother Warren the Exeter and Harvard man, New York, obsessively-written sonnets and short stories, Otto, Otto, Otto, the Nazi-lover, all the beekeeping villagers have been ripped from memory. The perfect love of parties, the tumbling into and of cocktail parties has gone too. Oh ghost, oh ghosts she was much too nice this empress, much too honest and dignified, she was much too pure, and where was the justice for this scholar, this thinker, this intellectual? How will she be remembered? Oh, just in dozens of books written by other starry-eyed scholars, thinkers and intellectuals and of course her poetry. She warned me, she warned me, she warned me with her words, with the force of her intellect, with her vocabulary, her mind’s eye’s perspective. No witch, atheist, pagan was she just a beautiful memory stuffed with a diary, notebooks, letters home filled with sadness. Did she pray, did she meditate when she was soaking up the sun on the beach?
And then she was thirty in a flat in London with two small children and composing Ariel, her masterpiece. Where was Ted Hughes? What was her last memory of Edward Hughes? In whose arms was he when she was looking for linen and sheets? Who was he sleeping with? What was the measure of the man? Was he extraordinarily gifted? Yes. Was he brilliant? Yes but did he know how to love, wasn’t he impulsive, wasn’t he a creative genius, wasn’t he a cheat? Didn’t he kill people, push and engulf women in sweetness or was it the woman who said kill me Ted, take me to bed? So he wasn’t a murderer, he was a poet, a broken man who suffered, what did he give up?

Men are cruel. Beautiful men are cruel. Intelligent men are cruel. And if girls reject them how on earth will they become transformed into women, transplanted into queens with kisses, how will they see the inside of a church in a wedding dress or a kitchen wearing an apron, perfect roast in the oven. How will they get that ring on their finger if they do not fall in love?

It is monstrous when bipolar leaves you numb, broken. There was always a quickness to it. How it enveloped her, how it enshrouded me. How did bipolar depression leave Sylvia Plath numb, clutching at straws, it left her with avocados in a suitcase in the The Bell Jar? There’s nothing dignified about it and the end of love. It is not just the end of fireworks but also that romance is an eternal curve. What’s love anyway when you can write, when you can write poetry? Sylvia in a hospital bed. Sylvia and Anne. Anne Sexton. Sylvia receiving therapy. Sylvia writing. Writing poetry.

Speak. Speak. Speak. The pain felt sharp. It burned. And I felt burdened. The pain felt like a knife. Pain is poison, a silent feast for some, for the vampires camping out in the woods, a winter guest writing a poem.

Ashtrays and cigarettes fill his house, papers, verses, correspondence. His mother is dying in Yorkshire. He has brought his lover with him. His father won’t sit at the kitchen table with her. He takes his meals in his bedroom. This is domestic bliss, golden living matter. The sex is medieval. His hands smell like a butcher’s. He is Satan. He destroyed her and she destroyed him, the dreamer in him, the father in him, and the husband in him. He had knowledge of lovemaking, taught her everything he knew with his frozen skill, his soul’s map, his wide-eyed country of transformations, his white picket fence,
They are swimming in this dark room together, soft dolls with delicate cores surfing over their wounds, touching the surface tension of the interior, wrapped up in the knowledge of the grace of the physical, the mental glare is no longer there. No more anguish. No more Sylvia.
Look at them. We are glimmering, gulping, our flesh and blood is dwelling, shining, illuminating the world around us.

He anointed her. The physical body sinks into another physical body, gnaws at it, its eaten magic, and its sum, its language as they exchange fluids and there is nothing and everything logical about it. There is a story here. Is it love? Does it need to be told? She is here to stay. She needs belief. The exotic, alluring Assia Wevill. She is a killer. A convicted murderous, Ted Hughes’s housekeeper, Sylvia Plath’s rival, a lover, a wife, and a mother too. Will she be another German Jew survivor?

‘Assia, my beautiful wren.’ He says, his hands on her shoulders, the nape of her neck, brushing away strands of her beautiful dark hair. ‘So exotic, so alluring. There is so much I want to say. This space is a proverb, this shape just here beneath your collar bone I like it best. You burn so bright. Writing is my little addiction. It is the life and death of me. So what do you think of my work.’
‘Admirable. Intelligent. Impressive. What do you think of my work?’
‘Admirable. Intelligent. Impressive. Clever. Very, very clever.’
‘Why are women always clever and men intelligent, fierce beasts, admired? I don’t think it’s an accident we met. It was simply meant to happen. Am I a good mother Ted?’
‘Yes. What a strange question?’
‘I want to be a good mother, a good wife, a good life-partner for you. I think we’re perfect together. Don’t you? I was a beautiful child and then I grew up and I wanted to see the world. And of course men saw my looks first but it always made me feel self-conscious, the interloper. Making love. I was always good at doing that. Falling out of love, falling in love, getting married. Let’s get married. Do, let’s. I love you. You’re the man for me. Think of all the adventures we’d have together, the places we’d go. You love me. We’ll have this picture-perfect family. Beautiful children.’
‘Wrists so fragile. Thighs and breasts so pale. Grey eyes. Wrap your legs around me. Are you warm? I want to feel you beneath me. Your breath is like vapour. What was it like on that train when you were a child? Were there really SS Officers walking up and down.’
‘It was cold, that’s all I remember. I was leaving the only home I had ever known. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Come here. Then we won’t talk about it. We’ll think pleasant, happy thoughts. Nothing will ever scar you ever again. I will diminish your fears, all the difficulties that you have, and erase them. I will unlock the gates to that nest that you call your brain. I will love you come rain or shine, come the madhouse of the heightened sky, I am rowing towards the sea in your eyes, swallowing all the hurt and humiliation that you have ever felt in this world.’
‘Ted Hughes I think you are the most profound man I’ve ever met. All of this will become history, craft, and ritual. Past is past is it not? Hell is behind us, that terrifying hammer and whatever has tormented me.’
‘There’s a self-portrait there Assia. Well, there’s really one in everything.’
‘You see poetry in everything. I need you Ted. I need you. Can’t you see that? I will give up everything for you.’
‘Don’t talk now. Hush. Pleasant, happy thoughts remember. Try and get some sleep now. If you’re not tired yet read a book, write something or read something that I’ve written. I’m too tired to talk now, to have this conversation.’
‘We can raise the children together. We can build a family, a real family-life away from the prying eyes of London, of your London friends, of your family. I know what they think of me, that I’m to blame for everything, for what happened to Sylvia, that I live in her house, sleep in her bed, and have stolen her husband and children, Sylvia Plath’s family. I am not responsible. I am not the traitor that everyone is making me out to be. Ted, I can’t go on living in that ghost house. I don’t care what people think. I tell you I don’t care what people think anymore of me, of you. Us. It’s done nothing to your reputation as a poet. People talk. People will always talk. Idle gossip. All lies. You are still you. You are still Ted Hughes.’
‘Assia, enough. I’m tired.’
‘I’m sorry. I just get so worked up sometimes. I’m trying Ted. Can’t you see that? Maybe I’m just insecure but I’m in love with you. I’ve never felt this way before. I’ve been married three times and I’ve never felt this way before for anyone else in my life until you came along. I’m trying for us. I had the abortion for us. I know now we can have other children. I’ve always been maternal, had that instinct within me. I live in her house for us. I take care of the children for us. I’m just excited about our new life together. You’re the best man I’ve ever met. The best lover I’ve ever had.’
‘Beautiful Assia Wevill. I will never, never hurt you.’ And then he kissed her forehead damp with perspiration, kissed her neck, stroked the arch of her back and caressed her arms. ‘Have men hurt you before? Made promises to you before that they didn’t keep?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to remember those times, the person that I was then, I’m different now, I don’t want to remember the past, and there were so many men. I told you this before. I was a pretty child who grew up to become a beautiful adult, but an insecure woman but do you promise Ted? Do you promise Ted Hughes that one day I will be your wife?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I promise.’ Edward Hughes cradled Assia Wevill in his arms that night like he had never cradled another woman in his arms before. He held her until he felt her fall asleep in his arms and he knew her dream would never be. It had come to an end whatever ‘it’ had been. Allure she had, she could put men in a trance, attract them, hold them down in bed, reject them, make them go kaput but did she know how to love? She was a sex object.

And now we come to me. Clothed, unclothed, shamed, and unashamed for now you are mine.
Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, the daughter Shura, Edward Hughes are six feet under, pushing up daisies, dead to the world but not to the world’s imagination. There is a knot of silence pulled tight in my throat, and I am pushed to naming home. Love for me is not home. It will never be home, mean home to me. I wither, men wither, and stories wither.

It is a mystery to me why he did not, could not love me. There was no tenderness there, no constant craving. I could not understand my infertility. The knowing of pain comes after sleeping, after waking from his touch.

I cannot remember lust. I remain unmarked by it. I hurt. You have hurt me. Energy has left me. Humility is like a cloud in the sky with a silver lining. I will not behave. I will not sit still and behave. I will fidget like a lunatic until you say that you love me, until you say that you will not leave me, leave me for her. I am in the garden of fire, of the dead and the living. I am dumb. What do I know about love? I know this. I want to feel your skin, read your bones with my fingertips, bath in your bath as you stroke my back, turn your world upside down, and harvest your moon. I am a mess but I am not your mess. If I was your mess you would stroke my face and ask me gently why I am crying. And I would say please stay with me, don’t go. Tell me that you like me.

Suicides have no glory when they die, they do not go to the last resting place up in the sky. They are driftwood.

The women have no sun, cure, dress, heels, pot of rouge, no furniture to move around, no laughter to speak of, and their family is ghost protocol.

There is a gun, a piece of rope, a fur coat, a car left running, and a bridge, a running leap.

Smile or you’re dead. And then there was nothing. There was silence in the kitchen, children sleeping in the bedroom, milk and bread untouched and gas. There is no longer any breath, any oxygen in her throat. She is deader than most.

My Edward comes to me in this world of all places that is meant for dead poets, and animals.
It is a world that is meant for humanity, and magical thought-foxes, otherworldly wrens and owls who before the North American genocide of the Native Americans, granted tribes shamanic wisdom, took their place upon a totem pole. It is a world made for ancestors and gold, minerals and modern society, a blue eye and the blues, justice and jazz, nature’s code, leaves anchored and not anchored to trees, to blades of grass, the wind’s song (a journey to the past, future living, soul retrieval, present survival). And then there is the rural countryside filled with patches of grass, the history of how to grow pomegranates, catch fish, the heritage of ruins, rain pouring down like a ritual taking its place in the hierarchy of the food chain, seasons that come upon us and pass, steps, leaps, stars, human stains, animal stains, blood, shark teeth, a school of fish, whales. This world is meant for sessions of personal injury, hurt, deep pain, smiling laughter, you calling your daughter darling, the grim existence, and the caged existence of the young poet. I am capable (every young poet is) even though the cigarette smoke’s vapour’s injury starts with a mocking signal. I am not lost. Bold Heaven is pulling at vital me.

I am a Romantic as I become more and more curious and the objects around me transfix me.
The Death of a relationship is in the air like horses in a race to the finish line, an aloe’s sap and tears, mirrors, your reflections, encounters with angels above and angels below on the earth’s alchemic plane as consciousness travels the globe, alongside the dimensions of spirit, the elements of soul. Edward is the music that has shaped my nutritious isolation, my night swimming, my eternal waiting, and my frantic, hysterical weeping. My night swimming comes with its own frequency and rhythm. My limbs take on a life of its own (so poetic, I am guarded against humanity, my imagination, inspiration, the Milky Way, the knowledge of other galaxies, the light of the shy laughter of a couple not far off from me swimming in the dark), suspended between the pull of gravity on earth’s plane and other parallel dimensions. The parallel dimension of my pure, virginal flesh and intricate blood, my dreams and goals, the gift of my personal space that most private area, an arena that so few have viewed. Daughters do not always become mothers. Mothers are not perfect. They have their flaws. Ordinary mothers. Extraordinary mothers. Put them in a box. Every goddess-mother. I see my mother’s brilliance.

I pick a valuable and beautiful object up and suddenly I’m transported to the room in a mansion.
And then shut Pandora’s Box. Plant a flag there. If only God could hand out a medal for every birth-pang. Every mother has had an Edward, pulled funny faces when she was a child, held a cloud of a helium-filled balloon in her fist by its string before it became a shred, dreamed of a childhood continued when she became a youth in her sleep, as she paged through fashion magazines reading her horoscope not knowing yet that her future was predestined, that she was predestined to be a sexual object on her wedding night, a friend and confidante when she was wooed by her future husband, that her eldest daughter would be a failure, her second a major success and her third child would be a Scout, a quiet, bookish, loner as a boy who suffered from asthma and a beautiful intellectual, funny and sweet, a deeply imaginative-thinker, oh-so-serious who would be charming and artistic, sensitive and understanding as he grew older, and that this introverted leader would be both spiritual and show humility when it was called for in political meetings, a man after Winston Churchill’s and Abraham Lincoln’s own heart. Betrayal is lethal. Plath a gone girl in young womanhood reaching dazzling heights like me.
Live or die. Those were Anne Sexton’s words. Pure. Introspective. A haunting interpretation.

Yet their craft and bittersweet verse still defies terrifying and manipulative electricity, attachment, movement. Clever girls. You were no women in black. I put my suicidal illness inside a jar like a butterfly and leave it there for the moment. I escape into the pages of my journal, those hard lines, the physical, emotional, and mental appetite beckoning. The creamy landscape changes every day in leaps from green. Once I was in pursuit of Edward, advancing upon him, closer to the flame in his psychological framework’s psyche, harvesting his cool gaze, that tower, that secret winter. His throne burns me, my guilt flares lap after lap in the Olympic-sized local swimming pool like diamonds in the sky marking the distance to the stairway to Heaven, the ladder to the Milky Way. Edward sits at my table, field mice in the kitchen, tails between their legs in the universal-solitary-shape of death after being wounded by the mousetrap, no survival guide for them, escape-route, seductive exit and their whiskers no longer move baffled by the world around them, there’s just an ode to the mute and I begin reading my letter from home that serves to improve the fragile, loved half-lie I’ve been living.

Where, when did Pablo Neruda find the time to write twenty love poems and a song of despair?
Edward is in my life again. I’m staring at his photograph. He comes to me as if in a dream sequence. The years have changed us. He is even more handsome than I remembered in my wishful-consciousness-thinking. I remember going back to the city’s elements. The watery-prophetic eyes of women and children, decay, dirt, spiritual poverty and that there’s nothing pretty or picturesque about the pain of the mind. It can be more acute than the pain of the body. Johannesburg is Hemingway’s Paris. A psychological construct made up of childhood dialogue, the female writer who speaks in code, the young women who would slip away in the early hours of the morning arm-in-arm with their dream man of the night after a nightclub closed. Johannesburg was a Freedom Land’s anchor, a feast where the abnormal became normal, running with scissors, poetry in my twenties, knives, guns in the air. Sacrifice is not effortless. Midnight is but a voyage into the goal of a dream. Laughter keeps me alive. I seem to have been born with this intuition. Edward the exceptional, the extraordinary, brilliant genius with his cigarettes, stale smoke and moustache. Boats have become arks. Girls quiet women.

Here there are no ducks in the park in their own world of silence marking time with their song.
My sister adores her reflection, her face is a lake, the face of a scholarship girl. I watch her swallow shiny things, flicker, go up in flames, rise towards truth in the flesh and the spirit, her celestial madness and I ask myself does she never feel fear or vulnerable, does she never meditate on the sun only on our silence. She was a pianist when she was younger, tap-tap-tapping the clouds of the keys. I can only survive with the memory of my Edward. I can no longer kill the sirens with their elegant-shapes. The sirens who slit their wrists, jump off bridges, leave the car running, and hang themselves. They’re becoming as rare as the rainforest, pilgrims. Perhaps they were too pure for this world, the heat of their sensitivity could not withstand dissolving in water, withstand a pilgrimage, listening to the noise in a glitter-ball-world, arrows of ballads flying through the air landing at their feet like dew, sounding like a symphony or Beethoven. Every dress, every heel, silk stockings, perfume is a gift but who will receive them? Daughters? Orphans? The Salvation Army? A fete’s jumble sale? Is it for a wedding, a baby’s christening? Beautiful women become ghosts of themselves like leaves.

Weaving delicious spice sinking inside a pot, I concentrate on the bowl, open my mouth wide.
A cardamom pod. A green bitter capsule floating, winking in warm milk, white rice and tapioca. I have no sister. She is as dead to me as I am most probably to her. This empty vessel has melted away into the distance. Pink is my favourite colour. The walls, the walls, the walls have eyes. I am walking on the beach. I sit down on the warm sand, there’s something loving about it, my physical body dissolves in it, my hands takes on the texture of the sand, my soft shoes in my hand. I have pebbles in my hand. Where have they come from? I don’t remember the history of all of this salt, and this light. I don’t need food only the marriage of bread and butter and piping-hot tea, wet masala that perfects a steaming curry with cinnamon sticks folded into it to take the warmness away. Loving, losing, living, laughter can be harsh sometimes, the brightness of sadness, illumined loneliness. I am a cup. Turn it over and you will discover it is empty of a spell. There is only the image of the cup that envelops my mind’s eye. I’m done with being distracted by ego and diaries. I’m done, I’m through with married men. No matter how distinguished they might seem to be on the surface. Stiffs, veterans, and the family man.
I am not Edward’s wife. He is dead to me. Look how he decomposes. My cries brood, roost.
Watch how the flowers glow on his grave, scorch my possessive grip. Watch how the petals fall, the foliage wilts, the grass grows like difficulties, a thin scar that still wounds, once this man was a pearl, wise beyond his years who taught me to invoke British Poet Laureates, Rilke, Goethe, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Wilde, Woolf, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates and Carol Ann Duffy. Edward has turned me into an invalid who takes naps in the heat of a post-apartheid African Renaissance South African afternoon. He is more than an illusion. He is a man dressed in black, in snakeskin cowboy boots, staring at me with snake eyes, covering me with a shroud, touching me with angelic hands, his voice an instrument pushing buttons, accomplishing everything that his mind has set out to do with a quiet, unwavering, bewildering intelligence. Old-fashioned seduction. The path of least resistance. I too am now an empty vessel, axed, amped, and well-established in observation. Edward’s wife is the poet Sylvia. On her wedding day she was the blushing bride who stroked the cream frill at her collarbone, starved herself because she was so nervous, oil on her hands, a veil to cover her virginal face from her groom.

Sylvia wears gloves and silk stockings. Sylvia writes protest poetry. Sylvia is a defiant feminist.
Her scent is in the air, fixed. She didn’t know yet she was in for a wild ride. A woman, a daughter and mother can’t cure everything. I knew his wife had merit. I knew she had her pans, her cooking pots, and her kitchen and that she slept like a perfumed queen in their house, in their bedroom and when daylight multiplied through the curtains she would pull them open, go downstairs, make tea, prepare breakfast. He was making love to her. He was making love to me. She was educated. She had been to Smith College and Cambridge. I knew his wife had love but I masked it with a million winters you see I just wasn’t up for it. I knew him through-and-through, inside and out. He was so pure. Like light in the sameness of a forest, or fluid in a glass or a child sucking on drops of butterscotch. Life is pure but his promises weren’t. It is easy to regard the olive branch as a symbol of peace but all I can see now is how shallow you’ve been, how precocious your Sylvia is. How much more articulate and brilliant she is than me. Alice Munro is coming through now. She is coming through with Doris Lessing. Others will think that there is something sinister about spirit guides, mediums and clairvoyants. I listen. All the time Sylvia, Sylvia, playing like a stuck record. She was no thief like I was ousted as.
Sylvia is a woman ahead of her time. The door, and that gap between us, closure happens in the light. Who would have thought the living and the dead, the earth-plane and the spiritual-plane could connect, but such contrasts though are projected sanely and with clarity of vision and thought through a guide’s orbit. It is not me Emma who walks on the water, crossing it from river-sea to the burden and the anger of another river-sea. It is not Emma who is worth her weight in gold, sensual in a quiet way, who wrote about gender giftedly, who had wonder guts, a brutal country to call her own and wrote both with a lethal and pure spirit, boldly, brilliantly who silenced the war poets, old men, the living and the dead. It is Sylvia Plath’s wonderland.

He was just a man. He was just a man dreaming of being found. Lost. Lost. Lost. And inside of me there’s a feeling, this feeling of being stuck in traffic in a thunderstorm. A feeling of thirst, a painful thirst and wandering, believing that my brother captures everyone around him with the electricity and lightning daze of influence. There’s a bold intriguing force of electricity and lightning within him. Lightning and electricity. And with that thought, that knowledge comes needles of them, of thoughts. A pinprick that feels life threatening. A flash. A burst of thought. And then the rain would come like a dream, like sleep. First drops and then it begins to pour. The rain would mean water, fresh, sweet, pure water, entitlement, privilege, being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, waiting, always waiting for that opportunistic moment, that mind hurdle that tells me I’ve been awake all my life but for the poor ones it would mean flooding. Their homes would be flooded. They would have to walk with skirts hiked up to get to where they had to go, barefoot, humiliated, scooping the water out of their homes with plastic buckets, helpless, homeless, sleeping on damp mattresses. How do people live like that I’ve always wondered? Where do you go from extreme poverty? Who will give you a hand-out? For the poor it would just mean another uncomfortable experience that they would have to deal with.

I press my knee against the foot of the table. Jew. Jew. Jew. Jew hair. Jew nose. Her hair looked like a Maltese poodle’s hair. How did she get the brush and comb through that mess every night? How quick she was to dismiss me, hide her smile. I’ve forgotten my words. Forgot the poem I years have been from home. Forgot the last two verses of the poem by Emily Dickson. I watch her mouth, Jewess, her soft lips making the drawing of a pout. Her lips were mouthing words. Words I could not make out. But I could make out the smile and the quiet laughter that gave me a sour taste in my mouth (already I had been used to this taste in my mouth for a very long time now, and I would never get over the anxious butterflies in my stomach, my thoughts racing but I would never get used to laughing and smiling with them at my expense even though my mother said I should almost as if she knew something I didn’t for the longest time) and for a long time I was very serious about feeling ashamed about the way I looked. It took me forever to work it out of my system. Her lips looks like the shade of an expensive perfumery sticky pink lipstick. She smells like Revlon. She smells expensive. Her nails are shiny, manicured. I do not accept her principles, the standards that she judges me by. The color of my skin, my faith. The sound of my posh voice bouncing off the walls. Her face gives her away. I wish she’d like me. I wish we could be friends anyway. Her mother did my hair and make-up at the theater for Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When my mother dropped me off outside the theater she told me crossly to smile and speak to the other children. ‘Be nice. Don’t be shy.’ She told us to enjoy ourselves at the rehearsal. All the other children were White. My brother, sister and I were the only children of color. Color. Colored. Mixed race. My golden-haired sister had a pink rose in every cheek. My brother was olive-skinned. He looked like his father. Dark and handsome. Bones. I didn’t understand why they were like they were. Every one of those highty-tighty Whites. I didn’t like the Jews because they didn’t like us. I didn’t understand how some of them could have straight hair and some had curly hair. They were like us but in other ways they weren’t like us. I watched her but then in a way I felt sorry for her when I imagined her in her storybook life. It didn’t seem all that wonderful to me. Liar. She didn’t let her mother put make-up on her. Instead she told her mother she could do it herself. And her mother said fine, go ahead, just like that. We all left seeing farms, cows and horses in fields on long drives to Grahamstown in the distance past. Rehearsals, scripts, being dropped outside the theater, the five minute call before opening night when the three of us left school. And my sister became a paler version of my mother. My brother grew taller, grew darker of complexion. My nickname could have been less-than-zero.

I must have fun like other girls my age. Why am I so serious, so sullen all of the time? And then I remember my mother’s mantra. Smile. My sister is happy even if I feel excluded from her happiness. I don’t feel I must be included in her plans anymore. I must have sunshine, try and sunbathe. Get a tan. Get as brown as a berry. Get some of that sun into my skin to seep into all of my sadness. Even sadness has grace, a personal space where you are free to express a torn idea that can rip you apart, terrify you as if you are in that moment of writing about a disaster or war or violence, (physical violence shattering all truth or sexual violence). She is always trying to get me to try harder. In her life money makes the world go round. It fires her up. She is wired to it all the while I am failing magnificently. I do not please her. She is not accepting of people who do not meet her standards, her criteria. And so I crazily, wildly fail again. I should be living it up, acting out, and not feel so vulnerable in relationships.

Is my brother like all men a man just wanting, waiting to be found? He is up to the primitive challenges and mating rituals of the slick futuristic society we live in today. Drinking with his mates, drinking them under the table. No self-defeatism in his voice. He is immune to it. In some regards we are alike. We are both quick to condemn the fainthearted, those cowards who do not meet the requirements of living up to the best intentions that their parents had for them.

If I write what I like am I asking for trouble? Should I tread with caution where angels fear to tread? There is no turning back. Your moon face rises out of air to meet me like people of the stars. Mummy, the creator of man, a boy, a baby boy, this woman intrigued me like a celebrity hanger-on. Those people who so desperately wanted to live in the public eye. They lived a life separate from their private one caught for a second in a frame, caught in a snapshot. It couldn’t really be called history until there was enough time for it to be called history. Until it was looked at in retrospect. I hear her laughing in the kitchen talking to my brother and his girlfriend who is cooking furiously in the background. Always cooking furiously in the background. Stirring things up in the pots and pans that I could never dream of. Always baking a dream of cake. My brother is her chosen one. I am a disappointment. I have failed her. I am the one who has to live with that. I am too old-fashioned, too clever, and more magnificent than her when it comes to my father. For her I think revenge must be sweet. Give enough rope to the handmaiden and she will hang herself. Look for example at Joan of Arc and Antigone. Look for example at Adam.

What is the nature of the beast that is found in man, in all of us (most of all human nature), the true nature of the heathen, the suffering of slaves, and the writer who is demanding of their readers? The world is not as it should be. One day poverty might not exist and that is the true nature of the beast. To divide and rule. Liberty, freedom, equality, fraternity, democracy. Do they exist in a futuristic apocalyptic world made out of our sensory perception? What is the basis of all politics? Possessions. Think. One day all technology will surpass all humanity and then what will become of the humanitarians and the philanthropists. Think of what our richest possession is. For me that is humanity. The soul. Soul consciousness. Being aware of the self, human behavior, social interaction, social cohesion in rural and urban districts. What is the true nature of the seasons? There is a time and place for the conscious.
Meanwhile our unconscious spirits us away. Are we truly ‘agents of conquest’ every one of us? From those who are con artists by day and night trying to put on the table for their growing family (and in every household like that there’s a woman making a hot plate for a man who will arrive late after the kids have been put to bed and who had spent his day’s wages at the club on the horses or drinking cheap wine). Are the sushi kings of this world flushed with sticky rice, California rolls and raw fish? And when we come to the greedy megalomaniacs stuffing themselves with shellfish and garlic butter, to monomaniacs drowning in (or driven crazy by it) paper money, to the regular blue collar maniacs who had from their honest day’s work dirt under their fingernails, when we come to the history of human rights, monopoly, don’t they all, doesn’t it have the energy of being an agent or ‘agents of conquest’ too? How quick the righteous become self-righteous?

Are every one of us not supposed to be instruments of change? Look for example at Joan of Arc and Antigone. Look for example at Adam. They were never found California dreaming as much as modern-day Africans (white and black, colored faces, the mixed races of different ancestry). The ones who most want to cross the history wilderness to make it to modern-day Los Angeles, making their mark, making a notch in their belt, traversing the plains in the counties of the Midwest of America. Words like Stevie Wonder, ebony, ivory, Times Square, Chicago and Wyoming, lake, tobogganing, Time, Newsweek, social media, the network, broadcast news, the land of the free and the home of the brave would sing arias inside of me alongside an orchestra.

Diary, journal, you think you’re the only one who has felt pain in this world. Pain that runs deep, as deep as a river. Bravery can sometimes be a mission. There’s such a cool detachment about man when he is brave. When he has a steady tolerance about him when he enters a world filled with a minefield of ghost disciples. When his smile carries with it a warmth and dignity. When his person has a cleanliness about him. Boys even those with a fearlessness about them cry (even those who have an easiness about them, those careful emperors can be sensitive and understanding, compelled to understand the vulnerable in a younger, less experienced female). The lonely can see lonely coming from a mile away usually (usually predictable) and they’re not like minded nor a match made in heaven. They’re haphazardly swinging from the chandeliers, hanging on for dear life to their sanity, sharpening their set of skills. Man, man in recovery sees therapy as sweet ritual. For centuries the man waiting to be found has journeyed in words. Wise people wiser than their years who did not have an easiness about them. Every man, even the homosexual is wise on his own terms. If you ask him what courage means (to him) won’t he answer you? The words will roll off his tongue. For every man leads a double life. For every man is beautiful and wise in his own way. For every man walks to the beat of his own drum. It is loyalty from a band of brothers that gives them (and not necessarily a loyal woman that has a high regard for them) a flaming spirit.

Whenever I think of girls I think of Swaziland, that green feast. I think of youth. I think of the young and how fresh and new their ideas must be to them and the world, a very adult world that must have been so far away from them. I remember the faces of the girls and the boys. They all had the skin of dark chocolate. As smooth as velvet. Creamy. Beautiful. The colored girls were also pretty. I remember how all the girls would straighten their hair (it is a painful chemical process, sometimes your scalp would burn) how the curls would frame their faces, how much time and effort they all took with their appearance for appearance’s sake. They had names like Lulu and Katanekwa. They were from other places too from as far afield as Zimbabwe and Zambia. Places whose names sounded so exotic. I wanted the O levels. I wanted to go to England. To study film was something that became all-important to me once upon a time. The escape was also part of the plan. To escape from dysfunction, to escape from family, from a difficult mother who was killing me, casting me out adrift into a grown up world I was not ready for. She loved to see me bump up against things that frightened me into a silent world where I would hold my tongue for once and not speak. Some of them wanted to go to South Africa. They wanted to matriculate there. Some were borders. I remember how the girls would hike their skirts above their knees so if they bent over everybody could see the color of their undergarments.

Whenever I think of I think of dirt, poverty, common sense, con artists, thieves and how much effort the church puts into saving souls for Jesus I think of the Salvation Army.

Whenever I think about the dirt-poor and poverty I think about the streets of Johannesburg filled with crime. And I think about Bruce Springsteen’s streets of Philadelphia. Whenever I think about violence (violence as a volcano building up inside of man) I think of the women and children I met at a shelter for abused women and children. The women and children I ate with, slept with, bathed with, and worked side by side with in the stinking compost heap filled with creepy crawlies under sometimes a hot day, a pale sky feeling the sweat and not feeling the sweat, and not feeling uplifted in any way by it, by doing what I was doing. I was unpacking and packing crates alongside women and children who has lost all emotional and financial security from the man in their lives and the lives of their children. I was giving away stale cake and breads, rotting vegetables going off to black families queuing up hungry, torn. I worshiped with them. With all of those black faces. And they became like family to me. The mothers of those children, absent fathers for every one of their children that they brought with them from their shadowy past forever in their lives became like a mother to me more than my own had ever shown me. They showed me love, a return to love. Taught it to me parrot fashion as if I had to get it inside my spirit come hell or high water. Love was an invitation to a movement. It was a sonnet, a verse. They taught me to fight ideas with ideas.

The rats really do represent the working classes. No freedom, liberty, fraternity for them. No democracy. Scavengers everyone. They’re left miserable, wet or dry or on the shelf hungry for a better life.

And when I think of the times I spent with the homeless, with the educated and uneducated, with the inferior-minded (not of their own making, not of their own fault) and those who had a superiority complex about themselves, when I think about Johannesburg I think about the failings of my mother and how the city itself rescued me when I was writing, studying, running up streets and down streets. I thought about the failings of my father. How safe he was in the life he thought he had built for his children. He thought we had it made or that we made it but how wrong he was. I think often now of the road before us, how long it was and how often we wandered off the path through the periods of our lives when we took ‘mini-breaks’ from life. University, college, recovery and rehab, hospitalization after hospitalization, counseling session after counseling session, homelessness, helplessness, loneliness, isolation, rejection.

The extraordinary child, the gifted child (once their gift has been noted by their teachers, and their offspring and once their parents are careful of praising them), the chosen one never looks a gift horse in the mouth if they can help it from there on out. All they see is an age of dreams if they are protected, kept safe from the world at large with all its distortions. At first I could not see the power of the emotional abuse of a pervert in Nabokov’s Lolita and then slowly it began to dawn on me have we not created a life for them? Have we not created a world for them in which to suffocate the human dignity of the vulnerable with their injustices? And when the abused child grows up don’t they become the abuser of a child’s trust or the most vulnerable human being they can lay their hands on? The abuser, well they inflict, and their intention is to harm, to control, to frighten the living daylights out of their captive or captives. And when they succeed at all costs it gives them a slight reprieve from the memories that make them stand on tenterhook in nightmares and flashbacks of their own abusive childhood. There is no one in the abuser’s life that will say to them, ‘Save yourself first before you try and start saving other people.’ Isn’t that sad. Isn’t that at the heart of the matter, that in this pure and fantastical land it is hard to change, transform families from not thinking that the weight of this huge sin matters? When our children hurt, when the vulnerable hurt we are all responsible. How simple and easy it is to let down the entire human race by going about our day being selfish stupidly and steadfastly. Why not be the adult. Be the saint. Be the Savior. Be someone’s Savior. Step up as high as the planets. There’s a joy that you get from the particles of the familiar and a peace of mind. It’s the same joy that you get from being kind.

I have been shamed and ashamed. But haven’t we all been shamed and ashamed. Trauma. Lived it. I’ve survived it. Everybody has stories like that that they’ve carried with them since childhood. I believe that wish-fulfillment (self-fulfilling prophecies), believing in yourself and what you are capable of doing can solve anything. And I’ve come to realize that no problem is too big for my shoes or humanity to fill to fill once you get your head around your own limitations. Everybody has limitations, flaws and weaknesses they cannot cast asunder no matter how merry, easy-go-lucky and terrific they may seem on the surface.

And so throughout the centuries the man dreaming of being found was never be robbed of his insight, his will, and his intelligence again through this realization, that the world was his oyster, that the conch shell he held up to his ear really did in fact hold the mystifying ocean-sea’s mist of a burden-of-a-breath, that every woman in the world really was beautiful.

I am tired. I look at other women in the ward and I see that they are tired too. It is hot. There is nothing that I can do to escape this intolerable heat. I lie under this sheet in this hospital. The doctor said I should just rest. Close my eyes and try and get some rest. There is nothing else they can do for me. But I have come to this nothing place in this nothing district to get away from my past. This too shall pass. The woman next to me keeps looking at me strangely. Are you God? She asks me. Some days it is, ‘Do you know his son Jesus Christ?’ She has a bible. She refuses to eat. Nobody visits her. Nobody visits me but that is because nobody knows where I am. There are ancient lives under Botswana’s sky. I found when I used to be a journalist in another lifetime when I wrote about people in that distant past there used to be something urgent about it but something unfinished as well. Writing also saved my life, having a child and a man in my life. But the doctors, the nuns here say I will go out of my head if I think that way. They say that everything is for the best now. I can go and sit outside today. It’s a beautiful day. Warm and sunny. Every day there was fruit at the hospital. Yesterday we had mangoes. The mango’s flesh tasted wonderful. It reminded me of my childhood, of my sister, the warmth of a pinch of cumin offered to a supper meal, a country to call my own and the girl I was once. Not like some of those coquettish ones but a unique who suffered from anticipatory nostalgia from one moveable feast that she found from one book to the next. A woman received some avocados in the ward and she shared it amongst her friends. I spooned the ripe olive-looking flesh out of the skin and sucked the threads off my fingers. Beautiful. I asked my doctor for some pages or a notebook and a pen that I could write with. I felt I had something to say when he asked what it was for. Sometimes the heat here in Botswana smells like incense burning. It goes to my head and stays there for ever after. Lovely. Poignant. Fresh. Burning sweetly reminding me of my female intuition. This heat has saved me. It has slowed all the racing thoughts within my head and they’re all within my grasp now.

‘Tell me Bessie do you have any friends here at the hospital. People who you can talk to.’
‘Friends? Tell me what the meaning of that word is doctor. To stay here does not mean it is a permanent residence. I will move on from here as I have done before. It is not good to remain tied down, make bonds with people, and form relationships that will probably only hurt you in the end. I have found that out the hard way. Breaking ties with people oh I’ve done that my whole life.’

And for a long time the doctor and I sat next to each other saying very little. We spoke about the weather and poetry and bananas of all things. Yes of all things in the world we spoke about bananas. Bananas dominated the conversation when we eventually came round to speaking about it.

‘Doctor, are you happy? Are you happy with your life? If you could go back to the past what would you change?’ I ask plaintively.
The doctor looked out into the distance. There was a lovely breeze. ‘Lovely breeze Bessie, don’t you think. You’re very serious this afternoon. What has got you to think so deeply? Are you feeling morose?’
‘Perhaps I am. But there have been times when thinking morose has saved my life. I’ve either stored enough of it away or not enough. And when it comes to those times of not enough I take to my bed, pull the sheets over my head. I don’t need friends. Everybody needs a friend but I don’t believe that people need friends in life. So, are you happy doctor?’
‘Don’t I look happy Bessie?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
‘Today this morning a nurse misplaced a file. I was not happy about that. But I had a hot cup of tea, a slice of cake, and a sandwich. Soon I will return your notebook. Perhaps you should think of going for a walk with the other patients.’

The notebook has saved my life but I don’t tell the doctor that.

‘Wake up. Wake up all you blasphemous fools. All you fools that are sinners. All you Judases that have betrayed God with a kiss. Blasphemy. Blasphemy. I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Jesus wants you for a sunbeam. Michael row your boat to shore. Repent, you wicked sinner or you will never receive salvation.’
I pretend I am fast asleep. I can hear her walking up and down in the room. She is wearing sandals. Soft like ballet slippers. Another woman is sobbing into her pillow at the far end of the room. ‘Make her stop doing that.’ I hear her say but nobody comes to make her stop.
‘Are you awake yet? Wake up. I have good news for you. It is the coming of the Lord, the father of our Jesus Christ, son of David.’
‘Wake up.’

And every time she walks past my bed she says those words. And finally I turn my head and play dumb, nodding my head. In a way it is soothing to know that the religious part of me that was always there within, along with my faith, my values, and my spirituality has never ever left me. It is only the woman in the bed next to me. The aliens have contacted her and they have a message for our government or she can see into the future and the human race have to be saved or she is a modern female version of Nostradamus. It has saved my life. This needful thing of people needing friends. God I love you Botswana. All my life I have carried this yolk of being an only child, the shroud of being an orphan has shadowed me all my life. I wonder now what it would be like to have grown up in a family with other sisters and brothers and to find rainbows everywhere you looked even in the Sudan, in the desert, in Kenya, in Ghana.

When it comes to the wife and kindness you will find her in rooms. But I did not find my mother there. My mother was White. My father was Black. I was born during apartheid South Africa. They put ‘mixed race’ on my birth certificate. The city would not accept them, their love story so I was taken away, given up to a kind-hearted missionary family. I do not hate my mother. I never knew either of my parents. Laws, regulations, the powers that were replaced love, a mother’s love. When I think about my mother now first you will find her, my mother with European blood, mostly German in her in the kitchen. She is baking a cake. I am licking the bowl out. It tastes like chocolate. It is for my birthday party. All my friends and cousins, family and family friends will be there but they are men and women dreaming about being found. I can’t get back to him, my father, the garden boy who couldn’t probably read or write. They found a sea of words and experiences in a rose garden filled with trees. Was my father a savage? My maternal grandfather probably thought so. He probably thought that my father was also a rapist. My mother was beautiful, sophisticated, elegant, and young. Much too young to have me. She was also mentally ill. There’s an unbearable lightness to it when you’re a sufferer of it in the world. People don’t understand the stigma, you are hidden away like Mrs Rochester, Pinkerton’s Sister, you drink like Jean Rhys, and you have a suicidal illness like Plath and Anne Sexton, you have love affairs. Brush the romanticism off them and become promiscuous. A she-wolf. And now all the time before I fall asleep, close my eyes I imagine my grandmother brushing my mother’s hair before she goes to bed and wondering if my mother wondered what happened to me and what was going to become of her. In my subconscious there are unstable, strained realities. Some are bipolar as there were inside my mother’s head. The world does not seem to see me, understand me or accept me as a writer, poet, intellectual and rival to man. Where did help come from for my biological mother? She came from a wealthy Johannesburg family. Did she hold me when I was born or was I simply taken away? Did she understand what was happening around her?

‘Can I read what you’ve written Bessie?’ my doctor asks. He pushes his glasses up his nose. He is in his mid-thirties, young, young enough to be my son.

She feels as if she is defying gravity when she thinks about her son and where he is now. The doctor is as handsome as her son who was most probably now wandering throughout an unnamed city.

‘I don’t know if it makes much sense. I was a journalist in another world. Dimensions of truth always seem to lead me to a naked city. Doctor, you don’t look as if you eat.’
The doctor smiles. ‘I eat. But my day gets very busy. I usually have some tea and a sandwich or some fruit.’
‘Yes, but you must eat something much more substantial than that.’ I shook my head.
‘How are you feeling today otherwise Bessie?
‘Tired. Pensive. The writing helps.’
‘Hmm. I see. It is good that you’ve found something to occupy your mind with. You see that is always good. You know that there is not much else we can do for people who suffer from your malady at the hospital.’
‘Here’s my notebook doctor. It is mostly fragments. It is almost as if my head is communicating to my heart but there’s a filter. There’s a switch in my brain. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, I completely understand.’ The doctor said without understanding. He leaned back against the bench and rested his hands on his knees. ‘Do you miss those days at the newspaper?’
‘Yes and no. Once in a while. All the time. Sometimes when I think about it I think about what I’m missing and sometimes I dream about it.’
‘Tell me doctor do you have a wife.’
The doctor smiles. ‘Yes, yes I do have a wife.’
‘I don’t believe you. If you had a wife she wouldn’t let you survive on fruit alone and a sandwich and tea for lunch.’ The doctor smiled and then he began to laugh. The doctor laughed like a hyena. ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.’ He put his hand in front of his mouth as if he was coughing.
‘Bessie I think I will leave you now. I will take this with me, your notebook and read it. I encourage you not to be so pensive, not to think so much. And get as much rest as you can especially in the afternoons. It is good to rest. Good for the body. Good for the spirit. Keeps your spirits up. Good for the soul. Soup for the soul as the North Americans say. I read that in a book somewhere.’

And since it was nearly Easter I asked him do they make pickled fish in this part of Africa, this part of the world and he said no. They ate a kind of fried fish, sometimes they dried it in the sun. He said it was delicious. His mother was still alive so she made it when there was a family function sometimes and his wife too. I turned my head as if I was telling the doctor a secret.
The potatoes are hard. I can’t eat this. So I push it away on my plate. I drink my water. The nun pulls a face when she comes to collect my plate. I pretend I don’t see. They always say we should eat everything on our plate and not leave a bite. The vegetables come in a watery broth that tastes like nothing but they say it is good for us. It will strengthen us.
‘You won’t be getting any fruit if you don’t eat everything. Food is good for you.’ I pretend I don’t hear the nun. I rather pretend that I’m asleep. But I know that she knows I am only pretending. I feel sticky and hot. The sheets are pressed up against my skin. There is no air conditioning here.

I am making a supper. I am making a grown up supper for my mother and me. I am cooking traditional. This is for a mother I have never met. She is wearing something out of The Great Gatsby as if she is a flapper. She wears a rope of pearls around her neck. She fingers every pearl as if someone is going to steal them from her. My table is unlike any table she’s ever sat at. It is quite plain just like her wallflower daughter. Malay cuisine. She does not speak to me. She does not make eye contact with me. This is what those kind of women were like in those days. The things she would say would kill me. ‘This is too cold.’ And she would make a face as if she was going to be sick. ‘Take this away. I am not going to eat this. It’s inedible.’ Believe me there are some days I am happy I never knew her.

Bright lunatic, bouncing off the walls there were moments when my moods were both electrifying and terrifying until I found myself in this country. Botswana and I immediately fell in love with it like I did with the name Maru. Outside seems to be a very good way of looking in. The earth bottom’s out streaming, flowing. I taste the rain and swallow. Yes, even in Botswana it rains in the evenings when Africa is at her most beautiful.

For wintering you need layers of clothes. Thoughts like who created the wounded in modern war. The parting gift from this prideful world to the hereafter. The fog has taken a lover. The wasteland that lies before and behind me, farming communities, families, lovers of Botswana where the light is all shiny and new. In the material world I go by the name of Bessie Head. Not even the important people read my books in South Africa even though I was published in London. I no longer fulfill that role or function here in this hospital. No longer wife, no longer mother, no longer journalist chasing after genocide, asking those tough questions.

And so I forget about the sun.

When I think of suicidal illness, of the poetry that was written on the sometimes brutal wonder of living and taking your last breath on this earth I think about how Sylvia Plath wrote about the biblical Lazarus. And in spite of the men around her who thought they were worldlier than female poets and that she could never be worldly enough as if she was the first woman to even contemplate doing something like that (it had to come from a thought, a pure thought) and she did not fail. Everything after that was just a test that she passed, that was an achievement with flying colors. If I could become something much more than my disability, my infertility, the thread of alcoholism and addiction that ran throughout my family history on both sides of the family tree. If I could just become a sea of hands then I would become the winner who would stand alone.

Everything is disjointed especially when they (the words) are first coming into being, in fragments, there’s no clarity to me the reader. Everything is a journey. Follow me they seem to say. Come with me.

When disjointed fragments of the spirit become apparent so does the dysfunctionality and the moods in families. I’ve lived with it for all of my life. Alcoholism and addiction and finding myself in that sometimes harmonic space of looseness, threads disconnecting and coming together again, the family going on holiday and reconciling and then going their separate ways again afterwards. It became ritualistic. Sunday and chicken, Easter and pickled fish, tumbling head first into Christmas and the feast that waited for us on the dining room table after church. When you’re a child and everything, every corner that you turn seems to torment you, what do you do when you crave an intimate world? When people in your childhood world aren’t kind, aren’t loyal, aren’t normal, live without love and teach you to live without love too and so you begin to live in books. You love the beach, hate having your picture taken because you have to smile and it is just so hard to smile from your perspective. You begin to love Jean Rhys, slowly fall in love with her and Mrs Rochester, their madness becomes your madness, you becoming, you becoming without knowing, without thinking it, it just happens by chance, a mad dance. You begin to feel shame, humiliation, selfish, self-absorbed, arrogant, willful, and you tell yourself that you need love to exist and you watch the world around you, how it isolated you, your strangeness, one-who-flew-the-cuckoo’s-nest type of stuff in your head. You see couples. You see families. You see love and you don’t see love.

You are not the chosen one. You are not the winner. I am not the chosen one. I am not the winner and you convince yourself that love is just a thing, a possession for others to have and to hold onto. It is not the hardest feeling in the world to think that way. Becoming, becoming, becoming. I am fading away amongst the pillars of our community. Why is it so hard to live?

What happened to me as a child?

‘What are they doing? Don’t be shy. Tell me.’ A teacher asks me and I almost feel like crying, feeling humiliated, as if I was slapped very hard in the face all of fourteen. He has stripped me of the pureness I still had, destroyed my virtue and dignity.

And he smiles. He knows he has the upper hand. What else can he do but play this game, his game, an adult game? His wife is in the kitchen preparing supper. Doing what so many women of her generation do in the evenings after work (my mother was not a woman of her generation). His children are outside on the lawn playing. I can see them from where I am sitting. I can’t escape. It is the first time I see physically the sex impulse in the man. There is nothing I can do but wait for his interest to wane and for my mother to rescue me from my extra-lesson. They are photographs. Photographs of animals.
‘Nothing.’ I say. ‘Nothing I can see. I don’t know what they’re doing.’ I say firmly. He laughs at me as if I am a funny little girl, a strange creature, and silly.
‘If you say so. Don’t be so. Don’t be so serious. I was only playing, playing with you.’ He replies and takes his photographs back and puts it in a folder.

Older. (In seduction there is only theory and identity. Who submits and who is the one who dominates the situation.)
Every day I am so excited to see you, wonderful you and I wonder about the secrets of your heart Robert. Could they be as deep as mine, as deep as the river of blood flowing in veins? You enclose my mind but you are not free. But it is much like the secrecy of the deep, of my hometown’s darkening waters. Best left as images stitched together like the strategy of a quilt or patchwork. There’s something about the sky above you about you that I adore. I can’t take my eyes off you. But already I know I am sick, dying to belong in one sense in modern society and in another I am so far removed from reality, from normal and only you seem to be able to see this. Lovesick, I feel now that he was the only person who knew and understood me completely, that I was addicted to feeling in control and out of it mostly.

Port Elizabeth. It feels so long ago as to how my childhood home revived me. They make me feel as tough as strings of beef.

War has visited house by house during the riots. It tastes like a stale loaf that has been left out too long. A slice of hard, dry bread that you can crack between your fingers and leave your desire for longing for the light in my eyes. It feels as if it’s burning. Something on edge like ballet pointes. The frozen wasteland of the streets of Johannesburg. My brown nylon stockings are hung up to dry in the bathroom. The streets are a catapulted realm of new-found freedom exploding into stardom. Where and when does the external become important too and what becomes of all the rage, and all the sadness, take it all away from me, from my childhood? Is it Chatterley’s ghost – what is it that terrifies me so? Is it the cold comfort of the Scriptures? Do we live as we dream? ‘Take it all off he said. I want to watch you take it all off.’ I obeyed. The day I left you and not the other way round I put the disorder between us, the words that were said and could not be said into a box. How you dominated me, wounded me, what you made me feel with a glance, with one look, how you desired me and what you made me think when you ran your fingers up and down my spine asking me over and over, ‘Can you feel that? What does that make you feel?’ ‘It makes me feel calm, otherness.’ ‘Not happy. Don’t you feel happy child?’ ‘I feel as if there are boundaries between us.’ There are always boundaries between a man and a woman but you are too young to know that yet.’ ‘When you put your arms around me when I’m naked I feel epic.’ ‘Epic. Now that is a strange word for a child to use.’ ‘Isn’t that the word you use when you describe your books to your classes?’ ‘Yes, maybe.’ And I could feel him smile as he massaged my shoulders and kissed my neck. His arms feel like the handmaiden’s rope around my neck. There’s no place, no room for hysteria only violent phenomena in this bedroom. This is not my house. This is not my home. I don’t struggle. I just feel a release. It is sharp. He has introduced me to books and films, French films and pasta and wine, preserved figs, chai tea that I’ve become passionate about and J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. The Childhood of Jesus. The House Gun. I am so far away from my mother’s house, the house of a monster, her primitive hatred of me that ran like an electric current into my fingertips torturing me, and my cries that nobody heard. Her obsession, her mental abuse, no wife, no kindness had she for a mentally ill daughter. She was kind of a deranged person with her own emotional damages. One person to another and another funny kind of cruel person to me. I felt a violent despair for Robert. Could he see all of this in me? But the lover was something else. He made me cheese on toast. ‘So this is all a divorced father can make.’ He smiled. I smiled. And I remembered the mad, dark sea of Port Elizabeth, the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape, the green feast of Swaziland and how far I had come to eating cheese on toast. Electric hurt is the price every poet must pay. I slept with a lot of men in Johannesburg. Older, wiser, more experienced, divorced, married, some had children, some had one and some were lonely like I was. I think they all had a traumatic loneliness like I had. To sleep with someone like me I guess you had to have one.

I’ve thought of suicide. And I am sure everyone with a suicidal illness thinks of it at some point in their lives. I feel as if I have been part of the Otherness of the universe at large. They would say things to me although it would frustrate me sometimes stuff like, ‘It’s all part of Phenomena. Maintenance. You don’t have to worry about that. I will take care of you child.’ I didn’t want their money. I wanted love but they would smile at me when I spoke of it as if I was too young to know of such things, much too inexperienced but to me I knew a man had to offer me a window to that world or leave a door ajar. I had too much of a primitive instinct for love, and a hyperactive imagination. I wasted my youth and in Otherness I didn’t.

When he entered me I thought I would experience hysteria, a flood of those traumatic experiences I had in childhood and adolescence would somehow be reawakened in me. It’s not that they would buy me beautiful things, a bracelet, a pretty relic, it was the things that they would say to me. Their intellect, their fierce intelligence, how they would make me laugh and when I telephoned them I could have a few minutes of their precious time listening to their brutally articulately voices at the other end. How they would make me blush.

She is not mummy. She is mummy’s sister. She’s been away a long time. She’s gone to heaven. Reminding me that Sunday is a ghost of a day. And so is the chicken. All of my life I’ve worshiped cake with a ‘higher learning’, a ‘poetic justice’, eating bread, cinnamon rolls and pudding like it came with the light of the world. Gold is the owlish sun-god Ra.

Port Elizabeth. Home. Home has given me burning driftwood wings. Up, up, up and then down, down, down like a moth inhaling smoke evaporating in air.

The air tastes like fried fish, smells like calamari rings, frying chips in oil that’s weeks old in the café. A man is following me home. He is calling after me. I begin to pick up speed, walk faster, think it will be suicide to stop, to pause, to think. I turn around. I know this man. I sometimes give him dry bread and hot tea. Today I give him bread and hot tea again. His clothes are splattered with paint. Mummy paints the world dead leaving me a portrait of the female poet.
Johannesburg. He is touching me. Warm breath upon my cheek. Chaste kiss upon chaste kiss. ‘I thought you couldn’t see me.’ ‘Don’t talk.’ He says with my hair in his mouth. ‘What shampoo do you use? It tastes like pineapple. Smells expensive.’ ‘It’s my perfume. You bought it for me remember.’ ‘It smells like pineapple. You put it on your hair. Now that makes me feel young. You think of me when you were doing that?’ ‘Its flowers.’ ‘Don’t talk.’ He begins to unbutton my blouse one button at a time, puts his hand down the front of my blouse. ‘Are you enjoying this?’ ‘Yes. Yes.’ I say half-heartedly. He pushes the hair off my neck and his hand lingers there. And all I can think about is my aunt. My dead aunt. The beautiful, elegant alcoholic with two daughters and four grandchildren and an abusive husband. A handsome abuser who had a porn star’s hairdo who would physically hurl her across rooms and bounce her head against walls for merciless psychopathic fun. I would think of America and of how studying there seemed even farther out of my reach now. My aunt has been away a long time now. Gone to heaven leaving me a leper with a stoned heart, with a mother who is ice and glass, brutal and aggressive, an untitled poem who has ancient motives like the eighteen gangs in the warfare climate of the northern areas in Port Elizabeth. My aunt made me want to live. There is no speaking of Christianity and of mummy’s bright faith as I feel his hand on my thigh, brushing my skin, stroking my bare stomach draining bravery out of my spirit, out of me and calling it promiscuity. And even then during the sexual impulse I would be making up stories. I would be in some parallel universe, dimensions away, not feeling my heart’s pain or sacrifice or hearing the particles of music, even a symphony in a pop song. I would see the winter stranger by the lake, monsters, the feast of Robert (the man I could not have), see my letters in my red box of memories, having courage and a love song in the wilderness, the believer’s spring essence. What a feeling it is to be loved, to kiss when you’re awake in this world, when you walk upon this earth. I was always waiting for this spell, this magic but it never came. Only men. Only the men and they would take and take and take and leave me disillusioned and sad and suffering from depression. Strange people. What strange people men are? They can bruise a girl and flee and feel nothing in the end.

‘You’re a bicentennial girl, you know that.’ A man once told me.
‘You use big words. I don’t understand them.’ I replied.
‘It means ‘birthday’. Birthday girl. Every day you spend with me is going to be your birthday.’ He answered.
Of course I didn’t believe him and I didn’t see him all that much. He moved in higher circles than I did. His wife was a socialite and an artist. In Johannesburg I found myself in the New World. The land of giants, of immortals, of vampires who came to life in a twilight world; a wonderland of synchronicity, stimulation, the anatomy of maladies and melancholia. These men would share with me the philosophies they had about life, talk to me about their children and their wives and girlfriends, the houses that they were building, how much money they were making. Sometimes I would smoke cigarettes with them even though I didn’t smoke. They had their own motives for befriending younger people and I had mine for befriending older men, drinking with them to forget an absent father, a father who had made me grow up too fast, a mother who had neglected me, abandoned me, made me neurotic, emotionally unstable, who forced me to go beyond reality and to imagine things that had no psychological framework. My mother did not keep me from children who were rough. She threw me to the wolves, left me there. I was a drowning visitor for all of my life. I was the one who had to push myself out of the nest. My mother and father were so distracted by their own melancholia they hardly noticed when I left for the streets of Johannesburg searching everywhere destination anywhere for a miracle, for a return to love, for a boyfriend, a brave desert cowboy, an arrogant urban cowboy.

Promiscuity for me was so easy. An adult game. Strangers meeting strangers. I could kill like my mother could kill. Sometimes I would worry about the connection I would have with someone I would meet. He would brush my hair out of my face. We would go to a park, sit on the grass, take our shoes off, talk for hours, play chess or go to his room in Hillbrow. He would sell roses. I would do and think and act like my mother. I would brush him off the next time we would meet remembering everything about him, tell him to leave me alone. How he said, ‘You’re lovely.’ How could a girl ever forget that, when a man told her she was lovely?

Home was hell. School was hell too.

There was no motive for burning driftwood on the beach that night but the teenagers did it anyway and they sat and watched the flames burn on the night they matriculated and drank their father’s single malt whiskey, cheap wine that came in boxes, alcohol and beers and made out with each other in parked cars. This was their spot and for one night in their lives they weren’t going to be responsible. I was at home. I was at home reading a book. Milan Kundera. I was trying to find my identity. I was trying to find myself, educate myself. My mother was slowly becoming addicted to over-the-counter pain medication and alcohol. She and my brother would drink vodka and beers together and I would watch silently as this scene would unfold in front of me every night, hating it as it haunted me into sleep. Sometimes I would worry what was going to become of me. I began to write. Mostly about a man’s desires. I could not give the impulse a name yet. My father began to watch them too. His neck, a turkey neck, nude flesh. The man who had given me everything as a child and who had later began to grow more and more remote as I had begun to grown older.

I am writing. I am writing my kind-of-poetry. It is a late history of autumn poems. It reminds me of Ezra Pound’s Alba, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, crazy people, Gatsby’s kind-of-people, those loony tunes who weren’t at first glance emotionally secure, men and women who sabotaged themselves.

The strange people. Men are strange people. How brutally articulate they are. Electric hurt, electric sacrifice is the price that every poet must pay especially poets who have a hyperactive imagination.

Sometimes I would dream of that sea, a mad, dark sea, and a warm pilgrim, who had an obsession with the violent despair of a man who could never love her. It would feel as if I was being driven through with a stake made out of chiseled wood through my heart. I often felt a primitive and traumatic loneliness in a Johannesburg filled with up and down streets, cold alleyways, homosexuals standing on street corners in skinny jeans with cigarettes in their mouths coming out of the clubs in the early hours of the morning.

‘What do you eat?’ he asked me once (the lover). ‘You’re so skinny. I can feel your lovely bones. Ribs. Spine. Shoulder blades. Neck. Chin. Your features are Germanic. What do you live on? Bread and cheese and gin. So much tension in the beating of your heart, anger in your eyes, tears on your lashes and now there’s a forced smile I’ve been waiting all evening for.’ He said and there was almost a kind-of-joy in his voice.
‘I eat. I live. I survive just like anybody else.’ I answered. ‘I never said I needed you. Never said this was romantic love. I don’t need you to tell me that I’m beautiful.’
‘Child, why must you lie to yourself? I know for a fact how much you’ve already destroyed yourself. Look at me when I’m speaking to you. I don’t say these things to hurt you. God only knows how much you’ve been hurt by people before me and what kind of hell you’ve lived in before. I, I can only imagine. Listen to me. You don’t have to lie to me.’
‘Is it written on my face? Is it written on my body for the world to see that I have sabotaged myself again, again and again? I want to smoke now.’
‘What are you going to do when you’re not young anymore?’
‘I’ll be dead long before that.’
‘Why do you talk like that?’
‘You asked me that. What did you think I was going to answer with?’ And I blew the smoke in rings out of my mouth.

He kissed me hard then and I felt the world turn. I was a dream. He was a dream. He was love but he was not mine and for now I could feel unafraid, soft in his rough hands. I felt unashamed as he took my suffering, erased my madness, my sadness, innocence, and my childhood, the memory of a mother who did not love me, a father who did not speak to me anymore as I had grown more and more like a modern version of his wife.

‘Sweet girl.’
‘Why do you call me that?’
‘Because you are a sweet girl.’
‘But it sounds as if you still see me as a child.’
‘You’re seventeen. You’re still a child. And you shouldn’t smoke. You’re too young.’
‘I need you. Why are you leaving me so soon? You taught me how to smoke amongst other things.’ He kissed the top of my head and pulled the sheet above my naked body.
‘This is just a journey that you’re on little one. I have a house filled with women. Daughters, a wife and a housekeeper, maids. You will have many journeys. How we came to meet, you will soon forget. You will seduce and be seduced. This is the way of life my princess.’

Muse named. Muse unnamed. No promises were often made. A mother was gone, returned to the wards of hell from whence she came. With no gift of a father’s protection as I entered the world’s cruel, dark and dangerous waters some days were good and others not. Promiscuity was just a part of the Luciferian culture, the underground and urban youth culture infiltrating dreams, yielding disorder in all of the seasons. It must be so you know for each generation becomes challenged in their own separate ways. Teenagers become rebellious especially when it comes to sexuality. Your eyes have such a clarity to them Robert. What are you like privately? Do you know what it feels like to be homesick for a country to call your own? I feel homesick. A loneliness, a frustration, a compulsion, all suicidal. Who seduces you? Does Jesus seduce you? A girl who thinks about things like that. How I wished with all my heart, my internal organs and the symmetries of my tissue that he loved me on that dark road. Nothing but that big swamp of a Johannesburg ahead of mute, over-exposed, observant me. No longer a steely-eyed child, no longer ablaze with youth. It is the same me. It is the same morning but always walking down a different street and leaving confessions behind, weathering grief. Nothing to hold onto on my own. You take my head in your hands, I can’t cope, and I turned away. Later I found myself naked under moonlight, an insomniac in a strange world, in an even stranger man’s world. The cell door opens for you but not for me. Rain exists for me but not for you lover striking a nerve in-a-kind-of-gulf. Rain like silver, rain like hurt and pain (a flood of it cometh) for me but not for you.

I am in the shower, skin soaked with fragrance and soap, soaked skin from him after I removed my black skirt, white shirt and heels. And I try not to think about the man who gave me my first physical hurt turned into emotional then turned into mental. He brushes my fingers against his bottom lip. ’Lovely. Palace of love. Lovely eyes, lovely tongue and lovely fingers.’

‘It is impossible to know me. You will never know me.’ He laughs and laughs and laughs.
‘You belong in Paris. You can become a writer there. You have such a wild imagination.’
‘Right now I just feel indifferent to everything you are telling me. I thought you didn’t have the time to read anything I wrote.’
‘I make the time for things that are important to me. You’re important to me. Can you lift your hysterical veil now for once and let us have an adult conversation.’
‘Am I more important to you than your wife and your dinners and your parties?’
‘For now, for this minute, these two hours, yes you are. You look breath-taking by the way.’
I have stepped out of the shower, rinsed my perfumed hair, and dressed myself in a white large hotel towel.
‘Do you want to eat something now?’
‘Always room service.’
‘I thought you preferred it that way.’
‘No I do.’
‘Why don’t you dress yourself in front of me? Everything about you is beautiful. You’re a gift, a gift from the universe to me.’
‘You know if this was still apartheid we would both be arrested.’ I took off the towel, flung it onto the floor and got into the bed naked. They all gave me such confidence and a bravado.

I cannot see the future only the perspective of the present. It is like a house on fire melting humanity’s junk, J.M. Coetzee’s ‘skin and hair’ and magic fantastical plastic. I’ve walked the sunburnt miles, forgot what my name was, what the taste of my lipstick was on his lips, what it meant to trace my limbs with his, to sleep arm in arm, fingertips caught between fingers, my what he calls ‘my hysterical veil’. I need lovers, spirited male conversation (the educated, and the ancient the better) to resolve my history. Make it plain for me to see that I’ve moved on from a religious household where spirituality included daily prayers and meditation, Holy Communion with pieces of bread and grape juice. I needed bold men in my life like I needed air.

Robert, you are that most rare thing, angelic dreamer. So you supplied me with inspiration. So you cut me in deep, imaginative and raw ways. A cut from your blade was a project. Thinking of you, staring at you, looking at you, your progress illuminated the world around me. Everything was brighter. I regained my strength. I had a childhood love for you. It was lost on the pages of my journal. Lost always lost. You laugh and say nothing and it hurts. The bright heights of it. Lying on my back I’ve been draped with a blackening world’s information. When evening comes it is even more poetic than the previous day’s evening. And when I spy the afternoon sun, that great yellow balloon, I am a woman found who dares not speak of the insanity found in her family and whose shell of pain is wet and bitter. I have lived in chosen exile. On the surface prayer is like a vision, cold is a delight, the silver lining that passes by, salt and air meeting on the wind. In poverty there is always decay, the song of a choirgirl, crystals of light, a graffiti of them. I trace them on my arm, the windows and my palms. What he, the lover does not know won’t kill him like it kills me? I am slowly destroying myself. I have nowhere to go but down, down, down and there is no one to rescue me, to pull me out from under the dark towards the light.

His roses looked like cabbages. Red cabbages, a red song for the mad girl, a flower for my bleeding heart. The boy I used to play chess with in the park, sit on the grass barefoot, walk to the library with. He doesn’t have a name. His face doesn’t exist in my memory anymore. He has become a dark line, a dark fantasy although I can still hear his voice but it is from far away. All these affairs of the heart has made me feel strangely creative. They slide through me, teach me, whisper to me in the dark. I hate the dark. I need the light to burn bright even in the middle of the night. I pull sheets over mirrors. And I imagine the lover whose dark hair smelled of rain. The rain of a child’s world. This is my sky, my grass, my rage (I view the world as an Outsider). Girls are drinking beers in fancy restaurants trying to make conversation. Crystals of light evaporate in winter rain outside my window. Sexuality is really not of the flesh although most people think it is. It is of the mind. It is of the ego. It is intellectual. When is childhood ever at an end? This planet is unstable. I am unstable. I was tangled in an obsession for being a ghostly not of the flesh sexual object. I thought that that would open doors for me to humanity for humanity’s sake. I thought I would be able to hear the chords of the earth’s harmony. It kills me to say this. Madness can be as magnificent as euphoria. If only my childhood was different.

Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath. Robert Lowell. Confessional poetry down a brick lane. Confessional poetry for a coquettish girl. How beautiful and extraordinary those words seem to me now and forever more. When is childhood ever at an end for a writer, years of history and the educating of a young girl’s mind? I saw pictures of a formidable brick wall seeming to close in on me in those affairs of the heart and the mind. Disjointed, evaporated fragments of the spirit. And every one becoming more and more apparent to me as the long days and the longer nights went by of my late adolescence and early twenties.

Everything is disjointed, in fragments, there’s no clarity in what I have written down to me the reader. Everything is a journey. I’ve had enough of feeling this wretched way. Enough of the dead of a creamy-white hot summer season, a season of fruits challenging me to think and to escape into a voyage in the dark, a sheltered experience, the blue-eyed wonder of the sky, stars falling down, stars in my lover’s eyes pleading with me with a clean perception during the midnight hour, scrutinizing me openly with like minded possibilities like clouds gathering across the sky. Everything in life is a journey. One must walk the path of inexperience to get to modernity, influence, perception and wisdom. I think a writer, writers like Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Keats, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a poet like Emily Dickinson knew this.

Two Muslim girls are standing outside my office window smoking as if their lives depended on it. I hated the taste and smell of cigarettes when I lived in my hometown before I left for Johannesburg. I don’t know where the children get the impulse to smoke from these days. At this moment I am concentrating on improving myself. Having a set routine, sleep hygiene, working on not having sleep deprivation, writing in my journal. And I wonder do they think of me, the men, as often as I think of them or do not think of them? The sexual impulse is sacred but I never saw this between a man and a woman, never grew up with it only with the realisation that the weight of sin matters. I couldn’t stand to be happy. When darkness falls upon the city I came undone under his fingertips. I didn’t know why I hated myself so. Why certain books changed my life? Why I could only surrender when a man touched me? Love comes with paradise, tears, the explanations, the words, the observations that comes with gravity, the love songs, and it will leave you wanting lying in the dark. There is no such thing as organic time or a clock. White meringue weddings are for girls, for orchids, for arum lilies, for tea light candles, delicate material like lace not for a wonder guts like me, a tough cookie.

I will not appear the same in the photograph as I do in memory. What do children communicate when they laugh, when they smile? Is their world not filled with joy? Why not mine? The faded leaves of grass under school shoes, bubble-gum stuck under a school desk, reading Athol Fugard’s A Road to Mecca, remembering all of these childhood things brings something temporary to the surface. Not tension, not indifference, a feeling of love for being young and not being in an adult world yet. A feeling of being fearless, so motivated that I got the lead role of an archaeologist (or anthropologist, I forget) in a house play. I don’t know what courage means anymore. Can you see the fragments now? How disjointed the narrative is? But is it enough? Is it enough to want desire? Sometimes I think that is enough. The sexual transaction can be far removed from being ‘a moveable feast’. Dampness seeps into the lining of my coat as I enter the hotel in Johannesburg fifteen years ago with someone else this time. He does not put his hand in the small of my back. He does not offer to buy me a drink. He falls asleep almost immediately as his head hits the pillow. The relationship is over before I know it for sure. They don’t come back to me. Am I so forlorn? Is youth and wisdom wasted upon me? As a matter of fact they can all go to hell and burn there, get a nice golden brown tan with a fiery looking cough-syrupy-texture-like cocktail in one hand or Brazil or someplace exotic like Mauritius. Maybe they’re seeking much more high maintenance girls. I just wanted someone to understand me. It wasn’t so much the educating part of it that I wanted. Dead writers have taught me that the pinnacle of creative expression is to challenge conventional wisdom always. I’ve surrounded myself, invoking their spirit, reading and rereading lines of their work, succumbing to their world of madness. The world is not the same for women as it is for men. The role that women plays is still a diminished one in the equilibrium of space and time although there have been women who have been visionaries just as much as men have been. Women have taught by example, led by example just as much as men have but what these women have known is that wisdom comes later rather than sooner.

Darkness falls and I feel an emptiness inside. I am alone and I’ve finally surrendered to it. I am more in love with love than being in love with someone. I am Eve taken from Adam’s rib. A daughter doing what her mother did and did not do.