five

“I tried, without yet having read Angela Carter, Kathy Acker or Tsitsi Dangarembga, who would one day show me how, to capture the turbulence of the body. I tried to write its desires, excesses and subjugations, but I could not think of this intimate woman’s writing as political. I had written love stories that acknowledged cruelty and fear. I had put the body at the centre of a tale and tried to express the passions that had gripped me. But I had failed. The savage censor in me tore up my pages, revolted by the self that appeared on the page – naked, wild, vulnerable.

sixteen

“But those books I had stopped opening accused me anyway. They had been my guides and I had abandoned them. At eighteen, I found in them a political language that enabled me to express what I saw around me, but which I had struggled to name. At twenty-six, I had strayed –been led astray- by my female body and its desires and its conditioning, despite Simone de Beauvoir showing me how woman are made and not born. Dog-eared copies of classics like The Myth of Motherhood and Fat is a Feminist Issue had unshackled a schoolgirl mind that encountered feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis and literature.

twenty-one

“The truth is, being contained in the back seat of the car, pinned down by my children’s bodies, their hands searching under my clothes for skin to caress, was bliss. It was also true – I thought as the veld whizzed by and we kept a lookout for kudu and baboons – those two weeks with nobody to attend to, nobody to interrupt me, nobody asking for food or comfort, had been bliss too. Being away and being alone had restored my sense of self. I had been able to think and to write.

twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

forty

“Shocked as I was by what I had seen, I was not surprised. This violence, flowering like a malignant plant, is rooted in the past. It has a lineage. South Africa is a country that makes men by breaking them first. That is the masculinist ethos of the gangs, the police, the apartheid army, and of a wider culture slow to exchange words but lightning quick to trade blows. I sat on a bench at Three Anchor Bay and watched black oyster-catchers running along black rocks. I longed for a return of the numbness that pushed violence into places I could not access, like the time I was released from detention in 1985.