Love and Fury – A Memoir

four

“There is no way to say something out loud that you can't say to yourself first. And so I was silent. But the body knows what the mind doesn't, and it has its own ways of getting what it wants, and I had gone off the pill. I told Aiden it made me nauseous and that my breasts hurt, which was the truth. I said hormones made me blue and that was true too. I was blue. The tears I had not shed in South Africa had risen to the surface since I had been in London. They would appear when I rattled along the Underground to work.

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.

thirty-five

“To escape the heat, I went to a diner on Bleecker Street. I was paying my respects, I suppose, to a city that did not look askance at a woman out and about alone. I sat down at a small table and ordered a glass of wine and a Caesar salad. I had grown to love the communal solitude of New York. I would miss this city where I learned to embrace ambition and to try things that felt beyond my reach, but much as I loved it, South Africa was the place where I felt there was unfinished business.

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.