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.

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.

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.

sixty-eight

“I had felt that if I moved, if I spoke, if I breathed, everything I valued and everyone I loved would be destroyed. But with my analyst’s belief in me, that suicide vest packed with the explosive that is shame started to loosen. The heaviness in my chest eased, and I drew breath. The weight had not only been despair, it had been rage. Frozen rage. The ice-fire of helplessness that I had finally turned into words, clumsy words, but because they had been spoken to a man who could hear them for me, a glacier shifted, moved by the melt of tears. It’s been said that there are no monuments to rape survivors. The only memorial I can build is this one, fashioned from words.