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.
We clinked bottles and smiled, but his words stung because the life I’d imagined for myself had slipped through my inattentive fingers. It was not the place that was a backwater, it was me. My spirit had eddied into the shallows of domesticity and beached itself. I had let John down because I had let myself down by immuring my combative originality, which he’d always valued and loved. Yes, my brother’s words stung –look how long I have remembered them- but they were a gift: he would not me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans.
nineteen
“‘Time is the trouble,’ I said. I no longer experienced my days as linear or purposeful. I was trapped in cyclical domestic time, I tried to explain, where there was no past and no future because the washing-up, cooking, eating, talking, sex, my period, were always on repeat. He made a little speech about how it takes some young women a while to get used to a new baby and the responsibilities of managing a household. I told him I loved the baby; I understood babies and their wildness; it was not the baby that was the trouble. There were adjustments to be made, said the doctor. On he went. I drowned out his voice by picturing the paper knife on his desk plunged into his heart. It was only because killing him was illegal and I did not want to go to prison again that I sat on my hands and allowed him to live. He went on talking and so I did not tell him about wanting to die when the afternoons took forever to get to the night.
I did not like how the Prozac made me feel, nauseous, numb, outside of myself, set apart from other people, muffled. I was told I needed to give the body time to adjust, but months passed and the despair was no different, even though I took those pills exactly as prescribed, because I wanted to inhabit life, not drift through it like an angry ghost. Like the ghost who’d haunted me at boarding school, the ghost of a girl who, in the 1920s, had burned to death in the dormitory where I slept. A boarder from far away, she and two companions had stayed an extra night after the end of term because of the timing of their trains.
We will die, I thought. We’ll burn to death because no one would break the rule never to go outside. We will die because not one of those girls, not even the prefects who were there in loco parentis at night when there were no adults, would smash the glass and take out the key.
twenty
“To make a future, shared storytelling was needed. I read what she had to say about the healing power of writing. That we needed to tell the tales of the past to better shape the future. Jane had opened up a vital literary space. I sat up straight, my mind clear. There was nothing wrong with my head, I knew; it was my circumstances I had got so spectacularly back to front. Pills were not going to heal me. What I needed was work. Real work.
Her eyebrows arched as she studied my face and I suspected that she, also a wife and a mother, understood domestic drowning. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I was planning to do English textbooks too. Next Monday morning, then. At eight?’ I hugged her. Thanks to her, I was going to fix myself. I was going to fix the world. I was going to do this with books. When I got home, I threw away those numbing little pills and negotiated a new way of working with Magdalena – and there I was, all set for my future life’s work.
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-two
“In 1995 we set about sifting through these texts for a collection we titled Coming on Strong, which also included oral testimonies. We received stories of interrogation, rape, assault and a mother-in-law shot by South African soldiers in a marketplace, as well as beatings and bombings. There were stories of love too: a reunion between a mother and a daughter separated by the migrant labour system, the erotic delights of a new lover, the gift of a child.
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.
I wanted to be elsewhere, but, trapped in the back of a hot truck, my only escape was to refuse to learn to identify the birds. I battened down the hatches of my mind and refused my father entry. Refused to know. Refused to catalogue those birds into categories of similarity and difference, to recall and compare, which gave my sister and my mother their bond with my father.
thirty-two
“I stayed put and lost myself in books. I had a decade of reading to catch up on and, because books were the place I had escaped to ever since I had learned to read, I went into a reading frenzy. I distilled what I read into sentences that occasionally had an elegance to them. I spent whole days in the library. Although ambition and work do not fill an empty Sunday-morning bed, and nothing substitutes for the joy of nuzzling the warm nape of a sleepy child’s neck, I learned to live without this. No matter that it was hard, I was ecstatically absorbed.
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.
fifty
“That is not true in South Arica. The country has had its share of serial killers, but the mundane murders, so chillingly common, prompted me to think of South Africa itself as the serial killer. A society preying on the most vulnerable citizens, young girls, with impunity. That was the context. The plot hinged around the abduction of the seven-year-old daughter of Captain Riedwaan Faizal and his desperate search for her.
fifty-two
“So, I went on at her about my eccentric but good-enough childhood and my well-intentioned parents, doing my best to keep from her everything that really troubled me. The experiences I could neither name nor claim, I had channelled into my writing. I saw no reason to repeat them, but I suspect I knew even then that if I did, she would be onto me – and there would be nowhere left for me to hide.
fifty-three
“I was thinking of his assertion that ‘what matters to the patient is the willingness of the analyst to help’.
sixty-six
“I told him that I had tried to write a suicide note, but I could not write one. Nor could I plagiarise the ones I found online, written by people more eloquent than I. ‘Writer’s block,’ I told him. ‘So far, it’s kept me alive.’ I laughed at my joke, but he did not. He looked at me over slender steepled fingers and said, ‘It’s what’s alive in you – your writing, your creativity – that won’t let you finish.’ That was not something I had considered, and it gave me pause.
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.