Amongst the desolation of a gritty beach,
abraded by years of abuse
a pole stands free.
The paint, once vivid orange,
is now rubbed back into original hard grey steel;
but the plaque above it remains legible.
No Non-Europeans Permitted
repeated in Afrikaans and Zulu.
The winds scrape,
the howling prowls ceaselessly
against the expanse of washed-out beach.
You can see corroded stones and bits of grease
deposited in blobs long ago.
The sea attacks the shore as though it had no choice,
a sluggish churning.
There's a searing wind which cuts and tears,
astringent to a peeled skin.
Grit which sticks under your eyelids,
scraping quietly,
till your eyes water and the grit pops out like tears.
Far away a hut stands disintegrating, deserted,
crumbling with every new weed and strenuous effort of tide,
You shield your eyes against the hardness,
and feel the slap of salt water stinging on your face.
(Published in A life stripped of illusions)
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
On the way to work
On the way to work
I see a dead dog lying on the pavement,
one leg lifted in rigor mortis,
a meaty chunk of shoulder flesh exposed.
There are woven baskets for sale
on the opposite side of the road, and round barstools.
The sun burns my driving arm crisp brown.
A desperate woman sells wooden bowls,
comes up to my window. I flick my
eyes away behind mascara-flecked
sunglasses. Her mouth drops a little.
There are men selling bags of avocados
and boxes of green grapes. I say no.
Driving to work I detour
through poverty.
The houses are small, shabby, paint peels
and fades away. Walls are not high,
and many are crumbling. People sit
in their yards and watch rerouted
traffic bump through the neighbourhood,
observing the unusual event as if it were a parade.
The shops are hot, dark holes. The children amuse
each other by buying sweets, walking,
playing in the streets.
It’s a different world here,
a world I’ve been warned against.
Driving home, one night, a dog leaps
into the dark road. I swerve to avoid its black
jumping shape. It’s limping, sick,
frightened or confused.
A group of men stand nearby, laughing
loudly, clustered in groups by their cars.
I put my foot hard on the pedal,
the dog disappears, defeated,
limping back into the darkness.
(Published in From Joburg to Jozi, Penguin)
I see a dead dog lying on the pavement,
one leg lifted in rigor mortis,
a meaty chunk of shoulder flesh exposed.
There are woven baskets for sale
on the opposite side of the road, and round barstools.
The sun burns my driving arm crisp brown.
A desperate woman sells wooden bowls,
comes up to my window. I flick my
eyes away behind mascara-flecked
sunglasses. Her mouth drops a little.
There are men selling bags of avocados
and boxes of green grapes. I say no.
Driving to work I detour
through poverty.
The houses are small, shabby, paint peels
and fades away. Walls are not high,
and many are crumbling. People sit
in their yards and watch rerouted
traffic bump through the neighbourhood,
observing the unusual event as if it were a parade.
The shops are hot, dark holes. The children amuse
each other by buying sweets, walking,
playing in the streets.
It’s a different world here,
a world I’ve been warned against.
Driving home, one night, a dog leaps
into the dark road. I swerve to avoid its black
jumping shape. It’s limping, sick,
frightened or confused.
A group of men stand nearby, laughing
loudly, clustered in groups by their cars.
I put my foot hard on the pedal,
the dog disappears, defeated,
limping back into the darkness.
(Published in From Joburg to Jozi, Penguin)
He sits there
He sits there,
yet he's already gone.
I'm too exhausted to move.
The heat has tired me,
the week has gone by too fast,
and that's tired me too.
He sits in a favourite chair,
smoking the nub of a cigarette.
And he's looking at me -
he's talking a little bit,
but I'm not hearing the words.
I'm too lost in my own misery.
Besides, they mean nothing
it's all been said and done.
So we're sitting here.
The heat has drained us both,
I helped him pack.
That left us silent and brooding.
His plane leaves tomorrow,
there's no stopping any of it.
The cars droning on by,
are the same as yesterday,
or the day before.
The grey tarmac,
the passengers on the buses,
the pedestrians,
the street corners -
everything is old, old, old.
Quietly, he puffs at his cigarette.
(Published in New Coin, in A Life Stripped of Illusions and on www.southernrainpoetry.com)
yet he's already gone.
I'm too exhausted to move.
The heat has tired me,
the week has gone by too fast,
and that's tired me too.
He sits in a favourite chair,
smoking the nub of a cigarette.
And he's looking at me -
he's talking a little bit,
but I'm not hearing the words.
I'm too lost in my own misery.
Besides, they mean nothing
it's all been said and done.
So we're sitting here.
The heat has drained us both,
I helped him pack.
That left us silent and brooding.
His plane leaves tomorrow,
there's no stopping any of it.
The cars droning on by,
are the same as yesterday,
or the day before.
The grey tarmac,
the passengers on the buses,
the pedestrians,
the street corners -
everything is old, old, old.
Quietly, he puffs at his cigarette.
(Published in New Coin, in A Life Stripped of Illusions and on www.southernrainpoetry.com)
An apple in Munich
I think a red apple won’t be good enough.
A red apple plucked from a bowl on a luxury
river cruise liner, carried in my bag for two days.
An apple cratered onboard in Passau,
placed in the industrial deep-freeze and displayed
five days later in a white china bowl somewhere in rural Hungary.
And then plucked by me, craving fresh fruit
after days of rich six-course meals.
But it languishes in the bowl in my cabin.
Until, packed, looking around, I grab it,
stuff it in my travel bag.
You never know when you’ll get hungry at airports
said an elderly woman on board.
We fly from Budapest to Munich.
Catch a train to the city centre.
It’s a cool spring, but the city streets, flanked by
history and beggars, are still full of strolling Germans.
It won’t be good enough, will he take it?
I ask the Scotsman with me. Surely he’d prefer money?
But the Scotsman takes it, gives it to the beggar
huddled in a doorway and without hesitation
the beggar, not even looking up, bites hungrily
into the fruit, devouring it quickly, desperately,
without words of debate.
(Published on www.southernrainpoetry.com)
A red apple plucked from a bowl on a luxury
river cruise liner, carried in my bag for two days.
An apple cratered onboard in Passau,
placed in the industrial deep-freeze and displayed
five days later in a white china bowl somewhere in rural Hungary.
And then plucked by me, craving fresh fruit
after days of rich six-course meals.
But it languishes in the bowl in my cabin.
Until, packed, looking around, I grab it,
stuff it in my travel bag.
You never know when you’ll get hungry at airports
said an elderly woman on board.
We fly from Budapest to Munich.
Catch a train to the city centre.
It’s a cool spring, but the city streets, flanked by
history and beggars, are still full of strolling Germans.
It won’t be good enough, will he take it?
I ask the Scotsman with me. Surely he’d prefer money?
But the Scotsman takes it, gives it to the beggar
huddled in a doorway and without hesitation
the beggar, not even looking up, bites hungrily
into the fruit, devouring it quickly, desperately,
without words of debate.
(Published on www.southernrainpoetry.com)
On the morning of my period
On the morning of my period
I am disappointed, disturbed.
I touch the roundness of my stomach
and wonder why there is nothing there.
I fasten a pad to catch the thick clots
of blood that drip down my legs after
a hot morning bath,
and wonder why there is nothing there.
All this, despite
not wanting children, being on the Pill,
yet even then I am reckless
taking it at odd times.
On the morning when the blood has dried up
and sun fastens itself to the carpet,
I prepare to take a new pill from a new packet,
filling up with love for you,
letting go of the disappointment of empty bits.
I slather butter on pancake rounds,
the extra kilo is round on me, weights me,
does not fill me up. My empty stomach
protrudes guiltily, I am filled with the past.
In the week of my period I am angry at you:
for not giving me a child,
comfort, security, I am contradictory,
we fight over a theatre location,
I tell my therapist I am not ready for commitment,
when, inside, the unborn child stirs,
restless, comfortless, we're both looking for a home.
And I deny it by our fight,
as I breathe in the hot breath of your body,
the full lips, the round stomach,
filling up my body with quilts, furniture,
food, acquisitions for the home.
I brush my teeth,
pop open the silver foil covering Saturday's pill,
weigh myself, bath, dress, make-up –
all the while wondering if this was a
phantom period, wondering if something
stirs in me still.
(Published in The fire in which we burn)
I am disappointed, disturbed.
I touch the roundness of my stomach
and wonder why there is nothing there.
I fasten a pad to catch the thick clots
of blood that drip down my legs after
a hot morning bath,
and wonder why there is nothing there.
All this, despite
not wanting children, being on the Pill,
yet even then I am reckless
taking it at odd times.
On the morning when the blood has dried up
and sun fastens itself to the carpet,
I prepare to take a new pill from a new packet,
filling up with love for you,
letting go of the disappointment of empty bits.
I slather butter on pancake rounds,
the extra kilo is round on me, weights me,
does not fill me up. My empty stomach
protrudes guiltily, I am filled with the past.
In the week of my period I am angry at you:
for not giving me a child,
comfort, security, I am contradictory,
we fight over a theatre location,
I tell my therapist I am not ready for commitment,
when, inside, the unborn child stirs,
restless, comfortless, we're both looking for a home.
And I deny it by our fight,
as I breathe in the hot breath of your body,
the full lips, the round stomach,
filling up my body with quilts, furniture,
food, acquisitions for the home.
I brush my teeth,
pop open the silver foil covering Saturday's pill,
weigh myself, bath, dress, make-up –
all the while wondering if this was a
phantom period, wondering if something
stirs in me still.
(Published in The fire in which we burn)
The bruise
It was the bruise on the breast
that did it for me.
It was a large pendulous breast
that hung obscene over the
damaged globe of stomach
and cake slices of hip fat.
'Ah no!' the crowd yelled as
she took off her bikini bra to tackle
her opponent, yet another fat woman
in this circus show of freaks.
They faced each other:
one taller, slightly less fat,
less a monstrosity,
with slim legs and perky breasts.
All she had was a huge belly that looked out of place,
like a pregnant woman's melon.
They squared up, they
battled and butted,
the crowd yelled feverishly
in the darkness of a converted movie house.
The breasts swung wildly,
flesh rippled.
There was no winner as they stood before us,
starrring into the our darkness,
defiantly showing their fleshy failures.
Lights pulsed, we clapped,
the bigger woman's breasts hung.
We stared:breasts like hers are usually hidden.
I noticed her bruise then,
a purple imperfection –
quickly, suddenly, she remembered:
she raised her hands to cover her ugly breasts,
the body put on parade for deformity and grossness,
and just as quickly she released her hands,
as though remembering an acquired defiance.
And then I saw her too:
I saw the woman who'd been chosen
somewhere in America
for her grotesque thighs
and dimpled stretched legs.
Who'd dropped her bra in an audition,
standing still for others to look and prod,
deciding that there was enough sag.
The woman who had cultivated ugliness because,
so I thought, it was easy.
But it isn't easy.
It isn't easy to stand there,
showing your ugliness to the world,
pretending you don't care
when people gasp in revulsion
and fascination
as you drop your bra.
It isn't easy,
and you show just how hard it is
when suddenly you remember to cover
a bruise on your breast,
hiding, for a second,
the folds of your dropped flesh.
(Published in The fire in which we burn)
that did it for me.
It was a large pendulous breast
that hung obscene over the
damaged globe of stomach
and cake slices of hip fat.
'Ah no!' the crowd yelled as
she took off her bikini bra to tackle
her opponent, yet another fat woman
in this circus show of freaks.
They faced each other:
one taller, slightly less fat,
less a monstrosity,
with slim legs and perky breasts.
All she had was a huge belly that looked out of place,
like a pregnant woman's melon.
They squared up, they
battled and butted,
the crowd yelled feverishly
in the darkness of a converted movie house.
The breasts swung wildly,
flesh rippled.
There was no winner as they stood before us,
starrring into the our darkness,
defiantly showing their fleshy failures.
Lights pulsed, we clapped,
the bigger woman's breasts hung.
We stared:breasts like hers are usually hidden.
I noticed her bruise then,
a purple imperfection –
quickly, suddenly, she remembered:
she raised her hands to cover her ugly breasts,
the body put on parade for deformity and grossness,
and just as quickly she released her hands,
as though remembering an acquired defiance.
And then I saw her too:
I saw the woman who'd been chosen
somewhere in America
for her grotesque thighs
and dimpled stretched legs.
Who'd dropped her bra in an audition,
standing still for others to look and prod,
deciding that there was enough sag.
The woman who had cultivated ugliness because,
so I thought, it was easy.
But it isn't easy.
It isn't easy to stand there,
showing your ugliness to the world,
pretending you don't care
when people gasp in revulsion
and fascination
as you drop your bra.
It isn't easy,
and you show just how hard it is
when suddenly you remember to cover
a bruise on your breast,
hiding, for a second,
the folds of your dropped flesh.
(Published in The fire in which we burn)
A life stripped of illusions
What happens is this:
a wall suddenly becomes a wall:
white, clean, clinical. It has nothing to say.
People suddenly become people,
legs bared to the summer
are smoothly shaven but you can already see
the black pinpricks where hair will grow.
The colours fade and dry out
till all that is left is a brilliant white wall,
stripped of shadow and angle,
friends rest against it.
The colours fade:
the rich romanticism of old paintings
where women wear brocades and silks,
and candles glow dimly
straggle into the stark white of a clean blank wall.
The images are the one-dimensional monotone photos
of newsprint, single images
where one child cries, or a man limps alone,
or a woman wails in despair.
Till that splinters and erases itself
into millions of negatives,
brown, edged, fingered and glossy
but indecipherable.
You have to hold them to the light
to find out what they're saying.
What we have here
is the bared white reality
of nothingness.
What we have here is the
reality of ordinary, every-day objects
as ordinary every-day objects.
You can't put paint on them,
your conscience makes it slide off.
Can't prettify it,
it's all waterproof.
It slips and slides away and you're left:
weakened by the reality of a blank wall,
and the giving over to nothingness.
(Published in A life stripped of illusions)
a wall suddenly becomes a wall:
white, clean, clinical. It has nothing to say.
People suddenly become people,
legs bared to the summer
are smoothly shaven but you can already see
the black pinpricks where hair will grow.
The colours fade and dry out
till all that is left is a brilliant white wall,
stripped of shadow and angle,
friends rest against it.
The colours fade:
the rich romanticism of old paintings
where women wear brocades and silks,
and candles glow dimly
straggle into the stark white of a clean blank wall.
The images are the one-dimensional monotone photos
of newsprint, single images
where one child cries, or a man limps alone,
or a woman wails in despair.
Till that splinters and erases itself
into millions of negatives,
brown, edged, fingered and glossy
but indecipherable.
You have to hold them to the light
to find out what they're saying.
What we have here
is the bared white reality
of nothingness.
What we have here is the
reality of ordinary, every-day objects
as ordinary every-day objects.
You can't put paint on them,
your conscience makes it slide off.
Can't prettify it,
it's all waterproof.
It slips and slides away and you're left:
weakened by the reality of a blank wall,
and the giving over to nothingness.
(Published in A life stripped of illusions)
My memory: the past in six movements
"August 31, 1983
I am changing. I have been changing since I first began a diary eight months ago. Even before then I was changing. I have just been too childish and young to notice. And now I am growing up. Suddenly I'm finding out all about myself. Never before have I tried to figure myself out. I've always covered my emotions and feelings by thinking of other things. There is still more to come. More for me to discover. I search myself. I want to discover more. Thinking is just thinking. As I write I discover..."
I was eleven when I wrote this, with my twelfth birthday two months away. I was just coming to the realisation that by writing, by keeping a diary, I was starting on a journey of self-exploration...Read more here
I am changing. I have been changing since I first began a diary eight months ago. Even before then I was changing. I have just been too childish and young to notice. And now I am growing up. Suddenly I'm finding out all about myself. Never before have I tried to figure myself out. I've always covered my emotions and feelings by thinking of other things. There is still more to come. More for me to discover. I search myself. I want to discover more. Thinking is just thinking. As I write I discover..."
I was eleven when I wrote this, with my twelfth birthday two months away. I was just coming to the realisation that by writing, by keeping a diary, I was starting on a journey of self-exploration...Read more here
Monday, December 1, 2008
Keeping the secrets
Keeping the secrets, keeping the past alive, making sure none of it is lost in the years and moments that follow. I suppose it’s one way of explaining why I keep a journal. But it doesn’t explain it all.
I have over thirty volumes of journals. They range from fat, black official notebooks bought in London, to thin, ordinary volumes covered in pretty paper to make them look special, to files, to folders, to really fancy books with marbleised paper, leather bindings and resplendent covers.
I started keeping a diary over nineteen years ago. It was January 1983 and I was eleven. I can’t say I was inspired by anyone. I simply had an itch to start keeping a journal, an itch I ignored until I read Anne Frank’s Diary. That started me off. I couldn’t wait anymore. A friend of my mother’s had given me a special book to copy my poetry into, and into that corduroy red book went the first entries in large, round childish handwriting.
They are not remarkable. They talk about school, crushes on Princess Diana, then a 21 year-old mother of William, about weight obsessions, my embarrassment over my developing breasts, (they were already the biggest of the girls in my standard) and what food I ate; they were about school trips, an impending journey to San Francisco, and they contain some examples of my earliest prose.
They became deeper, more meaningful and serious as that year went on. I seemed to have returned from that trip to the US older, more searching, having grown up in an important and very real sense.
After that my writing grew smaller and more cramped as I tried to “grow” up, not realising I didn’t need to make the writing small to show my increasing maturity. The topics deepened then too: they turned to crushes on other girls, to philosophy and to what I was beginning to formulate as my own beliefs in life and why we were here. They contained arguments with my divorced mother, and they spoke about my desires to become a singer, a pilot, an actress, a writer, an astronaut and other childish dreams.
‘I’ll become an opera singer,’ I told my best friend, ‘and when I’m fifty I’ll turn to writing.’ She thought it was a good idea. None of us questioned whether I could actually turn my voice to opera. (I can’t, I no longer even like the stuff. But then my ambition in this regard came from the enormous crush I had on Maria Callas.)
They were the vessels into which I poured loneliness, dreams, hopes, fears, emerging puberty, the faint twinklings of adulthood.
And they changed as I grew. The books got bigger and prettier in size, the writing more fluid, the themes bigger. Reincarnation, Buddhism, conversations and arguments, my dying belief in religions. I grew up. I became a teenager. I got pimples and big breasts, I entered high school, I told my teachers I believed in the Masters and I didn’t believe in death. Everyone thought I was strange. A new-born Christian tried to show me the error of my ways. The Jewish religious teacher kicked me out of Jewish religious classes. But I stuck to my guns, I believed what I believed.
The teenage years were not that happy. I spent my time dreaming, writing journals, hoping that one day soon our emigration papers from America would come through, and we’d be gone, away from this hot, horrible country with its limited opportunities. When that didn’t happen I took to trying to materialise money out of the air. (That didn’t work either.)
Political awareness came early. Having been born in Spain, and having lived in Israel from the ages of three to five, I came to South Africa with a fresh eye. The first time I saw a black person was in Jerusalem. I was amazed. That night my mother made chocolate cake and I smeared chocolate icing over my face to prove that I too could be black.
I wrote about the black maids who worked in our houses, in the homes of my friends, of the inequities. I followed the events in South Africa keenly, from the Rubicon speech to the State of Emergency (Did this mean I wouldn’t have to go to school – unfortunately not), to the plunging rand and the violence that was bursting out in the townships.
It’s all there in the dairies. But it’s hard to extract the raw essence of all the people I was then. To go back into the dairy pulls me right back into those worlds, those times of my childhood, my teenagehood. Till I pull my head out of them and wonder where I am. Because I’m not here in the present, and I’m not there either. The veil of memories serves as a sharp, thankful reminder that I’m an adult. The adult I longed to be so long ago.
But there’s power in diaries too. The power to draw you back, sure, but also the power of making you remember things you’d rather forget, or the things you forgot simply because there was so much going on in your mind at any particular time. And there’s the power of knowing your younger selves exist, in neatly stacked volumes, in a variety of inks and colour papers, and it’s harder to ignore your dreams when they’re there, imploring you to go out and reach them.
My diaries have also taught me to write. At first they were self-conscious musings. Later on, at around twelve, I read Anais Nin’s journals, and found her exploring other people psyches in them, and then turning them into characters. I didn’t think the people I knew were that interesting, but I tried anyway. I attempted turning my twelve-year-old friends into exotic myths. It didn’t work, but I did learn something about characterisation, gestures, people turned into fictional elements.
I learned to write dialogue as I recorded arguments, religious disagreements with my grandfather and conversations with my friends. I learned where to put the pauses, how to make it dramatic, what to leave out. Of course I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was learning to become the writer I’d decided to be at eleven.
University. Reading quantities of African and South African literature, and learning that I could express myself through the land and the people I knew and saw around me. The choices were open, and realising that my own attempts at fiction were freed. I too began to write about South Africa, instead of mysterious overseas countries and surrealistic landscapes.
To starting work, and learning how to deal with that part of my life. I was now the adult I’d longed to be, although I didn’t feel it at twenty-two. I felt it only later, much later, when I’d gone through some more growing up, through love affairs, a disastrous job, the revolution of losing confidence in my own talents. And on to the writing successes that were beginning to come at such a young age, the poetry and short stories being published to winning the Sanlam Award, to becoming the journalist I’d decided to be, simply because I could write.
The diary was there throughout it all. I never stopped except for a period of three months, when I thought I should try to do without it. What did I do instead? I kept a writing journal, proving to myself that I couldn’t not keep a journal. There was no choice. I had this compulsion that others didn’t, that other people seemed to admire, yet not understand. No matter how busy my life, I always took time out for writing my journal, for catching up, recording it. Even reliving life, perhaps.
It’s a compulsion that goes on toady, and it’s a compulsion I just can’t explain. I finished a volume the other day, and I’m diaryless at the moment. I feel stateless. I can’t wait to begin the new one, to start on those fresh, clean pages, ride across them with my old-fashioned fountain pen and bottle of smooth blue ink. Everything else I do is written on computer, but not my diaries. I go back centuries when using the books and the special pen.
Nearly twenty years. Almost like a relationship. Do I feel such an attachment to the past that I cannot let go? That I keep diaries to recapture it, to feel again what it was like to live through all the years? Perhaps.
But perhaps it’s also more a need based in the present, oddly enough. I need to be here, now, recording the conversations recently had, noting the ideas tossed around in a room one night, for instance. It’s a need to reduce time to an essence, to a collection of words, days, months.
And the need to write. The need that propels my short stories and my poems propels the non-fiction side too. It’s arbitrary, it’s unexplainable. It’s simply there.
(Published in Fidelities, August 2003)
I have over thirty volumes of journals. They range from fat, black official notebooks bought in London, to thin, ordinary volumes covered in pretty paper to make them look special, to files, to folders, to really fancy books with marbleised paper, leather bindings and resplendent covers.
I started keeping a diary over nineteen years ago. It was January 1983 and I was eleven. I can’t say I was inspired by anyone. I simply had an itch to start keeping a journal, an itch I ignored until I read Anne Frank’s Diary. That started me off. I couldn’t wait anymore. A friend of my mother’s had given me a special book to copy my poetry into, and into that corduroy red book went the first entries in large, round childish handwriting.
They are not remarkable. They talk about school, crushes on Princess Diana, then a 21 year-old mother of William, about weight obsessions, my embarrassment over my developing breasts, (they were already the biggest of the girls in my standard) and what food I ate; they were about school trips, an impending journey to San Francisco, and they contain some examples of my earliest prose.
They became deeper, more meaningful and serious as that year went on. I seemed to have returned from that trip to the US older, more searching, having grown up in an important and very real sense.
After that my writing grew smaller and more cramped as I tried to “grow” up, not realising I didn’t need to make the writing small to show my increasing maturity. The topics deepened then too: they turned to crushes on other girls, to philosophy and to what I was beginning to formulate as my own beliefs in life and why we were here. They contained arguments with my divorced mother, and they spoke about my desires to become a singer, a pilot, an actress, a writer, an astronaut and other childish dreams.
‘I’ll become an opera singer,’ I told my best friend, ‘and when I’m fifty I’ll turn to writing.’ She thought it was a good idea. None of us questioned whether I could actually turn my voice to opera. (I can’t, I no longer even like the stuff. But then my ambition in this regard came from the enormous crush I had on Maria Callas.)
They were the vessels into which I poured loneliness, dreams, hopes, fears, emerging puberty, the faint twinklings of adulthood.
And they changed as I grew. The books got bigger and prettier in size, the writing more fluid, the themes bigger. Reincarnation, Buddhism, conversations and arguments, my dying belief in religions. I grew up. I became a teenager. I got pimples and big breasts, I entered high school, I told my teachers I believed in the Masters and I didn’t believe in death. Everyone thought I was strange. A new-born Christian tried to show me the error of my ways. The Jewish religious teacher kicked me out of Jewish religious classes. But I stuck to my guns, I believed what I believed.
The teenage years were not that happy. I spent my time dreaming, writing journals, hoping that one day soon our emigration papers from America would come through, and we’d be gone, away from this hot, horrible country with its limited opportunities. When that didn’t happen I took to trying to materialise money out of the air. (That didn’t work either.)
Political awareness came early. Having been born in Spain, and having lived in Israel from the ages of three to five, I came to South Africa with a fresh eye. The first time I saw a black person was in Jerusalem. I was amazed. That night my mother made chocolate cake and I smeared chocolate icing over my face to prove that I too could be black.
I wrote about the black maids who worked in our houses, in the homes of my friends, of the inequities. I followed the events in South Africa keenly, from the Rubicon speech to the State of Emergency (Did this mean I wouldn’t have to go to school – unfortunately not), to the plunging rand and the violence that was bursting out in the townships.
It’s all there in the dairies. But it’s hard to extract the raw essence of all the people I was then. To go back into the dairy pulls me right back into those worlds, those times of my childhood, my teenagehood. Till I pull my head out of them and wonder where I am. Because I’m not here in the present, and I’m not there either. The veil of memories serves as a sharp, thankful reminder that I’m an adult. The adult I longed to be so long ago.
But there’s power in diaries too. The power to draw you back, sure, but also the power of making you remember things you’d rather forget, or the things you forgot simply because there was so much going on in your mind at any particular time. And there’s the power of knowing your younger selves exist, in neatly stacked volumes, in a variety of inks and colour papers, and it’s harder to ignore your dreams when they’re there, imploring you to go out and reach them.
My diaries have also taught me to write. At first they were self-conscious musings. Later on, at around twelve, I read Anais Nin’s journals, and found her exploring other people psyches in them, and then turning them into characters. I didn’t think the people I knew were that interesting, but I tried anyway. I attempted turning my twelve-year-old friends into exotic myths. It didn’t work, but I did learn something about characterisation, gestures, people turned into fictional elements.
I learned to write dialogue as I recorded arguments, religious disagreements with my grandfather and conversations with my friends. I learned where to put the pauses, how to make it dramatic, what to leave out. Of course I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was learning to become the writer I’d decided to be at eleven.
University. Reading quantities of African and South African literature, and learning that I could express myself through the land and the people I knew and saw around me. The choices were open, and realising that my own attempts at fiction were freed. I too began to write about South Africa, instead of mysterious overseas countries and surrealistic landscapes.
To starting work, and learning how to deal with that part of my life. I was now the adult I’d longed to be, although I didn’t feel it at twenty-two. I felt it only later, much later, when I’d gone through some more growing up, through love affairs, a disastrous job, the revolution of losing confidence in my own talents. And on to the writing successes that were beginning to come at such a young age, the poetry and short stories being published to winning the Sanlam Award, to becoming the journalist I’d decided to be, simply because I could write.
The diary was there throughout it all. I never stopped except for a period of three months, when I thought I should try to do without it. What did I do instead? I kept a writing journal, proving to myself that I couldn’t not keep a journal. There was no choice. I had this compulsion that others didn’t, that other people seemed to admire, yet not understand. No matter how busy my life, I always took time out for writing my journal, for catching up, recording it. Even reliving life, perhaps.
It’s a compulsion that goes on toady, and it’s a compulsion I just can’t explain. I finished a volume the other day, and I’m diaryless at the moment. I feel stateless. I can’t wait to begin the new one, to start on those fresh, clean pages, ride across them with my old-fashioned fountain pen and bottle of smooth blue ink. Everything else I do is written on computer, but not my diaries. I go back centuries when using the books and the special pen.
Nearly twenty years. Almost like a relationship. Do I feel such an attachment to the past that I cannot let go? That I keep diaries to recapture it, to feel again what it was like to live through all the years? Perhaps.
But perhaps it’s also more a need based in the present, oddly enough. I need to be here, now, recording the conversations recently had, noting the ideas tossed around in a room one night, for instance. It’s a need to reduce time to an essence, to a collection of words, days, months.
And the need to write. The need that propels my short stories and my poems propels the non-fiction side too. It’s arbitrary, it’s unexplainable. It’s simply there.
(Published in Fidelities, August 2003)
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