Dawn breaks. Night falls.
What is the correct path, and who is to say what that is exactly? To be good, to do good, to be virtuous, I mean, this is what we teach a child. We teach a child about the lessons of nobility, and humility. We praise children for being obedient, for being high achievers, for being athletic and academically gifted, for being kind to the less fortunate, and as adults we give our highest achievers honours in the form of prizes, and the highest praise.
It is the poet that speaks from memory, and it is the poet that is defined by memory and knowledge and the wasteland of childhood, that wilderness of war and love, the undefined, yet infinite spaces and shapes of humanity, and the human condition.
It took me twenty years to write from experience. What is this? Is this me, the poet being free, and honest about the journey? Every poet’s source of truth comes from either deep feelings of resentment that cannot be hidden, diminished or erased or the source comes from aspirations, truth, or emotional pain or the tension and the spark from the moodswing.
Dawn breaks. Night falls. I am the poet who has found God and faith. It is my brother and my mother and my father who have found God and faith and the church. It is reckoning and determination that sets the path in front of me tonight.
To me Albert Camus was a thing of strange beauty. This caused a very powerful image in my mind. It was his intellect and masculinity that set my intellect and feminine energies and powers on fire. It was Albert Camus that made me want to write about a kind of love that was elusive, the kind of love that could never find the man or the woman, the kind of love that always danced within reach but that could never be obtained, found, held, claimed. It was Camus and what he cherished, the intimacies and vulnerabilities of the interloper that I wanted to write about.
I began to read philosophy, really study it. I began to spend my time, while my father, now eighty years old, while he rested, or read the newspaper, or bible, I began to spend my time reading books on politics and men and women who had been involved in politics during the sixties in apartheid South Africa. I read love stories. I found love stories in poems, in the poems of South Africans Dennis Brutus, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Mangaliso Buzani, Alan Finlay, Robert Berold, Joan Metelerkamp, Abu Bakr Solomons, Malawian Nixon Mateulah, and I decided that this is what we are meant to be living for. Humanity is meant for love, to love, to discover love. Humanity is not meant for war, to go to war. It is not meant for the individual to be locked away in isolation, rejection and alienation.
It is in night that the poet within me is awakened to self-respect, grief and regret, melancholy (see clinical depression) and a buzz of words becomes alive inside my head. Negative matters turn into matters of the heart that nourish my spirit, and not in a condescending or self-sabotaging or destructive manner. No, it sends fire down the trajectory of each cell held captive in my body. I don’t know if it is health or fire, volcano or regret. I only know when I begin to write that it is summer. That I am on fire for language and poetry, context and narrative, and the river within me, within my heart begins to overflow its banks.
It is during a night like this that I begin to write again as I once did twenty years ago. Now my father’s limbs are weak. He no longer has the strength to proofread my work. He tells me to write, to continue to write, to never stop writing. He offers me this wisdom, and his intellectualism. I am his primary caregiver. We have no secrets. We simply share a secret love language now. I wash his lovely bones. There is no response from me. There are no tears. I dry his back, his bare legs, shoulders, neck after his shower. Yes, companions have no secrets. I understand his body language so well by now. I know what upsets him, what confuses him, when he is hungry, or angry.
I rub lotion onto his legs. I ask him to show me where it itches. He shows me. I look at him, staring into his brown eyes. I stare at him when he asks the impossible of me. I am the good daughter, fulfilling all of my obligations. I am, of course, the dutiful daughter, the daughter who stayed. I am the daughter who gave up her life in the city of Johannesburg and her dreams to direct films to become a writer. I first became a poet, and then a novelist.
Writing novels about love has taught me to let go, to surrender cynicism. Although truth be told, I, like many writers and poets from the African continent remain works in progress all blended, mixed together in flight, in the fire of the combination of the tension and spark of adrenaline pumping through the lovely bones of all of us.
It is romance that makes both men and women tick, be they straight or homosexual. Today I was thinking of the character traits of my brother and father combined. How there was no man in my own life, how my brother had two small children, how he lived his life inspired me, a woman, a female who considered herself to be a second-rate intellectual who had no obligations to small children, only an elderly father who was growing weaker by the day. I was still a woman who had a strained mother-daughter relationship and it has made me both humble and fragile.
We choose who we love in adulthood. It is determined by our childhood. Who did we choose to love more? Is it the representation of the father figure that we love more or the sacrificial lamb, the mother, the maternal presence from childhood who wrapped her arms around us and comforted us whenever we cried or sought attention? Who, who, we must come to accept, who idolised us more, gave us more affection, attention, worshipped us more, or who did the most damage, who influenced us more in a dark way, who impacted our virtuous qualities? And finally in the lonely hour, in the dark silence, in the shadows, we are left with one question, not the solution to the question but one question, who do you think?
What does loneliness look like in a woman, what does sadness and an insult look like to a man? I repeat those questions. Darkness has fallen. What does loneliness look like in a woman, how can she shield her face and her physical body from humiliation and embarrassment, from harm and gender based violence, from the personal, except for a return to life? That is the shield, a return to love.
As a poet I am love, as a woman I am love. I am love, I write this in each line of my poetry. Every poet is love, whether it comes from childhood, or being loved by siblings, or the very first love of your life. It was Albert Camus, his life and his writings that taught me that.
The writing of poetry has taught me to always seek the path of truth. For it is the path of equals and justice. It is the correct path.
