“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”
T.S. Eliot
“I, myself, am a poet but I love working in the garden growing vegetables… I know very well that if I do not grow lettuce, I cannot write poems. The two are interrelated. Eating breakfast mindfully, washing the dishes, and growing lettuce in mindfulness are essential for me to be able to write poetry well. The way someone washes the dishes reveals the quality of his or her poetry.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”
Hafiz
Perhaps the poem itself is a bird feeding or sunning itself, a bird singing or building a nest, perhaps the poem is a symbol of a bird, the signs of life, of powerful, soul-stirring veracity, or rather, perhaps the poem has the life of a bird and the words, are the poet’s body, the poet’s pen, a brandished sword, and the poem itself, a poet’s vision in flight.
The poem often says more than silence. Silence often speaks louder than words.
I was born in a June winter in the Livingstone Hospital in the northern areas. The doctor performed a C-section on my mother. They pulled me, bloodstained, out of the belly of my mother. I came out of my mother’s womb, a shadow, my hands, satellite dishes, a garden with a manicured lawn inside my head, a bipolar oak growing in the middle of the garden. My father was so proud that he deposited a worm in my mouth. My mother prayed over me, You will be a psychiatric patient. My mother wielded unspeakable power over me since birth. She said that I would be a psychiatric patient like it was every mother’s dream for her child. Afterwards, she smiled as she held me.
My father told her to hold me to the hospital light in the room and then he took our picture. In the picture, when I look back at it now, I am red and I look as if I can’t stop crying about my fate that my mother seemingly singlehandedly handed down to me, but there was nothing I could do about it. My maternal grandmother wasn’t so kind, she minced the words, “she will be a mental patient like her father”, and so it began. So, my world was set in motion. I couldn’t breathe on my own. I needed a kind of hostage-apparatus so that each inhale and exhale could be implemented. And, so now, I am disappearing. It began in childhood. Today, I asked my father.
Why did you have us, why did you want to have children? I don’t want to live anymore. He opened his eyes and said, There is nothing that I can do for you anymore. I’m sorry. I don’t know what is going to happen to me. I have cancer. It was as if he was saying my problems were no longer important to him. I shouted at him, Can’t you stand up for me, can’t you speak for me? He closed his eyes. I got the feeling that he wanted me to disappear. The birds inside my head sing hymns. At night, in the dark, I position my body like glass. I am sixteen years old, a pupil at a prestigious all girls school, a school that has a colonial history steeped in apartheid. Have you taken your smarties yet?
My mother’s voice, and then a laugh escapes from her. In the evening, I find wine in the kitchen and drink it slowly. It doesn’t drown my sorrows, it doesn’t make me forget, I don’t turn into the sun. Present day. Sometimes the ghosts in my bedroom hover at the foot of my bed at night and say prayers for me. Sometimes, the man will sit on my bed and lay hands on me. The ghost of the man who was briefly in my life when I turned forty. The ghost of the man who now lives in Cambodia and who promised me that he would marry me. There are hills now in the garden of my brain and my third eye turns into a red light at night inside the middle of my forehead.
I am now middle-aged and there are worms inside of me, inside my heart eating me alive from the inside out as if I was already dead and buried in Papenkuil cemetery. Maggots in my eyes, bacteria doing the thin dissolve of my body. My sleeves are decaying, simply withering away, gathering dust. One day, I too, will gather dust in the cemetery. I gathered winter into my arms, into my embrace, the frozen air embroidered by the dozen with his misdemeanours. Do you know what love is, have you never known what love is, the birds caged inside my mind sing? In their beaks, tiny glistening silvered razorblades. Slumber is psychosis. Psychosis is slumber.
In the mental hospitals, I couldn’t tell the difference. My eyes, rain. My eyes, rain. Why is there this flood in my eyes, I ask God? I speak to the man’s ghost about it or try to but he just watches me in the dark. Sometimes he asks me, why do you tell people I was going to marry you? A., it wasn’t a genuine relationship. You were just seeing things, seeing what you wanted to believe as fact, as truth. I never loved you. Broken things cannot be loved. I look at him coldly and declare that I am not broken, I am not a thing and that I never was “just a thing” to be toyed with, exploited, taken advantage of. But, honey, he says quietly, you were already broken when I met you.
I asked him, why do you want to hurt me by saying these things to me? You did love me. The man answers, it is just a casual observation and you were in the loony bin. No, I never loved you. But you were so good at pretending. Yes, the ghost of the man says, I was very good at pretending. I convinced you, didn’t I, that I was in love with you, that I was going to marry you? I just called you Wife. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a game that men play sometimes on agreeable conscientious women who don’t know any better. Sometimes I will remember what his hands felt like on my arm, like cold water, as cold as granite and when he kissed me, he would taste like mushrooms, it felt as if I was drowning, as if the water had a chokehold on me.
His hands were like butter.
Night-time the birdsong is deafening. No man or woman has ever looked at me in admiration. I have faced and conquered the doom of my isolation on a daily basis. My mother doesn’t remember my birth. The child is now witness to my sense of alienation, to my sense of longing to belong. My brother and I don’t share the same values. He has two babymamas. The fact that I have no babydaddies, that, I consider, to be quite an achievement. My brother has hit me in the past. He has had a series of micro-agressions that he has had to deal with. To cope, he smokes marijuana. I look into the bathroom mirror. I can’t see anything. There’s no face. I am invisible. Ghost.
I must be strong, I must be a sequoia. Nothing hurts a sequoia. Not even fire.
I knotted the suburb around my eyes. Here skin is skin. Here is the quickness of a fist like a mallet. I shouted at my mother. She screamed back at me. The child sat on the potty and became very quiet, very still. The child didn’t make a sound. She turned her head and looked at me standing in the kitchen. She looked at my face. I said, It’s best if I wasn’t alive. I mean absolutely nothing to you. Just look at how you treat me. Just look at how you handle me. The child looked away again. Her silence spoke volumes. You are of no value, you are not important. Nothing that you do matters to anyone. You have not lived, my brother says to me. Shut up! My mother yells. Go away, I don’t want to look at you. You are of no value, you are not important. I wish you were never born.
She says this because I am a mental patient, a manic depressive, a depression sufferer. She doesn’t understand my choices, my soul that glows with suicide ideation, why poetry, why no husband, no children. I thought I had options, once, once. Foe: Men, the enemy, my brother, the enemy, my mother, the enemy. Things the man said to me. Things like, You’re demented. You’re lazy. Stupid bitch! Eff off in front of me! Just eff off! He has a son and a daughter, properties, commodities. He speaks to me like this in front of his son and daughter, his properties, his commodities. Things the men shouted at me. Basketcase. Eff all of them. Dracula. Age before beauty. Nutcase. Beauty queen.
Mulungu. Transvestite. Dyke! Dyke-dyke-dyke. The words, still, to this day, reverberate inside my chest. Things that men have said to me. White, black, brown, of mixed race descent, blood relation, European. Things I feel. The stick in his hands coming down on my head multiple times but I don’t feel anything after he hits me the first time. No, I don’t feel anything. Just this inescapable soreness. Afterwards, I feel the bruise, numb yet inside I feel dangerous. Glass breaking and then I’m numb. Shouts, swearing, then screaming. Crockery hurled against the wall, plate, cup, bottles of liquor, his bottles of liquor, the man’s bottles of liquor, motherfucker. Is he high?
Must be the reason for his appearance, the man’s behaviour. I stay in my room, frightened, shivering under a blanket. Later, my finger rubs the groove of the indentation in the wall. His fist, his fist, his fist. The bruises, lavender blossoms on my arms. Now I keep quiet. I know I must keep quiet to keep the peace, to maintain my dignity. I hide my tears away. They’re my secret. Sometimes the ghost of the man who now lives in Cambodia or somewhere else, who was very briefly in my life before the pandemic, sometimes he gets into bed next me. Lying there in the dark, we say absolutely nothing to each other. I mean, what would two great pretenders say to each other anyway.
Sometimes he puts his arms around me and just holds me because he knows that’s what I like.
I don’t have pictures of us on my phone. I have pictures of him with another woman that he told me was a tourist guide. She is holding him around his waist. They give the appearance of being more than just a tourist and tourist guide. The pictures gave me the chills when I first saw it, as if they were together in real life. The man looks happy in the picture, his eyes, stars, a fanny pack around his waist probably containing money, his passport. Yes, I believed him when he told me when he wasn’t a ghost person, when he still existed in realtime, that she was a tourist guide. She was thin. I wasn’t, I was morbidly obese, and she was very pretty. She was wearing a pair of shorts.
I never wore shorts. She was smiling. It’s very painful for me to smile. Sometimes I think of the image of that very pretty Asian girl. It just makes me very, very sad. When I was a child, my father would tell me stories at bedtime of how he met my mother. He would make spaghetti meals, sequoia forest heaven out of my questions. In the evenings, when I can’t sleep, I lie in the dark and think of Johannesburg. That was not a good time in my life. I had my first nervous breakdown in my twenties there. I would apologise all the time to people, to men in particular. My first boyfriend, for example. He was an ex-drug dealer. I met him at the Salvation Army. Sorry, I was in the loony bin.
What’s that? The madhouse. You’re mad? That’s okay, babes. There’s something wrong with all of us. We’re the same but later that response turned into something else. Me being crazy wasn’t alright, he frowned upon it like my maternal family in Johannesburg. Then one day we weren’t girlfriend and boyfriend anymore. When he saw me packing vegetables and fruit into crates at the Salvation Army in the evening and I met his stare, I looked away very quickly again but I couldn’t erase the smirk on his face, the taste of polony and hot sauce sandwiches in my mouth. Don’t you remember that you loved me?
I wanted him to remember that but then I was reminded about the smirk, and I just wanted to erase his memory-like-glitter, like a chest-of-drawers filled with lost socks and underwear from my mind. I wondered what my life would have been like if I had studied to be a physiotherapist, if I had gone to university like everyone else I had gone to school with at the all girls high school in Port Elizabeth. Years passed, hours turned into decades, I bound the empty pages that became a psychological release, they had constellations embedded, enmeshed between the cold blue lines. I should have traveled and seen the world, I tell myself.
The woman who was like a second mother to me, it took those same years for her casket to turn into flowers. When the blooms drooped, something sacred happened. It was noted as a kind of holiness. The birds caged inside my mind stopped singing. They had noted it too.
Love corrupted me, whatever love means, what I witnessed in four long decades, my brother’s addictions, his son’s mother, his daughter’s mother, mental dis-ease, mental tension, hospitalisation, relapse, my mother. I have failed as a woman because I was not loved, because I was not cherished, because I was not treasured. I remember Van Gogh. I can relate so much to his isolation, to his sense of alienation, the longing to belong. Then there were the times he was institutionalized, his love was not reciprocated. Yes, I can relate. For me, hospitalisation was not a one time thing. It was a series of habitations, configurations, a series of reflections, introspection, life put on hold, on pause for months at a time.
You’re so pure, you’ve never had any boyfriends, my father said. No, I said in my head, no serious boyfriends, no last ditch attempt at love, just people who abused me, abused my trust, just men who held me at arms length, men who called me beauty queen, men who broke me, men who laughed in my face and said, You’re such an Eve. Evening falls and my elbows nestle in his side. I listen to the ghost of the man breathe and I weep quietly in the dark for the woman, the wife I never became, the son, the daughter who I did not birth. Have hurt people hurt me? I just don’t know. Maybe they were just wounded, like me.
I should have gone to Stanford when my ex-film school lecturer had sent me the information, done post-graduate studies at Harvard or won a scholarship like my father did to Columbia University. If that didn’t work out, well, it didn’t work out, I should have gone to Wits. Maybe instead of being a real nobody, I should have just been a nobody in the crowd. My brother hands the drink to my teetotaller father who has recently been diagnosed with cancer. What is this, he asks innocently. My brother takes the glass from his hands, I look at the sadness, the emptiness in the expression on my mother’s face, he takes the glass and gulps the brown liquid down.
I could have disappeared in Johannesburg, no one would have looked for me, no one would have filed a Missing Person’s report at a police station, and now, in June 2026, that realisation is not lost on me. No one cared enough to make breakfast, lunch or supper for me, there was no one who would miss my presence at their kitchen table, or my smiling face in a photograph of a family gathering, or my existence. People were more concerned about church. I was invisible, just like I was to my paternal grandparents on the day I was born. They had not come to the hospital when I was born.
They weren’t there to congratulate my parents, to welcome me into the world even though they stayed two minutes from my parents house.
Today I’m struggling. Not like yesterday or the insurmountable years before, it’s just different. God enters the frame or the picture or whatever you want to call it. Can’t you condense this pain to make it easier to bear, to make it easier to carry, I ask him? But God, the omniscient, is patient with me. He is waiting, I think, for the day that my mood improves but I wonder, will that day ever come and when it arrives will I be different, or the same. Will I be the same depressed me with the blues singing in every ventricle of my heart, from my aorta to my mitochondria? The wound holds the child. The broken heart, my broken heart, my wounded soul smiles and laughs to draw a reaction from the child.
I colour in Bluey but really I’m mending my broken heart, I’m repairing my wounded soul, I am telling myself to fall in love with myself again. You are not just a mental patient, you are an aunt who is loved to the moon and back. The immaculate shoreline at the end of my bed, the valleys of my clothes in the wardrobe, the astonishing mountain of the wall on the far side of my room, the silence, the silence, the silence. How mysterious the silence is. The waves that lap the foot of my bed are cool. You never made an impression on any man, my father says. You are pure, he continues. I want him to tell me that that was not my fault, but he doesn’t.
What does it feel to be as popular as Zendaya, the actress? It feels as if she carries zero burdens from her past, unlike me. In pictures she is the definition of personal freedom.
I was invisible as air, as invisible as the sea at night, just blackness, just the firm resolve of darkness meeting black peak, dark trough. Really, it took years. I was not only invisible, I was muted by the remote control of my mother’s hands, my personality was muted by genetic predisposition. You make too much noise, my brother said. He pressed a button and muted me. My mother did the same. Sometimes she would feed me Sister Clarke’s pills. My mother said the sound of my voice hurt her ears. It feels like that is something she would think, and go as far as to say. She told me with a laugh and wearing a smirk on her face, You’re a storyteller. You like telling stories.
You fabricate the truth. You’re an intellectual just like your father, but she said it in a way that wasn’t very nice, she said it in a way that made me blink back the tears in my eyes. I was as wanted, as needed as a cavity, as desired as dry rot with my mother. I became a poet because I carried myself like a poet, because I have always believed I was a poet. I want to say, I am not a transvestite, I am a woman but I know no one is listening to me. I am not a transvestite, I am a poet but nobody really cares. You’re not caviar, my brother says. Loony bin, you’re not caviar, and another thing, the magistrate would never have married you. You were in the loony bin for goodness sake.
You hear things, see things that I don’t see, that nobody else sees. Of course, if you’re in the loony bin people will call you crazy. I look at him, I just look at him, my patience wears thin and dissolves into a smile, and then I laugh. I am the joke but I am laughing. He looks at me and a shadow falls across his face. It crosses my mind that just maybe, perhaps he was also born a shadow. All my life, he told me, I was not caviar. I was something else. Something else, not a poet, or an aunt, or a sister, or a woman, but a Bertha Mason, Mrs. Rochester. I was in the loony bin, had several stays there, for me it was enough for a lifetime. To my brother, I was just crazy. I was certifiable.
He had me certified twice. Not caviar, something else. There is so much loneliness in this house. Even the clouds are lonely, the silence in my room, my cups of coffee, the tea that I drink, even my rage. I have, over the years, come to know of the isolation & alienation of a psychiatric patient. I take care of their child. In the past I know that they’ve used drugs together. I support him but don’t know how long I can put up with or tolerate this kind of abuse. What do women do? What would happen to the child if I leave? I can’t take her with me because I am not her mother. I am here for the child. I am making a record of the things you say to me, I want to tell him.
My father says he is brain damaged from all the drugs he’s taken. Sometimes I give my brother money for cigarettes. He is not a sequoia. No, he is not a sequoia. One man ignores me when I speak to him. He is a teacher, an older male figure. I speak again, thinking he hasn’t heard me but he still ignores me. I walk out of the classroom, numb, embarrassed. One man counts the money I hand him. My brother takes me to the ATM machine every month. It becomes a cycle of abuse. No one tells me that abuse can change a woman, that it can transform her in unimaginable ways. It takes me years, decades, to find this out for myself.
Years later, this man cries while he gives me his daughter. The child who is not my daughter. I still give him money for cigarettes. I remain quiet, shut myself away in my room, the world forgets all about me. Daily, I mourn the life I did not live. Daily I write sad poems that turn into love poems that turn into political poems. The air is soundless. The sea is soundless. Inside, deep inside, I am as calm as the sea, the Dead Sea, the Hormuz Strait.
