Travel
November 2010
'So you consider yourself a traveller, a bit of an intrepid African
nomad?' my latest therapist asked in his odd tone of respect and
mockery.
I nodded, in my own odd tone of pride and defeat - precisely the damn
paradox that had me seated in this sweaty leather couch. Pride and
defeat. The story of Africa, and now of me. Or at least that’s what I
imagined they’d write on the back of my biography.
Me, the almost-brilliant travel writer. A risky, most would say manic,
journalist striding headlong into the beauties and cruelties of the
continent. Awards won, women won over, wonderings limited only by the
budget of whichever gullible editor was footing the bill of whatever
local beer in which I happened to be drowning.
And then the pathetic suicide attempts and shameful depressions. That
was an unrecognisable me, but one who held the position of dictator
nonetheless.
'He is confounded and incapacitated by the paradox he has encountered at
every turn of his travels through Africa' was the intelligent but
useless observation of one psychologist.
He was right about running into the sneer of paradox: poverty dancing
its cruel dance with wealth, disease's body on the continent's
unimaginably beautiful face, enlightened contentment in the eyes of
exploited and ravaged peoples. Africa nurtures them all. But he offered
no way to make sense of it.
'He suffers intense feelings of meaninglessness and guilt related to his
whiteness and supposedly superficial pursuits' remarked another.
I already knew what my generation's white African skin conferred:
prejudice, liberalism or shame. But he couldn't help me get me out of
that skin and I was beginning to think that suicide had been the only
bloody meaningful thing I'd ever attempted.
So here I was, shrinking in front of another shrink. A regressionist,
apparently. I'm sure you appreciate why I might have been put off by the
term - how does one regress from trying to kill oneself - getting it
right? His mild laugh at this joke irritated me. Calm, huggy new age
types always do. Despite the fact that I find myself wanting to kick
some excitement up their second chakra, I despise the westernised middle
class religion of self-improvement. Sell that to the child prostitute I
met in Mozambique, taking care of a mother whose decaying body could
have been giving itself to any number of masters: starvation, AIDS, TB.
Or to Ou Een, a Khoisan shapeshifter whom his people called 'die boesman
leeu'. I never managed to lay eyes on the elusive man, reputedly a
hundred and three years old with a nighttime job as a skulky canine, but
I'm sure I would not have found him reading a manual on how to reclaim
his inner child.
Desperation and the urging of a decent friend, however, had me
consenting to the process of a past life regression. I felt too listless
to resist, which is probably why I easily followed Don's instructions to
imagine I was descending a stairwell where each step was a year of my
life. I must have swallowed some of my skepticism with all those pills,
I remember thinking dryly. But with nothing more than a somewhat lulled
mind and tired acquiesence I did indeed experience my seven-year-old
self and every detail of my school classroom as if I was back there.
Then I was three and then five months old, fully aware of my mother's
sadness and a great desire to pee. I'd have simply added 'phenomenal
memory' to my list of skills if I hadn't experienced what happened after
that.
Don instructed me, in his irritatingly musical voice, to move into a
significant previous existence, and asked me to look down at my body and
describe myself.
Without hesitation or any thought of the impossibility of what I was
doing, I told him of my thin, weak legs and sickly female body. I was
wrapped in a blanket that smelled of the smoke from the fire in the
centre of our hut and I knew I hadn't moved from there in a very long
time. I described my young brown face and my pride in the markings on my
smooth cheeks and the plaits in my hair.
My sisters have done up my hair to celebrate the beginning of my
bleedings, I tell Don. I am surprised that I have been blessed with
bleedings when my body is so ill and abnormal in every other way, but
how gracious of the ancestors and how wonderfully important I feel on
this day. There is no movement in the bottom half of my body, but my
arms work just like my sisters' and my head even better says our father.
I watch him sweep outside our hut with the dignity of a chief, though he
is a lowly herdsman and constantly mocked for not taking another wife to
care for his three daughters. Our mother died giving birth to me, and
that is also what killed my legs and many other inside things of mine
besides. I do feel the pain of this, especially watching my oldest
sister make eyes at boys. I also feel that throbbing sometimes and now
I'm even bleeding, but I will never lie with a man nor push a baby from
between my legs.
I talk to our father of these things and he tells me only two things:
life, like the sun and the moon, is a circle and every person will
travel every path at some time. That is why I should search deep inside
my broken body to find out the name of my path and to be grateful for
each experience of this particular way of being alive. That way I will
recognise the path when it comes again and I will know I have already
had that gift. The other thing he tells me is that my sister is too
young to make eyes at boys.
When it is time for my body to feed the soil, I know it. I have learned
how to talk to her by staring at the fire for a very long time until my
mind disappears into the flames and I am free to listen to the stories
that come from my legs and my womb and many other places besides. Today
they are singing a joyful song as if the rain is on its way or they are
about to eat something delicious. I can understand the words of the
song, which whisper that I am soon to meet my mother and to make my
father the head of only two living daughters. When my mind is resting
like this I can see the meaning and richness of my life quite clearly
and it is in this state that I gratefully release my body.
Fortunately Don had the wisdom, or lack of time, to allow me to make my
own sense of experiencing myself as a paralysed, young black girl who
didn't live for very long nor achieve very much, other than that which I
longed for most. Certainly I have considered that the whole story was
intelligently imagined by me to provide an explanation of inter alia my
need to roam and have as much sex as possible. I am now trying my hand
at a novel to see if indeed I do possess such a quick-thinking, wise
imagination.
More than the source of the experience, however, I am intrigued by the
questions it poses to me about how essential my whiteness, my travelling
and even my body and mind are to my sense of myself. Maybe I'm white and
black and all the shades in between and maybe my usefulness is measured
by more than what my mind and body produce. Maybe the paradoxes in the
African world around me simply reflect the ones with which I internally
wrestle. I have no more answers than before but at least I have more
questions. That, and a desire to live, seem to be just about all I need.
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