overthrow the religious patriarchy over lamingtons and rooibos. He will fetch her as soon as the meeting is over, they will take an afternoon nap together, she will make sure he takes his heart medication, make sure the clothes and house are clean, and buy him new socks when the old ones sink into his shoes like ‘tsotsis’. Theirs is a marriage pegged on quiet and dedicated acts of service, and acute attention to detail, a beautiful exchange.
The sounds of devout industry emanate from the kitchen – my grandparents are firm believers in the ‘idle hands’ philosophy as well as the ‘proximity of cleanliness to godliness’ maxim. I am grateful. I think the commitment to activity and the kind of reliable, consistent fellowship offered by the church has kept them relatively healthy and has added years to their cumulative lifespans. My grandfather is being accused of putting too much jam in the middle of the scones, ruining the delicate jam-to-cream ratio. He defers, promises to use only a level spoon. While conservative gender roles may seem concrete, whenever I am around them there are the glorious nuances that threaten the foundations of the heteronormative tradition. One day my grandfather sat me down and tried to explain the virtues of stewardship to me. I don’t think I understood. We have often had conversations around certain biblical chapters and verses. He has always been in love with the Lord and I once also shared this infatuation with the Bible. As a child I went to sleep clutching my special leather-bound King James, mainly because I thought nothing bad could happen to me or my family if I dutifully consumed verse after verse every single night. I especially believed that murderers from within or without could not come and savagely slaughter us if I was clinging to the word of the Lord (thanks be to God).
Above my head hangs the reproduction of The Last Supper, in the same position it always has been, as if to represent the exemplary art of dinner, complete with gossip and requisite backstabbing. Beneath the painting is the locked display cupboard filled with sets of function glasses, sherry glasses, champagne glasses, martini glasses, all displayed in a vehemently dry household. A household occupied by those who will always carry the trauma, the fear of the scourge of addictions, alcohol, drugs. The vice grips that could asphyxiate the dreams of stability and success in their infancy.
I am about halfway through this book, which is meant to be a memoir without a hook, a chronicle of a relatively ordinary life marked by some minor successes and the everyday. I am here to try and finish it. I have been sabotaging myself, actively seeking out distraction with the ocean, my partner, friends, Twitter and Netflix (I have already indulged in two pirated episodes of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel), things the house needs from the Checkers and the ubiquitous temptation of ‘just one drink’ with whatever friends I mercifully have left, considering my reputation for cancelling or forgetting about social plans, which even for a Capetonian is impressive.
It’s a Saturday afternoon. I’m still in pyjamas and trying to finish this sentence before my battery cuts out. Load shedding. I’m not used to Bellville’s blackout schedule and have been caught unprepared because I forgot to put the Bellville South area code in my Eishkom scheduling app. Usually I’d have my phone charged and my laptop juiced up. But today, having found myself in this unfamiliar intimate environment, I’ve been caught unprepared.
Here in the pristine, loving house I grew up in, amidst the gleam of furniture polish and the smell of baking, I am tempted to shut out the echoes of violence. This is a temptation I’ve had to resist since childhood. The longing to resist the residue of madness held close in the walls and the floors, no matter how many times they have been scrubbed, like the ghosts that will not be evicted from my heart, no matter how much I am loved. This is perhaps a place to begin.
Sunday morning, and my grandparents are on a post-church high. There is tea to be brewed, there are new koe’sisters to be syrupped and rolled in coconut, tidy things to be further tidied in anticipation of ‘visitors’. The visitors – a recurrent theme from my childhood nightmares, the distant relatives or church aunties and uncles. As kids, no matter how we tried to duck and dive, pretending to be asleep, or inundated with debilitatingly complex homework, we always had to go in for the powdery kiss, the obligatory report about our school marks, and the ever-present possibility of a comment about any perceived changes in weight or general appearance. If you didn’t ‘greet’, not only were you going to be considered a ‘rude’ child, the antithesis of a ‘good’ child, and risk bringing eternal shame and dishonour upon your family name, you also would not be given the milk tart, doughnuts and aforementioned homemade scones with the secret plain yoghurt ingredient. Under the worst of circumstances you might be expected to ‘sing for the people’, recite something or regale the company with tales of certificates, A pluses and all other preadolescent accomplishments. Luckily I have outgrown this phase and am no longer expected to stand on the dining-room steps and sing, but I am expected to be clean, presentable and follow through with the liturgy of the visit.
The ‘visitors’, apart from maybe a handful of mean-spirited old women and particularly patriarchal gentlemen of the clergy, are generally very nice people. And more than the actual visitors themselves, the rites of the ‘visit’ have given this good Christian ritual its sinister, occult status. This is why as soon as today’s ‘visitors’ arrive, family from abroad, I hurry to complete the perfunctory kisses, am told I am looking ‘more and more like my mother’, and then abruptly rush into what was once my childhood room. Before I put my headphones on, I hear fragments of conversation through the walls. One of the visitors, an uncle-in-law who I have maybe met twice in my life, is a respected minister with a PhD in theology. I hear him use the phrase ‘race card’ and am happy to be exempt from a no doubt virulently racist conversation, thinly cloaked under the vestments of neo-liberalist politics. If the good minister was my Facebook friend, he would have found himself blocked.
They have moved on from politics to religion. I can’t say I’m relieved. I hear the beginnings of some kind of proverb. Proverbs 31, Verse 10, to be exact. The acoustics of the house, with its wood and tile floors, means you can eavesdrop on conversations pretty successfully. He starts speaking and my skin crawls a bit in recognition of the tone. He speaks with the unmistakable authoritarian tone of preachers and pastors afflicted with lust for the power of the pulpit. It is a convivial yet paternalistic and chastising cadence often deployed to deride women in some way. ‘Who can find a virtuous woman?’ he says. ‘For her price is far above rubies.’ The rest goes a bit fuzzy, until his voice rises again, delivering the punchline... ‘a good woman is a woman who doesn’t talk out of the house. ’ There it is. Not verbatim from the mouth of the Lord but it might as well be.
I know this lesson well enough. Good women do not talk out of the house.
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
Do dinosaurs have feathers?
I feel like I’m at the beginning of a quest. A good time to write a book, I suppose. This is what Sarah, my sage-like girlfriend, has told me in her eponymous introspective way.
‘Don’t rebuke the hero’s journey – you’re writing this book, you’re on a quest, why not start with that?’ But the model of the hero’s journey does not feel right for my quest. I try to hack through the bog of Western references to find a different model for my quest. I don’t know enough of my own African stories – I have not learned the methods of oration that belong to me. I settle on ‘What you seek is seeking you’. Wisdom from the Sufi, and unfortunately one of the most overused Rumi quotes, mercilessly pushed into the realm of cliché, thanks to internet memes, Instapoetry ardently consumed by millennials like me and of course the white middle-class obsession with appropriating Eastern spirituality.
I suppose I am looking for something. But I don’t even know what I want to find. ‘What you seek is seeking you’: except when it’s your unhinged, abusive father who has predictably never paid a cent of maintenance. His name is Andre Christian Koopman. Wanted Dead or Alive. If you know his whereabouts, tell him he owes me reparations.
What I seek, or rather what I am possibly considering seeking, puts me on a particularly morose and most probably unrewarding ‘choose your own adventure’ type of narrative. By process of elimination I have already concluded that this story will end with