)My father is dead.
b) He stole money from his mother and/or his mother’s NPO and therefore does not want to be found.
c) He has become more mentally ill and is homeless and/or needs to be institutionalised.
d) He is as happy as possible under the circumstances and lives in some kind of torrid but safe commune with other displaced individuals with unresolved pasts and uncertain futures.
Should I decide to act, take up the quest? One of the above will be the prize of my valiant efforts, requiring exhausting emotional labour to find this person who left most of my childhood and teenage years scarred and bruised and filled with agonising unanswered questions. Memories that have ugly, misshapen holes like cigarette burns. Voids of time that got sucked away in a house that harboured a somnambulant psychotic, a man who was so easily triggered to rage and strange, virulent anxieties.
Even if I were to do the things we misname as healing and exorcise my assortment of daddy issues, through the idealised mixture of therapy, vigorous physical exercise and perhaps some kind of exclusive esoteric practise – involving excessive amounts of sweating, an appropriated tribalistic drum and a matching Adidas two-piece, of which variety there are undoubtedly many in Cape Town – there are still the genetic attachments, depression, anxiety disorder, pathologies and pathways that unmistakeably carry my father’s family name.
I look like him. My body cannot purge the evidence of his existence. I have the impressively thick and dimpled thighs, the dark, thick bushy hair that grows conspicuously all over me. Hair that sprouted way too early and made me feel less like a girl and more like a kind of strange animal. I was maybe about eight when a particularly astute and unkind boy, noticing my excessive hair and excess body weight, started calling me a woolly mammoth. Mercifully, the name never stuck, and was abandoned after he taunted me with it for a few weeks and I tried to show him that the words bounced right off my thick woolly skin. But sometimes, even now, I look in the mirror and recognise at once my strange, monstrous father combined with vestiges of that great Pleistocene beast and I wonder how much of just me I really am.
I never thought I would go looking for my father. I had thought I had left him behind. I thought that the smudgy shadows of him might be abolished as soon as I washed them off the walls through therapy, through conversations with my partner, my mother, my sister, my partner some more, asking questions, uncovering a myriad of suffocated years through the process of breakdown and resuscitation, of personal truth-telling. I had fallen into that naive and damaging belief that the excavation of my truth would mean my own inner reconciliation. I thought I had left him behind. But every time I am emotionally intimate, every time I make a bad decision, every time I am inspired, every time I come to the page – I am leaking, wading through this flotsam and jetsam of him. My body feels swollen with the retention of this flood of feeling, of rage, of hurt, of a reproachful and reluctant empathy. On the days I think of him too much, it is as if I am turning to an essential source for my own analysis, an important intersection of my own veins and arteries – me, the bloody, messy map of genes and generational experience.
It has been roughly eight years since my father was exiled from our family home and vacated my life. Most days I can look at him from a distance, more closely, more fairly than when he held me hostage in the house, roaming the passages throughout the night, at once protecting us from danger and inducing our nightmares. Except for the times I see him when I look in the mirror, the distance has made me view him as if neatly framed and mounted on the dense white walls of my cranium as ‘The Portrait of a Post-Apartheid Black South African Man’. I say black because my father would never have identified as coloured. The Molotov of toxic masculinity meets PTSD and broken dreams. Now, with insight into the intersections of trauma, untreated mental illness and unfettered ego, I can read him as a splayed-out, bloated, unwashed Vitruvian man. No longer the foggy chimera of my childhood, the creature that lurked at the back of the house and would come out every now and again in grotesque forms.
These are the ways I now conceive of him. Often in therapy, in my relationship, in my own process of self-analysis, I try and remember specificities. I attempt to pinpoint who I was, who he was, trudging through the fog of childhood to make some kind of sense, to excavate an enlightening moment. I ask my siblings what they have held on to from our childhood. My brother cannot recollect anything that happened pretty much up until his preteens, an erasure that is an act of self-preservation.
My sister cannot afford to remember, another act of survival. My mother, despite being a university-trained historian, can offer me some things but they are mired in her own feelings, her untouched pain, her infallible desire to forget and move forward. My grandparents, although eager to share old photographs, anecdotes and oral history, do not know how to talk about these things. The things ‘good women’ don’t talk out of the house about, right? The dirty, bloody laundry, which with this book I am not only hanging out to dry but leaving to stick between the pages.
So I try and fill in the gaps. Piecing the skeleton of my personal history together with broken evidence. Like an archaeologist who, from the safe distance that time allows, can cast the bones of the prehistoric creature, no longer terrifying. But even then, when relics and fossils are lovingly and painstakingly pieced together and studied, the theories we build around these can be vulnerable to conjecture. And we curate the museums of our past with wilful subjectivity.
A few months ago Sarah and I had the privilege of going to a conference in London. I wanted to hate this trip to the colonial motherland, but in spite of myself, the fucking behemoth of a city charmed me with its chic gloom and edgy, ubiquitous art. With the pound exerting its tyrannical colonial weight over the feeble rand, we aimed for as many free activities as possible. Luckily there are incredible museums. We tried to avoid those that we knew for sure were filled with stolen things, which cut out about three quarters of them. Around the time we were there, Sarah showed me an article about how leadership from the Easter Islands had travelled to visit the leadership of the Victoria and Albert Museum to urgently appeal for the return of an 8-foot basalt Moai statue known as Hoa Hakananai’a (‘lost or stolen friend’). Moai are defined as the living faces of deified ancestors. The governor of Easter Island responded to this capture and display of his ancestors with the plea, ‘You have our soul.’ This line, ‘You have our soul’, was the headline of the newspaper article. In response to this, the Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to possibly, maybe, loan the statue back to the Islanders.
To avoid complicity in this hubristic display of inhumanity – and armed with the knowledge that in most museums, there are trophy bones, even if not on display; there are the frontal lobes from skulls prised open for all the brain matter and thoughts and dreams and memories to spill out; there are the eyeballs and sex organs, reveries, histories and desires of the vast and varied indigenous people hidden and pickled in boxes and jars in museum basements – we stayed away. Instead we flocked to the modern art exhibitions (these are safer to visit as a colonial subject abroad although not necessarily safe for women, considering the predation of so many modern artists) and the Natural History Museum, which we hoped housed only the bones of long-dead animals.
The entrance to the museum boasts the shell of a massive Brachiosaurus, safely enclosed behind a glass cage. Just a few paces on, there is the majestic framework of a Tyrannosaurus rex; a short left reveals the dead monsters of the deep. They make an incredible pantheon. We were at first unsure whether the skeletons were real. I felt like I was in the presence of gods. At some points, walking between the glass cages, awestruck, one of us murmured: ‘You know, it’s very possible they all had feathers.’ I am not sure whether it was me or Sarah. We are very similar and we share thoughts generously. Sometimes the lines get blurred and I feel like I am absorbing her knowledge and saving it to my hardwiring as if I was one of her cells or one of her senses.
Although most of us have grown up with the notion that all dinosaurs are covered in skin resembling scaly reptilian armour, it’s very likely they could all have had feathers. Somehow a gigantic bird, even armed with guillotine teeth, is less scary, or perhaps just entirely different to the tyrannosaurus we all know – the dragon scales, the tiny, inept Trump hands, the wide open mouth.
If you google a picture of a Tyrex, it is always depicted