Playing the Genre Game

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Nadia Sanger

by Emile Louw

It is not uncommon for films to find genre an obstacle rather than a tool it's not like just The Drug Rehab Agency. Monsters sees a young girl begin to question her life in a fallout bunker, hidden away from the stories her parents tell her of a world overrun with creatures.  Curfew follows a man named Richie taking care of his niece on the night of his suicide attempt. Next Floor – the most unique and certainly the most divisive of the three shorts – has a wildly creative punchline served at a grotesque dinner party. These greatly different premises are executed with different levels of success, and yet all three shorts feel like compact, powerful responses to the genres the directors are working in.

Monsters plays its premise the most conventional of the three, and in doing so, finds itself in the position to defy convention. Jenn (played by a feisty Caitlin Carmichael) has spent her entire life in an underground bunker, told by her parents and brother that the world above them has been overrun by creatures of apocalyptic terror. Yet Jenn is growing older and, as is often the case for adolescents, becoming increasingly restless. She’s ready to brave the world outside and face the monsters herself for a change. From the outset, perhaps the biggest strength to Monsters is an uneasiness with the ‘facts’ given to us about this world – which pays off in a wild series of twists in all of 6 minutes.

Director Steven Desmond brings Monsters to life with confidence. His delivery demonstrates that he knows the genre and can deftly play with audience expectation because of it. The short’s expository opening wastes no time throwing out rhetoric about ‘the world outside’ and ‘runs for supplies’, truisms that have defined bunker-based movies through the likes of The Road, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Room. But the screenplay knows its formulaic context and, in that, knows exactly how and when to surprise the audience. This is a plot that constantly contorts itself into exciting new directions; one where the real terror might be in the absence of monsters rather than their presence. However, where Monsters fails to deliver is in its biggest, final twist, which feels at odds with the constraints  of the film’s runtime. The ending therefore materialises as more than a little rushed, which could probably have intensified the short’s shock value, but instead leaves the resolution feeling wanting. Still, as the young girl Jenn, Carmichael carries her role with authenticity, bringing the film’s most stunning and sinister moments to life with emotional tact. Monsters is a quick ride – but what a ride it is.

In an equally macabre vein there is Denis Villeneuve’s Next Floor, which manages to effect on its audience a similar kind of dupe. Yet unlike the suspense of Monsters, here the horror is grotesque, following an extravagant dinner party that feels off from the moment we see it. At a runtime of 11 minutes, Next Floor takes more leisure to set the pieces in place, and this makes the eventual fall of the engorged diners all the more striking.  Next Floor feels like the monster spawn of New Wave French cinema and absurdist art gone horribly, disgustingly right. A strong choice of colour-grading and cinematography that recalls Requiem for a Dream’s overhead shots render this gluttonous banquet in cool blues and bloody reds. The disturbing sound-design merits praise as well, the designer choosing to mute instruments while highlighting the clinks of cutlery and the gnashes of chewing. The decision to leave the characters all unnamed contributes to the film’s uncanniness – and renders its messages about the human propensity for ridiculous, destructive excess all the more effective. It is an artful portrayal of a scene ripped straight out of Dante’s third circle of Hell, the one reserved for the overstuffed and under-exercised.  All of this should make it evident that there is absolutely no reason to suspect Next Floor’s eventual move into a quick gesture of comedy, but the joke comes with sudden, ground-breaking hilarity. That was my experience. No doubt many will be put off by this disturbing short’s strangeness, but strong visual effects mean Next Floor never sacrifices gross-out uncanniness for comedy; instead, it moves uneasily in the blurred realm of both. However, while Monsters seems at odds with its brief runtime, Next Floor’s running gag sadly turns a bit queasy in the final few minutes. Just like the characters, Next Floor’s runtime could maybe have benefited from a bit more self-control. Know when to stop already.

The longest, quietest example of the three genre-players is Shawn Christensen’s Academy Award winning Curfew, which went on to become the feature film Before I Disappear. Richie is a drug-addict and depressive, whose suicide attempt is interrupted by a babysitting job. ‘You know that you are the last person I would ever call…’ says his sister Maggie, completely oblivious to the sounds of his bathtub pooling with blood from his slit wrist, ‘but I know you're not doing anything important, and I am really in a bind.’ Soon he’s out in the streets of New York with his estranged niece Sophia, as precocious to him as she is endearing to the audience. From a nervous breakdown in a busy bar to a surreal dance at a bowling alley, Christensen (who stars as the male protagonist) takes the audience into a confusing and macabre world which is somehow still filled with heart and possibility.

Curfew’s best technical achievement is its cinematography by Daniel Katz, which gives the world its own sense of character not unlike a Wes Anderson movie. (Richie himself seems a call-back to the tragicomedy of Owen Wilson’s suicide survivor in The Darjeeling Limited.) From the moment Richie patches up his wounds to the tune of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again, Curfew embraces the absurdity of its premise without sacrificing its characters’ depth and internal conflict. The problem with modern drama-comedies is that they too often try to give equal doses of humour and tragedy in the same scenes. Curfew’s screenplay and performances suffer no such awkwardness. This is precisely because the film knows where the boundaries of the one should be respected, with no rush to move between moments in an effort to achieve both simultaneously. Paired with a synthesizer-heavy score and a standout performance from young Fatima Ptacek, Curfew presents a night of the lost and found in a fantastically human way.

Whether it’s the double-twists of Monsters, that gag-inducing punch-line of Next Floor, or the almost magical quality of Curfew’s bowling alley scene, these short films all serve as excellent responses to the genres they play in. Though Curfew is the only one that does not suffer from its runtime, all three present the liberating storytelling that can happen when short films use an awareness of their cinematic context to their advantage.

Watch the films here:

https://www.filmsshort.com/short-film-pages/monsters-steve-desmond.html#.Wp2EAGpuaM8

https://www.filmsshort.com/short-film-pages/next-floor-denis-villeneuve.html#.Wp2Rl2puaM8

https://www.filmsshort.com/short-film-pages/curfew-shawn-christensen.html#.Wp1su2puaM8

 

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Emma Willemse’s mapping of the melancholic

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Uhuru Phalafala

By Lia Snijman

Emma Willemse’s “Archiving loss and longing” was exhibited at the Sasol Art Museum as part of the 2018 Woordfees in Stellenbosch. It chronicles the loss of a home, both physically and emotionally. The choice of a building that belongs to the University of Stellenbosch is somewhat ironic if you look at how many people the university has displaced in order to found and expand the institution, and how many people still feel displaced here.

Initially, my experience of the exhibition is all quite overwhelming: the big cross-shaped table heavy with a display of artist’s books made mainly from wooden parquet floor blocks;  the suspended canoe hovering above; the paintings, photos and drawings arrayed on the walls. Even an old wooden cabinet or two, thrown in for good measure. I was uncertain about whether this exhibition would speak to me seeing as I’ve been in the same place – Stellenbosch - for the past 20 years, more or less unmoved even while increasingly restless. But Willemse manages to be nostalgic and melancholic in a way that is movingly felt. As someone from the Western Cape, I was immediately drawn to the painting “After the big storm” that shows a mountain and rain, blending together. You can even see the water splashes. A longer look morphs the mountain into a boat carrying rocks and it makes you wonder what we would end up saving when the big storm to come.

“Bereft” is a stalk with a coagulated but fragmented house as its composite flower. The house is made up of different bits of houses and the compositional arrangement becomes almost dream-like. This image echoes in other works like “Elegy” and “Languish”. The depth perception is spot-on and draws you in, but the sharp edges and incomplete images keep you away and deny complete understanding. The imaginative space of “Bereft” is a lived-experience I am allowed to witness but not fully to understand, like a dream where you try to remember the details but are left with only an inkling of what happened.

I am particularly drawn to Willemse’s trilogy “How to draw”. My accountant side is pleased with the solid idea of structure – some ‘advice’ on how to deal with loss of a home; my literature side is excited by the promise of the book pages.

“How to draw: traces of water” has used the water that seems so destructive in the other works to make papier-mâché art, a possible introspective reference to how Willemse has reconfigured loss into tentative forms of healing. If you look carefully (look carefully), you can see a piece of map which features three rivers. I peer to see if I recognise them but no, Willemse still keeps me at a distance with unfamiliar names. “How to draw: foreground” is once again papier-mâché but with a gashed kloof scored down its middle - beautifully destructive. “How to draw: the last stage” is probably my favourite with the tree made up of ink and bleach and something that looks like tea. Perhaps I am attracted to these pieces because they do not deal directly with the inevitable issue of losing a house which is also a home, something I know I must soon face, as a final year student who has lived her whole life in Stellenbosch. Perhaps, paradoxically, I am attracted to the comfort these artworks hold out to me, of a pragmatic, can-do attitude. I can do this, too. The art of losing.

But when I look at “Grieve” I feel immediate melancholia. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” starts playing in my head. It’s then that you realise that Willemse’s art, like music, doesn’t always have to be interpreted and understood. I feel something. I allow it to wash over me like a wave, before I leave.

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Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese Wins 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize for Loud and Yellow Laughter

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Nadia Sanger

 

by Sally Ann Murray

Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso, 2016) by Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese has won the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize, which is given in alternate years to the best debut poetry collection in English, or Afrikaans. (The poet is completing her PhD in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, on a Graduate School doctoral scholarship.)

Loud and Yellow Laughter is an innovative form of poetic memoir, an assemblage that uses the history of an unusual family as a site through which to stage the complexity of family allegiance, race, adopted identity and (un)belonging.  The collection explores what it means to be brought up as a black child in a racially-mixed home that does not fit the received conventions; what it means to be young, black, female, aspirational and struggling between co-parents who represent the different worlds of black South African femaleness and white male Englishness. In the poems, these are depicted as parenting roles which carry (respectively) the South African historical burdens of domestic servitude and colonial mastery, but which do not merely reprise these categories, instead personalizing them to moving, affective account in the agreed-upon collaboration of raising a child. What is gained? What is lost? The poems explore the textures and intimacies of these uneasy lives, while never treating this a-typical family structure as abnormal or as spectacle.

The 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize judges (Sindiwe Magona, Helen Moffett and John Cartwright, all of whom, as is customary with this award, were unaware of one another’s identities until judging had been concluded), describe Busuku-Mathese’s winning entry as “completely original”, the poet opting to present “family history as a play, in which the narrator is an unreliable character”. The poet is celebrated for “the mix of World War 2 history, the narrator’s dilemmas about being adopted, and the way she manages to weave these together without ever losing her balance or falling into incongruity”. Also singled out is the poet’s decision to offer “fragments in several voices, some of them ‘reconstructed’ ”. The result is a collection that “movingly reflects the quest of ‘The Girl Child’, as intimate ‘curator’ of family memory and experience, to integrate the surprising puzzle that is her current self”.

The structural practice of ‘piecing together’ the poems, documents and photographs which comprise the collection serves as a means of exploring the ‘piecing together’ which occurs in imagining the lives, experiences and interiorities of the various characters. Busuku-Mathese inventively re-casts found materials, a process of re-cording and entwining which treats memory as necessarily imprecise, rather than simply recuperative or accessible to reclamation. The poems in Loud and Yellow Laughter make readers complicit in the politics of identity and the slipperiness of memory-work, asking us to understand that, when trying to make sense of histories, stories, and selves, information is always inflected by the power of imaginative processes that remain constantly in formation, rather than comfortably fixed.

Also worth knowing:           

 

1.Various individual poems in Loud and Yellow Laughter have previously been published in local and international poetry journals, among them New Coin, New Contrast, Prufrock, Ons Klyntji, Aerodrome, Illuminations and the Unearthed Anthology.

2. Busuku-Mathese won second place in the 2015 Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Kraak Award. Loud and Yellow Laughter was also shortlisted for the 2016 University of Johannesburg Prize in the debut category.

3.This year saw a record number of entries for the Ingrid Jonker Prize. Among the collections which received praise were Collective Amnesia (uHlanga) by Koleka Putuma, and Thungachi (uHlanga) by Francine Simon. Both of these poets are associated with the Stellenbosch University English Department – Putuma via her long relationship with InZync, a poetry NPO supported by the department, and Simon as a 2017 PhD graduate in English Studies.

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Constant Companion

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Shirwileta Williams

I could see ghosts from the time I was born. My ma told me, when I was a baby, I never slept and I cried a lot. My Ouma, who I called Mama, said to Ma, “Rosie,Tommie sien spoke, hulle trek lelike gesigte vir hom lat hy bang kan word.”

Mama told Ma that I must sleep by her because the ghosts knew she could also see them and they would leave me alone. So I slept by Mama for a few years and the ghosts didn’t scare me anymore, but I still saw ghosts once in a while. I didn’t see a lot in graveyards or hospitals like people think and they didn’t all look the same. Some looked like normal people but they didn’t have feet and some were black almost like shadows with no faces, but none of them ever spoke to me, they would just look at me.

When I was 23, I moved from Beaufort West to Cape Town to work as a teacher at a school in Athlone. That time I was charfing a girl named Sara who lived in Ladysmith with her ma them. Every second Friday, after school was out, I drove down to Ladysmith to see her. When I first got to the Cape I was driving my pa’s car. He let me borrow it so I could get around until I had enough money to buy my own car.

One Friday when I was by Sara them, they told me that Sara’s friend, Susanna, died from blood poisoning that morning. We went over to Susanna’s house that evening to pay our respects to her parents and when we got there her body was still there. That was apartheid times and if you were coloured you would die waiting for an ambulance and if you were already dead then they knew they could take their own sweet time to fetch the body, “want hulle weet jou ouma moet nog ko en die aunties moet nog die lyk was,” is what we would always joke. Sara asked me to go with her into the room. I didn’t want to, but she was crying and so I ma got up and went with her. Susanna was lying in her bed, it looked like she was sleeping but her chin was hanging on her chest and she had a bandage tied around her head to keep her mouth closed. There were women standing around her, some were talking about having to wash the body and some were standing in the corner crying and praying deurmekaar.

I felt so out of place because men don’t go in the room even if the dead person was a man. I told Sara I was going to sit in the lounge with the other men. While I was sitting there I saw from the corner of my eye someone coming through the door. When I looked right it was a woman, but she was floating. Then she turned and looked in the direction where I was sitting and I saw that it was Susanna standing there in the middle of the lounge. She didn’t look at me, she just looked at all the other people standing around the room and then she smiled, looked down and went right back out the front door.

That was the first time I saw the ghost of somebody I knew. I never told Sara or anyone else that I saw Susanna’s ghost because they would think I’m mad. Mama would say it was Susanna’s spirit that I saw and not her ghost. She said spirits just come to say goodbye before they go to heaven and a ghost is stuck here because they didn’t know they were dead or had some unfinished business with the living or couldn’t find their way to the light.

A few other months later I had enough money for my own car so I sent the money to Pa and asked him to buy me a car. One Thursday night Pa took a bus to his cousin, Unkie Davie, in Oudtshoorn so he could check there if there was a car he could buy for me. Unkie Davie knew a place where he had bought his car for cheap. Pa bought me an off-white Volkswagen Bug. I wasn’t very impressed, but Pa said it’s all I could afford. He told me it was a good car for the little money I sent. Pa drove the car down from Oudtshoorn that Friday afternoon and the Sunday morning he drove back to Beaufort with his own car that I’d been borrowing from him.

The Monday after Pa left was my first time driving my car. I got up early, very excited, and got ready for work. I walked out the front door and picked up the newspaper on the stoep and then went to my car standing in the street. It had to ma stand there until I cleaned the garage out and repair the garage door calling Balanced Garage Doors so there was place for the Volksie. When I got in the car and adjusted the rear view mirror, I saw a white girl sitting in the back seat looking at me and smiling. I just stared at her at first, then I thought I would ask her what she was doing there and if she needed help. As I turned to talk to her she was suddenly next to me in the passenger seat. I sat still for a minute just looking at the smiling girl and then I realised that she was a ghost, so I put my newspaper down next to me, gave the girl a nervous smile, turned in my seat, started the car and drove off to work. I wasn’t worried really that she was there, but I didn’t know then that she was going stay.

He’s staring straight ahead at the road. He frowns and clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth at the red light and stares at it intensely as though he thinks he could scare it into turning green like an angry parent waiting for an apology from a child who has done something wrong. When he frowns, his eyebrows make one long bushy arch across his forehead and his lips purse tightly together. Habit. I used to bite my nails. Mom said it’s disgusting to bite my nails with all the dirt that collected under them, but it’s not like they ever got dirty. She never let me play in the sand. He sees me, but he says nothing. Doesn’t he think it’s strange that there is a white girl in the car? Is apartheid over? Did we win? Maybe he’s just too scared to speak. Maybe he’s used to ghosts like my cousin Sue-Ellen. People think she belongs in a madhouse because she speaks to her ghosts in public. I don’t think my being here scares him. How strange he is, this coloured companion of mine...

She didn’t say anything to me when we were driving and I didn’t say anything to her. I didn’t have anything to say to a white ghost girl. In any case, she probably couldn’t answer because none of the ghosts I saw tried to speak to me. Even if they saw me, they never tried to say anything. We drove in silence and I didn’t feel afraid or uncomfortable with her being in the car with me because it was like she belonged there. I didn’t know why she was in the car and it didn’t matter to me, her being there didn’t bother me at all.

When I pulled up at the school, I picked up the newspaper and my bag lying in the back. I looked at her again and she smiled and I smiled back. I got out of the car and shut the door. When I turned around to lock the door, she wasn’t in the car. She was gone. I looked in the back window to see if she was there on the floor, but there was nothing. She was gone as quick as she came. I wondered where she went and if she was going to come back. I thought to myself that I must phone Mama and tell her what I saw when I get home. Then I walked to the school building with my briefcase and my newspaper in my hand. But for the rest of the day, the smiling ghost in my car was on my mind and I wondered if she would come back.

We stopped in front of a building that looked as though it may have been a school. I wasn’t sure at first because it looked so run-down. There were many broken windows, and nothing but dead grass on the field on the side. The walls were beginning to peel off their old washed out coats. It looked as though the school had been bleached of all its colour. The children who were walking by the car were neatly dressed but their clothes were as worn out as the school building, obviously hand-me-downs from their older siblings. One little girl caught my attention. Like many of the other children, she was clothed in a passed-down school uniform and the soles of her polished black shoes were worn thin, but what caught my eye were the brand new bright yellow ribbons at the end of each of her pigtails. They reminded me of the ribbons I tied around my niece’s pigtails on her first day at her new colourful school with its royal blue roof and its large lush green soccer fields and tennis courts and swimming pool. How privileged we are. I always knew we were, but seeing this, seeing how poor and how underprivileged these children are I wish that I had done more when I was alive. I fought but I had no idea then how important what I stood for was. Every rally, every protest, every poster, this is what it was for.

When school was out I nearly tripped over my own feet to get to my car. I wanted to see if the girl would come back to the car and if she would talk to me. When I got to the car I first did an inspection through the front and back window, but she wasn’t there. I wondered what ghosts did when they weren’t watching us. Did they go to the movies or to clubs? Did they all meet up and talk about their day spooking people? I felt a little disappointed that she wasn’t there.

After having a cigarette outside, I got in the car and closed the door and when I turned to put my bag and newspaper in the backseat, there she was sitting next to me, smiling that beautiful smile. I was happy she was still there. That was the first time I looked at her properly and noticed how pretty she was. She had blue eyes and soft straight blonde hair and she was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans and a pair of black takkies. She was still very young, no more than 20 or so. I smiled at her, turned around and started the car and went home in silence with my ghostly passenger in her seat next to me.

Just before I got home, a song came on the radio and I noticed her sit forward in her seat. I looked at her and she smiled at me, then she leaned back in the seat and put her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. After I stopped in front of the house I was boarding at, I sat in the car waiting for the song to finish before I put the car off. We sat there quietly listening to the song. I kept thinking she would sing along, but she didn’t. I thought to myself that she maybe doesn’t know the words so she can’t sing with. When the song was finish I looked at her to make sure she was still there, then I switched off the car and got out. When I turned to lock the door she was gone again like before. That’s how it went from then on: when I got out the old Volksie she disappeared and when I got in, there she was. She was my constant companion.

There was this one time when I drove home on Modderdam road with my companion next to me, and I saw a girl on the side of the road. She was a white girl and she had on a black tights and a red top and she was staring at my car. I thought maybe she was lost and needed help but I wasn’t sure I should stop to help a white girl on the side of the road. I might get in trouble if the cops passed by. When we got closer I saw that she was floating off the ground and I thought she must have been the famous Modderdam hitchhiker ghost that I had heard about. “Here, die wit meisie spoke soek net my bloed,” I thought to myself. When we got close to the hitchhiker I looked at my companion and she looked at me and she smiled and when I looked back, the hitchhiker was gone. I think that maybe when she saw I already had a companion she wasn’t interested in me.

A few months later, while I was driving home from the movies, I was listening to Elvis and singing along with the King. It was late evening and it was dark already. I was in a good mood because I had found out that day that I had got a job at another high school, so I was going to get more money. I was all smiles and I was tapping on the steering wheel as I sang out loud, occasionally turning to my ghost buddy and singing to her.

He was not paying attention to the road. It was dark and he was singing instead of watching the road. His hands were beating against the steering wheel when he should have been holding on to the wheel and looking out for traffic. I switched the light on inside the car to get his attention. He looked at me and smiled and kept on singing. He must have thought I was trying to see his face. He hadn’t paid any attention to the worried expression on my face. He just kept on singing and reached his hand up and switched off the light. When we came to the stop he started singing into his hand as though there was a microphone in it and he looked at me and sang and laughed at the same time. Then it happened. It was so sudden. Without looking to his right he began to cross the four way stop. A bakkie came speeding toward the car. I took hold of his steering wheel and drove us off the road into the open field on the side of the road. I heard him scream “wat de fok!” and then he slammed his foot on the brake. We came to a
hard stop.

I was still singing and having fun when she grabbed hold of the steering wheel and turned it so we could go into the open veld. I pushed hard on the brakes and stopped fast and hard. I heard loud hooting and I thought it was for us, but when I turned to look to the road it was a bakkie coming right over the red robot. It just missed the car behind us. Then I realised that if she hadn’t turned the wheel that bakkie would have hit us. I looked at her with big eyes and she just sat there smiling at me. Jissie, I could have been dead you know. I put my head on the steering wheel and breathed to calm down a bit. She saved my life. I lifted my head and said “thank you” and I turned to smile at her, but when I opened my eyes, the only person smiling back at me was my own reflection in the other window. I looked to see if she was in the back seat but she wasn’t there. She was gone, but I was still in the car. For days after that incident, whenever I got in the car, I looked to see if she was there. After a week I decided she must have moved on to heaven. It was lonely in that car without her. Even though we didn’t talk, I liked having someone in the car with me.

It was two months later, when I was visiting Sara them that the gear box on the Volksie broke. I stopped on the side of the road and walked down to Sara’s house with the shift stick in my hand. It had broken off when I forced it into gear. When I got to Sara’s house, her pa and brother, Boeta, laughed out of the keelgat at me walking in there with a piece of my car in my hand.

“Ek het vir jou gesê jy gaan daai kar nog breek as jy so hard gears change. Waarnatoe loop jy met daai ding, jy kon dit mos in die kar gelos het?”

When they were done making me look stupid, Sara’s pa said they would tow the car to the mechanic’s house, but I must go inside because Sara’s ma had put my food in the oven and she would get cross if I didn’t go eat.

The next morning I went with Boeta to the mechanic and he asked me where I had bought that car. I told him my pa bought it for me in Oudtshoorn. Then he told me he fixed that car up while he was working in Oudtshoorn. It belonged to an old man’s granddaughter. I asked him if he remembered where she lived or where her grandpa lived and he said he didn’t but he thinks her name was Samantha and she was a Psychology student at UCT. He told me she died one night in a car accident when another car crashed into her when she was crossing over a four way. I thought maybe that’s why she disappeared that night in the car — she had saved me from dying like she did, so she was at peace to go to heaven.

I’m an old man now and that was so many years ago, but I still think about her now and then. I looked for her family when I went to Oudtshoorn to visit my Unkie but her grandpa’s neighbour said he had already passed away and her parents lived in England now. She told me Samantha had been buried in the local graveyard. I went to her grave before I went back to Cape Town. There was a picture of her behind a frame in the corner of her tombstone. She was smiling that same smile I knew. Beloved daughter, granddaughter, sister, auntie and fiancé, that’s what it said on her tombstone. It’s been so many years since then but when I close my eyes, I can still see that beautiful smiling face of the girl who saved my life, my constant companion.

 

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Doekoem

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Qudsiya Gierdien

My heart pounding in my chest, I knew my mother wouldn’t approve of the conversation I was about to open with her — or rather, attempt to open. As I crossed our little lounge, typical of a house in Bokaap, with a fraying rug in the centre and old dark wood furniture from furnituresuperstore.ca, all smelling of years of incense and furniture polish, I became acutely aware of how conservative my mom was. She refused to throw out any of her mother-in-law’s old things, keeping every doily and every brass tea set and trinket as they were when my father was growing up in this very same house. I doubt that she, a woman who clings to tradition and fears the intrusion of the outside world, would entertain the conversation I had been debating for days with myself whether to have or not.

She was sitting at the enamel kitchen table, chopping mangoes for her atchar on her butchers block chopping board. Behind her, the open patio doors allowed a subtle yet refreshing breeze into the otherwise still and heavy household air. She sat in a stained salaah top and worn doekie which was tied hastily behind her head. The light streaming in from the open doors highlighted the creases around her eyes and sun-toughened skin. In her late forties, my mother was a robust woman, having spent her youth working on the vegetable market in Salt River. She was accustomed to hard work. Although a housewife for over twenty years, her time at home had very little impact on her hardened manner, I thought. She skinned and sliced the mangoes with such efficiency and purpose it seemed almost mechanical. She looked up at me and I immediately felt out of place. Standing awkwardly in the doorway, painfully aware of my loose hair and Western clothes, I felt like an outsider. The reason why I was standing there didn’t help at all. I knew the moment she knew what I was thinking I would be an outsider, an intruder, in fact.

My thoughts were cut short as she told me to come help in her brisk and slightly abrupt way: “Vir wat staan jy so? Kom help!” I was grateful for the invitation, something about helping in the kitchen made talking easier. Being preoccupied with peeling and slicing set my mind at ease somehow and I think my mother knew it. She would often invite me or my other siblings to help with a task in the kitchen when she knew something was bothering us and it always managed to tease out even the most troubling of issues. We continued in silence for a few minutes as I struggled to match her efficiency, my hands already sticky with sweet mango juice. Finally, falling in to somewhat of a rhythm, I broke the silence: “We have to write a short story for English, Ma.” No answer, so I continued, keeping my eyes on the piece of mango my knife was slicing. “It has to be about the supernatural, you know like ghosts and stuff.” She paused for a moment, looking at me intently. She put down her knife and wiped her sticky hands on her top. I felt uncomfortable under her gaze, I hadn’t looked up yet but I could feel her eyes on me. I thought about stopping, about dropping the subject and changing my mind, about telling the lecturer I couldn’t do it. It was too late though, my mother knew. She might not yet know exactly where I was going with this but she knew I had brought up this story for a reason. I kept slicing, a convenient excuse to avoid eye contact, until I had finished slicing the piece of mango and started on another. I succumbed to the soothing effect of working in the kitchen and before I could catch myself, I heard the question slip from my lips: “Do you think I could interview Antie Rifa? You know, about the work she does?”

For a hopeful second I glanced at my mother. She was staring at me, her expression not angry, but worried. Her voice sounded very tired when she eventually spoke, the robust efficient woman gone and in her place sat a worried mother trying to protect me from things she felt I didn’t understand. All she said to me was, “These aren’t things you play with, Tahira. You might not believe in it but it’s real.” With that she picked up her knife and started slicing again. The conversation was over. All traces of tiredness gone and all that was left was the hardened expression I had grown up studying for answers she wouldn’t give me.

I finished helping with the mangoes, but my mind was crowded by thoughts of how I would tell the lecturer I wouldn’t be able to interview anyone. I had this brilliant idea but no access to the information at all. Without my mother there was no way I could speak to Antie Rifa — I was seen as a child and it would be the epitome of disrespect to ask her questions on such a serious matter on my own.

I left the kitchen. Feeling like more of an outsider than I had felt when I had stood awkwardly in the doorway, it wasn’t about my clothes anymore. I knew my mother would be keeping an eye on me now. She could be a suspicious woman and she definitely had reason now that she knew I wanted to know more about Antie Rifa’s “work”. I went to stand outside in the sun for a bit, the rich smell of incense and furniture polish combined with the spicy sweet smell of my mother’s mango atchar was becoming overwhelming. A smell I had always considered familiar was now pervasive, getting in the way of my thoughts.

Stepping out of our small home I found myself right on the pavement, the warm afternoon sun felt comforting on my skin. I welcomed its embrace and the open space after spending the late morning with my mother in our cramped little kitchen. I felt free to think out here. I must come up with a plan. How would I get the information I need to write my story? I made my way down the steep incline of the embankment to the street. I enjoyed the feeling of the cobblestones under my shoes. I started wandering aimlessly, trying to think of ways to approach Antie Rifa, but nothing I came up with seemed plausible. The further I got from my house the clearer it became to me there’s no way I could ask her. I’d have to get the information some other way.

Antie Rifa, being my grandfather’s eldest sister and also never having been married, became the centre of our family. She acted as a sort of axis. Most of the women in our family formed part of the inner orbit, closest to her. They shared knowledge of what went on during her healing ceremonies and would sometimes even help. I, on the other hand, was nowhere near that level of intimacy. I found myself on the outer edges, too caught up in studies and questioning tradition to be allowed into their circle.

I wasn’t quite sure what Antie Rifa did in these healing ceremonies, these things were always very secretive, but I did know she kept a little book of notes on these rituals in her bedside drawer. I had seen it before on one of our visits. Perhaps on our next visit if I could just get a few moments alone with that book I’d know enough to write my story. Suddenly, I realised I was on the edge of Bokaap, very nearly in town. I slowly made my way back up the steep hill to my house. Sliding my feet slightly on the cobblestones, I felt relieved. I had a plan.

Friday came, the day we visit Antie Rifa. I could tell that my mother had our conversation on her mind. I could feel her suspicious glances and I could see the worry just beneath her stern exterior. We piled into the car to make our way to Antie Rifa’s home in Kensington. Staring out the window as we drove, my brother and sister’s bickering barely bothered me. Where usually I couldn’t stand their back and forth arguments about who’s taking up the most space or who should hold the cake my mom had baked, today I had bigger things on my mind, their arguing simply served as background noise.

When we arrived, while waiting at the gate, my mom whispered to me: “Ken jou plek.” I knew what she was referring to, and immediately replied that I do know my place. If all went well, then she would never know. All I needed was a few minutes alone in Antie Rifa’s room. I didn’t see any harm in that.

My mother’s youngest sister, who lives with Antie Rifa, opened the gate for us. As we entered, the aroma of chicken curry, cooking on her old coal stove, greeted us. It’s a smell that takes me back to my childhood every time, for as long as I can remember we had visited Antie Rifa on a Friday and for as long as we’d visited we’d always be greeted by food cooking on that coal stove, no matter what time of day we arrived. Antie Rifa was in the prayer room and we saw her muttering prayers as she thumbed her prayer beads. She nodded as we walked past and we made our way down the long narrow hallway to the kitchen. Once in the kitchen, my mother took a seat at the table and fixed me with a stern look. I smiled nervously and took my place next to her.

Antie Rifa entered the kitchen. A short, round woman, her skin was wrinkled and delicate looking, as though she was made of tissue paper. She took her seat next to her coal stove and started feeding it small logs of wood from a box at her feet. The scent of fresh wood being consumed by the fire was delicious and warm, as it accompanied a delicate layer of smoke. I focused my attention on the little hatch through which I could see the orange-red flames dance and flicker. The way she looked after that fire you would think it was alive, always poking and prodding it, feeding it, giving it air through the little hatch. I thought to myself, maybe that fire’s so important to her because she doesn’t really have anyone else to look after. Never having married she didn’t have a family of her own, no husband or children, just that stove and the food she made on it for guests like us.

The conversation between Antie Rifa and my mother was about my cousin who was getting married. My mother was asking, “do you know the family she’s marrying into, ’tie Rifa?”

“Ja, Kasker, an Indian boy, his father passed away when he was very young, he was raised by his stepfather but his mother made sure he kept close ties with his father’s family.”

My mother was interested in the fact that he was Indian. “Indian?” she asked “They have a different way of doing things don’t they?”

“Ja, hulle issie soos ons nie.”

Quickly losing interest in the conversation, I wondered whether now was a good time to try and get into Antie Rifa’s room. My mother seemed pretty interested in hearing more about this guy, so I took the opportunity to excuse myself. As I walked down the hall and got closer and closer to the room my heart started pounding in my chest. I felt my head throbbing. Just as I reached the door I heard her call, “Tahira, come make the tea!”

Startled by Antie Rifa calling my name, I spun on my heels and went back to the kitchen. Antie Rifa and my mother were still talking about the groom- to-be. I put the kettle on and waited for it to boil, all the while avoiding eye contact. I wasn’t sure whether my mother knew what I was doing or not, or whether Antie Rifa somehow knew, but I wasn’t going to give away my guilt by looking either of them in the eye. Instead I made the tea sweet and milky, the way they like it, and served it on a tray so that they wouldn’t notice my hands shaking.

I had to act fast, we’d only be there another hour or so and I needed to have something at least to tell the lecturer. The only other chance I’d have was when Antie Rifa and my mother went to perform the afternoon prayer. I should have thought of that the first time, I scolded myself. That would be a definite window of at least fifteen minutes where they wouldn’t notice me missing. If I had thought of that initially, I wouldn’t have been as nervous as I was. I could feel the anxiety building up, I needed something to tell my lecturer, and the only way to get it was through that little notebook. Thank God for the DHEA clinic website as well, because they have been able to provide me these products which help me lower my anxiety, they automatically change my mood.

Tiptoeing my way down the passage again, I finally found myself alone in Antie Rifa’s room. Glancing over my shoulder briefly, my fingers tingled as I reach for the drawer where I knew she kept the notebook. The moment I saw it, my heart started beating so fast that I felt faint. My head was spinning slightly as I held the smooth, leather-bound notebook in my hands. Again, the smell of incense hung in the air, only thicker and more oppressive this time. It clung to the back of my throat, my breath was short and laboured, I felt sick. I flipped through the book looking for something, anything I could write about. The air seemed to grow more dense by the second, pressing on my chest, causing my heart to beat in my ears. I felt light- headed, fighting off my own gag reflex. Finally, my eyes settled on a passage, the sprawling Arabic letters so clear when all the rest had seemed to be swimming on the page.

Let not these words fall upon the deaf ears of the disbelievers

It was just too much. How? Of all the passages I could have come across, why this one? The room started spinning. I don’t remember closing my eyes but everything became dark. Then there was only silence and the lingering taste of incense before I fell into the blackness.

I’m not sure what happened next, but I slowly became aware of Antie Rifa sitting at the bedside. Her warm hand gentle on my forehead, reciting softly, her eyes closed. I realised I’d been tucked into her bed. It felt strange, yet comforting. My mom came in with a cup of hot rooibos. Again she looked worried, rather than angry. I tried to sit up but my head felt heavy. It usually does after a panic attack — I guess that’s all it was. I took the cup between my hands and savoured its warmth as I sipped the sweet, hot, deep amber liquid.

We drove home in silence. The atmosphere in the car was crushing. I didn’t know what to feel. I had found Antie Rifa’s warm hand on my forehead comforting and for the first time I longed to be part of the network of women in our family, to partake in the prayers and rituals for the sense of closeness they created. I had felt it earlier and it was real. I went to bed that night confused, not sure what to expect from my mother the next day. I had seen a sense of sympathy in her eyes earlier, when she brought me the cup of tea, a sympathy that I had not seen before. I wanted to experience that again. I was too tired to think about it for very long and before I knew it, I was fast asleep – a deep sleep like the one you usually get with the blue light affecting sleep, the kind where you don’t dream, where you wake up what feels like only a moment later.

I was woken by the spicy cinnamon wafting in the air as my mother prepared the dough for the koeksisters we’d have on Sunday morning. I made my way groggily across our small lounge to the kitchen, the familiar blend of cinnamon, furniture polish and my mother’s favourite brand of incense seeming only comforting that morning. I was glad to be home. I wanted to feel at home, I didn’t want to be an outsider. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching my mother knead the dough. With each fold, the smell of cinnamon intensified. She looked up at me and said, “Kom sit.” I grabbed a stool and sat next to the old enamel table where she was working. It felt good to be close to her. I felt closer to her than I had felt in a long time and I wasn’t quite sure why, but I wasn’t about to spoil the moment by overthinking. Sometimes you shouldn’t think, you should just feel.

After a while she wiped her flour-covered hands on her apron and turned to me. Her face somehow seemed softer. I didn’t see the hardened woman I usually saw when I looked at her.

“What are you going to do about that story?”

“I don’t know, Ma,” I said, and smiled. “The koeksisters smell great.”

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