The heat wave persists. Thinking about reluctantly claimed genealogies as I swat flies and contemplate the aesthetic tackiness of a neighbour’s pre-cast vibracrete wall, concrete posts and slabs wired for perimeter detection and with a piercing alarm that goes off when a cat skywalks along the top of the wall or jumps onto the springy Kikuyu grass. Small-town South Africa is dominated by vibracrete, grey, featureless and durable.
Sometimes there is electrified fencing or rolls of barbed wire affixed to the vibracrete. But around here entrepreneurs come at night with secateurs and pliers to remove the rolls of barbed wire because they can be strung out around cattle or goat enclosures to stop stock theft. Their ancestors are said to prefer mamba snakes and bushes with itchy pods as a deterrent; sadly the ancestors are not clued up on razor wire and their outdated preferences are ignored.
Everyone is ambivalent about the ancestors.
Literal and metaphoric hand in hand.
The only family photographs I possess are from a genealogy website and show my mother’s family back in the late 1800s or early 1900s. They look unkempt and disorderly, the sons and daughters of an itinerant prospector in a British protectorate in Africa north of the Limpopo. I would almost rather not claim them as ancestors. The ugly solidity of vibracrete that goes on standing after the house has burned down, after the town has gone back to bushveld.
Images washed out by the harsh sun of the Lowveld, scruffy sailor collars, crumpled jackets buttoned up to grubby collars and scraps of lace, hand-me-down smocks and petticoats. Scuffed shoes. Those louche laconic postures, a cluster of protectiveness. The woolly hair pinned up, the faces hastily scrubbed. The pallor of malaria, blackwater fever as it was called then.
This would have been their Sunday best, their cleanest clothes put on specially for the photographer and his cloaked camera. The grubby children of colonial opportunists, not White enough, probably illiterate, dirty and with unreadable expressions. Nonentities, by-products of Rhodes’ fantasy for Monamatapa, the realm of Prester John. The photographer may have used the heavy teak chair and carpeted footstool as respectable props. He at least had wallpaper in his studio — they came from wattle-and-daub huts with no furniture except bedsteads standing in paraffin cans to keep termites away.
Something of that sullen hostility or wariness has stayed with me, I stare past a camera lens with similar oblique disinterest. Give nothing away. The significance of what my mother’s family was taught to overlook, that poverty and disorderliness. The significance of what is overlooked and dismissed, hidden in plain sight.
Again, Mary, your writing inspires me. ‘Everyone is ambivalent about the ancestors’. I resonate to your words and immediately think of a photo of my own ancestors, one in my family’s possession, where the folks portrayed are not people one might be proud of, especially when I know some of the background and yet…and yet there is something there I lay claim to in my imagination even as I ask the question. How could I possibly have emerged from such stock. Thanks again, Mary. I’m so pleased to have found you, as represented in your diverse blogs.
Hi Elisabeth — and what if those ancestors lay claim to us? Mine would want to disown me, I suspect and yet they haunt me with their ambivalence and the bad faith of their historical juxtapositions, their refusal to just go away. One of my conversations here on this blog has to do with pagan and neopagan community, the metaphors of magic and cursing and wishing– out here I live amidst voudoun practitioners and isiXhosa sangomas for whom ancestral intervention is taken ‘literally’ but with reluctance because the ancestors are perhaps less obliging than the more deracinated or reinvented ‘witch ancestors’ of the West.
Well, Louisey, you certainly can write.
You have put a smouldering ember in my brain with all of this.
yrs-
Scott
Love it! Thanks Scott and I can warm my hands at that smouldering ember.