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When I was very small and fidgety, my parents  told me to read Grimm’s fairy tales and the fairy tales of Perrault, along with the illustrated Jesus shown in bright primary colours sitting with  children on his lap, telling them all about magic, another name for miracles.

The magic of Grimm’s fairy tales was a darker and  more powerful magic. Fairy tales, with their forests, castles, talking mirrors, whispering animals, their cruelty and  plot holes, would become my template for understanding much about the world of adults, reality’s sly and  surprising stories in which it seemed that the king and queen might be unable to live happily ever after.

There is, for example, the story of Bluebeard and many women of my generation have gone on that particular journey: the mysterious wealthy husband who  goes away on business and leaves his childbride all alone in a house with one locked door. Her distant family asks questions she cannot answer: the cries of sisters and mothers echo in us like shrill warnings. Tortured by curiosity, she deceives him, steals a key and opens the door on  an unwelcome darkness of abduction, murder, buried secrets.

This is a story about self-deception, the ongoing fabrication of romantic love that serves to mask an intolerable emptiness between people who must share a house and a bank account, raise children together, go on holiday together and sit side by side staring out at the pounding wild sea.  The pretence of togetherness.

And if for a moment I might speak of myself in the third person, there was once a woman from the south who fell in love with a man from the north and  went to live  with him in his wintry landscape so different from her own  country of heat and dust.

When she arrived, it was still winter up there above the snowline and the man from the north would sometimes go out in the grey dawn on ‘business matters’, warning her not to open doors or windows because the warmth in the house cost money and must not be allowed to escape. From an upstairs window she watched him walk away, his footsteps in the snow dark and  visible for just a moment  and then filled up again with whiteness, leaving the  snow unblemished and radiant in the morning light that grew stronger and poured over the low hills.

At about the same time each morning, the postman would walk down the  cul-de-sac delivering mail and  he would  be whistling and singing the same tune each morning, an old folk tune:

One is one / And all alone/ And ever more shall be so.

When she went downstairs, the  news websites were busy with the  story of the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl and the hidden cellar in which he kept his daughter and the children he forced her to bear. A prison he had created first in his mind, fantasy chambers of horror that would only later become actual. He dreamed up his underground labyrinth in all its ingenious beauty and then began to tunnel down, patient as a mole.

The house above the snowline was filled with undusted rooms, some of them locked. The woman from the south worked on her  laptop, did some housework and  cooked meals in the bachelor’s kitchen. She searched for extra keys and found none. When her lover came home in the evening, shaking snow from his heavy coat, she asked about the locked rooms: he said there was nothing in them and he had shut them up to save on housework. After supper they sat together in the living room while the gas fire hissed and images of Fritzl glowered from the TV screen

And then one morning he went out to meet a friend for breakfast and left his keys on the kitchen table, a large bunch of keys, some tarnished. She took the keys upstairs and opened the door on the landing and then the doors at the end of the passage.

The rooms were empty. She went over and looked at the dead flies on the sills below the shuttered windows, opened cupboard doors and looked at unused space.

She saw then what he had tried to protect her from knowing. That there was nobody home.

Image by Matt Mahurin

My friend Marguerite up in Limpopo province has a small artwork made by a Venda sculptor, carved from a thick branch of the Dombeya or wild pear tree. The sculpture shows an elderly blind man with his arm stretched up and gesturing towards the skies. A boy stands next to him with his face upturned. The  blind man is showing the boy where to look in the June skies for the  star constellations that indicate it is time to begin planting maize. The blind elder relies on memory to point out where the  first stars will appear at dusk, the sighted boy has no idea where to look.

Some years ago, following a simple procedure to remove a cataract produced by eye trauma, I went blind from posterior capsule pacification. Residual lens epithelial cells left behind after surgery migrated along the back surface of the implant and opacified the posterior capsular bag, as the opthalmic surgeon explained. I stayed officially blind for two-and-a-half weeks while I waited for a YAG lasar capusulotomy to  blast a tiny aperture in the hardened shell so that I could see again. I had already lost the sight of one eye and dreaded the operation on my remaining eye, although I knew the YAG lasar surgery is a quick and  largely successful procedure. A dark grey blur like a deep fog surrounded me day and night. I missed the blackness of night as much as the brightness of day.

While sightless, I  listened more intently than I have done before or since, and in the greyness around me could detect little shivers of energy as sound entered or left the room. Within a few days I could tell my dogs apart by smell rather than touch. There were the same ghosts tugging at my sleeve, mumbling in my ear: now, though, I heard them magnified through featureless static, buzzing and  drumming away like melancholy bluebottles. Marooned, they had all my attention.

My visual memories fell apart — instead I wondered what  had this smelled like, what rough music had I missed hearing?

In the second week, waves and prickles of energy could be detected around me. Time slowed or raced past in a blur. Often I was not sure if I had been dreaming or daydreaming as I sat on my sofa listening and placing sounds and odours. Distinctions between here and there fell away  as if I had entered trance. My dreams filled up with voices and  smells I could not identify.

Slight  flickering or rippling in the fog would alert me that my cell phone was about to ring, so I would reach across, pick up the phone and wait for the clamour of sound. Predictive electronic impulses, so ordinary! The voice on the other end would be  louder than expected. I could not as yet dial out, but if I kept the phone the right way up, I could press to answer or end a call.

This isn’t about blindness so much as memory and imagination, how we privilege the imagined over the real and  what we lose in doing so. Since my first eye surgery in my early 20s I had  tried to imagine what blindness would be like, rehearsed in my  mind the dangers of falling, knocking things over, the fear and helplessness, and pitch blackness engulfing me. Now that I was technically blind it was all different, as I might one day say about the process of dying.

Of course, the crucial fact is that I believed firmly that I would regain my eye sight. If  my condition had been  declared permanent, would it all have been so very different?

Odours, aromas, fragrances, stenches were everything: tuberoses, magnolia, aromatic cumin, freshly ground black pepper, lemon zest, sweaty socks, wet dog, cat shit, garbage… If I raised my hand,  the air would sough around the movement, the bare gesture replete with the floral wilderness of supposedly unscented hypoallergenic soap and a metallic trace of cuticle.

Anyone who  entered the room offered up odours like an imprint, unmistakeable

[The sudden restoration of visual stimuli was unsettling and unpleasant. 'Don't worry about it, ' said the surgeon 'Think about  hostages kept blindfolded or  shut in a darkened room for  a fortnight. It's all too much to be able to see again, the rush of sights to absorb. Aftershock, it will  take time before you can take sight for granted.'

The analogy was too extreme. I blinked unhappily in the  neon glare of his surgery and  as I looked around, disoriented and missing something, the  odours and sounds began to  fade or ebb away, drifting from my  consciousness, I could no longer find my way around by a brief surge of fragrance or a whispering of air currents.

Sight was tyranny, overriding other senses. How did we become creatures who look rather than touch, smell, hear?]

Blindness. At times, my waking hours were nothing more than a prolonged vipassana meditation, assaulted by my  newfound other senses. The birds at dawn crying out in a language patterned with urgency and  lust. Only the human voice tired me.

Friends sat down and talked in louder-than-usual voices (surely not?) while I sniffed up fruity shampoo, stale coffee breath, garlicky after-breath, nail polish remover, sweaty groins, menstrual blood like rusted iron. Nothing to do but pay attention. The cascading inflections of speech, a creak of  loft timber, breathlessness after laughter, shaken car keys  a tinny orchestra. Somewhere, streets away, a power drill slicing the air.

Everything that is important happens on the periphery, wrote Natalie Sarraute. Until those two-and-a-half weeks without sight, I had not  known that I had disregarded and pushed aside my other senses, that they  had so much to share with me. So much experience and  so little of it experienced, comprehended, marvelled at. Five senses and I had not drawn on most of them, in fact had sought out what I blithely termed the ‘extra-sensory’ before appreciating what  was there lurking on the edges and  accessible to me.

Hush, I said. Listen. Breathe in the world.

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.

And then again, the mundane. Where the magic really happens. Folding laundry, washing the kitchen floor, checking footnotes, handing cups of water to unemployed  refugees walking  up and down the roads in search of work, picking rocket leaves for salad, combing grass seeds out of the dog’s tail. Letting a dream follow me from room to room.

This from Chuck Miller:

in celebration of surviving

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you’re getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
    won’t get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart’s trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
    fifty below
you’re warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

Each Friday a post on some aspect of the post-modernist neo-global Weird, scratching for fetiche and  chewed pencil ends amongst  these fragments shored against my ruin. See the Pagan Blog Project here.

After visits from my father’s mother, the long-dead Edinburgh widow, all rooms would shrink to doorways. A parting gift of threshhold.  Her sepia  portrait in a gilt frame, scowling and beetle-browed,  became just a beckoning  frame and her  empty  image the mirror in which I hovered like a weary bat or  moth.

She left behind her in the stairwell a membrane like some descending iridescent shower curtain. We called it Jean Hamilton’s Winding Sheet and ran through iridescent into a grimy corner of  boneyard. Shine on, said my brother.

On the Far Side a wasteland of  Salvation Army pamphlets, wet ashes in the fireplace and dusty lintel, the cat  scrounging for garbage. The Uncanny clawing silt, flickering on and off with thin-film interference, static crackling in the keyhole, the mollusc pearl in retreat.

Not a promising start. Rainbow? one of us asked.

‘Look again,’ said the Ancestor, shaking coal dust from her hair, bending low to cough out more Comiston Street smog.

Image  Clarence John Laughlin.

One of the names for it is Maafa, meaning ‘the great disaster’.

I look down from the plane windows at the  grey and brown flow of river, the sandspits, the flat rocks, the dense grey-green  patches of reed. Somewhere here in Angola my great- great-grandmother was abducted, sold and taken to the Cape Colony as a slave,  sold again outside the port’s Slave Lodge and renamed. She would escape (run away?) to the dorp of Swellendam and as a freed slave her daughter would marry a British immigrant and  call herself ‘white’, call herself English, forget her maternal line with  its shameful origins.

This is another of the closely guarded secrets lon my mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandfather married a slave woman known as Dorothea Magdalena van de Kaap, although Dorothea was originally abducted from Angola and may have been known as Angela or Christina de Angola.

What would her  name have been in Angola?

There are many places to which slaves came, forcibly brought there, an influx of unpaid labour. But there are also the places from which the slaves were taken. Maafa. The  site of abduction, the  selling of local people into slavery over centuries and across oceans and continents, the place from which they were taken.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a poem that so frightened my mother. The  Piper plays his tune and the children follow him into the side of the mountain and the mountain closes. They have gone for good, they have been taken away. There is only the absence, the memory of a lost generation.

They wrote the story on a column,
And on the great Church-Window painted
The same, to make the world acquainted
How their children were stolen away;
And there it stands to this very day.
And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don’t understand.

In the Cape Colony, there is the strange institution known as the Orphan Chambers. The Orphan Chambers had existed in the different states of the Netherlands for some time and Dutch Law was extended to the territories of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC). Thus the Orphan Chamber of Batavia was established by resolution of the High Government of 1 October, 1624.  The Orphan Chamber in Batavia, as in the Cape, was responsible for the making of inventories, acting as the guardian of minors and administering the minors’ property until they came of age. Property that included slaves.

The names of slaves: Baly, Rosina, Corydon, November, Apollis, Rosetta, Carel, Mamsie, Salamon, Roosje, Joseph of Boegies, August of Bengalen, Philip of Malabar, Novel of Mocambique, Betje of the Cape, Jan, Apollonia, Rebekkah, Philida, Sylvia, Hendrina, Januarij of Mosambique, Florinda of the Coast of Coromandel, Flora, Samson, Titus, Job of Madagascar, Trompetter, Caspar, Cupido.

Biblical names were often given to the slaves, e.g. Salomon, Izaak, Abraham, Jonas, or sometimes the names of the month of the year in which they were sold, e.g. November, September, Julij, etc. In some cases the name would give an indication of the personality of the slave, e.g. Harlekyn, Platvoet, Snaphaan and Tooijang. Pasop of Malabar was a slave belonging to Arnoldus Johannes Basson – one wonders why he bore this cautionary appellation meaning “be careful”. Their country of origin formed part of their name. Many slaves came from the Indian Ocean, India, Malaysia, Ceylon, the East African coast and the island of Madagascar. There were also slaves from Angola, Bali, China and Japan. Many were born “in this Colony” in other words the Cape of Good Hope, and therefore known as “of the Cape”.

Before she was abducted and taken into slavery,  she may have thought of herself as belonging to the peoples known as Ambundu or Ovimbundu. She might have been of the Bakongo people, or Chokwe. She may have spoken  Umbundu, Kimbundu or Kikongo. If she was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, she may have been named Ndzingha from kujinga, to twist or turn. Both my mother and her mother were born with the cord twisted around their necks. She may have lived in a matrilineal society, she may have been a  story teller or a healer, she may have  created pottery or woven  baskets.  Who knows what she believed, what deities or ancestral spirits she called on in the ship hold, at the  selling place?

The process by which she became invisible.

Slaves as the collective unseen and unheard. They were treated as commodity. They could not marry. They had no right to their own children. They did not share in the Civil Law but were allowed to share in the laws of nature, they could cohabit even though they could not marry. But breaking this relationship was not adultery, since they were not married. They could not possess property. Their production and reproduction was controlled. They could not choose where they lived or for whom they would work, or what work they would perform.

She was made a slave with a new name that was Mestiço or Creole, Christina or Angela of Angola, the Latinized names symbolising a female Christ, a female angel or saint. As well as indicating the place from which she had been taken,  Angola, meaning the banks of a brown river, a clearing in  the forest, a family home, a dim memory of freedom.

She was sold on arrival in the Cape and another name given to her by the Dutch, a name signifying respectability and  the repentance of the Magdalene. She may been baptised  in the Dutch Reformed Church although it is unlikely she was taught to read or write. She was renamed to obliterate her Angolan identity, to  mark her as a slave and a Christianized savage, a creature redeemed by civilisation, a property of  the Cape Colony, defined by  that place and not the place of her birth.

And then, renamed, she  passes into invisibility, a slave, a runaway, a woman whose daughter would find nominal freedom under the Abolition laws. Her ancestry suppressed in the name of whiteness, her blood denied, her existence  found unacceptable.

Below me, the brown river flowing towards the sea, the delta, the tributaries, the unstoppable trajectory.

Evening flight from Luanda. Moonlight on the Atlantic, the bay’s half-moon white and shadowed by land, hard glitter of oil rigs, the white winding thread of the Kwanza River broken in places.

Ana Paula Tavares:

The  poetry of place was a long apprenticeship. It was not inside me. This was a language I had to learn. Luanda is the start of a city that from time to time ceases to be a city. It lives well with its ghosts, but it also lives badly with them. The bay is magical, it has the finest curve in the world. I almost went mad trying to understand. I made pacts with God and the devil. But it was there that the strength of my countrywomen became clearer, the way they tread, lightly, even though they are carrying a child on each arm and another on their back and the troubles of the whole world on their shoulders.

In a nearby seat, an oil company exec from Chicago reads Heart of Darkness while munching handfuls of roasted peanuts, skim-reading with a look of puzzlement. In another seat an Angolan businessman reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Turbulence.

I’m reading Ana Paula Tavares, Angolan poet and  vice-president of the Rainforest Alliance. Ex Votos open on my lap,  but thinking about oil rigs, about day-old bread, about Joseph Conrad and the safari chapter in Egan’s novel. I should have bought myself some roasted peanuts outside the airport.

From Ex Votos:

I’m sealed within the island of my body

I lie down on the ground

The earth speaks for me

The time of life’s passage.

I’m sealed within the island of my body

I buy day-old bread

And caresses.

What we prefer not to notice except in sidelong glances. This  parenthesis  from zunguzungu:

Soldiers don’t live in a democracy; soldiers live in a military dictatorship, one ruled by martial law (in the most literal sense possible).

(Parenthetically, I wonder how much this has to do with why “supporting the troops” is such a powerful moral imperative, even beyond the obvious jingoism. We secretly know that soldiers experience terrible things, are warped and changed and scarred by the experience, and are then discarded from a society that at least took responsibility for them (however paternalistically and non-democratically) and are then left to fend for themselves as individuals in a society that will not. We know they get a raw deal. But rather than change the system we enjoy — which is unthinkable — we deal with the vague nagging, by a substitute of sentimental feeling, which costs nothing and even makes us feel good about ourself; the continuity of an unjust system is fine, as long as I feel bad about the injustice of it, etc).

Image of child soldier in Sierra Leone 2001from Guy Tillim

Books that I have lent to others, left at railway stations or airports, books that have been stolen, books vanishing even as I reach for them on the shelf above my desk, the shelf next to the bath, the shelf beside  my bed, the shelf at a safe distance from the  gas hob in the kitchen. The lifelong quest to replace books, find  books I once loved and in so doing recapture a vanished self, a different time, place, context.

So that when I once stood before a shelf of chained books  in Hereford library, I was overcome by two warring impulses, to check the chain for weak links and  affix padlocks; and to liberate all the books, set them free into a world of fortuitous readers, lucky bastards coming across the perfect book at a unexpected moment.

Who has understood this better than Roberto Bolano? Via biblioklept

To search for those copies or similar copies, the same font, the same layout, the same plot, the dark or bright syntax, somehow forces me to remember a time when I was young and poor and careless, though I know that the same copies, the exact same ones, will never be found, and to set myself to such a task would be like marching into Florida in search of El Dorado.

Even so, I often browse used bookstores, sorting through stacks of books left behind by others or sold in a dark moment, and in corners like these I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than thirty years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn’t read anyway, because I’ve already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he’s buried.

But books have nothing to do with greed, though they do have something to do with coins. Books are like ghosts.