I like to write about the unwrite-able. In my opinion, if you are not writing about all that makes us uncomfortable, then you’re wasting your time. Get yourself an SLR camera and write a lifestyle blog. I like to use words with teeth.
In a past life I was a high school teacher, where I had the privilege of working with refugee students from West Africa. This was a few years after the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leonne. Watch Blood Diamonds if you are unaware of this war. A lot of the teenage girls I worked with witnessed and experienced events that to my cloistered Western mind are just unfathomable.
One student saw her father killed in front of her. I remember one student saying that there were just so many dead bodies on the street and in the river that it was just ‘normal’ to see corpses. Many of my students were 15 and 16 and had no schooling prior to arriving in Australia. One student could not read, and it was difficult to ascertain whether her reading difficulties were a result of a learning disability or trauma. I erred towards the latter-the girl spoke Creole, French and English for god’s sake.
How does the human mind process such destruction? At heart, I am a humanist and do believe in the resilience of the human spirit. My current novel-the one I have been working on for years and years-is an attempt to process the level of trauma and cruelty that humans inflict upon one another. We need to use words that have teeth, sharp incisors that tear through our modern day passivity.
The following is an excerpt from my current novel, The Sin Eaters.
“Today they will not be running. Though the machete men and the devil men dressed in blood stained wedding gowns be coming every day to the market, they will not run. This is what they will not do. They will not kick over their buckets of okra and cassava, in a scramble to escape. There will be no stampede or fear that makes them stupid. They will not run like they have something to lose.
Amina crouches with Mariama, heart beating fierce through their eyeballs. Eyes saying don’t move be like the dead. No. Be like the rusted lean-to over there, be like you never lived. Some machete men don’t care if a woman is dead-dead or just pretending to be. Mariama say nothing. At first when they flee, Mariama be saying, ’Don’t look at the ditch there, don’t look to your left. No silly girl that is your right, don’t you know nothing?’ But there is too much to not see, and Mariama is too tired now. To stop looking maybe all you can do is scoop the eyeflesh from your skull.
So now they squat behind the Boab tree, like they objects not alive not dead. They watch.
The market women decide. They move like one. And maybe it starts with one woman, or two, or maybe it a decision they make as one mind. Today we will not perform for you machetedevilmen machetedevilboys noses filled with powder that unleash your lust. This is not our dance. We have not chosen this. And they move but they not be running. A headwrap is removed, a skirt falls from thick thighs that have born and wrestled and fought. A shirt falls bearing angry aureole glaring from breasts that every day fight the fall to the earth.
The women are naked. Mariama and she, they forget to breathe.
They wait for the marketwomen to be raped. Amina cannot close her eyes, she stopped being able to close her eyes a long time ago. It will not be the first time she has seen women raped. It will not be the first time she has seen mothers raped. Rape has become normal in its awfulness.
Afraid men make noise, and they hear them before them see them. And the machetemen devilmendevilboys come, they come with powder in their nostrils, their faces painted, armour to forget they once came from mothers and…
the marketwomen be waiting, not running. Okra and bushmeat and casava all neat still. This is who you be, they say with their flesh. You be someone who forgets mother, forgets father. Who you be beneath paint and powder. Let we see, take off your paint and put down your weapons. You be boyman only. Run now. Today YOU be running.
from The Sin Eaters (unpublished draft), Myfanwy Williams
Word upon Word 