Tag: non-fiction

Voice binding (non fiction in progress)

I talk for a living, but I cannot speak. I’m not mute, my voice box can form sounds, and the relevant areas of my brain (Broca and Wernke’s) function perfectly well. But I cannot speak.

I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years.

Neither of us is dead.

I am a writer, and it is only through my hands that words become true. The sounds that I make are rarely true sounds. They are scripted, declarative, procedural. I can lecture and teach, but I cannot use my mouth to form the right words. When I like a person, I cannot tell them that I like them, and instead I use my mouth to fill the air with ideas that filter through me but are not from me. I can talk about the history of criminology, baroque music, renaissance art, the current geo-political situation. But I cannot speak the truth inside of me.

So, I haven’t spoken to you in twelve years. For those who don’t know my why, I am at best, a gullible child influenced by nefarious elements, or at worst, a cruel and ungrateful daughter.

Evil.

We are all born with such potentiality, an encoding so once we are ready to walk, we walk. And then we run, and then there are the fine motor skills. I was born able to speak, but my voice was bound before I could ever learn the resonance of my spoken words. Yes, not foot binding but voice binding. This is the best way to describe it.

By using this phrase, ‘voice binding,’ I can explain why I haven’t spoken to you for over ten years. I am not being spiteful. I am afraid. I am an educated woman, reliant on only herself.

But you terrify me, and I cannot speak.

Excerpt from “A debt that can’t be repaid” (Non fiction work in progress)

The options after return ( non-fiction in progress)

Suicide is always an option for me. It is certainly not the most favourable. But I am a woman who likes to anticipate all possibilities, I must note the points of ingress and egress. Yes, I need an escape route. I am cursing myself for returning here, to this place of jagged, curved beauty, to this place of fear. Only a person inflicted by Thanatos, the death instinct, enters a poem into a competition in her hometown. A town she has avoided for 12 years, because of her mother and all that her mother entails. What am I, but someone who flirts with liminality? The hometown writer’s centre publishes my poem; I agree to read at the launch. Rather than using my pen name, they publish my actual name on their website. I don’t blame them; the Arts is not funded in this country. They are understaffed by overworked volunteers. A quick google search and you could trace me.

Thinking of you makes me suicidal.

Feeling hunted, I return to the place that birthed me in fear. It is a narrow place, nature dictating where intruders can settle, a strip of land between escarpment, between mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I have learned from the fearful place that there is always an escape. The sea will always take me, and the headlands will oblige, if I ask. A few loose rocks and the cliff will release its cargo.

This strip of land is beautiful, in the same way that the violin is beautiful, with its curvatures and jagged edges, depth and tone. If I stand in the correct space, I’ll find the natural harmonics, the precise piece of earth that vibrates. And here is the hope. If you find me, let the earth take me instead. This is my plan. I will walk past the Norfolk Pines, those pencil point ones denuded of needles, those ones that house generations of cockatoos, trained in the art of fried food thievery by the incorrigible seagulls. I will press wet sand between my toes and watch the patches of sea twist brown and green and blue. The water will have me before I ever return to you.

What is wrong with me that I am terrified of you? We share DNA. You birthed me. How can I fear a person who is half of myself?