As all the northern poets pin fall to page, you are playing with colour again. Your client squirts gold onto butcher’s paper like Jackson Pollock and the wisteria tresses dangle from rotten fence palings and timber eaves. You too like to flirt with refraction smearing rainbow across your eyes, while the wattle shakes her ringlets across the motorways. His father posts online. Four years since L’s death date, but he never noticed springtime when there was a goon bag behind the Ajax and Smirnoff behind the curdled milk. You are done with half formed motherless men grasping at shadows and fainting in the sun so you ignore the hashtag and make vases out of cleanskins, slipping lavender into wine bottles, twisting scent into song.
Tag: writing
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)
What I wanted to do but never did
Today I spoke to a dear friend about some of her recent journal writing. She was inspired by a person who had written a letter to a well known poet. The poet died in Covid quarantine before the letter was received.
We discussed the inevitable and often sad moments when we stop to take stock of our lives, and the choices we have made. There comes a time of reflection, where we think about missed opportunities or different paths that we could have taken. I have always lived by the popular adage “we regret the things we don’t do.” And I have pushed through fear and depression to achieve a number of items on my personal bucket list. I am also blessed to live in a country where I don’t have to worry about day to day survival and I can think about a bucket list. So I have no regrets when it comes to travel, education or creative projects.
But I have many regrets, often tinged with a suffocating guilt that wakes me in the middle of the night. Let me explain.
Life desires equilibrium, which can sometimes be mislabeled as irony. I have the capacity to write tomes detailing with great complexity and frequent indulgence, the feelings of my characters. I try to capture motivation, regret, desire and the subtleties of human interaction. To counteract this, my nature is one where I appear reserved, detached and unemotional.
I have no contact with my family, and without divulging too much to the online world, this lack of contact extends beyond those with whom I have a legitimate grievance. I do not speak to cousins, my brother, aunts and uncles-not because they have hurt me, but because the realm of human connection is overwhelming. This is not because I don’t care, and it is my concern for them that keeps me awake in the middle of the night.
It’s an odd thing to notice about myself. I have no problems pursuing non-relational desires. And perhaps it is because there is certainty with bucket list goals. You either travel to Europe or you don’t. You pursue a creative project and it works, or it doesn’t work, or you revise it.
But reaching out to others, there is uncertainty to this. Humans are unpredictable. We say what we don’t mean and we mean what we don’t say. We let anger and resentment shield love and loss. And unlike a novel, a story or a film, sometimes there is no resolution to the plot complication. Sometimes there is no character arc, as some people may choose to never grow. The innate satisfaction, the dopamine hit, that accompanies a sense of completion never arrives.
Perhaps this is why we need stories, why we need art and music, because it is capable of providing us with the closure we may never receive from those we love.
On worth and being
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
Desiderata by Max Erhmann (1927)
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been plagued by feelings of deep inadequacy and shame. To quote the 90’s singer Sarah McLoughlin, “You can always find reasons to not feel good enough.”
I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone. We live in a capitalist society where competition and winning are paramount. We’re taught to measure ourselves against endless yardsticks ranging from physical appearance to sporting prowess to academic success to wealth accumulation. We’re taught to see ourselves as ‘better than’ and to strive to be ‘more than.’
Researcher Dr Brene Brown has written extensively on the subject of shame and worth, and I recommend her books for a more psychological analysis of the subject. But really, what does it mean to feel worthless? It is a feeling of toxic shame inside, a feeling that inside you are not enough, and that you must not, under any circumstances, allow the world to see your unworthiness. So, we wear masks of bravado, we waste our lives trying to reach milestones that tell the world we are enough. And we do this so one day, we can convince ourselves that we are enough.
After years of striving to show the world that I was enough, I spoke to a dear friend about these feelings. She responded by sending me the poem Desiderata (excerpt above). Something inside me began to shift.
I have a theory that if we were taught deep ecology in school, our consciousness would change. Deep ecology contends that each organism plays a role in the collective. Remove an organism and the ecosystem is thrown out of balance. Every being has an impact, and every being is valuable to the ecosystem. Just look at the humble bee and consider what would happen if the world’s bee populations disappeared.
Now consider something more optimistic. Imagine what the world would be like if we all believed we were innately worthy. Not better than, but not less than either. How would we spend our time? What choices would we make? Would we need to engage in conflict to prove that we were the strongest, the mightiest and the most capable of destroying the world ten times over?
My current novel (still being written) explores our struggle with worth, amongst other equally light topics. It explores the harm we do to ourselves, our children, and everyone we touch, when we feel unworthy. Writing this novel is no easy feat. I still struggle with a deep sense of unworthiness, but I am conscious of it now. Sometimes I simply need to pause my writing and spend time in the garden.
There is wisdom in nature that our human minds are only beginning to comprehend.
Because sometimes a person just has to dance.
This is an excerpt from the novel that I am currently writing:
“A person had to dance. Sometimes they just had to. And the more broken, the more torn they were, the need was even stronger. And a person could dance in more ways than one. They found rhythm in all that was inadequate and defective. If they couldn’t move their body, they could move sections of their body. Forefingers and thumbs could roll Champion Ruby tobacco or Northern Light bud into a spliff; fingertips could flick a Bic lighter to melt a teaspoon of brown. Oh and nostrils, they could snort powder, or the harsher crystals. Yes, these were inadequate ways of moving, but they were moving, nonetheless. A person needed to move because when they moved, they remembered they were flesh and sinew and viscera. A person needed to dance to remind themselves that some part, some minutia of their being was free.
-Sometimes a person has to dance, Moses stated quietly, winking at Amina. He slipped in an old cassette mix. Nina Simone’s Sinnerman, remixed. And he began to move, clumsily, shoulders hunched, his body jerking in the falling sleet.
– That’s not dancing, she said. We have real dancing, back home. African dancing. The men will dance all night to show us they are worthy.
-Well then, Miss Amina, that might just be what we’ll do, I reckon.
From The Sin Eaters, Myfanwy Williams
I once met a West African drummer who said that dance was the best remedy for depression. After earning a Masters in Psychology, I believe that this humble musician might just be right. Perhaps I have an obsession with buoyancy, with being able to defy the physical laws of this orbiting rock enslaved to gravity. Dancing and running (which is essentially unimaginative dancing) are the closest to flying that I can imagine.
Why this wing-envy? I don’t know. It’s hard being human. We are odd creatures, humans. Big brained mammals with machinery in the skull that we are unable to properly master. The same brains that we use to compose music, write code and sequence a genome are the same brains that can destroy us with rumination, resentment and fear.
What is the solution? My solution is to power down this machinery and dance. I have tried Latin, Bollywood, Hip Hop and African. A shout out to Kukuwa Fitness- an awesome mother daughter duo who run African dance fitness classes online (361) KUKUWA® AFRICAN DANCE LIVE – MOOD BOOST 15 MINS – YouTube. Thank you amazing women for helping me fly a little each day. Quite possibly, I look absolutely ridiculous. But really, the ice caps are melting and pestilence is quite the celebrity these days. Looking ridiculous is the least of my worries.
Recently I came across a viral video from China. A rural couple turned to dancing after the husband fell into depression. I invite you to watch the video because what the world needs right now is a little more joy. (361) Chinese village couple’s ‘rural-style shuffle dance’ goes viral online – YouTube
About Word Upon Word
Margaret Atwood once said “Word after a word after a word is power.”
Perhaps I do err on the side of megalomania. My tortoiseshell cat certainly does. What is endearing in a soft furry sociopath is hardly endearing in a human, however. A quietly spoken five-foot two Eurasian woman is not the stuff of tin-pot dictators. I know, I know. You might be thinking, power need not be destructive. But it is rather covid-y in my neck of the woods and a tad cold, so any freedom fighting must be done quietly, lest I break lockdown orders.
So, I write instead. This is a site that showcases my writing because…well…because marketing, really. Oh, and I write about matters that are never to be uttered in polite company. Trauma, politics, the absurdity of humanity…and cats. The internet loves cats. I love cats.
On this site you will find links to a novel that a publisher once told me was well written, but unmarketable, a collection of short stories and my rolling blog.
You’ll also find the odd poem. I will keep poetry to a minimum. Unpublished, unsolicited poetry is usually a cry for help and I like to keep my psychoses private.
Word upon Word 