The hit you don't see coming

When you were single
I was a great friend
(and we were nursing your heartbreak over that elusive individual from varsity)

When you finally opened the door and let Jesus in
I was a great friend
(and the car accident that wrote off your car and rolled you down a hill)

When you started dating
I was a great friend
(and you told me all about her, she sounded lovely)

When you knew she was the one
I was a great friend
(and you told me about the day she spoke wisdom into your heart when an encounter with some guy from high school made you feel so small)

When you got engaged
I was a great friend
(and the quaint private cinema where you proposed)

When you got married
I became a threat



(and you told me that the type of friendship you have with me, you could only have with your wife)



When you...
I don't know, we haven't spoken since

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

WOW! This book is just incredible. WOW! In the last two years, I have started to read more non-fiction than fiction but one doesn't forget their first love and this book reminded me why. While non-fiction just opens your mind to a wealth of knowledge, it's fiction that opens your mind to worlds unchartered. Freshwater gifts us with the unlocking of our imaginations and the tickling of the underbelly of our spirituality. In this review, I will just be including excerpts and quotes from the book that knocked at my bones and send reverberations to the recesses of my being.  

'There is a method to this. First harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child'

'It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn't even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.' 

'Do people need to see you for you to be who you are?'

'You will always be in the process of change because every time you get born into a basilisk, that basilisk consumes itself so you can be born into another basilisk'

'Do not hang your heart on me'

'Let me tell you the truth about men like that- they want soft moons. They want women with just enough crescent to provide a sufficient edge, tender little slivers of light that they can bring home to their mothers'

'We understood what was necessary- humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power'

'But I loved him and that made him more human than human to me. Love is transformative in that way. Like small gods, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really believe. So in loving Ewan, he somehow became a god. I don't mean that in a good way- he made me suffer but I still cast idols in his name, as people have done for their gods for Millenia. It didn't end there. When the years accumulated and exposed Ewan's cracks, I covered them in gold and bronze. That's what you do for the idols you make'

' When I think of them and the love I hold for them, it unfurls into a greater love. My chest multiplies with it. I even want to hold the faces of my friends and tell them I love them. I don't feel trapped or anchored, which is really strange, Yshwa. I stop being afraid of relocations and I can move wherever I want because I know that I will be loved constantly across all space. And even if it fades with them, it will bloom again. We are all conduits. It moves through us, freely'

'Honestly, Yshwa, I just want to rest. Let me find a place where even if I'm alone, I can sit on my veranda and look at a mango tree and we can just talk. You will be the words in my mouth and the ones that fall from my fingers; you will be the one to whom I direct my longing'

As I look at the tattoos of the author on the cover of the book and read the final chapters of the book, I wonder where the author's story ends and where it begins for the characters in the book.  

Swallow by Sefi Atta

Swallow follows the life of a stuck-in-between-a-hard-place-and-a-rock-woman (Tolani) whose survival in the city is in the hands of an employer who exploits his position. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one of the components of the physiological needs is homeostasis which is the tendency of a system to maintain internal stability or a state of psychological equilibrium. Tension in humans can be a driving force and push humans to excel but if that tension is excessive then it can become debilitating. This book explores the extremes of tension and how human beings react differently to that tension.

LOVE AND FREEDOM

'I preferred your father's way. He appreciated me enough to leave me alone and I could do almost anything I wanted'

I've recently learnt a lot particularly regarding love and how it works with freedom and not against it. Our inclination, when it comes to love is to move towards co-dependence, we romanticise it, think 'when he cries, I taste salt' vibes. Co-dependence is not sustainable and it usually results in dysfunction. A lot of men I've spoken to speak of how marriage is an institution and within the context of marriage, there is not a lot of freedom for him to still be able to do the things he used to love doing. There is a general negative attitude towards marriage and yet many a man succumb to it. Perhaps there are ultimatums or perhaps there is the male-mother-need aspect that the MGTOW men talk a lot about or even just a general case of FOMO. In this book, there are ultimatums which just don't end well, do they ever? The quote above is from Tolani's mother who expresses an alternative to the general love-and-unfreedom coupling where there is room in a relationship for people to still be themselves fully and still also be able to explore their personal interests. If someone falls in love with your full-of-life-ness, what kind of love wants to tame that? The very thing that made you fall for the person in the first place is the thing that comes to die in the name of love and marriage? I prefer the alternative and I owe that largely to Bell Hooks' All About Love. Tolani's father, for the most part, was able to exercise that freedom until he succumbed to the societal pressures of a man needing to keep his wife in check. The thing with freedom is that it really is an indispensable part of a fully lived experience, it brings joy and is catalytic to self actualisation.

CHANCE

'My father told me once, "You are not special. There are many like you in this world. Do not consider your good fortune a blessing or their bad fortune a curse. It could easily be the other way around" '

The truth is the family you were born into, the socio-economic status you were born into, the race or country you were born into are arbitrary in as much as that you really had no say into where you landed as a baby. You landed where you landed. Tolani's father was speaking particularly to that, warning her to not become arrogant as though to be born into a house of good fortune was where she rightly belonged and where she would always be. In Rowan Hooper's Super Human he speaks of the equanimous farmer who is a man who goes through a series of good fortune followed by misfortune (Law of Undulation) which is part of being human and he reacts with the same attitude to every single event. Being equanimous teaches us to handle feats with humility and defeats with understanding and so much of our happiness is not in the hands of things external to us.

MORALITY

'Morality was an easy friend to part with, yet so hard to avoid thereafter'

'The prospect of misfortune was more than enough threat, and it was around us, killing people, turning them into prostitutes, making them sick, hungry, crazy, and I was not special'

Robert Sapolsky from the University of Stanford says that decisions we think are led by morality or rationality are usually made as a result of affect. Our bodies react to stimuli in a certain way before our pre-frontal cortex gets to cognitively process that stimuli. I think that for most of us, morality does not come before self preservation particularly when it comes to death. Our morality will bend for our survival. Tolani goes through a moral journey where she, due to the tension mentioned earlier, begins to bend and really considers doing things she thought she never would. They say 'blessed are those who bend, for they shall never be broken', does this apply to morality as well?

PRAGMATISM

'Vroom! You should have seen the old woman who was sitting on her chair with a chewing stick in her mouth. Vroom! Instead of spitting, she swallowed. Vroom! She slapped her chest. Vroom! She fell off her stool'

LOL! This was the reaction by an elderly neighbour witnessing Tolani's mother riding a Vespa. Riding a Vespa was just not done by women and not by women who were married because somehow riding a Vespa disrespects your husband. When Tolani's mother was first learning to ride the Vespa, her complaint was who would design a Vespa without consideration for women who had to wear a wrapper which kept getting stuck in the Vespa. Tolani's mother was very practical and she says how she would wear pants if she could. Even though she had freedom, her freedom was impeded because it was constricted to a certain radius; bigger than for most but there nonetheless. What I appreciated about Tolani's mother was that she understood that certain advancements required her to be practical. A wrapper was just not practical for a Vespa. In one of Bell Hooks' essays, she mentions how enslaved women who worked on plantations would still go to the fields in dresses and skirts even though it would have been easier for them to wear pants. There are freedoms others take away from us and there are also freedoms that we take from ourselves.  

I'm going to wrap up this post with a quote that hit home from the book about the nature of death, the disguises it wears, the frequency of its visits, its whim, its softness or hardness, its persuasiveness or its force depending on the colour of your skin.

'Frowning, laughing, crying, smiling, there was no normal way to react to the news that people died unnecessary deaths, avoidable deaths, ridiculous deaths, African deaths.'

Letting go

At first
It’s the tension of ‘I hope he doesn’t come back’ on the one side and ‘I hope he comes back’ on the
other side pulling in polar directions at equal measure
Relentless, taut, tight, tense
An equilibrium allowing you to function
Barely

Then
There comes a time of disorientating panic
When you feel the scales tipping right off the fulcrum of your sanity
When you start anticipating the snap
Where you feel the muscles of your hand preparing
For the impending phone call from your phone
For the ‘I am sorry’ ‘please forgive me’ ‘I need you’

But then
You somehow manage to live the ache away by just continuing
Relief and desperation have swopped places by daybreak
You pulled through by chanting resistance and courage into yourself
‘I am sorry’ ‘please forgive me’
For all the time you stayed longer than you should have
For all the time you didn’t show yourself compassion
For all the time you allowed his unkindness to poison you against you

‘I need you’
A note to self

Un-Loving

Remember how when you encountered me for the first time
Your tongue instinctively touched the roof of your mouth
And found it in want
You were absolutely parched

You drank of me
The cup did not pass your lips
You filled yourself
Soaked me up in your entirety
Grew gills

And now you wonder why
Try as you may to relegate me, in fickleness, to past
You cannot evaporate me off your skin
Distil me from your quintessence
Siphon me out your blood
Cry me out, for heaven’s sake
I became your most quiet need
And now you are drowning in the deluge of my absence


Hydrate.

Your Children's Eyes

It has become a trend in black communities where a man will have a relationship with a woman for a long time, more than 5 years. Then the couple breaks up and the man is married 5 months later to the complete surprise of the woman who he was with. In my opinion, I don't think the man gets away as cleanly as he makes out, which is how I got to write Your Children's Eyes.  

I see how your children have sad eyes

Could that be because you parted with pieces of yourself in procreation before you had healed?

Like how a lamb spreads bitterness to it's meat when it sees the knife to end it's life

You thought your heartbreak was contained and covered with a shotgun marriage and marital consequences

And even though your face wouldn't betray you as you fulfil your new roles

Thoughts of the her of past have spread bitterness through your blood

And even when relatives quibble over which features belong to which lineage

No one owns your children's eyes

No one can quite place them

You, however, know whose eyes they belong to

The heartbreak you just did not want to deal with

And which now you have to face 

To build a home

After one of those peaceful evenings without strife

Where your chest knows my name and rises and falls my weary head to it

And sleep comes Sunday morning easy

And our mouth's in O's because that is the last syllable of both our names

Then we both are wrenched out of sleep when we hear the crack

From the balcony we both see a line running from one side of the apartment to the other

We seek and find relief in each other's eyes

We thought the earth had cracked right open and threw us on either side

Separated eternally

But we called the landlord and forgot all about it

When we should have seen it for what it was

That homes are built to contract and expand

We were built too co-dependently close together

And there was not enough room for either of us to grow, to breathe

You exploded

I imploded

We called time

Cracks in rental homes are other people's problem

Stay with me by Ayobami Adebayo

I read this book in one sitting and at the end of it, I just felt it was too much to take in all at once. A whole lot of possible human tragedy to process in a few hours. The book is about a woman (Arinola) who is led to believe that she is unable to have children when it is actually her husband (Akin) who is not able to. She then has to go through a series of humiliating experiences including having the grooms family choose another wife for him (Funmi), deception and eventually having that wife live with them. 

OWNERSHIP

One of the themes that comes up repeatedly is the idea of ownership, something I've found a lot of people feel is concomitant to relationships. Arinola keeps saying that a husband can have many wives but a child can only have one mother. She is driven by a need to have someone to call her own and goes through a lot of hurt to satisfy this need or desire. Once again, this idea of unclenching instead of holding to someone or something for dear life resurfaces; where we've seen through our experiences that when we let something that was meant for us in the first place go, then it will come back to us. Arinola learns this the hard way through the birth of her third child who is called Rotima which translates to 'stay with me', who she loses but finds again fifteen years later and who now goes by the name Timi. The author creatively reiterates this idea through names that a child can not be compelled to ownership even if she is given the name Rotima, ironically, it is only when the child sheds that name where she finds her way to her mother again. A person can not be owned, and as hard as it is for parents to accept, neither can a child. This is due to the fact that everyone has their own consciousness and it is that consciousness that separates us as individual human beings. 

A poem from The Dream in the Next Body by Gabeba Baderoon:

How to find something lost

Let the lost thing, or the loss itself call to you

There is a reciprocity in vanished objects

That make them want to rejoin you

Long after you stop searching,

Lost chances, lost causes, lost loves

Circle back

GRIEF

Arinola goes through pseudocyesis (phantom pregnancy) because of her desperation to bear a child. When I was reading the parts of the book that described her pseudocyesis, I couldn't help but think how her experience shows all the five steps of grief  (Kubler-Ross); denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Grief has in my mind always followed a loss, but there Arinola was, grieving something she never had. 

LOVE

'It's the truth- stretched but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond it's limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only one that exist?'

This was not something unique to Akin who did not present his true self to Arinola, of him not being able to have children, in the first place suffered greatly for the decision and had to then resort to going to extremes to maintain the inaccurate presentation of himself. This inaccurate presentation is soon exposed and he loses the love of his life in turn. As well meaning as Akin was, he paid tenfold for his deception. I was watching a series where this woman goes on a date and the guy just reveals way too much on the first date. The woman complains to a friend and says something about how a guy must at least wait until date 4 to reveal so much about himself. I found this scene hilarious and 'date 4' has become an inside joke with friends. As much as it is important to not scare people off the first time you meet them, it is also crucial that if that relationship forms then everything that could affect your beloved be disclosed. 

Love is explored in such great detail in the book and in the early chapters of the book, the author writes about how there are things that love cannot bear; that it can break into a thousand pieces under certain loads but even when it is a thousand pieces at your feet, it doesn't mean it ceases to be love. People on the average crave wholeness and many people look for that wholeness in love, but what is interesting is that the wholeness desired can very well come from something which of itself is not whole. 

'I was not stupid. I understood that it was a matter of time before Moomi showed up to make sure that Funmi started living in the house. If I fought with Funmi, it would only make things worse. Moomi could ask me to leave and though Akin kept telling me how much he loved me. I no longer believed him. But I wanted to believe him. I had no father, no mother and no sibling. Akin was the only person in the world who would really notice if I went missing. These days I tell myself that is why I stretched to accommodate every new level of indignity, so that I could have someone who would look for me if I went missing.'

I lament, all the indignities women have had to endure; in the name of love. I lament!

Kasi Love

But how will I find you?

Where did we have our first kiss?

Under the mistletoe of the township, the Apollo light at the corner

What was I doing when our eyes met for the first time?

You were competing with your friends, throwing rocks at the Apollo behind my house trying to break the plastic casing

How did you know it was time for you to go back into the house?

My mom said to be in when the Apollo came on

You see, you already know how to find me

When I first saw it, I knew it was his doing

Chuck Taylors swinging from their laces at the top of the Apollo lights

I followed the stars to find him

ALL the STARS

The Punctuation of Ending Love

When love ends it doesn't have to be, 

the exclamation marks of pregnant silences, broken photo frames, tears and 'all your crap is in the box at the door', to the left

the parenthesis of 'its not you, its me'

the question mark of 'what on earth just happened?'

the ellipses of runners who left the door open with none of the closure

the ampersand of I&J needing to undo and separate

When love ends, it can just simply be a period at the end of the story

Full stop. 

The Knock on the Door by Terry Shakinovsky and Sharon Cort

This book is about the Detainee's Parents Support Committee which was headed by Max and Audrey Coleman whose sons were detained by the apartheid government. It was a committee that helped to support families who went through the trauma of being woken up in the dead of night by the knock on the door and having a family member taken by the police. In a system where people were detained without trial or charge for that matter, were interrogated and tortured, where the families were not even informed where their family member was taken and where black families in particular did not have access to legal representation or knowledge; this committee fulfilled a huge role. The committee made sure that information travelled from families to detainees and also provided basic necessities to detainees such as clothing and food and support. 

The reason why I liked this book in particular was that I was learning so much that I have had little knowledge of in general and it is always necessary to fill in the gaps in our minds because it is in the details where we are reminded of our past as South Africans and it is the details that reinforce how to not easily forget what happened before 94.

Max was said to be quite particular about documenting everything and that information was used during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place after 94 which was really cool for me. As much as I think the TRC had its limitations, the fact that Max had the foresight to keep record was really great and provided the TRC a lot of the information it needed.

THE WAR ON CHILDREN

This chapter was the most interesting to me. Tomorrow, South Africa will be commemorating June 16, 1976 with a public holiday. This book went deep into just how badly black children were treated during apartheid. I mean, most of us are familiar with how thousands of children were massacred but there is a lot of information that I personally did not know which further widened my eyes.

'I don't think anywhere in the world has there been such a vicious, assertive action against youth and children as there was in South Africa'

The number of children that were detained is just shocking. The entire student body of Hlingwe School (1200) was arrested. I mean, wow! The youngest child who was detained was 9 years old and the book provides details on how, for example, a child walking to the shops was just picked up by the police just like that without the parents being informed.

'What does the world think of a government a third of whose political detainees are schoolchildren? and just how does an 11 year old threaten the security of the state, particularly this state with all its military might? This government, in releasing these children, is starting to admit it has no answers to such questions.' 

OPERATION PHAMBANE & AN EMERGENCY AWARD

Operation Phambane also offered a lot of insight pertaining the longest hunger strike in this country. The hunger strike was called Sidla Ekhaya meaning we eat at home which was a strike against detention without trial. It took place at Diepkloof prison and one of the detainees, Sandile Thusi, went 38 days without eating and left the prison bedridden and on oxygen. 

Black people, particularly those who got hurt during a protest, were not able to go to the hospital because the police would wait for the wounded there and then proceed to arrest them. Black people who were in need of medical care had to find other ways of getting it and the chapter called an emergency ward details how the DPSC worked around those restrictions and how a handful of skilled medical professionals placed themselves at risk to give black people the medical attention they needed. 

ASSASSINATIONS

South Africa's death squad is something most of us know quite a bit about and we also know anyone active in anti-apartheid activity would likely be gunned down in their driveway. David Webster suffered the same fate but I think what just highlighted the egregiousness of his murder was the fact that he was told in advance that he would be killed, in no uncertain terms, at a tea party (gathering) by a police officer; a week later he was dead. 

PRAVIN GORDHAN

When Pravin Gordhan was arrested for the third time of which he said that his detention was part of a winning advantage and having leverage over the ANC in the negotiating process. This reminded me of a poem from Azanian Love Song by Don Mattera. The poem is called Shattering Glass but I am only including the part of the poem that is relevant particularly to what Pravin said.

'Don't bargain with oppression

There's no time, man

Just no more time

for the black man

to fool around'

When I look at what South Africa is now and think of what Pravin said, I wonder what price was paid for bargaining with oppression. 

ON THE SIDE

Casspirs aka Hippos are these mine resistant army vehicles (right) that were used in South Africa in apartheid South Africa. One can imagine the fear these instilled in black people back then and also what their presence implied about black people; that black people were the enemy of the state and should be dealt with militantly. 'Geen genade' type vibes. This is nothing new as black people were referred to as 'terroriste'. Interestingly for me, a few years ago South African malls were being hit by criminals and the response was for one or two of these to be placed in Malls. So as I saw these, I wondered what other South Africans who saw them thought. I can grasp how this vehicle would not mean anything to white South Africans but how could it not send chills down the back of black South Africans who survived apartheid? I mean, how could those vehicles not illicit the same feelings that brought down the Rhodes statue? Why would a black government even use these as a scare tactic for a mall syndicate, Why not a bunch of GTI's with blinding blue lights which would be the most appropriate for the crime? I mean, really.