the myths of our times

Its a strange old world. This is a chitenje (sarong wrap) worn by a woman in a village on the shores of Lake Malawi.

I wasn't sure whether to post this. I put it on facebook, hardly expecting the furore of comments it provoked.

We had a beautiful afternoon with a group of women who are part of a radio listeners club, a community radio project that gives listeners clubs their own recorders so that they can record inserts on the issues that affect them. They send the tapes to the local station and then they get aired - its a lovely, elegant design for community involvement - mostly in public health matters.

The photo was an afterthought - as we were leaving I noticed what she was wearing and asked if I might take a pic. She didn't really see what all the fuss was about - F the photoman was very excited by the image. You often see representations of Saddam, Osama, the towers, if you travel around Africa. On wall paintings, on cheap shirts made in China or India. These images have become like comic books or campfire stories to explain mysterious forces of the universe. Like the angry gods of old, they've grown out of their contexts like billowing dust clouds. Signifiers run wild and then tamed again.

I've decided that its safe to post it. Even though most of my dear loyal readers will have already seen it on facebook.

Safe, as in - I don't think Mrs Phiri (not her real name but common as Smith or Jones in Malawi) will get found out and arrested for running a terror outfit. Even though they do have their own radio.

And while we're talking about conspiracies... (er, we were though, weren't we?)
What are the chances we could arrange for the Hardon machine, I mean, sorry Hadron machine, to create a black hole that could devour Sarah Palin.

Ho hum.

Here in Jozi, where the air is hot and still, we pray for peace.

the lines are dead

Oh look. The door, its open. I wonder if its safe to go out?
You know you mustn't. You promised. Something terrible will happen if you don't stick to the Deadline.
Just a cup of coffee?




Look, I could just nip out and be back in a second. Its safe out there.
Isn't it.



Oh bollocks is that the time?



Doooon't look at the liiiight!
But its so beauuuutifuuuuul.....!




AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!




I told you something terrible would happennnnn!!!!!!!!




Don't you hate deadlines? And dead lines? Some jobs are just plain hard work. This one is not happening for me. I love the idea, I love what I could do with it, given more time and a little more space to interpret freely. But, no. Client wants it this way. Client is nervous of lines that take on a life of their own and maybe try to dance a little. Let the words be neat, and all in the right sequence. They say they don't want jargon but when I cut it all out and worked very hard to make it clear and direct, they got nervous. Now they want me to put some back in.

I read it out loud to myself. Every line is weighty, porridgy. No sting to it, no sing.

Aah well. I have to amuse myself in other ways...

night noises and morning spoor

When you sleep in the bush in Africa, you seldom sleep through the night. There's nothing quite like being woken by lion voices vibrating through your blood. Or the bellow of some beast giving its last to teeth and claws. The scuffle of a chase right through camp, right past the thin grass walls that you're sleeping behind. Hyena sirens streaking your dreams with colour. The slow soft breath of an elephant, metres away from your head.

Sometimes, its the silence that wakes you. Its so rare to have utter silence, it usually signals some drama about to unfurl. Like when there's a lunar eclipse - the deep darkness and silence that creeps across the bush for a few long minutes while everything holds its breath, even the insects that I used to think were stars singing. Truly soul awakening stuff.

Luwi camp, one of my favourite spots on earth. Waking in the morning, and last nights mopane coals are still alive in their grey jackets of ash. The horizon is steely, before the ripening blush, and your breath is grainy smoke, fingers cold but before you clutch a handful of warm air at the fire, you must walk around camp and look for spoor. That's footprints, for those of you who don't know. Signs of the drama of the night.

When we was kids, my sister and I, it was daily routine. Bonkar would show us the perfect pugs marks on silty riverine sand and we had to identify - porcupine, honey badger, civet. We got good at it. We learned how to fake them, even, to make our own. We could read the map of an elephant footprint, outside the house at night, in between the toys that we had left out the night before. Never a single toy trodden on, mind you. Those eles just pick their way through. And yes, one thrilling morning there were lion prints in the sandpit where we played.

As I sat at my desk this morning I realised - I'm still doing this. Treading through blogland with my morning coffee, looking for the signs of the night. Ah, good, Janelle's feeling better. Miranda has a clutch of friendly comments. Ooh, look who came past my front door. Now, which of my cross continental facebook friends have left tracks in my inbox, or pissed on my wall?

I guess we're all just territorial beasts at heart.

six word me

Ok I am procrastinating heavily, and I couldn't let the last post stand on such a grumbly negative note.

So - have taken up the gauntlet cast by Ernest de Cugnac

Write your life story in 6 words.

Here are some run ups at it. (is that cheating?)


Learning to love: from sprouts - baobabs.

Shy girl onstage returned to books.

Thin bush waif ate a library.

Loved trees, ate books, spat words.

Born screaming. Grew quiet. Too quiet.

Couldn't find the words. Til later.


Ok so they're more descriptive than narrative - but you try, its blerry hard!

floods and drought

My deadline looms at me across the narrowing gulf that separates Now from Tomorrow when it is Due. Three chapters took me two weeks. I have until tomorrow to do two more.

The dishes of the weekend tower in the kitchen.
Laundry creeps across the floors.

August winds toppled plant pots in the night, their crashes and woke me and used up the last spurt of adrenalin I had been saving. I did not get up at 5 to work.

What should I do first, I wonder. The chapter on Aids orphans, the section on floods, or the one on drought and famine? Or Governance? oh, this is no way to treat the muses.

My friend arrived in Nwarlins to start his new job. Hasn't been there since he was a student, when Katrina flushed him out. He arrived, found a place to stay, unzipped his bag. And zipped it up again. Gustav blowing him off for a little while longer.

Fires floods and droughts all over the news.

My computer screen scowls at me, stories husking, flaking in its glare. Tears and tantrums in my coffeecup.




Aaah, how delicious it is to nap in the middle of the day, curled up in the sun like a cat.

dancing emptiness

I've always been fascinated by Butoh. As a student I thrilled to those images of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, their bodies powdered and bent, chanelling the spirit of a dying flower, a breeze tremor or an ageing old woman grasping faded memories. I adored the scary nihilism of some of Sankai Juko's work. They struck a minor chord in me that I found hard to resist.

Part of its mystery I suppose, was that fact that it was so completely inaccessible -I mean, who would ever get a chance to meet a real live Butoh performer in little old Grahamstown? The best we could hope for was to read about it, in dog-eared art and dance journals in the university library. To scavenge for images on the internet. And make up what we thought it meant. For us. For me, it had the appeal of being so unlike any of the 'dance' stuff that my drama department was obsessed with. I mean, this was the home of the First Physical Theatre Company and its host of pretentious twats who loved throwing themselves at each other, at the floor, at the walls, and then sitting on the drama steps comparing bruises, slurping down energade and talking about the vocabulary of physical theatre and how pedestrian were those with fewer bruises. Ooooh, I loathed that weekly movement class. My and all five of my left feet. Me the uncoordinated lass who preferred to live in the airy but active space between her temples. Whose body always seemed a little left behind. (Yes, I often have to stop at streetcorners, sigh patiently, hurryup, catch up... my body a lagging reluctant child. Or is the body stopping waiting for the errant mind to wind her way back... ah, I've got better at this in recent years, but its a lifelong lesson.)

For me, Butoh had all the promise of an awkward poetry, of finding your own clumsy vocabulary, and delving into the dark recesses of unconscious mind. Emptying the body. Creating deep stillness, so that from there you may investigate the universe in all its strange forms and invite your body to converse with those forms in a silent way. Squelching into the grotesque, the 'darkness' within that Hijikata so honoured. Hollowing out the joints to create crevices in the body for mysterious essences to creep into.

Of course I never found it. Instead I had to drown in the deep end of progressions and extensions or gumboot baffling rhythms in my weekly torture sessions. I who never had the option of a ballet class in my grass walled bush classroom. Who somehow missed the clapping games that little girls get to play with each other. My hand eye coordination skills extended to turning the page of a book. Ah well.

So last weekend an extraordinary gift came my way. A visiting Butoh practitioner from the Su-En school in Sweden. A distilled performance on Friday night that defies words. She danced the dance of the ostrich. How can I describe it? A scrawny, lost being that is learning to walk. A dark earthsong, naked white and strangled on the floor. A slow contracted spiral, never graceful in the sense we may expect of 'dance' and yet utterly poetic.

I wasn't going to do the workshop. After three weeks away I thought it would be too thin an ice sheet to tread, relationship-wise. Imagine my suprise when he suggested it - but why not, it'll be good for you, might help with your writing. But, er - won't you - what about - I mean its the whole weekend! That's ok. Do it. Be good for you.

So I dragged my porridgy winterbottom to class on Saturday morning. A Movement Room, oh my body reacts instantly, expecting to hang out in the back row, sheepish clumsy, wheezing... except its on the 9th floor and there's a spectacular view of Jozi, mine dumps and jittery skyline.

But no, it certainly wasn't a picnic. Whatever my romantic projections about the art form, its still dance. The site of creation is in joints and muscles. To create that emptiness they speak of you have to retrain your body - gravity lines that hold you up but are cut at the hips, the knees. You walk on bended knees, low gravity, weight in the back of your body. and you walk. and you walk. and walk. and you sweat and dizziness fills where the tension fights with poisons fights with holding patterns in back, shoulders. wrenched ankle of weeks ago screams at you from the floor. calves hum, thighs sag and flab and mind doesn't want to play.

But then theres her still voice floating towards you. 'eyes are windows. the body is erased. eyes are erased. the body is small the world is big. the world is looking through the body the body doesn't see.'

Somehow, somehow, you find this in you. the cavities that crowd with daily nonsense do empty out. the mind does quieten. the eyes do become windows. and thirty seconds of this an hour is well worth it. somehow.

I did a slow walk once. twice, actually. With James (who was also there for the workshop). And Leonard, the good doctor. We walked down High Street during the swarming heaving bustle of the 2006 National Arts Festival. This usually takes about 7 minutes, if you stroll from Drostdy Arch to the Cathedral. It took us 3 hours. Slowing your blood to the pace of a tired snail. Teaching your bones to unfold as your consciousness swims, flails, then opens up to a karoo-like vastness. And the world is still there and people say such curious things. You see the pavement as you have never seen it, its maplike scrawls, its skinlike pores. You love the pavement, as it swims up to meet you and then you are not anymore. you are the pavement, past the pavement. the breath of the person next to you, tuned to your rhythm. something as transient as a cigarette smoke curl can take an eternity to infuse your nostrils, dissolve, go back to air as you step into, through and past it. And soon this feels like the normal, the required pace of existence. You cannot comprehend why the world around you is tearing at time in this frantic grasping way. And then you don't comprehend, or need to. You just exhale. And then it hurts and your blood clogs and your hands are heavy and you can't do it for a minute longer. and then you do. and the pavement, again. and the soft noise of everyone's busyness.

So we did one of these walks on Sunday, all 20 odd of us in the workshop, in line not looking down or up just sensing the change in pace and keeping same distance between us and walking backward and knowing when. and hurting, the muscles fighting, thighs cross and ankle belligerent, cursing. To the confusion of passers by on the wits campus, who probably, as they did at rhodes, just muttered to themselves "oh, drama students" as the catch all explanation.

Oh there was more - pain and delight both. I loved the faces - the wicked child (curved closed smile, tip of tongue points out, eyes look up and cross over....ha. made you do it.) I loved the 'conditions' that you learn - investigations into the state of isness of, for example, an onion segment, always in the process of becoming. My body fought me almost every step of the way. But I take away that voice of hers. 'eyes are windows. body is erased'.

I don't think I'll ever be a butoh dancer, not for audience. But i do like that i had the chance to empty this seething brain for a few brief expansive glimmers. And really, you should try that walk sometime. Its quite a thing.

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