by Z. P. Dala
Is it not the most natural thing in the world for a prisoner in a solitary cell box to spend the endless hours reflecting on the life they have lived? Up until that fateful moment when you become a prisoner, your life is never a reflection, it is a reel of ever-present moments that you don’t take the time to watch. When you are alone, and all you hear is the scratching of rats, and you are grateful for the sound of the scratching rats, you begin to play the movie reel, projecting it onto the bare walls of your cell.
But the movie never fully plays out in sequence; it lurches, time traveling from childhood laughter into hot nights of lovemaking, careening into the childbirth that split your body into halves. The walls have scrawled writing of women that have been there before you. Scratches into the gray paint that they could never wash off when they hose down the cell after its inhabitant has gone. She has not been freed; she has just vanished. You only know that they walked the Earth because they made it a point of digging into wall paint: “I have been here, I was here. I lived.”
When you stare at the lurching story of your life as it plays itself out again and again on the walls, their words become the captions. The silent movie of your life bears a monologue; it bears the whispered words of all the women that have been there before you. You know that their words are the same as your words, the cartoon bubbles of a hundred silent women become just one story; there is no difference between every single one of them and you.
That you love lipstick, the redder the better. That you smoke cigarettes on a public street, and men write letters in complaint about you. Smoking doctor. Woman. Indeed! That you wear your hair just so, that she enjoys caramels, that she loved sex, that she lost her nerve in the end and that she and she and she . . .
She is who you are. She is the you, who I have become. Sylvie Pillay, prisoner number 1434/80. Prisoners in a country where the murdering is not confined to the incarcerated.
I spread a rank mat on the floor. Somebody once told me that one must place a forehead on the ground to pray. I try it and it does not work. I am not connected to this Earth in any way. This prison may very well not be on this Earth; it has traveled through space and time and left the beautiful soft, sexual soil behind and landed on an arid planet. I do not feel her, this mother of saline ocean sons and fertile, undulating daughters. Even my Earth has left me. All I have is this memory, this reel on constant. And now, the celluloid is burning with holes too. Even this memory is leaving my side.
There is a daughter. She is somewhere left behind. I watched her walk away from me, those legs of no shape, no discernible ankle, no flesh of thigh. But she is my flesh. I remember how she broke me into pieces. Birthing her was the easy part. They stitched up the cuts when she was born. I sent her away, that watchful child. Sending her away from my breathing space left me with no air.
She looked at me with hate. I had not known before that children can hate very deeply. I pulled ever so lightly on that silvery cord that I thought would always connect us, even though I never knew how to be with this daughter. I had faith that this cord would send messages along its pulsating length. She swung those insect legs into a car, and the cord began to fracture, bisections along its thin girth. I was losing my child. And she fed herself on hate because it was better than being hungry. The car drove my child away. It was the fault of the car. It was the machine. I will hate that metal kidnapper. It was not me, it was not me. It was the fault of that car. I want to blame that car. I place this on record, Brigadier. It was not me.
One rap on your metal door. This means cold, uncooked porridge has been thrown like trash at your feet. I eat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I am a poor girl. I was born into a world of cheap. Food that is picked from the fields outside your door is the tastiest food you will ever eat. Grandmothers who massage coconut oil into your hair at night are the most expensive gifts you will ever receive. But I knew, even when I was a young girl, that some people are born for things that they can never be prepared for. Larger things that come with double edges. If a call against injustice comes to you in the early hours of a poor morning, you may hide under your blankets and shiver, saying in your sweat, “Go away, go away. Go to someone else,” but the call will never go away to someone else because it has chosen you. Even when your mind and your body are not prepared for what you will do in your life, you wrestle. And then you give in. You resign, and it is then that you feel most free.
They said it was a disgusting thing, a young girl wanting bigger things. They did not understand all my wants.
“So pretty you are, girl. What is this studying you want to do? Better you marry a nice boy, have a nice house, give nice children. Wasting such a pretty face.”
My father was a carpenter. The wood spoke to him when no one else would. In the hours that he spent chiseling and chipping away at blocks of nothing, arriving sometime in the middle of a day at the most beautiful cabinets and tables, he communed with worlds that spoke more than the dissonant world in which he walked. His five sons did not look into his eyes.
They resented the rough hands that brought scraps to a mahogany table. An intricately carved table, inlaid with the little chips of oak, a pattern created from a place that he could never name, his daughter could see. I could see.
I was the only daughter. Born last. Born because one day, while carving and sanding and fondling wood, he asked for a believer. He demanded an old soul who would stand in silence next to his workbench and speak without words. I came to him, and I knew him.
He knew that one day, this daughter would leave him and walk into an abyss. But he was glad that he had brought her here. He knew I would suffer. But he was glad that I would.
Despite all the hands that pulled at his pretty girl, my father pushed me far away. To a safe place where I did not have to hide my brain underneath a pile of dirty laundry. He sent my boat out into the world, and he said a silent prayer that it would not sink.
“Selvarani, you go. Go to the medical college.”
“Appa, I will make you proud.”
“I don’t want you to make me proud. I want you to make me satisfied.”
“Appa, I do not understand.”
“Selvie, you came to me because I asked Goddess Lakshmi for a way to change this world.”
“Appa, I will make you proud.”
“Selvie. Go. Just go away now.”
“Appa, I will.”
The medical college was called Natal Medical School. It had never admitted nonwhites, and it had never admitted women. But the world was changing. It was in 1964, when defiance was bubbling inside the bellies of townships and spilling over into the hub of cities paved with gold, that I entered the medical college as one of the first nonwhite women to gain admittance. I joined three other women. The others that joined the black section of the same university were all men. We were told we were lucky to have even been considered.
There was the outspoken young princess, the pampered daughter of the Motala family, a tight-knit unit of Gujarati-speaking Muslims who had set up most of the booming businesses in Durban. Their Fatima would not hear of marriage and veiled decorum. She hissed and spat and threatened her way into allowance. Medical college was, for her, an act of rebellion in a world where rebellion was so strongly frowned upon. Especially for girls.
And then there was Gladys, a silent Zulu woman from a place where we knew she had seen horrors we could never imagine. Gladys walked into the college like a royal combatant, telling everyone that her traditional name was not the mouth-hiss prefixed Gladys. But her true and real Zulu name will be known to no one, for as long as she was forced to study in the arms of a white man’s paradise, she would answer to the name he had given her. She vowed that on the day that freedom for all came to our land, she would answer to her true Zulu name.
Gladys became my closest and most vocal of companions, for we shared a room. The loud-mouthed Fatima could not tantrum her way into living at the college dormitories, although she deeply desired it. She
was driven to college daily in a beautiful car, which she exited with distaste, sometimes kicking its tires before her driver sped away. She believed that her privilege was her deepest shame. Yet she never found comfort in our crammed dormitory either. On her visits to us, her nose would twitch at the smell of cabbage, and sometimes she wore soft, suede gloves.
Mpho was the last of the women admitted that year. She was known for her sweetness. Underneath a bookish beauty lay a heart of pure treasure, a place where we girls would go to hide. Under the soft eaves of her glance we could find comfort when our little brown hearts were broken by unsuitable boys. Hers were the lovely cushioned cheeks we rested our foreheads against when the professors told us to learn how to scrub pots and fold laundry as we huddled over strong chloroform-smelling cadavers.
Learning the pathways of blood vessels, slicing into muscles long dead, we tried to make as little noise as possible. We knew our place was a treacherous one. And when we cried to Mpho, or watched Fatima scream rhetoric and Marxist quotes from atop a bed, watched eternally by the sullen Gladys, we did not realize the large noise we were making by simply being there. By passing our exams and tests, by dodging pathology professors’ wandering hands, and by pretending to be more stupid than our male colleagues we slipped like stowaways through the system. They treated us like anomalies, silly girls who, if briefly indulged, would soon go away. Most of our professors—and almost all of our fellow students—were convinced that we were there simply to snag a doctor to marry.
Medicine is for men. And the black and Indian men that had finally been allowed to study it in that hallowed place felt that their special world had been somehow commandeered by four tiny women. Within them there lay revolutionaries who could see the ugliness of segregation by color of skin, but who could not bring themselves to see how they kept women in boxes. They read Trotsky, they quoted Marx, but in their hearts they wished we would just go home to cook dinner.
Four silent women, we trod with light steps. We passed every one of our exams, but we had to follow the rules of the game. We worked very hard not to pass too well. We made sure we never took first place. In the bedroom I shared with Gladys, in that substandard hole in the ground that we were given, we gathered by day and spoke of our suffragette hearts. And in the nice building across the street where there was running water and maybe a painted room, the nonwhite men who had gained their place at the black section of the Natal Medical College eyed us for signs of rebellion. They believed that rebellion belonged to them, the men.
They held meetings, speaking deep into the night in secret coding, using medical and anatomical words to describe how the people needed to change their consciousness first, and act on their rejection of apartheid later. Their leader was a handsome man, standing noble and grand in his Blackness, but we did not know that he was listening carefully for news about us women and our own political discussions which we spoke about on our own. This leader was not blind to us; he had been secretly talking with Gladys, who told him everything.
It was Fatima who fell first. None of us imagined she would. Somehow, somewhere in the middle of a world filled with women who veiled their beauty behind the gauziness of black and tinkled their bangles behind embroidered curtains as they learned the way to a man’s heart, Fatima had stepped lightly but in wavy lines around the stones that surrounded her. She straddled the world she came from, the pampered world where a young woman such as she was discouraged from politics, and constantly harassed subtly and not so subtly to get her medical degree and open a shiny private practice as far away from ugliness and poverty as her world was from it now. But she spent the nights with secret books that expounded freedom, democracy, and the ugliest of words to her people—Communism.
Fatima held the reins for as long as she could, but one day she lost herself in the chains of her schizophrenic world. She could not amalgamate these pampered offerings—the hand of the richest merchant, the ideology that there is no such thing as religion and God that all was one and one was all. She ran off in the middle of her final year, and all we heard was news of the lavishness of her wedding party. Gladys lifted an eyebrow and sullenly said to us two remaining, “I always knew it.”
I looked to Mpho, who smiled in her way, a warm golden ray that made everything better again.
“May she be happy.”
And she was. I hope she was.
One morning, shortly after Fatima left medical school to her wedded life, Gladys arrived at my side. She was still fuming from how rapidly Fatima had walked away, after being given such a golden chance to study, to become a doctor, and to serve the community and the struggle. I was preparing to go on the much-feared surgical ward rounds with Professor Andrews. I knew that I had to ensure I stood far enough back so as not to be envied by my fellows, but not back enough to be noticed for doing so. I remembered how my aunts used to say that the way to rule a husband was to never let him know that you were doing it.
Gladys pushed a piece of paper into my hand. I was too sweaty and nervous to look because I knew what it contained. It happened that way. The leader, although also a medical student, kept away from almost all of us. He had forged ties with a few people who he felt were key players, and they were his voice and his eyes. It was too dangerous for him to be seen in public—he avoided many lectures and tutorials because he knew that he was being watched and soon a day would come when he would have to run or risk being picked up by the Special Branch. Gladys was one of the people whom he had allowed into his inner circle. In awe I would often ask her to tell me about him, and to speak about his ideals of Black Consciousness, and late into many nights she would whisper all the theories and plans to me. I became hungry to include myself in the work, and one day I admitted it to her.
“Sylvie, I am no fool,” Gladys said. “I have watched you, and I have listened to the things that you say to me. Your words have power. But I am afraid to call you into our world.”
“Why? Gladys, I want this. You know I want this.”
“But look at Fatima. We listened to her speeches, we were seduced by her talks and lofty ideas. And just when we included her into our secrets, she turned and walked away, carrying these secrets with her, and throwing our choice in our face. How do we know you won’t do the same?”
“Gladys, I want this. I want the chance to fight for our equality. You have seen me flare up in my tiny talks with you. I have so much more in me, so much more. I want this chance.”
Gladys had simply nodded and rolled over to fall asleep with ease. I on the other hand could not sleep; I paced the room, wondering if she would awaken or was aware of my restlessness. It was true, I wanted this. I wanted to launch myself headfirst into the world of activism. I was tired of subversively scribbling in journals. Every part of me ached to join in, to do good work, to meet our leader and to make him see how committed I was.
I shook Gladys awake. No moment could be lost now that my hunger was awakened.
“Gladdy, listen. Wake up. I . . . want this. I want to join you. I want to meet him, to work with your group. Don’t leave me out when you go for your meetings. I will not desert the struggle.”
Gladys sighed, not from sleep, but a deeper sigh, one of awareness and slight apprehension. She seemed exhausted. “Sylvie, it is not easy. It is not the glamorous world you picture in your head. You should know . . . the men don’t welcome us in their group easily. They believe this fight is theirs. How will you handle that?”
“We’ve been handling that since we got here, haven’t we, Gladdy? They didn’t want us to become doctors either. They pushed us to the back of the lecture halls, the laboratories, and the wards. So we stayed in the back, but we still learned as well as them. We are still as good as them in this medical world. I know in my heart that this is what I want.”
“Go to sleep, Sylvie. I will think about it,” she replied, but from her tone I knew she would agree to take me to meet her comrades. It was only a matter of time.
I was filled with fear. Th
is was the only real bold step I had taken since I had defied my old aunts and grannies and listened to my father’s voice telling me to go to university. Now, his voice came into my head again like a distant echo, and I heard myself reply:
“I will make you proud, Appa.”
Despite the fear, I waited. And like a virgin who knows the night will come when she would become a woman, I held fear and apprehension at bay with excitement and deep desire. I had been awaiting this moment that I had known would come, the moment when the leader would call me to his chamber. Among us black students at the medical school, we knew that political work and the activism of the Black Consciousness Movement had its roots in our very own backyard. Some chose to avoid it and look away. I chose to dig down. In my own way, I had coveted a life that was larger than myself, and I always hoped the day would come when I would be given a chance to openly show my inner thoughts.
My father had always spoken of justice. In his uneducated, carpenter’s mind, he understood human beings and politics better than many schooled academics. And the reason for this was because he believed in right and wrong. He did not know the big words to describe what was right and what was wrong, but in simple peasant language he stoked the furnace of a burning mind. I read voraciously, I devoured thoughts, and I began wanting change so salaciously that I became a harlot on the pages of my journals, writing out my deepest secretive ideas and philosophies of how the world should be, rather than the ugly place it was.
At medical school I kept writing. My reading in the dark hours had taken me into the deepest heart of the Resistance, into the most delicious taste of a democracy. In a bound-up journal, peeling at its corners, my words danced out desire as I channeled the great words of those who had come before me. I filled the thin, blue lines of the pages with written words because I would not and could not speak them out loud. I wrote like a revolutionary, but I wrote in secret. I did not know that Gladys was reading my words and talking about them to the movement that she had joined.