I watched her search
for my story (thinking little of what she would find. After years of reporting
inside a small rural community in South Africa, I arrived at Thoko's homestead on a
Sunday morning, this time as a customer. A traditional healer, she’d said to me once
that she’d never thrown the bones for a malungu
and told the malungu the truth,
the whole truth—only the shiny parts. She’d said that she’d be honest if I wanted,
that I could count on her reading each bone as the ancestors placed them. At
the time, I nodded and smiled. She knew little of my life, but after spending
so many months, years even, so intimately at her side through obstacles and successes, inside her ndumba and shebeen (backdoor illegal pub), I was finally ready to sit there and hear her tell me about my life. Inside
her ndumba, I sat, legs swept to
the side, and watched Thoko begin something I’d seen her do a dozen times over
the previous year. Her voice grew raspy. And she began to speak
to her ancestors. She shook, lifted, and released the bones into the air, onto the mat, across
the floor. She pointed to the constellation of objects and told me what she could see.
Her wooden spear pointed to specific pairings and single items, each telling me something about my life and my family. Some were
shiny. Some were dark. A few secrets, things I’d recently discovered and some I would only discover months later, were on
her ndumba floor, for both of us to see.)
Lists push what I don’t
know how to say onto the page (knowing no other way to parse through life’s
hard parts. After years of long form journalism, years of writing about others,
my first blank page staring back at me was meant for me. I spent a year looking
at the list I transcribed from Thoko’s ndumba, everything the ancestors told her about my present, and everything
they outlined for my future—the
story of my life had been plot-lined through futsu seeds and coins and the
bones of animals that roamed nearby. But, years later, I could not write of
this life, the life she told me about, with the same ease I’d grown accustomed. I had so much to say, but I’d
lost my long form voice. My marriage had slowly stolen my words and I grew to
speak only when spoken to. After—once things were over—I maintained this
silence for many years, on the page and in person. Words about others have come
back, but words for myself are still hard to come by. And so, I make lists. I
trick myself into millimeter steps toward writing about issues of death and
violence, infidelity and manipulation, race and the character of a place I
still call home. I play with these lists, pushing and pulling them like silly
putty, stretching inside some spaces, and rearranging each item or sentence for
narrative. I let there be room for absence and leave space for my imaginary
reader to make connections. The truth is, I am not writing essays. I write
these with no intention to publish. They are a collection of iceberg tips. They
are a map for me to explore.)
Our words are often the
first thing to go (slipping into
survival mode.)
My mother is quiet (choosing
to express very little of herself on the page. I’ve rarely seen her write
letters. She writes lists. A lot of lists. She rarely tells stories of growing
up. And I was more likely to steal affection from her than to receive it
unsolicited. She spends ages inside greeting card aisles and writes only Love Kris, Love Mom, or Love Nana inside birthday cards,
Valentines Day notes, and milestone congratulations. For serious affairs, she calls the Cenacle for a personalized
sentiment and a commitment by the church—her long time rock, the space in which she silently speaks—to pray. On those, she signs nothing. When
her third child, my older brother, moved as far away as (at the time) it seemed
possible, my mother started to cut Dick Tracey, his favorite comic strip, from
the paper each morning and sent a batch at the end of each week. On top of
each, she placed a yellow sticky note, wrote the day of the week and one line.
The weather. Simple news from home. Eventually, my mother was cutting comics
for all six of her children and keeping the post office in business with her
weekly priority drops. Tiny paper tweets two decades before I sat at the
kitchen table and helped my parents sign up for Twitter so they could follow
Pope Francis. Her account remains blank, much like the letters I know she would like to write and the sticky notes she no longer writes. Eventually—soon after her youngest
sister, a woman who would send you an eight page handwritten letter, went
missing—my mother's words found paper and other people less and less.)
I force myself to find and
stretch language inside the confines of form (finding ways to write around and
around the subject I should be facing until I am left staring at what I’ve been
avoiding. Lists are just one of these. Crots. Panels. Modeling unnamed forms like this very one you see here. Or this one. Or this one. These are all
tricks. They are games. They get me moving. And, they push my voice to fill the
space. And, now, I have stacks of these shape-shifting pages. Lists as
tombstones. Lists as eulogy. A collection of crots in search of myself and our
own cartographic existence. Segments that compartmentalize a long string of
events I have never shared with another person. And, as I work to tell my aunt’s story, impossible
to separate from my own, panels and maps help me explore her life, her
art, and the island where she disappeared. I have written these late into
the night, on airplanes, in other people’s homes and hotel lobbies in the
middle of the night when I can’t sleep. Last I counted, I have written more
then one hundred and forty of these essay-like-things, digitally stacked inside a vault.
Every once in a while, one gets loose and finds itself a home, but they are more
about piecing together the plot lines Thoko identified in front of me, my narrative and my mother's, prying open a closed door, rusted by years of pushing away
the past or scarred shut. They have become like calisthenics, assaying toward a truth.)
*
Maggie Messitt has spent the last decade reporting from
inside underserved communities in southern Africa and middle America. Author of
The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa, Messitt lived in
northeastern South Africa for 8 years during which time she was a long-form
reporter, newspaper editor, and founding director of a writing school. Since
returning to the US, her essays and reportage have been published in Creative
Nonfiction, Essay Daily, Memoir Journal, Mother Jones, River Teeth, and the
Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others.
Messitt is currently a PhD candidate at Ohio University and a 2015 Scholar-in-Residence
at Bowers Writers House.
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