I
Another European Christmas, with its dirty snow and deserted dorms, was a rather frightening prospect. The anxiety came with the first bite in the air, as the multi-coloured lights were hung in the streets. Few things could be more isolating than the festive season for an international student who couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go because flights to Zimbabwe during this time of the year cost an arm and a leg. More honestly, because I had been fighting with my mother. I decided instead to stay with some Kenyan friends in the French Pyrenees.
I forget whether it was by chance or by choice that I booked a reading with an internet sangoma on the first night of the trip. It must have been purposeful. Mountains have always given me a sense of spiritual grounding. This would be my first time receiving this kind of service. My staunch Christian mother at home would be scandalised.
This didn’t feel like any kind of reading though. For starters, the woman was Canadian. Biracial, but with no Zimbabwean parent, yet curiously using a Shona name. What’s more, she grounded her practice in the Yoruba tradition of Ifa and told me this reading would be online. Who knew then that ancestors could still reach you through fiber optic cables, that offerings could be made to the gods via PayPal?
Whatever skepticism I had would soon be shattered by the woman’s first words to me, after pleasantries had been exchanged:
“Your ancestors from your father’s side are unhappy with you because you have neglected them.”
My ancestors from my father’s side simply refused to leave me alone, no matter how far I ran. The way the sangoma said these words with ease, so accurately and matter-of-factly, filled me with vitriol. These ancestors, whose son had abandoned me, how dare they hold me accountable for his absence? Were they also angry at my father for how he had neglected me?
This wasn’t what I had come for. I expected a love reading, something about a rich, handsome husband finally finding me. Or at least something about my life’s purpose, what to do to make my career take off. Something sweet to the ear. I had traveled three hours on the high-speed train. I left sprawling, grasping Bordeaux in search of the refuge of mountains. Getting off the train in Pau, I found my shaggy-haired host with two beers in hand, ready to meet me. We were surrounded by pristine mountains streaked with white and silver, like in a fairytale. The clouds had cleared as the temperatures dipped, bleaching the sleepy town in cool sunlight.
His girlfriend was ready for us by the time we arrived. We were greeted by intoxicating aromas of oriental spices, stewing cuts of beef and chicken, fluffy basmati rice. Fela and the Africa 70 blared through the television. The wine popped open. Once dinner was over and the couple was having some alone time, I slipped into my room. It was a corner room with pine panelling and crisp, white bedding. Blue light brightened my face when I opened the laptop, and I settled down in expectation.
Unsuspecting, I had been plunged back into a place I thought I had escaped, to speak once more to dragons I swore I had slain. My ancestors had followed me with all their baggage into the mountain, and now, throwing it at my feet, they ordered me to carry it.
II
Violence occurs in patterns. As above, so below. Violence comes out of an impulse of emptiness, insatiability, causing mothers to feed on their young. It is born from a false boundary between one’s own appetites and the humanity of the other. Ancestors locked in spinal memory elicit emotions they formerly fed on, contributing to our unconscious drives and desires. Impulses which continue to demand pain and excess. And so it repeats itself: violence, need, violence.
My relationship with my mother has been fraught with tensions since childhood. Old practices of dehumanisation and control from a time when masters whipped their farm hands with sjamboks became a routine, a staple in our language of relation. Our love twisted itself into a chimera of distrust and contempt.
Of course, I had severe anxiety and depression. This is why I left home to brave the world alone. I thought the distance from the memory of the past would heal me. Yet, somehow, home never really left my body. Anxious dreams would torment me nightly. I would wake up in cold sweats, screaming and shouting, defending myself in front of a council of ghosts.
In one of these dreams, I found myself in a geometric realm, as though seeing through a tinted prism. A tranquil air hung about the place. Icy lakes dotted the planes where tiny deer and moose drank. This land had neither trees nor grass. It was a sterile, uniform landscape of violet and indigo hues. It had a strange familiarity to it, as if I came here often. It seemed I had friends in this dimension, who invited me from time to time to rest.
This plane was a crystal tablet spinning on an axis through the dark expanse, and on it sat a single, isolated dwelling. A large, rectangular house whose cold interior was of marble and emerald, a topaz ceiling and pearly floors. At its center was a black pool of mercury surrounded with pillars. From this nucleus radiated countless maze-like corridors with thousands of glass doors on either side, doors into rooms of exotic delights, vapors, pills and liquors, all manner of decadent, jeweled creatures dripping with perfumed oil, of fruit and frogs and serums. My thoughts remained suspended as I mated with these creatures. On and on the festivities went, all things made acceptable by the secrecy of boundless night.
But just as it has always been cursed to, the dark began to dissipate in submission to piercing daylight, and wanton desire gave way to clarity of mind. For the first time, all of us humans in this house could see the creatures that had enchanted, drugged and seduced us in the shadows for a time immeasurable. For the first time, we could observe their form. Their strange skeletons towered above ours, covered with taut, metallic sinews of flesh and leathery skin, covered in iridescent scales.
Gigantic lizards, veins coursing with teenage wildness, venom-coated fangs brandished in a sneer. Lizards atop larger lizards, saddled each on fiery coloured ones, beastly, blind and ravenous. We stood stunned like helpless monkeys. Shame surged like faucets of tar from my hips into the pit of my womb as I looked upon the abomination with which I had prostituted myself.
Before we realised what was happening, these creatures launched themselves into a state of violent abandon such as I had never seen in my life. They grabbed petrified bodies and ripped them in two, head from shoulders. They tore stomachs open and scattered their bloody entrails. The air was filled with helpless screams as these creatures carried on their genocide. Their teeth glinted through the red spray with unbridled delight.
I looked around at the scattered heads with tangled hair sticking in clumps to darkening blood, frozen faces of friends with wide, glazed eyes. I saw the bodies with breasts and genitals bitten off in seconds, spat out soon after. I was enraged. I began to call these lawless creatures by name. I cursed and I swore. But they only laughed at my pathetic attempt.
I ran towards one of these demons with nothing but bare hands and bare feet, ready to scratch and bite, wild with grief and regret. Just as I set myself upon him, he cut me down with a single blow. His hand had torn the cage of my chest apart and pulled my voice savagely out of its place. I fell slowly and silently.
I woke before I touched the ground.
Exasperated and oceans away, I launched an angry sermon on WhatsApp, attacking my mother for everything she had contributed to my present state. I blamed every Tinder idiot, every failed payment, every declined visa application on my upbringing which she had botched up beyond redemption.
Capitalism builds pyramids of fear, fears installed in previous generations and experiences, fears re-enacted and reproduced at every stage of the pyramid, fear that is broadcast brazenly under a veneer of justice, to monetise and sustain itself, fear which conditions us to subordinate ourselves, as if under hypnosis.
Fear that keeps Cecil Rhodes buried still in the Matopos, like a festering thorn in an unmentionable part of mother’s flesh, deeply resented but too shameful to dislodge. A crippling, isolating fear which morphs itself into twisted forms of dependence and desperation. A fear which condemns the victim to circular, pointless searches for safety in the same structures that took it away in the first place. Forays into mountains in faraway lands. Searches for never-before-seen things, impossible to recognise.
A stubborn belief that the perpetrator, and those who look like him, and the things he left behind, and his way of life, have the power to return what is lost. What must be recognised, however, is that the perpetrator is nothing more than an empty void, a destructive vortex that cannot know satisfaction. One that can never have its fill because it is essentially an endless darkness.
Only life can beget life.
So after the witch has been branded, after we’ve burnt him at the stake, after our rage is spent and justice has been served, how do we mend these gaping wounds where darkness still seeks to suck at other things?
III
The morning after Christmas, my friends suggested we go to see the Sanctuary of Lourdes. It was just an hour away. The train chugged past brooks and through idyllic woods. We walked on the cobbled road into view of what looked and felt like the Disney castle. Pilgrims bent themselves, lighting candles, kneeling down to pray. Colourful, sparkling mosaics busied the walls. My eyes followed them up into dizzying heights, until my head was completely tilted back. I was haunted by the holy images of God the absent father, and Mary, the child with child.
When I was born, my paternal grandmother asked that I be named after her. This was not an unusual request to make. In our culture, the names of elders are often passed down to newborn children, in the hopes that their strengths and virtues live on after them. In this sense, the ancestors have a channel to continue looking after their offspring. My proud mother, having suffered countless humiliations at this woman and her son’s hands, with pursed lips and folded palms, politely declined.
I would have refused too. I can imagine how the conversation would have gone; I’ve been told the story many times. My paternal grandparents sat in their matching, baby-blue, calf leather armchairs. Their ashy, wrinkled feet rested on low stools, crossed at the ankle. My parents would have been at opposite ends of the room, on less regal seats.
“Was she a virgin when you had sex?” Grandmother would interrogate, loudly for the whole world to hear.
She would gesture with clanging hands, heavy with bangles and rings. My mother, a girl, would adjust the sleeves of her threadbare dress, feeling suddenly cold. My father, poster child for the black elite, would keep his head down like a coward, and mumble something like he couldn’t remember.
The lack of Grandmother’s name, however, did not exempt me from paying her debt. She had been the handmaiden of patriarchy, the law enforcer for class and hierarchy. She had won the game. But in the long shadow she had cast, my mother’s bitterness became discipline. Her shame turned into piety. Her abuses were God-ordained, backed by scripture. My body kept the score in every bruise, every insult.
We live at a time where structures are visibly crumbling, but the echoes of this system’s crimes have not, will not leave our bodies if we cling to our individual rage, after the fire comes time for rain, time for calm and for planting, for sprouting.
I thought it a beautiful gesture, to offer the people that hurt you a glass of water, a way into a conversation. I collected a little water from the miraculous fountain just outside the cathedral. They said it could cure all kinds of ailments. I kept it in a thumb-sized plastic bottle I had bought for €2 on site. Initiation into a practice of empathy towards ancestors meant understanding the saying we all grew up with: I am because we are.
We are all entangled in the web that is personhood. I myself had come to accept, through dreams and other strange encounters, that I had lived many lives before this one. The people close to me now are souls I met before, souls I’ve known forever. And with each incarnation, we agree on the costumes we wear, and we say our lines and act out our parts. Suppose I was my grandmother before I was born as myself. Suppose I came back to experience the things I had done to my mother. To her my own vicious words launched back at me. What if I came back here to face my shadow?
On a grander scale, what if I’m the white man that hanged my great grandmother, returned to experience the fallout and loss that followed, the ripple effects a century later, returned to write litanies cursing myself, litanies to mourn my victim? Viewing humanity as a single soul experiencing itself means we each take full accountability and responsibility for our collective pain.
I become my mother’s parent. I hold her as my child and say,
I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I love you.
And in softening her I make a place for myself to also be soft, a feathered place to land.
Eventually, I went back home to Zimbabwe. My grandmother had passed away and left me the two blue couches she had sat on when deciding my mother’s fate. Gingerly, I cleaned the cracking leather. I poured her a glass of water, and asked her to come in.
About the Author:
Rutendo Goneso Harvey is a writer and independent researcher based in Harare, Zimbabwe. She holds an M.A. in African Studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany with a focus on Art History and Philosophy. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories set in Harare, where she has spent most of her life. Her writing experiments with magical realism and folklore. An avid traveler, Rutendo loves to explore different cultures and experience the local cuisine.