Authors: Norman Rush
In retrospect I have sympathy for Nelson, knowing what his intentions
were. There is such a thing as being so driven to act that you blot out the gulf evolving between the incident you find yourself creating and the ideal incident the depth of your feelings entitles you to have. Also, the image of William Blake was somehow ghostlily conceptually entwined in Nelson’s idea of what he was doing—Blake the defender of the essence of England against the traducers who were turning it into mere empire. Nelson adored Blake. And in defending himself, when we went over this later, it was his identification with Blake he used against my accusation of Anglophobia run amok. The idea of the performance had been to present to Harold and Julia, emissaries of England the mother of empires, the feelings of some former subjects of the crown who were now undeceived and no longer humble—as those feelings might well have been articulated by people acculturated to express themselves in terms of formal drama. This may seem elaborate, but I want to be fair to Nelson. The script for the occasion came out of several sessions where members of the mother committee were encouraged to free associate on the subject of the British Empire—with Nelson stirring the pot, interpolating considerably more than he should have, I’m sure, transcribing, and then editing the whole. I never fathomed how he had proceeded so far without cognizing how embarrassing a product was resulting. Because it was embarrassing.
I was truly embarrassed, which I think may be why my memory of the overall event is what it is. I looked away. I willed it to be over. And so on.
Two boys came out, my friend King James and his best friend, Edison. They were in traditional dress—goatskin capes, breechclouts, seed-pod rattles on their ankles. They posted themselves truculently, one in front of each of the torch sets, leaning on staves clearly meant to represent spears. We had actual spears in our stores house, of course, but no actual weapon was ever going to be released into real life if Nelson had anything to say about it. And of course real spears would have been vastly more effective. A girl came out, Adelah, a darling who would be leaving us soon for the government secondary at Kang. She was shadowed by a bulky presence, a woman completely swathed in black and carrying a flashlight with which to aid performers in reading their lines. It was getting fairly dark. The presence was Dirang Motsidisi, and the black swathing was meant to make her inconspicuous, unbelievably enough. Even her head was somehow veiled. Prettyrose Chilume joined the central group, her violin fixed at her throat, ready to be played. There
was something transfixing about the tableau against the fading glow of the desert, the torch flames wagging. The audience settled down unusually quickly.
Then began a declamation, I think it would be correct to call it, by Adelah, a declamation against England. Prettyrose wasn’t there to do Lady of Spain but to produce harsh saccades to underline the different indictments of perfidious Albion being shouted out. The boys also provided emphasis by stamping their staves and feet. To me what was interesting was that what I was hearing was a complete inversion of the traditional Tswana praise ceremony for the chief and his subchiefs usual on festive occasions, wherein the royals are exhaustively likened to cattle, a great compliment.
I hope I can give a decent approximation of what went on. There was a concentration, understandably, on the war in Zimbabwe, which was just over, as, in
England
you had a killer slave, but you let him to be free to kill amongst us at Lesoma, where seventeen Tswana soldiers he shot down, and this slave was Ian Smith. This was about an actual famous massacre of Batswana soldiers during a raid into Botswana.
It went on with
Now
today Ian Smith is the forward-leading man running away with excrement on his heels from fear.
England
you gave away Ghanzi Ridge to Boers and as well Tati Farms to Boers, and rich farms in Tuli Block as well to Boers who mischarge Batswana as to oranges from those trees to this day. All this was in English.
England
how could you leave us with no roads, whilst you have many roads crossing all about England? There was more along these lines.
Then
England
you wished to hand over all Botswana to the Boers but were stopped from betrayal by your queen when Tshekedi made her to prevent you from this.
England
you held President Sir Seretse Khama away from us above seven years.
England
when you brought your churches upon us even your pastors could take some slaves from the Bakhurutshe and Barolong and sell them for money in Natal, because in that time you were hard as teeth to us, the same as Boers or Mzilikazi.
There was more, but less than there might have been. I was relieved that it had been so succinct. Harold was looking around in a way suggesting an interest in offering a rebuttal if some appropriate modus presented itself.
The spectacle had been received with a fairly uniform puzzlement, I
thought, amounting to annoyed dumbfoundment in a couple of cases at its discourtesy. As I was organizing Harold and Julia to come away with me for some refreshment the word was passed that we should sit down again. Clearly we weren’t through being entertained.
Five women lined up between the torches. Four were holding flashlights in the air above their heads, and the fifth was carrying an implement impossible to make out at first, which proved to be an oversized flail, almost a caricature of the real implement because it was so large. When someone came out and deposited an object like an ottoman in front of this chorus I knew what was coming. The object was in fact a foot-high segment of tree trunk crudely sewn into a cowhide casing. The woman with the flail would shortly be abusing it. The flashlights were switched on and trained on Dirang Motsidisi, still dressed as she had been but with the veiling around her head pushed down. She was now a principal. The flail was handed to her. I was right about what was coming. We were in for an installment of The Lamentations of Women Brought to a Finish, Full Stop. I hoped and prayed it was only an installment. From time to time I had seen installments done, rehearsed. It was an ongoing production which in its entirety would probably never be performable because it was so epic.
I felt like shriveling and concurrently felt disloyal over my embarrassment, seeing myself as callowly identifying with the white West and turning my back on the person I lived with because his attempt to tease out and concretize the voice of the formerly oppressed was too hubristic for me, at least when I had to witness the attempt not en famille but in the company of educated members of the West cultured in ways I happened to be impressed by. We all love hubris in a mate but we prefer it to be in moderation. I know what was happening with me. Something about Harold and Julia was reviving all my sensitivity about my education. I look more educated than I am. I know how many thin spots there are and how much of what looks good is sheer memory. Harold and Julia were regressing me. They were beautifully educated and I wasn’t, ergo
they represented the ideal observer, jointly. It was excruciating that Nelson was insisting on this second extravaganza, the innocence and good intentions of which would be inaccessible to Harold and Julia because on the surface it could be so rowdy and peculiar.
I appreciated what Denoon’s strategy was, and that it was innocent, so that why ultimately I somewhat freaked is hard to explain, even given everything I’ve said. Obviously Part the First of what we’d been treated to you could imagine being entitled A Fiery Raspberry to Decrepit but Still Perfidious Albion, and Part Two, now in the overture stage, The Lamentations, would be a demonstration of the new live post-Albionic culture of liberated Tsau. So what, if through The Lamentations Denoon was skirting making a spectacle of our bodies and ourselves, us women? Why was this so suddenly intolerable for me?
The Lamentations ritual, which is what it was, was a hybrid thing. It was both artificial and spontaneous, both foreign and domestic. It was ritualistic in that its format was fixed—although the flail was a new touch, an improvement, and I suppose an escalation over the switches or lengths of rope I had seen used in previous outings when the ottoman was being lashed for emphasis at certain junctures in the performance—but the content was only partly fixed. The germ of The Lamentations was notes taken by people attending a set of lectures I am tempted to call seminal, given by Denoon, on the history of the oppression of women. These notes had been expanded by the women to a master list of iniquities, and every household had a copy of the list in a special wallet hung next to the rondavel door.
The popular attitude to The Lamentations was pro, on the whole. I do know that in the one case of a woman whose wallet of tribulations had been eaten by a goat, I should say allowed to be eaten by a goat by her husband, who was responsible for keeping the goats out of the house, there was a rather severe penalty assessed against him that everyone agreed with except me. People were supposed to bring their lists to sessions of the evolving Lamentations spectacle. Many did. Denoon’s cadre was faithful about it and knew just how to inject historical injustices appositely into the proceedings when vox populi got off the track, got fanciful or notional or brought up injustices not strictly traceable to men or nongermane in other ways. The agon was always the same. A lead woman would start reading out particular injustices, a chorus and the audience would yell out Shame!, the audience would be encouraged to volunteer additional personal injustices—there were some favorites that people wanted to hear over and over—and there would be ululating, the
ottoman would be lashed, periodically there would be declarations that such things as were being mentioned would never be allowed to happen in Tsau. Men who came to the sessions were polite but tended, I noticed, to drift home early. The pattern was for The Lamentations to start out in English and then for Setswana to predominate, as emotions rose. As I say, I had nothing against The Lamentations. I embraced them for what they were, for their being didactic and sociocathartic, for the bawdiness that crept in, all of it. But still I wanted to run away. Denoon’s attitude to The Lamentations was too pious. This was going to be evident to Harold and Julia. The Lamentations was deeply amateur, almost burlesque, but Nelson’s demeanor during it was as though he were listening to a tone poem, some sententious piece of music by a composer like Messiaen, like my mother sitting piously frozen while she listened to something by Messiaen once she had decided that of all the phonograph records I had taken out of the public library for her this was the one that was meant for her soul. It was holy. It contained the holy. Once I knew she liked it I saved my allowance and brought her her own copy, one of my worst mistakes because whenever it was on, the whole downstairs was supposed to be frozen in silence, so she could listen correctly. Everything I did made too much noise, including, once, gargling. She listened to the thing endlessly, it felt like, during certain periods, like a drug. I had been trying to impose music appreciation on her, working from some list I had, and then she stopped dead at Messiaen. And it wasn’t anything to do with Messiaen in the sense that she wanted ever to hear anything else by this master of her soul’s heart. In fact she recoiled from the idea. It was just this one religiose perfect endless composition and only this. The look in Denoon’s eye was milder than hers during Messiaen, but it was still cognate. I hated him to be rapt, ever. When he was, I would remind myself that no one is perfect. Christ himself, for instance, never saw his doctrines extending as far as the condemnation of human slavery. My reaction may have been due to feeling totally overbooked on the woman question, especially as it applied to reconciling my supposed nobility and independence with the requirements of my campaign to get Denoon, who was seeming more and more like the store of all value to me, whatever my cavils. I wanted Denoon in an increasingly absolute way I was losing control over. No doubt the last thing I needed emotionally was to be convinced—or reconvinced—that every society you look deeply enough into turns out to be yet another male conspiracy against women conducted with assistance from the victim class itself. I was doing something and I was going to do it and I suppose I felt there was no point
in philosophically paralyzing myself. Anyway, the sight of Harold sitting down again like Canute on his throne and looking around for me to explain to him what on earth was now going to happen was too much for me, and I fled.
I realize now that a thing that happened that morning had put me in a volatile state, quite obviously. I thought I’d conquered it by defining it as pseudo. It’s only recently that I connect it to my bolting act. This was a pseudo epiphany regarding Nelson. I saw the tree of life on his front for a second and got hot in the eyes and weak all over. He had come in naked from sponge-bathing in the courtyard. As he turned in the doorway he was ventrally lit by a shaft of sunlight that made the way his body hairs were matted, chest and belly and so on hairs were matted, look like a perfect tree of life, with the exfoliation on his chest the canopy, the pressed-together belly growth the trunk, his escutcheon and genital area hair—he had quite a bit of hair on his actual scrotum—the root, and the whole genital package the treasure or casket or rare gem the roots of the tree were twined around. I got a grip on myself and warned myself that if I was seeing Nelson’s flesh as a billboard for Yggdrasil, I was having the pseudo epiphany of all time. But we are fools, and the moment was unquestionably a contributant to my hair-trigger state of being as The Lamentations began.
I retreated as far as a privy in back of the kitchen building. I hid out there. The excuse for my absence was going to be gastric distress not further specified. Why I bothered to sequester myself during The Lamentations is, in retrospect, a good question, since as the event tediously ran its course I began proposing my own tribulations, as a distraction, to fit into the gaps in the cycles of cheering and groaning. This is my way. A lot of The Lamentations I knew by heart. In my own private pageant I had masses of women vilifying the State of Maryland for having Fatti Maschii, parole femine, deeds are like men, and words—weak things—are like women, for its official motto. I was fairly miscellaneous. I ranged from the case of the first woman gynecologist being forced to attend courses disguised as a man, and then having to practice as one, on through the woman who invented the astrolabe being stripped and tortured to death by a male mob led by the patriarch of Alexandria, and when I sensed I was cleaving to a rather elite level I went for the generic class of women east to west in Africa who had routinely been forced to let male relations fuck them in exchange for trifling little loans, not to mention a study I read some years back about the percentage of American women owning small businesses who, credit being unobtainable by
them, earned their original stakes by selling their only material asset, their bodies. It was easy to monitor The Lamentations and know where you were, because somewhere toward the end there would be cries in English and Setswana of a favorite line of Nelson’s from Blake: Every female is a golden loom. That moment came.