Cheshe Dow

I don’t read prologues.

That I put this, my fear of my impending silent death, a death to be mourned only by myself, in the prologue, is perhaps as much as I will ever tell you about who I am. I

don’t know how it sounds to you to read me say this, but what I record here is my salvation. Some people get married, some have children and others find a way to believe in a God. For me, I need to know that I was here, that I was real before parts of the mask became my face.

When I was a child others saw me and remembered me. When I got old enough I asked to hear others tell of me as if I wasn’t there. I asked often. Not because I didn’t remember, but because I didn’t want to forget.

I am suddenly gripped with apprehension that after this winter, I will not ask myself again what I really feel. And so, before this, my last childhood quits the stage, before I forget that, “its not fair” is a damning recrimination I would like to answer myself on that worthy question and I would like to try to do it well.

I see my ability to claim that I am not complicit, my freedom to use “they” slipping away and I find that I want to rage, at least one last time.

You see, I am about to graduate from Law school and the natural evolution of things finds me being asked everyday, whether I have a job. In the face of this incessant questioning, I have decided to take the summer off so that I can hold on to my “theys’ just a little while longer.

I see it coming fast, just this past weekend I read Stone Butch Blues, Jesse was raped twice and I didn’t flinch until the second time, more than a hundred pages later.

One hundred and twenty-two days is all the time I have. I hope I didn’t leave it too long.

 

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I want to be able to tell you that sitting by his grave, holding his baby I saw him, not as he had been told me by others, by himself or even the life he had so in-artfully led. Stripped of his body and his ability to be seen, from behind the eyes of his son, for the first time I saw him and only then could I cry. It lasted no more than a minute, likely no one else noticed and I would not speak of it until seven months later lying in the dark beside a man who was not of my world and whose time was borrowed. Without permission, sometime from then I would find myself talking, not entirely sure why.

It is amazing what is said between people who are strangers on the stage but intimates in places where the rules each has accepted as the set of their life do not reach. I wonder if everyone takes time to sit in the chairs facing the stage, if others have comfort there in missing a curtain call or two. I have, and I was thrilled if a little terrified to find that the stage edge was also a beginning.

So I lay in this man’s arm, in the dark where we could whisper about everything and hear each other. I told him that I had sat beside my cousin’s husband’s grave and he had looked at me as I held his baby and that the she who I was off stage knew that he had wanted someone to look at him just once and see him. That he was dead and I had not known him in anyway that could be measured or amounted to much, but that nonetheless he and I shared a secret.

I told him that I was too aware that I was on stage to be good at feigning abandon. That I was my own audience at the same time as I was the performer and I up until law school the reviews had been too good for me to ever admit that a stage was all it was. I was a thespian who knew her audience. Then one day, without any warning at all, I got a C. So while I would like to take credit for exploring the theatre beyond where the light reaches, the truth is I had some encouragement.

 

The Beginning…

In the beginning there was my relationship with three colours. We go back a long time. We go back to the time in my childhood when I was reviled by how yellow tasted to mouth, and cringed at the way purple, deep purple burnt my skin. It was long before I learnt that unless one was describing cattle, Setswana has names for very few colors but blue and yellow were among them. There was a drought on and the grass was a sickly, burnt yellow and so no one called yellow by her name. Yellow all around me and all people would say is how we needed rain. The only other yellow came with progress, it was garish and loud. It had no business on the council housing’s fisher boards and certainly not above doors that particular shade of blue. It was a yellow only a teenager could have picked, Botswana was every inch that teenager, falling rushing and tripping over herself to grow up.

For me purple was and remains the color of methylated spirit. Methylated spirit was there in my earliest memory of pain. My grandfather applied that scalding vicious purple on my upper right thigh. There were gashes I had acquired after colliding with a wire fence. I love and trust him and never doubted that he was helping me, but I would not wear purple for 15 years.

The particular shade of blue I remember and am talking about was not mine, at least not at first. In fact I looked down on it, I can’t really say I understand why and only now as I write this do I find I can say that out loud. I suppose I thought that its existence festooning doors across Botswana, mocked me just a little. There was a drought on.

She is I, and I is She, sometimes I was there but other times it was only She. It is a lot to remember and telling her story that is also my story can only be told in the order that we have the strength to remember it in.