Purpose

It is possible to be nostalgic for a life one neither lived nor remembers. Through stories told by others, whimsical imaginings of feelings and perceptions can be appropriated into our own lived experience and organised into personal memory; ours but not quite. They are the personal memories of our grandfathers and mothers, of parents, of older siblings; or the distant memories of strangers that lived before us, recorded by history for consumption and appropriation by future descendants bound to the fate of their ancestors through ethnicity, nationality or gender.

I am nostalgic for the time of my birth, a time I could never remember without the memories of my mother.  My nostalgia has nothing to do with that fact that I inherited mum’s neurosis – which of course I self-diagnosed as soon as I old enough to grasp the meaning of neurotic  – and am inherently afraid of failure and thus of possibility and consequently of life, but not afraid enough to not want to live it, mind you, only enough to justify not living it to the fullest.

My nostalgia has nothing to do with how the world seems to become more complicated as I grow older. My roles as a daughter, friend, sister, girlfriend, colleague, employee, customer and member of society at its various levels, change constantly as interpersonal boundaries (having transcended space since the time various freedoms were endowed to us as citizens, as women, as black people) are constantly redefined.

My nostalgia has everything to do with wanting to escape the mundaneness of my existence and speculate perhaps on my mother’s, as a first time mother this time, three decades ago. She was much younger than I am now, barely 23, when I was born.

She had known my father since she was 16. They were neighbours in the neighbourhood where she lived with an uncle’s family, having been sent to wealthier relatives in the city for there was no available schooling beyond standard 2 – grade 4 – in the rural areas where her parents eked out a meagre living. My mother, even then  always one to prioritise, would not love my father when he would have had her love him because he was 24, far too old for her.  He was also a playboy, reputed for his heavy partying; qualities that my mother, the daughter of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, would have been taught to avoid. And besides, being Sotho he was obviously a scoundrel; everybody knew, after all, that all men from down South carried about okapi knives on their person, to be whipped out during the drunken brawls they would inevitably involved in, usually involving the affections of women with questionable reputations.

Then she went away to college and my father moved away from that neighbourhood. Destined to be together they bumped into each other in a supermarket years later, upon which my father declared that he would never let her go (he might have tried to pay for her groceries and mum, wary and reluctant, would not have had it, but she would have let him give her a lift home in his car – a source of pride and status in a time when not many black people owned cars in colonial Africa).

Mother was 21 when they reconnected and I was born 11 months after their wedding. I know this because I have often fantasized about the beginnings of my existence as a love-child, the illicit product of a clandestine love affair between a pastor’s daughter rebelliously exploring her sexuality and a charming rake, who had been drugged into feverish desire by the sweet, chaste innocence of the pastor’s daughter, and impressed by the lack of awareness of just how beautiful she was.  And my parents’ interest in each other would have aroused a wrath in my grandfather so intense he would have had to banish my mother from ever setting foot in his homestead ever again.

Actually this really happened, only that my conception came after my parents marriage – a court affair solemnly conducted by a magistrate; the kind partaken by those too poor for the extravagant celebrations of a wedding feast, and those marrying under a cloud of disapproval from important significant others so that there is neither the point nor the desire for a feast. Still, love-child or not, marrying my father is one of two  steps that my mother has ever taken that prove she is not without fire or courage and sometimes dares to live life to the fullest no matter the consequences!

And so mum, newly qualified as a teacher, married her mining engineer husband in front of a magistrate who would have been a white man in colonial country, marrying Africans in the non-white sections of the court house. Maybe benevolently, teaching them about the sacredness of the union, speaking slowly as if they were children even though they assured him they understood English. Or maybe contemptuously, unable to understand how blacks could even be allowed to marry, it’s not like they understood what the institution meant given that the men paid for their wives and beat them like the stinking goats they tended to keep in their back yards even in the urban areas.
And this would have been how a woman born and raised under the auspices of the strictest of religious denominations started her new life as wife: disowned by her father, wed to a heathen who believed the bible to be a bunch of stories,  married by a man of the law and not of the cloth; thus she lived believing her marriage was not blessed by the God she never stopped regarding as a Father.

The signs that God refused to bless her marriage would have come swiftly for my father loved his alcoholic beverages. Having grown up in a strict household that abhorred alcohol and viewed the imbibing of spirits as a mortal sin, my father’s occasional all-night binges would have come has a shock so that a couple of nights every month his young wife would have cried herself to sleep in those early years when her disposition was still gossamer-fragile, and her dreams of a life ahead, optimistic and blissful.

When I was older I would become aware of how charming my father was the morning after his drinking binges. He would continue to be that way for weeks on end, taking us out for meals in the evenings or picnics on the weekends, staying home after work with the newspaper or spending time in his workshop at the back of the garage making or repairing something useful – because he was always good with his hands  – for my mother.

When I was older I became aware of how these ‘damage control’ mechanisms impressed my mother less and less.  But I’m sure in those first few years of marriage, before the hopelessness of realising people rarely change hardened her heart (and in turn lowered expectation and brought on the neurosis), my mother chose to believe each time, that her husband would realise how much he was hurting her and he would change.

She would have prayed to the same God who hadn’t been there to bless her union with this same husband;  that He reunite her with the family she missed very much. She wanted to lean her head against her mother’s comforting bosom and cry her frustration about this husband. And once she discovered she was pregnant, so soon after her marriage, she needed her mother more than ever,  to guide her. And more than anything she needed her father to look forward to his first grandchild because she really did not want this life of isolation and aloneness to be the kind her first child would be born into.

She would have started shopping for baby clothes every time she and my father left the sleepy mining town they lived in with its handful of shops – mostly liquor and grocery – and visited the big city. My mother, always one for elegance and quality, would have bought only the best for her first child. Not knowing whether the child was a girl or a boy she would have been careful to select neutral colours, like lemons – not yellow – and powdery greens. She would have started buying Living & Loving magazine, with its smiling white babies on the cover and started to read about how to be a good mother to a healthy, happy baby. She would have pored over the knitting-pattern pages, seen something she liked and bought knitting needles and some yarn. She spent the shortening autumn days of her maternity leave knitting miniature woollen bootees, hats and matinee jackets in soft white or lemon wool, and some of the few friends she had would have done the same.

When I was born, she and my father may have marvelled that I was so little yet so perfectly formed. Well maybe not initially because mother likes to embarrass me in front of friends and boyfriends by telling them that I was a reluctant baby, only coming out of her womb almost three weeks after my due date by which time I had started to shed my baby skin so that I was born with the crinkliest skin that had my father suggesting to his young wife she rub me down with Vaseline. Then two weeks later, my mother tells, the wrinkly skin peeled off and left behind the softest, smoothest skin on a most beautiful baby.

And it was this baby that she took to the home of her childhood, risking her father’s displeasure. Instead she got the miracle she had prayed for throughout the first year of her marriage, for my grandfather took one look at me and fell in love. His brother’ who happened to be visiting at that that time suggested a name for me – Xolani, which means peace – for it was time to put away the animosity and the anger over past mistakes, a time for forgiveness and thus peace in the family.

My grandmother would have been against the name for she loathes what she calls ‘talking names’. Why saddle a child with baggage it has no part off, she argues. I am inclined to agree with her, but I cannot deny that I am proud of my name and the story behind it. And I can tell in mother’s voice, whenever she tells this story,  that she is to. I can almost feel that surge of love that she must have felt for me in that moment she realised she was forgiven. Unwilling to shatter the perfect scene of love and forgiveness, she would not have told her mother of the difficult moments in her young marriage.

And because she made such a decision not to, she would not have been able to explain a long absence away from her husband and in a culture where a woman’s place is by her man’s side, she would have had to leave – reluctantly – when my grandmother started making enquiring noises; even though she would have much preferred to stay in the rural areas with her parents.

On the bus back to her marital home she would have clutched me tightly to her, knowing and taking comfort in the fact that for a while at least she need no longer fear being alone. She would have thanked God for giving me to her. And in that short prayer she would have given my life a purpose that it lacks today as I contemplate another day at the office and wonder why I am here.