This blessed year

I haven't had the killer instinct of late, since dealing with the finishing of my autobiography has been rather a masochistic project. It's like Marechera holding the bare threads of his words in his fingers and despondantly proclaiming: "Look what I have left of it: My life!"

There is much in this new version of the writing that I had been unwilling to face so directly, before -- so much that doesn't meet with higher standards for human experience, in a way that would give expression to some sense of human purity or transcendence of life such as it was and is. It's hard to express this sense of life's almost totalising contingency that had me in its grips during the first part of my life -- and which set into place the chain of cause and effect relationships that has effected me until I was 40. There can be moral choices only when there is first knowledge, and secondly various options in place, apart from just one. These options are made accessible by predominating social values and by law. The Australian law that broke the very negative chain of cause and effect for me was that of the rights of a citizen to claim welfare payments. It was this that got me out of a situation of workplace abuse and homeplace dysfunction, without which, I would not be alive today.

So now I have knowledge, and despite the sometimes prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes that persist in society, against migrants, and against women, I am learning to recognise, once more, that I have freedom.

The best I can do is to share this freedom of mine, for however long it lasts. I know too well what it is like to have few clear or apparent options. My gifts are of a minor variety, and this is what I get back:

"You are a freind in need and indeed.I just dont know how tothank youenough.Had it not been for you we would be six feet under the ground ."

It is not impossible to imagine that this is true in present day Zimbabwe.

I am inclined to feel very much that only those who have lived through some extremes can imagine what it is like to try to survive the extremes.

"Here's to wishing yu a happy 2009.We have been weighed and found worthy to enter this blessed year."