On not being buried in a purple philanthropist's shirt
(why this is advisable)
~~~
How might life have ended for me in the colonial world?
Certainly, much of life would have been easier. Certainly I would not have become much of a hybrid: I would have been less of a monster, less of a dragon of the deep. My struggle with my not belonging kept me youthful. I refused the easiest way, the path of least resistance, which is the means to aging.
By that degree to which I resisted I am became Eternal Youth!
It hit me forcibly, that somehow I could have been the person I was supposed to have been – even though I’d been transposed.
It struck me also in a sweet-sick way, the way that I have layers–layers of skins for coping, layers of mental and of physical toughness ... dragon skin I didn't have before.
A woman died, (a woman that I knew), and then I heard she wanted to be buried in her philanthropist’s shirt! She was a nice woman, but it seemed like a flighty and unreal mystics dream, that she would make this gesture, outright, in this way… She confuses me. I could have ended up this way, in Africa.
Surely not, in the Western world, with all of its sophistication and all of its faux sophistication (vulgarity)?
I still have traces of the natural reticence that comes from being brought up well, and female, and in Africa. Forgetting anything that appeared malicious, going to the grave knowing as little as she did to start with, might have been my fate -- maybe more or less.
Could she have been me? What if I had never questioned anything, and what if the confusion of an almost completed maturity being thrown into a cultural disjunction was not mine?
Perhaps my parents may not have been so off the mark in trying to ensure the presentation of a perfect, purple corpse. I am sorry for her, in the purple shirt, I am. She was trying to say something like, “You people hold on there for me, and make the world a happy place – and try not to take any of this too, too seriously.”
I still have traces of the natural reticence that comes from being brought up well, and female, and in Africa. Forgetting anything that appeared malicious, going to the grave knowing as little as she did to start with, might have been my fate -- maybe more or less.
Could she have been me? What if I had never questioned anything, and what if the confusion of an almost completed maturity being thrown into a cultural disjunction was not mine?
Perhaps my parents may not have been so off the mark in trying to ensure the presentation of a perfect, purple corpse. I am sorry for her, in the purple shirt, I am. She was trying to say something like, “You people hold on there for me, and make the world a happy place – and try not to take any of this too, too seriously.”
My first burbling, adult cries: “What does this culture mean? What the fuck does this culture mean?” must have sounded like a death of innocence to them. The arithmetic measure of an adult's cry exceeds the childish cry only by decibels.
The punishments to evoke fear of ‘finding out’, lest the burg'ning female experience a death to innocence. What was never, ever clear, to the aforesaid burg’ning one was that knowledge could be bypassed – possibly by following the path of least resistance. To find an answer in connectedness by forging new relationships: such might have got around the need for knowledge; might have made everything feel right, no matter that the differences between one culture and another are.
From the point of view of feeling, change is less an issue: human beings appear to remain static. Only logic analyses and separates out: making them, and us, into separate entities with separate historical periods, and separate natures. How terrible must be the death of innocence, when things are no longer connected! How wonderful the religious state, which draws us all together, in a condition of amorphous feeling!
But – things never change for the religious mind-set: you can go to the grave as innocent as you were born!
She was amazing! – the purple-shirted woman: She must have had self control. She must have, for she kept on teaching right until just about the point when she died. But what was it that was eating her from within? Only a cancer?
(Or rather more besides?)
Sainthood is amazing. She must have gone all throughout her life, taking only very little for herself, giving out, always. Essentially passive, she put on the bravest of faces: She became a Stoic.
What for?
Females in my culture were necessarily Stoic. As "undeniably emotional" creatures, it was ‘the best they could obtain’. Those who have pain, and do not know how to express it, scream. Those who have a need to understand their lives, but do not know how to express it, relate their feelings incoherently. Without Knowledge, there is either Stoicism or -- uncontrolled emotions.
The men in my culture flattered themselves: As women aged, they were supposed to become more stoical, like "the male".
The fact is neither divided-from-themselves gender knew anything but that was because life was brilliant! For the most part, living off the fat of the land is not a hassle.
My life had been a product of indifference to this knowledge that grew somehow and inexplicably within my parents, into a fear of knowledge.
If only I had used my feeling sense, instead of intellect, I would have understood their “solution”, better. As it was, they expressed their fear of my intellectual growth in a way that was incoherent and un-Stoical:
by fifteen, I was mistress already of many Stoicisms.
~~~~~
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