Cokcraco. Paul Williams
and covered with coarse golden granules. Your skin tingles with the drying salt, and you feel better, much better. This is complete freedom. No one about.
It’s an odd thing: you can only be yourself when you are absolutely alone. The minute someone appears, you leap into some other self and begin acting. Why? Is it possible ever to be yourself, like you are when you are alone? Or are you still in some ghostly mask while you are alone too, unable to rip off this acting self? What is the real you, the real self that is not constructed, or habit-formed by genetics, nurture, and ecopoliticosocioshit? You don’t know. It feels good being this self, this Rousseauian free man. But perhaps the good feeling has more to do with the fact that you have succeeded in one of your selves, that you have just procured a job, wormed your way into a pleasantly secluded cottage 9,837 kilometres away and bought yourself a space in which you can be yourself, whoever you are.
* * *
The word ‘I’, like the word ‘self’, is a word that has fallen into ill-repute. There is no such thing. You initially named your doctoral dissertation ‘Constructing the African Self’ but then had to erase all the selves in it, on advice from your Lacanian supervisor. The ‘self’ is a false construct, she’d said. You have to use the word ‘subject’. And for god’s sake, stop using the personal pronoun in your academic work. Who is this ‘I’? Haven’t you realised that the author is dead, and that even if he isn’t, he does not know what he is talking about?
* * *
Your meditation, conscious as it is, is made even more conscious by the sight of a lone figure walking miles away on the dunes, watching you, as if to test you, to see what chameleon colour you turn. You are suddenly too aware of yourself, how you appear to this man. Or woman. At this distance and in the haze of the sun, you only see a stick figure. The person is walking, meandering in aimless circles, but always returning and staring out at the sea. Or at you. Reassured that you must also be an unrecognisable stick figure, you continue what you are doing, which is tracing your feet in the sand, feeling the texture of the granules, and staring at the brown haze over the sea. Then the person waves. So he is watching. Annoyed, you wave back, conscious now that you are doing what the self you are now would not do. Get lost! you want to say to this watcher, but instead you wave heartily back, to keep the peace, to show you are a friendly, fellow human being.
That evening, alone in a dark house (no electricity yet), you eat the second K Burger and chips glued together with white grease. Faint echoes of Dire Straits waft across from the house behind, but they are no match for the frog chorus at the end of the property, or the screeching cicadas on all four sides of the cottage. Animals scuffle in the bush. You strain to listen to the haunting guitar of Mark Knopfler’s ‘Private Investigations’, played with thumb and fingers.
You discard the pink sheets and lie on the open mattress, tossing and turning, listening to mosquitoes buzzing and geckos tapping on the ceiling until you drift into a haze of dead sleep. But at midnight you wake, sweat-drenched and harassed. The previous occupants of this house are still around. Whoever lived here before has imprinted his sweaty, restless nature in the air, and the room is full of ghosts.
You crawl out of bed and light the candle. The room immediately fills with shadows of hugely distorted Timothy Turners leaping around. You reach for the volume at your bedside, Bantu’s Complete Works, flip through to a page chosen at random and begin to read.
^
^ ^
“The Hermit Cockroach”
I am a spirit hovering over the water,
A soul brooding over the formless void,
Waiting to incarnate.
What is the shape of my soul?
Am I black, white? Male, female?
My soul does not wear a label,
Does not hunch its shoulders,
Does not carry centuries of programmed
Guilt or shame or degradation or complexes.
I live in the words and conventions but am NOT.
I am other.
I pretend, yes, but I am always aware that I am lying,
Humouring;
I am not my body or my roots
I am not my skin.
I am a soul, a spirit, an ageless, sexless, raceless being,
Yet I am the fullness of my sex, my race, my age at the same time.
I am uncomfortably lodged in the kontradikshun,
In a particular space and time,
Dependent on the shells I inhabit for survival;
I need to eat, sleep,
Commune,
so I husk myself until
I get too uncomfortable
And then—
I move on.
v
You blow out the candle, slap the incessant mosquitoes. No air-conditioning, no fans, no cool breeze here, just the pounding waves on the rough shore rocking you to sleep.
3. Periplaneta americana
American cockroach
American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) are the largest cockroaches found near human habitation and can fly, although they do not get their wings until adulthood. Prolific breeders, they can hatch up to 150 offspring a year. Interestingly, the American cockroach which has spread all over the world is thought to have originated in Africa and was possibly brought across in slave ships in the 1600s.
You wake at five thirty a.m. to a rustling of leaves, cawing and scratching. Outside your window, a squadron of birds with oversize beaks and scruffy black and white feathers are feasting on the paw-paws. Are you seeing right? They look dinosauric, rhinosauric, prehistoric. Shoo. Shoo. You bang the window sill. Bugger off. Only then do they dip and dive in a curious arc of flight above the house. Makaya! Makaya! Makaya! they call.
The sun prises open the horizon and blood oozes through the cracks.
You stumble through the garden—barefoot—to salvage a paw-paw and twist it off its stalk. This was supposed to be my breakfast, you thieving bastards. You slice it open with a pen knife, scoop the black pips out and grind them into the red earth. Then you sit on the back step to eat and watch the sun ripen through the trees. The sea pounds at the coastline.
In the bathroom, a scorpion claims your green toilet bag, and its tail arches as you try to reach for your toothbrush. It is small—three centimetres—but these buggers are deadly. You clamp a shoe box over it and carry it to the edge of the lawn where you shake it off into the rubbish heap.
You are used to creatures that kill with one bite, sting, suck, or zap. Your five-year-old niece nearly died of a paralysis tick bite in North Queensland. The Australian bush is dripping with brown snakes, black snakes, tiger snakes and taipans (to name a few of the more deadly species). But here in Africa you don’t know the bad guys from the good guys yet.
And then there is the gecko that clings to the ceiling of the bedroom all night catching mosquitoes and making kissing noises every time you try to drift off to sleep. In the morning it occupies the bathroom while you shower. It follows your every movement, watches you take a crap, and cocks its head at the clanking of the toilet roll against the wall.
Lizards drop their tails as decoys to allow them to get away from predators. All lizards have detachable tails. Which is why humans need tales too, to trail along behind them, to give them balance. And what are tales for? The analogy swishes its way through the jungle.