Who am I
Who am I now
Who is this person I call me
Who is she
Is she the baby leaving the shores of her birth and first footsteps
Never to return to it again as home
Never to see the grandfather hanging onto the last breaths of his silicosis hardened lungs ravaged by cancer
Until she is safely deposited onto far flung shores
The one learning to substitute without thought the original language of her dreams
With the mother tongue of empire builders
Is she the toddler sitting on the Lombardy East wall
Smiling hello to anyone that passes
The young child paddling in the pool of the local convent play school
Lining up for the daily lunchtime soup
The one awakened in the night by an invisible hand suffocating her in the dark
Only to realise the sheet wrapped up under her pillow, the only thing holding her down
The one watching the nightly play of lights wandering the midnight bedroom hallway
Is she the primary school child running barefoot through the hot dry veld under the Windhoek sun
Growing up carefree in a world of friendship, athletics meets, flapjacks, Eisteddfods, sleepovers, movie night birthday parties
Swimming in the blue pools of privilege
Glistening against a darker background of Apartheid, Swapo, parent discord and depressive absence
Maternal attachment disrupted by pregnancy, hospitalisation, birth, illness, surgery, demands of new baby sibling
Relegated to school lifts home with parents attached to others
Afternoons distracted and enchanted by the treasure trove of costume sewing, of substituted warmth and care
Is she the one on the cusp of teendom transitioning through her land of birth
Out east, almost as east as one can go before being west
Transitioning out of childhood
Beyond the borders on the map
From innocence to a new land
Rendering her illiterate, culturally bereft, emotionally challenged
No ready guide points for this journey of identity and developing personhood
Negotiating the world between parental home and new frontiers bounded by hangukmal, GIs, new friends, school at the army barracks
The seashore not far from the front door not for sun bathing but walking
Arm in arm cobbling together unformed untranslatable sentences, ideas and questions
Is she the sporty teenager
Ahead of herself at school
Yet to discover how it is to fall
The youngest newly exposed to sexuality and drugs
A closeted Catholic upbringing never prepared her for this
The budding confident youngster stepping into an offered ride
Shamed for belonging to the nation of the Holocaust
Forever haunted by unfolding knowledge and the never to be forgotten spectre of suffering
And the ever present nonchalant brutality of humanity
Propelled onto a search for meaning, service,
A journey for the truth never to be found
Is she the teen at seventeen leaving her parent’s home
Traveling across another ocean eastward, to the west
Exploring the edges of loneliness, marginalisation, never quite finding comfort at the university by the star-spangled lake
Pulling up fresh pegs, starting anew on the continent of her childhood
Amidst the vibrant welcoming sounds and smells of a familiar land
Finally to have her eyes pinned wide open
To the exclusion, the bias, the hidden curriculum
Keeping out all who look unlike the ones occupying the ornate chairs
The student who rallies, falters, is lost along the way
Losing connection, a year here and there, almost herself to the depths of the abyss
Is she the one falling in love still unconsciously frozen by the fear
Seeking adventure yet sacrificing ideal to conformity
Finding death and loss amidst the beckoning transition points
Despite the joyous call of small hands, feet and sparkling curious eyes
Tugging persistently at her refusal to care
Her refusal to be called mother, until mothering finds her
The one lost in the cold loneliness of the internal tundra
Finally to thaw with the warmth of just one hand
The courageous one diving the deep well in search of the glittering coin
Thrown there long ago knowing one day to be found
She is woman
She does not break
She is fierce
She is unexceptional
She is here
