Ingrid Winterbach Ingrid Winterbach (aka Lettie Viljoen & Ingrid Gouws) has written two novellas and four novels. Her latest novel will be published later this year. She is both writer and visual artist, and lives in Durban.

Exile

Ingrid Winterbach

She sails for London. She sails under a false name. Under false pretences. She sails towards economic emancipation. She will be the first of her kind. She stands on the prow of the ship. She sings tra-la-la, but in her language of opaque clicks. Not allowing entrance to her opacity. The sailors watch her from the corner of their eye. (Connivingly.) She is their figure-head. Carved from obsidian. Dark vitreous lava. Volcanic rock like bottle glass. Ebony; made of; black as. Black-ass as in jackass. With shades and traces of purple and dull mauve. Of Quinacridone violet and cobalt blue hue. The sea-wind lifts her cloak. The salty spray moistens her cheeks. The sailors shut their eyes. The earth curves away magnificently towards the horizon.

The journey lasts three months. At night she dines with the captain. He blackens his body and rubs his skin with animal fat and boegoe for her sake. But she keeps her head averted. He sings to her. He calls her by various little names; he calls her his goiingtot, his gomtot, his kieriekop, his koffiestok, his pokaaier and his swartasempie. But she has a sudden premonition (dark foreboding) of her future mortification.

She arrives in London in March 1810. Some black ladies she finds in frills at the opera house, and some black ladies she finds in various positions (attitudes, inviting postures) of servitude. But she is the first exhibit. Some queen had a dwarf who was eighteen inches high. But she is the first specimen from the banks of the Gamtoos River. At two shillings a head, from one to five in the afternoon, topless and on a plinth, but wearing a little traditional apron, she is all the rage in Piccadilly. Where nothing is horrific enough and where anything goes. Later she goes on stage, three feet above the floor & sulks when she has to dance, this female stranger, who is treated with tenderness & has two black boys who wait upon her. For the air here is too pure to permit any wretchedness.

In London she has no fixed address. She does not live in the kind of basement flat buried under a terrace of identical Victorian houses that will become the customary habitation for political exiles. It is too early for that. But like all political exiles, her route is sometimes difficult to trace. She reappears a year later to be baptised in Manchester and after that goes underground for three years.

She emerges in France in 1814. Science now seems to make the universe more, rather than less, mysterious & she is sold to an animal trainer. She is painted by Marie Guillemine Benoist as an individual, not a picturesquely exotic type. Stones. Bones. Animals. Plants. People. The need to classify is urgent. She sits patiently for Théodore Géricault; thrilling to the music of the battle, the boom of the cannon and the whistle of the grape-shot. (Because of his financial independence the notion of artistic independence is established.) She is a special guest at chic dinners. Victor Hugo observes her fancy footwork. She is the centre of attraction. She jumps and sings. Her throat warbles. She strains to produce the erotic range of (obscure) clicking sounds. She has small feet. She is sullen and moody. She wears a piece of turtle shell around her neck. Sometimes she bites on this and looks imploringly at the sky. After the dinner parties she returns at night to stay with the animals. She sheds her otter pelts and her beads, her magnificent kaross and her ostrich feathers, her glitter and her leather skirt, her beaded crimplenes and her stays, her ruched sashes and her hide jerkins, her skin colour tights and her jackal’s pants and her lion’s skin purse. She sheds it all like skin. She crawls in and sleeps close to the warm flanks of the trained bear and the striped giraffe. The talking hyena and the singing slug. We are all freaks here.

She has two dreams during her (exiled) stay. One is of a structure which resembles a dwelling under construction — an open lattice-work of pale and supple saplings, half covered with the hides of animals. (You cannot live by the memory of small sounds alone; the frogs begging for rain.) The second dream she loses, she cannot access it the following morning. She cannot be reached for she has no fixed address. No one sends her a postcard from her country of birth. She is not informed that forty thousand black mermaids have been clubbed to death on the long, exquisite stretch of beach from the Gourits River Mouth to Wilderness, from the Gamtoos River Mouth to the Great Fish River and Keiskamma River Mouths. Oh the lovely names toll like bells. (Her remaining kin are wiped out in an epidemic of small pox.) There is no one left to inform her how lucky she is to be alive. And well. How far removed from the contested terrain. Her obscure clicks become subdued; the sounds become modified. She speaks less and less; she has less need for language.

After the dinner-party circuit she serves the purpose of science. She stands on a revolving podium and a stick is pointed at her. It is also pointed out that the Gona thereafter diverged eastwards, while the ancestors of Attaqua, Hessequa, Cochoqua and Peninsular Khoikhoi moved westwards past the present Mossel Bay until they reached the vicinity of St Helena Bay. The circumference of her skull is measured. The distance from Clavicle to nipple is measured. The ribs are counted. The length of the Femur and its relation to the lengths of the Tibia and the Fibula is established. The circumference of the pelvic girdle is measured, but the relational distance between the Ilium and the Ischium (at its lowest point, where it curves towards the pubic arch deep inside her body) can only be approximated. She refuses to lift her beaded apron; the audience has to rely on its imaginative powers of displacement. It is mentioned that as semi-nomadic communities the Khoikhoi frequently adhered to a fixed migratory pattern according to seasonal changes. In this way some moved to the Cape Peninsula in the summer, only to return inland with the onset of the cold and wet winter weather. It is pointed out that each tribe or horde consisted of a number of sibes or clans (groups made up of blood and other relations) which frequently broke away to form separate clans. This fragile social organisation prevented any development of hereditary chieftainship, with the result that the Khoikhoi offered less organized resistance to colonial encroachment than other African societies.

(If she had chosen her own place of exile. If she had hired her own boat & moved up the waves and down the waves. If she had faked a passport. Packed her bag at night. Left at dark moon. The waves lapping restlessly on the shore. If she had opened a map & started rowing then and there. She might have chosen a better place herself, a warmer climate (more like home). She did not have to go as far as England. She could have moved stealthily up the west coast of Africa. She could have lolled on the beaches like the other exiles. She could have eaten the ripe fruit from the trees & lived off the beach on shellfish and crabs. She could have been more homesick and less freakish. She could have returned to the fatherland after the bitter & drawn-out period of colonial excess. She could have been seen on television in a different context.)

In the cold spring of 1815 she is made available for scientific observation. For three days she is observed by comparative anatomists. She refuses to lift the apron. They offer her money but she will not reveal the secret of her pathology. When she dies her refusals are silenced. Cuvier presents the findings of the autopsy to the Academy. He explains that the genital organs have been prepared in a way so as to allow his learned colleagues to see the nature of the labia. He explains that to make his prepared specimen even more scriptible (to enhance the pleasure of the text), it has been garnished with little scalloped roses of radish.

News of his findings spreads to the courts of Europe. King Ferninand Bourbon buys the bottled organs (or has them abducted at a price) for the amusement of his menopausal queen. After a time the bottle is displaced from the Sicilian summer palace (its lovely Venetian shutters closed at noon) and it is never traced again.

She died in exile & she must be made whole again. Her displaced and displayed parts must come together again. She is the Patron Saint of the Preserved & the Pickled, the Jarred & the Canned & the Bottled and she must be made whole again. She is Our Lady of the Genitals. The conned & displaced, the displayed & the objectified, the exiled & the abject look to her as refuge in times of trial.

She must be made whole again. Her (exiled) flesh must be restored to her bones. The toe-bone connected to the footbone connected to all the membranes and articulations connected to the organs of special sense and of voice. She must be received back in her fatherland. She must appear in the foyers of airports to be embraced amidst jubilations and laughter. The women must ululate; the women will lead the ululation, a high, shrill, piercing sound which signals both grief and triumph.

The theme is exile. The mood is obsidian and black, although the colour range is yellow and gold ochre, burnt and raw sienna, caput mortuum red, light oxide red, blue and dark violet, imperial purple and burnt carmine. The tone is sombre, indeterminate. The bones laid bare tell all; the story resides in the mortified (dissolved) flesh.

(First published in Cargo 17/18, printemps/spring 1999, pp. 88-92)

boontoe

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