The accused is permitted to display the bumper sticker EAT SHIT because
it is determined that no motorist, not even a coprophiliac, is likely
to be sexually aroused by a bumper sticker reading EAT SHIT.1
- Dodie Bellamy
I don't want to leave my flat. Waking up soaked in sweat, I pull open the curtains and see everything quivering with waves of heat. It makes the horizon look liquid, crinkle-cut at the edges. I check the time on my cell. After 11 o' clock. Shit, already late. I push through the stasis, somehow find some clothes on the floor.
Outside the sun reflects off the shining surfaces, countless cars parked along the road, mirrored windows of the office buildings across the street. I'm sweating into my too tight jeans, gasping. I've never been able to handle summer. Physically I'm just not suited for it. This is how I look: doll body with a too small baby head; fair skin, the kind that goes pink in the heat; hair pale, a colour somewhere between blonde and mouse. I squint against the sun, lick at my dry lips. I sunburn too easily. Protective cream doesn't seem to be any use. After an hour I go deep red. I don't tan; instead my skin peels off, underneath it's paler than before.
At the taxi rank, dry hot snot collects in my nostrils, strong smells of cooking, frying onions, meat. The guys call me "Barbie Girl". Three or four of them, hanging off the railing under the corrugated iron roof that runs down one side. They're smiling and leering, flashes of a shaved head, gold teeth, a snatch of high-pitched laughter. The words are drawn out, half sung, like that pop song, "She's a Barbie Girl, living in a Barbie world." Past the women selling cooldrinks floating in big baby baths of water with ice; it's so hot I want to dive in, bob along the surface with the Coca Colas and Fantas and those no-name orange juices that come in small plastic bottles with a foil top. Pop the top with your fingernail and all the preservatives and colorant make your throat scratch. I swallow hard, trying to push down a cough. The Barbie Girl guys are still singing after me, "Hey B-a-r-b-i-e!", but I keep going, acting so cool, as if I'm wearing my baby-girl pink T-shirt and skin-tight jeans because I'm using feminist strategies to take back derogatory perceptions of women, subvert them to my own ends, and not just because I like the attention.
Really, I shouldn't be at the taxi rank at all. My boyfriend is always telling me that. He offers to drive me instead. "It's not safe," he frowns, his blue eyes clouding over, mental eye checking out the dark corners. I laugh him off: "I think I can handle it." I keep going back. I like thrusting my body into different landscapes. The tension that creates, the clashings and slippages of culture … Okay, that and the at-tension.
In Graeme Feltham's "sex crazed anti-fiction", One Hundred Naked
Beers2 he has this character, Sannie.
Two pages in and I'm already obsessed. More than that, I'm jealous.
I envy her daring. Her lack of constraints. See, Sannie is "an adrenaline-junkie"
who "likes doing it in dangerous places or places dangerous to get
to". She's every guy's wet dream. She's wild, and beautiful, she
really goes there, to the limit, you know, to the very fucking edge.
"Baring her teeth, she klaps him somewhere between playful and serious, mounts her XR 500, her Rolling Stones tattoo on her right shoulderblade sticks its tongue out at him, and wheelies on the gravel all the way to the biway that used to be the hiway. Something else."
The taxi drops me in Rondebosch and I climb past the suburban houses, along the cement pavement, shaded by oak trees or eucalyptus trees or one of those non-indigenous types. A woman jogs past in a baby-blue tracksuit, Walkman, her ponytail bouncing obediently behind her. The rugby fields are on my right, I'm on the footpath that leads up to the university.
I haven't had anything except five cups of coffee and my birth control pill since I woke up, and my stomach is growling as I climb the stairs. The toilet is on the landing between the first and second floor. I swing open the door. There's no air-conditioning and it's hotter than outside. The first available stall. I spit up a bit and feel better. The flush doesn't work. Wet paper and gob float gently on the surface.
I'm five minutes late by the time I reach my writing teacher's office. The overhead lights gleam across the wooden floor, dark panelling, dehumidifier in the corner, a fluctuating hum that wavers at the periphery of awareness. My stories are spread out on the table in front of him. He tells me the thing I do best is bodies: fucking, puking, shitting - the physical stuff. He thinks I write well enough, but my characters are flat, they lack flesh, they're not nicely rounded. Where is the plot? Where on earth is the conflict? The resolution? The dénouement? Instead of separate and coherent individuals, each with a single body and character which is built by conflict, I write half-formed skinny little anaemics, vacuous and vacant, produced and destroyed simultaneously, like words leaving my mouth.
He smiles, lips curling up, they're so full and defined. He's trying to help, to give me narrative strategies to build from. "I feel like you're holding back, not getting to the heart of the story." He's pointing at the books on his shelf, a wall of spines; some of them are behind glass, I can't make out the titles. I smile back, but only halfway. My lips are thin but elastic. They stretch easily, like twin rubber bands. My teeth are skew. I open my mouth to say something, then close it again. I can hear my bones move deep inside my ears, my tongue is stuck to the top of my mouth. I gulp for breath but the air is so thick I can't inhale, I'm pushing through it, trying to break the surface.
That's the thing. I always get stuck there, right there on the
surface. Strolling through the taxi rank in the midday heat in my
Anglo-Americanised eurotrash outfit. The tinted windows of a taxi
catch the light; as I get closer I see a glimpse of my reflection:
my uneven profile, starved body. I push the hair out my eyes. The
tar is almost melting, glimmering like black ice.3
I'm sure there's something underneath, a deep undercurrent of history
swelling up, some kind of meaning threatening to break through,
but I don't stop, I quicken my pace, just another Barbie Girl living
in a Barbie world. Camille Roy writes, "Mainstream fiction assumes
a position not too close, not too far away."4
That's my problem: I'm always miles away from the heart of the matter,
too distant, too empty. Or else too close, shoving my heart-fist
in your face, throwing myself into blind physicality. Bodies bouncing
against bodies. Fucking.
I've been reading Dodie Bellamy lately. She's great on the fucking
stakes. In her book Cunt-Ups5
she collapses romance and porn. It's sexy stuff. Dodie sees sex
as a "time out, a break in linearity". She uses Catherine Clement's
book Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture as the basis for
her understanding of sex as a state of being. Clement lays out a
syncope as a temporary absence of self, a hesitation or dissonance:
fainting, a musical disruption, an elision. "Syncope is scary because
it subverts 'power and force, muscle and health, vigor and lucidity',"
says Dodie. "I'm interested in a writing of embodiment, not of abstraction.
I don't want to take messy, lived corporeal, emotional existence
- and then rationalise it with theory."6
I'm thinking about Graeme Feltham's Sannie again. All that naked flesh, "squelching inside". It's impossible to maintain a safe distance. Even Sannie eventually realises that "maybe everywhere is dangerous". I get the same feeling when I read Nadine Botha's poetry. It's dangerous too. It's so fucking cool and hip, but at the same time it makes me squirm. It's like confections that dissolve into sensations on the tongue, a sticky substance that gets caught in between my teeth:
We fucked again until I was dry
He wanked over my feet.
I lay there blank with vermicelli bliss.
Like a cake. A koek.7
Or Paul Wessels's poetry and prose. The way it forces into places that language
seems to resist. It's like he makes fictions in order to withstand
the unbearable physicality. It's beyond what we can know, so he
pushes hard, as hard as a body lunging against a body. Afterwards
I'm gasping: "I think of you, Mother Christ, rising from black waters/
my eviscerated guts lying beside me/ my oesophagus pumping oil as
it spurts in a jerry can/ dogdogs are shoving their snouts into
my cavity ripping at my lungs."8
Paul emails me a quote. It's from another writer, Samuel Delany. He describes his writing as an attempt "to challenge just about every dichotomy on which our culture is based. And the distinction between dirty and clean - as a grounding for both civilisation and pleasure - is one of society's most fundamental." I kind of like that. It gives me a way in to understand how I can glide along the surface then wham, cut down into the flesh, the muscles and the blood, the sticky stuff.
My writing teacher must be guessing what I'm thinking because he hands my stories back to me. Our eyes meet across the table. He says, "Look, what people want these days is good old-fashioned stories." He's probably right. Fuck, who wants to hear about dichotomy anymore. My ass is sweating against the chair. It squeaks on the leather every time I move. I take my stories and slip them into my bag.
Back home I sit down to write. I'm not dumb. I know that stories should have a beginning and a middle and an end. I know that an essay requires a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points, but I can't seem to get any of it to hang together. It keeps coming undone. Sweating, melting down.
Already my mind's a million miles away. It's too hot to think. I'd rather be somewhere cool, drinking cold beer and maybe fucking. I'd rather be watching you: the waistband of your underpants peeling down across your hips. My panties discarded in a little white pool on your carpet, I'm not too sure what the real colour is but I imagine it dirty brown, mottled and prickly. I can feel a rash forming on my ass: my oversensitive middle-class skin is up in arms. I don't care. I am too enthralled with the fucking, the pinpricks of sensation my skin is experiencing, your scent - sweat and soap and cigarettes. I'm on my back, legs open ... flushed forehead in dead heat, the back of my head bangs against the floor, your body heat bearing down on me, a hot rain, steam tunnelling into my cunt, scorching clit. I close my eyes and imagine I'm dying in an explosion. My cunt expanding, contracting, pumping while my mind flashes greens, then blues, then bright white-silver.
I get up from my desk. Fuck it, I'm going out. I strip down. The water is
so hot it almost feels cold. I scrub myself off. I have one of those
Body Shop scrubbers; 100 percent natural, organic, it comes from
the sea or something, it was probably once alive. I'm scrubbing
hard, loosening skin. My legs are pink. Or maybe not quite so white.
I lower myself down. I can feel the thin gritty ring of dirt forming
around the edges.
1 Bellamy, Dodie. "Talking Dirty". Prose
Acts, a conference on narrative at SUNY Buffalo, October 18-21,
2001. (Archived at www.epc.buffalo.edu.)
2 Feltham, Graeme. One Hundred Naked Beers.
Brevitas. 2002.
3 "Black Ice is a thin transparent layer of
new ice on a road or similar surface … There may be nothing behind
it, nothing underneath it, there may be other pitfalls. There may
be nothing to understand, nothing to interpret." Paul Wessels: An
email exchange between Alan Finlay and Paul Wessels, editors of
the South African journal donga. www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/fall_2003/1interviews/paul_wessels/the_mag.html".
4 Roy, Camille. The Rosy Medallions.
Kelsey St Press. 1995.
5 Bellamy, Dodie. Cunt-ups. Soft Skull
Press/Tender Buttons. 2002
6 Bellamy, Dodie. "Talking Dirty", Prose
Acts, a conference on narrative at SUNY Buffalo, October 18-21,
2001. (Archived at www.epc.buffalo.edu.)
7 Botha, Nadine. Compared To Not Eating
Tuna Or Chocolate. 2003.
8 Wessels, Paul. "Raining", Green Dragon
Number Two. Gary Cummiskey (ed). Dye Hard Press. 2004. |
Stacy Hardy is a writer living in Cape Town. She is
a founding member of the Venus Fly Trapeze Theatre Company, which
has produced nine works since 1995. She's written scripts for the
likes of Andrew Buckland, Ginette Ginslov and Martinus Basson's Reis,
Vleis & Aartappels Theatre Company. Her hypertext and multimedia art
has been exhibited at various local and international exhibitions.
In 2002 she was a member of the South African delegation at Ars Electronica
in Austria. She has won numerous awards, including a Construction
Award (2003) and a New Channels Digital Art Competition award (2003).
Her fiction has appeared on donga and LitNet and in AFRO
Magazine. She participated in the 2003 Crossing Border Festival in
The Hague in The Netherlands with fellow South African authors Ivan
Vladislavic, Lesego Rampolokeng, Phaswane Mpe, K Sello Duiker and
Nadine Botha. 
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