It feels heavenly to be out. There I felt like one of those solitary trees encased in concrete; safe and well cared for perhaps, but walled in and tied up, unable to feel my earth and grow.
Here the wet season is rounding up; the grass lush, green and overgrown, dirt roads sodden with rain, transformed into broken terrain that can’t be travelled. The hills roll and curl and in my eyes will always suggest the curves of contentedly lounging women. It’s bliss for an art lover to be in a place where the eye is constantly pleased. The land, it saturates me and sates me in those deeper unexplainable parts.
Yet it’s impossible to miss the stench of decaying souls, the brutal stain of history for which fifteen years is a mere blink. Death is spread through the compensation of the emasculated man coupled with the woman who’s known not love and sees her body as a tool rather than a temple. And the child. What of the child in this burning flesh? Raped, beaten, broken, helpless hopeless, history takes another bout of itself.
To those of us who are apart of the university generation of the west where everything is a cause and an experience, poverty can seem almost glamourous. To sit huddled together in a house with a leaking roof and two candles lit is quaint and cosy, and to have only six items of clothing in your possession brings a simpler clearer perspective to life- reduces the clutter.
But I am beginning to learn that to have nothing to lose is not freedom because there is no choice; you are still bound by desire. Perhaps if you possess and then you choose to lose- to purge, to cleanse- perhaps then having nothing can lead to freedom but no freedom can exist while you’re left wanting. I am also learning the capacity that people have to be nasty, that people are a lot crueller than I had deemed possible and there is a lot that can be hidden behind a bright smile and a slick tongue
But everything in me is better being here, I am fully present. Never depressed, lonely, unfulfilled, empty, but elated, ecstatic, torn apart, flabbergasted, enraged, devastated, scared, full of joy, ready, strong, capable.
*****
The sun was hot red in a way that drenched the entire sky.
The bounty of hills below carried a tender glow that refused to be ignored, even in its comparative subtlety. Such is the alluring guise of a pulpit of hell littered with what were once people. Now it is shadows that walk, redeemable perhaps, but shadows nonetheless, shadows and shells in a gleaming space.
It was the civilised who took them. Jesus on their tongues and guns in their hands. Amen. Clean white hands marked black men with blood. As the time passes the blood continues to soak into the cracks of the earth and from these roots are generations born.
The sun was hot red in a way.
