Dear Abigail
Your story, Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? (published by ZamaShort) is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma of mental illness. As you write in the 24th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying how tired you are of the illness:
I am
tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that
be. I watch it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone
turned into rubble. Make it go away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on
Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.)
I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s,
but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma, because my father told me in
no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for
more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I
had a three-year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the
meds I was told I’d need to take for life, and focused instead, fully, on having
to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that those age-old, anonymous
roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never raise
children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad
Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed
help, can ground us – as you, too, I think, are finding, by having to look
after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly,
vulnerable father – ?
But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one, wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”, preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother, though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so:
Writing
was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal
myself, and others. (From your Bio)
Despite the hatred and the absence of peace
around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school
and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and
peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless,
or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a
sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of
[your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your
experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with
some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to
blossom”.
You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any social creature.
I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there is something stately and leonine about that.
Years in
Summer Days.
Let Me
Sleep Now in Peace, Please.
I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your suffering, to announce:
I Don’t
Know How to Start.
Or:
The Gap
Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.)
… where the capitals seem to submerge the
reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing with lungs, there is
almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:
The sea
began screaming at me.
And:
I held
the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing.
(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in
Having a Nervous Breakdown.)
Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in his comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not Dead, and you
squeeze
blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The
aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven,
but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.)
Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of
humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is with you and it’s
awful.
So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use:
I can’t
throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus
Flowers in the Dark.)
Or:
Nothing
grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who
were somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.)
And:
These
pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the
Frontlines and the
Ambulance
Chasers.)
The snails are actually comical in their
non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in Eden. Even the
pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile,
after their shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love),
I accidentally read “harm” for “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see
you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a perfectly regular
“fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or
should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine
details are so awfully human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is
reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my connection to the wind? I
want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the mountain,
who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)?
I have to admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to
live this remarkable destiny of showing the world that the word was NOT God,
the word was far, far too HUMAN!
The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)
So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply?
My spirit
has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to
myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my
suffering? (I Don’t Know How to Start.)
You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a
positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words
which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.
And then!
Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”):
As a
poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to
loneliness?
Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I
want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to know, and I want myself to
know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth that
matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend
a Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all,
to write (By Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not
prioritise the role of ‘being a writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this
is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice
– the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not
a name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said.
I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers. Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest!
Love from
Silke
– Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea,
6th April 2026
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| https://www.zamashort.com/2026/03/zamashort-12-did-you-get-married-to-her.html |
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| Abigail George |
