Travelling Regressively

‘So you consider yourself a traveller, a bit of an intrepid African nomad?’ my latest therapist asked in his odd tone of respect and mockery.

I nodded, in my own odd tone of pride and defeat – precisely the damn paradox that had me seated in this sweaty leather couch. Pride and defeat. The story of Africa, and now of me. Or at least that’s what I imagined they’d write on the back of my biography.

Me, the almost-brilliant travel writer. A risky, most would say manic, journalist striding headlong into the beauties and cruelties of the continent. Awards won, women won over, wonderings limited only by the budget of whichever gullible editor was footing the bill of whatever local beer in which I happened to be drowning.

And then the pathetic suicide attempts and shameful depressions. That was an unrecognisable me, but one who held the position of dictator nonetheless.

‘He is confounded and incapacitated by the paradox he has encountered at every turn of his travels through Africa’ was the intelligent but useless observation of one psychologist.

He was right about running into the sneer of paradox: poverty dancing its cruel dance with wealth, disease’s body on the continent’s unimaginably beautiful face, enlightened contentment in the eyes of exploited and ravaged peoples. Africa nurtures them all. But he offered no way to make sense of it.

‘He suffers intense feelings of meaninglessness and guilt related to his whiteness and supposedly superficial pursuits’ remarked another.
I already knew what my generation’s white African skin conferred: prejudice, liberalism or shame. But he couldn’t help me get me out of that skin and I was beginning to think that suicide had been the only bloody meaningful thing I’d ever attempted.

So here I was, shrinking in front of another shrink. A regressionist, apparently. I’m sure you appreciate why I might have been put off by the term – how does one regress from trying to kill oneself – getting it right? His mild laugh at this joke irritated me. Calm, huggy new age types always do. Despite the fact that I find myself wanting to kick some excitement up their second chakra, I despise the westernised middle class religion of self-improvement. Sell that to the child prostitute I met in Mozambique, taking care of a mother whose decaying body could have been giving itself to any number of masters: starvation, AIDS, TB. Or to Ou Een, a Khoisan shapeshifter whom his people called ‘die boesman leeu’. I never managed to lay eyes on the elusive man, reputedly a hundred and three years old with a nighttime job as a skulky canine, but I’m sure I would not have found him reading a manual on how to reclaim his inner child.

Desperation and the urging of a decent friend, however, had me consenting to the process of a past life regression. I felt too listless to resist, which is probably why I easily followed Don’s instructions to imagine I was descending a stairwell where each step was a year of my life. I must have swallowed some of my skepticism with all those pills, I remember thinking dryly. But with nothing more than a somewhat lulled mind and tired acquiesence I did indeed experience my seven-year-old self and every detail of my school classroom as if I was back there. Then I was three and then five months old, fully aware of my mother’s sadness and a great desire to pee. I’d have simply added ‘phenomenal memory’ to my list of skills if I hadn’t experienced what happened after that.

Don instructed me, in his irritatingly musical voice, to move into a significant previous existence, and asked me to look down at my body and describe myself.

Without hesitation or any thought of the impossibility of what I was doing, I told him of my thin, weak legs and sickly female body. I was wrapped in a blanket that smelled of the smoke from the fire in the centre of our hut and I knew I hadn’t moved from there in a very long time. I described my young brown face and my pride in the markings on my smooth cheeks and the plaits in my hair.

My sisters have done up my hair to celebrate the beginning of my bleedings, I tell Don. I am surprised that I have been blessed with bleedings when my body is so ill and abnormal in every other way, but how gracious of the ancestors and how wonderfully important I feel on this day. There is no movement in the bottom half of my body, but my arms work just like my sisters’ and my head even better says our father.

I watch him sweep outside our hut with the dignity of a chief, though he is a lowly herdsman and constantly mocked for not taking another wife to care for his three daughters. Our mother died giving birth to me, and that is also what killed my legs and many other inside things of mine besides. I do feel the pain of this, especially watching my oldest sister make eyes at boys. I also feel that throbbing sometimes and now I’m even bleeding, but I will never lie with a man nor push a baby from between my legs.

I talk to our father of these things and he tells me only two things: life, like the sun and the moon, is a circle and every person will travel every path at some time. That is why I should search deep inside my broken body to find out the name of my path and to be grateful for each experience of this particular way of being alive. That way I will recognise the path when it comes again and I will know I have already had that gift. The other thing he tells me is that my sister is too young to make eyes at boys.

When it is time for my body to feed the soil, I know it. I have learned how to talk to her by staring at the fire for a very long time until my mind disappears into the flames and I am free to listen to the stories that come from my legs and my womb and many other places besides. Today they are singing a joyful song as if the rain is on its way or they are about to eat something delicious. I can understand the words of the song, which whisper that I am soon to meet my mother and to make my father the head of only two living daughters. When my mind is resting like this I can see the meaning and richness of my life quite clearly and it is in this state that I gratefully release my body.

Fortunately Don had the wisdom, or lack of time, to allow me to make my own sense of experiencing myself as a paralysed, young black girl who didn’t live for very long nor achieve very much, other than that which I longed for most. Certainly I have considered that the whole story was intelligently imagined by me to provide an explanation of inter alia my need to roam and have as much sex as possible. I am now trying my hand at a novel to see if indeed I do possess such a quick-thinking, wise imagination.

More than the source of the experience, however, I am intrigued by the questions it poses to me about how essential my whiteness, my travelling and even my body and mind are to my sense of myself. Maybe I’m white and black and all the shades in between and maybe my usefulness is measured by more than what my mind and body produce. Maybe the paradoxes in the African world around me simply reflect the ones with which I internally wrestle. I have no more answers than before but at least I have more questions. That, and a desire to live, seem to be just about all I need.