1940-1955
The triage of memories continues. Albums pile up. They get thicker. Now covered in heavy bordeaux faux-leather, they look like spell books waiting for a lectern, and a priest to officiate. Out with the earlier scrapbooks, the glued and stringed pages. In with the temple tomes and careful order. Pictures get glossier, gelatinous somehow, sharper. So do my memories. Pointillism turns to fauvism – I know why I erased it all from my mind.
These latest albums want to fill space, and time. They want a new reality. They blow away wilderness, trees and tents, and replace disheveled memories with neat, clean, proper ones. These latest albums brim with certainty. Pride. Faith. Events as they should be remembered. Oh, adventure, wonders and the hunt are pushed to the end. Discovery disappears. Page after page, the same locations, the same poses, the same week-ends.
This is History thumped on a table in a cloud of dust and certainty.
Any collective history requires some form of ceremonial remembrance: the 4th of July, the 14th of July, ANZAC day, … The repetition itself proclaims: we belong! It has pageant, content but only one intent: we are that, I am that. And so, in our family, we did also have our very own annual remembrance: the Watching of the Films and Photos. Each tome would emerge from their shroud, be dusted, and reverently laid out on the table in the living room. Our Africa, rising from the dead each year. Our very own personal Paradise Lost, reborn for an evening.
Behold Bliss! Never said aloud, but repeated in each sigh of the turning pages.
The voices spoke of exotic landscapes, exciting discoveries, daring and outlandish adventures. But, the pictures showed bungalows in a suburban equatorial African California. Lawns and verandas. American cars. Even Church and School! The Audio did not match the Visual. And yet, the narrators’ enthusiasm never faltered: school dances, school marks and pretty dresses, at catholic communions 1, 2, 3 and even 4 or 5. Visions of gardens and animals. No, not anymore leopards or lions, but they are just around the corner, suggested the voices. In the picture? Cats. Just cats. Dozens of cats.
Africa as a mundane epic, the reasonable adventure of a Hobbit.
The enthusiastic narrators would invoke colours, shapes, moods from the stills and reels. “Here chameleons cling to the rafters.” “There, frightened birds take flight in shimmering rainbows’. “Chimpanzees gambol around the rooms”… Fireworks over a unwanted castle? Nope. In a parallel universe that. The storytelling drones on, never overlapping, never stopping. Locations weave and merge, blur. The timeline whips around, who cares! … The story told by a griot, an African wordsmith, a world of words. The photos? Suburbia. African suburbia.
Here is what I saw.
Life, linear. Us. You and the kid, the kid and you. You and the kids, the kids and you. You, the kids and the pets, the pets the kids and you. You and the pets. You and the pet. You. Please smile.
Life, circular. Veranda, kitchen, swimming pool, picnic, sofa. Sofa, picnic, swimming pool, kitchen. Veranda. A fractal loop of events. Circular time, achieved.
Life, cyclical. Sunday Church, Sunday Roast, Sunday Hunt.
Repetition as an addiction. Bliss ad nauseam.
My grandmother sits at the back of the room, silent. Why does she not say anything?
This was a séance for the Africa she had given her daughters. This childhood was theirs, with the duty to pass it on as gratefulness. Pictures? No, just one Picture: Africa forever Happy and Bright and Twittering. Birds, Pongo the Chimp, more Birds, Cheeky Chameleons and Smiling Cats. Their Youth. Orlando, Katanga. African suburbia.
And on every picture, my mother just always smiles the brightest, living her best life. Turn around and look at her. She lived her best life over there. No point to look at ours, she knows.
Just indulge and endure.
The lie of a fractal loop. A Purgatory that will end one day.
These latest albums, these movies, were never intended for an external audience. They just speak to themselves. Why would I even listen to them, remember them?
I know them all, I saw them all. Empty pictures full of people.
The Old Photos – the ones I posted until now – were never shown to me. Never laid out. I dug them up. They jolted all of these memories. They opened the gates of purgatory. I had done my time. These Elder pictures I never saw, never looked at, were swept away together with the bungalows, the churches and the pretty dresses. The Old Photos are wonder, excitement, movement. They brim with belief, wonder, pleasure. They are truly Life. Not Bliss.
Subliminal echoes of Africa are always there, sneaking in the movies, the pictures, the voices and ushed sighs.
The Old Pictures of the Time Before. A dream shared with the daughters. Not the veranda of Panda, but the thunderous waterfall, the malachite waiting to be found, the Fantastic Beasts and the myriad of local dialects. Wakanda. The endless horizon.
Why would these Elder Albums be put out of reach, and yet, never destroyed?
I like to think that was the Africa my grandparents missed, their own youth, they had to betray, they had to leave behind. The deep, vibrant, violent solitude they had crowded with kids, cats and dogs. They left behind a dream to be dreamt again. I suspect – no, I am sure – that is exactly why my grandfather never shot a Greater n’Kudu, his lifetime dream trophy. Kill your dream? And then what? Just wait for Death.
I erased my African heritage wholesale for 50 years, all of it, as the Disneyland of Our Perfect Childhood. A captive audience no more. Was it? Is what I think a very unfair, unkind judgement? Of course it is. How could it not be? I am looking into their life, littering it with my thoughts, my own memories. I betray our ancestral compact to allow anyone to share only and exactly only what they wanted to share. I give all of them my voice, I conjure them all up. It is still my thoughts and words. I conjure the true wonder of these years, not the veranda. And yet.
Yet, they maybe would rather all sit together on their veranda in Panda. Forever. Rather than bring out the pain of loss.
Only, that veranda was forever in Likasi for my grandfather, in Panda for my grandmother, and in Jadotville for everyone else. So I do not think I am that off from the ore. That is why I feel allowed, urged, compelled to bring it out.
The Africa of their youth had been a suburban utopia, punctuated by forays into a tamed wilderness, the picnics, or the hunt. Their true heritage was the unexplored horizon. They showed it to me in these Watching of the Movies.
They showed me Hell, the soul-draining life I would forever flee from.
I still distrust barbeques and verandas. If you are not careful, you may end up in one or the other.
Did I succeed? That is for someone else to write about some day.
Maybe.
A typical colonial house in Belgian Congo
Suzanne et François, a Life
Me
You
Us
You and the Kid, the Kid and You
You and the Kids, The Kids and You
You, the Kids and the Pets, the Pets, the Kids and You
You and the Pet, the Pet and You
You
… Please smile again …
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