A Memoirist's Tapestry

Image via Google showing Guatemalan tapestry weaver

1. Amongst the festival noise of the night market in Jonker Street, flashing bright nighttime equivalent of miniature suns from bulbs dangling onto black wires that curve like the eyelashes of a beautifully extravagant cross-dresser. A man dressed in a flimsy Pagoda tshirt, no longer white for the stains of his armpit sweat and the many Pollocky smears of the yellows and oranges of the curried stew he is promoting, bellowed his loud, husky voice over the heads of tourists and locals, let them settle into their ears like confetti, before shouting the same verse all over again. A toy monkey, clapping his metal gold cymbals and rolling his beady eyes to the giggles of little children in outfits of primary colours, bent over the wooden platform where the monkey is performing, the reds, blues and yellows of their t-shirts and pants and skirts cling to their sweaty sticky bodies by the urge of the sudden cool wind. The parents, standing two feet away from the commotion, slurp their curry stews off of blue plastic bowls, their fingers balancing the wooden disposable chopsticks to the side. Red plastic stools filled with bottoms in more neutral-coloured pants, the tips of wallets and handphones peeking out of their backside pockets scattered all the plaza in between stalls of keychains and brown palm sugar wrapped tightly with the pink ribbon of rubber bands over the top of see-through plastic hung on metal hooks over wooden poles.

2. On the carpet of Jacaranda flowers, by the anonymous combi stand that goes from Sandton to Soweto, making stops along the way, a pungent concoction of body odour and stale food lid loosely put on their Tupperwares that weren’t actual Tupperwares interchanging, intermingling. The secret, sacred handshakes and embraces off long-forgotten friends and familiar neighbourly faces, the transfer of dried marijuana leaves whispering crackles inside see-through plastic, Zip-locked for freshness, from one hand to another, swift, secret and sacred too.

3. Inside the tube tunnel, the pungent urine smell made thicker by the cold. The busker playing Kiss Me on his violin, pulling his bow to exaggerate the sadness he wanted to imply for a few extra coins. Businessmen in suits and briefcases, laptop bags in each hand, busy as bees. Skateboarders sliding down the stairs in their vehicles, mothers pulling the faces of their children into their hips as the wheels clack thunderously against the cement floor.

Scenes woven in and out like colourful threads on a tapestry passed down from one mother to another, one woman to another, one child to another, on the wall. It is not displayed like medals or trophies, but like pictures in gilded frames full of stories that only the people who have lived through it know.

It answers the question:

Where do I belong?

What am I made of?

In the recollection, the bearer of the wall remembers, reminds. In the recollection, the bearer bares it all, bears it all, and in the recollection, she finds.

Friends,

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