❖
The sessions with Dr. Phakama are a waste of time. She wants me to do relaxation exercises. She makes me sit with my eyes closed while she reads from a printed sheet that tells me to picture myself walking alone in a park.
“Find a quiet space where there are no people,” she reads, “where you can be alone, where no one can see you and you can see no others. Find a tree, a tall towering tree, sit down, close your eyes, and rest your head against it.”
Is she crazy? What is relaxing about the idea of being alone in a big, empty park behind some tree?
When I said this to her, she said I should use my imagination.
Heaven only knows where she downloaded this one from. Or perhaps she got it from a visiting lecturer as a student and has used it unimaginatively ever since. Where in the world is this technique helpful? Maybe somewhere in Europe women go alone to big, empty parks and sit behind trees with closed eyes to relax.
❖
I wish I could look inside and see if anything’s broken. If my memory serves me right, the vagina is lined with squamous mucosa like the inside of the mouth, so it should have healed up pretty fast. But maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it’s severely damaged, rotting, like those necrotic cervixes after botched abortions.
❖
“I was raped.”
Dr. Phakama wants me to say it. She says it will help. She says by putting it in the past tense I can overcome it.
But when it’s your own life and you’re living it, there is never so clear a distinction. I’m still being raped even now, even when I’m not. I can’t say when one stopped and the other began. I am being rape.
❖
How viscous our blood must be. It carries so much in it. Stories swirling round and round our veins, up into our hearts at least a zillion times a day. Stories of men going into cities, men in men, men in women, women in men, children in women, men in children. Strangers living in each other’s arteries, sharing intimacies, sharing pain, sharing anger, sharing hatred, sharing resentment, sharing loss.
Who are these terrorists that have invaded my blood, taken over my body?
❖
Ma came home triumphant this afternoon. She went to the flat to make sure the electricity was off, and it looked like Nyasha had moved out.
“At least one good thing has come out of this mess. Finally that Zimbabwean girl is out of your life.”
When I asked Ma why Nyasha hadn’t come to see me, she said Nyasha was probably still angry that I stabbed her for burning the mincemeat, but that who knows what is what with these foreigners? When I asked what she meant, what mincemeat, she said I shouldn’t worry, I should just rest and “forget that girl.”
I stabbed her? Did I stab Nyasha, Lord?
❖
“Major depression with psychotic features. It happens, Masechaba, particularly with your family history. You were especially vulnerable. You are unwell, but you’ll get better. Nobody can blame you for the things a sick mind does, and you shouldn’t blame yourself. I’m sure your friend understands, and from what your mother tells me, it wasn’t really a stab, more like a small cut, and it wasn’t very deep. These things happen to the best of us. Stay on your medication and you’ll get better.”
Dr. Phakama thinks she’s some kind of prophet. What does she know about my family history? How dare she use Tshiamo against me? This has nothing to do with him. I’m nothing like Tshiamo.
She then had the nerve to say that there’s a blog for women like me, for women who’ve been gang-raped.
“Correctively raped” as she called it, a rape to correct what their society deems abhorrent behavior. She says in our society many people don’t like foreigners, and the men who raped me might have seen my behavior as threatening societal norms, and felt it their duty to correct me. She said this has been seen in the gay and lesbian community, but she hadn’t seen it reported in the context of xenophobic violence. She said it would help to try to understand where the men were coming from. It would help my healing. She’d been thinking she and I might write a scientific paper about it together, if I was up to it. Of course she would be the first author, as it was her idea. But I would be acknowledged.
I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. But I said nothing. I just resolved never to set foot in her offices again.
❖
How do they expect you not to lose your mind? They pull you open again and again, ram themselves into you again and again. Leave you with disease, warts, worms, pimples, pain, blood, rot coming out of your body. Your body! Why? Because of the gold mines, they tell you, because of the Dutch, because someone at some point stole from them, because they never had fathers, because of Zimbabwe and Shaka and the government, because of xenophobia, unemployment, apartheid, colonialism, because of history, because of the serpent, because of Adam and Eve. Because of anything and everything. Because they can.
Just because.
This is the problem of knowing, of knowing but not knowing, of knowing too much but not enough to fully understand. Webs and webs of lies. History is a con man; history writers change stories to suit the times (their times!) and memory is weak and unreliable. And truth? Any man’s guess. And what of woman? The first fool.
❖
I called Tshiamo’s phone today, to tell him what Dr. Phakama had said. That we’re a family of mad people, him, me, Papa, Ma, all of us. That I was correctively raped. That I should sit in a park behind a tree with my eyes closed to help me get better.
“Hello, this is Tshiamo Lebea. I can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
Tshiamo has always
