Leaving Before the Rains Come

You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late.

Because of all the kinds of love there are out there—romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly—the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters.

As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren’t culturally distinct anymore. Then we’re part of someone else’s corporate plan, we’re a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we’re a black dot on a bottom line.

What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything,

Until you make the unconscious conscious,” Carl Jung said, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

But deep down I always knew there is no way to order chaos. It’s the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it’s the ultimate law of nature. There’s no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.

The problem with most people,” Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, “is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.

Still, I also had grasped enough of the West’s views of such fatalism—that it made of us primitives, naïfs, and fools—to keep such beliefs to myself. In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy. What I didn’t know then was that ignoring my own southern African knowledge was its own kind of mischief: it rendered me speechless when I should have spoken, helpless when I was profoundly capable, and broken when in fact the very places inside me that had been damaged and snapped were their own kind of strength. I saw the landscape around us as tattooed with death, fraught with the possibility of unrecovered land mines and undetonated ordnance.

People who are careless of the land and of the creatures and spirits with which we share it are careless of themselves.

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.

...truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity.

Bloody dogs,” Dad said, kicking indiscriminately under the table. He put his revolver next to his side-plate. Mum put her Uzi on an empty chair beside her. “Safety on?” Dad always asked. “Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat’s testicle.

For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.

At morning assembly we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: 'Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.' Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended in whether or not we'd had eelworm and blight.

Stand unshod upon it for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator,” Alan Paton wrote. “Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

It's not anyone's job to make another person happy, but the truth is, people can either be very happy or very unhappy together. Happiness or unhappiness isn't a measure of their love. You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.

But if I knew any of this back then, I didn't yet have the vocabulary for that knowledge. And perhaps because of that, without intending to do so, I had continued the pattern of some of the men, and most of the women, in my family, reaching s far back as we had memory. We were careless, and shiftless, and unthinking. We left our ancestral homes, we birthed and sometimes buried our children in far-flung places, and we started afresh over and over. We cared for land, but too often it wasn't our land to care for.

When Dad spoke, he said everything only once, and then quite clearly, which is the only way I have known him. 'Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say,' he said when I complained about the long silences he was leaving on my tapes.

...what life had taught me is that where we come from is a point -- not the starting point, not the defining point -- just a point. It's where we are that really counts.

But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless,’” Arundhati Roy has said. “There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to buoy us up, is unnatural.

To say someone has lost her mind does not do justice to what madness looks like. It's not as if a person's mind rolls out of her head, lodges under the carpet or between the cracks of the sofa, and is therefore retrievable by some logical search.