Unspeakable is my blog page for stories from my family and their communities of District Six, Bo-Kaap and Bridgetown, Cape Town. They are also meditations on the act of remembering.
Growing up I felt frustrated by the lack of stories in my family, the mouthless, heavy hearted silence – myself included. There were memories there, even of my own, that were inaccessible to me and still are. As a teenager, I would imagine a heavy red curtain that stood between us and all our stories. As a family we lived passed each other like ghosts in the same house, trapped in our own hauntings. But I had no evidence, no real reason for thinking this – just this puzzling observation that people did not speak about what was troubling them. Not ever. If the men spoke it was to be funny, to be clever, to be admired, to dominate, to demonstrate, to observe. If the women spoke…it was never to disrupt. It was women’s stories, with its cataloguing of the community, of families and histories that gave some sense of the past. For the most part with my mother, those stories were told to laugh, to hold genealogy and in the case of her mother, to give honour.
Memories of kindness helps you remember whatever is unspeakable in a way that helps the soul, the poverty stricken soul. Those are the stories that lead to love and make it impossible to forget the story and its teller.
Sofiaworx 