‘Kak.’ Andile took the Kentridge print and frisbeed it across the length of the very white Goethe Project Space. It crashed into a long-dead video installation in a shower of glass.
‘And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level,’ I added, hurling a small, heavy blob of metal, about the size of a tennis ball and with no discernible aesthetic form, through another retro flat-screen (Sony 97-inch super plasma) installation entitled Urban Dynamics – Ocean Flows. The metal blob was called Weeping Underground. ‘All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don’t find anything that even considers what actually happened to us. With art, at least, there is some kind of hit rate. Every twenty or thirty pieces you find something that screams at you, that at least gets close to the chaos of life. The books are just useless.’
‘We should go back to the student studio in town.’ Javas left his half tyre and began heading out. ‘There’ll be better stuff there. Better odds than here, anyway.’
I grabbed a few brochures for Urban Dynamics – the name of the exhibition as well as the video installation – on the way out. Andile took a small wooden sculpture of a lady balancing an absurdly large barrel on her head. ‘Reminds me of my mom,’ she said.
I drew cows’ heads and sweeping, curved knives and rivers of blood. I drew Jabu in the various stages of falling. I drew people in an abattoir clustered around a child corpse.
Jabu’s death was just the start. I needed to convey our new context. We weren’t just people who had killed their child. We were the only people, and we’d killed one of our only children. The work had to be unique. It could not be the same as anything that had gone before it. There was a gulf that had to be bridged, and I was lost as to how to do it.
But it needed to be done.
I moved through sheet after sheet of Fabriano. Andile told me to keep the rejects, so I piled them up, a huge stack of childlike failures. Stick figures without perspective. Cows’ heads and badly composed chainsaws and barrels in watercolour and charcoal and acrylic.
About thirty or forty attempts in, I switched subjects and began beating out an equally ill-composed series of us on the farm. Beatrice leading the cows. Fats on the ladder fiddling with another panel, screwdriver in his mouth. All of us in the abattoir, clustered in panic around a single cow head.
This series felt better. It had the ring of settler art to it. Strangers lost in a strange land. I began exaggerating the poses. Myself running up Munro Drive, but a steeper road, the kind that leads to God, the path thin and getting thinner, almost unimaginable as it faded through the growth and the trees. This was my first success. I enhanced the yellow of the Nikes to the kind of biblical hue able to compete with the surrounding jungle. My legs were super-hard, thighs bulging with effort, my face strained and taut with ascension, my eyes fixed on the pinprick of light breaking through the forest at the top. It was epic. Godly. The hyperbole worked.
Next, Babalwa. I fattened her up, added folds to her thighs and sat her on a kind of rocking chair with a quilt over her knees, a nursing baby in her crooked arms, and ten or eleven brats in various stages of development at her feet. Behind them, to the right, the complex, our complex, the endless horizon with just a hint of the Northgate Dome on the left. I added ten, twenty years to her face. A middle-aged woman surround by her brood. Her swarming brood. Some of them staring absently, some fiddling with toys, and a few at arm’s length, fighting over something. Babalwa the breeder.
Gerald alone. No backdrop. Nothing. Just standing there in a stained butcher’s coat with that curved knife strapped to his wrist, dangling limp, a smudge of congealed blood brown on the tip. His eyes vacant.
And on I went, my lines growing more and more biblical with each picture, my exaggerations extending, seeking out the nuggets in all of us and distorting them, twisting them up and out and into the open.
‘You got something going here, eh Roy?’ Andile clucked, poring over the pictures. She giggled initially and then was silent. ‘I mean… ja.’ She paused at the one of her and Javas, hand in hand, walking into the sunset, an ambiguous Moses-type basket dangling lightly in Javas’s free hand. ‘You’re getting your shit together technically. Bodies and legs and all.’ She leafed through to Fats straining on his ladder, muscles bulging, arm reaching in vain for an elusive socket. ‘I don’t like them, but I’m not going to stop you.’ She pushed tears away with her palm – a strange, unproductive gesture, as if by using the part of her hand with the least utility she could reverse, or at least deny, the flow. ‘A lot of them are repulsive, in fact, Roy. You must carry on. And I must go.’ She walked away, pushing again with the palm.
Painting became my nightly ritual, the thing I now did to replace reading, which I had consigned to a necessary pre-sleep technicality. I let myself follow the perverse path I had started. Andile’s tears had been disturbing, but also inspiring. I was, I believed, accessing the bubbling anxiety that ran common through us.
I was making art.
We were now shut off. Initially, in those first few months in Houghton, I had felt the vegetation acutely. Our isolation was made all the worse by the unmown lawns, by the obvious disappearance of order and straight lines. But slowly the plants receded from my consciousness, and only occasionally would that initial sense of invasion and claustrophobia recur.
Our personal feelings were incidental, however, to the green forces inching over roads and fences, chipping away at the chasm. We noticed it – the growth – again in the months after Jabu’s death, when it suddenly seemed to become much harder to move outside our regular zones. And even those – the paths and roads we used the most – had begun to require steady, intensive maintenance.
Gerald was at the forefront of the hack-it-back campaign. His ambition in this regard was, I believed, a way for him to expunge or rechannel his anger at Jabu’s death. He would load the chainsaw and the axes into his bakkie, his jaw set and his mind fully on the battle. He never asked for a partner, but if any of us offered he would hand out a tool and wordlessly pull the volunteer into the fight.
Eventually we had to structure the process. Once a month, during summer, we would all throw ourselves into a week-long maintenance mission. First, hack back the trees and vines trying to swallow Munro Drive. Second, clear the perimeter areas – Fats’s gates and the outer border. Third, make sure we had access to the major arteries in and out of the city. North and south were easy – nominal effort was required to access the M1 highway. Lastly, keep Louis Botha and Empire avenues clear. Not because the routes were necessary to us as such, but because it was philosophically impossible to concede to living in a jungle with only one road to the highway.
Regardless, Gaia shrugged off our fight. We were slowly becoming a one-road town.
We had too much invested in our set-up to try to move, although the idea of transferring out to flatter farm areas was increasingly mooted. The girls were sick of the creeping forest, and Javas and Gerald leaned in favour of relocation. I fought it, as did Fats. I couldn’t accept the idea of having to retreat from Jozi. It felt like the defeat that would crown them all. If we left we would never be able to come back. The forest would close its arms and that would be that. Joburg would be a mythical memory, a place of the past, of adventure stories for children, of warnings not to get lost.
Still, the summer monsoons kept coming, the forest grew and we were all carrying machetes and a chainsaw in our vehicles whenever we went anywhere.