The Architecture of Loss by Z. P. Dala

Author:Z. P. Dala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

CHAPTER SEVEN

Where is it written that one who has suffered has to be long suffering? Sylvie, reaching her seventies, had hidden the greatest secret of all from her own child.

Sylvie, not just a cruel, evil witch-mother. Sylvie, who began as a reluctant activist, morphed with the hard years into a rampant activist of the anti-apartheid struggle in a land that was running with blood. Now, she lies silent in a dry town, and no cares what she threw away so that she could be a warrior. Who made the rules that silenced the activist? Sometimes, when the fight has been fought and the day has been won, all the fighter would like is for someone to immortalize their struggle. A book would be nice. A plaque, perhaps. A street name would be just first prize. A bust or bust.

Oh, look, books are written about famous freedom fighters now. Memoirs filled with stories told by people who knew people, sometimes written by gnarled old hands that had pulled triggers or detonated bombs, mouths filled with speeches, those jailed days, those broken rocks, those pins pulled from grenades. Because now, after it all ended, the struggle had become glamorous. And women of the struggle, rampant female banshees who stared apartheid in the face and spat, had become fashionable to know. Especially the ones who were still alive. Of them there were few. Back then, when politicians were raping and imprisoning them, frightened grannies warned their girls never to turn out like them.

What you want to go to high school for, girl? You stay at home and learn to cook or you’ll end up in jail like a black woman. What you think, Nelson going to find you a husband after you done shaking your ass at black rallies? In your dreams.

Doctor Sylvie became notorious for dreams. She had them and she lived them. And when it all was over, and the country was one, she just never made it into the hall of fame. In a book of a thousand pictures, where was this one?

Why had this face lost the privilege of becoming another black-and-white portrait of the Resistance in an overpriced coffee-table book to be bought by patriotic expats? One needed to ask these questions. Heroes only became their archetypes when the smoke had cleared, when someone decided to shadow them around asking the right questions. How did you and why did you and when did you and now what will you and . . .

Oh, Sylvie, the writers have not come knocking at your bright green door. The photographers, the biographers, the chronographers, oh, Sylvie, purrty Sylvie . . . you are not even a footnote. Forgotten you, they have.

Quite a slap in the face. Even when the ones who you fought for never saw your face, and the soldiers who you stitched together with rough twine died before they opened their eyes, and the place where they finally took you was so dark that even when you were allowed

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