The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom

Author:Wilma Stockenstrom [Stockenström, Wilma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935744-93-1
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

The water in the stream tastes sweet. I am thankful I wandered here after the stranger’s disappearance. In humility I thank my water spirit for guiding me. And for the thunderstorms that wash the baobab nice and clean and spur him to bud and all at once thrust out all his leaves and hang up his great flowers one by one on twigs, white and crumpled, to be fertilized by the bats, white, crumpled and malodorous.

When the tree blooms, then I cannot feel somber. Then I see the journey as a confusion I had to undergo, then I do not try to unravel it and make sense of it. I say the name of the tree aloud, the name of water, of air, fire, wind, earth, moon, sun, and all mean what I call them. I say my own name aloud and my own name means nothing. But I still am.

One time I fled from the tree. I ran aimlessly into the veld, trying to get out of its sight by hiding behind a high round rock, and I opened my mouth and brought out a sound that must be the sound of a human being because I am a human being and not a wildebeest that snorts and not a horned locust that produces whistling noises with its wings and not an ostrich that booms, but a human being that talks, and I brought out a sound and produced an accusation and hurled it up at the twilight air. A bloody sound was exposed to the air, with which I tried to subject everything around me. To be able to dominate with one long raw sound.

At night I hear lions roar. Every now and again I get up to throw wood on the fire. Sometimes I see eyes shining greenishly in the firelight. In the mornings I bake tubers that the little people have brought me in the ashes, break open a hard-shelled monkey orange with a stick and scoop the flesh with the stick into my mouth. A gulp of water, baked bulbs, and I am ready to resume my struggle against time. We fight in an endless roundabout circle. I do not manage to divide him up and segment him, so as to form a pattern and control him, in spite of my ingenuity with the beads. I sometimes get confused and forget when I linked what to what. Green and black mixed up in accordance with my mood. I cannot shake time off me. He squats continually before my tree. Everything that has been in my life is always with me, simultaneously, and the events refuse to stand nicely one after the other in a row. They hook into each other, shift around, scatter, force themselves on me or try to slop out of my memory. I have difficulty with them in the necklace of my memory. I am not a carefree little herder of time at all. Day and night pass. Summer and winter, another summer, and here is winter again.

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