Drawing Flowers, Counting Mangoes, Voice Hunting & other Shenanigans…
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| Inner Voice Finding - 2022 |
Its been almost three years since I lost my brother, and only most recently that I finally felt brave enough to reread his writings. I still have a range of snail-mail letters, birthday cards, postcards he sent me growing up …there are emails spanning decades…and then, of course, his published work.
In all of them, I hear his voice reverberating clearly and resoundingly.
Growing up, I liked to share the progress of my home assignments with family… each of them had a ‘specialty’ in something, so I figured why not get a review before submission. My mother, for instance, was an artist. Creating things and drawing things came easily to her, and she had a good eye…she would walk through the steps of, say, drawing a vase of flowers (still life art class) by looking briefly at a vase of flowers in the room and sketch it on paper effortlessly. It was all magic to me, and I stared at the process in awe… before I could get any ideas, she would crumple and tear the sketch asking me to come up with my own work. I always felt it was a difficult way of teaching me about integrity because my drawings turned out terribly…And I am not exaggerating here… but apparently, there were points to be gained for effort…
My dad, on the other hand, was a numbers man. He helped with math assignments by using practical things in the house…I would ask for his help to solve stuff like 2X+3Y=15. What is X…He would look at it and go on about how equations are all about common sense…I would balk rather than eye roll because that would get me in trouble… he would smile and say super patronisingly, okay, let's use a super eeaassyy example to solve this, so if X is mango and Y is a banana. We have 15 of them in the kiondo. They want to know what is X… yaani how many mangoes are in the basket. I blankly wondered how fruit salad got mixed up with my algebra problem. He persisted…”Now you start by subtracting the three bananas from both sides then divide by two to know how many mangoes we have...” sigh.
In much the same way, Binya has helped me in expressive writing since we were kids. He would patiently read and review everything I sent him…be it those ridiculous school compositions starting with strange drama-filled scenario sentences that began…
“It was a dark starless night, and Juma woke up in bed with a start to the strange sounds coming from the other side of the door….”
Instructions:
Write and complete the story. **Remember to use similes and idioms - 2 pages or 800 words.
I also went through a poetry phase all of high school. I used onion skin writing pads (IFKYK) to squeeze in more pages and pages of mostly (bad) poetry and snail-mail them all to his address in South Africa to review. I was pretty committed; international postage stamps were a huge investment back then for modest boarding school stipend… it meant much less for visits to the school tuck-shop!
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| Snail-mail is EVERYTHING |
Binya would inadvertently tell me to rewrite every written work I gave him. He would almost always say the same thing…’ find your voice and write what she says’…of course, he’d say that; his voice came out so naturally and effortlessly... decades later, I still try to find that voice and figure out what she is saying….
Back to the now, my ability to reread his work is cathartic… private moments to smile, laugh and cry as I privately mourn him this month…
Binya comes alive in his words…who knows, perhaps he never left; instead, he poured his voice and disappeared into his work…maybe if we listen real close, we might hear his booming laughter as he tries to get a rise of us all with his cantankerous ways…he was good at that.
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| Still doodling those flowers… |
You are always loved and remembered Swes… say hello to mum and babs for me… tell mum I am learning online how to doodle flowers, and tell baba I finally figured how many mangoes were in the kiondo… and to you, I will always try to stay true to my voice…
with much love Chiqy
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