i wish
that I fight
The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to leave that first relationship, a year later – this struggle absorbs more of my energy than I can tell. In Ghana I am free and scintillate, I roam the countryside of this strange and wildly interesting city. People greet me and I call back. I am smiling from my soul. But even here my lover and I must attend constantly the vigil of ensuring that I never provide myself to him as a service.
Occasionally I do and he catches me out.
Are you sure, he asks, and I lie, Yes. Am I hurting you, as we press ourselves into each other like metal into sand and heat into metal. No, I lie, and he stops still to look at me narrowly. This narrow suspicious glance in my case is a necessary feeler of love.
When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dropped aside the pleading, exonorous letter serial rapist Larry Nassar had written to the Court, when she told him his self-pity was nothing compared with the pleasure he took in these immature women’s forming bodies, let alone the pain and anguish he has caused them which inhibits still their talent-stained lives – I could relate. I waited months, until yesterday, to expose myself to parts of the footage and reportage, waiting til I could bear it. I watched the testimony of a young Olympian who told him from the stand, “I will not take my life. I am taking it back.” And on the couch in our rental in Accra I crumpled forward and clutched my hand around my so long sore heart and cried out and cried.
These decades later, I still have no income. Having topped every class I took from the age of four to eighteen, when in the final semester of university and throes of this awful year of cumulative hell I dropped from my flock and barely passed, I have no career. The money I’ve lived on comes from waitressing, fifteen years of waitressing, which I was good at; and from sporadic coaching in which fellow writers tell me I have inspired them, and pay me for an hour; and from a stunning single purchase of property which I renovated and lived in, dividing the bank interest with a series of housemates I invariably chose for their resemblance to the abusive family who loved me as best as they could.
The waitressing was mostly in a fine Paddington BYO which required me to carry seven full plates of food at once, and taught me to open a bottle of Moet after I dropped the first one, and to carry out twenty-one champagne flutes between my fingers and lay them out on the table one by one, shining and polished. It exposed me to the old man who pressed his face up against my breasts when I stretched across the table to set down his friend’s plate. It put me in the path of the stranger who stuck a fork in my arse as I bent over the table as though I had been a bird in an oven. Was I done?
In Berlin, as a friend has only recently pointed out to me, I struggle some days to get myself off the couch. Leaving my apartment is a daily heroism. I am shy and exceedingly sensitive to start with. The performance instinct which is a lion dancing in me and roaring has been silenced externally for several years. Instead I practice dealing with bus drivers. If some random barkeep is rude to me I feel the talons of self-silence cage round me and I become a mouse, limp in the sailing claws of this bigger predator, playing dead lest he kill me, trapped in the freeze.
The amount of energy this perpetually renewed struggle costs me is mortifying to tell. The spectre in myself of being someone who is de facto preoccupied with her own past, or at least, stained by it, humiliates me when I long with all my heart only to face the day, this day – the only day, and build all its fruits.
My brother, who though he has three children mines coal, has told me when I tried to discuss this perennial battle, “There’s something wrong with your personality, that’s why you can’t sustain a decent relationship and you have no friends, that’s why you don’t have a job.” An aunt who discovered – or invented – God told me, when I timidly brought up the topic of her sister’s, my mother’s, rage, “It’s you. I sometimes think you are possessed by the devil.” I was so irritating as a child, that same brother assured me, that our parents had no choice to get violent with me.
My mother, who once called me ‘a failure as a human being’, also supports my daily life. Fear of publicly shaming her – a shame that seems unearnt – and of hurting my family has long kept me silent. Having run out of my own miracle earnings, much of which I spent on unnecessary medical procedures whose invasive humiliations I was convinced were crucial for my health, I am living outright upon her, in her seventies – how dare I? – while I labour to complete some saleable work, or to get some business started. Some days, the labour focuses still on finding the wellbeing to bother to feed myself. You see I have not always eaten every day. I find trouble keeping my little home clean and combing my own hair. Every now and then I have to take the nail scissors to it and cut out all the little knots.
Meanwhile I write and make photographs every day, I draw and make assemblage and small films. I give all my work away for free and the album I made, lassoing twenty-eight musicians in New York and Melbourne, is still unreleased except online. I play my album to the jazz impresario who in the 50s brought Shirley Bassey to Melbourne, and my heart clutches when he says, “In my opinion, you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” I finger the dusty piano I have lugged from Brisbane to Adelaide, and from Adelaide to Melbourne, and Melbourne back to Brisbane and now across the seas to Berlin. I cannot bring myself to touch it, I never sing, I have forgotten how to play my own songs on my own guitar. When I think about money, I panic and flail. It is almost not possible for me to believe my work has value, and that anyone would ever pay for it.
29 comments on “that I fight”
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From the first time you asked me “what excites me?”, through the wonderful words of your poetry – spoken and sung – you have offered energy, challenge and confidence. Even the title of this tribe, the House of Lovers, rejects the violence that you’ve experienced – that makes my soul cry and my mind rage with how my sex still fights for dominance by any means.
Your words are never superficial or superfluous – and always priceless.
Dear Mark, this thoughtful response from you moved me. Thank you. I love that you so cleanly understand and corroborate the work I am making here and its intention. Means a lot to me. Thank you beyond rubles, rubies, even back rubs. Cxxx
what can one say to this? all i can think of is to thank you for bravely sharing and that despite all this you have the biggest heart, that is incredible … love to you Cathoel ♡
That’s a really beautiful thing to say, Jo, and it’s comforting to me. Thank you very much. And to you, lovely. ♡
Cathoel, dear, I have been thinking about you lately. Every artist knows this struggle with self-worth and the worth of one’s work. When that is combined with a history of abuse then it is understandable that you have crippling weights keeping you down. Keep going and please don’t cut yourself off. Your words are very powerful and your voice has a maturity and experience that might help others heal or understand. Your difficulty in procuring creative work has nothing to do with your personality. These are our times and they are hard. Keep going because you know you are worth it and you do believe in yourself deep down, otherwise you would not write and share it with the world. All the best,
I thought a lot about what you said here, Z, and it has lent a lot of clarity. I haven’t known how to say thanks well enough. This means very much to me. Thank you for your generosity and kindness.
Oh Cathoel, I wanted to talk you in person, But when you are back in Berlin, for sure.
I always wondered why bad things happen to good people and I can’t seem to find a proper answer. But what I realised is you come out more stronger and find your true self. I don’t mean to justify all the terrible things that happened to you. But I believe through that suffering and pain you have been through, you have found your mission. You have a reason to live for and I think that deep inside, you already know that and that reason will keep you going through any challenge. You have already made through so much. You are an inspiration and a perennial source of hope. And I know you will keep that flame burning inside you. and Oh, Remember you already fought, in your own way.
Warm hugs
Kishore
Dear Kishore,
I am sorry to be so late in answering this beautiful letter. Your words moved me so much. Thank you for taking the time.
I thought very deeply about all that you said and I’m sorry my slow response has not been an accurate reflection of what your generosity and your words have meant to me.
Really looking forward to seeing you when you are in Berlin, lambent soul. Thanks for you. CHJx
Brilliant and Brave.
Thank you, Gary.
Cathoel, sending love to you. Your anguish is palpable and I hope I didn’t hurt you in any way during our loud, artroom discussions about the issues that have left scars on your body. I hope you can soon find a safe place for your body and your mind and that you can begin to see your incredible worth. Connie (from your artclass)
Dear Connie, you didn’t hurt me and it is my responsibility to find a way out of conversations that become uncomfortable. It’s so generous and kind of you to think of this. But I loved our robust and confident discussions and I loved painting alongside you. Thank you for these loving comments, which I treasure. Looking forward to more strenuous, exacting, old-school classical art classes. Cathoel
❤️xxxxxx no words, just love & support
imbibed and absorbed with dearest thanks, Caren xXx
We are born perfect in every way, regardless of form or feature. Our unknowingly families pull and flatten us into screens on which to project every fear, and hope, and joy. Then, they scrunch us up if we don’t reflect what they expected to see.
We repeat this with our friends and lovers and constantly with ourselves.
Some of us have children and despite our best efforts we pull and flatten our own children.
Some of us are lucky enough to get the chance to grab back at our own edges and plump ourselves into a semblance of that perfect newborn.
Some of us gather up the borders of our friends and lovers in a tightening embrace and try to fill the spaces with love and power and righteous anger.
I don’t have any answers for you but you can have some of my cushioning righteous anger. I have plenty.
Oh, Cathoel, forever writing thrillingly delicatly about the ugliest vilest things! Thank you for sharing you vision and your pain. Thank you for not giving up on yourself and being an inspiration for allowing, accepting, honoring your desire and your life, which too few of us can do so well (I struggle with this every day, and mostly still let others roam violently all over me and what is important to me).
Wishing you more beauty and healing, in Ghana, and back here.
Dear Vira. Please do not let others roam violently all over you and what is important to you. Particularly the people you are closest to – it’s so hard to stop from allowing this. Maybe the hardest thing. But worth everything, worth all the transformative hair-pulling heart-scratching effort. I wish you joy and lucid, lissom, blissful, free interdependence. Thank you for reading what I have written and for your generous response. I hope we can see each other now and then and some of the wild and strange events back in Berlin.
Love to you. Tender healing love to you beautiful, brave woman. I read your every word with deepest respect and utter tenderness. May my/our sisterly love nourish you dearest Cathoel .
Dear Maryla,
it sent a shock of warmth through me to read what you wrote here. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to say so in person. Thank you sisterly woman for your gravitas and love, which is mutual.
Thank you, Cathoel, for sharing your hurt and letting me know that I’m not alone. Blessings to you.
I want to provide comfort but is hard to do this with words alone. If I were there I would dance with you. I would wrap my arms around you from behind and press my cuddly squishy body into yours so you could feel the warmth and softness of another and rest there for a while. And then we might begin to sway and dance our bodies together so gently and softly. And we would stay in the moment breathing and swaying and knowing that love is in this moment and the next and the next… the dance loves and releases…
Janet this beautiful dance is felt in my body whenever I read your warm, wise, kindly words. Thank you for this gracious comfort. Big thanks.
I wish I knew the perfect answer. As someone who has had to pack away the person who she wanted to be because the mundane was required in order to conform and sustain I weep on another side of the table for us all, dear Cathoel. Many hugs to you and all those wishes that time could be reversed so that the horrors that you have endured were able to be erased and the grandeur that were to be yours were easily attained.
You’re so lovely, S. I have cherished all the times we have spent together and the honesty we’ve shared. Thank you for these gorgeous wishes, which I will put to use. They really mean a lot to me, like bread. Like salt and bread.
Love to you in your southernly northern eyrie, woman of the land.
To be different is both a blessing and a curse, say those who judge Cathoel… But, in fact, to be different is simply to be… And that IS enough.
No one has the right to judge for there is no irrefutable standard to judge by; have you not noticed that they most likely to judge do so from their safe, impotent and colourless cocoons?
I often wonder if these are no more than self imposed prisons from which they weave threads of regret and jealousy… I prefer to believe this is the case… Silk thread can capture prey… Yes… But those who are different can capture the thread and dress themselves in the lustre of their dreams. Namaste…
Maz, such thoughtful wondering from you, and it makes me wonder more, too.
Thank you for sharing these ideas. I cherish them and I hope you’re well. Namaste.
I know the struggle to find enough belief in yourself to get out of bed and try and create something of worth only too well. Somedays I don’t make it, but guilt about being useless gets me up eventually.
Your brother is wrong tho. You have at least one friend (me! hello!) and I suspect you have many, many more.
Hello my lovely friend. I thank you for this kind and honest response. You are not useless, even whilst sad. And I would like to add that I am not the only one who is glad when you get up and come out into the world to spread your irresistibly salty saturnine glow.
I feel like you sing my song. Your words have energy and empathy for others shining through. I hope they reflect back off the page into your heart so you know your worth. Thank you for your beauty, your sadness, your art and all you give.