#243: Lessons from Love and Fury
“That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all”.
Zia Haider Rahman – In the Light of What We Know
Good morning good people
Our last few letters have tilted towards the strategy side of this letter. We explored ways to reduce friction that wastes energy in our business, looked at ideas to build strategic focus, and took lessons from the building of South African success story, Capitec. Today, we skip strategy to focus a little more on self and soul.
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//self
Building a life requires we be both archaeologist and architect. Whilst we can, and must, dream of what to build, we must also understand the terrain on and from which we are creating and constructing.
Both are difficult. The world bombards us with blueprints telling us who and how we should be. Some are innocent, a parent’s dreams offered with good intent, some malignant, enslaving stereotypes to protect the status quo.
Hearing our truth, doing effective architecture, requires deep awareness and careful listening. Without archaeology, without history, it is all too easy to pick up the wrong plan, which in turn directs us to some ingredients and blinds us to other possibilities.
Margie Orford’s memoir, Love and Fury, is a testament to the excruciating effort and exhilaration in doing this; the hard work of building a life of meaning and joy, and the times in which it feels impossible.
In its opening chapter, she writes, “This book kept me alive; I will give it that”.
Her university years are filled with intellectual adventure. Born in Namibia, she studies in Cape Town, then moves to London. She’s reading, writing, exploring, becoming. Then, at 25, she falls pregnant and marries shortly thereafter.
“In that first week of December 1989 my thoughtful mother sent me a parcel addressed to Mrs Aidan Williams. The sight of that usurper’s name – that wife, that being I never could or would be, stopped my breath as surely as if I had been curried alive. I crossed out that alias, scrawled ‘Person unknown return to sender’ across the front of the package and shoved the parcel into the bemused postman’s hands with a force that made him step back”.
Orford, her husband and their daughter move back to Windhoek. Nambia’s capital, but in truth a tiny town. The gravitational pull of life starts to make possibilities disappear.
In her late twenties, after the birth of her second daughter, “This tentacled creature, this anxiety, had climbed inside of me. It was hunkering down, making itself at home. I was afraid and I wanted it evicted, but I did not know how. I could not tell anyone about it, but everywhere I turned, it was there, reaching out its arms, finding me in the dark, taking my air, turning ordinary tasks into ordeals”.
She tells her gynaecologist. He does not see or hear her, “There were adjustments to be made, said the doctor. On he went. I drowned out his voice by picturing the paper knife on his desk plunged into his heart. It was only because killing him was illegal and I did not want to go to prison again that I sat on my hands and allowed him to live. He went on talking and so I did not tell him about wanting to die when the afternoons took forever to get to the night.”
Decades later, back in London, she starts seeing a psychoanalyst, “I told him that I had tried to write a suicide note, but I could not write one. Nor could I plagiarise the ones I found online, written by people more eloquent than I. ‘Writer’s block,’ I told him. ‘So far, it’s kept me alive.’ I laughed at my joke, but he did not. He looked at me over slender steepled fingers and said, ‘It’s what’s alive in you – your writing, your creativity – that won’t let you finish.’ That was not something I had considered, and it gave me pause.”
That analyst saw her. In the intervening years, she had remembered herself, taking steady steps back to the fires of her eighteen-year-old soul. She built a career as a writer, publishing several successful novels. Before that, at 35, applied for, won and accepted a Fulbright Scholarship enabling her to complete a Masters in Comparative Literature in New York. It accelerated her path, as learning and reflection nearly always does.
Nearly a decade before that, her younger brother had visited Windhoek, “I can’t believe that my sister is living with a baby in a backwater… My brother’s words stung – look how long I have remembered them – but they were a gift: he would not let me forget that I had once known other things and made other plans His words gave me the backbone I needed then, as an oyster needs grit to make a pearl”.
Life, its pace, pressures and expectations, can cloud our vision. We can, through prejudice or inattention, not see the fullness of others. The greatest gift we can give ourselves and others, is careful attention to help see, remember, and reclaim who we are.
And even when we do not know where we are going, the next step taken creates a fraction more possibility. And, with possibility comes hope.
(If you enjoy crime fiction set in the Cape – a la Deon Meyer and Mike Nicol – or the literary bent of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, you’ll love Margie Orford’s Clare Hart series.)
///soul
Saint Louis University’s Literary Award is one of the world’s oldest. This year it was awarded to Colson Whitehead. Amongst others, it has been won by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Jeannette Winterson and Zadie Smith.
Arundhati Roy won it in 2022. Her awards-ceremony conversation with Dr. Amber Johnson is worth watching (It begins at approximately the 52nd minute).
Dr. Johnson asks what advice she’d give those struggling to access vulnerability in their writing or other modes of expression.
Roy responds, “I’m terrible at giving advice, but I think one of the things, especially now, is that young people are growing up so full of information. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of the human race when humans process so much information, and I think that is dangerous is some ways.
I remember growing up in the village of Aymanam. There was no cinema, no shops, no restaurants, nothing. There was just the river, trees, and we literally made our own toys, learned to talk to the fish, and figured out the worms. If I had any advice to give to people who want to write, I would say, please try and switch off for at least one day a week. You don’t need all this information. You don’t need to know everything about everything. It’s unnatural and not necessary. You need to know the earth, your neighbors, the birds, the dogs, whatever. I think it’s destroying us.
It’s not a moral judgment; it’s just the volume of information that we are required to process. It’s so hard to know even what your own thoughts are, what your own language is, what your own voice is, what your own feelings are. Are you sure they’re your feelings, or did you just get them out of Facebook or Instagram?”
I choose to interpret Roy’s answer as advice for living life.
In all the noise, in the deluge, the most powerful thing we can do is simply stop. Stop. Be quiet. And then, in the silence, we will hear the whispers of our past and remember our future. To know ourselves and help others do the same.
(You might also enjoy this letter reflecting on Hasan Altaf’s amazing Paris Review interview with Roy).
All the best
Karl
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