Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

I am a subscriber to the UCT Poetry Web, and so I am privy to the thoughts of great poets and writers. We’ve been talking about Australia’s Stolen Generation, where aboriginal children who had European genes were taken away from their parents (I’m sure you remember the film Rabbit Proof Fence).

Ken Barris included some commentary on Sarah Gertrude Millins’s God’s Stepchildren: “Her premise is that the more white blood is diluted, the less the strain of intellectual inferiority becomes evident. However, the narrative asserts that despite this promising development,someone of mixed blood can never really overcome their inferiority. The only solution is to refrain from breeding, so that your inferiority can die out with you.”

Ms Millins’ comment was just like she had just chucked her cigarette stompie into my petrol tank. This rant poured out of me under the title: The Stolen Generation: Taking Back One’s Life. Liesl Jobson and some other members suggested that I post it on Book.co.za, so here it is (lightly edited):

After being chased out of cinemas and buses as a child in the 70s, I grew into political awareness in the 80s and started attending anti-apartheid events. After my very unimportant arrest, my father decided to tell me: I was adopted, and my biological mother was Australian. There was a strong suggestion that my father was not white. I immediately imagined that he was an aboriginal.

As a teenager I had read Walkabout and had enthusiastically entered the dreamtime of Aboriginal thought. I read more: Sally Morgan’s My Place, and tried to teach myself how to play the didgeridoo. Deep in my DNA, I believed that I was a wanderer, as well as a much taller, slimmer, darker of myself.
But this could be blamed on my mixed genes. My mother was obviously small and fat, which explained my lack of height. Either way, I was curiously affirmed by thinking that I was not white, aboriginal. I was able to see myself within a social context that made sense to me: we were experiencing the same things.

I identified strongly with the stolen generation for all my twenties, which probably saved me from insanity. In their stories I found courage and desire, tragedy and creativity.

When I finally met my biological families, my sister-in-law, an Aboriginal from Adelaide, told me that she had never imagined marrying a white man because she had never met a white person who understood her and where she came from. She was always sure that she would marry a black man, but she was afraid of black Australians.

She told me that it was because she could never be sure who she was related to. There were so many children in her family stolen, her aunts and uncles were all pulled apart in some way or another.

So she was happy to marry my brother, who is Ghanaian-Australian.

We are breeding happily. Coming from a background with an inordinate number of suicides, alcoholism and the self-destructive ills of a people in absolute trauma, our children are hope and the future. We only see the shadow when the sun hits a certain way. But we live in the day: all the time we are walking, breathing, talking through our lives.

Every day we deal with the ghosts of reason, which tell us that we’re not supposed to exist, or to have any thoughts about our existence at all.
Either way, our thoughts are of no interest to reason or rationality. Our methods of dealing with these troublesome dybbuks vary depending on our mood and what is available. Since they inhabit our own minds, we have to take responsibility for them and limit their thrall. The voice of Reason still demands responses to a reality, that for me, doesn’t exist.

The more people I meet, the more I like dogs. The more dogs I have, the more I prefer trees. Always returning to the jungle, the forest, the sacred spaces where we are simply human in a wondrous universe. I renew myself in the certainty that I am not a mistake.

Overcoming inferiority is just an item on the to-do list of a black woman.

This is a really bad poem that I wrote a few years ago. It’s one of those that you have to write to put things in their place. I can’t imagine it would be of any use to anyone else. But in case it is, here goes:

Schadenfreude

Across the road lived a blue-eyed boy
whose pursed disgust hurled names like
Rubberlips!
Kaffirtackies!
That’s what’s on your face,
kaffirs.
Me and Ntomb’futhi, with Judy balanced on her
five-year old hip shouted back:
“Ke tla donsa wena! Ke tla donsa and shaya wena!”
Our words flew out like sparrows,
dodged between his stones
and scattered into the air.

At night, in front of the mirror I
turned my plump, soft, lips into
thin lines folded back against my gums,
pressed my flaring nostrils flat. All this to be beautiful
like white people are.

Now I thank that boy
for slicing my childhood confidence
for teaching me pain
for throwing me down
so I could work out how to
get up again;
for tearing off my frail mask
for giving me a new name
his joyful murder of our innocence
exiled me from white suburbia
and gave me an epic journey,
a return:
I came back wreathed in poems
striding like a hero with
a hundred foreign cities under my feet.

Him? He’s got a boep and is divorced. Shame.