Note No. 7

And memory transforms the continual struggle
into a process which is full of mystery and interest
and yet is tied with indestructible threads to the
present, the unexplained instant.

– GEORG LUKÁCS, THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL

June 2020

I have begun reading again. Yes, the scorched skin of the passed years has blistered and peeled away. To a younger, fresher veneer. To a time when I read all I could. History. History of thinking. History of creating. History of history. In the intervals between writing, I am reading again. I go each day to the Kilburn Library in the misspelt Salusbury Road that I have renamed, in my interior map of this space, Harare Boulevard. The Kilburn Library, with its orange-brick façade, white-framed portico and bay windows, the black-painted metal railings bounding the raised frontage. It’s only a half a mile walk (yes, I am already thinking imperially) from The Old Bell and another half-mile back for a post-study bitter.

I joined the library trepidatiously (is there such a word?), unsure whether my ancestry visa status allowed library privileges. Yes, thanks to my Scottish grandpa I have a tenuous hold on imperial residence. The old man kicked the bucket before I dropped into the world. Married, as they used to whisper in family kitchens, a young Xhosa beauty who worked in the factory where he supervised at a time when it was frowned upon but not yet totally illegal. And Grandad and Grandma begot my mummy, who, with my third-generation Cape Flats daddy, begot me. And here I am, forsaken in the land of my forefathers two or three times removed. So, yes, thank you, Scottish forebear, for my access to the Kilburn Library.

And I am reading again. Old reading. Flaubert. Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Eliot. cummings. Kant. Hegel. Marx. Lukács. Yeats. Lenin. Sartre. Achebe. Ostrovsky. Fanon. Nietzsche. Serote. Zhukov. Gordimer. Reaching back to when the mind was lush. When it all made sense.