When Dark Became All The Light, I Knew

When Dark became all the light, I knew

“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”  – Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.

A few years ago, I sat in a fluorescent-lit sitting room with my friend, Albert, praying our dreams would not fall as a tumbling piece in my country’s underlying disequilibrium. We spoke of our pains, in chuckles. We were learning that a misery wished away, could become hope. I remember, I suffered from these reoccurring dreams that kept me awake at night, and anxious throughout the day. I wore memories I found no words to express, and I was trying to make sense of what my mind said to my body so I could share all of it with my friend. In the middle of finding words, and struggling to speak them, there was a power outage.

Albert did not stand up to power the generator which he would typically have done. We both sat in the silence. Our hums of deep breathing became a lead, in the background of disembodied voices of his neighbours, the cackle of generators coming to life and passing traffic. Perhaps, we were both waiting for the first person to reignite the conversation, or maybe the outage offered a time for reflection. The greyness in the room encouraged our quiet. This was when I found myself thinking: what would it mean to live the rest of one’s life in the dark?

I left my friend’s house that day, armed with two things; his suggestion to introduce me to someone who could help me through my bad dreams and the knowledge of the dark as a reflection of how trauma is always on the margins listening to the silence between loss and evaporating laughter. (You know that last ha after the bust of ha-ha-ha-ha telling one the joy of merriment is now a waning sound).

I sat on an old Vono Desk, I inherited from two elder brothers’, and returned to the darkness in Albert’s room. I wrote: There was never light in his room; his apartment stuck out like a missing tooth among several blocks with bright fluorescent lamps.

The story grew into a short story and was published in an anthology. The story resisted remaining a short story and I wrote as much as I could, until I felt it was enough. The story resisted that type of completion, as it wanted to be a novel. I found myself returning to the story, and I moved into my elder brother’s apartment. I moved in and out of depression, living the life of my main characters, one day, I’d be Prof, the next day, Desire. On many days I’ll be me, in the borders of my fears, writing a book, jobless and dreaming of old pains.

The thing about trauma is, it feeds imagination. It departs from the familiar trauma and fabricates something to keep its own past. And I, faced with the powerlessness to write my experiences, or things I know, I write what I can feel. How else could I have learnt that the understanding of another’s pain mirrors one’s frailties and vulnerabilities? How best would I know how not to speak of your brokenness, but to perform writing into status, where you become a cracked ceramic held together by hope? And so, every night, alone in my brother’s apartment discussing with the shadows of my characters, I leant on the chair imagining Desire and her world, my fear of the dark springing in and out of the power outages. I wrote my story.

The story moved with the years into new computers, into a Lenovo, and then another Lenovo, and then an HP and then a Dell. Life happened to me; life happened to my novel…I complete a draft. I completed a draft. I write a draft. I wrote the draft. And then Jide, my friend read it: This is different. I wonder, what does different mean?

I have dwelt on the gift of imagination to continue to show up when pain wants you to hide. For imagination, as Bessel Van Der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, is critical to the quality of our lives, “Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”

I gift my pain to imagination so that it has the baggage of trying to meander the trauma of my characters when I could not find words for the things I felt, at the time of the writing. I gave my trauma to imagination to burn, not my pain, or the uncertainty of knowing what was wrong with me, but to know that I learnt to find my way in the dark where we never know where we are going to most of the time, but we keep going. We wake up, we find our way in/to the dark, we go, we go somewhere, we go into the dark even if it tells us it can swallow us.  We make art. For me, I authored a novel: A Small Silence.

—

BIO

Jumoke Verissimo’s debut novel A Small Silence (Cassava Republic) releases July 31, 2019. She has also published two poetry books, I am memory (Dada Books, 2008) and The Birth of Illusion (Fullpoint, 2015), and is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the University of Alberta.

You can pre-order the novel here: https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/a-small-silence/?v=3e8d115eb4b3

Twitter: @awapointe

A SMALL SILENCE

Imprisoned for ten years for his rage against society, activist and retired academic Prof resolves to live a life of darkness after his release from prison. He holes up in his apartment, pushing away friends and family, and embraces his status as an urban legend in the neighbourhood until a knock at the door shakes his new existence.His new visitor is Desire, an orphan and final year student, who has grown up idolising Prof, following a fateful encounter in her hometown of Maroko as a child.

Tentatively, the two begin to form a bond, as she returns every night at 9pm to see him. However, the darkness of the room becomes a steady torment, that threatens to drive Desire away for good. A Small Silence is an intimate and evocative debut charges us to look again at the alienating effects of trauma and the power of solitude and darkness to ignite the imagination.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing