Prose | The Moment of Dying
By Kanya Viljoen
Have you ever looked at stretchmarks? On skin. Your own. That’s evident, I know. We all have them and we see them. Every time we dress or undress ourselves, they’re there, etched onto our skin. But what I’m asking is if you’ve ever looked at them? Really magnified what they are — what they were.
Scientifically speaking, stretchmarks are the result of the skin scarring due to rapid expansion. But I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not just sitting in a bathtub, staring down at marks newly birthed. What if they signified more? Contributed more? Evolutionary theory suggests that we stem from apes — put in its simplest form. But, there is a minority opinion in the field of anthropology that disagrees. If the thinking is that we, as homo sapiens, descended from the trees and moved into the savannah, and in this change of environment evolved, one could argue that a great deal of evolution took place prior to us even existing in the forest. Some evolutionists argue that we underwent an aquatic phase. That we, at some point in time, spent a great deal of time in water and that this shifted the very fibre of our own bodies. The aquatic evolutionary theory isn’t some bizarre reach and the evidence can be found in how our bodies evolved over time. Some evidence includes the fact that humans are relatively hairless compared to other mammals, that we contain more fat, and that this fat is held under the skin, in the same way dolphins and whales store it. We also have the ability to control our breathing, and our larynx is positioned closer to that of ocean dwelling mammals. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m just saying the body is never completely still.
And then, when you magnify your own body, magnifying these marks inscribed on it. I can’t help but wonder where these marks sit in relation to the aquatic theory. Are they scales calling us back to the moment we left the water? Or just the scars of where someone had inscribed themselves into us? Or onto us. Maybe that’s why it’s difficult to exist here.
That kind of thinking makes sense to me. The moment of dying starts as soon as the fish is removed from the water. And it’s not fast. It’s not an instant moment where they move from being alive, to being dead. It takes time. The lungs need to fail. The body needs to convulse and fight. It takes time to die. But the process starts as soon as you’re removed. And who’s not to say our dying process started at the very point we left the water?
Bio: Kanya Viljoen is a recent Theatre and Performance graduate from the University of Cape Town. Kanya doesn’t consider herself a writer, but instead considers everything as performance. Language being one of them. These lines of poetry are but one attempt at unraveling this performance.
