Prose | This. As Archive

Words by Kanya Viljoen and collage by Dave Mann

This is how I remember it. This is how it went.

Or maybe it isn’t, as memory is but fleeting recall, fickle and flawed. But this is what I found in the pit of nauseating stomachs and wilted dreams.

I don’t know why this needs to be penned down, written against the wall. Perhaps it’s because I believe we will meet again and that this should be written as a point of emergence, as lungs filled with first breath. Maybe I realise how rare and raw this moment in time was. Maybe it remains clouded, and in this writing, I hope to gain something that stands as translucency — glass or mirror that starts to tear-up, crying to the point of clarity.

I don’t know. I cannot answer. What I do know is that you were the first to see me. The first to hear my voice without grating, without whisper. And that that is enough. Enough to make me question everything I thought I knew. Enough food to feed mouths mourning. Enough water during these drought-filled days. It is enough to not want to live or lay still, because in lying my head down, doubt and dread fills futile attempts at eliminating something so sweet and subtle.

This is an attempt at understanding and capturing. Whichever serves the purpose of existing and co-inhabiting the country we were both born into, we were both burdened to carry. Backs and spines archiving with each breath held. Together. Inscribing. In thought or what we thought was collecting, moments gathering. Inhaling and exhaling. Now existing in this place of recollecting, of re-writing. This. Archiving us.

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.