Nonfiction from Sophie Fetokaki

Photo: Glen Carrie

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§ 1.1
For some reason the way of telling has become very important to me. If I want to tell what is happening now, I must find a way. I cannot tell without a way. The trees do not tell me now. I cannot hear their way of telling. My mother could not tell, still cannot tell. The work of telling is hard, and slow.

§ 1.2
There was a timeline that opened up, we stood and faced it. What they tell is correct, it was as if a veil had been lifted. My mother saw that world in sepia. She draws it sometimes. I walk in step with a shadow of myself, one who, after the funeral, looks at everything in this house as a trace of her.

§ 1.3
I want to tell everything I know. I can be of use, I can find ways out of tunnels. This is what I am good at, what all my labours have been dedicated to. Now I cannot tell what I know, I keep it to myself, I save it for later. I recoil, like a flower that feels the heaviness of the air before rain.

§ 1.4
To tell of love without telling of resentment is a sham. And resentment builds in the not telling. To tell a life’s worth of resentment is a herculean labour. That great, dark mass was also unveiled. I stood at its opening, nodding. Cared for the lips that parted in rage and helplessness.

§ 1.5
We should not need the lick of death to find the courage to tell and to hear the way of telling. The problem (as always) is time.

§ 1.6
Suddenly, my sense of time changed. All the pieces of my life were gathered, held together, shaken, and cast again. I try to read the story they tell, to divine something useful from the pattern of their falling.

§ 1.7
I take in the washing. We do a lot of washing. Even though it is October it is warm and sunny, and the clothes dry quickly. Washing tells a lot about time, and our extension in it. I take my time in the short walk from the washing line to the house, resting the lip of the laundry basket on my hip.

§ 1.8
I water the scallions I planted as an act of consolation just under two weeks ago. They are sprouting now, among the leafless pillars of last season’s lettuce, telling their quiet stories of necessity, causality, time.

§ 1.9
I am in a bind. I mourn the grief I almost felt, but did not feel, and it is impossible to tell of something one has never felt. In order to bear the weight of the not-telling I pick the greenest figs and drink my coffee from the bluest cup.

§ 1.10
The waves rise in my dreams again, this time immeasurably high and telling of total destruction. But they are slow, so that I and a few nameless others have time to discuss what we will do. We decide to go under. We assume that, sooner or later, we will come out the other side.

§ 1.11
We tell through baking now. The flour speaks for us. The cinnamon powder, the groundnut oil, and the fresh cheese speak for us. My shadow is there too, as always, reading the traces in the twenty-year-old recipe book. Stains, notes, dog-ears, post-its. Testaments to what will be gone.

§ 1.12
Remembering how to tell is healing me. The telling comes sporadically in small, fully formed thoughts: The wave of grief that rose in me became a wave of hope that in surviving she might be reborn. I write down these thoughts, to not forget.

§ 1.13
I listen to Nuka Alice tell of the celebrations of Ullukinneq, the winter solstice. She tells how her Greenlandic ancestors placed a bucket of water on the ground so that they would know, by the spilling of the water, that the earth was trembling with the rising of the new sun.

§ 1.14
I think of the love of what is scarce. Even as we now come closest to the light, its warmth is distant. We tilt away, and our days are dark and cool. So we sing, and light fires, and tell stories, and yearn for what is distant to bestow on us once again the warmth of its closeness.

§ 1.15
I drive to the sea. It is fraught from the beginning. I get lost, but I give in to the loss, taking dirt roads along fields of squash and freshly sprouted hay. Finally I arrive at the rolling shore and my solitary walk is interrupted by a prying man. I tell him to leave me alone, but then I am the one who leaves.

§ 1.16
In the car on the way home the stupor lifts for a while and the waves of grief strike with their unpredictable timing. The grief tells of an ever-renewable hope. Of a longing whose fervour belies the perpetual absence of what is longed for. It tells of the knowledge that not even death can wake her.

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§ 2.1
I remember that my mother left this world and then returned. I remember that she needed a ventilator to breathe. I remember I bought her handmade pasta and truffle pesto at the airport in Rome, so she would stay alive long enough to receive my gift. I remember trying to bargain with the gods. I know you must take her, but not now, not before I get there. I remember the terror of what I so very nearly experienced. My mother’s sudden and unforeseen death, in my absence. I remember that, since then, I cannot shake the sense that this life is nothing but a parenthesis. I have been granted a reprieve, which comes with the knowledge that it will not last. Now I wait, for her death, and mine. Wait in a kind of unspent grief.

§ 2.2
I am in between Mother-grief and mother-recognition. Holding my breath in the ocean of the Mother I didn’t have, not coming up to the surface to see the mother I do have.

§ 2.3
Remember, when you saw her hands in the folded laundry, and thought these are the hands of the only mother I will ever know. And you cried. And she said, have you been having a hard time? And you nodded, but she didn’t ask anything else. And you imagined what it would be like to talk to your mother without feeling that stone-heavy resistance weighing down your body and soul.

§ 2.4
I bought you a gift of food you like to bind you to life. And you lived. Now the jar of pesto and packet of fileja sit in the glass cabinet in the living room. They carry the trace of a bargain with death. We don’t eat them. They just sit there, reminding us.

§ 2.5
For a while after the heart attack, we said I love you again. Those words I remember from long ago. The three of us traumatised, wounded siblings, standing in the sudden light of love. A dawn of almost-death, the frailty of what gave us life. I love you, meaning, I am your flesh.

§ 2.6
How do I make time start up again? How do I unfreeze all that stopped then, those words that cling to the left side of the page, will not move over, refuse to extend themselves?

§ 2.7
If you are 67 forever, what will become of me, in the meantime?

§ 2.8
Is this why I have tried to put a stop to so many things? Is it because I want to contain the death? What died in me, that I must revive?

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§ 3.1
Have you ever seen a field of artichokes? It is the most surprising thing. The artichoke flower is a symbol of wisdom hard-won. A field of thistles is what you meet at the end of the land.

The Greek name for artichoke is αγκινάρα.

Ankinára.

It is named after the goddess Cynara, turned into an artichoke by Zeus as punishment for leaving Olympus too often to visit her mother.

About 100 metres from my field of artichokes is the church of Saint Leontius the miracle-worker. It is tucked away at the southern edge of a small village. It wears its placeness like a thin veil and its placelessness too. There are old graves in the graveyard of the church of St. Leontius. Women who died in 1978 at the age of 86. Women with names like Mirianthi, meaning a myriad of flowers. Their surnames are derived andronymically, ending in the genitive case, the case of ownership. In the small oval portraits mounted on memorial crosses the men all have moustaches and the women wear headscarves.

The grave markers and the bell tower all neatly face east. For a while I sit in on their meeting. All the bottomless somethings become, for a moment, nothing.

Nothing at all.

Twice I try to leave, and can’t. On the third try, I turn southwards from that place, past the grass lined with newly bloomed poppies, and on to the artichoke fields, the haybales and the sea.
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Sophie Fetokaki is an itinerant artist, writer, singer and researcher. She is often drawn to the intersection of the conceptual and the situated/specific. Learn more at sophiefetokaki.com.