by The Tent
– Well do the best you can.
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– Sir, the wild dogs have dug their way into the food cache and they’re eating the winter supplies.
– Don’t just squat there, you layabout! Pick up your stone axe and bash them on the head!
– Sir, these are not ordinary wild dogs. They are red-eyed demon-spirit dogs, sent by the angry ancestors. Anyway, my stone axe has a curse on it.
– By my mother’s bones, what did I do to deserve such a useless duck-turd brother’s nephew’s son as you? No help for it, I’ll have to do it myself. Recite the red-eyed demon-spirit dog-killing charm and hand me my consecrated sacred-fire-hardened spear.
– Sir, they’ve torn my throat out.
– Well do the best you can.
Post-Colonial
We all have them: the building with the dome, late Victorian, solid masonry, stone lions in front of it; the brick houses, three storey, with or without fretwork, wood, or painted iron, which now bear the word Historic on tasteful enamelled or bronze plaques and can be visited most days except Monday; the roses, big ones, of a variety that were not here before. Before what? Before the ships landed, we all had ships landing; before the men in beaver hats, sailor hats, top hats, hats anyway, got out of the ships; before the Native inhabitants shot the men in hats with arrows or befriended them and saved them from starvation, we all had Native inhabitants. Arrows or not, it didn’t stop the men in hats, or not for long, and they had flags too, we all had flags, flags that were not the same flags as the flags we have now. The Native inhabitants did not have hats or flags, or not as such, and so something had to be done. There are the pictures of the things being done, the before and after pictures you might say, painted by the painters who turned up right on cue, we all had painters. They painted the Native inhabitants in their colourful, hatless attire, they painted the men in hats, they painted the wives and children of the man in hats, once they had wives and children, once they had three-storey brick houses to put them in. They painted the brave new animals and birds, plentiful then, they painted the landscapes, before and after, and sometimes during, with axes and fire busily at work, you can see some of these paintings in the Historic houses and some of them in the museums.
We go into the museums, where we muse. We muse about the time before, we muse about the something that was done, we muse about the Native inhabitants, who had a bad time of it at our hands despite arrows, or, conversely, despite helpfulness. They were ravaged by disease: nobody painted that. Also hunted down, shot, clubbed over the head, robbed, and so forth. We muse about these things and we feel terrible. We did that, we think, to them. We say the word them, believing we know what we mean by it; we say the word we, even though we were not born at the time, even though our parents were not born, even though the ancestors of our ancestors may have come from somewhere else entirely, some place with dubious hats and with a flag quite different from the one that was wafted ashore here, on the wind, on the ill wind that (we also muse) has blown us quite a lot of good. We eat well, the lights go on most of the time, the roof on the whole does not leak, the wheels turn round.
As for them, our capital cities have names made from their names, and so do our brands of beer, and some but not all of the items we fob off on tourists. We make free with the word authentic. We are enamoured of hyphens, as well: our word, their word, joined at the hip. Sometimes they turn up in our museums, without hats, in their colourful clothing from before, singing authentic songs, pretending to be themselves. It’s a paying job. But at moments, from time to time, at dusk perhaps, when the moths and the night-blooming flowers come out, our hands smell of blood. Just the odd whiff. We did that, to them.
But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night? Is that them, sneaking in here with outlandish hats, with flags we can’t even imagine? Should we befriend them or shoot them with arrows? What are their plans, immediate, long-term, and will these plans of theirs serve us right? It’s a constant worry, this we, this them.
And there you have it, in one word, or possibly two: post-colonial.
Heritage House
The Heritage House is where we keep the Heritage. It wasn’t built for that – it was once a place where people really lived – but the way things needed to be done in it was cumbersome, what with the water coming out of a well, and the light coming out of oil lamps and tallow candles, and the heat coming out of a stone fireplace, and then there were the chamber pots to be emptied and the tin bathtubs to be filled. Also it was so hard to keep the rooms clean. So people built newer houses, with plumbing and so forth, but the Heritage House was not torn down, and when we decided to have some Heritage we agreed that the Heritage House was a good place to store the stuff.
We spruced it up, of course: fresh paint, brass polish, floor wax. Women were hired to show people around: they are adept at smiling and giving explanations, and nodding. Among us, it is thought that if men perform too many of these activities their faces will crack all over and peel off, and there will be nothing but gristle underneath.
The people who visited the Heritage House were mostly women as well. They wanted the explanations that could be found there – why some chairs were higher than other chairs, in the days of Heritage, and who did the scrubbing of the tin bathtubs and the emptying of the chamber pots, and how the water used to make its way out of the well. They wanted to know how things got the way they are now, and they hoped that the explanations given by the smiling women in the Heritage House might help.
Men didn’t care so much about those subjects, and so they didn’t go. Also they said that Heritage ought to mean things that have been inherited, passed down from father to son as it were, but since nobody did the so-called heritage things any more, or even thought about them except when they were in the Heritage House getting nodded and smiled at and bored to death with explanations, Heritage House was a misnomer in the first place and they didn’t see why they should have to pay taxes to keep the joint going.
Over time, the Heritage House filled up. It was such a convenient place to stash things you no longer had a use for but didn’t want to throw out. More and more Heritage was crammed in. An annex was built, in the style of the original edifice, with a tea room in it where you could rest your feet and relax – Heritage could be exhausting – and more female guides were hired, and research was done on authentic costumes for them to wear. But then there was a change of government and funds were cut. Perhaps some of the Heritage should be disposed of, it was said. But by now there was so much Heritage jammed in there that just sorting it out would take much more money than anyone wanted to spend. So nothing was done.
I went to the Heritage House myself, the other week. It was in disrepair. The windows were opaque with dust, the front steps were a disgrace: it was clear to see that nothing had been scrubbed off or fixed up in years. I rang the rusted bell for a long time before anyone answered it. Finally the door opened. I could see a long hallway, piled to the ceiling with boxes and crates. Each box was labelled: CORSETS. MIXMASTERS. THUMBSCREWS. CALCULATORS. LEATHER MASKS. CARPET SWEEPERS. CHASTITY BELTS. SHOE BRUSHES. MANACLES. ORANGE STICKS. MISCELLANEOUS.
From behind the door an old woman appeared. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe. She let me in, pushing aside a stack of yellowing newspapers. The place stank of mouse droppings and mildew.
She nodded at me, she smiled. She hadn’t lost the knack. Then she launched into a stream of explanations; but the language she spoke was obsolete, and I couldn’t make out a word.
Bring Back Mom: An Invocation
Bring back Mom,
bread-baking Mom, in her crisp gingham apron
just like the aprons we sewed for her
in our Home Economics classes
and gave to her for a surprise
on Mother’s Day –
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Mom, who didn’t have a job
because why would she need one,
who made our school lunches –
the tuna sandwich, the apple,
the oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper –
with the rubber band she’d saved in a jar;
who was always home when we got there
doing the ironing
or something equally boring,
who smiled the weak smile of a trapped drudge
as we slid in past her,
heading for the phone,
filled with surliness and contempt
and the resolve never to be like her.
Bring back Mom.
who wanted to be a concert pianist
but never had the chance
and made us take piano lessons,
which we resented –
Mom, whose aspic rings
and Jello salads we ate with greed,
though later derided –
pot-roasting Mom, expert with onions
though anxious in the face of garlic,
who received a brand-new frying pan
from us each Christmas –
just what she wanted –
Mom, her dark lipsticked mouth
smiling in the black-and-white
soap ads, the Aspirin ads, the toilet paper ads,
Mom, with her secret life
of headaches and stained washing
and irritated membranes –
Mom, who knew the dirt,
and hid the dirt, and did the dirty work,
and never saw herself
or us as clean enough –
and who believed
that there was other dirt
you shouldn’t tell to children,
and didn’t tell it,
which was dangerous only later.
We miss you, Mom,
though you were reviled to great profit
in magazines and books
for ruining your children
– that would be us –
by not loving them enough,
by loving them too much,
by wanting too much love from them,
by some failure of love –
(Mom, whose husband left her
for his secretary and paid alimony,
Mom, who drank in solitude
in the afternoons, watching TV,
who dyed her hair an implausible
shade of red, who flirted
with her friends’ husbands at parties,
trying with all her might
not to sink below the line
between chin up and despair –
and who was carted away
and locked up, because one day
she began screaming and wouldn’t stop,
and did something very bad
with the kitchen scissors –
But that wasn’t you, not you, not
the Mom we had in mind, it was
the nutty lady down the street –
it was just some lady
who became a casualty
of unseen accidents,
and then a lurid story … )
Come back, come back, oh Mom,
from craziness or death
or our own damaged memory –
appear as you were:
Queen of the waffle iron,
generous dispenser of toothpaste,
sorceress of Mercurochrome,
player of games of smoky bridge
at which you won second-prize dishtowels,
brooder over the darning egg
that hatched nothing but socks,
boiler of horrible porridge –
climb back onto the cake-mix package,
look brisk and competent, the way you used to –
If only we could call you –
Here Mom, Here Mom –
and you would come clip-clopping
on your daytime Cuban heels,
smelling of sink and lilac,
(your bum encased in the foundation garment
you’d peel off at night
with a sigh like a marsh exhaling),
saying, What is it now,
and we could catch you
in a net, and cage you
in your bungalow, where you belong,
and make you stay –
Then everything would be all right
the way it was when we could play
till after dark on spring evenings,
then sleep without fear
because you threw yourself in front of the fear
and stopped it with your body –
And there you’ll be, in your cotton housecoat,
holding a wooden peg
between your teeth, as the washing flaps
on the clothesline you once briefly considered
hanging yourself with –
but forget that! There you’ll be,
singing a song of your own youth
as though no time has passed,
and we can be careless again,
and embarrassed by you,
and ignore you as we used to,
and the holes in the world will be mended.
Horatio’s Version
Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story …
These were Hamlet’s last words to me. Well, almost the last. I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t a request but a command – in effect, a clever and twisted curse. I would be doomed to stay alive until I did tell the story. Which is why you are reading my own words, in this very newspaper, today.
Yes, this is Horatio speaking: friend, confidant, ear-for-loan, eternal bystander at the festivities and debacles of the great and bloodthirsty. I have to say that I did my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair. I listened to Hamlet’s outpourings, which at times bordered on lunacy; I sympathized; I offered what I hoped was sage advice. And then I got stuck with cleaning up the not inconsiderable mess.
Or not so much cleaning it up: wrapping it up. I was supposed to set down the events truthfully, as they had occurred, though showing Hamlet in a more or less favourable light, the light that shines on every protagonist. I hoped to wring some poetry out of these events, darkish poetry it would have to be. Perhaps I could add some philosophical musings about the human condition. I also hoped to come up with a plausible resolution to the story.
But what was the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, “O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.
This often happens, as I’ve observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one’s left standing. Countries are similar. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I have often said while standing deliberately in the line of fire during these small, medium, and large payback events, but few have ever listened to me. An eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings – I’ve observed – are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they’re always going one better than the other fellow.
Excuse me. Not one better. One more.
I started out well enough at the outset. I found a fresh piece of parchment, I ground some ink. Once upon a time there was a well-meaning but knotted-up prince called Hamlet, I wrote. But that didn’t sound quite right. Then I thought I might do it as a sort of play. Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle, I wrote. Then I dried up.
Trouble is, I started thinking about the story behind the story, which was not that Claudius had murdered Hamlet the Elder, but that Hamlet the Elder had murdered anoth
er king called Fortinbras. Well, not murdered exactly: slain in single combat, thus getting hold of a wad of Fortinbras territory. But the upshot of all of Hamlet Junior’s machinations was that he himself ended up dead and Fortinbras the Second got hold of everything – not only his father’s lost lands, but all of Hamlet’s lands as well.
So if it was a revenge story it was a strange revenge. The only person to benefit from it was someone who hadn’t been directly involved. That often happens too, I’ve noticed. Maybe instead of being a revenger’s tragedy the Hamlet saga was a story about subconscious guilt – Hamlet realizes the Hamlet family has done dirt to the Fortinbras clan, and obliterates his own kinfolk and scuppers his inheritance in a spectacular act of self-sabotage.
While I was chewing on my quill, dozens of years went by. Then some jumped-up English playwright chose to dramatize this whole fracas. I was annoyed – he hadn’t even been alive at the time, and he put in a bunch of stuff he couldn’t possibly have known anything about. If he’d come to me I might have set him straight; but he didn’t, and he published first. He filched my material and appropriated my voice and exploited a human tragedy that was really none of his business.
Anyway his play was too long.
My own writer’s block got worse than ever. Hamlet’s well-known procrastination had rubbed off on me. I began asking difficult questions. Why me? Why should I have to write Hamlet’s story? Why not my own? But there’s nothing much to mine, really. Come to think of it, is there anything much to Hamlet’s? By this time we were well into the seventeenth century, and Oliver Cromwell had gone on the rampage, and Charles the First had had his head cut off, and thousands of soldiers and civilians had died cruel and ghastly deaths, with their intestines wound out of their bodies and their heads stuck up on stakes. I’d seen a lot of that up close, so a few slashed and drowned and poisoned bodies littering the Danish court were no longer very horrifying to me by comparison.
