hhaaayyii!!

If Shakespeare was right that there are only comedies and tragedies, it looks like this movie might be a comedy after all. I'll skip the six hours of confusion at the hospital on Monday that I spent tearing the rainbow wings from the bodies of crushed locusts, right to jubilant Tuesday, when M.'s madness had come and gone from its peaks, and she was laughing at the insults that she'd spat at her daughter the night before ('harlot in trousers!'). Madness is common with one of the ARV pills in particular; nightmares and dizziness come, and had almost prevented M. from continuing to take them. But with the force of the Home Based Carer and her children, she has arrived at a more peaceful state of being.

We spent the morning scurrying through the ravines and tunnels that her children hide in when the police come, looking for fields of dagga, marijuana. It felt like the moon's surface appears from down here, craters in multicolored layers, eroding in knuckle-like rows. We were accompanied this week by Cazie, the film student we met up with upon arriving in Durban. She was the mistress of sound control, and thrilled the kids with her perfect Zulu. We visited M.'s sister-in-law, where a neighboring gogo (granny) was shucking dried corn. Every exclamation she made began with HHAAAYYII!! and Vusi and M.'s daughter laughed so hard they could barely stand. "HHAAAYYII what is this Misses doing??!" when Sarah sat beside her and began to shuck the corn. "HHAAAYYII I like this Misses! She has done this before!" She reminded Sarah of the old Cuban ladies that she knew.

This afternoon we talked about love, with D., in her pink walled bedroom. The fears for her daughter, the little she knows about what goes through her head. Universal teenage stuff. The senseless murder of her daughter's father in the work hostels in Johannesburg, which she had never mentioned before. On the drive home, a perfect snake of fire wound its way through the mountains. It's law to burn two meter fire breaks around the crops by mid July. The stillest nights yield the most beautiful displays.

The pictures here were painted by the first people on earth. Painters take note: egg whites, animal blood and fat. Don't waste your money on Windsor & Newton. Fluid gestural drawings, broken with bullets in areas by British soldiers who were angry with their portrayal. Wars, births, food, and eland-headed spirits standing over it all, larger than all of the rest.