On the Bounty of Her Senses
The branches that made me
The recent loss of a notebook (or temporary displacement as it thankfully transpired), had me thinking about who really returned from Ghana back in April. Meaning, as well as the 40-something woman who is typing these words from her desk, along for the ride was also a nine-year-old girl who once left Montego Bay for Nottingham, whose sense of self, so wholly connected to the landscape of her childhood, was, on leaving it, put under enormous emotional strain.
It’s hard to overstate how I felt about that landscape, three acres of tropical land surrounding a house in the hills above MoBay, a place I wasn’t just born but entirely of. I grew directly from it like a fruit grows from a tree. And when I was ‘picked’ and had to leave that place for good, the branches that made me were preserved in my nine-year-old heart.
Some integral shard of self
For months in the wake of the move I would dream I was back there in that garden. Dreams so very lucid I would feel I had gone home, able once again to touch, to smell, to pick the flowers. And then I would wake up, return to the fact of number 10 Abingdon Road, with its tiny, mostly concrete yard in which no fruit trees blossomed.
The nature of those dreams was so marked I have come to believe I left an imprint of myself, a spectral proxy who could not bear to leave and so stayed while my body came to England. As if I had surrendered some integral shard of self and told her, Wait here until I can return. And she, in the meantime, communed with me in dreams, granting me the bounty of her senses.
The detail of a potent inner world
My connection to the place I stayed in Accra was, naturally, nowhere near as potent. Although I did eat pawpaw and pear from the trees that grew in its yard, I did not grow from Ghana as a child. Still, the experience of leaving a tropical climate for England is quite loaded.
When I thought I had lost my personal record of the last two months of my trip, the stress I felt was not just about the notebook. It was also the fear of losing my account of a former, and formative, chapter. Something I felt very keenly as a child, particularly when I started school and found that the detail of my potent inner world could not be translated to my peers. It, and therefore I to a large extent, was completely inconceivable to them.
The child inside
I’ve often thought the gap between that inner world and outer reality is likely why I’ve ended up a writer, a describer. Someone who feels compelled to record and share what is going on inside, in the hope she will be seen and understood.
That said, I’m also someone who has a lot of resistance to writing, continually struggling to show up and express the nuance of my various experiences. And I think that nine-year-old girl informs that also. She knows the heat of standing out and was burned by it for many years. Some part of me would rather no one ever saw my work, or fears what will happen if they do. Such is the tussle I’ve inflicted on myself, both wanting to and fearing to be seen.
Anyway… the postman knocked a few paragraphs ago. After a fortnight of pleading with a crap Airbnb host, the notebook has finally been returned. I ran up the stairs just now, clutching it tight to my chest, like a teddy. Every time I look at it, a child’s heart inside of me smiles.
