16 August 2012

What do thirty-four lives look like, all saturated with colour and meaning?

Families, yes, Partners and children. Parents. Memories and dreams and everything in between. Bodies etched with history, bodies that have in turn etched, no gouged, gouged deep into that history. I'm trying to form a picture in my mind of what they look like, those bodies and lives.

One year since they were killed, in what is only symbolic of the violence perpetuated by larger structures and institutions and systems and powers. One year since their thirty-four lives were forced to end, like gears with no grease screeching aggressively and consumingly before sparking and stopping and never starting again.

But what do their lives look like?

In pre-primary school, one of my favourite activities was the crayon cover-up. Presented with paper and a rainbow of colours, you drew bubbles and blotches and patches of colour. Bright colours. Colours that bounced and bumped into the colours next to them and filled all the spaces until not a speck of white paper could be seen. Then black paint. You covered the crayon with a layer of black powder paint. You'd mix it in the bottom of a 2 litre Coke bottle, a bottom cut off from its top. You'd put in the powder and splash in the water and mix it around with a white plastic spoon. Then you'd paint it on to the colour and wait, and wait, and wait, and finally it dried.

Then came the best bit.

With a small scratchy tool, you'd start to scrape away the paint. Either in stripes or in curly-wurly-twurly lines. Whatever pattern you chose. As the black scraped away, the colour beneath peeked through. Bubbles and blotches and patches of colour. Your picture at the end was made up of exposed and hidden colour, and a mask of black paint.

That's how I think of those lives. And of those deaths.

Full pages of colour, painted over with black. Scraped away slowly as their stories are told. But they never get to be full pages of colour again. And we don't get to see them that way.

I'm not sure that it's justice that's pushing me to know. I'm not sure that that's why I'm wanting and wondering about who they were. Or maybe it's a different kind of justice. That which I feel as a fully coloured paper, wishing that other people's papers could be seen and be felt the same way that mine can.

I want to know what happened, and I want to know why. Marikana shouldn't have happened, and the larger violence it captured in microcosm shouldn't either. But I'm human. A person. And at the end of it all, I also just want to know who they were.