Swamp

What’s the swamp?  The swamp is a feeling. It’s a feeling of being stuck. The first time the inside of my head felt like a swamp I was eleven years old; it was 1982. Today, I’m stuck in the swamp and remembering that first time. Then I was living somewhere else. Now I live in London. Before that, I lived in Johannesburg. Before that I lived on Mahé Island, part of the Seychelles archipelago. People have often asked me where the Seychelles are. They say they have never heard of them. If they have, the image they hold in their mind is one of postcard exoticism. Why would you leave such a beautiful place?

The islands are located in the Indian Ocean, just south of the equator, in the eastern and southern hemispheres, north-east of Madagascar and east of Kenya. Most people live on Mahé Island, which is called the main island. The second largest island is Praslin. While anyone can travel easily to many of the islands in proximity to Mahé, other islands are less accessible. The islands closer to Mahé are called the Inner Islands and those further out are known as the Outer Islands. The Inner Islands are granitic and the Outer are coralline although this mapping is not without ambiguity. The Seychelles are comprised of well over 100 islands and I can’t say with any scientific accuracy how many there are as the numbers keep shifting. New islands have been dredged up from the seabed and reclaimed from the ocean. The last count of islands I read was 163. Dense mangrove forests once edged Mahé coastlines and there were also crocodiles, which were hunted and killed by settlers. The mangroves have mostly been cleared away. Mahé is also where Victoria, the capital named after Queen Victoria, is located. We call the capital ‘town’. In 1900, a statue of Queen Victoria was unveiled in town to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. The statue, which is tiny, is atop a ceramic fountain and I have heard that passers-by mistake it for the Virgin Mary and cross themselves as they walk past.

At this moment, I’m eleven years old and I’m sitting next to my mother in my great-aunt’s sitting room, in Anse Royale on the south-eastern coast of Mahé. The room looks out onto a garden. From the garden there’s a road. Cross the road and there’s a beach overlooking the Indian Ocean. A coral reef separates the bay from the ocean. In the bay, on the far left-hand side, facing the sea, there is a small granitic island with rocks and a few trees. More accurately, it’s an islet because it’s so tiny and can be walked around in no time at all. It’s called Rat Island. I don’t know how it got its name and I have never actually seen any rats there. I did try to swim to it but I got caught in a current and was almost swept out to sea. Rat Island is close to a series of small beaches separated by granite rocks and foliage. The beaches are called Fairyland. The coral reef keeps sharks out of the bay although once while I was swimming at Fairyland my brother started shouting: ‘Sharks! Sharks!’ I thought he was just trying to scare me but then I saw them. They were only baby sharks. In the bay at Anse Royale there is a gap in the reef through which fishing boats travel out to the open sea. We call it The Pass. I have seen a hammerhead shark there and rays that swoop out of the water and back down again.

The beach, across the road from my great-aunt’s house, is long and the sand is soft and white. The sea changes from season to season. In the monsoon months the water becomes choppy and murky. Seaweed washes up onto the shore. The seaweed, which is golden-brown when wet, has miniature balloon-like forms that I like to pop between my fingers. It clusters at the point at which waves break into the sand, scratching my skin as I dive into the water. At other times of the year, the water is crystal clear and warm, too warm. When it’s full moon, it’s like a mirror. I know every inch of the bay, where to swim, where there are underwater worlds of coral, seaweed, shells, shifting sands and fish. When I go diving for shells, I find cowries hidden in the crevices beneath corals. Cowrie shells are smooth and shiny and when I hold them in the palm of my hand they gleam in the sunlight. Cowries are marine molluscs. They are living things. Sometimes I dive for cone shells and when I find them I bring them up to the surface of the water carefully because the snails that live inside them are poisonous. I bury the shells in the ground until the snails inside them die and then I wash them and add them to my collection. At Fairyland, I put on a mask and dive down to the corals to get to the lionfish, which are beautiful in form, shape and pattern. They have fan-like fins and spines that move with the water as they hover beneath corals. I am afraid of being stung by their spines yet I am compelled to swim up to them. Afterwards, I float on the water and look towards the ocean. It extends to a distant horizon line, which is mysterious, and I long to see beyond it.

The front door of my great-aunt’s house, which also leads straight into the sitting room, is always open to let in a breeze. The room is long and narrow and circled with chairs. There are wooden chairs with rattan backs and seats with ornamental arms and feet. There are also plantation chairs of the kind that fathers and grandfathers would sleep on with legs stretched out after Sunday lunch. My favourite chair has twisted arms and legs. It has engravings on the back. The engravings are of flowers. I put down my glass of icy orange squash and put a sweet into my mouth. The sweet is pale yellow and when I bite into it the inside is sherbet. It tastes lemony and acidic. The flavours catch at the back of my throat. I cough and move around in my chair. My body is heavy. My back presses into the hardness of the wood. My arms weigh down into the arm-rests. I’m waiting for something. I don’t know what it is I’m waiting for. I’m longing for something. I don’t know what it is I’m longing for. I feel as though I’ve lost something, but I don’t know what it is I’ve lost. I feel a weight. It’s like those seconds after a nightmare. You don’t know where you are. Half awake, still in a dream.

My mother is looking ahead through the louvred windows towards the garden, the road and the sea. She’s fanning herself with one of the fans my great aunt gives her visitors. I also have a fan. It’s resting on my lap. It’s hot. It’s always hot. Sweat gathers on my forehead and at the back of my neck. My hair feels damp. It hangs long between my shoulder blades in a dark brown plait. There is a lithograph of a young Napoleon on the wall behind my mother and me. Soon his image will be absorbed into the dampness. ‘I feel depressed.’ I don’t know how I know the word. ‘Nonsense’, my mother says. ‘Go for a swim.’ I can’t move. I can’t lift myself off my chair.

The air is thick with tension. Insults are flung carelessly to and fro. The island is silent. Thoughts echo backwards and forwards. In the heat of yet another Sunday afternoon, I fall asleep on the chaise longue next to my great-aunt’s chair. The chaise longue is heavy and Victorian; its velvet upholstery far too hot. I am awoken by an atmosphere, a sensation of heaviness. It feels like the atmospheres human beings create when they’re not very happy about something; the kind that fills a room and leaves everyone shifting in their chairs. People say you can cut it with a knife.

Behind my great-aunt’s house, which is on a plateau, there are other houses in-between thick vegetation. It’s always so hot and sticky and at dusk, mosquitos buzz around my ears. They irritate me and I start smacking at my ears with the palms of my hands. Sometimes, one lands on my arm and I smack it hard. I wipe away the blood and see the mosquito’s remains in the palm of my hand. Whenever they bite, little red bumps form on my skin and I can’t stop scratching. The more I scratch the more they itch. In one of the houses crockery started to fly around, for no reason at all. My great-aunt walked in with her rosary and it all stopped and went silent. I didn’t actually see this with my own eyes. But the story has been repeated to me over and over again. Now, sitting on my favourite chair, half in the room and half in the swamp, I see my great-aunt out of the corner of my eye. She sits in this room, in the same white rattan chair, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Her hands are white and smooth. She uses them to fan herself with a rattan fan or edges her fingers along the mother-of-pearl beads of her rosary. She has dark eyes and hair streaked with grey. She is neither tall nor slim. She wears dresses made of fabrics that are variously plain or printed with some kind of floral pattern. They have short sleeves, collars and buttons down the front. Around my great-aunt’s neck is a thick gold chain with a Mother and Child pendant. My great-aunt never married, but I have heard the grown-ups mention a lost love. When I visit her with my mother she tells us about her maladies and pains. When I tell my mother about my maladies and pains she tells me that I am like my great-aunt. She says I am a hypochondriac. She says my great-aunt is a hypochondriac.

My great-aunt’s name is Tante Hoppy and she lives in her house with Nan Nan Alda. Nan Nan Alda sleeps in a room off the kitchen. Tante Hoppy sleeps on the opposite side of the house from Nan Nan Alda; next to her bedroom is another bedroom and a bathroom. Neither Nan Nan Alda nor Tante Hoppy speaks English. One day, I arrive to visit them early in the morning. Hoppy is sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen eating toast and jam. Nan Nan Alda had made her breakfast and a pot of vanilla tea. The tea that is produced on the island is drunk with tinned carnation milk. Tante Hoppy is sitting down and Nan Nan Alda is standing up. Nan Nan Alda is wearing a long skirt with a floral pattern, a white blouse and a headscarf. Like Tante Hoppy she is neither tall nor slim but while Tante Hoppy’s skin is white hers is black. I watch Tante Hoppy pour her tea into her saucer to cool it then pour it back from the saucer into the cup. They laugh as I stand there watching them. They speak to each other in French. I speak to them in broken French.

This extract is from pages 11 – 18 of Unearthed by Yvette Greslé published by Copy Press in 2019, available here:  https://www.copypress.co.uk/index/unearthed-by-yvette-gresle/

Sisonke Msimang writes ‘Yvette Greslé manages what many cannot – she reclaims memory without falling prey to sentimentality. Achingly spare, Unearthed is a haunting catalogue of remembrance, an unflinching and melancholic examination of racism and privilege.’