There is No One at My Gate
I saw you through the glass and rain
Wearing a white dress, at my gate
You said we would talk it over,
But, again, you have made me wait.
…
Words & picture: Fred Hatman
How suddenly we fall away from the sun…
We fight and we fight, we fight to find our flight to the light,
But, so quickly and without warning, we submit to your might…
RIP Guid Man.
Words & picture: Fred Hatman
The home of our horror (and shame)… revisited
Earlier this year, on February 2, Anene Booysen was taken from David’s Sports Bar and Grill in Bredasdorp to a nearby housing development. To a sandy passage between two small RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) houses, and alongside a deep culvert.
There, the 17-year-old girl, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister and a friend of some and known to many, was gang-raped and murdered. Inbetween those two events, she was disembowelled. Not just her body but Anene herself… because she died much later, after she was found by a security guard, her blood sinking into the sand.
A week later, with South Africa seemingly rising up in protest over the grotesque invasion and mutilation of Anene’s body and life, I went to join the demonstration outside the Bredasdorp Magistrate’s Court, where three young men appeared in connection with the crime. I also went to the spot where Anene’s dignity and life were taken from her…
… and found these flowers. And a wooden cross. And I found the horror. I found it on people’s faces. I felt it in the heat of a midsummer’s day. Between two unoccupied houses.
The horror had its own home between two tiny, empty houses built on sand. And I felt it snaking through my body.
Like Woodstock… only with a lot more wood
I’ve spent the past two days feeling the biggest love. Now I’ll try to share it.
The love feeling is so large that I don’t know where to start to spread it. Like mulch. So, obviously, I will start at the end.
Me and Lucille (by now you know that she is my Grand Old Lady of The Road) crested the rise just near Grootbos, but even closer to midnight.
The half-moon that had blessed the blissed at Greenpop’s Reforest Fest at Platbos now hung over Walker Bay before me. The supreme blackness and my headlight beam of just seconds before was replaced by a shimmering silver path on the sea. It was a sight that simply served to send my spirits soaring even higher, if that were possible.
It was. I stopped Lucille. I looked. My heart sang. It sang of one of the most beautiful days of my life. I expelled a frighteningly discordant and quite primal whoop, not a thing of beauty at all but one that yelled of a man set free of the chains of ordinariness. I was alone. And it was mine. I was heading home to my bed.
I left my heart somewhere among the good and happy and carefree people who had planted three thousand trees on the edge of Africa’s southernmost indigenous forest. And my sole remained in the rich and reddy-brown earth which would help those trees grow. I have never had a problem distancing myself from a crowd. But I was already missing the three hundred-odd and somewhat odd people who had gathered for “Friends Fest”, truly a union of friends who had never really been strangers but were now forever unified in the spirit of nursing the planet. And their own souls. And those of each and all of us.
Stainless Steel Dragonflies
Rain, rain drops. Like cut-out tears glued to my eyes. Stuck here.
Obscuring vision. Frozen. Unseeing. Unable to move.
The invitation of the road is glimpsed. Open. Then closed. Reopened.
It’s slippery out there. Wet. Beyond the high gate of my mind’s eye.
Wet. Cold. Wet road. Cold hearts. Stainless steel dragonflies.
Flitting. Fey.
The silver highway slips and slides, slaloms into uncertainty.
Behind me, my well-worn dirt track, dusty and brown.
Sandy. Rocky. But warm to the feet of my understanding.
I’m leaving now. The rain won’t stop.
Dripping. Drops down my cheeks.
Slipping. Sliding. Clearing.
Shoop… shoop.
The windscreen to my memory, wiping.
Wiping. Wiped clean.
But it is still so painful
.
Words and pictures: Fred Hatman
The Rainbow Elation
I made this rainbow at home.
And, the more I think about it…
I think… I think I understand
that our Rainbow Nation…
will be created in our homes,
and in the revealing of
home-made rainbows
in our hearts…
and minds.
Rainbow Elation (Fred Hatman, 2013)
I can see the sea… sigh!
“Looking Out To Sea”, Koppie Alleen (2013)
When I was young, my father would often pack us all into the Ford Cortina (with round rear lights and tailfins) on a Sunday. And we would head for the ocean. Nobody had picked up on my astigmatism then and I would lie like a descaled and reddened crocodile in rock pools, with my begoggled eyes slightly submerged and, sight magnified by the refraction of sunlight on the water’s surface, watch the tiny fish flit about and the crabs beady-eye me from their shadowed nooks. Boy in a bubble. I wear glasses now. But no roadtrip in Lucille is complete without a snuffle around South Africa’s magnificent coastline. To submerge myself in the sights and sounds and sand and salt. And, while seagulls skirl overhead, to lie meditatively in rock pools. On my back. Like a seal. And drift off… and be washed away. And washed.
Picture: FRED HATMAN
Photographic Phenomena at Platbos Forest
Children and I are on the same wavelength. I adore them. They tend to love my company. We play. The child is strong within me. None more so than an adorable pair who are the children of a friend.
These girls, my “Gargoyles”, and I went to Platbos Forest the other day so that I could take some photographs of them for a project I’m working on. I want to produce a set of three images for a conceptual artwork which might illustrate the spiritual path of children.
R & S have walked a very difficult path without their father. I imagine it has been both heartbreaking and strange. And the strangeness was there when we entered Platbos Forest for the photo-shoot.
‘As long as there’s fire…’
The fires came again three months ago, rushing through the range,
The mountain-glow glowed nearer and near, inducing fear.
We heard the crackling, the roar, the burning in nostrils raw,
Dogs and clothes bundled into cars and hope left crumpled on the floor.
Then yesterday, driving into the smell that has never left me…
“The moment you know
You know, you know…
As long as there’s sun,
as long as there’s sun…
As long as there’s rain,
as long as there’s rain…
As long as there’s fire,
as long as there’s fire…
As long as there’s me, as long as there’s you…”
“Where Are We Now?”
David Bowie
(The Next Day, 2013).
Pictures: Fred Hatman
Seven Years On…
I sat staring at the sun soaked in water
Almost blinded by the light.
Knowing I was seeing someone I love,
Who was blind… until she died.
Seven years on…
She sees me. So clearly.
Words & Pictures: FRED HATMAN