Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 43

Would it raise the value of men’s labour to depreciate ours? Or advantage them to keep us, forcibly, in idleness, ignorance, and incapacity? I trow not.

You have a fascination with artists, creators, thinkers; people who express and reveal and articulate. Because you come from a world that resolutely does not and as you get older the exclusion from family and home and hearth – the lack of explanation, the silence – only gets worse.

Your father walks into your verandah room one Saturday and almost steps on a canvas flung across the room, a self-portrait screaming its paint, and murmurs, ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’ve raised.’ Serious, befuddled, fearful. Of the female with a voice in his midst.

In your early twenties you will say to him, ‘You know, Dad, some time I’d like to write a book.’ And he will respond, swiftly, ‘Waste of time, that,’ and never sway from his thinking and the distance will grow even wider between you. The two Chinas joined at the hip, once, bush mates – and that chasm will only be broached when you become a parent yourself; put in your proper place. Normalised. To your father, come good at last. And by then the writing dream will have long gone because you have always taken heed of what your father says; he is that ingrained in you, you have wanted to please him that much.

But at fourteen, you crave difference. So, the obsession with artists, creators, thinkers, the opposite of anything you have known in your life. All that: an escape. A world where people communicate honestly and openly; touch, laugh, cherish, seize life, sizzling like luminous fireflies in the dark; feel deeply and passionately, yes, yes, all that.