Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: conversations with strangers

  • a man in the house

    I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering of people I didn’t know, who regularly host discussions of thoughtful topics. In a little while I was deep in conversation with two women, one of us Chinese, one of us Brazilian, and we were so relaxed and open together that our peels of laughter attracted a man in a blue linen shirt. He came and joined us, and when the Chinese woman kindly made him part of our intimacy by explaining, we were talking about online dating and what a minefield it is for women, he said, “I wouldn’t know about that, I met my wife before all this happened.”

    That is, rather than ask questions and be curious about the rapport which had drawn him, he winched the conversational topic out of our grasp and put it firmly inside his own experience.

    In fact he wasn’t just conversing, he was pontificating, complete with didactic finger wagging and pompous tone. Within five minutes the man was doing all the talking as the three of us women supplied what Dale Spender has called ‘housework’. “So how did you meet? Wow, that’s interesting. Gosh!”

    I pointed this out, in a friendly tone, thinking that in a group based on thinking, he might be interested to learn something from a perspective he has not considered. Instead he took immediate and lasting offense. “Or,” he said, “it could be that you just have a negative attitude.”

    Some men, even whilst literally setting straight a group of women whose discourse they have interrupted and whom they don’t know, cannot bear to be resisted or corrected by any insubordinate females. Their only recourse is, I must hate men. Imagine being so accustomed to civil obedience that any disagreement must be read as hatred.

    When I told him that in a group of people of colour talking about the experience of Blackness in a white-dominated world, he would not expect (one hopes) to come into a discussion and begin pontificating about his own experience, he looked blank. “This is no different to any other conversation I have experienced,” he said, and when I said, “Exactly my point,” he didn’t know what I meant.

    Eventually the woman to my left, who is from China, graciously took him on so that the remaining two of us could return to our rapport. We talked until she had worked out what she wants to do with her career, having qualified in law in Brazil and her qualifications not considered applicable in Australia. This insight, which was merry and nourishing, arose through the free and open discourse in which strangers respected and made room for each other; if we had submitted without protest to the domineering man, we would have had a less pleasant afternoon and she might not have gained it.

  • beautiful is who you are

    I came to visit a Ghanaian friend who runs a very tiny, very humble business. When he had no customers he came and sat down. He saw tears in my eyes and leaned forward to plant his hands flat on the table and make me hear. He said: Cathoel, the strongest woman I’ve ever met.

    We sat by the big tree with the sky drowning our heads and he said, I don’t want to see you cry like that. The rainy season has started at last and due to climate catastrophe, it is months late. I love the rains. I told my friend, it is a luxury to cry. I am many miles from home and to be able to show such strong emotion and not have to hide it from someone, thank you for this gift. He knows I am newly single and the guy who had pursued me many months has turned out to be a fawkes. One thing I cherish about you, he said: one thing I love about you. Open hearted. To look at the world and see its beauty, to want to share that looking. When I sleep, I can’t sleep. I’m always thinking, where is she, is she ok? You are always on my mind. He said, how many people come out this way.

    In Ghana, men come forward as soon as they see any woman unclaimed. All of our friendships turn out to be courtships. The night was withering its breezes all around us and I could feel its slim clouds passing. I began to wonder were we under some kind of spell — the spell of communion, the spell of know each other. You are beautiful, he said, you’re a beautiful woman. I took hold of a plait of my hair and held it. Its smoothness and the fluid stout solidity in my hand. My hair has silver threads like a costly embroidery and like an embroidery they are not real silver. My hair is turning white, I said. No, said my friend, what I mean is: beautiful is who you are. 

    I sat there in silence. You are a beautiful woman, he said, and you will always be what it is. No question about it. I can’t think what other words to use for you.

    Walking home I passed a spot where a local woman with whom I have a fondness was sitting with a group of quiet men. Two of the men were speaking in German, she called me over. He’s not with you this evening? I told her why not. And my friend said, Wow. Well. You need good people around you. She introduced me and I had sweet and intricate exploratory chats with each of her friends in turn. It felt so easy. Sitting under the thin sketch of moon with a big dark tree staining the dark night like a hand. Some women walked by and they greeted each other, I learned the Ewe word for home. Efui. I don’t know how it is spelt but it has a whistle in the f. I stashed it carefully in my modest stock of local words, a few in Ga, a few in Pidgin, a few in Twi.

    The same women walked by more slowly in the opposite direction, one of them had dropped her money and they were prowling the streetside to find it. At our purple plastic table the five of us sat talking. Our conversation was quiet and in four languages, plus Pidgin. One of the men my friend is friends with is a Ghanaian German teacher from the Volta Region who speaks Ga and Ewe and Twi. And I was bathed in the iridescent sense of being among philosophers, not those who use thought to keep life at arm’s length but who make use of conversation in order to swallow it whole, in order to bathe in it and swim right out into it. Conversation is the gift and prejudice of our natural human world. It’s what we’ve lost. It’s what loving relations of any kind regain: a business partnership, a neighbourly friendship, teamwork, collaboration, sharing a bus shelter in the rain. And I was thinking how a marriage is a deeper conversation: that’s what it is. You start talking with some stranger at a party, or at work or in a bookshop, and the two of you just want to keep talking. Before too long it seems your conversation has become precious and it now engrosses kissing, and all the kinds of touching two lovers can invent, which like stories, like songs, are numberless. Your conversation together is interrupted by misunderstanding, or deepened, and interrupted or deepened again with each child and you must now pay attention to the business you have built together, the garden you have grown, the home you tend, the songs you write, the holidays you plan. Sexual closeness is a thread in the conversation and so is sleep. And so is cleaning the house. And one day when you are quiet with age the two of you are going to sit down once more once the business has closed its doors and the children you raised have gone off into their lives, and you’ll resume the intimacy you first started out with, enriched and grown deeper by the years stretched in between.

    You are far out on the wild black sea on the long journey you have built together and wherever you are is always home.

    My three new acquaintance were funny and so interesting I had to keep reaching for my bag to jot things down. The Ewe man insisted he must hear the song in Ewe I had recently recorded and I sang it for him. I said, I have the feeling I maybe sound like an Ewe who has had a stroke, or a little bit drunk. No, he said, judicious and slow: I’ve never heard anyone get so close. And then he tipped his head. Is that really all your hair? I had loosened the elastic and released it like a thick fur collar too heavy to wear during the day. I grabbed a handful of it and tugged my head sideways: Yes. I grew it all myself, in my own head.

    The third man was older and a journalist. He had travelled. Now he was recently retired. He told me, I don’t know what I am going to do now but I know there’s something, and I keep searching for it. I thought of everything I have encountered in Ghana and how I could never have known any of it before I first arrived. So I said, why not just wait to see what comes. Let it emerge. You cannot know it til it arrives. He said, I don’t know how it will arrive when I am sleeping all the time. And I said, napping is perfect for awaiting insight. Because in each new day you get several of those littoral dream times when you’re half woken and your deeper mind can speak to you. Your wild mind will seed ideas you yourself cannot conceive of and let you loose into the radiant last adjunct of your life. Yes! he said. He grabbed my hand and raised it like a trophy we had won. You are a natural conversationalist, my Australian friend! You, too, I said, rejoicing. He called our friend over and in her floral dress she came, riding on her big haunches, all woman and then some. The man set my hand down as carefully as though it were blown glass. My friend sat down and settled her skirt around her knees and he sat back and opened his arms. He was smiling. In any group of people, he said: Cathoel is going to be the heart. 

  • the organic drunk

    In the supermarket carrying my two jars of honey, because it’s been nonstop chai masala weather, I fetched up queuing behind a guy in a vinyl blouson jacket who had just unloaded his entire cart. He turned his back on me to demonstrate that there was no way he would be letting me in front of him with my measly two items, just in case I was getting any ideas, and so I turned to the man behind me. There is nothing else to look at in this vast discounter warehouse, next door to the bottle shop which offers tiny toddlers’ shopping carts to educate your kid into alcoholism, a local outlet which sells everything unfresh and also, inexplicably, organic honey.

    So there I was with my organic honey and he started unloading onto the belt long, fresh, green bottles of wine. They looked like stalks of grass, their lovely labelling, and on each the promising word ‘Bio.” Bio in German is pronounced bee-ohh and it means organic. “Wow,” I said, “Biowein. Bei einem solchen Supermarkt ist’s schön, so was zu finden.”

    I think I said, Wow, organic wine. Nice thing to find in a supermarket like this. My German is riddled with infealties and infelicities but I live oblivious, above all that, smiling. He looked rather startled. Unloaded five bottles of wine and one flask of apple juice and now some random stranger has commented on his shopping! I tried again. “Ich bin Australierin. In Australien findet man Biowaren nicht so leicht.” In Australia you don’t find organic products this easily; I’m Australian. A look of compunction crossed his face, streaked with humour. He leaned in. Conspiratorily,

    “Es steck noch Alkohol drin.” There’s still alcohol in it. Ah yes, I said: and also, though – vitamins. I mean… it’s made from fruit.

  • opportunista

    In the supermarket I was queuing in front of a woman with a lot of groceries. Her arms were laden and I stepped aside to offer her the space to put her stuff down on the conveyor. Germans are possessive about their conveyor space and it remains the only country where I have ever had someone not only install one of the little dividers between my groceries and his, but then lean across me to reinstate the missing divider between mine and the person’s in front of me; then rock back on his heels and give a satisfied nod, saying to himself almost sweetly, “Hmmphf.”

    The woman spilled her goods onto the belt and said, “Ich hab’ gerade ‘was vergessen. Kannst du…” She had forgotten something, she darted away into the aisles and disappeared. I said hello to the guy with all the piercings who works the register. He scanned my bunches of vegetables one at a time. The woman slipped back into her place in the queue and put one of those toilet ducks on the belt beside her things. She smiled at me. Her smile, and the fact that she’d used du rather than Sie earlier, gave me a slender opportunity and I made the most of it.

    “Kannst du bitte – das nächste Mal – vielleicht daran denken, etwas ein kleines bisschen umweltgesunder zu probieren?” Couldn’t you please, next time, perhaps think of trying something a bit environmentally healthy? I tipped the plastic duck-beaked bottle to show her. “This stuff is complete poison. It goes down the drain and comes back out the tap, goes into our rivers. There is a brand called – Frog, I think they sell it here, you might try it.” I strove to sound as casual and off-handed as I could. This is perhaps the five hundredth such conversation I have had in a grocery store with a stranger and I’ve got skills. “Have you ever thought about trying the recycled paper toilet tissue?” I’ll ask, sidling up like a flasher in the aisle. “Ah, no,” they might say, looking startled. Often they confide they have sensitive skin and it’s supposed to be much scratchier. Oh, good god. Around us in the shadows rainforests fall to bulldozers and orangutans limp away from palm oil plantations so that we can eat our corn chips and make our soap. “Actually, it’s softer,” I always say. I’m smiling. “I mean – it’s been pulped twice.”