By Anna Hartford.
Kenyon Review, September 2019.
This is a photograph of my parents from 1988. I saw it for the first time some years ago. A friend of my father’s had uncovered a spool of undeveloped negatives, mostly of my sister and I as girls. In this photo, which was among them, my mother is visiting my father at the COSATU offices in Johannesburg, where he was working at the time. ‘It looks like you’ve been split in two!’ a friend in America wrote to me, after I sent it to her. I was sending it to everyone. Proud to have these cool parents: this woman in her Annie Hall get-up; this man jamming on the floor beside her. Finally, I showed it to my mother, who responded in her familiar deadpan: ‘Dirk pretending to play the bass guitar, and me pretending to be happy.
It’s true. My father can’t really play the bass guitar, and my mother can’t really be happy. She can be many other things though: this acerbic and mischievous, but secretly devout woman. My mother is rigorously unsentimental about photographs. She has never owned a camera. She has kept almost no photographs of her own parents, her siblings, or herself as a child. For the most part I haven’t known these people and now I have no faces for them either. Often I forget their names. Sometimes I misspell her surname. I can’t really speak Afrikaans, her first language. She set out to erase her past from me, and she succeeded, and yet sometimes she seems wounded by her success: that this seemingly immutable lineage was not innate, after all; that it could disappear, just like that, by a simple practice of omission.
Full essay
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