At my grandparents, with my uncle
My mother had three younger brothers. Her mother died giving birth to her oldest brother in 1945. Her father remarried and the couple had two more sons. The youngest, Pieter, was 12 years younger than my mother, and I was 12 years younger than him. Growing up, he was my favorite uncle. I always felt closest to him. He was studious, shy, and socially conscious. We had a natural, easy connection. Whenever we visited the grandparents between my fourth and tenth year, I would end up in Pieter’s room, where we took either side of some great African army, represented by a bunch of pens and pencils, in historical wars narrated by him. We would make the pens clash, which was great fun, and of course they would end up in a big messy pile of a battlefield. One pen would remain erect, as for example in the story of the Malinese king Sundiata Keita, when his army won the battle of Kirina in 1235. Then the pens got busy building a great Muslim empire, and less than one hundred years later, the great king Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca, accompanied by at least 60,000 of his subjects (All the pens were needed for this pilgrimage.) King Mansa Musa was exceedingly wealthy and generous and gave away so much gold on this trip, that when his caravan passed through Egypt, he devalued the local gold currency. In my role of the magnanimous pilgrim, I went to find all of Pieter’s little metal wind-up toys and trinkets to drop them in his hands, laughing as they spilled onto the floor. Pieter studied African history, acutely aware of the role the Belgians played in the destruction of Africa, and pained by enduring racism. He ultimately converted to Islam, finding his ideal of race equality and unity through diversity reflected in that religion. Politically, he was far on the left, and he usually wore a red sweater to honor his political preference. His favorite flower was the red carnation, the revolutionary symbol of the proletariat. His sound mind was forever on the side of the oppressed, whether it was the working class, immigrants, people of color and all native populations of colonized nations.
In 1982, when he was thirty one years old, Pieter killed himself. The last time I visited, he insisted we go for a walk, and we ended up by the cemetery where he would be buried a few weeks later. I don’t remember what we spoke about, but I do remember feeling guilty for avoiding physical touch, since his body odor was strong due to years of poor hygienic habits. His teeth were greenish. It was not his first attempt at suicide. I was told that when Pieter was fifteen years old, he had started wading into the canal where he ended up drowning himself, but, remembering that his older brother was in the middle of finals at that time, he had turned back and gotten out of the water.
I wondered if that first suicide attempt had been right after he had sexually abused me, when I was three years old. I’ve carried the knowledge of his abuse without the actual memory for many decades, and never was able to access anger or grief. My attachment, knowing that he did care and did not continue, the fact that he was a child himself, and of course, that he killed himself - all stood in the way of my being able to feel for the little girl that I was, who remained isolated in anxiety and loss of innocence.
I had in the past months been experiencing a sense of loss of my strongly leftist attachment, observing my formerly sweet liberal friends getting stuck in meanness and hatred, allowing their own unresolved trauma to surface in dark projections onto groups of strangers, pushed by increasingly vulgar media - the voice for the parents of the dysfunctional world family keeping the focus on gossip and quibbles, away from the dark family secrets. Without joining the other side of the divide, I felt rather lonely. It was a surprise to learn that my grief of separating from the left was actually brought about by the onset of separating from my uncle. Pieter’s fight against racism and the oppressed populations was the way in which he, as a sensitive soul, was able to stand for the traumatized, vulnerable part inside himself. However, without healing, this noble struggle was an unconscious positive projection, which necessarily covers a negative. In a brochure Pieter wrote in 1978 to fight racism, distributed in the local co-op, he harshly criticizes the white, South African Miss Universe of that year, as if her whiteness alone was proof that she did not care about apartheid in her country. However, in recorded interviews with this woman, she is very mindful of the fact, and she had not participated in the Miss South Africa contest because it was only open to whites. Pieter’s judgment of the woman, his scathing remarks of a contest in a pamphlet about a subject that could not be further from beauty pageants, belied his prejudice towards a certain type of woman due to his own abuse, projected out. In his fight against racism, he found the need for justice for his innocent self, while his judgment against a white woman triggered his unresolved negative feelings against his own abuser. Without healing and creating peace inside himself, he could not truly create peace in the world. More than that, he perpetuated his abuse onto the most vulnerable female of all, thus priming me to become a woman he might hate, like the sexualized woman he saw on TV. Politics are thus polarized, in that each citizen’s own unconscious trauma contributes to allegiance to one side and vilification of the other, while the focus of the real evil perpetuated by those behind the politics, the abusive “parents” of the world, remains obscured.
In the past few days, I was plagued by an occasional sense of being dirty, and sometimes experienced shame over feeling like an underdog/outcast. Though I identified these states as a repetition of a previous traumatic state, they were vague and I could not access the memories. Asking the divine for clarity in a healing session, the question arose as to what Pieter had done, and what I was made to do. Suddenly, my right hand felt dirty, and the images of what he had coerced me to do rolled by, actions involving my arm. The pain instantly vanished and has not returned since. I also understood that my tender age and love for Pieter had made me relive aspects of this trauma my entire life, while the memory would remain protected in an inner sanctuary where he remained the lovely uncle at the expense of the little girl.
That little girl very recently experienced excitement, when I met someone I liked. After having spent several decades peeling off multiple layers of professional-level torture-based training designed to attract men, I was surprised to feel such child-like excitement. However, it did not feel natural or wholesome. I noticed that the excitement was mixed with anxiety, sending an endless stream of thoughts and fantasies to my mind suggesting romance, only in a frantic rhythm and cadence. Certainly, a teenager might experience something like this when they first meet someone, high on hormonal surges. But this energy felt much younger than a teenager’s, and the anxiety more sinister than teenage angst. Linking this excitement to the secret I was to hold for my uncle, finally revealed that secret. It felt really good to be angry at Pieter for what he did, and the grief has grace in it, in that I feel the integration and healing coming about.
As to the unwholesome energy, I do know it well. There is a person who used to display this excitement around all the men she met - and that is my mother. When she sexually abused me, she acted as if she was inducting me into a secret club of pleasure, exhibiting the same child-like excitement usually reserved for all men. She acted like a sexualized little girl who found a love substitute in the secret physical pleasures of covert sex. Of the two women of our family in Pieter’s young life, his mother was about as far from a beauty pageant contestant as one can get, but my mother definitely aspired to the part. Pieter carried my mother’s energetic stamp. He never showed this excitement at any other time in his life that I’m aware, and I myself am averse to it. It makes me wonder if my mother made more victims than just myself. She was fifteen years old when Pieter was three. She had no boundaries, no shame, and no remorse. We can never get firm confirmation about such things, but we can feel into our own trauma and read the energy of it, which can reveal everything we need to know.