From: hornpete@uctvax.uct.ac.za (Peter Horn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: My voice is under control now
Date: 4 Oct 92 09:55:48 +0200
Organization: University of Cape Town

My voice is under control now

As it is the custom among our people I have a hole in my upper lips and a hole
in my lower lip, and when my husband is tired of my talking, he inserts a
wooden peg through the two holes in my lips. These holes are inserted in our
lips in a ceremony called "opening of the mouth" ceremony at the age of four
just after we have begun to talk. During this ceremony an old rhyme is taught
to all the girls which says that speech is precious and must be guarded behind
closed lips. It goes on to say that our fathers and husbands are the guardians
of our speech, and that because speech is so precious it must not be spilled
except when our guardians are there and mentally prepared to receive it. To
spill our speech into other ears, to engage in idle gossip or senseless prattle
while our guardians are preoccupied with other, much more important matters,
such as drinking beer with their friends and the worthy ancestors, is not only
a waste of this precious substance but a serious disturbance of the harmony of
the universe, which is expressed in the custom of men to share their beer with
the ruling spirits of the universe, the ancestors, in a solemn and ancient
ritual of holy jokes about the curves of women's arses and breasts and the
texture of their cunts.
It was not always that I have had this deep understanding of our customs. As a
child I was very rebellious and often tore the slender wooden peg from my lips
when I had the feeling that I just had to tell my parents and their friends
about such important matters as that my puppet's leg had come off and needed
mending or that I was bleeding from a cut in my knee when I had fallen in one
of our childish games. But my parents guided me steadfastly towards an inner
acceptance of our sacred customs, and after a long and nearly endless struggle
against my rebelliousness I have now finally accepted our wonderful traditions,
so that I myself can now hand them on to my own children.
For children like me who did not immediately accept the customs of our people
our society has a very effective measure: the old rhyme says that she who
cannot accept the peg must accept the lock. The lock is a heavy iron
contraption which hangs painfully in the holes of our lips, and which so
effectively locks our lips that we can only make weird and crazy sounds of no
import. The lock also disfigures the face of the woman who has to wear it for
any length of time, and this disfigurement vividly and for anyone to see shows
that the woman who wore the lock was loquacious and could not control her urges
to prattle and gossip. The lock can only be opened by the key in the hand of
our guardian. I am ashamed to say that I had to wear the lock practically
constantly from the age of five to the age of thirty. Even marriage did not
teach me the value of speech, even having children did not convert me once and
for all from my evil ways and so my young babies were confronted with the
appaling spectacle of a mother whose lips had to be secured by the lock while
they already cheerfully exercised the selfcontrol of submitting to the peg.
Already at the age of six I was caught by my elder sister when I wanted to
seduce some of my friends to get rid of their pegs and indulge in a session of
wild and uncontrolled speaking. I had indicated to them that we would meet near
the brook just outside our village where the overhanging trees shielded us
effectively from the view of our elders. As everybody was very busy on that day
preparing for the festival of the naked ancestors, which is celebrated each
year at the first full moon after the spring rains, and attended by all the men
of the village, but for which the women of the village have to prepare enormous
amounts of food and drink, we succeeded in slinking away from the control of
our guardians and assembling in the cool, shady and secluded spot near the
river.
When I took the peg out of my lips, all the other children gasped at my daring
and looked at me in admiration mixed with shame and horror. I encouraged them
to do the same, and said: Come on, let's gossip! Nobody is going to overhear
us!
One of the girls taking out her peg for a moment said: But what about the
ancestors? Don't they see everything?
I said very daringly: The ancestors are too busy with the festival right now,
so none of them will come snooping around here.
This was greeted with a suppressed groan of horror by most of the girls
assembled. One did not speak like that of the ancestors! But as I chattered
away about the meat and the drink and the music and the dancing and the naked
men I had seen exercising throwing stones into the holy holes and about all the
interesting and exciting things which were happening in the village right now,
the one or the other girl shortly took the peg from her lips and contributed
the one or other observation of her own. How the naked men in the great hut of
the ancestors had arranged wrestling matches, how they had performed the dance
of the insemination of the holy spirit of life, how the mayor had lain drunk in
his own vomit for hours before somebody had found him his tongue hanging out
and all blue in the face, nearly choked to death. But most of the girls were
too terrified to remove their pegs although they of course took in all this
exciting talk about our village.
It was then that my sister who has always been an examplary girl and never
rebelled against the customs of our tradition discovered us and our
transgression and went straight back to my mother and told her about this
wicked violation of all the rules which was going on just outside the village.
Within minutes my mother and the mothers of all the girls who were with me came
running towards the bush and dragged us screaming back to the village. Our
fathers were notified in the proper way and they assembled to enquire into this
unheard of thing that young girls of six had assembled to gossip next to the
river. We were all assembled in a hut which is known as the hut of shame
because every woman who has been caught breaking the law of the peg is brought
there to be undressed and smeared with the white of shame and then from there
led to the tribunal of the broken vow.
Each of us in turn was led to the open place before the hut of the mayor,
interrogated and then returned to the hut. In the hut an old woman, called the
keeper of the speech, watched over us so as to prevent any more gossiping. When
it was my turn I had to repeat word for word what I had said in our gossiping
session, and although they must by now have heard it all at least seven times
before, after each sentence they broke out in horrified "Oh's" and "Shame's".
After we had all been interrogated we were called together before the tribunal
and the sentence was read. But at first we were given a long and tedious
repetition of all the instructions which were part of the "opening of the
mouth" ceremony and which clearly set out our duty to be silent unless
specifically asked to talk by our guardians. Then the mayor who acted as the
judge pronounced sentence: all of us, even the ones who had just listened were
to wear the lock for an entire year. There were horrified shouts from our
mothers at this severe sentence. But the mayor said that this unheard of
transgression had to be punished in such a way that the example of the
punishment would kill the desire in anybody to imitate us. A short verse about
our crime and punishment was even included in the rhymes which were recited at
future "opening of the mouth" ceremonies so as to impress on the young girls
the seriousness of our offence once and for all.
To my great shame I must confess that I just simply could not control my urges
to gossip even after this terrible punishment. While I was never again stupid
enough to try and arrange a gossip with a whole crowd of girls, whenever I was
not wearing the lock, I again and again succumbed to the desire to tell others
about what I had experienced, felt, dreamt, hoped, and wanted. And since the
other women were aghast at my immorality, not only did I find fewer and fewer
friends who were prepared to listen to me, those on whom I forced my gossip, to
whom I exposed myself shamelessly, in order to protect themselves from the lock
and from disrepute in the village, began to report my lapses immediately to the
guardians.
My worst transgression, however, came at the age of fifteen, and the shame of
that event is still burning so vividly in my memory that I can hardly bring
myself to talk about it, and it is only so that all can be warned about such
immoral behaviour and avoid it in future that I am now recounting this most
serious breach of the law of the ancestors ever recorded in our village.
There were very few foreigners ever in our village. An occasional white
missionary who attempted to convert us to his strange customs and gave up after
a few weeks of oppressive silence from all the women, the occasional traders,
who however knew that they were not allowed to gossip with the wives and had to
do all their trading with the men. Of course, the ones who sold coloured beads
and nicely printed cloth sometimes attempted to break that rule, because it is
much easier to persuade a woman to buy such an adornment in exchange against
some of the stock of maize she had hidden away in her hut than a man, who saw
these adornments for women as entirely unnecessary. But, of course such
breaches of the rules of conduct were always discovered, at the latest when the
unfortunate woman attempted to wear the adornments in public, and were strictly
punished by the lock. Nevertheless, it was generally admitted that even meek
and mild wives or daughters, who normally submitted to the law of the peg
without any resistance often could not withstand the temptation of a haggling
session with one of the traders. So serious was and is this problem that the
guardians at one stage even considered banning the traders from the village.
Fortunately that idea was soon buried, since most of the men were too lazy to
walk to the far off town to get their necessary provisions, such as tabacco or
yeast for their beer brewing. In any case they themselves have to adorn
themselves for the various festivals of the ancestors, there are at least fifty
of them in the course of the year, with beads, silver armlets and brightly
coloured head scarves. On the whole, with the occasional transgression and
punishment by the lock, the traders therefore do not pose a serious problem,
although their presence is somewhat annoying.
When I found that I had been ostracised by most if not all of the women for my
tendency to gossip, and that even the few who were still prepared to listen to
me, if not to talk, were so afraid that there were very few chances of a real
tension relieving gossip with them, and since my father was an escpecially
taciturn man by that time, who kept the peg in my lips practically without a
break, so depriving me even of the boring conversation with a male guardian, I
really became desperate. The long, nearly constant periods which I suffered in
the lock added to my frustration and rebelliousness.
I am deeply ashamed to confess that at that time I had begun to hate our
ancient and holy customs, I was a more than usually rebellious teenager, I
constantly made weird and uncanny noises from behind my lock, which the people
around me could fortunately not understand. In any case it was the custom to
pretend that women in the lock were not speaking but just making animal noises
to which one need to pay as little attention as to the screams of the monkeys
or the chirping of the birds. Secure behind my lock, which I even began to love
in a weird kind of way, I mumbled such blasphemous things as: This entire male
society is utterly crazy! It suppresses the most natural urge of all human
beings joyfully to talk about all the things which happen to them! The peg is a
torture which men have invented to humiliate women! Why can men gossip as much
as they like at their festivals and beer drinking sessions? The very thought of
using such words as "gossip" for the solemn and ancient ritual of holy jokes
about the curves of women's arses and breasts and the texture of their cunts
today fills me with an unnamed horror. But that, I am ashamed to say, was what
I thought at the time. I do not recount it here to encourage young girls and
women to follow my shameful example but to experience that kind of holy terror
which in the end cured me from my afflictions, and the ancestors willing, will
keep me on the straight and narrow path through the jungle of life in the
future.
Just at that time, when my lock was removed after a lengthy period of over two
years, a young whiteskinned and fair-haired missionary entered our village. If
our men had their way they would have banned all missionaries from our village,
yes, perhaps even have roasted or cooked them at the new moon festival of the
angry ancestors. Unfortunately for all of us these meddlesome men apparently
had the protection of some very powerful ancestors somewhere far away,
ancestors who in contrast to our own ancestors apparently were able to protect
these men from the wrath of our men far away from their homeland. 
This missionary now belonged to an order which had the outrageous and strange
rule that the men belonging to it had to exercise the same kind of silence as
the women in our village. Whether the ancestors of the missionaries believed
that such a silent man would be more acceptable in our village because of our
law of the peg than one who attempted to talk to the women, I don't know. In
reality, however, a man who keeps silent in our village is considered to be
effeminate and a weakling, unable to express himself. So this silent missionary
was the butt of constant jokes in our village, and the men at the beerdrinking
sessions had long conversations about the sexual preferences of a man without a
voice: Does he submit to other men to be sexually satisfied, or does he do it
with the wild animals? Even worse things were suggested which are not properly
spoken of by a woman, such as that he might even do it to himself with his own
hands. The men really had a field day in their sessions of the solemn and
ancient ritual of holy jokes.
To me, however, this man seemed to be a fellow sufferer, one who had been
condemned by other men to eternal silence, and I felt myself drawn to him
inexorably, and I must admit the rumours about his sexual preferences added
just that much spice to my fantasies of finding a soulmate. Since at that time
I found myself in a rebellion which was so fundamental and which questioned all
the wisdom of our community, I was attracted rather than horrified by what at
any other time I would have condemned or found ridiculous. So one night I
escaped from my parental hut and, in the dark, I entered the missionary's hut.
The missionary was on his knees in front of a  piece of wood covered in various
colours, his hands folded in front of his breast. At first he did not notice
me, but when he turned round he looked at me with what seemed great anxiety. He
pointed to his mouth, and indicated that it was sealed.
I in turn took the peg out of my lips and spoke for the first time for a long
time. It was as if with the peg I had opened a sluice and a torrent of words
came out of my mouth, and my speaking lasted well into the morning sunshine.
Never in my life had I spoken so much. I explained to the missionary that I
wanted to have asylum in his hut, that the enforced silence of the peg and the
lock was driving me crazy and that I needed a place where I could speak. All
the time he was silent, stayed on his knees and kept his hands folded. While
his eyes looked at me, I had the feeling that they looked through me. While I
told him my entire life story I had the feeling as if he was at the same time
listening to a higher, more important voice than mine. Nothing seemed to
deflect this constant attention to this inaudible voice and this radiant
presence which I could not see. I told him that in return for the asylum I
would become his wife - at that he shook his head for a moment - without a
bride price, since I was in the eyes of the community entirely worthless: a
woman who could not be silenced even by the lock could not be entrusted with
the upbringing of children. I would, and I blushed violently even accomodate
myself to his strange sexual practices and do it with my hand for him, if he
preferred that. But I felt that at that moment he was already no longer
listening to me. His attention had fully returned to the inaudible voice which
to judge from his behaviour did seem to come from the piece of wood covered in
various colours. But since he had neither thrown me out of his hut nor handed
me over to the the keeper of the speech I assumed that he had granted me asylum
and had accepted my offer to be his wife.
So when, later that morning the women of the village were sent to fetch me for
punishment, I stepped out boldly into the entrance of his hut and told them
that I was now the missionary's wife, that therefore the laws of the village no
longer applied to me, that I could talk as long and as loud as I wanted to,
there were horrified gasps of disbelief from all the women. Such a thing had
never been experienced in the village before. But they returned to their men
and explained how I had refused to come and be punished, as was demanded by our
custom. The men sent the women away and held council for the rest of the day.
As I could see from my hut large quantities of meat and beer were delivered to
the hall of the sacred ancestors. Towards the evening they approached the hut
of the missionary and the mayor demanded to see the missionary. The missionary,
however, continued to listen to his voices, as if he had not heard their
demand.
So it was again I who had to go to the entrance and speak for him. I stood
there boldly, although my knees were quivering in fright, and spoke to them:
The missionary does not deign to speak to such low creatures as you men. He is
so far above you that he does not want to pollute his ears with your prattle.
The men made a noise like an angry swarm of bees. Never in history had a woman
spoken to them like that.
Let us not listen to her crazy and obscene words, said one of the elders
eventually. All the others nodded assent and continue to make angry noises. Let
us just take her and punish her. Only the severest punishment is strong enough
this time.
Stop, I said. The missionary is under the protection of his ancestors, and you
know that you are not allowed to attack him. As I am now his wife, I am under
the same protection. If you touch me, the protection of his ancestors will
strike you dead.
There was a moment of shocked silence among the men. Then they all started to
shout wildly, uttering curses, screaming that I should be abducted, that we
should see whether our ancestors or the missionary's were stronger. But this
time the elder and the mayor spoke to the assembled men and said that
unfortunately they were unable to do anything as long as I was under the
protection of the missionary and his ancestors. Gruesome stories about whole
villages killed by the ancestors of missionaries who had been harmed in these
villages were common knowledge in our village, so most of the men accepted that
nothing could be done to me.
As they left, grumbling, defeated, I was so elated by my victory that I shouted
some of the obscenities which they recited at the solemn and ancient ritual of
holy jokes, but they were so dejected that they did not even turn around to
threaten me with the lock.
Once this was settled, I could move freely through the village, go wherever I
wanted, but no man or woman in the village wanted to talk to me. While I had
completely cast off the peg, and considered myself a free woman not bound by
the laws of the village, my freedom helped me nothing. Since nobody talked to
me or even wanted to listen to me, my freedom was empty and meaningless. I soon
found out that the situation in my own house was not any different. While I
could talk and talk as much as I wanted, I had the feeling that the missionary
never listened to me. While he was physically present in the hut, his ears
where somewhere else, and his mouth was eternally sealed.
I made an attempt to have sex with him, and one night when he was sleeping,
using all the tricks which girls in our village are taught how to please their
husbands, I finally had him doing what man and wife do together in bed, and at
that occasion found out that he was no different in his sexual preferences from
any of our men. But the next morning he was hitting himself all over his naked
body with the sharp nettles which grow in our village, until his body was one
huge weal of nettle stings and covered with cuts bleeding profusely.
From then on he both resisted any further advances, he always cast down his
eyes so as not to see me in my beautiful nakedness, and he became even more
fervently devoted to the voices which he heard. Everything I said was said as
if into a vacuum, an empty room, was mere prattle and noise. Gradually I became
violent, I hit him, I kicked him, I implored him to listen to me, but to no
avail. The whole village in the meantime was both shocked and constantly in
peals of laughter about a man who could not control his woman, who even allowed
her to hit him. The whole situation was so outrageously wrong that a few young
men, amongst them my future husband, decided to give me a lesson, and when I
wandered through the village one day, abducted me and gave me a hiding. The
mayor, who was afraid of the missionary's ancestors came the next day to
apologise to the silent missionary, though not to me.
The band of young men was called to the mayor's house, led to the hut of
unruliness and from there to the tribunal, where they were severely chastised.
The mayor then addressed all the men and the women of the village, declaring me
mad. Only a woman who was completely deranged could have done the things I had
done and could have spoken the way I had spoken. Since I was mad there was no
shame in me, and thus no shame in my acts. None of the men should therefore
feel himself shamed by my words or deeds. If the crazy missionary insisted on
keeping me as his wife, using my hand for his sexual needs, then that was his
affair, they as real men could only laugh about a man who was silent as a woman
and who committed unspeakable acts with me, missionaries, as we all knew were
crazy themselves but under the protection of very powerful ancestors. In short
they should continue to simply ignore me and not respond to whatever
provocation.
I, in the meantime, was so frustrated with the unresponsive missionary that I
ran around the village in the nude, talking and talking all the time, no longer
caring if anybody listened, my hair in disarray and more and more dirty,
fouling myself, drinking beer which I stole from kitchens momentarily not
protected. Nobody touched me anymore. I became more and more like the mad woman
which the mayor had declared me to be.
One day I broke into the house of the ancestors, when the men shared their beer
with the ruling spirits of the universe, the ancestors, in the solemn and
ancient ritual of holy jokes about the curves of women's arses and breasts and
the texture of their cunts. There was a shocked silence, because no woman had
ever been allowed to enter this holy ground. My presence there, entirely
unthinkable, defiled this holy place. I went and picked up a drinking vessel,
filled it with beer, and drank, pouring some of it on the ground, greeting the
ancestors, as if I were a man. None of the men had moved. It was as if my
entrance had turned them all to stone.
Then I stood up and after uttering some of the customary obscenities I said: I
am no longer the wife of the missionary. Herewith I end my marriage. That again
had never happened in our village before. Of course, men are entirely at
liberty to divorce a troublesome and talkative wife, in fact that is expected
of them. They would be considered soft and under the spell of a woman if they
tolerated such a wife. Often they only pretend that women are troublesome so as
to be able to marry a younger wife. But never before had a woman divorced a
man, and only because the man was this strange and crazy missionary was the
divorce accepted.
The divorce, naturally brought me back under the guardianship of my father, and
he, after consulting with the mayor, decided to bring me to a healer who lived
a day's march away in the northern forests. My lips under lock and key I was
driven like a stray animal along the dusty roads through the maize fields and
through the hot bush and the grass field with cattle grazing on them to the
edge of the dark forest. Following a narrow path amongst the gigantic trees
down a ravine we finally arrived at a hut woven out of fern and grass at the
edge of a small stream. There I was handed over to the healer, who asked that
the lock be removed from my lips and then led me to a second, much smaller
grass hut, where he indicated I had to wait in silence while he spoke to the
men who had escorted me to this wild and inhospitable place.
After the men had gone the healer came to fetch me. He was a small wizened old
man with grey hair and curiously agile eyes clad in wild animal skins wearing a
rod covered in coloured beads. For a long time we sat without talking. Then, as
the shadows of the trees deepened, and after he had lit a fire and had started
to boil something on it, he began to talk to me, and his voice was soothing and
spun a web of dreams around my troubled mind. It was the lure of this voice
which eventually made me talk, tell him the one or other thing about my life,
about my shameful compulsion to gossip. After many days of such talk I even
confessed the blasphemous and hair-raising ideas which I had formed as a
teenager that the peg is a torture which men have invented to humiliate women.
He was always understanding and a good listener, so that in the end I even
related the horrifying story of my marriage to the missionary and my
desecration of the hut of the ancestors to him. I could see that he paled for a
moment at such outrageous behaviour which must have been unheard of even to him
who had been dealing with many crazy and deranged women in his life, but he
quickly gained control over himself again, and listened to the story as if it
were a common and everyday occurence that a woman talks back to men who have
come to fetch her for punishment.
After three months of staying with the healer, and after my mouth had been
purged of its dirty gossip several times with a concotion made of very bitter
roots, the healer declared me healed, and sent me back to the village.
When I arrived there, I met the group of the young men again who had beaten me
up while I was married to the missionary. One of them stepped forward and said
to me: although you are an incurable gossip I have decided to make you my wife,
and your father has agreed to give you to me without a bride price. I have made
a wager with my comrades here that I will be the one to cure you of your habit
of gossiping.
There was nothing I could do, and I followed my husband to his hut. It took
only two days before my lips were back in the lock, because the habit of daily
talking to the healer had pampered my desire to gossip, and I was not used
anymore not to say what came into my mind whenever it came into my mind. It
happened when I asked one of my girlhood friends what had happened to the
missionary, whose hut I saw stood empty. My friend confided to me in agitated
whispers that one day while I was at the healer's this strange man had burned
down the hall of the ancestors, had stood before the burning house and had
spoken for the first time since he had come to the village, saying that they
must abandon their evil customs and embrace a thing which he called Jesus. The
men who were very angry shouted at him that never would they be converted to
his strange sexual practices, and that they were quite content to embrace their
wives, and would never sink as low as to embrace a thing like Jesus. Since they
were not allowed to touch the missionary, the men sent a delegation to the town
which is several days away, and complained there that the missionary had gone
crazy and would they please fetch him. A few days after they had returned three
white men in strange clothes came and took him away.
Despite the wager of my husband he did not succeed in silencing me, and even
after we had several children together, I had to be put under lock again and
again. When he had to pay out his age mates on the wager he became really
furious, and one night he dragged me down to near the brook just outside our
village where the overhanging trees trailed their branches in the streaming
water. There he took out a huge butcher knife and said: Since I have not been
able to silence you by any other means, I am now going to cut your throat.
For the first time in my life I was speechless. My lips quivered but did not
make a sound. I fell on my knees and lifted my hands and implored him to spare
me with that gesture. But I was unable to utter a single word.
From that moment on I became as silent as the missionary, my first husband. I
never spoke again. But three weeks later I poisoned my husband with a plant
which I had learnt how to cook at the healer's hut. He died in terrible cramps
while shouting abuse at me and my cooking. Nobody ever found out that I had
killed him, and since I could no longer speak, I could not betray myself by
idle talk.
-- 
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Peter Horn 
German Department, UCT 
43 Trevor Road, Lansdowne 7764, Cape, Republic of  South Africa . 
Phone Home ZA-(021)696-1983		e-Mail: HORNPETE@UCTVAX.UCT.AC.ZA 
      Work ZA-(021)650-2936		Fax ZA-(021) 650-3726 
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Peter Horn, Walking through our sleep (Poems), Ravan Press 1974
Peter Horn, Poems 1964-1989, Ravan Press 1991
Peter Horn, An Axe in the Ice (Poems), COSAW Publishing House 
forthcoming September/October 1992
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Ravan Press, P.O.Box 31134, Braamfontein 2017, Republic of South Africa
COSAW Publishing House, P.O.Box 421007, Fordsburg 2033, Republic of 
South Africa.
USA: Ohio University Press Fax (614) 593-4536
Britain: Central Books, Fax (71) 378-1811
Australia: New Era Books, Fax (02) 596-0045
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