The Frightened Quotes

“…it feels like throwing a rope in the air to keep oneself from falling.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Some things we are prepared to accept only in their mystery. In their perfect folded forms. By the will of their boundaries, by the doubt in us all.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Black as a mamba, black as burnt bark, black as the men you fear in the dark. Do not fear what you are, there is still warmth in a body with scars. Be gentle, daughter of God, as you would with the residual spark from cinder.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“In the distance, there is a mother nursing the wounds of her child. She is the image of what you must become to yourself.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“The truth is a desert. It is barren at first. You have to fast for forty days and forty nights, evade the devil’s whispers.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“It is a gift to ache. It is alright to remember.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“God help me. There is something inside me I can't contain.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I am not vulgar. I am not the sum of a dozen hands wrapped around my neck.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Grace is not to walk on water, but to sink without resistance. I let the darkest of thoughts overcome me. To have a child, I say, is exhausting, and he will run to me, he will fall asleep in my arms. I am nineteen years old, but my logic is sound — he who fucks a child cannot raise one.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“My mother wonders why I've lost the colour in my eyes. Why I hardly manage to finish a plate of soup. I tell her, ‘Men are not brave, but they are supposed to be.’ She tells me men are ill-prepared and they are frightened.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“But it is familiar to her, it is a kind of inter-generational wounding. It echoes in the manner she came to be born. We both know it, my mother and I, but we will never bring ourselves to say it. There is a pattern of pain on our dark continent. A communion amongst men, who try, but really, couldn't care less about us.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“My father was the first man to break my heart. Men love in order of proximity. The children of his wife would be the ones he loved best, the rest as a kind of discipline.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I don't mean to go on about my body this way, but it remembers things that I've forgotten. My face is blistered and I've cut my hair — in hopes that it might grow again, as it was; before your sister scraped the skin off my neck, and you denied you ever knew me, disgraced me. I have broken down before, but never with the weight of ten years on my body.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“This system of love is in your hardware:
Take a man from his wife, have him love you. Watch it fester like woodlice hollowing the trunk of a tree. We are The Frightened, the women of substance and sin, we know our fathers saw our mothers this way.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I don’t mean to make a fool of myself
I’m just losing my mind and I don’t
feel like doing it quietly.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“A girl comes to terms with being on her own. She develops rituals to sustain her oath. And it becomes evident with time that she has left a good deal of space to crown her solitude as a template for art. To say, for instance, that it is her depth and their lack thereof which makes it hard for them to notice when she's gone. Then she pictures her face taped to the walls in the Marais and dials the number signed at the back of her postcard.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“You don't like the photographer, but you will stay with him. And this will be the shape of how you love. Wilfully, with all the might of your mind, numb to his touch on your body. There will be a rapture, a severing of cords, a disjuncture between your love and your passion. You'll tell yourself that no man has captured the light as he has, and though you wish he were younger, it is quite alright that he fucks you from behind.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“The therapists recommended Mrs Dalloway, where I read that madness is simply a loss of proportion. In my case I felt, as I imagined Virginia Woolf concede, that this was certainly a disproportionate response to sudden pain. But at its core lay something frightening and far more challenging to repair. I was simply no longer a child, and the ground was not solid, and the Eastern Cape was barren and poor, and I didn't have a driver's licence. To witness true poverty when you know what it is to live easily is something very hard to come to terms with. I felt in this moment so far away from you, so far below, and most incapable of reaching.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I'd never cared much for my face before. I'd never cared much for beauty. I just wanted somehow to be loved and to be free. But to desire both these things at once seemed rather contrary. Love, I'd come to understand, was the benevolent choice to restrict oneself. I saw it in the many ways my mother steadied her rage, sighing instead, when she woke to a pile of dishes in the morning.
Her love almost always manifested itself in small acts of servitude.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“It's simple!' I respond, at the edge of my sobriety. "You just have to read and write! That's how I do it! That's how anyone does it! But you also have to be sincere. That matters more than anything!' Even at my loudest, my voice remains hard to hear. He leans in. He wants to be seated close to me. Not for any reason other than to absorb all that I have to say. I begin to understand that it is my mind he wants, not my body. But that feels a little like being heard and not seen, and one still finds in the end that the entirety of their needs must be negotiated. I suppose for a woman there is always that arduous choice: whether to be loved or to be respected.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I understand now why sex is taboo within the confines of sanctity and truth. It is a binding agent. Everything you've said moments before suddenly holds reverence, and it takes a pronounced period of abstinence to unbind from this lewd knot. I arrive home to find my mother seated alone at our dinner table equipped for a gathering of six.
She's been waiting for me, I can feel it. She worries herself with a pot of tea and a box of macarons from Ladurée.
And I look at her with borrowed eyes - fearing her solitude, her size and her calm. She is relieved that I'm home, but I'm no longer at an age where she can scold me. Instead she offers me a cup of tea. Her best approach is to paint our home into a place I'd rather be.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Someone asked me once, 'How do you know when you have been ruined?' She wanted to know because her father died and she had since found it hard to love on equal ground. I told her no man will ever love her the way her father did. That nothing is as unconditional as a parent's love. That she'd suffered a great loss of infinite magnitude.
That she would never be alright and she would have to find a way to be okay with that. 'Trauma is an inconsolable wound you have not accepted to be inconsolable.' I think the point is not to deny our wounds, but to assimilate them.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“The Catalonian photographed an old man struggling with the weight of his outmoded suitcase; a chef caught in a cloud of smoke at the back of a bistro. He found distinct beauty in ordinary things. Even in my sad countenance, how I couldn't look the boy in the eye, how I pinched my lips each time we kissed to reduce the evidence of my ethnicity.
He took to my solemnity, photographed my reading, eating, never giving way to a smile. This is love, I said, I know it, I feel it in the ease with which he takes to my seriousness and my unrelenting focus on the ground. But when you've been misused, you tend to view love as a type of sacrifice, or a numbing of the senses. You never let him please you, instead, you arch your back and offer the full view of your behind.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I printed a poem about an Italian boy in the school publication. Months go by before he finds it and he approaches me to ask if the poem is about him. He tells me no one has ever captured him so precisely before. He has the look of someone who believes he knows me because he has read my work. But I am unknowable, we all are, shifting course to suit each tide. I try to think of what he pictures when he thinks of me. Someone quiet? Alert? The way I glide through campus, my soul ready to depart. Could he bear the full weight of what I am? I reckon at the very least he could try, as might a student of literature reading the cumulated works of Nicole Brossard. He could understand with a certain degree of objectivity, possibly even discern a notable comparison. But could he live with her? The writer? Or stomach the reality that informs her? I presume he's still looking for a dream. He is a young man, he is allowed to. So I will try to be the girl who runs with him, the one who falls and laughs, but not the one who tells sad stories.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Moments I won't forget: When I experienced myself not only as loved but as deserving of it. That's what happiness does, doesn't it? Makes us feel deserving. I recall feeling this way in the mountains of Catalonia, where you'd driven me to visit your grandmother. She lived in a stone hut with wooden floors. She only spoke French and Catalonian. I tried to use what little French I'd learned from the old man to communicate to her that I'd enjoyed her duck confit and her homemade jam. You were her only grandchild, the last of what was left of her son. I could feel how precious you were to her and how much it meant for you to bring me here. We couldn't make love at your grandmother's house. I fell asleep on your chest and drooled over your black t-shirt. And you wore that shirt all day, marks of me all over it. 'It's just you,' you said, shrugging it off as we drove up to a valley for a hike. You photographed me seated on a rock on top of the mountain where you'd scattered your father's remains. We walked past fields with wild horses grazing in the mist, and you allowed me to invent a story about us, there, quietly in my head. That was the moment I was sure. Love is not always an outward expression, sometimes it is, as it was between us, a silent affirmation, a sense of purpose, a feeling of calm.
I promised to complete my first book in the mountains of Catalonia. I promised to come back, but I never did.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Nothing will ever transpire between the Italian and me. I want it too much, and I've based it all on a silent film.
The Italian and I have dinner with his friends - a guild of young writers. I can tell he wants to know me but he's also afraid of something he senses. He isn't quite sure whether his admiration has anything to do with desire, and I'm still trying to adjust to the isolation that comes with being adored from afar. He asks, 'How do you write the way you do?' So earnest in his curiosity. It's quite evident that I've been a subject of enquiry between them. The twenty-one-year-old girl who writes poems about old men. Who is she? They wonder. Men love to sit amongst themselves and mythologise our shame. The trouble was that I wrote about these things as though they were removed from me, like I was now here reflecting on despairing events that occurred in a distant past. But the old man is pervasive, always here, hunching my shoulders, adding weight to my sluggish stance. He makes it almost impossible for me to regard a young man with any feeling of equality.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“Something about a man always trying to make sense of things until sense no longer suits him. How he must hammer at your inclination towards sensibility, make a fuss about it, claim it doesn’t suit you, that he has no use for you. And you, gentle creature that you are, surrender, abandon the a priori, submit to the concrete, the destructible, all for a man who knows, in a way, that he is beneath you, they all are, your minds will never meet, and that it is a kind of grace on our parts to submit submit submit.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I'm seated in a room full of women who hate me for being with a man who doesn't know how to share. Yes he is handsome, yes he is inordinately smart, yes he has promise, and his future is wide and open. But what does any of this matter if the man is a hollowed shell. Some men are mysterious only to hide who they are. Others maintain their mystery in order to hide the fact that they don't know.
They compensate for this feeling of emptiness by filling the room with their absence. They will never risk themselves.
We will never speak on the phone, he'll never write. He will make no effort to respond. I want to tell all the women who envy me that being with him feels a little like playing squash; and while they hope that he's withdrawn from me for the sake of someone else, I know that it takes friction to bond, it takes surrender and possible harm. I worry that he is dead inside, and that there is no hope, because he doesn’t believe in God.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“There has to be a way out of this experience: out of remembering, regretting. I find small uses in breathing. Inhale eight seconds, exhale seven. It’s said to slow the hurry, manipulate the pulse.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened

“I am trying to make sense of dying […] I’m summoning all the parts that compose my sobriety. Sometimes dealing with death feels like dying.”
― Lethokuhle Msimang, The Frightened