mama, 2012
There’s a series of photographs taken on my mobile phone shortly after my mother died. This is Johannesburg, March 2012. My brother, my sister and I are clearing out the room where our mother lived out her last few years in anger.
There’s an air of spontaneous gaiety and unreal hilarity in these images. In one sequence, I’ve slipped into one of my mother’s boxy, big-shouldered blazers (in her tailoring, she remained stuck in the eighties) and tied one of her square, silk scarves smartly around my neck. I’ve donned sunglasses – my own – but my scarlet lips are hers, as is the unlit cigarette I make an ostentatious show of puffing. In this hyperbolic construction, I have about me an air of appropriated and travestied glamour: I’m passing as my mother, and both my siblings recognise her in me and cheer me on. Later, they too will slip into the mother-blazer, each taking a turn at being Fay.
I found it so hard to clear up my mother’s things after she died.
Bundling them away felt like bundling her away. And seeing her life reduced to a few meagre possessions was heartbreaking, and made me feel like I hadn’t been a good enough daughter, though I knew that in life, she wanted to exercise control over what she did and didn’t own. Photographing these items quickly and with no concern for artfulness was like taking notes so as not to forget, but also to give her credit in the diminished existence she had in the last years of her life. You see here her sense of order, and how she liked to tidy things. Smoking was the great pleasure. For me, the photographs were a way of not throwing her things away too quickly, of bundling her away.
