2 days Ago
Have you ever wondered what you would do if you received visions of the future? Now, I need to be clear here. I'm not talking about a situation where you could willingly peer forward through the veils of time and see exactly what you wanted to see. Because, in that situation, I feel 99 out of 100 people would say something like: "Why, I'd get some winning lottery numbers or be like Biff Tannen in Back To The Future 2 and place massive winning bets on every sporting event ever.
And then I'd tell everyone at my place of employment to kiss my ass until their lips fell off." And that slightly pithy, wonderfully greedy response is perfectly human and perfectly understandable. It's the other 1 out of 100 people, who would say something like: "I'd find out if my beloved Arsenal ever wins the cup," that we really need to worry about.
But let's talk about another sort of vision. The kind that comes unbidden and shows you things that are either terrifying, sad or confusing. The kind which makes The Oracle wish that she wasn't one.
I think it's reasonable to state that it would take a special person to handle frequent, unwanted visions of such a nature. And, occasionally, that person may get bent and broken by such visions. Or would have been bent and broken to begin with.
History and folklore are positively littered with examples of this. Many, many stories contain The Seer —those who can part the mists of the unknown and get access to knowledge and vision that should not belong to them. This person, usually a woman — and often of some sort of exotic ancestry, when portrayed in books written by white male authors — is often a figure that inspires fear and respect in equal measure.
And it is often implied that said person is special and potentially unwell in equal measure. It is these women, these all-seeing, powerful, mysterious, frightening, potentially not-all-there women, upon whom Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's impactful new piece of African Gothic literature casts a..
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