Writing on Robben Island – 6 November 2001

Nothing can stop the hand moving once it starts. It makes the line around the world. The line between night and day, the line between beginning and ending and then starts the beginning again while the scratches of the pen are the drumbeats of the present which dance us into the future.

Looking back at Cape Town as the ferry arrives at Robben Island

No amount of knowing or not knowing can stop the rhythm of the writing. It connects as it separates and the separation becomes a connection through the ages.

Beach near Murray Harbour on the Island with Devil's Peak and Table Mountain in the background

And so I sit on this ancient mountain jutting shallowly out of the sea and think of the millions of people who have read about it all over the world and who by the writing are connected to the first people who sat here close to where I am now and watched the clouds tinged with pink sun’s fire just as they are now separated by thousands of years but joined by these lines I’m writing.

After his release from prinson in 1990 and on his first visit back to the Island as a free man Nelson Mandela started this pile of stone in the infamous Lime Quarry where he and the other political prisoners did hard labour

They are flesh of my flesh and bones of my bones and the air going in and out of my nostrils passed through theirs also. And so the pen scratches on breathing new life into my and their brains, our hearts connected by the rhythm of life and the breathing of the waves on the rocky shore.

Window in the cell that housed Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela for some 18 years

And as the pain of birth is fulfilled by the pain of death, the pain of our separation is fulfilled by the pain of our connection. I can never know what they thought or felt as they looked at the clouds with the sound of the sea in their ears. But I feel their hearts beating in the beat of mine.

The prison wall and guard tower

Bitter cold and searing heat connect me to them as the stones on the path hurt my feet. And although I cannot know their joys or their pains my tears are their tears, my fears are their fears.

And I taste the bitter salt of the sea even as I see the glory of the new day’s beginning.

And so night after night has gone by here, season followed season to bring me here to hear again the song of the earth and its people in a new key.

Each generation will grow in the humus of the suffering of the previous one and lives are enriched by hard stone chipped patiently or impatiently away.

And still the pen keeps moving echoing the sound of the blood in my veins and the cries of the sea birds haggling over their catch. And my hope is to know one thing at a time. To know it in my heart and in the soles of my feet as they touch the rough stones of experience or feel the soft grass of love growing over the place of death.

Table Mountain across the Bay

What is my role in this long chain of experience symbolised by the words roughly scrawled across the page? I think it is to allow the words to flow out with the ink and connect me to all those people who through the ages past have walked here and who in ages to come will walk here again.

I can’t know them but I am them. I can’t feel them but I am them. And all I can do is hope that as their words flow onto the page I don’t stop the pen but let it go on until the next one is ready to start here and pick up the rhythm of this song to keep its harmonies rising to the clouds or echoing across the bay as long as people have breath, until the last heart beat fades and this great music rejoins its source in the spheres.

And the silence of its end is the silence of its beginning again.