AustLit

'The sharp sting on my thigh brings my mind back to the present, and I look up to see Mama's face glaring at me disapprovingly as Pastor Mnisi continues to scream into the microphone, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead. Naledi's smirking face pops out from behind Mama's shoulder, and she shakes her head at me in feigned disapproval. It's been two hours now, and it doesn't seem like we are any closer to the praise-and-worship part of the day. These visiting pastors always have to make a show of it, as though we have all the time in the world, like in Africa.' (Introduction)  

'Two months ago, my paternal grandfather passed away. It was a Wednesday, usually my favourite day of the week — now always a reminder that it has been (x) days since he left us. The worst thing about grief is the forgetting: those split-second eternities when you are caught between dreaming and waking. Those moments in between heartbeats, as you draw in a breath, before it leaves your body with a sob. The space of a step when suddenly the weight of memories makes you stumble. I still forget there is a gaping hole in the universe in the shape of his smile.' (Introduction)
 

First, looking up, there is the dance. How long ago? A long time ago. Growing up, I knew my father's family came from a long time ago. All rime, from time travel, yet we were severed from the knowledge of the dance — where the feet go, the arms bent, the hips, the line of spine. We didn't have the carriberrie or corroboree, nor the song with it. We were living on saltwater country, not freshwater, not from those rivers and lakes where history sat beyond the escarpment in a slouched pose, defeated. There was no dance handed down, it had been cast into the four winds, yet I saw the dance. My cousin is the dancer still and there, that early memory is of her at a family gathering — in one of those blip moments, I am looking up at an impromptu modern dance, fluid, mad, yet articulate. I think she'd just graduated from dancing with the Martha Graham School in New York and returned to our slip of coast. I looked up from where I sat and saw all the possibility in the world. My cousin evoking a dance long buried. From those child's eyes she was the most incredible person I knew. I wondered how it was that she salvaged the dance? I wondered, had she read about it, had someone whispered it to her, did she time travel to find the moves, did the ancestors visit her in her dreams? Would they visit Ma too?  (Introduction)