The Rock River Files | File 2

–Topography 101

Pastel Habitats

The other day, whilst sitting by the river, I saw a kingfisher. It flew past me so fast I felt both joy and sadness almost simultaneously. On reflection, I saw absolutely nothing - just a flash. The trail of a fleeting, shooting, blue star. It was like a vivid memory – I wanted to hold onto – that somehow escaped me. My dalliance with the kingfisher made me think about the way birds utilise their experience of landscapes to help guide them over great distances.

“Their [birds] ability to successfully perform long-distance migrations can probably only be fully explained with an accounting for the cognitive ability of the birds to recognize habitats and form mental maps.”  source: wikipedia

During my formative years – in South Wales – there was, in my life, a marked absence of resilient structures of love. So I developed a heightened awareness of my environment…the world around me. I would go blackberry picking on the embankments beside the steel train tracks that flowed like rivulets over a rock riverbed, behind my street. And sometimes, just as you would to hear the ocean in a seashell, I would lay my head on the tracks (the main line between Cardiff and London) and listen to them whisper. It was like they were a conduit for the voices of children whose lives were lost on the line, warning me of impending danger. They would whisper long before the train was in view, and by the time the train approached the whisper would always turn into a gut-wrenching scream. Then there was my ability to find routes through the thorny arms & pinching fingers of brambles and stinging nettles (stingies) without getting scratched or stung – almost as if the plants knew I had been hurt enough, so instead, offered me sympathy in the form of safe passage to the berries; individual clusters of the earth's gloopy black tears. I even developed a knack for sniffing out the maggots within the black fruits’ ever-shifting spectrum of bittersweetness.

© Copyright Gareth James

And the butterflies, they became something to covet, a flame to capture – to illuminate the dark hours. I would use the discarded Perspex boxes that once housed my mother’s cheap jewellery, as makeshift plastic sarcophaguses. I would attempt to position the dead butterflies (more often than not, moths) on the velvet cushion inlays. To me, the butterfly was a symbol of courage; their fragility belied by their visual arias that dared to defy the forces of nature. There was a time I would’ve given all the world to be able to successfully place a dead butterfly – their wings the same shades of pastel as the terrace houses on my street (pictured above) – in a resin case, wings outstretched for all eternity like a beautiful inclusion in a piece of synthetic amber. Yet, always, my little dirty fingers would corrupt the powdery perfection of their pastel crayoned wings.

There were coal yards by the railway lines. The coal possessed the same powdery pastel crayon quality as the butterfly wings. I would ascend the shifting slopes of the slag heaps, on the lookout for prize pieces of coal. There is a vulnerability to a piece of coal…sadness…fragility, even. And promise, too. To my young mind, a piece of coal was like a chrysalis – its stoic earthbound hardness belying its destiny on the wind. If I looked at a piece of coal for long enough I could see the synapses of its mind glinting across its surface as if I were witnessing the birth of an idea; the inception of its metamorphosis. And if I looked at that piece of coal for longer still – which I often did – I could see the workings of my own imagination; the organs of my mind.

© Copyright Sean Edwards

As I grew older and my biological structures became more and more ruinous, I evolved. I learned to love the manmade. I learned to love the steel; the walls; the kerbs; the uninhabited buildings and places that abutted the imperceptibly moving asphalt rivers. Until eventually, I learned to love their components: the grit, the glass, the synthetics, the cement and liquorish-coloured tar that held together long after my own structures of love were no longer. Moreover, I learnt that the bricks can love you back; protect you, the asphalt river carry you far away, and that the cement can hold together when all you got is falling apart.

The landscape I once knew is the topography of a childhood…my childhood. And it loves me…it really does. Because it’s the only thing in this world that remembers me, remembers me as I once was. These are the places that raised me. And they are more than landmarks, more than a series of mental maps. These places were – in my lifetime – the relationships that endured. They offer me more than memories, more than love, more than a way to find my way. They offer me an identity. A provenance. A source.

Sometimes the councils and local authorities – usually innocently – demolish or destroy my recognisable habitats. My beautiful secondary school (pictured, right), for instance, was demolished in the 90s – my year was the last year to attend. On the railway sidings now stands a retail park. The shopping centre (above, left) on the estate I lived on with my biological family, my very last experience of a biological family, is now due for demolition.  And large swathes of the London council estate (pictured bottom, left) that I lived on after I left the young peoples' home in Cardiff, are now due to be sold off and demolished to raise funds for the council.

Every time another of my "recognizable habitats" is lost, I lose my way; a little more of my identity is eroded. But, when looked at from far enough away – everything remains…everything. Everything is just as it once was, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." The scars on the land are like the scars of the mind – indelible.

When I look back, I am still there. Waiting on the lines, earthbound, landlocked, so small – with the bittersweet taste of blackness on my lips and the powdery pigments of earth’s crayons on my hands. And between the scars and the contours and the erosion of the lost land that always remembers me, I see the child I once was. Waving both arms in the air, yelling up at me from the embankment – from such a distance the voice sounds more like the whisper of an unseen train on the steel tracks by a lonely siding – crying out:  It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m between the coal and the butterflies. You can leave me, I’ll be okay. Just keep going…keep on going! You’re going in the right direction. I know. I won’t never forget you, either.


–Cheyelle

COPYRIGHT ©2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:  CHEYELLE OMAR