As a kid I’ve always had questions about things like death, dreams,
happiness, anger, sadness and a lot of other things that make us human beings,
but I was more interested in death. I remember when my Aunt passed away in 2004
(RIP Desrey Mitchley) I was only 8 years old when she passed away. My mother
called me from hospital I was still living in Ngangelizwe at that time,
she called the helper who stayed with me and my older
brother, anyway, the first thing she sad was ‘Mtnam ndiyakwazi uqinile,le nto
ndizokuxelelela yona ingakophuli’ in English “My child I know you are strong do
not let what I am about to tell you break you” … and I’m just on the line like
…”mama I need to go play outside what’s up”… because my brother actually
fetched me from the streets to talk to mom on the phone. So after she told me
the Des passed away, I cried so hard and honestly I don’t know why I cried but
just after she told me my body felt so uneasy, felt dizzy, I couldn’t eat for days,
vomiting and just feeling tired. She was
my favorite human being on earth, she is still my kick ass aunt J. . My mother new exactly
how I would feel about this situation hence she started to encourage me before
she actually told me about Des. What really confused/surprised her though was
my reaction to the situation, I am sure she asked herself do I even know what
death is because I was still young. Even now I won’t lie and say it really hurt
me(at that time) because I didn’t know
any better ,but I knew something was wrong going and she is obviously not
coming back
Anyway I was told she had migraine and yeah it was a hectic
one.
Fast-forward few, years later I started isolating myself
from a lot of my friends and stayed at home, started hating soccer, watched a
lot of movies(like every kid did) but the change, I used to hate sitting home
all day now all of sudden i never go out
and play with other kids. I developed a hobby, started drawing I would stay late
just drawing weird skeletons from the grave and my mother noticed this
behavior/change. My drawings were no longer clean and all happy anymore. She
would take all the red crayons and red pens and hide them because I always drew
skulls with blood and all these crazy things which I obviously saw on television,
but the crazy part is every female character I drew was Aunt Des. This other
time she banned me from drawing because everything I drew was either graves or
a whole bunch of scary things. So I drew at school most of the time, even my
brother started to intervene, telling me I should stop drawing because I was
dropping at school and I was not as active anymore in sports, dropping in Math basically and he was the one tutoring
me and helping me with my homework’s. Anyway the point is I took my frustrations
(even though I may not have understood them as frustration) but now I do. They
probably thought I was possessed at home lol. Honestly I was just normal,
drawing scary stuff like other kids.
Don’t get me wrong (even if you do, I don’t care) I am not
saying the death of my aunt came with some magical spirit or whatever and boom
I learnt how to draw. No, my drawings/content changed/became dark and I am Christian
so this behavior scared the shit out of my mother who is used on seeing her
son’s beautiful trees and happy green landscapes, psychedelic drawings and
all. I won’t proof read this I made a
lot of grammar mistakes and frankly I don’t care.
On this series i'm just really trying to wrap my head around the question of what is death,how does it feel like. Loneliness,is there something wrong when you feel lonely?,Heaven,is it real? is it far?,is it up there?Is heaven blue? these are things i kind i took into consideration when i roam around the street of Port Elizabeth,just trying to find the most loneliest human being i could find and obviously take a picture of them and yes,with out their consent.
