Parents and Children
January 2009
Banner photo: © Frans Lemmens/Getty Images
The Angle of the Gaze
My father owned a tailor's shop in a small town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, but when he moved down to Cape Town in 1971 with my mother, he sold his business and found a job in the construction boom.
In his new job, my father was a carpenter, but he didn't put his training as a tailor behind him. He continued to make clothing for my mother and the children. There was an industrial sewing machine in the corner of their bedroom and brown cardboard patterns lay on top of their wardrobe. With them, he made my mother skirts and jackets that were the envy of her sisters, themselves seamstresses and the daughters of seamstresses.
Watching him sew, I think I learned how the two kinds of work were connected. A few years ago, I went to buy supplies for a new floor in my parents' bedroom. As I waited, my eyes wandered over the displays. The precision of the boards and their matching door handles, skirting and nails all spoke of a certain careful beauty.
I needed four floorboards and had to choose between 6mm and 8mm laminates, the latter for high traffic areas like doorways or lobbies. I went for the cheaper 6mm ones but the store was out of stock so I took the higher traffic boards, even though my parents' bedroom is a quiet place.
Two millimeters--the whole store was filled with fine distinctions and men who understand their meaning. Black men, white men, builders, laborers, artisans--they spoke a language that is about the eye, which material and machines to choose, what weight to place on a hammer, how to change the angle of the gaze in the late sunlight to find the places on a wall that need touching up--the line, the corner, the finish. A language in which they measure one another by the skill of a hand, the ability to plane something smooth, to love its length and straight lines. Here, different men contemplate differences silently, run their fingers down the grain of wood, make their choices.
My father loved to see my mother wear the clothes he made. Today, a decade after he died, the precision and love of his craft are evident in the lines of the cupboards in the bedroom and of the coat my mother wears.
Fit
Dim light of the tailor shop, small bell calling
him from the back, shelves with their bottles
of buttons, a thimble, dust and thread
of cuttings on the floor.
To make a coat, search
in all the fabric shops from Wynberg
to Town for cotton, linen, wool.
He licks a forefinger to turn to a new page
in the small black book with red binding
and, holding a thick stub of pencil, measures
the arm from collarbone to wrist, elbow bent.
At the waist, two fingers go
on the inside of the measuring tape
to allow a give of flesh between
the measure and the fit.
He translates the length and hardness
of the bones, the breath and change
of the human body
into the flat numbers of the pattern.
*
My father loved to see
my mother wear the clothes he made for her.
At the fitting, holding pins at the side
of his mouth, he lifts the coat from its hanger,
seams pressed but not yet finished
with buttons and hem.
She puts it on, turning
the cloth from two dimensions into three.
Always this taking shape around the body,
this translation again of breath into fit.
To watch my mother as she hurried
out of the house on her way to work, the swish
of her dress in the slipstream of her walk,
was to discover a rhythm too fine to see
in the steps themselves. To grasp it fully,
you had to watch her coat as she left.
--from A hundred silences, 2006,
Cape Town, Kwela/Snailpress
Gabeba Baderoon, from South Africa, is the author of three poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005) and A hundred silences (2006). Visit http://www.gabeba.com
