Dear cousin

In her letter to her deceased cousin, Ronelda S. Kamfer tries to make contact via a non-existent line. She revisits the world of their shared childhood, which was shaped by hereditary silence and the subtle brutality experienced by working-class children in South Africa. Survival is neither an animalistic instinct nor a heroic deed, but rather a form of graceless labour. However, amid the backdrop of factories and funeral rites, there is a glimmer of resistance in the form of a shared laugh – one that is both rebellious and liberating.

Dear cousin,

My dad called to tell me you’d died. They’re saying you killed yourself. All I could say was, ‘Shit, we promised we’d outlive our dads,’ before switching my phone off. It’s still off. I imagine the inside of it crawling with emotional code: crying emojis and broken hearts. I stopped replying to messages a long time ago. The only person I want to discuss your death with is you. I apologise if this is something you’d rather not talk about. I was always doing that when we were kids – bringing up things you didn’t like.

Like the time I begged you to teach me how to ride the bicycle you got one Christmas. You refused. ‘Bikes are boring things. We’re not those people’s kids,’ you said. We were not those people’s kids. It became a manifesto, etched in the soot and rubble of our upbringing. We were raised by cleaners and factory workers – people whose lives were measured in shifts and stains. Their backs curved like highways. Our inheritance wasn’t trust funds or degrees or even a family name to lean on; it was a stoic acceptance of fatigue. You told me to stop trying to pass through life as a normal person, to stop polishing the rough edges of our origin. ‘Bikes and gifts are for children,’ you said. ‘We were only children in age.’

We were raised by cleaners and factory workers – people whose lives were measured in shifts and stains. Their backs curved like highways.

So instead, I asked you to join me in learning how to swim. I was drawn to the water’s terrible honesty – its refusal to be lied to or to lie. It demanded surrender before allowing passage.You shook your head, eyes fixed on the ground. That was your whole body language whenever life asked for your participation.

‘If I ever fall in the sea,’ you said, ‘I should just drown. I don’t want to fight for survival.’ We were different in that way: me, fascinated by the deepest blue; you, contemptuous of its demands.

You saw survival itself as graceless labour, an exhausting expenditure of energy. We only stayed afloat to keep our heads above debt, disappointment, and social pressure. If the sea claimed you, so be it – a clean surrender.

So when I see you waving in the sea, is that goodbye? Not a distress signal, not a call for a lifeline? Then it’s farewell – a final, unburdened salute to the shore you let disappear. ‘I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.’ That old poem returns to me.

When we were seven, I almost went a year without speaking. I wonder if you ‘d even remember that. Everyone thought it was a vow of silence – a protest against the trivial noise of the world, like some angry nun in conversation with God. But the truth was simpler: I couldn’t speak. I was Dea Muta – the mute Roman goddess. An angry man – my father – had ripped my tongue out. So I pulled a blanket of quiet over myself and made it safe there. You were the only one who never tried to lift it.

You taught me the volume of silence – the deepest form of communion. We fed on silence for half our lives. Silence sustained us when it felt like even a cry or a whisper could make the walls fall down around us.

An angry man – my father – had ripped my tongue out. So I pulled a blanket of quiet over myself and made it safe there. You were the only one who never tried to lift it.

Those were the years when the tidal wave of our resentments washed the world away. And it was the death of context, the collapse of the architecture of our lives. So many of our family members died. The people who defined us, who were our anchors in this life. And with them so many parts of our history died. We were two children in an empty city, scavenging for little things to stave off our growing desolation.

One day, walking home from school, we saw a smooth tree branch lying in our path. You picked it up and brandished it like a ceremonial sword. Then, without warning, you struck me on the arm. Not hard enough to bruise, but enough to slice the air. I froze. I didn’t cry out, or flinch, or drop my schoolbag. I just held the spot where the branch landed and held my breath.

Leaning in, holding my stare, you whispered: ‘Even though you don’t speak, you’re extremely annoying ... and loud.’

I remember thinking, How dare you? But my defence stayed locked inside me – a mute, roaring rebuttal scribbled on a prison wall. You read me like a star sign; I could never tell how much of it was true. You said you could tell when I was screaming at people by how I held my breath until they left the room.

We walked the last block home. The crowd came into view first: old women in black with bright floral scarves and shawls. Then came the sound: wailing between worship songs. It was ancient, a noise that peeled paint from the walls and flattened grass underfoot. A language that needed no translation. The scream I’d kept locked inside was being voiced by every mother, sister, and aunt in that yard.

You read me like a star sign; I could never tell how much of it was true. You said you could tell when I was screaming at people by how I held my breath until they left the room.

You, pragmatic and disturbingly calm, asked your mum who had died. Sometimes your quiet frightened me. ‘Stille water, diepe grond, onder draai die duiwel rond,’ was all I could think.

Your mother looked at you, her face a canvas of grief and exhaustion, and said: ‘Everyone.’ You looked around, saw your father skulking in a corner, and walked on. If ‘everyone’ didn’t include him, you weren’t interested.

We slipped away like ghosts looking for rest. We sat outside in a patch of shade, a safe distance from the epicentre of sorrow. We just listened to the wailing, letting it wash over us – a cleansing, terrifying baptism. You didn’t talk. You simply existed beside me, a silent witness to the catastrophe. No one ever told us who had died, we found out the same way the neighbours did – by hearing the rumours. It was a young person though. A little older than us. A cousin, too.

Then the weird Ayaman appeared, materialising out of the shadows. His sorrow looked performed, a man treating tragedy as theatre. Flowing robes, ridiculous beard. He moved with the slow, deliberate pace of a minor deity. He stopped, pointed a long, bony finger at us – two silent children in the sun – and said, in a low theatrical rumble: ‘You must never, ever break your mammies’ hearts. Otherwise, you will live in eternal pain.’

You waited until he was gone, robes swishing like dry paper, before leaning over and saying, ‘That’s a pork-eating Rasta.’

The laughter of the once-mute must always be jarring – a betrayal of silence. I stopped immediately. You looked at my face – a contortion of guilt and sudden joy – and then you started laughing.

And in the face of ‘everyone dying,’ in the shadow of eternal pain, and before that absurd prophet, I smiled. It was a tiny crack in the wall of silence. Then I burst out laughing.

The sound was strange – rusty, unused, an ungreased hinge of noise. It made us both uncomfortable. The laughter of the once-mute must always be jarring – a betrayal of silence. I stopped immediately. You looked at my face – a contortion of guilt and sudden joy – and then you started laughing. Loud, barking, unapologetic. A laugh that rejected the Ayaman, the wailing, the dead.

‘You laugh like an old man,’ you said, wiping a tear from your eye, the insult full of affection.

This made me glad you were my cousin. In that sun-soaked space, we found our unholy, irreverent communion. Everyone may have died that day, but we – the children of cleaners and factory workers – were born again in that liberating laughter, bound not only by blood but by defiance. The last two people standing on the shore.

I can't believe you just stepped into those waves. You simply rejected the fight, like you promised you would. In our family, no one ever spoke the truth, why did you? I will never see you again. That is the part that breaks the silence in me into a million pieces. We were going to live forever. As a constant, irritating presence in each other’s lives. Now that you’re dead, who will haunt me now?

Everyone may have died that day, but we – the children of cleaners and factory workers – were born again in that liberating laughter, bound not only by blood but by defiance.

I don’t remember if I ever told you about Japan’s wind phone. It’s a telephone booth with an unconnected phone, standing in a field in the middle of nowhere. You can call the dead from there. That’s where I’m writing from: the middle of nowhere, where the air is thinnest, between earth and space. Another attempt at fleshing out the skeletal frame of our childhood. My words search for you in the echoing silence.

‘Hello, are you there?’

Your cousin,
Ronelda