The God of War within

There is a quiet war unfolding in my house. The kind that does not announce itself with sirens or headlines. The kind that does not make it onto timelines or into breaking news alerts but instead settles into the corners of the home, into the rhythm of breathing, into the slow, deliberate movements of a body that has carried too much for too long.

My grandmother is here, having travelled from Limpopo with very little in her hands but everything in her being. There is an understanding among us that no one has dared to name out loud, a fragile, hovering awareness that her visit is not just a visit in the ordinary sense but something heavier, something final, something that sits between presence and departure, between being here and preparing to leave. Before goodbye, though, there is something else entirely, something urgent and insistent, something that feels almost like a release.

She talks now in a way that feels both deliberate and uncontrollable, as though the stories have been waiting for this exact moment to surface, as though her body has decided that silence is no longer necessary. Her voice moves through the room, stretching across time, collapsing decades into single sentences, bringing the past so close it feels like it is happening again in front of us. She talks about my grandfather but not in the way we have come to know him, not as the softened figure who existed within the safe borders of our childhood memories, not as the quiet presence who occupied space without demanding too much from it but as a man who was once sharper, more difficult, more flawed in ways that we were never made aware of.

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And there is something deeply unsettling about listening to her speak of him like this, not because it feels like betrayal but because it shifts something fundamental inside us, rearranging the neat and uncomplicated stories we had told ourselves about who he was, forcing us to sit with the uncomfortable reality that people are never just one thing, that even those we think we understand are layered with histories we may never fully grasp. She speaks of his flaws not with anger, not with resentment but with a kind of calm clarity that feels almost heavier than either, as though she has done the work of processing, of carrying, of surviving and what remains now is simply the truth, laid out plainly, without decoration, without apology. It is strange, the way proximity to death seems to loosen the grip of silence, the way it creates space for things that once felt unsayable to be spoken without hesitation, as though the urgency of the moment demands honesty above all else. She talks about her life as a domestic worker in apartheid South Africa in a way that sounds almost ordinary but the more she speaks, the more it becomes clear that there was nothing ordinary about it, because domestic work was never just about cleaning houses or raising other people’s children.

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