Absent. The English Teacher: The English Teacher

12. ...The Need

1 12 … …T TH HE E N NE EE ED D George read to the boys for about an hour, paraphrasing nearly every line and thoroughly mystifying them with scurrilous assertions that ‘nothing’ (no thing) was a vagina (0). As if that wasn’t enough he linked Lear’s ‘darker purpose’ with Edgar’s ‘dark and vicious place’, insinuating that the King had some sort of guilty incestuous feeling for his daughter. The word ‘place’, he explained, like ‘nothing’, was a vagina, and it had that connotation in Cordelia’s sarcastic reply to ‘the jewels of our father’, her sisters: But yet, alas, stood I within his grace, I would prefer him to a better place. And later in the play, Regan jealously asks Edmund, ‘Have you never found my brother’s way / To the forfended place?’ She suspects that Edmund has been having sex with Goneril. George tried to explain, without much conviction, that Shakespeare used female genitalia as a metaphor of Lear’s loss of masculine authority, as a king, as a man, and as a father. Doesn’t the fool repeatedly call him ‘nothing’, an ‘O without a cipher’, a ‘shealed peascod’? “That’s a shelled pea-pod, boys.” “Shelled?” “With all the peas taken out. By the way, if you reverse the word ‘peascod ’ you get ‘codpiece’. A codpiece was a sort of leather bag that men wore at the front of their trousers, and it came to symbolise masculinity. Lear isn’t the only male character to whom this emasculating imagery is applied . The blinded Gloucester is told to ‘smell his way to Dover’ (in this play, men are associated with the sense of sight, women with the sense of smell), and who can forget that haunting inversion: ‘Edgar I nothing am’? And Albany gets put down in this way by his wife, Goneril. She calls him a ‘milk-livered man’, and when he says the only thing that restrains him from beating her is her ‘woman’s shape’, she replies mockingly, ‘Marry, your manhood! Mew!’” 75 “AlsoLadyMacbeth,”saidSkelter,“sheaccusesMacbethofbeingacoward.” “Yes, and Cleopatra taunts Antony in a similar way.” “Why is it men hate being called cowards?” “I guess it goes back to the days when men were warriors and hunters. They had to be brave. That was one of the worst effects of colonialism in Africa. It turned warriors into houseboys. How’s that for emasculation?” George smiled at the twins who smiled back. Ultimate called them for lunch, pizza and Coca-Cola from the takeaway at Hillside shopping centre , and they seemed quite relieved that the lesson had come to an end. They wandered indoors with their sister, amazed at how little the synopsis of the play, which their teacher had given them, had to do with it. George always dressed in his old school clothes on his day off: the powder -blue safari-suit was his favourite, with its loose fit and its capacious pockets. His rapid weight loss had rendered the suit even looser, and the pockets even more capacious. Also on Sundays, he replaced his workaday tackies with his reinforced cardboard shoes (socks, however, from Woolworths), and his tasselled fez with a floppy hat. He was ready to go out walking. He wondered if the mysterious little girl would like to come along. The snowberries were in season, and if they were lucky they might stumble upon some field mushrooms. She was still under the bed, the pipless mealie cob in her hand. She stared at him with expressionless eyes. “Would you like to go for a walk, child?” asked George in a gentle voice. She did not move until he held out his hand, which she took with hers, and then squirmed out from under the bed. He stood her up and dusted the tracksuit top. He wondered at her age: seven? “Come,” he said, “let’s go.” Hand in hand they walked to the side gate, Hercules and Ajax anxious to join them but knowing that without the choke chains there was no ‘walkies’. George didn’t have a key for the padlock and Joseph had been arrested on Friday and was still in custody. The police had stepped up their arrests of poor people since Simba Makoni’s announcement that he would stand against Robert Mugabe in the forthcoming presidential elections . Suddenly people were being apprehended for not having lights on their bicycles, or for chatting together in public places. Joseph had been confronted by five policemen...