Architecture of Division

Daily we watched the aggressive side of town feeding off the depressed side of town. My parents constantly at loggerheads with one another had a huge impact on the cityscape of my developing awareness. Children can absorb only so much of the madness. As soon as we could walk, we bolted out the door to the hills. There were actual hills nearby, wild surrogate bosoms ready to distract the urchins displaced and traumatized by the perpetual tit for tat. I had a wonderful childhood filled with adventures in those hills despite the backdrop of a divided architecture back home.

My parents when I was growing up never concerned themselves with any of the latest developments in fine dining. Little love was infused into the psycho-emotional pottage that was usually served, oscillating between piping hot anger and stone-cold melancholy. As an army cook my father certainly knew how to follow a menu.  Boy did he dish it out every time my mother served him a meal. Countless dinners sautéed with a torrent of verbal and mental abuse from the sergeant major. I became a target once for refusing to eat liver, still can’t stomach that shit. My mother received the brunt of the verbal abuse. When the legions of horrid names were deployed upon her, we all acutely felt the pain. Some families have a grace before meals. We had a holy disgrace for a prologue and an epilogue to every dinner.  Why was he such an antichrist, especially around dinnertime? Having a rare confessional moment with us once, he revealed that he was receiving the same hurtful ingredients from every rank and file within the barracks. It was an absurd joke to us that he worked in an army tasked with mainly peacekeeping duties abroad. Without the tools to deal with all that negative energy, he held onto it until chowtime and channeled the messed-up shit he absorbed in the mess hall into us. Its basic physics.

Extract from Seescapes Chapter 1.

All Images © Stuart Christie