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The Ghost of Amelia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2022

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Summary

The fear of abandonment phobia is characterized by extreme dependency on others. It is commonly seen in adults and children who are also diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorders. Such people live in the constant fear that their ‘world will collapse’ if their protectors or loved ones abandon them.

I LEAVE IT TO SPECIALISTS TO DECIDE whether the ‘Borderline Personality’ syndrome, to which the above quote from a medical handbook refers, might have applied to Dambudzo's psyche or not. What I am sure of, however, and what many examples in my narrative reflect, is that my friend was horrified at the prospect of being left alone.

When he could not accuse me of expelling him – because he had his own flat – he hissed the flag of abandonment.

In August 1984 my family and I went on our first visit home to Germany.

When I told Dambudzo that I would be away for a month, his world collapsed. He thought he would never see me again. Although his fear was utterly irrational and, for me, incomprehensible, for him this was reality. All through his life he seemed to re-enact the dejection he had lived through as a child: his father's violent death and his mother's turning to other men in order to make a living for him and his siblings.

The ‘Amelia Sonnets’, which he wrote in anticipation of my departure, talk about his fears of abandonment. The ordinary objects around him, the dust, the crockery, the cockroaches, turn into symbols of absence.

A band of near-molten steel tightens

Around my iceblock head. The clock ticking

Hurls loneliness’ searing arrows. The dust

In the neglected flat, glows like radioactive

Particles under my bare feet. Though noon,

I stand in my nightshirt grinning inanely,

Afraid to draw the curtains on the bright

Nightmare of daylight.

All that's left of Amelia is all this pottery

Silent, soothing, yet eerily arranged around my memories.

Absence, loneliness, abandonment become premonitions of death. In apocalyptic scenarios heaven and hell are invoked, ghosts and skeletons embrace each other in lecherous dances, foul flesh and rotten bones haunt the figure of Amelia.

On my seventh drink she appeared in strips

Of rotting flesh and faintly gleaming bones – Her

Hollow eye sockets instantly found me.

Type
Chapter
Information
They Called You Dambudzo
A Memoir
, pp. 158 - 163
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

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