Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/2

In the second part of our literary journey on Planet Literature, Zacharias Mbizos’s literary miniatures take us to dream worlds that – in keeping with the season – take place in a wintry setting.

Winterly Seclusion

On the coldest day of the year, you turned into a block of ice. Now you are lying as a stranger in the world, as a comet from another galaxy for which there is no place on Earth, a heap of rubble that has no feeling for what is happening around it.
Lovers kiss each other passionately on your skin, soldiers kindle their blind fury against each other, children slide laughing over your back – but you do not take notice of it. To you, the storm of events is just another swarm of comets that you watch pass by indifferently.
Just as the world is foreign to you, you are foreign to the world. Some people make themselves comfortable on you and marvel at the strange panorama that is offered to them from the small hill of your existence. Others cool their heads on you when, heated by their wanderings through the jungle of the world, they immerse themselves in your cold atmosphere. But you yourself do not exist for them, you are only the medium that makes their metamorphosis possible.
And then, finally, you feel the breath of spring brush over your ice shield. Before long, it has completely thawed away. Your skin is suddenly alive again, it breathes again, and when you are touched, the contact penetrates your skin again instead of evaporating on its surface.
Now you are part of the whole again, you think. But then you realise that the ice shield has grown into you. Even though your skin is no longer frozen, it remains an impenetrable wall that separates you from the world. What you feel is not the world itself, but only an echo of the idea you conceive of it. And when others approach you, there is always an invisible boundary that they cannot cross. You see them talking, you see them acting, but their talking and acting does not reach you, just as they do not perceive you under the cloak of your ice shell.
Thus your thawing has only made you aware that you are condemned to congeal in a living body. You have become aware of your true nature, you clearly feel that the ice shell is only a costume that an unfathomable fate has forced upon you. But since the costume sticks to you like a second skin, you now not only look foreign to those who are foreign to you and who unsuspectingly exploit you for foreign purposes. You have also become a stranger to yourself, to yourself and your ice-block existence that encloses you within yourself.

More winter dreams in The Hidden Chamber, pp. 36 – 42:

Icy Morning

The Ice Queen

The Blue Land

Image: Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902): The Iceberg; Oil painting; National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta (Malta); Wikimedia commons