DOG

DOG began as an insult. It explores generational trauma, abandonment, and the pull to return to what hurts you. Raised as an Afrikaans girl in post-apartheid South Africa, I found my wounds were never only my own; they sat inside a nation's.

I was told that my mother threw me away like a dog - I've never stopped believing that.

My sister was three when my mom left. My father joined the South African Army before I was born, and I was legally written off by my mother. 

Adopted by another. Bereft of love, you get lost somewhere along the way.

You find yourself in situations of instability driven by post-apartheid society, religion, and child welfare systems. Survival despite the abuse. Afflicted by ancestry and heredity. 

DOG began as an insult and questions the damage left inside of me, the real cruelty of abandonment and the capacity to return to something that hurts you.

The flinching, the hypervigilance, the desperate waiting in a life where the original danger is no longer present. There is beauty regardless of the devastation. Endings and beginnings, balance and imbalance. The 'inbetweenness' that forms a collective memory. 

I was that dog that retuned many times, absorbed the damage and then one day I didn’t go back. I was an Afrikaans girl raised inside an inheritance of violence, shame and uncertainty, trying to become a solid person amid neglect. My wounds were never my own; they sat inside a nation’s. I am a dog.