Room for a view

Secret thoughts, sacred spaces – and the quest to contain them.

“All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air …,” I catch myself humming to My Fair Lady as I patter round the room, half adrift with new-day plans, half churning the guts of Virginia Woolf and a lesson on karma in my weekly astrology class. Open plan with a double bed, a fridge, a couch and a mirrored dresser with a small work surface, the simply furnished 10^th floor hotel room overlooks the rapidly developing city that is Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire. (Cote d’Ivoire as opposed to Ivory Coast because they still speak French here and because the latter is seen as politically insensitive.)

I tell my brother in a stream-of-consciousness phone conversation that I have realised I somehow prefer this view to a mountain (despite its obvious pull) or a sea (though monitoring its moods or anticipating the appearance of a whale or dolphin or a fisherman landing the Big One are mindful blisses in themselves). Directly below is a patchwork of silver tin roofs, which seem like they could peel off like a sheet of perforated stamps if you touched them. Fluorescent lights, swatches of bench colour, swathes of wide dust road are interspersed with satellite TV dishes, random swimming pools and high-rise apartment blocks in the making. In the distance a lagoon waterway services a daily ferry, woro-woros ply their trade on an expanding highway, yangos take the place of Uber taxis, humans go about their daily business, often dressed in bright traditional Baule fabrics. By night, vibrant cafes spill out onto the street.

Confined by a flu bug, I find myself entering a haiku competition using the view as inspiration. Savouring every syllable as if it were a special ingredient in a kedjenou recipe, chewing on the rarified cud, for no other reason than to taste of its spicy, refined palate. A universal kigo – monsoon – seems apt for the current landscape. The tropical rainy season – Cote d’Ivoire is just north of the equator in the Tropic of Capricorn – brings with it both seasoning, and destruction. Mid-afternoon downpours are delicious.

As are forays into new literary territory (I mostly read non-fiction). Enter ‘Intermezzo’, an unputdownable piece of contemporary romance by Sally Rooney recommended by a friend. In which jock and nerd brothers face a deep test of love after their dad dies. And Jodi Picoult. ‘By Any Other Name’ -- picked up at Cape Town International because it mentioned Swaziland in the first paragraph and because it was about a struggling playwright – has me enthralled from page 1. The story of two women, a modern westerner battling sexism in the arts and her ancestor battling the same centuries earlier, and in which Picoult postulates that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written by women, not allowed to sell their work, it ends with a spectacular array of author’s notes and Shakespearian quotes. To believe or not to believe, that is the question, but she makes a valid case.

After which, I pick up Virginia Woolf’s ‘A room of one’s own’ (which has lain fallow on my bookshelf for years and was added to daypack at the last minute) and revisit (for the uninitiated) a similar thread. With comparison to Shakespeare again – only this time the analogy is a hypothetical sister who kills herself because domestic drudgery precludes her from being a poet. Point being, ultimately, that women writers have suffered because of their gender for centuries. And Woolf is wild with theories on how to maintain freedom of thought and expression, one of which is the oft-quoted room of one’s own. Sheer luxury for the most of us, but something I have always hankered for.

Or at least since I can remember, around the age of 13, when I shared a dormitory with at least 10 other girls at boarding school. I remember once putting all my belongings on my bed in an effort to feel secure in the face of having little control over my environment. I remember imagining that our beds were trains en route Siberia during the Holocaust (our setwork reader was ‘The Endless Steppe’ by Esther Hauzig) and that looking after our respective compartments was essential for our wellbeing. My most prized possessions were my few books, one of which was Rod McKuen’s poetry, a prize for English.

And which may be why I have always been attracted to one-roomed apartments with a view. Where, like EM Forster in ‘Room with a View’, you can “let yourself go: pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them”. Own space is sacred space. Even if it’s in the form of a temporary hotel room, which, with its anonymity, no household clutter and concomitant daily servicing, is haven for the reflective mind. To which South African award-winning poet Fiona Zerbst pays homage in her anthology ‘In praise of hotel rooms’ (Dryad Press):

That hush behind curtains

you can’t describe later:

a hotel’s anonymous

shuffling of bodies, the cool, bland

surfaces lovely as rest homes,

fresh-paint complete.

I love oval tables,

blonde wood, deep-set lights,

bedspreads drawn back

like a fan’s tasteful opening, scent

of corridors, acres

of sleep – like deep woods.

I harbour a vision

of animals grazing, at grass in the same

timid place, untroubled

by predators. These are the fields

of silence and pillows –

dream-sated, yielding to sheets.

According to author Lauren Marino, Maya Angelou kept a hotel room in whichever town she lived, getting there at 6.30 in the morning and working until early afternoon. She never slept there but would lie down on the bed with “a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible.” Then she’d go elsewhere and try to live like a normal person until the evening, when she would go back to her hotel room and read what she had written that morning and mark it up.

Like many parents, Kate Jones, author of the substack ‘A Narrative of their Own’ – which discusses, inter alia, these writing rituals and preferences (Virginia Woolf wrote from a low armchair in a converted wooden tool shed with a view of the Sussex Downs and kept a diary) – relates how, for many years, she has written around her children and other work, wherever and whenever she can find the space and time. “I have just (finally!) managed to carve out a small nook in my home for a tiny writing desk and chair. This is perfectly placed between the bookshelves and in front of the window, where I like to stare at the trees. Having somewhere that is just mine has made such a difference to how I take my writing more seriously.”

When I mail her later, asking her if she shares the sentiment, Jodi Picoult replies: “I do have a room of my own — the attic (cue the madwoman in the attic trope). It’s my office and everything I need is at my beck and call. It was the last space in our home to be finished, and has a row of shelves on one wall and a long desk built into the wall facing them on the other wall — with my computer, printer, research, books, you name it. It’s cluttered with pictures of people who mean the world to me, and posters of bestseller lists.”

For me, like Haruki Murakami in ‘Kafka on the Shore’, my Abidjan boudoir feels simultaneously like coming home and being newly born. “As I relax on the sofa and gaze around the room, a thought hits me: this is exactly the place I’ve been looking for all my life. A little hideaway in some sinkhole somewhere. I’ve always thought of it as some secret, imaginary place, and can barely believe that it actually exists.”

My astrology lecturer tells me that karma is like a spring-driven toy – every action we take winds the spring and stores the energy until a future life. So I am simultaneously thanking past karma for perhaps giving me the potential to understand the relevance of this room and practising visualising it as a fully operational toy.

Fantasia continua.