Making connections
How I picked up a book in the dark and found myself ambushed by what I discovered
This post began as one thing and became something completely different, something I never intended to write nor even knew was asking to be written until I began to make connections.
“These prayers are not poetry or verse of any kind, but plain continuous prose, though printed in broken lines. They are printed in this form to remind the reader to go slowly, to pause frequently, to break up and as it were to punctuate his thought in order that each idea may have its due.” (William Roche, S.J., The Mysteries of the Mass in Reasoned Prayers, Introduction)
This is what we do, we pick up something in the dark. We don’t know what we will pick up. We always do this: we pick up a book, but we don’t know why. And it happens to be our parent, since the only way to find our real parents it to pick up a book in the dark. It is mysterious. Maybe it is the parent on the shelf that has chosen us, but it can’t be explained. Anyway, this is the way we happen on those books that will change our lives. (Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 24)
Today I picked up a book in the dark.
I first picked up this book in a secondhand bookshop in Harare in 1986, when I began to yield to a desire that had lured me towards the Catholic Church since childhood. This morning, I was reading Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, making notes for the Substack post I planned to write today, when my eye fell on this other book among those I’ve set apart for research and reflection (they are for me one and the same thing). I picked it up in the dark.
A connection sparked across the space between Cixous lying open by my side, and Father Roche’s introduction. (I don’t call young priests Father, but for old school priests I sometimes do). I decided to write about connections, and to revisit something I’d written a while ago about Cixous’s reflections on the letter H.
But first, I decided to linger awhile over the battered old book I had picked up in the dark. It brings back so many memories, so many yearnings for the mysteries it once drew me towards. I had no idea what secret connection it contained, what a shock I was about to have, and what a flood of memories it was about to unleash.
I was gazing at it, reminiscing about when I bought it. Who was I back then? A young mother, thirty one years old, feeling my way back into the world after a traumatic pregnancy in which my fourth child and I had nearly died. We both survived because I was white and had private health care. Our lives were saved by an emergency Caesarean. Had I been a rural African woman, my son and I would have become one more statistic in the carnage of maternal and infant mortality that blights the lives of so many poor communities. But today, thirty seven years later, I discover that this stained and battered old secondhand book and I are connected by a different kind of carnage.
See how casually I crossed through the name of the original owner and wrote my name instead, as if anybody ever owns a book. Today, it occurred to me to Google “D. Myerscough, S.J.” Who was he, this priest who once shared the mysteries of this book with me?
Only connect. That was to be the theme of my Substack post today. I found D. Myerscough, S.J. on Google. I connected, and now I am stunned and undone by the connection. How can this be?
I clicked on that link, and if you click on the screenshot above you’ll see what I saw, and you too will be able to download Connecticut’s Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Transcript, dated March 4, 1977. Take a moment to laugh or to cry over the headlines of some of the reports. “Archdiocese Creates Committee on Women”. “Women’s Ordination Demonstrations Staged”. “Connecticut’s Pro-Life Council Takes Stand on Life and Death Issues”. “Church Opposes Homosexual Bill”. So many connections. So many distractions. But it’s the long article above that last title that has stunned me.
The author, Alfred J. Jolson S.J. doesn’t name the four Dominican sisters who were killed, but I knew and loved one of them. She was Sister Ceslaus, our formidable Maths teacher at the Dominican Convent in Lusaka, whose stern exterior masked a deep commitment to the girls in her care. Here she is in a photograph I took on a school trip, when she and another teacher bravely took a classful of adolescent girls for a weekend in Livingstone to see the Victoria Falls.
I may owe my conversion to Catholicism and my decision to go to university at the age of thirty six, to the influence of Sister Ceslaus and those other bold, bright sisters who taught at Lusaka Convent. Dunstan Myerscough was the sole survivor and eyewitness to the massacre in which my beloved teacher died, along with six other white Catholic missionaries. Suddenly, the opening lines of the prayer in that book I opened this morning and over which I lingered for some time take on the form of a eulogy:
But there is something else. The story of how Sister Ceslaus and the other missionaries died depends on whose version you trust, which narrator you rely upon, whose side you are on. Were they killed by guerrilla fighters, or by Rhodesia’s Selous Scouts? My novel Between Two Rivers explores questions such as these. While the characters and some of the events are fictitious, the story of Sister Ceslaus was never far from my mind. Little did I know what a rich resource I was missing until I picked up a book in the dark this morning. In every story, Father Dunstan Myerscough S.J. is cited. I had crossed out his name and never thought to ask who he was. Until today.
Here is an account published by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information in July 1978, detailing the murders of missionaries by “terrorists” in the 1970s, including the St Paul’s Massacre at Musami on February 7, 1977. This was one of the sources I used for my novel. It quotes from a newspaper article describing the killings:
In what the sole survivor described as a senseless, insane and brutal act, nationalist guerrillas last night gunned down seven white Roman Catholic missionaries, including four nuns. Father Dunstan Myerscough, who is 65, said today that he had escaped by throwing himself to the ground as the guerrillas opened fire from five yards range. Father Myerscough said he was in no doubt that the killers were nationalist guerrillas, although they had uttered hardly a word before shooting the helpless missionaries.
Here is a different version from a Zimbabwean newspaper, The Patriot, written in July 2015, in which the Selous Scouts are blamed for the killings. Here is how it opens:
THE following is an account from Sam Dhliwayo as it was narrated to them by Father Dunstan Myerscough, a survivor of the Musami massacre. Sam was doing Form One at St Paul’s Musami in 1977 when members of the Selous Scouts came to the Mission school and killed only the white staff working there.
And finally, here is how it was covered by The New York Times in 1977:
SALISBURY, Rhodesia, Feb. 7—Seven white Roman Catholic missionaries were shot to death by black guerrillas last night at a mission station 37 miles northeast of here. The dead were two priests, a lay brother and four nuns.
A 65‐year‐old priest survived without injury as about a dozen guerrillas herded him and the others together on a dirt road running through the remote St. Paul's Mission at Musami and opened fire at them with a light machine gun and automatic rifles.
The Rev. Dunstan Myerscough said he survived because, he instinctively dropped to the ground when the firing began.
The attack came at about 10 P.M., as several missionaries were watching a British detective series on television. Those who died—Jesuits and Dominican nuns—came from England, Ireland, Kenya and West Germany, and ranged in age from 34 to 76. At the mission, they gave schooling to 400 black students and operated a 100‐bed hospital.
Today, I picked up a book in the dark. An act of trust. An act of abandonment. A tremendous risk. “This is what we do, we pick up something in the dark. We don’t know what we will pick up.” Why did I pick it up today, when my intention had been to spend time with Hélène Cixous?
Maybe tomorrow. For today, I must follow where these texts have led. I must go slowly, pause frequently, break up and as it were punctuate my thought in order that each idea may have its due.
Here is what I wrote when I was going to begin. Here is where I might begin when I begin to write again.
Hélène Cixous writes of writing as a descent into and an ascent out of death. She reflects on the letter H, which I found pretentious at first. But before we can finally judge an act of writing, we must allow it to be absorbed back into silence, where it can morph and grow into some new insight. H. A letter which is often silent. A letter which allows another letter to change its sound. A letter whose silence is a gift of meaning to those around it. Sigh. Flight. Height. Night. Shhhhh. …
D. Myerscough lives on. I have chills. I heard the stories in the eighties at Moleli mission, and met survivors of other massacres. Honestly I'm still reacting to this piece. I can't believe one of your teachers was a victim, and somehow this book found its way to you. I'm so glad I clicked on your writing in the dark.
This is beautiful and uncanny! I think you are actually doing something more than writing about Cixous. You're writing reading and writing her, if that makes sense. So glad you have the time and space to follow wherever this goes... Jennifer