I won’t tell you the name of this country, the place where I learned to play. I have grown tired of speaking of her, the country in question. She sits like a weary old woman inside my memories, ragged and unsmiling. I protect her now. I place her between clean bed sheets and make sure that she is warm.

I can tell you some things about her, though, this forgotten country. The truth is, she was heartless and she hated me. In the end she spat me from her borders and told me I didn’t belong to her, can you imagine? After eight years of loving her, she said she didn’t need my privileged person’s charity.

She informed me to take my strange accent and go back where I belonged, except, by that time, I belonged nowhere. I had spent too many hours with her children, in her orphanages. 

The world has forgotten this country and this country has forgotten her children. Yet I remember, and I keep these memories protected, sometimes hidden, in the paint of my art-making, a suitable place for their heaviness. I will tell you some things that I have made palatable for your hearing. I assume your ears have not been calloused by the sounds of suffering stemming from institutional abuse and neglect, but if they have, you will know much more than this work can share. You will know the things that have no words at all.

Every village in this country has an orphanage, sometimes two. In the first months of living there, I learned that no-one wanted to go to the orphanages because no-one cared. According to locals, the children emerged from wombs soaked in vodka and would surely become the next generation of alcoholics. ‘Social orphans’, they called them, their parents still (barely) living. These parents were the ones I saw on the street collecting glass bottles from bins to return for small change, their faces ruddy with cold and drink, eyes vacant. They stumbled across footpaths in the early morning, and the word ‘legless’ developed a new meaning for me. Not just drunk but immobile, face down, blood running from the head. It was common to see this sight several times a week, perhaps several times a day. How many people I passed by in those first few months of my residence, not knowing if they were dead or alive, not brave enough to check, each time my stomach flipping over, my heart beating faster. Afraid of their strewn-out bodies, and how they may have moaned or shouted if I tapped their shoe with my shoe, to rouse them. I let them sleep, or perhaps, I let them die, I will never know. 

In the orphanages, the children from those strewn-out drunks taught me to play. It was important to them, so we made a deal.

I remember how it felt to be there, and the sounds I heard as I woke in my little guest room. Children ran to get dressed, to wash up, to exercise, to get breakfast, how they shouted and rushed, meeting demands and orders, told each other off. They worked hard and ate little. When it was the coldest part of winter they were so cold that they slept in their coats. 

I remember the bread that they hid in their pockets, how they sometimes gave me these morsels, as a kind of payment, and I did take them, and warily, eat.

By the end of the third year I ate the children’s bread without fear of disease, and then swallowed cafeteria food with them at mealtimes, without qualm. I began to feel how they felt. Malnourished and angry, deficient of sunlight, protein, nutrition, and freedom, my body began to weaken in the fourth, fifth, and sixth years. Seventh and eighth years, I masked how ill I had become, how ill I really felt. Learning to play comes with its price, one that I am still paying.

The children and I made a deal. They made their stories in the sand and I promised not to mock them. I asked questions in their own language, a hybrid of village and city inflections. The cadence of my speech made them smile, but they did not mock my crude language skills. They taught me their words and were patient when I made mistakes.

We made a deal. They would tell me their sadness with their stories in the sand and I would be present. I would absorb their grief and wrap up in their losses. Their anger became a second skin for me. I exchanged a fragment of my peace for their frustration. Shred of light for the darkness that pulled and whispered, Give up playing, lose yourself… the ever-present pull to become unembodied, a soulless substance of water and flesh. 

These children, who shared everything in institutional living, even soap and underwear, created individually complex worlds in front of my eyes. They re-enacted battles with sound effects and swooping gestures, revealed intricate knowledge of tension and conflict. They arranged tiny homes with tiny kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, imagining what safety would feel like, where one lives with a mother who lectures about the necessity of hats before leaving for school. They imagined a mother who took their small hands between her own, blowing steam from her depths. I was not this mother. I was too young. I was a kind of sister who became their confidante. A trusted other. 

We learned to play when we had nothing else. When play became healing, we knew that it was real. When play unfurled the folded-together silences and gave form to secrets, we knew that it was true. My faith had brought me to this joyless place. What held me here was much more fragile, it was a fleeting moment of joy at the height of play. 

Or so my teachers, the children, taught me, in a place angry to its core, hateful and cruel to its depths. They taught me well. Now I guard play as a sacred act, the taste 100 percent sweeter than ideology. Theories come and go, but I have not seen them set anyone free. If we lose the essence of play in art-making, we will have nothing to give, either at home or abroad, nothing to make a deal with, and nothing to exchange.