Cape Panopticon
Enter stage left. You dress me as a ventriloquial figure—mini pith
helmet and a Milnerton High blazer—and I perform the white
schoolboy I am in the little cage, under the auspices of the PW
Botha Theater, ultra-visible in my varnished pine body. Alone, or at
least acting so. An eyebrow raised with a hidden lever. You speak
from your belly into my mouth. “Visibility is a trap,” I insist, seated
on your knee. When the dummy critiques the slit-mouthed
ventriloquist, do you believe the cheeky boy? All this takes place in
the wing named Dominion, on the upper-level of the periphery,
where the meme of the wooden boy embedded on your knee
begins in the music halls of a dreamt-of London. Or, you are the
schoolboy in the annular building and I the supervisor in the central
tower—invisible, I am a nascent chameleon stuck to a white wall.
“I’ve got the power,” you repeat into me.