3 June 2012
Glenwood, Durban
I’m not so sure I believe
I’m not so sure I believe that
I fit in
So I rise up and look down from an eagle-eye view
I watch all you people, you’re like pieces of a puzzle
This I ponder
And it seems it’s all connected and this mosaic is a patchwork sea
And if it’s all connected a shifting mosaic on a patchwork sea
We are all puzzle pieces
We are all puzzles
We are all puzzle pieces
We are all trying to fit in
Now don’t be alarmed
I’m not I’m listening…and observing
But don’t be alarmed
I’m not I’m listening, I’m always listening now, listening now
Don’t be alarmed, no I’m listening
I glide through the clouds, down
I’m asking no questions
As I slip into my place I know I don’t
Need all of the answer right now
Nate Maingard, “Puzzle Pieces,” 2012
I’m currently sitting at my picnic table/writing desk on a crisp autumn Sunday afternoon. The windows are open, letting in the sunlight as well as a bit of a chill, and I sit here with a mug of tea and bowl of popcorn while an exhausted graduate student sleeps in my bed. It’s been a busy two months.
For the last two weeks, Irina Spector-Marks, another PhD student in the history program at the University of Illinois, has been in Durban, looking at archival documents as part of her first research trip. It’s been a bit surreal and somewhat full circle to experience the city and country with her, going to archives, restaurants, parks, and beaches with a new visitor. Part of the trip allows me to see this place I’ve grown to love and care for so intimately through the eyes of both a friend and a neophyte, so to speak. Things that seem settled or common suddenly get thrown into strange formulations, and things that I’ve believed or thought were knowable take on new character when you’re with someone new to it all. I guess that could be a rough theme for this entire trip, and these past two months in particular.
Since I last wrote, I turned twenty-eight, went to Johannesburg and back, and plowed my way through hundreds of documents over decades of history. I’ve pored over legislative debates surrounding immigration, drunkenness, sexual morality, racism, and missionaries; I’ve continued to attempt putting all of these documents in a chain in my mind, somehow selecting, editing, interpreting, processing them, in hopes of eventually making a narrative that explains, decodes, reframes, enlightens us about our purpose and place here. Things that seem logical or easy continue to unnerve me, and I continue to find new challenges in the archival documents that make me wonder what I’m doing, exactly.
In mid-May, I became painfully aware of my need for a break from researching. Fortunately, I had several friends graciously offer me places to stay and friendships to deepen while in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, and a place I’d not seriously visited since 2004.
Joburg is big. Joburg is intense. Joburg reminds me a lot of the more bizarre parts of Los Angeles, with its sprawl, its juxtapositions of intense poverty and terrifying luxury, it’s history of gold rush rumours and disappointments, and its pretense as a city of dreams and reinventions, where ‘anyone’ can make it big and successfully. It was no coincidence that I read Stephen Simm’s riotously satirical novel Miss KwaKwa, about a scheming, brilliant, ruthlessly Sotho beauty pageant winner who attempts to make it big in eGoli, the city of dreams. I read the book while taking buses, trains, taxis, and riding in friend’s cars, and traveling over much of the strange, teeming city.
I walked the depressing corridors of the University of Johannesburg, described as a friend as “clearly the intended backdrop for a dystopian zombie apocalypse,” cringed in the airconditioned perfection of the elite wealthy shopping malls of Sandton, caught mini-bus taxis in the city centre, and pondered domesticity with university lecturers and ironic artists living in the stolid suburbs of Randburg. What I liked most were the ways in which people shared with me how the city impacted them, how they felt at home.
My friends Stephen and Nafisa are recent transplants to Joburg from Durban, and they kindly opened their home to me, making me delicious food while I plied them with gin and played with their adorable three year old son. The family that they’d built in the city, and more importantly, the work they were committed to doing with university students in making history relevant, and beautiful and significant touched me. On a Tuesday afternoon, the three of us piled into their car after leaving the university, as Stephen described a day at work. His eyes flashed as he talked about connections students were making, as they way that they could piece each thing together, and how words on a dry page instead through alchemy, became keys to understanding their own past and hopefully their future. For the two of them, I could hear in that moment, the squat houses of the suburbs rushing past my window, that Joburg was about helping people see what was around them all the time, tuning them into the sounds of their history and the connections ahead of them.
With my friend April, the words seemed a bit more bittersweet. A graduate student from the States, she was back on another research trip. We sat on a sun-drenched patio in the shabbily chic corners of Melville, cradling tiny porcelain vessels of espresso and pouring out from our hearts three years of pent up frustrations and hopes and fears. I heard about her work—which is brilliant—and about her plans and about what she wanted. At one point she talked about how Joburg felt like home, or at least one of the few solid ones as a grad student putting in the required work and constant trips back to a site. We smiled, ruefully, at our wandering lives, and at the ways that some places become like lodestars pointing us onward and giving us senses of connection.
On a bright Friday afternoon, my dear friend Sekoetlane Jacob and I walked around the streets of Joburg’s city centre. We stopped and lingered for a while at the city’s high court. SJ had originally studied law, but felt more drawn to advocacy work, particularly focusing on combating the institutional and ingrained nature of violence against women. “This place brings out so many feelings,” he said, staring at the imposing edifice across the street from us. I adjusted the straps of my bag impatiently, until I saw how serious he looked. “I remember being here, standing outside during all of the madness after Zuma’s rape trial. How after that woman was villanized openly in the press and public for so many reason, people protested, demonstrated, laid their bodies down on those steps…” He shivered, in spite of the afternoon heat. I did as well. “This place matters so much to me,” he continued, crinkling his brow and sweeping one hand outward, pointing across the intersection. “I hate it. I hate what it makes me feel. But I also feel so much here. I feel the struggle, that things aren’t done, that they’re constantly being made and…battled here, Teej. It’s not over at all—but this place makes me tired.” His features softened as he ran a hand through his hair and turned to look at me, attempting a half-smile.
For me, Joburg was a whirlwind. I felt the shifting of hundreds of puzzle pieces—of friends and fits and hopes and dreams sliding into each other and against each other, making new shapes and each person trying to connect. It became too much for me to handle on Friday, as I thought of people I loved here, that I knew here, and how soon I’d be returning to the States. In the Sandton mall, in an upscale café, of all places, I began crying uncontrollably. I did try to stop, really. It just seemed gauche to be surrounded by manicured, seemingly successful people, and for tears to fall, like a slow, salted rain, unbidden into my coffee cup. It was a lot at once, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I pushed it away with a healthy dose of mortification and commonsensically told myself I had a few days left before a final month of work in Durban.
Which brings me back to a month of work in Durban. I’ve been typing frantically, checking archives, working, worrying, wondering. I was asked to write articles for a very cool Africa-focused blog, one focusing on LGBT rights and another on violence against lesbian women in South Africa. I have hugged a lot of friends and shared a ton of meals lately. I leave for the States on June 20th, and I wonder exactly how to get ready for such a happening. It looks like I’ve been given funding to go on a brief research trip in London in July, and then I’ll head back to Illinois for a year of writing most of my dissertation. In the midst of all of this, I didn’t really think I’d have a bit of a personal breakthrough, however.
I thrive best
hermit style
with a beard and a pipe
and a parrot on each side
but now I can't do this without you
I never thought I would compromise
I never thought I would compromise
I never thought I would compromise
Let's unite tonight
we shouldn't fight
embrace you tight
let's unite tonight
Bjork, “Unison,” 2001.
Two weeks ago, Irina arrived, and it’s been a wonderful sense of disorientation to ‘show’ her this place I most certainly do not own, and to share the experiences that I have come to claim. In addition, another friend, Will, a fellow history PhD student from the UK, came to stay for the past two days. Taking Irina and Will to cafes and the archives, and markets, and up and down Durban streets has been surreal, wonderful, and reassuring. Yet it’s also pointed out to me quite a bit about myself and my life.
Graduate school is an incredibly solitary experience, particularly if you are pursuing a PhD in history, a discipline which demands hour after hour, week after week, year after year, of writing and reading alone. It is an exercise occasionally on the edges of sanity, as you lack the ability to sometimes connect your work to the masses of people around you. It is, simply, an isolating experience, especially for someone who self-identifies as sociable. In particular our works and triumphs and hopes are often so very solitary because they take place in archives and in our minds and our fever dreams and on runs or in the shower or when typing frantic panicked emails to our supervisors.
The past seventy –two hours have spent me in near constant communication with two other PhD students and budding historians. We’ve lived and breathed our work; we’ve chatted animatedly about the empire and historiography, and work. We’ve been in the archives and spaces together, and processed. And for me, it was just mind-blowing. As someone who has begun to accept the ‘rules’ of my studies—that I will be alone, that I am a fortress, that my work is solitary—it was a direct challenge to that.
It was only a matter of time before I began to think beyond that.
Despite the fact that I am insanely sociable, that I make friends easily and frequently, and somewhat deeply, I also live like an island. I’ve not been in a real romantic relationship of significance in the past four years, I invest in my friendships to a point, but I also keep a series of watertight locks on my interior life. Yet there was in this moment of intensive community for these past three days, a deep, bubbling desire to be more than my maintained, friendly, ordered self. What would it mean to more purposefully live in planned sharing, community, and engagement? What would my life look like if I was open to being vulnerable, to being loved, or to accepting openly that I do deserve good things in this world? Would it be more meaningful than right now? I feel that these final days and these encounters are forcing me to ask so much of myself, in myself.
“Facing myself is not something I’m good at it,” SJ said once. I had the sneaking suspicion that he was talking about both himself and me at the same time. I keep a tight lock on myself, focusing on work andthen on other people, in order to stay sane and be productive and valuable, and get shit done. But I find myself wondering, restlessly, what would it look like to be vulnerable again? What would it look like to be open to community, and to be engaged, and to be challenged?
I think of the puzzle pieces I saw in Joburg, the intensive three days here in Durban, and I wonder if I’m spending most of my days avoiding those connections by superficially smiling past them in hypersociality or putting my head down and powering through my work. If there’s anything I’m challenging myself in the remaining seventeen days I have in South Africa, and onward to London, California, Illinois, and beyond, it’s to be open to those connections. To the vulnerability. To being committed into being with people and trying to move through life far more integrated with you people that might (and almost certainly will) hurt me.
So I’m going to ask you all to hold me accountable to these choices, and I’m grateful for you all every step of the way so far. Some of you I’ll see very, very soon. Some of you I can’t bear to think of leaving just yet. But I demand to be deeper, and more connected in these next few days, weeks, months. I want to live more in unison with you guys, and less in my own island.
--Teej
2 April, 2012
Glenwood, Durban
I've been most unwilling to see this turmoil of mine
The thought of sitting with this has me paralyzed
With this prolong exposure to mirror and averted eyes
I've feigned that I've been waiting: such mileage for empathizing
And now I see the madness in me is brought out in the presence of you
And now I know the madness lives on, when you're not in the room
And though I'd love to blame you for all, I'd miss these moments of opportune
You've simply brought this madness to light and I should thank you
Oh thank you, much thanks for this bird's eye view
Oh thank you for your most generous triggers
--Alanis Morisette, Madness
It’s a crisp autumn evening this Monday as I sit here to type. I’m feeling a lot of things at once at present—I’m two-thirds of the way through my time here, and strangely enough, tomorrow’s my birthday. I mean it’s odd; I’ve never had a birthday in the fall time (or for that matter, in the Southern Hemisphere)—for me, the notion of an April birthday always coincides with the season’s changing, things warming up, and days lengthening. Yet this morning I woke up chilled, surprised by the sudden coldness of the night before and realizing I’d need more blankets soon for the upcoming season.
It’s utterly bizarre that I’ve been here for six months. How did that happen? How did time move that fast? (Conversely, I wonder, “how have I not done more research!?” But that’s a neurosis for another day.) Things feel familiar still here in Glenwood, although perhaps less frustratingly than they did back in February. With the dawning of April, the increase in anxiety has also seen nostalgia doing its pre-emptive work; I begin to see that things are truly limited, and that this exciting, ridiculous life I have is temporary. I will not always reside in the granny flat behind Joe Brooks’ house on Laurel Road (he has already taken a tenant for July, which feels very soon), any more than I will always remain a graduate student. At some point, this stage has to end, and I have to actually buckle down and write the damn dissertation I signed up for, a prospect that fills me with both joy and dread.
On some levels, I look towards to my return to the United States with a measure of trepidation. This South Africa trip was one of the chief goals I had envisioned when I applied to programs four and a half years ago. It continued to sustain me during coursework, snowstorms, and institutional racism in Urbana, Illinois. Part of me feels deep-seated unease at the idea of the thing I’ve been waiting so long to have happen come to an end. What next? What will I do? Will I be able to finish? These questions echo quietly in my brain as I walk along the cooler streets of Glenwood, watching the way that light plays at different angles than it did a few short months earlier.
Feeling in need of a change of scenery, I took advantage of some saved money and my immense privilege as a graduate student visitor, and took a week sojourn to Namibia earlier this month. I ‘knew’ only one person in Windhoek, the capital: Nikki, a friend of a friend, a fellow history PhD who was taught by the same Zulu teacher I had when in South Africa in 2009. Armed with this singular acquaintance, I took a chance and booked a plane ticket to Windhoek, not knowing what I was getting into. It was a confusing and fantastic experience.
I maintain Namibia is the country that is most likely to be thought to be made up by Americans. Its independence is relatively recent; it gained its independence on 22 March, 1990 (an anniversary celebrated on my first full day in the capital city) from South Africa, which had illegally been occupying the territory following an international mandate in the 1920s. Namibia was initially colonized by the Germans in the 1890s, until its capture by British and South African forces in 1915. The South African government occupied and ruled Namibia as a de facto fifth province for the next seventy-five years, subjecting the population to its apartheid system while an increasingly violent and acrimonious independence struggle erupted between South Africa and SWAPO (the South West African People’s Organization). Indeed, Namibia is one of the sites of the many proxy battles of the Cold War; South African forces fought Cuban and Angolan revolutionary forces across the Namibian border during the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, Namibia is a bizarre patchwork of histories—the lone example of German settler colonialism, a different shade of Southern African apartheid history, a Cold War battleground, and a newly independent African republic—all at once.
Namibia, to be blunt, is an insane and fascinating place. Windhoek is relatively small for a city, yet self-important as the national capital despite the very low population density of the country and its high percentage of desert. When thinking of Windhoek, it might be best to picture a city the size and geographic layout of Albuquerque but with the sovereign trappings and pretensions of a national capital (and with the kitschy Spanish colonial markers replaced with German ones). I met Nikki and quickly befriended a strange coterie of ‘cosmopolitan’ sojourners in Windhoek, meeting gay German intellectuals, Japanese honeymooners, American political scientists, Namibian university students and Canadian NGO workers. I spent the first two days both wandering around Windhoek, taking in the Tintenpalast (“Ink-Palace”, home of the current Parliament and central administration center for nearly a century), the Alte Fest (an imposing German fortress), Post Street Mall (best known for having in its center a collection of meteors discovered in 1911---I know, right?), and other places, while walking up Robert Mugabe Avenue and Fidel Castro Street. On Wednesday, I celebrated Independence Day in Katutura, the township built by South Africa’s apartheid regime to segregate the black majority population; today 60% of Windhoek’s populace lives within the former township’s borders. Nikki and I as well as another new friend, Mark (a Stanford researcher and an overall winner) ate at an outdoor market in Katutura; of note in these outdoor markets are the somewhat makeshift abattoirs that feature the decapitated and vivisected cow bodies at the entrance, and row after row of rills set up where men are quickly grilling beef for a crowd for very little money. Despite the nearby smell of blood and the butchery, the beef was delicious. The evening was spent overlooking a local dam and meeting other friends at many of the local shebeens (relatively informal drinking establishments) while sheets of rain poured down outside.
On Friday morning, I boarded a bus very early and headed out to Swakopmund, the legendary German village by the sea. Swakopmund is an insane, surreal place, and one that I despair of ever describing even one-tenth as accurately as it deserves. Founded by the Germans in an abortive attempt to build a deep water harbor during their twenty-five year rule, the town is surrounded on three sides by arid Namibian desert, and on one side by the cold waves of the South Atlantic. Swakop is self-consciously German; in that way it resembles the Southern Californian Danish kitsch village of Solvang (founded around the same time), although Solvang comes without the same brutal and puzzling claims to colonial power and heritage. Imagine a tiny German village, selling frosty locally brewed beer, fresh-made schnitzel, and quaint wooden homes on streets like Bismarckstrasse WHILE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NAMIBIAN DESERT and inhabited by Germans as well as black Africans, Coloureds, and white Namibians. Now imagine being a mixed-race American historian of race and colonialism. Do you feel the aneurysm building behind my eyes as I walked the streets of Swakop? You should.
I got off the bus in Swakop disoriented, and soon blundered into a German student named Conny. Thin and wiry, with long blond dreadlocks and piercing blue eyes, Conny was on a two year program of service in Namibia working with local African communities (I’m trying not to think of the Peace Corps here). He radiated a painful earnestness and sincerity that muted even my most staunch of cynical attitudes. I asked if he knew where my backpackers was located, and he nodded, chatting with me on our short walk.
“How do you like Namibia?” I asked, cautiously.
“It’s so very…German,” he said, frowning.
I laughed. “So that’s got to be reassuring, right?”
He nodded fiercely, eyes tearing a bit. “This whole place is so weird. And these Germans,” he said, emphasizing the difference and the sameness at once. “These Germans come up to me and say, ‘we have built everything here. Without us, these monkeys would still be in sand and tribes and naked.’”
He looked at me, crystal blue eyes wide with confusion, disgust, sadness. “They think…they think I am like them. But I am no one like them.”
At that moment, we reached the hostel. Conny grabbed my hand, shook it, wished me well, and turned to go.
I looked down and noticed that he was wearing a shirt emblazoned in Cyrillic letters. Dimly, I remembered the image being something from an anti-Fascist poster in the Soviet Union during its occupation during the Second World War. As he turned to walk away, I noticed the back of his shirt was emblazoned with a giant Swastika—with a giant line through it.
We all have histories.
We are often still living through and with our own pasts, I reflected, as I walked the streets of Swakopmund that afternoon. I turned down a side street and ended up near the Swakopmund lighthouse, standing in front of a simple white obelisk. In front of the obelisk were two simple sets of numbers: 1914-1918. 1939-1945. Two German style insignia from the turn of the century flanked the monument. My eyebrows furrowed as I tried to understand what was in front of me.
“It’s a monument to all the Germans who died in World War One and World War Two,” said a voice behind me. I turned around to see a stranger in a loud t-shirt with a thick Eastern European accent smiling at me. “I’m Alexander. That statue? It’s for the dead Germans. Including the Nazis. Someone keeps leaving fresh flowers. This place is weird.” I nodded, disoriented by what I was seeing, before my new friend Alexander grabbed my arm and led/talked me to the other nearby statue, of two German men in military gear, standing on a rock. It was a tribute to all of the German soldiers that died in the ‘violence of 1904-1906’ against the Herero and Damara peoples, the indigenous peoples of the region. For the record, that ‘violence’ resulted in the systematic massacre of nearly 80% of the Herero population, an event that some historians have said served as a psychic and logistical ‘dry run’ for the Holocaust. There are no statues to the Herero or Damara in Swakop. I walked away uneasily from Alexander and the twin statues, trying to catch my breath and figure out this place.
I eventually made my way down several side streets and found a coffee roastery and café. Inside were clean small benches, a giant roaster, an impressive sea view from the windows, and a friendly blue eyed man behind the counter. He asked me what I did, and I told him.
“Well if you’re studying Southern African history, you have to study Namibia as well,” he said, with a half-smile.
I nodded ruefully. “I would, but I’m focusing on the mid to late 1800s. I end in 1897, and Namibia’s just starting up around 1890, 1895.”
“Well, if you’re counting since recorded history,” he said, the half-smile stretching into a gentle smirk or reproof.
I nodded, chagrined. “A needed criticism, man.” Thanks for calling me out.”
So much of Namibia passed in a fantastic blur—I toured impressive sand dunes, walked around a gigantic German castle built pointlessly and futilely in the empty scrub of central Namibia (and now a museum), was aided by a kindly German farmer when I ran out of petrol (and teased kindly by one of his assistants, a Herero woman named Elizabeth who couldn’t believe that I was a ‘white person that spoke Zulu’ until I shook my afro free of its hat and she believed I was ‘mixed’); each place offered another competing view of the colonialism I studied in nearby South Africa, and forced me to confront the familiarities and issues of my work that I often don’t want to think about.
There is something seductively generative about colonialism—‘Look we made this! It has been built from nothing, forged into reality from a wilderness!’
But part of my training is to see through that—to judge the façade and to see that on some levels the perfume of 'civilization’ covers the filth of violence and pain, like flowers on a dung heap, or cologne on a corpse.
Yet I am part and parcel of such project. The cannon and stonemason have made this world one that meets my expectations, that creates a world possessing those contours in which I find comfort—my ease and habitation are intertwined with violence and dispossession that I inherit and critique and reject and embrace, like a Mobius strip.
“Nothing is neutral, and no one is clean,” I once declared naively and decisively in a discussion in Illinois. I still believe that, but I am more aware of my own complicity in it, of my own academic navel-gazing, ego-centric celebration. But what do I do with it all? Where do I go after turning the critical gaze from the colony to my own heart of (semi)darkness? Where are the limits and the overall things to be gained?
I thought about this quite a bit as I entered the taxi to take me from Windhoek to the airport, and eventually back ‘home’ to Durban. My driver was a man about five to ten years older than me, with my exact same skin tone, deep green eyes, and close cropped light brown hair. His name was Gunther, and he was of the ethnic group known as the Rehoboth Basters, mixed peoples from the Northern Cape that were mixed with Germans, Afrikaners, and native Khoisan and Tswana speaking peoples. We spent the forty-five minutes talking about race and hope and history and dreams. He told me about SWAPO and the independence struggle and the continued histories of quiet racism and inequality. We talked about Trayvon Martin, and American racial politics. He asked if I saw myself as Coloured, and laughed when I said I saw myself as ‘mixed’ or ‘multiracial’—or black if it was most amenable at the moment. We pulled up to the airport, and he locked his eyes onto mine.
“We all have histories, T.J.,” he said, smiling. “We think we live past them, or away from them, but we carry them within us, and around us. We are parts of them, and we are nothing like them. We are here and yet not. But then again, you know all this, historian. Go catch your flight.”
We shook hands, and I pulled flyaway strands of afro hair out of my eyes, thinking back of my own ‘blackness’ for Elizabeth, of my time in this country, and all that I don’t understand still.
* * *
I turn twenty-eight tomorrow, the same age my father was the year I was born. I find I know so little about this continent, these peoples, and the history I purport to study. I don’t get so much about my own parents, and I marvel at the idea that two scared, flawed people in their late twenties had the audacity to raise and love a terrifyingly precocious kid. But maybe that’s where I start today; not using cynicism to smash through facades, not using theory to critique my own positionality or the viewpoints of others. Instead, how about I start twenty-eight with a quiet wonder—a weird soft moment of gratitude to be alive, a time to embrace my lack of intellectual control and to take comfort in my inability to make sense of all of this?
Oh thank you, for this bird’s eye view. Oh thank you for these most generous triggers.
Happy birthday. Happy Spring. Happy Autumn. Happy Easter. Thanks, as always, for reading, and for putting up with me.
19 February 2012
Glenwood, Durban
Don’t try to figure me out
Don’t try you’ll only fail
I’m not a reed in the sand
You’re already starting to pale
Everyone’s gone for the summer again,
Something is building, I don’t understand
A hummingbird larks in my hand
But I’m too busy chasing parades
To ever love you the same
Just breathe, he’s going away
I find myself typing on a typical Sunday afternoon here in Glenwood. I’m at ArtsCafe, the coffee shop that adjoins the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Art Gallery. It’s the only café in the neighbourhood that’s open on a Sunday, and it’s a mixed indoor/outdoor space, with well-worn tabletops, sleek wooden furniture and a terraced platform of brick steps that local children delight in running up and down at top speed, heedless of the effects of gravity. As I sip the last dregs of my lukewarm black coffee, I feel myself swallowing down the mild irritation I’m feeling all around me—with myself, with the neighbourhood, with my work, with, well—everything.
Tomorrow marks five months since I got on a plane and left the United States. I have become somewhat established here, I have friends and people that I see regularly, make plans with, and feel a part of a larger community. I feel, on some levels, “settled in”—which is no small amount of irony for someone who critically studies settlement, occupation, and making of space. Some of the odd paradoxes of gender, race, and space have become increasingly familiar by my staying here, and while I am occasionally jolted out of my newfound familiarity by a strange remark or the rough edges of research, things have become rather…well, routine.
Part of me is rather disappointed by routine (and deeply amused, since that’s what I craved more than anything else when I got here in September, being the ungrateful postmodern introspective grad student that I am), by the notion that things have become comfortable and therefore less challenging in a way. I find myself asking what my role and purpose is here: is it to continue to gather the best and most helpful archive materials? Is it to live in a space and therefore be accountable to the work that goes on here? Is it to continue to push myself to be more than just an easily comfortable historian of empire in general and South Africa in particular?
I’ve been meditating somewhat on the effects of routine of late, but it really came to the fore for me when I was having an online chat with my advisor last week. She gently pointed out that, with few exceptions, I have been focusing on nearly one sole archive for the past few months. While incredibly rich in information, it might not be the best approach to spend the entire trip mining the depths of this particular space, she offered politely. I nodded in ready agreement, beginning to realize how easily structured my life had become—Monday through Friday poring over newspapers and journals and letters with the intermittent indulgence in social media sits to entertain a conversation about race or gender or sexuality or kittens before a stop for coffee in town, a quick run in the neighbourhood and either dinner quietly at home with a book or an outing to a local pub with friends in the area. All of these are perfectly fine, or course, but I began to wonder just how dependent I had become upon routine to make sense of the madness of my life and to provide stability.
Nowhere was this more apparent than this morning, when I went to my beloved ArtsCafe, where I spend most Sunday mornings/afternoons poring over research books and typing notes over a coffee (or three) and my personal favourite menu choice: buttermilk French toast coated in lemon curd and served with hot, crispy bacon. I ordered it automatically today, smiling at the idea of eating the best breakfast in the history of the universe and enjoying my weekly dose of bacon-related happiness. Alas, the café has chosen to reinvent its menu for the month and discontinue many items including the French toast that I love so very much. The sheer power of my emotional reaction—absolute disappointment mixed with a ludicrous amount of anger—demonstrated to me just how deeply I’ve allowed my reliance on routine to make my life comfortable. Also, I live in a country where the unemployment rate is staggering, people live in abject poverty, and my painfully bourgeois self is bemoaning a lack of fancy French toast that I could a) make at home and b) should just get over? It’s occurred to me that for starters, I need to get out of the suburban bubble that is Glenwood more often and remember that it is not the center of the universe, although it is so very, very easy to make it so.
Pack up your jacket and shoes
Kiss all my friends one more time
Don’t take a minute on paintings you see
There’s a curtain of red on the blinds
One aspect of living in a space for some time is that you grow attached to people, and then they leave. I occasionally—believe it or not—forget that I am part of the coterie of foreigners that traipse in and out of South Africa frequently, and I begin to think that I belong here in a sense (a dangerous aspect of settlement that is entirely natural and even more disconcerting). This past month a group of foreigners—mainly Canadian—have moved on from Durban as part of the natural order of things. It’s strange to see them go, to attend their good byes, their sending offs, the ritual exchanges of sadness/happiness/excitement/regret that accompany these social gestures. In my narcissistic way, I remember that I, too, am leaving at some point, and that these people, this space is temporary. I will be moving on, and taking these experiences with me. Remembering this pushes on me further—how am I responsible to this location? How do I appreciate the shit out of being here (and not mourn over a lack of French toast?) and respect the privilege that it is to occupy this space, for all the inequality of power and space that entails? I’m thinking about this a lot, I’m worried about it a lot, and I don’t have an easy answer, amigos.
One thing I do tend to have a lot of is opportunity to get into conflict. I think that one aspect of being comfortable in this space is that the ‘guest’ attitude has in many ways worn off in my interactions. I’m looser, warmer, blunter, and less self-possessed; I’m far more likely to say what I think (which is hardly a problem to begin with) after a few months in this country. I’ve found myself of late getting into a bunch of heated arguments, quarrels, bickerings, and snipings with people. In particular, I grow frustrated with my fellow members of the coterie internationale, those lovely foreigners sharing close quarters and space with me. Like high schoolers in an artificial and tiny social bubble, we bicker over things said and unsaid, perceived slights, and the rough edges of one another’s personality. I’ve gotten into falling outs of late due to my unfortunate tendency to defer to snarky defensiveness when I encounter a comment or action that I feel disrespects me.
Perhaps that, then, is another negative result of routine in my Glenwood-bubble. I’m strangely invested in ‘belonging’ here, and sometimes I default to kneejerk responses, snapping at people in pursuit of my own claims to space, to say that I am here and I deserve to be here. Hours later, I find myself taking routine long walks through Glenwood’s leafy streets, or occasionally on the seashore, reflecting on my own hasty self-protectiveness, and regretting the turn of words and exchanges of the day. This, I feel, is the rough truth of settlement, in a way; occupying a space means that you now must defend your claim. Imagine how difficult that is if your claim is predicated on the manifest unfairness of theft and dispossession. I think of the privilege I did not ask for but did both inherit and worked hard for to enable me to live semi-comfortably in a country where the majority struggle to make ends meet. That I can expend my energy being irritated at what the Canadian environmentalist or Norwegian social scientist said in the bar on Tuesday rather than recognize my how fucking lucky I am to be here doing this work that matters so much to me is a humbling and terrifying realization to make. And then I have to apologize.
Peeking is stealing the life you don’t share
There’s a map of memory, of us over there
Dangerous questions are near
I’m too busy chasing parades
To love you the same
Just breathe
I’ve begun a bit of a strange new friendship with two neighbours that moved into the recently vacated home two houses down from mine. Clint and Roxy are an engaged couple around my age, who, with two over-eager dogs and an amazingly haughty cat, have set about occupying the house formerly owned by an octogenarian couple. Clint owns and manages a successful plumbing business, and is in every way shape and form involved in its day to day affairs. His cracked fingers, dark tanned white skin, frequently dirt encrusted arms, and well-worn work boots are proof of that every day. He’s got a scraggly mustache a shade darker than his light brown hair, and his blue eyes are constantly alert and watchful. His fiancée, Roxy, is a dark eyed beauty with bleached hair, a ready grin, and a quick wit. Some days, when I’m walking home, thinking either about settlers, sexuality, or maybe what to have for dinner, they call from the ancient walled in front porch with its beauteously incongruous zebra print furniture, seeming to mock the stately order of the home, built during the high years of apartheid. Without fail, if I exchange more than four sentences with them from their front gate, dogs barking good naturedly at me through the fence, I’ll be invited in, offered a beer (or three), asked (pointedly) if I want to share dinner with them, and spend the next three to five hours talking about life, family, and friends.
Clint and Roxy’s hospitality is incredibly gracious, and their good humour is infectious. They are both fans of rough humour, long drinking parties, the occasional fisticuffs, and bad internet photos. They regale me of stories of Clint’s past, where he’d get blindly drunk or some oke would foolishly threaten him or his family and get a good hiding in response. In Clint and Roxy I see a very intriguing set of South African characteristics—they have taken a dubious stranger with a fly away afro, strange fashion sense, and an overly bookish temperament, and invited him in to share their life and hear who they are. We have silly in-jokes, and I find myself weirdly amused as the lines between ethnographer and neighbor become blurred very quickly. Occasionally jokes are highly racialized or would be just impossible to relate back to another human being, but in it, I am offered glimpses of another aspect of what life is like in South Africa for these working/middle class identified white South Africans. They have accepted my penchant of the absurd, and for combining ridiculous swear words in silly combinations, and the fact that I am genuinely interested in learning about them, and they help in some ways to make me feel a part of the neighbourhood that I live in.
But of course, my existence here is temporary, and I’ve begun wondering what next year will look like for me. This is no small feat, as I have spent the last few years preparing for this trip—it’s hard to imagine what my life would look like post-South Africa. Yet, I’m now waiting for replies to a spate of applications I’ve submitted for teaching and research fellowships across the country next year—I’ve applied to the University of Illinois, Ithaca College, University of Virginia, Marquette University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara for positions. So as I find myself critically wondering about my relationship to this place in the present, I am also facing an uncertain future, as I wonder where I am supposed to go and what I am supposed to be doing. I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop, but it’s another reason that I want to cling to routine—it seems safe and making sense for me as the future begins to appear on the horizon, disconcerting in its blankness.
So here I sit—sans the toast of the French—typing, aware of the ludicrous nature of my privilege, and grateful for the chance to be here. Now I need to push myself to new horizons and places, to be and do more. I am grateful for you all in listening to my ramblings, for offering love, support, and silliness, and I genuinely miss each of you. Don’t be strangers; I’d love to hear how you’re doing.
Fondly,
Teej
27 January, 2012 | Glenwood, Durban
“Even in a strange or unfamiliar environment we might find our way, given our familiarity with social form, with how the social is arranged. This is not to say we don’t get lost, or that at times we don’t’ reach our destination. And this is not to say that in some places we are not shocked beyond the capacity for recognition. But ‘getting lost’ still takes us somewhere; and being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar: being lost can in its turn become a familiar feeling.”
–Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 2006
“Do you remember the early morning Do you remember the scars I showed you?
When we went back to bed?
When we found the first position? How I always said ‘Forever!’
And every muscle rested?
I do remember that I already knew
It was the last time
The last time for first positions
The last time you’d be mine.
--Ane Brun, “Do You Remember”, 2011
It’s been awhile.
It’s a balmy Friday afternoon here in Glenwood, where I sit at my kitchen table-cum-desk. It’s one of those rare days when it’s not overwhelmingly humid, in the good tradition of a Durban summer, and I have taken a strange gratitude in the quiet joys of wearing long pants for the first time since the season started. The next door neighbor’s cat, whom I have secretly named Truganini, is eyeing me from my windowsill, yawning with that weird mix of disdain and intense interest that only cats and serial killers seem to possess. It’s been a strange month, to be honest, and I’ve continued to feel the weird jostlings and discomforts of calling Durban home while continuing to be very much a foreigner, or studying the colonial past of a place where histories leave deep shadows over the present.
I’ve been trying to write, and it’s been a difficult experience. Inspiration comes at odd and convenient moments, when it chooses to come at l. I’ve instead spent most of my days diving deep into my archival sources, drinking worrying amounts of coffee, and reading a fantastic array of novels, hoping that the fermenting mash of ideas I keep pouring into my brain will ripen into some heady brew that I can properly bottle, feel clever, and justify my excessive lollygagging about. I am loving Durban, and I’m glad to be back here from Cape Town, even more aware of the fact that I have become part of a community (or a series of communities) here in eThekwini, and I am grateful to continue to be around inspiring and awesome people.
And yet, things have been weird. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am fundamentally incapable of actually just existing in a space without questions, anxious self-reflexivity, or Camus-style existential angst, but sometimes such a worldview gets tiring. I’ve been told by more than one person here that I “think too much” about life (and then promptly overanalyze such a prognosis), but I honestly don’t know if I can or want to be any other way. At any rate, it means that I get all of these crazy thoughts in my head, and I have to work through them slowly but surely, feeling as if I’m pushing my way through dimly familiar corridors, looking for spaces that make sense, that I can understand and recognize and embrace and feel marvelously in control about. As usual, this means that I open my copy of Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and thumb through its pages on finding a place, feeling lost, and getting (re)oriented around spaces. This week has found me struggling on sort of deep-seated emotional levels to grapple with thigns around me, and Ahmed, prayer, and excessive cups of caffeine have been proving moderately helpful in ‘finding my way.’
As I’m sure many of you are now tired of hearing, my research here in South Africa focuses on race, masculinity and questions of belonging in the colonial period, roughly 1850-1897. I look at ways in which race and masculinity can be mobilized not simply as identities, but as forces that justify claims of sovereignty or belonging amid differing groups in the region. It also means that I am constantly thinking about ways in which sexuality, modernity, race, and all of those good things overlap, interplay, and confuse the hell out of each other. So it was with great interest that I read an article in the South African news on Monday where King Goodwill Zwelithini, the head of the Zulu nation, made pretty derogatory statements about homosexuality, calling gays “rotten,” saying that such activities were untraditional, and an affront to culture. This rhetoric is not new, and is fascinating in the way that different groups push with and struggle with claiming authenticity, and validity in a modern South African state. In particular, Zwelithini’s comments line up with the deeply problematic statements made across the continent by civic and religious leaders in Africa that call ‘homosexuality’ foreign, unAfrican, and deeply wrong. Of course, many base this on a reading of imported Western Christian traditions, which apparently can be indigenized with less of a problem than the Western conception of same-sex attraction as a personal identity, but that’s an article for another time. I shook my head in irritation and anger at Zwelithini, made a mental note to add it to my file on African nationalism and sexuality, and thought I had moved on.
The next day, however, I logged onto facebook and saw that one of my friends in Durban, a gay white Afrikaner in his thirties, had written specifically about the event. “So Zwelithini thinks we’re dirty, eh?” he wrote. “Well then I can say he’s a Kaffir.” I blinked in quiet shock at those words. I could understand immediately the anger at the Zulu king basically supporting outright homophobia in a country rife with anti-gay violence despite the protection of all sexual orientations under the South African constitution. Yet, it was a classic moment racial vitriol that stunned me.
For non-South Africans, the word Kaffir has decidedly negative, derogatory, and racist colonial implications. It is rather analogous to the word nigger in North American discourse; originally an Arabic word for unbeliever, it was adapted by Dutch settlers by the eighteenth century to mean any and all black Africans living in the region, and soon became a term of outright abuse and disdain. It is complex, of course, in its meanings, but for a white person to call a black person a Kaffir produces a very similar sense of de-humanizing destruction that the word nigger does in the United States. To see someone I considered a friend write this about black Africans was incredibly conflicting and difficult to read. I felt personally hurt, and unsafe on a lot of levels, and I struggled to understand why.
Confused and upset, I went for a walk the next morning, trying to think exactly why I was so bothered. I kept Ane Brun’s song “Do You Remember” on repeat as I walked around the neighborhood. It’s a song about loss, about memories that no longer match up to realities, and about broken relationships, severed connections. It felt right.
I am not South African, I reminded myself as I walked. I am not even seen as a black person in this country. That word does not describe me. Yet it still bothered me, immensely. I thought more about it, and I thought about how in the United States, despite my mixed status, I am often immediately interpreted as black. My white mother becomes part of a larger swallowing of ‘blackness,’ and the discourses around that make me strangely aware of the way terms are used and developed. Thinking about this, I rounded the corner of a leafy, tree-lined street in my neighborhood, the guard dogs and my hair both wilting slightly in the heavy summer humidity. I paced further, thinking harder, ignoring laughing school children, blaring minibus taxis, and the world around me.
Two things came to me immediately. First, I could see the intersections of sexuality and race that were occurring here in this incident. Hurt by the king’s hateful words, and rightfully unsettled, my friend had responded with a word in his deck—a deeply dehumanizing word steeped in an oppressive, colonial past (and I’d argue a constant present). That someone I knew could find a racist term as a ‘backup’ in case of offense was alarming enough, but it still didn’t immediately impact my sense of deep involvement, a feeling of being unsafe. And then I realized that this was acting somewhat as an emotional trigger for me, reminding me of one of the worst parts of graduate school back in Urbana, Illinois.
In October of 2008, about five weeks into my education at the University of Illinois, I attended a party with a group of graduate students, mainly first years in the history department, but a few older students as well. After a while, we decided to play Trivial Pursuit, as nerdy graduate students are wont to do—especially after a few glasses of wine. One of my male friends in the department continued to roll the dice in a way that put him on the “roll again” square in the game—three times in a row. Upon the third roll, I looked at my friend and said, “Roll again, bitch!” Which he did, landing for the fourth time on “roll again.” I laughed and said, “roll again, bitch!” At which point, a white female student in our department, annoyed that I had said the word ‘bitch,’ looked at me point blank and said very loudly, “Nigger.”
I remember everything froze. I was suddenly aware of being one of only two people of color in a room filled with white students. The other student of color took one look, and left the party. I had no idea what to do or say. And I remember that not one of those damn grad students did a thing. They looked at me to explain it, to make sense of it, and to help them out. The older ones in particular were egregious in their cowardice, and left me to sort through a tangled set of feeligns involving humiliation, alienation, and questioning whether I even belonged in such a space.
I almost quit graduate school over that. It may sound silly to have been so ‘sensitive’ over such an issue, but when you are visibly a minority in a space that you don’t know, that you have yet to understand, and one that you struggle to know your place in, such an instance can be severely demoralizing. I had come to an ostensibly activist department in what I believed was a progressive minded university and felt safe among this circle of academics. Yet here was a progressive white woman who felt at the end of the day, that she could call me a nigger. Dehumanize me. Name me. Make me less than.
I understood why she was upset; yet, the scope of her response to me—not a simple “why are you using the word bitch?” Or “could you not say that, even to that male student?”—was so disproportionate, so blindigly personal, so unexpectedly hateful, that I was caught off guard. I thought I’d processed it, dealt with it, put it all away after three years. I was wrong.
I cried thinking about it yesterday, and realized that I was feeling echoes of that dehumanization again, and that I was trying to figure out why my South African friend’s words had stung so personally, besides their obvious racism. The memories of that incident, the realizing that this world is broken so fundamentally through its histories and legacies of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry overwhelmed me again.
I emailed him and said that I was hurt by what he’d said, even though it wasn’t directed at me. He’d thought better of it since I’d first read the posting, and had already deleted it, but the memory was still there. I told him that I couldn’t reconcile my friendship with him with the action that he had taken—the idea that he could name people by a dehumanizing, foul term, one that denied the humanity of other people. I said that I needed to not be friends any more.
Why am I writing all this? Because I’m so painfully aware that Kaffir is not Nigger, that their histories are intertwined, linked, but not identical. Yet, I am a multiracial American living in South Africa, and this is one of those points of friction that hit hard. The traumas of pasts personal and historical, are lived in our presents. I had the theoretical wind knocked out of me by someone’s racist posting online in response to someone else’s homophobia. Does this mean that I need to figure out what triggers are and how to respond emotionally? Yes. Does this mean I’m being over-sensitive? I don’t’ think so. What I am taking most out of this incident, however, is that my own histories are constantly at play as I try to understand the history of this place, and that I am never a neutral observer. I’m once again trying to feel my way through a social corridor that is unfamiliar, as Sarah Ahmed might say. And even in moments where I am lost, or shocked into new sensibilities, I have to figure out what I’m doing, where I’m going, and why I’m doing the work that I do.
And so I’m pausing to catch my breath, and figure out what it means to be here, doing the work that I am, and why.
Thanks for reading.
31 December 2011
Loading Bay Café,
De Waterkant District, Cape Town
I am currently sitting at a painfully hip café in Cape Town’s young urban professional neighborhood, De Waterkant. The tables are roughhewn wood slabs with clean granite everywhere, uber-attractive men and women punching in smartphones and pretending as if they hadn’t spent hours making their tight v-necks and designer jeans look carelessly thrown together. To my left, the café opens up to a panoramic view of the impressively massive Table Mountain, its craggy, surface dominating the vista for miles as puffy white clouds spill over its flat edge, making a sort of atmospheric avalanche amid the crystal blue summer sky.
I am eight days into my stay in ‘the Mother City,’ and fifteen total into my incredibly self-indulgent vacation. I’m returning to Durban on 6 January, and I am simultaneously excited and reluctant to go back ‘home.’ But isn’t that always the way with vacations? You find yourself excited to be traveling somewhere only to also wish that you were back at home soon enough, in routine and order.
This has been my first trip to Cape Town in seven years; in September of 2004, as a twenty-year old undergraduate on exchange at UC San Diego, I went for a week with friends, and stayed at a backpackers on Long Street, still a bustling hub of foreign transit. It’s strange to be back here, a changed person occupying space in markedly different ways. I can at least stumble through conversations in isiXhosa when the occasion demands it, and I can read the frequent Afrikaans language signs I find, although Cape Town’s cosmopolitan posturing makes it still a primary English language city on the surface, it seems.
I have to admit, however, that in nearly every way, Cape Town is more beautiful, more impressive, more grandiose than Durban. It’s self-consciously impressive, well-assured of its status as a major ‘cosmopolitan destination’, and it definitely throws me for a loop to walk its many streets, confused if I’m in Europe, Africa, or California sometimes.
Of course, none of this is neutral, and I keep pounding the pavement, hitting museums, and talking to people, trying to ‘make sense’ of this place. Granted, making sense is one of the hardest things possible to do. I get that as a historian of South Africa, part of it is my job to ‘figure out’ this place, and to comprehend, map, understand it. But that shit is hard, people. It’s weird, and it’s hard, and it’s a creepy project if you think about it in a certain way. It is entirely human to want to comprehend something, but those of us tragically overdrilled in postmodernism are painfully aware of the fact that such knowledge searches are not neutral, not objective, and fraught with power relations. I’m both grateful for and immensely frustrated by the fact that I can’t turn off my ‘grad student brain’—for every second I seek to understand, describe, inscribe, make legible the world around me, I’m aware of my own lack of neutrality here, my own positionality, and my attempts to make sense of things that may not be so simple. It’s funny, because I didn’t’ feel this way as an undergraduate, as a high school teacher, a master’s student, or even early in my PhD. It was living in a rural Zulu village in 2009 that showed me most viscerally how my project to ‘make sense’ is fraught in its own way. And so I seek to humbly understand, process, debate, and learn from the people around me. I’m grateful for people like Rina and Joe (my landlord), who challenge me to look past simple black/white archetypes; for the history faculty at Howard College, for expat friends helping me deal.
I’m struggling to ‘get’ Cape Town (and South Africa in general), and I usually let people know that early on in our conversations; the results are often pretty interesting.
---
“But it’s only natural to want to understand people,” sputtered Jon, a twenty-four year old Canadian staying in the Cape for an indeterminate time on funding I don’t really understand. “How can we understand each other if we don’t try?”
My friend Dane and I, sitting on low couches in another friend’s apartment in the trendy neighborhood of Green Point, talked about Steve Biko, about his chastising of white liberals who wanted to ‘understand’ but never saw that they could never truly grasp/maintain/know certain people’s lives. “Perhaps what we can hope for is building alliances, knowing, working with, loving people and trying to be in place with them, and never speaking for them, or attempting to ‘know’ them,” I said, thinking hard about my own work and feeling all of the disorientation come creeping back to me in my work and my life.
“This is my home,” Shari said, looking me directly in the eye, sweeping a long, highlighted strand of honey brown hair out of her large hazel eyes as she did so. She gestured out the window to demonstrate the entirety of Bo-Kaap, the Cape Malay/Muslim Quarter that had survived apartheid predations and was in the midst of its gentrification throes in a post-1994 world. “We live here, we love here, we are here. You are welcome here. These are our lives, and we will keep living here. Tell your friends in America about that. And don’t stop coming back here.”
I love Bo-Kaap best of all the places I see in cape Town, with its brightly painted houses, its well worn pavements, the sounds that call the faithful to prayer five times a day from its many mosques, and its palpable sense of place and community. I want to live here one day, but I keep remembering as well that there are plenty of people before me who have ‘fallen in love’ with parts of Africa and want to make it their own, to live in it, to claim it. I don’t want to be one of those people, but I do want to be part of this in an increasingly meaningful way. “I would give my eye-teeth to get a decent professor job in the Cape,” I say after too many drinks with a friend. “Well you’d blend in more, missing those teeth,” he snarks back, referring to the prevalent image of the Cape Coloured with missing teeth. I swipe at him with a mix of amusement and irritation and miss.
“WHERE AM I FROM?” thunders the Coloured cab driver in response to the question. “I AM FROM HERE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I AM INDIGENOUS. DO YOU KNOW THAT WORD? IN-DIDJ-EE-NUSSS.” I blink back in surprise, both at the volume of this delivery as well as the opinion expressed wherein—what is indigeneity in a Cape context? Is this man a pure Khoisan? Is he a Cape Coloured in a different way? Should I even ask? “NOWADAYS, THERE ARE SO MANY BLACKS HERE,” he booms dismissively. “I SHOULD ASK HIM WHERE HE’S FROM, HAH! I’M INNNDIIIIIIGEEEEEENUUUUUS.”
Like the rest of South Africa, Cape Town is a mass of very particular realities and a larger history of raced and gendered collisions all over the damn place. To be ‘Coloured’ means generally to be descended from the Dutch and initial Khoi-san inhabitants of the Cape, or perhaps mixed with some of the many slave people the Dutch brought in from 1652-1808, people from as far away as India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Mozambique. These slaves built the infrastructure of the Cape, and their descendants toiled in unequal discriminatory worlds for centuries after. Sometimes South Africa sounds very familiar to my American ears.
Yet despite government attempts over the centuries, people do not stay put. They move. isiXhosa speakers, Indian immigrants, British adventurers, Jewish refugees, all move through, claim a space of the Cape. And in some way, the Cape is right to call itself cosmopolitan, or international and even ‘global’. But what is obscured by calling oneself ‘cosmopolitan’? What local connections vanish? I bristle every time I hear a Capetonian tell me that “real Africa” extends beyond the metropolitan confines, and continues somewhere beyond. It sounds to much like this place is still a colony, or a colony within a country, of European internationalism and modernity while the rest of the land must stretch on, traditional, unchanging. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, as usual.
“This is a place unlike any other,” Blue agrees as we sip our second beers in a small café off the tourist mecca of Long Street. A fire has flared up and been quickly extinguished next door, and white smoke billows everywhere. People scurry like ants, and sirens wail. We do not move. Nor does anyone else. Blue runs his hands over his knit cap and smiles as he talks, relating twelve years of life in Cape Town after a childhood in Polokwane, in the far distant Limpopo province. “This place is full of bullshit, but it is great.” We talk for hours about being labeled an ‘angry young man’ by well-intentioned white liberals that don’t want us to raise our voices too loudly, about living in new cities, about interracial boundaries, and lines that still exist, about being told by the police that we don’t belong in certain neighborhoods. I leave grateful to be alive, to be in a city that I don’t’ ‘get’, that I feel uncomfortable in, and that I feel thankful for. We pay and leave. The people are still milling about, aimless, and looking a bit cheated by the end of the fire. The police have long since left.
---
2011 has been a very strange year. I helped bury my grandfather, deeply developed my intellectual and personal work, spent a tremendous amount of time in Los Angeles, ran three conferences, turned twenty-seven, obtained a monocle, and moved back to the country that challenges me so deeply. I ended long-term friendships with people I never thought I’d stop knowing or loving. I’ve met fantastic new people who challenge me differently. I’ve traveled to Lesotho and Swaziland and Mozambique; I’ve spoken a ton of languages, I’ve pushed myself, and plan to keep doing so. And I’m grateful for knowing you guys this year and into the next. If there is a theme for this year, it is disorientation, confusion, and feeling out of place—these can be wonderful things I’m discovering, and not the horrible things I‘m frequently afraid they are. “All the mental confusion is absolutely excellent, it means that SA is unsettling your certainties,” a professor and good friend told me via email last week. “And what could be better than that! It means you are letting go of the things you need to let go of in order to see where you are going and what is around you.” Here’s to hoping that 2012 brings more confusion, and more ‘letting go’ in order to see and study and humbly describe the world around me.
Happy New Year// Unyaka omusha omuhle//Voorspoedige Nuwe Jaar
