I sing it with a broken soul voice.
I put the "m" on the front of "baby" like John Fogherty does, but it's mostly lost to the wind coming in through the windows. Here landscape supposedly flashes past cars like it does everywhere else, but you wouldn't know because the terrain is identical for miles: flat. Wide. Cotton, sometimes maize. A monocrop culture of people who might live in a city and teach at a university but who are only one generation removed from a family farm.
It's three weeks after the puddle jumper landed with a bump on the runway a few miles north of here, and I alighted into a town I've known for eight years. My brother is driving in fast careening curves, my father is in the passenger seat, and I am content in the back, dreaming about the present. We're singing "Suzie Q." We've got some harmony going and the wind participates too.
I have tried to talk but found that people mostly don't want to hear, so I stay quiet.
I have so much to say.
I stay quiet.
I'm more afraid of being home than I ever was of going abroad.
I have known what it is to be the only person you know in a country, and it is a fast addiction, a high I want again.
A freedom.
I have developed more intense relationships with people in days or weeks than I have with most people in the US town where I live in years.
I have talked about HIV/AIDS, about the American education system, about Bosnia, about virginity, about God, about what it means to be alive.
I have danced where I'm not supposed to, with people who didn't think twice about doing the same.
I have swum.
I have seen a sunrise over a field of sunflowers.
I have fallen in love with this whole beautiful planet, which is the same as falling in love with a person.
It loves me back.
Here I stay quiet.
And that is the most terrifying thing I could have imagined, and did not foresee about coming back. If I must remain quiet for fear of offending, of seeming pretentious, of being laughed at, of boring my audience,
will I forget how to live?
And so, for this last entry, I want to speak.
I want to tell you to go barefoot.
I want to tell you to write love letters.
I want to tell you to accidentally-on-purpose leave your cell phone at home every once in awhile.
I want to tell you to sometimes forget about what time it is, and don't look too hard for a clock.
I want to tell you to climb a mountain.
I want to tell you not to be afraid of being alone.
I want to tell you to listen hard to a person who loves her job, even if it's something you would never do.
I want to tell you to listen hard to anyone who loves anything.
I want to tell you not to laugh when someone suggests doing something out of the ordinary, and even to do it.
Fall in love all over again with your parcel of this beautiful planet.
Even if it's alone, do something extraordinary.
So now I'm home, in my favorite country in the world, singing Creedence Clearwater Revival at the top of my lungs with two people I love. I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't care much. I am no place but here, and that's the only place I'll ever be.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
down the rabbit hole
Last night Heather and I left our hostel and wandered around the block in search of food. We entered the first restaurant we happened upon, and when we were handed menus by the waiter whose first language I could not speak, I flipped through in numb confusion.
Kebaps. Lamb. Beef. Gyros.
What country was I in?
There was a moment when I honestly could not remember.
I looked around me for clues. There on the wall was an engraving of a mosque with six minarets that looked suspiciously like the Blue Mosque.
Turkey, then.
No. We left there ages ago. I was tired from little sleep and a long bumpy bus ride, but surely I could remember where I was.
Austria. Vienna. I was in a Turkish restaurant in Vienna. The waiter spoke German.
Since leaving Cape Town, I have been in nine countries. European cities are old and beautiful, with extremely old churches and museums that hold things you studied back in middle school. But after so many cities with so many holy spaces and outrageously gorgeous gold or marble or painted decoration and cobblestone streets and languages that you don't speak and bizarre, jilting, rolling, long train rides and bus rides that you try so hard not to sleep through for missing the countryside but end up waking up four hours later when a Croatian turns on the light in your berth to inform you he needs your passport, NOW, or that's what you think he says because it's in Croatian and he seems bossy and official and he's got some kind of enormous black stamping mechanism, you fumble through your bag and you don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's amazing and you're learning so much, but you're a little exhausted and you want to stay put in one place long enough to maybe learn some of their language or watch the sunflowers turn their heads.
I wrote this journal entry on the train ride into Serbia from Bulgaria:
Part of the appeal and the confusion and the adventure of this trip is the overwhelming bizarreness, the incessant shifting, the suspension of reality.
I am Alice.
Kebaps. Lamb. Beef. Gyros.
What country was I in?
There was a moment when I honestly could not remember.
I looked around me for clues. There on the wall was an engraving of a mosque with six minarets that looked suspiciously like the Blue Mosque.
Turkey, then.
No. We left there ages ago. I was tired from little sleep and a long bumpy bus ride, but surely I could remember where I was.
Austria. Vienna. I was in a Turkish restaurant in Vienna. The waiter spoke German.
Since leaving Cape Town, I have been in nine countries. European cities are old and beautiful, with extremely old churches and museums that hold things you studied back in middle school. But after so many cities with so many holy spaces and outrageously gorgeous gold or marble or painted decoration and cobblestone streets and languages that you don't speak and bizarre, jilting, rolling, long train rides and bus rides that you try so hard not to sleep through for missing the countryside but end up waking up four hours later when a Croatian turns on the light in your berth to inform you he needs your passport, NOW, or that's what you think he says because it's in Croatian and he seems bossy and official and he's got some kind of enormous black stamping mechanism, you fumble through your bag and you don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's amazing and you're learning so much, but you're a little exhausted and you want to stay put in one place long enough to maybe learn some of their language or watch the sunflowers turn their heads.
I wrote this journal entry on the train ride into Serbia from Bulgaria:
I find myself in a train compartment, and books come to mind, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, trains full of people going to some grotesque party I am not privy to,
Heather says they're gypsies.
But here I sit and across from me are three women tumbled atop one another, speaking a language I do not understand, they don't understand mine either, so we sit and they talk about me and I talk about them, they smoke cigarettes and have husky middle-aged voices and blonde hair, black hair, cleavage, like Dallas people but something different.
People everywhere gypsies.
Part of the appeal and the confusion and the adventure of this trip is the overwhelming bizarreness, the incessant shifting, the suspension of reality.
I am Alice.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Philosophy regarding a Turkish commode
"I can hold it," Laura announces, sliding defeatedly into her rickety plastic chair. "It's Turkish."
We are at a bus terminal in Athens waiting for transport to Delphi, and Laura has
"just paid fifty cents to not use the bathroom." I have two bottles of water and a cup of coffee in me, and a forthcoming 3-hour bus ride. I decide to take my chances.
I hand the woman manning a table before a door labeled "W.C." fifty (euro) cents, and pass her, focused on entering the dark watery beyond. "Wait," she calls after me. I turn. "Paper?" She holds up a generous portion of toilet paper, and I accept it, smiling.
Then turn back to my fate.
I open the stall door to find a Turkish commode: two rippled foot ledges bordering a porcelain funnel which disappears into a dark hole.
Like peeing in the woods, I decide a moment later. Except with a convenient sink and soap. Cleaner, in fact, than the U.S. and English version of toilets, given that you don't touch anything. It even flushes.
This is something I have learned from being abroad: difference is not scary. When you need to pee and there's a hole but no place to sit, this is not scary, it's just different. When you need to eat but no one speaks your language so you don't know exactly what's in that pie you're getting, this is not scary, it's just different.
When facebook changes its layout, this is not scary. It's just different.
Ultimately, if you have a safe, cleanish place to sleep, and you're getting fed somehow, and there is a place to relieve yourself, and your friends are still alive and human regardless of how you connect with them, life is okay. Things come in different forms, but life is okay.
When you realize that, you are not only a successful Buddhist, but you are a happy happy person.
It's a sweet kind of liberation.
Snapshot:
You stand on an uneven rock before an enormous, weathered, ivory-colored pillared building, and the sun hits the top of your head with fiery effectiveness. You're thinking about cataracts, about peeling skin, about a hat, about the accoutrements you wish you had now, and then you stop, and you just are, you and the Parthenon, and you are full of shame because you are here but you don't know about columns or Athena really or old politics but you're here and someone else is not.
So you study it and catalog details so that when you do learn, you remember.
Snapshot:
The ferry is disappointingly enclosed so you press your nose against the glass and watch the spray strain to reach it. When the dock collides with the boat, you bound out, onto land, you breathe. The old Greek man with weathered skin twinkles at you and directs you down the road, there's a beach there, maybe some tourists but mostly not, and so the three of you walk, the soft sea on one side and the Mediterranean rock and brush on the other, glaring at you kindly, and the only people who pass are brown boys on motorbikes, black hair blue eyes, they look at you with mild curiosity and then they are gone. When you reach the beach you shed your towel, your clothes, and you slide into the water and it's the warmest saltiest smoothest clearest water you've ever seen and now you are in, it's effortless, it's like coming home, the oldness goes and you feel new.
Snapshot:
The center of the world.
Snapshot:
Istanbul. It's Laura's birthday so Ali the hostel-owner buys her a cake and all the hostel sings happy birthday, and then crosses the bridge for drinks, are we going to Asia? And after it's over you walk over uneven slate cobblestones to the sea, it's almost sunrise, there are enormous blocks of rock barricading the sea from the road and the city, and first Alex and Mikel remove their shirts and their shoes and their pants, and then Xabi, and then Heather goes, and you and Laura, and with a shivery splash you're in the sea, very different from Greece but there's the saffron sun, exhilaration, good morning Istanbul!
Snapshot:
You're barefoot, your sandals are in your purse, you fumble with a blue cloth big enough to use as as a toga should you so choose, and finally you turn and ask the guard--"No problem! I show you--here." He throws it over your shoulders, covering the skin of your arms, and you gesture at your hair, shouldn't you cover that? He waves his hands, smiles, "Okay." And gestures you inside.
You enter your first mosque. There's the enormous open space, the dome above. There's the pious man praying, up and down, murmuring in another language. There's the low wooden fence separating you, the nonbeliever, from them, the believers. There's the screened alcove behind you where the women go.
Here you are, in the Blue Mosque, and for the past two days you have not been anonymous, you have been white, you have been English-speaking, you have had blonde hair and blue eyes
and you have had a vagina without accompanying hijab.
Men undress you with their eyes on the street.
At first it was cheesily charming,
"Did you drop down from heaven?"
Then it was funny,
"Hello, Spice Girls. Can I hassle you?"
Then, it was
"You have beautiful lips. Come kiss me with them."
too
"Gorgeous chicks."
much.
Always.
You walk on the sidewalk and they want to sell you something, or they don't, but they talk to you, the men, always men, and sometimes, sometimes, you want your body, your eyes, your lips, to not be remarked upon, because somehow the remarking makes them, your body, your eyes, your lips, belong not to you but in small part to the remarker, and after three days of remarks none of it is yours anymore.
So you stand in that mosque and you look at the women's section and you remind yourself not to be imperialistic, not to be a judging outsider, but you stand there and you look at the women mysterious in their screened piety and you are angry.
What is this society, that is so afraid of women?
Cover them up.
If a Turkish man sees a woman he has to remark, to sexually taunt, he cannot let her be because that is allowing her to be herself and that is a terrifying kind of power.
For a week in Istanbul not a single Turkish woman spoke to me. Anytime I bought a ticket, or a sandwich, it was a man on the other side of the counter. And they didn't let me live separate from my gender.
This, I find, is what it means to be weary.
I do not know what progress means.
So I define it myself.
Progress is not machines.
Progress is not English.
Progress is not Christianity.
Progress is not Western.
Progress is the antithesis of this soul weariness.
Progress is a society that allows everyone to grow.
Progress is freedom which is truly for everyone.
This has little to do with government or religion.
According to the government of Turkey, I am free to walk down the street in any clothes.
According to me, I am not.
There is a lack of freedom in the United States too.
A discrepancy.
If we are all free, if no group subjugates another, why is there rape?
Last Snapshot:
The most beautiful building in the world.
I have not been in all the buildings in all the world, but I know that nothing, nothing, could ever be more sacredly beautiful than this.
The Hagia Sophia.
A cathedral and then a mosque and now a museum. Mixed on the walls are murals of Christ and motifs of Islam. The ceiling goes up longer than you thought any ceiling could, and every corner, dome, rise, is painted with the kind of old art you see in textbooks.
You forgot your language, and it doesn't matter, because no matter what war we're fighting or what religion is currently all the rage, this is a sacred place.
For you.
For everyone.
We are at a bus terminal in Athens waiting for transport to Delphi, and Laura has
"just paid fifty cents to not use the bathroom." I have two bottles of water and a cup of coffee in me, and a forthcoming 3-hour bus ride. I decide to take my chances.
I hand the woman manning a table before a door labeled "W.C." fifty (euro) cents, and pass her, focused on entering the dark watery beyond. "Wait," she calls after me. I turn. "Paper?" She holds up a generous portion of toilet paper, and I accept it, smiling.
Then turn back to my fate.
I open the stall door to find a Turkish commode: two rippled foot ledges bordering a porcelain funnel which disappears into a dark hole.
Like peeing in the woods, I decide a moment later. Except with a convenient sink and soap. Cleaner, in fact, than the U.S. and English version of toilets, given that you don't touch anything. It even flushes.
This is something I have learned from being abroad: difference is not scary. When you need to pee and there's a hole but no place to sit, this is not scary, it's just different. When you need to eat but no one speaks your language so you don't know exactly what's in that pie you're getting, this is not scary, it's just different.
When facebook changes its layout, this is not scary. It's just different.
Ultimately, if you have a safe, cleanish place to sleep, and you're getting fed somehow, and there is a place to relieve yourself, and your friends are still alive and human regardless of how you connect with them, life is okay. Things come in different forms, but life is okay.
When you realize that, you are not only a successful Buddhist, but you are a happy happy person.
It's a sweet kind of liberation.
Snapshot:
You stand on an uneven rock before an enormous, weathered, ivory-colored pillared building, and the sun hits the top of your head with fiery effectiveness. You're thinking about cataracts, about peeling skin, about a hat, about the accoutrements you wish you had now, and then you stop, and you just are, you and the Parthenon, and you are full of shame because you are here but you don't know about columns or Athena really or old politics but you're here and someone else is not.
So you study it and catalog details so that when you do learn, you remember.
Snapshot:
The ferry is disappointingly enclosed so you press your nose against the glass and watch the spray strain to reach it. When the dock collides with the boat, you bound out, onto land, you breathe. The old Greek man with weathered skin twinkles at you and directs you down the road, there's a beach there, maybe some tourists but mostly not, and so the three of you walk, the soft sea on one side and the Mediterranean rock and brush on the other, glaring at you kindly, and the only people who pass are brown boys on motorbikes, black hair blue eyes, they look at you with mild curiosity and then they are gone. When you reach the beach you shed your towel, your clothes, and you slide into the water and it's the warmest saltiest smoothest clearest water you've ever seen and now you are in, it's effortless, it's like coming home, the oldness goes and you feel new.
Snapshot:
The center of the world.
Snapshot:
Istanbul. It's Laura's birthday so Ali the hostel-owner buys her a cake and all the hostel sings happy birthday, and then crosses the bridge for drinks, are we going to Asia? And after it's over you walk over uneven slate cobblestones to the sea, it's almost sunrise, there are enormous blocks of rock barricading the sea from the road and the city, and first Alex and Mikel remove their shirts and their shoes and their pants, and then Xabi, and then Heather goes, and you and Laura, and with a shivery splash you're in the sea, very different from Greece but there's the saffron sun, exhilaration, good morning Istanbul!
Snapshot:
You're barefoot, your sandals are in your purse, you fumble with a blue cloth big enough to use as as a toga should you so choose, and finally you turn and ask the guard--"No problem! I show you--here." He throws it over your shoulders, covering the skin of your arms, and you gesture at your hair, shouldn't you cover that? He waves his hands, smiles, "Okay." And gestures you inside.
You enter your first mosque. There's the enormous open space, the dome above. There's the pious man praying, up and down, murmuring in another language. There's the low wooden fence separating you, the nonbeliever, from them, the believers. There's the screened alcove behind you where the women go.
Here you are, in the Blue Mosque, and for the past two days you have not been anonymous, you have been white, you have been English-speaking, you have had blonde hair and blue eyes
and you have had a vagina without accompanying hijab.
Men undress you with their eyes on the street.
At first it was cheesily charming,
"Did you drop down from heaven?"
Then it was funny,
"Hello, Spice Girls. Can I hassle you?"
Then, it was
"You have beautiful lips. Come kiss me with them."
too
"Gorgeous chicks."
much.
Always.
You walk on the sidewalk and they want to sell you something, or they don't, but they talk to you, the men, always men, and sometimes, sometimes, you want your body, your eyes, your lips, to not be remarked upon, because somehow the remarking makes them, your body, your eyes, your lips, belong not to you but in small part to the remarker, and after three days of remarks none of it is yours anymore.
So you stand in that mosque and you look at the women's section and you remind yourself not to be imperialistic, not to be a judging outsider, but you stand there and you look at the women mysterious in their screened piety and you are angry.
What is this society, that is so afraid of women?
Cover them up.
If a Turkish man sees a woman he has to remark, to sexually taunt, he cannot let her be because that is allowing her to be herself and that is a terrifying kind of power.
For a week in Istanbul not a single Turkish woman spoke to me. Anytime I bought a ticket, or a sandwich, it was a man on the other side of the counter. And they didn't let me live separate from my gender.
This, I find, is what it means to be weary.
I do not know what progress means.
So I define it myself.
Progress is not machines.
Progress is not English.
Progress is not Christianity.
Progress is not Western.
Progress is the antithesis of this soul weariness.
Progress is a society that allows everyone to grow.
Progress is freedom which is truly for everyone.
This has little to do with government or religion.
According to the government of Turkey, I am free to walk down the street in any clothes.
According to me, I am not.
There is a lack of freedom in the United States too.
A discrepancy.
If we are all free, if no group subjugates another, why is there rape?
Last Snapshot:
The most beautiful building in the world.
I have not been in all the buildings in all the world, but I know that nothing, nothing, could ever be more sacredly beautiful than this.
The Hagia Sophia.
A cathedral and then a mosque and now a museum. Mixed on the walls are murals of Christ and motifs of Islam. The ceiling goes up longer than you thought any ceiling could, and every corner, dome, rise, is painted with the kind of old art you see in textbooks.
You forgot your language, and it doesn't matter, because no matter what war we're fighting or what religion is currently all the rage, this is a sacred place.
For you.
For everyone.
Monday, June 15, 2009
London bridge hath fallen down: a day in between
Twelve hours after leaving Cape Town on Friday the twelfth, our plane lands in London. I hug Brian and others goodbye for the last time, and while they hurry away toward their gates which are their portal to America, I make my way leisurely to the baggage claim.
I'm about to make my solo debut into Europe.
I miss Cape Town, I miss my friends there, the death of my life there; I am so full of reaction to the irretrievable nature of life that I cannot pick apart emotions and examine them. Rather, they exist all together in my body, somewhere near my intestines or my heart or the constricted balloons of my lungs or my soul, they're all the same and filling me up, and it's been so long since I've last slept that my body cannot cope.
Yet I find myself alone in a strange country, with no clock and no rules.
Cue mischievous grin.
I retrieve my luggage and roll clunkily into the women's toilet near customs. I brush my teeth. I change into the brightest summeriest skirt I own. I wash my face. I brush my hair. I get strange looks from the pregnant Czech woman manning the bathroom.
Clearly, if I'm going to be in Europe for the first time, I have to look good. This is my wall against the world, my protection, my unofficial passport.
I take the Tube into central London and emerge into the city without a hitch. It's 8 a.m. and I am high on the fact of being someplace I have never been before; it's a joy like none other, one to which I am fast becoming addicted. It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and everyone I pass on the street looks glum. They look at me curiously, taking second glances, and it's because I'm wearing a summery skirt on a cloudy morning, it's because I am buoyant in my walk, it's because I nod at them which they do not do to one another, it's because (I surmise), at this moment, I am pretty and happy and the bouncing personification of life.
It is the most freeing thing in the world to be the only person you know in a whole country.
I get mildly lost looking for my hostel and so clunk into a hotel several light-years above my budget to ask the German behind the counter where my street is. He smiles at me, shows me on the map, and sends me on my way. I find it, drop off my luggage, and ask directions to Westminster Abbey.
I walk, and accidentally-on-purpose lose myself again. I don't mind; this part of London is clean and prosperous. Londoners are awakening and opening shops, and tourists are marching purposefully through the streets toward some common goal. (I am reminded of the Pied Piper.)
I notice ahead of me a blonde, middle-aged couple; the man has socks with sandals and a heavy black Canon with about 35 lenses dangling around his neck. I focus on it in shock.
Won't it get stolen?
Good God, we're not in Cape Town anymore. I haven't been asked for money once. No one has solicited me for sex or any other dubious purpose. No one has tried to sell me "ethnic" goods.
On the contrary, most people are white. Most people have expensive haircuts and artfully cheap-looking expensive clothes. A man passes me in the opposite direction, his jeans razored beautifully and falling exactly tightly enough over his hips, his goatee perfect. I catch part of his sentence as he barks into a silver cell phone with no buttons: "...possible to meet at quarter past..." I blink after him. What an idiot. Everyone knows you have to find a non-sketchy shop to go into if you want to talk on your cell phone in public. If you even leave home with it at all, which I rarely did in Cape Town.
But this place is different.
You can dangle your $2,000 camera nonchalantly around your neck. You can talk on your several-hundred-dollar Blackberry on the sidewalk. I don't see anyone who is even below middle class. If you go by exchange rates, I'm in the wealthiest country in the world, and I can take pictures in public without a care in the world.
An enormous weight lifts from me, and I wave it goodbye cheerfully.
I have made it to Fleet Street, which does not look at all like a place Sweeney Todd would inhabit, and wonder where the hell the Thames is. I jingle into a tiny law bookshop (est. 1700s) and ask the man behind the counter, a (suspected) grad student with long hair and an eyebrow ring. He shrugs easily and directs me nicely back the way I've come; apparently I've made a wrong turn.
I find the Thames and take my first picture.
Then, crossing the bridge and thunking down the steps, I am distracted by a used book market under the bridge run by a friendy mom-and-pop team. I choose a book (A History of Tractors in Ukrainian), pay my four pounds, and set off. To my left is a rolling cement landscape of graffiti'd wilderness; teenage boys with neon trick bikes and skateboards (or longboards, or J-boards, or whatever) roll almost upside-down before swooping to the other side. To my right, kids take turns flipping backwards off the stairs onto the grimy Thames sand below.
The city is a playground on a sunny June Saturday. How fabulous.
I make my way at last to Westminster, stopping only for sustenance and pictures, and ease into St. Margeret's with peace.
This right now right here is why I love being alone in a new city sometimes.
If you have never been alone in a strange beautiful cathedral, GO.
I slide into a pew in one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and there are dead bishops, bodies of clergymen that were dust before the printing press. There are candles lit by pilgrims for people who are dying, people who are living, people who are deciding, people who are leading countries and people who are being born. There is furniture the function of which I cannot determine. There are carvings and there is stained glass and there is an enormous soaring ceiling and embroidered knee pillows. There are tourists murmuring, separated or maybe affected.
There is me.
I am there but I forget, I don't exist anymore, there is something mystical, I am allowed when I am alone in a strange city to be the least lonely I have ever been in my life, the most hopeful, the happiest.
There is no such thing as a perfect life, never, and there are things wrong with mine, but at this moment, right now, I am fulfilling my potential, and that is all I ever need.
So I sit there and I look into the mystic and it looks back.
And then I nod and I stand and I take a breath and I walk out the door.
Westminster Abbey has a lot of graves. There are dead people everywhere, marble pious hands, demure holy faces, un-relaxed sleeping sculptured people, wooden people, painted people, faceless people, flowered people, people who have no likeness or words but just a name cut into a coffin-sized marble tile:
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN.
Queen Elizabeth I with her ridiculous collar which attaches itself to her even (or especially?) in death, and opposite her Mary Queen of Scots, whose execution Elizabeth ordered. There are choir rooms and altars and cloisters and temples, all magnificent, all unbelievable in their architecture and expensive detail.
My breath skips when I see the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. Then there is Alfred Tennyson, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and an unholy altar, a veritable shrine, when I reach William Shakespeare.
I meander into the College Gardens, pausing to receive some strange looks when I refill my water bottle in the loo, and find the Rose Garden.
This is what this day is about: the difference between that sweet light intoxicating smell, and the other deeper spicier one. The first is pink with wide traditional petals, the other darker, closer to a sun shape, with smaller, more numerous petals.
Today, I am alone in London, and I smell the hell out of those roses.
Their scent remains with me still.
I leave happy and with no plan.
I walk along streets, vaguely back to my hostel but mostly just toward whatever seems interesting. I see a circle of blacks wearing black, green, and yellow colors singing familiar-sounding music. I stop on the fringe of the circle, the only white person. "'Ello, gorgeous!" There is a table with flyers, and the man behind it, about my age with dreads, hands me one. We are outside the Zimbabwean Embassy, and they are promoting a petition against Robert Mugabe and for fairer elections in Zim. I immediately sign it.
Next to occur before me is Trafalgar Square, which I have heard of but to my shame do not know why. There is an enormous phallic tower with some kind of bronze figure mounted atop it, high over the surrounding official-looking buildings. (With a jolt I see the South African Embassy.) Surrounding it is a fountain and the National Gallery and a mix of tourists and people promoting some kind of cause--in an effort to read the sign I bump into a kindly-looking middle-aged woman, who hands me a flyer. "There you go, love," she says, smiling. It reads, "DARWIN WAS WRONG." A man climbs unsteadily on top of one of the enormous lions guarding the penile monument and reveals a megaphone. "In the modern world," he intones, "we have moved away from the Lord..."
After consulting the map, I meander onwards. I briefly pop into the British Museum and consider Virginia Woolf's brain as I search for the elusive Reading Room. When it closes at 5:30, I purchase a salad from a Romanian woman in a shop, then make my way to one of the ubiquitous parks in this part of London. I sit on the grass and watch: the couple in front of me is slightly nerdy but undeniably in love, the two girls at the far side pick at a guitar ambitiously, the hipster near me is sitting against a tree quietly, the fashionable father kicks a soccer ball to his two young sons, the thirty-five year-old daughter pushes her mother in a wheelchair along the sidewalk.
I have become so used to being another country that London, as a major city in an English-speaking, powerful Western/Northern country, seems like home. It's a perfect break between South Africa and eastern Europe, the beautiful beginning to a backpacking trip through Europe that I can't wholly predict.
Tomorrow is Greece.
I'm about to make my solo debut into Europe.
I miss Cape Town, I miss my friends there, the death of my life there; I am so full of reaction to the irretrievable nature of life that I cannot pick apart emotions and examine them. Rather, they exist all together in my body, somewhere near my intestines or my heart or the constricted balloons of my lungs or my soul, they're all the same and filling me up, and it's been so long since I've last slept that my body cannot cope.
Yet I find myself alone in a strange country, with no clock and no rules.
Cue mischievous grin.
I retrieve my luggage and roll clunkily into the women's toilet near customs. I brush my teeth. I change into the brightest summeriest skirt I own. I wash my face. I brush my hair. I get strange looks from the pregnant Czech woman manning the bathroom.
Clearly, if I'm going to be in Europe for the first time, I have to look good. This is my wall against the world, my protection, my unofficial passport.
I take the Tube into central London and emerge into the city without a hitch. It's 8 a.m. and I am high on the fact of being someplace I have never been before; it's a joy like none other, one to which I am fast becoming addicted. It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and everyone I pass on the street looks glum. They look at me curiously, taking second glances, and it's because I'm wearing a summery skirt on a cloudy morning, it's because I am buoyant in my walk, it's because I nod at them which they do not do to one another, it's because (I surmise), at this moment, I am pretty and happy and the bouncing personification of life.
It is the most freeing thing in the world to be the only person you know in a whole country.
I get mildly lost looking for my hostel and so clunk into a hotel several light-years above my budget to ask the German behind the counter where my street is. He smiles at me, shows me on the map, and sends me on my way. I find it, drop off my luggage, and ask directions to Westminster Abbey.
I walk, and accidentally-on-purpose lose myself again. I don't mind; this part of London is clean and prosperous. Londoners are awakening and opening shops, and tourists are marching purposefully through the streets toward some common goal. (I am reminded of the Pied Piper.)
I notice ahead of me a blonde, middle-aged couple; the man has socks with sandals and a heavy black Canon with about 35 lenses dangling around his neck. I focus on it in shock.
Won't it get stolen?
Good God, we're not in Cape Town anymore. I haven't been asked for money once. No one has solicited me for sex or any other dubious purpose. No one has tried to sell me "ethnic" goods.
On the contrary, most people are white. Most people have expensive haircuts and artfully cheap-looking expensive clothes. A man passes me in the opposite direction, his jeans razored beautifully and falling exactly tightly enough over his hips, his goatee perfect. I catch part of his sentence as he barks into a silver cell phone with no buttons: "...possible to meet at quarter past..." I blink after him. What an idiot. Everyone knows you have to find a non-sketchy shop to go into if you want to talk on your cell phone in public. If you even leave home with it at all, which I rarely did in Cape Town.
But this place is different.
You can dangle your $2,000 camera nonchalantly around your neck. You can talk on your several-hundred-dollar Blackberry on the sidewalk. I don't see anyone who is even below middle class. If you go by exchange rates, I'm in the wealthiest country in the world, and I can take pictures in public without a care in the world.
An enormous weight lifts from me, and I wave it goodbye cheerfully.
I have made it to Fleet Street, which does not look at all like a place Sweeney Todd would inhabit, and wonder where the hell the Thames is. I jingle into a tiny law bookshop (est. 1700s) and ask the man behind the counter, a (suspected) grad student with long hair and an eyebrow ring. He shrugs easily and directs me nicely back the way I've come; apparently I've made a wrong turn.
I find the Thames and take my first picture.
Then, crossing the bridge and thunking down the steps, I am distracted by a used book market under the bridge run by a friendy mom-and-pop team. I choose a book (A History of Tractors in Ukrainian), pay my four pounds, and set off. To my left is a rolling cement landscape of graffiti'd wilderness; teenage boys with neon trick bikes and skateboards (or longboards, or J-boards, or whatever) roll almost upside-down before swooping to the other side. To my right, kids take turns flipping backwards off the stairs onto the grimy Thames sand below.
The city is a playground on a sunny June Saturday. How fabulous.
I make my way at last to Westminster, stopping only for sustenance and pictures, and ease into St. Margeret's with peace.
This right now right here is why I love being alone in a new city sometimes.
If you have never been alone in a strange beautiful cathedral, GO.
I slide into a pew in one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and there are dead bishops, bodies of clergymen that were dust before the printing press. There are candles lit by pilgrims for people who are dying, people who are living, people who are deciding, people who are leading countries and people who are being born. There is furniture the function of which I cannot determine. There are carvings and there is stained glass and there is an enormous soaring ceiling and embroidered knee pillows. There are tourists murmuring, separated or maybe affected.
There is me.
I am there but I forget, I don't exist anymore, there is something mystical, I am allowed when I am alone in a strange city to be the least lonely I have ever been in my life, the most hopeful, the happiest.
There is no such thing as a perfect life, never, and there are things wrong with mine, but at this moment, right now, I am fulfilling my potential, and that is all I ever need.
So I sit there and I look into the mystic and it looks back.
And then I nod and I stand and I take a breath and I walk out the door.
Westminster Abbey has a lot of graves. There are dead people everywhere, marble pious hands, demure holy faces, un-relaxed sleeping sculptured people, wooden people, painted people, faceless people, flowered people, people who have no likeness or words but just a name cut into a coffin-sized marble tile:
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN.
Queen Elizabeth I with her ridiculous collar which attaches itself to her even (or especially?) in death, and opposite her Mary Queen of Scots, whose execution Elizabeth ordered. There are choir rooms and altars and cloisters and temples, all magnificent, all unbelievable in their architecture and expensive detail.
My breath skips when I see the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. Then there is Alfred Tennyson, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and an unholy altar, a veritable shrine, when I reach William Shakespeare.
I meander into the College Gardens, pausing to receive some strange looks when I refill my water bottle in the loo, and find the Rose Garden.
This is what this day is about: the difference between that sweet light intoxicating smell, and the other deeper spicier one. The first is pink with wide traditional petals, the other darker, closer to a sun shape, with smaller, more numerous petals.
Today, I am alone in London, and I smell the hell out of those roses.
Their scent remains with me still.
I leave happy and with no plan.
I walk along streets, vaguely back to my hostel but mostly just toward whatever seems interesting. I see a circle of blacks wearing black, green, and yellow colors singing familiar-sounding music. I stop on the fringe of the circle, the only white person. "'Ello, gorgeous!" There is a table with flyers, and the man behind it, about my age with dreads, hands me one. We are outside the Zimbabwean Embassy, and they are promoting a petition against Robert Mugabe and for fairer elections in Zim. I immediately sign it.
Next to occur before me is Trafalgar Square, which I have heard of but to my shame do not know why. There is an enormous phallic tower with some kind of bronze figure mounted atop it, high over the surrounding official-looking buildings. (With a jolt I see the South African Embassy.) Surrounding it is a fountain and the National Gallery and a mix of tourists and people promoting some kind of cause--in an effort to read the sign I bump into a kindly-looking middle-aged woman, who hands me a flyer. "There you go, love," she says, smiling. It reads, "DARWIN WAS WRONG." A man climbs unsteadily on top of one of the enormous lions guarding the penile monument and reveals a megaphone. "In the modern world," he intones, "we have moved away from the Lord..."
After consulting the map, I meander onwards. I briefly pop into the British Museum and consider Virginia Woolf's brain as I search for the elusive Reading Room. When it closes at 5:30, I purchase a salad from a Romanian woman in a shop, then make my way to one of the ubiquitous parks in this part of London. I sit on the grass and watch: the couple in front of me is slightly nerdy but undeniably in love, the two girls at the far side pick at a guitar ambitiously, the hipster near me is sitting against a tree quietly, the fashionable father kicks a soccer ball to his two young sons, the thirty-five year-old daughter pushes her mother in a wheelchair along the sidewalk.
I have become so used to being another country that London, as a major city in an English-speaking, powerful Western/Northern country, seems like home. It's a perfect break between South Africa and eastern Europe, the beautiful beginning to a backpacking trip through Europe that I can't wholly predict.
Tomorrow is Greece.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Dear South Africa
Dear South Africa,
I wish there was some way I could say it to you.
Say back to you what you've given to me.
But at some point,
when you peel away the tissue
to something deeper,
something so internal you can't feel it except dully,
achingly,
you learn
that there are no words.
So I write this because I don't know anything else,
it's the only thing I can give you,
the only thing I have that I can give, and
I need to tell you,
you humbled me.
I came with my prejudices,
my sophomoric assurance of self-knowledge,
did you know
that I knew everything?
I'm leaving now
after you gave me the dubious gift
of finding
that I know nothing at all.
I went to the high school to teach kids how to debate.
I am inadequate.
I went to the TB hospital to give affection to kids.
They taught me how.
I became surrounded by people who speak more than English.
I only know one language.
There are tag words:
colour.
American.
parliament.
girl.
black, xenophobic, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesothu, Swazi.
Afrikaner.
Apartheid.
racist. sexist.
sexual harrassment, fear, poverty, unemployment, robbery, kidnapping, rape, township, Group Areas Act, white.
Table Mountain.
Once a group of South Africans sang me an impromptu national anthem.
It is difficult,
I have found,
when you love the whole world.
Where do you fit?
As an individual.
I am small,
I am miniscule,
a dot on the face of our big granite Earth,
a flick in time.
We have to categorize to make things fall into comprehension.
The more I learn,
the fewer categories I can endorse.
Thus,
the world loses comprehension...
So here I am
deep in the aching tissue
where the world is
where you are
where I am
and where words can't go.
Thank you for the trip.
I can't claim you for my own,
and so I don't know how to love you
but I do.
I do.
And I always will.
I wish there was some way I could say it to you.
Say back to you what you've given to me.
But at some point,
when you peel away the tissue
to something deeper,
something so internal you can't feel it except dully,
achingly,
you learn
that there are no words.
So I write this because I don't know anything else,
it's the only thing I can give you,
the only thing I have that I can give, and
I need to tell you,
you humbled me.
I came with my prejudices,
my sophomoric assurance of self-knowledge,
did you know
that I knew everything?
I'm leaving now
after you gave me the dubious gift
of finding
that I know nothing at all.
I went to the high school to teach kids how to debate.
I am inadequate.
I went to the TB hospital to give affection to kids.
They taught me how.
I became surrounded by people who speak more than English.
I only know one language.
There are tag words:
colour.
American.
parliament.
girl.
black, xenophobic, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesothu, Swazi.
Afrikaner.
Apartheid.
racist. sexist.
sexual harrassment, fear, poverty, unemployment, robbery, kidnapping, rape, township, Group Areas Act, white.
Table Mountain.
Once a group of South Africans sang me an impromptu national anthem.
It is difficult,
I have found,
when you love the whole world.
Where do you fit?
As an individual.
I am small,
I am miniscule,
a dot on the face of our big granite Earth,
a flick in time.
We have to categorize to make things fall into comprehension.
The more I learn,
the fewer categories I can endorse.
Thus,
the world loses comprehension...
So here I am
deep in the aching tissue
where the world is
where you are
where I am
and where words can't go.
Thank you for the trip.
I can't claim you for my own,
and so I don't know how to love you
but I do.
I do.
And I always will.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
about the blog: a letter to you
I want to be your translator.
I want to tell you about you, translated from another language.
I started a blog because I wanted you to know what it's like to be a body in South Africa. I wanted you to know what it's like to be you in South Africa. I wanted you to be any body or your body or my body in South Africa, in that van with me, feeling that man's head roll hard and round across my knees. I wanted you to wake up in my bed alone, hear the buses roll past outside. I wanted you to bite into a sweet bursting grape, taste the ambrosia in your mouth, on your tongue, feel vaguely worried as you read that you might drip juice down your chin and onto your shirt.
I came to South Africa because there was something I suspected, and I wanted to prove it to myself.
I suspected that there is no such thing as a real world. There is only such thing as many real worlds, as many as there are people. There is no actuality, no reality. The only thing Africa is, the only thing it ever ever was, was what people saw tasted felt heard breathed it to be. That is Africa. It does not exist in the back of your head, in the corner of your eye, just beyond your reach, just behind your vision. It exists here, in this blog, in what you're reading. It exists in anything you've ever heard about Africa, anything you've ever tasted in Africa. My Africa is real and different from that of the man who robbed me, they are so so different, and different from Carmen's and different from Funeka's and different from Kcowane's Africa, but they are all Africa, they are all real in our heads. You can be from Oceanview or you can be from Namibia or you can be from Norway.
You can be from Lubbock, Texas.
The Africa in our heads is real and it is the real Africa, and the public sphere of Africa is people communicating what is in their heads, that is the only way to know the real Africa, what people say, what they say in their bodies and in their words, that's the only real way to communicate is through bodies and words, and since you cannot see my body or feel my skin or the soft compression of my fingers on yours, and you cannot taste it or hear me or smell me, we can't communicate that way, it's out, so the only way to communicate, you and me, America and Africa, is through words.
I couldn't lie to you.
I couldn't tell you untruths. I wanted to contribute something new, something you did not know. I could have added high fructose corn syrup and wrapped it in cellophane.
But you don't need to go to South Africa for that.
I wanted honesty. I wanted rawness. So I talked about fruit and its sweetness but I also talked about his long lashes, the fear and the seahorse, but mostly you were in my white female young American body, I didn't pretend to be anyone else, I didn't try to be the whole public or the whole Africa or to tell you that this is what Africa is to everyone,
I just wanted you to know what Africa was to me.
And I think since you know what it is to me, you maybe know better what it is to you too.
I am small, I am one human being and I am in South Africa and these are my experiences, only mine but if you want you can apply them to you or anyone else, that's what they're there for, that's what stories are for.
I want to be your translator.
I want to tell you about you, translated from another language.
I started a blog because I wanted you to know what it's like to be a body in South Africa. I wanted you to know what it's like to be you in South Africa. I wanted you to be any body or your body or my body in South Africa, in that van with me, feeling that man's head roll hard and round across my knees. I wanted you to wake up in my bed alone, hear the buses roll past outside. I wanted you to bite into a sweet bursting grape, taste the ambrosia in your mouth, on your tongue, feel vaguely worried as you read that you might drip juice down your chin and onto your shirt.
I came to South Africa because there was something I suspected, and I wanted to prove it to myself.
I suspected that there is no such thing as a real world. There is only such thing as many real worlds, as many as there are people. There is no actuality, no reality. The only thing Africa is, the only thing it ever ever was, was what people saw tasted felt heard breathed it to be. That is Africa. It does not exist in the back of your head, in the corner of your eye, just beyond your reach, just behind your vision. It exists here, in this blog, in what you're reading. It exists in anything you've ever heard about Africa, anything you've ever tasted in Africa. My Africa is real and different from that of the man who robbed me, they are so so different, and different from Carmen's and different from Funeka's and different from Kcowane's Africa, but they are all Africa, they are all real in our heads. You can be from Oceanview or you can be from Namibia or you can be from Norway.
You can be from Lubbock, Texas.
The Africa in our heads is real and it is the real Africa, and the public sphere of Africa is people communicating what is in their heads, that is the only way to know the real Africa, what people say, what they say in their bodies and in their words, that's the only real way to communicate is through bodies and words, and since you cannot see my body or feel my skin or the soft compression of my fingers on yours, and you cannot taste it or hear me or smell me, we can't communicate that way, it's out, so the only way to communicate, you and me, America and Africa, is through words.
I couldn't lie to you.
I couldn't tell you untruths. I wanted to contribute something new, something you did not know. I could have added high fructose corn syrup and wrapped it in cellophane.
But you don't need to go to South Africa for that.
I wanted honesty. I wanted rawness. So I talked about fruit and its sweetness but I also talked about his long lashes, the fear and the seahorse, but mostly you were in my white female young American body, I didn't pretend to be anyone else, I didn't try to be the whole public or the whole Africa or to tell you that this is what Africa is to everyone,
I just wanted you to know what Africa was to me.
And I think since you know what it is to me, you maybe know better what it is to you too.
I am small, I am one human being and I am in South Africa and these are my experiences, only mine but if you want you can apply them to you or anyone else, that's what they're there for, that's what stories are for.
I want to be your translator.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
a kidnapping and a robbery
Winter is threatening. It's April and it's Saturday and we are hurrying against the weather, the three of us, Laura and Brian and me, and the wind is blowing through our rain jackets and rain is curling into our necks via our faces. Our plan is to go to a farmers' market in Woodstock, a few miles away from where we live. We wait at the street corner near our res for a minibus, the large haphazard van that passes for public transportation in Cape Town. One pulls up to the curb. It contains the shouter, a man who advertises the taxi's destination by shouting to passersby; the driver; and two people we assume are fellow passengers, a man and a woman who sit quietly and separately, looking serenely out the fogged window at the cold rain.
We clamber on, and pay the requisite five rand (fifty cents) for a ride to Woodstock. The air is steamy with our breath since the windows are shut against the winter, and I wipe the window nearest me with the sleeve of my rain jacket so that I can watch the world go by. I can barely see out even once I've squeaked an opening on the glass because the rain has made shivering beads of cold liquid on the window.
More people climb clumsily onto the minibus, and a man with a brown leather jacket and a large backpack sits next to me. His backpack digs into my hip, and I hunch against the ceiling, which collides with my head, feeling trapped and wishing I could disembark.
We pass Woodstock, and turn onto the N5 for center city Cape Town. The minibus stops at a taxi depot, and Laura, Brian and I confer and decide to get off here with the rest of the passengers before moving to some Plan B. Laura moves to disembark, but the shouter blocks her way. "You needed to go to Woodstock? We'll take you to Woodstock." He grins. The four original people, including the woman, remain on the taxi, so we relax.
If there's a woman it's okay.
Right?
The minibus turns around and moves toward the main road, on the way to Woodstock. I move to a seat nearer Laura and Brian; before, too many people had squeezed me into a high back corner. The driver swings the minibus into a petrol station; the shouter hops off and sprints into the store. Shortly he returns clutching loose cigarettes and a package of hot food. We are off.
The other man turns to us, and lights a cigarette. He has a cap and a face that looks like he could be someone's cousin, someone's little brother, thick-lipped and clownish and young, with mischievous eyes. "You smoke?" We shake our heads no.
"Where are we going?" Brian asks. We have passed the sign for Woodstock and turned off the main road onto the highway, the N2.
The shouter laughs. "Just taking you around directly to the market."
The woman stays silent in the front seat. We say nothing. What can we do?
The shouter has a baseball cap and long eyelashes. I remember that, long girlish lashes and a mustache. He lights a cigarette. The two men are relaxed now, sprawled over the seats, eating and smoking and laughing. He asks us where we're from.
"The U.S."
He laughs. "The U.S.! I'm an original American gangster. Look, I'll show you, I have--" and he gestures across his chest and pulls at his shirt to show us a tattoo, then seems to change his mind. He sobers and takes a puff of his cigarette. "I'll never go there, though. Money."
"Maybe someday," Brian reassures him optimistically.
We're passing UCT. Long Lashes asks Brian for his name, and they shake hands. He makes a vague gesture toward Laura and me, and says, "I won't ask, they might be your wives." He throws his hands up and shrugs as though to say, don't want to touch another man's girl(s). Then they laugh, Long Lashes and the other, hard, as though this is the funniest thing they have heard in hours. Brian manages a splutter, and Laura and I smile with tight lips.
Where are we going?
The other, not Long Lashes, suddenly lunges up and squeezes between Laura and me. I can't decide what I'm avoiding more, his intentions or the hot lit end of his cigarette, which almost brushes my arm and then my jaw. He has something metal and round in his hand, and it's not until he pushes to the seat behind us and pulls the blade on Brian that I realize it is half a pair of scissors.
He presses the sharp end into Brian's neck, and pats down his pockets. "Hey, hey!" Brian says, and I process that Brian can't decide between throwing up his hands and pulling out his wallet, and he does both in succession, opening his wallet to show Scissors that he has no cash.
Long Lashes takes my purse from me with resignation, as though this was expected, as though there was no other way for this to turn out. I remove my camera from it, placing the soft white case in my jacket pocket, before giving him my purse. He doesn't see and pads through my purse, finding the wallet with one thousand rand (about a hundred dollars).
Scissors is asking Brian for his PIN number, and Laura's, and I whisper to Laura, "Are you giving him your real one?"
"Yes," she whispers back, "they're stopping at ATMs."
So Long Lashes finds the pen in my purse and passes it to Scissors, who scrawls each of our PIN numbers on his palm.
Then he pushes us down. We lie on the seats awkwardly, and Long Lashes sprawls across my knees, still smoking, and he talks to us. "I was shot when I was nine," he says conversationally. The smoke curls blue and opaque out his face as he talks, and I can't decide which would be more offensive, lit tobacco in this closed vehicle or an open window with cold hard winter rain on my face. "You see why I have to do this." He rolls his head, hard and round, across my left knee to look at Brian. "I have no choice."
"Out of circumstance," Brian agrees.
Laura and I say nothing. Simultaneously we grip one another's hands, hard. I can't see her or Brian.
This is what I can see:
The gray vinyl ceiling, overlaid with black metal bars.
Long Lashes and his offensive smoke.
Foggy windows.
The blue beaded seahorse swinging from the rearview mirror.
They won't rape us, I conjecture. Bizarrely, I feel safer in that respect with Scissors and Long Lashes than I do with some guys in clubs. But what if they do?
I try to calculate how long it would take me to regain a healthy view toward sexuality if these three men gang-raped me. I wonder distantly how it would affect my psyche, if I would become withdrawn or overly gregarious. And then I allow the thought to trail off as this knowledge is so foreign to my experience, and also because something new has occurred to me.
I think about HIV.
I think about how much it would cost to be on ARVs for the rest of my life, and what that would prevent me from doing. I would be poorer and I would take tests and know the inside of a hospital better than I ever ever wanted to. I can see potential jobs and potential lovers and maybe potential friends melting into nonexistence when faced with the stigma.
I haven't even gotten to pregnancy, it hasn't even popped into my dazed and distant mind, when we stop presumably for an ATM trip and Scissors tosses at us, "I have a .45. Don't move."
"Don't shoot them," Long Lashes slurs lazily. "They're human too, white and American and all."
Scissors has half a pair of scissors in lieu of a knife. How can this man have a gun?
Laura squeezes my hand, and I grip hers hard, and feel the first real fear balloon in my gut. He can't have a gun. I haven't seen a gun. If he had a gun he would show us.
Wouldn't he?
I have to get the license plate number, I think.
This is my mantra.
Licenseplatenumberlicenseplatenumberlicenseplatenumber.
I wonder vaguely what Nancy Drew would do. I wonder a lot of things: where we are going, how long we will be in this minibus, how long I can stand being this powerless.
What it'll be like after.
Or if there won't be an after.
I half-heartedly pray to God and the gray vinyl ceiling, but mostly I try to break into my career in telepathy by messaging Quinton, the director of our study abroad program.
Quinton would know what to do.
And then, after thirty minutes or seven hours, Long Lashes leaps off my knees and throws open the door and I don't move because I'm still wary of that fictional gun and scissors, and he thrusts forty rand (four dollars) into Brian's hand--"for the taxi back." And, tossing his head, "Get out." I catapult myself onto the pavement, suddenly aware that my knee is twisted painfully from his weight, and I turn to watch Laura stumble out, the van is speeding up, oh God, will Brian make it? And he breaks free of the minibus with a missed step, and trots to a stop, and Laura hugs me hard, and Brian hugs us both, and I throw my arms around them, and we are here and we are safe and we are alive and here we are we can breathe.
And then we laugh, that is what we do, we laugh, because we forgot to get the license plate number.
Where are we?
A wide deserted road; one side is bush, the other has nice condos. We cross to the condo side and walk, and walk, and come upon a Mr. Video (like a Blockbuster), and go in, blinking.
"We've been robbed!" Brian announces. "Can we use your phone?"
The woman grins at us uncertainly, and shoves a telephone in our direction. A man who had been perusing the movie selection looks up and assures us he will call for us, do we know a number?
No. We don't. Not a single one.
He ushers us into the bar next door, which it turns out he owns, and sits us down. "Something for the nerves? Want a beer?"
"Water," we answer. I gulp mine as though there is no time, and there isn't, but there is all the time.
A woman working there listens and tells the bartender, "I will take them. Where do you live?"
"Mowbray," we answer.
"Want a ride?"
We look at one another, and we laugh, and I laugh hard on the inside, I have been laughing hard since this began because you can laugh or you can cry and laughing's easier, we're finished taking rides from strangers but where are we, by the way?
"Muizenberg."
A town forty-five minutes south of Cape Town. We laugh harder because how can we get back home for forty rand? That wouldn't even take us a quarter of the way.
Yes, we tell the woman/angel. We want a ride.
On the long ride home I stare out the fogged window and wish things I can't put into words, and I am not aware anyone had been talking at all until Laura nudges me and tells the woman, "Geography."
"Geography," I repeat. "Sorry. I'm a geography major."
"I studied advertising myself," she tells us. Where? I ask. Advertising Institute of South Africa, or College of Advertising in the Western Cape, or University of the People Who Are Good. Is that in Cape Town?
Yes.
We clamber on, and pay the requisite five rand (fifty cents) for a ride to Woodstock. The air is steamy with our breath since the windows are shut against the winter, and I wipe the window nearest me with the sleeve of my rain jacket so that I can watch the world go by. I can barely see out even once I've squeaked an opening on the glass because the rain has made shivering beads of cold liquid on the window.
More people climb clumsily onto the minibus, and a man with a brown leather jacket and a large backpack sits next to me. His backpack digs into my hip, and I hunch against the ceiling, which collides with my head, feeling trapped and wishing I could disembark.
We pass Woodstock, and turn onto the N5 for center city Cape Town. The minibus stops at a taxi depot, and Laura, Brian and I confer and decide to get off here with the rest of the passengers before moving to some Plan B. Laura moves to disembark, but the shouter blocks her way. "You needed to go to Woodstock? We'll take you to Woodstock." He grins. The four original people, including the woman, remain on the taxi, so we relax.
If there's a woman it's okay.
Right?
The minibus turns around and moves toward the main road, on the way to Woodstock. I move to a seat nearer Laura and Brian; before, too many people had squeezed me into a high back corner. The driver swings the minibus into a petrol station; the shouter hops off and sprints into the store. Shortly he returns clutching loose cigarettes and a package of hot food. We are off.
The other man turns to us, and lights a cigarette. He has a cap and a face that looks like he could be someone's cousin, someone's little brother, thick-lipped and clownish and young, with mischievous eyes. "You smoke?" We shake our heads no.
"Where are we going?" Brian asks. We have passed the sign for Woodstock and turned off the main road onto the highway, the N2.
The shouter laughs. "Just taking you around directly to the market."
The woman stays silent in the front seat. We say nothing. What can we do?
The shouter has a baseball cap and long eyelashes. I remember that, long girlish lashes and a mustache. He lights a cigarette. The two men are relaxed now, sprawled over the seats, eating and smoking and laughing. He asks us where we're from.
"The U.S."
He laughs. "The U.S.! I'm an original American gangster. Look, I'll show you, I have--" and he gestures across his chest and pulls at his shirt to show us a tattoo, then seems to change his mind. He sobers and takes a puff of his cigarette. "I'll never go there, though. Money."
"Maybe someday," Brian reassures him optimistically.
We're passing UCT. Long Lashes asks Brian for his name, and they shake hands. He makes a vague gesture toward Laura and me, and says, "I won't ask, they might be your wives." He throws his hands up and shrugs as though to say, don't want to touch another man's girl(s). Then they laugh, Long Lashes and the other, hard, as though this is the funniest thing they have heard in hours. Brian manages a splutter, and Laura and I smile with tight lips.
Where are we going?
The other, not Long Lashes, suddenly lunges up and squeezes between Laura and me. I can't decide what I'm avoiding more, his intentions or the hot lit end of his cigarette, which almost brushes my arm and then my jaw. He has something metal and round in his hand, and it's not until he pushes to the seat behind us and pulls the blade on Brian that I realize it is half a pair of scissors.
He presses the sharp end into Brian's neck, and pats down his pockets. "Hey, hey!" Brian says, and I process that Brian can't decide between throwing up his hands and pulling out his wallet, and he does both in succession, opening his wallet to show Scissors that he has no cash.
Long Lashes takes my purse from me with resignation, as though this was expected, as though there was no other way for this to turn out. I remove my camera from it, placing the soft white case in my jacket pocket, before giving him my purse. He doesn't see and pads through my purse, finding the wallet with one thousand rand (about a hundred dollars).
Scissors is asking Brian for his PIN number, and Laura's, and I whisper to Laura, "Are you giving him your real one?"
"Yes," she whispers back, "they're stopping at ATMs."
So Long Lashes finds the pen in my purse and passes it to Scissors, who scrawls each of our PIN numbers on his palm.
Then he pushes us down. We lie on the seats awkwardly, and Long Lashes sprawls across my knees, still smoking, and he talks to us. "I was shot when I was nine," he says conversationally. The smoke curls blue and opaque out his face as he talks, and I can't decide which would be more offensive, lit tobacco in this closed vehicle or an open window with cold hard winter rain on my face. "You see why I have to do this." He rolls his head, hard and round, across my left knee to look at Brian. "I have no choice."
"Out of circumstance," Brian agrees.
Laura and I say nothing. Simultaneously we grip one another's hands, hard. I can't see her or Brian.
This is what I can see:
The gray vinyl ceiling, overlaid with black metal bars.
Long Lashes and his offensive smoke.
Foggy windows.
The blue beaded seahorse swinging from the rearview mirror.
They won't rape us, I conjecture. Bizarrely, I feel safer in that respect with Scissors and Long Lashes than I do with some guys in clubs. But what if they do?
I try to calculate how long it would take me to regain a healthy view toward sexuality if these three men gang-raped me. I wonder distantly how it would affect my psyche, if I would become withdrawn or overly gregarious. And then I allow the thought to trail off as this knowledge is so foreign to my experience, and also because something new has occurred to me.
I think about HIV.
I think about how much it would cost to be on ARVs for the rest of my life, and what that would prevent me from doing. I would be poorer and I would take tests and know the inside of a hospital better than I ever ever wanted to. I can see potential jobs and potential lovers and maybe potential friends melting into nonexistence when faced with the stigma.
I haven't even gotten to pregnancy, it hasn't even popped into my dazed and distant mind, when we stop presumably for an ATM trip and Scissors tosses at us, "I have a .45. Don't move."
"Don't shoot them," Long Lashes slurs lazily. "They're human too, white and American and all."
Scissors has half a pair of scissors in lieu of a knife. How can this man have a gun?
Laura squeezes my hand, and I grip hers hard, and feel the first real fear balloon in my gut. He can't have a gun. I haven't seen a gun. If he had a gun he would show us.
Wouldn't he?
I have to get the license plate number, I think.
This is my mantra.
Licenseplatenumberlicenseplatenumberlicenseplatenumber.
I wonder vaguely what Nancy Drew would do. I wonder a lot of things: where we are going, how long we will be in this minibus, how long I can stand being this powerless.
What it'll be like after.
Or if there won't be an after.
I half-heartedly pray to God and the gray vinyl ceiling, but mostly I try to break into my career in telepathy by messaging Quinton, the director of our study abroad program.
Quinton would know what to do.
And then, after thirty minutes or seven hours, Long Lashes leaps off my knees and throws open the door and I don't move because I'm still wary of that fictional gun and scissors, and he thrusts forty rand (four dollars) into Brian's hand--"for the taxi back." And, tossing his head, "Get out." I catapult myself onto the pavement, suddenly aware that my knee is twisted painfully from his weight, and I turn to watch Laura stumble out, the van is speeding up, oh God, will Brian make it? And he breaks free of the minibus with a missed step, and trots to a stop, and Laura hugs me hard, and Brian hugs us both, and I throw my arms around them, and we are here and we are safe and we are alive and here we are we can breathe.
And then we laugh, that is what we do, we laugh, because we forgot to get the license plate number.
Where are we?
A wide deserted road; one side is bush, the other has nice condos. We cross to the condo side and walk, and walk, and come upon a Mr. Video (like a Blockbuster), and go in, blinking.
"We've been robbed!" Brian announces. "Can we use your phone?"
The woman grins at us uncertainly, and shoves a telephone in our direction. A man who had been perusing the movie selection looks up and assures us he will call for us, do we know a number?
No. We don't. Not a single one.
He ushers us into the bar next door, which it turns out he owns, and sits us down. "Something for the nerves? Want a beer?"
"Water," we answer. I gulp mine as though there is no time, and there isn't, but there is all the time.
A woman working there listens and tells the bartender, "I will take them. Where do you live?"
"Mowbray," we answer.
"Want a ride?"
We look at one another, and we laugh, and I laugh hard on the inside, I have been laughing hard since this began because you can laugh or you can cry and laughing's easier, we're finished taking rides from strangers but where are we, by the way?
"Muizenberg."
A town forty-five minutes south of Cape Town. We laugh harder because how can we get back home for forty rand? That wouldn't even take us a quarter of the way.
Yes, we tell the woman/angel. We want a ride.
On the long ride home I stare out the fogged window and wish things I can't put into words, and I am not aware anyone had been talking at all until Laura nudges me and tells the woman, "Geography."
"Geography," I repeat. "Sorry. I'm a geography major."
"I studied advertising myself," she tells us. Where? I ask. Advertising Institute of South Africa, or College of Advertising in the Western Cape, or University of the People Who Are Good. Is that in Cape Town?
Yes.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
warning: a real blog post. or, Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh my)
I hate flying.
This is a recent development. When I was younger I loved it, the prospect of going to a new place, the novelty and to-do of packing, floating through security, discovering secret snacks and notes my mother had slipped into my backpack, drinking from my special Little Mermaid sippy cup. Then I got older and the Little Mermaid cup lid was lost, the snacks and notes stopped, the security became more complicated. 9/11 happened, and I steadily declined from loving flying to neutrality to hating it. My parents are no longer involved; instead, I book flights and arrange transportation and print out my boarding pass. It's worse when going overseas--there is the constant panic in my abdomen that I have forgotten my passport, that the airline will have lost my booking, that I'll forget something, that a different country's laws about airport security will affect my carry-on, that the plane's mechanics weren't properly checked or the captain will fall asleep or Something Bad Will Happen.
I'm on a plane now, scrawling this on the barf bag. It's the end of spring break and we're en route back to Cape Town from Johannesburg. My head is full of words and words, and if I never hear anyone speak again I could die a happy woman. Animals, on the other hand (I am delighted to relate to you), don't actually talk.
Let me tell you this about African animals and me:
upon watching a nature documentary in my parents' sunny living room in Lubbock, my impression of Africa involves a vague open savanna and perpetual dry season. I was always impressed by the tenacity of the filmmakers, thinking they must have hiked through land sharp with lions and splashed through water oily with crocodiles to arrive at a water hole maybe three people were aware of in order to sit in what I imagined was a ThighMaster position for 12 hours behind some marula tree, waiting for something interesting to happen, like death or sex.
Then I went on safari.
Waking up before sunrise was in line with my idea of African game drives. But we neglected any (imaginary) remote parts of the country; instead, we traveled to Kruger National Park in South Africa and game reserves in Swaziland, where we bounced over paved and well-graded dirt roads in pickup trucks to view game on the side of the road in a place where animals were official. While there was something eerie and magical and, to use the word of my friend Allison, humbling, to watch a family of elephants lumber with their slow easy grace across a savanna sunrise, or the sudden butterfly discovery of male lions arrogantly lying in the tall grass, or waiting as four cheetah with flicking tails crossed the road un-self-consciously, or stumbling, heart pounding, six inches away from the fenced-in face of a roaring behemoth lioness--despite all this, I felt disconnected. All of this together was an experience that reminded me of driving through Yellowstone to see bison or the elusive grizzly; I felt segregated from the land, as though there was a denial that we were a part of one another. There seemed to be an attitude that land should be kept at arm's length, viewed but not touched, like television or Victorian children who may not speak. Unsupervised hikes in the national park were not allowed. I wondered what to do to prevent meeting a lion in the bush, but anyone I asked seemed not to know, and upon reflection I don't blame them: in their eyes, it's irrelevant. How would you risk meeting a lion in the bush if you never go walking in the bush?
I wondered where the Africa everyone dreams about had gone, and found that it has disappeared, along with the frontier in America and wilderness around the world. The truth about Africa has less to do with lions and cheetah and wildebeests, and more with the hard glittering buildings of Johannesburg and the polyester uniforms of schoolkids. Rural KwaZulu-Natal prvince has round Zulu huts, but roofs are tiled now instead of thatched, and jeans have replaced whatever loincloth existed in the imaginations of Western people. Breasts are sexualized, and covered. The jarring juxtaposition of old Africa and new is fascinating and incessantly fresh and raw and surprising. It applies too to the African take on animals and conservation. At Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Sanctuary in Limpopo province, the white Afrikaner presenter derided "natives" for killing leopards for traditional uses. This is what I, as an environmentalist and an anthropologist, learned: in order for conservation to be sustainable, its ideals must be reconciled with those of locals, be they Montana ranchers or Limpopo Tswana. Otherwise, conservation is a synonym for imperialism.
In other news, my passport is accumulating exotic stamps. Swaziland is a tiny country squeezed between South Africa and Mozambique. It's an absolute monarchy, one of three left in the world, and the king has I think about 16 or 17 wives. Things I know about Swaziland: it's a leader in Southern Africa in virginity testing of young unmarried women, a movement led by older women who claim the practice reduces HIV/AIDS. Its currency is pegged to match South African rand. The South African border control was a boxy, industrial brick building, and I got a quick exit stamp under a glass window. I walked twenty feet to the Swaziland border control, made of wood and falling apart; the officer received my passport with curiosity. He noted the nationality. "Obama country," he murmured. He stamped it and handed it back to me, grinning. He was missing a canine. "Welcome to Swaziland!"
Durban has Victoria Street Market (Indian wedding garlands and red spices piled in bowls and women with babies tied in towels around their bodies and big containers on their heads and meat markets and people, this is where people go to Live) and the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere. Johannesburg is like Fort Worth or Philadelphia, tall gleaming buildings and smokestacks and highways. Rural South Africa is indescribable, almost laughably photogenic. The mountains are tall and green, the fields are terraced like Peru except not as cold and wet and high, the tree farms line the roads with tall straight vegetation that has white peeling bark and sunlight seeping through to the leafy ground. The light is perfect somehow no matter what time of day it is, but sunrise and sunset are intoxicating, and require dreamy concentration.
And now we're landing, and my hatred of flying, of being so far away from earth, is becoming immaterial as we get closer and closer to the ground. Nothing was forgotten and the plane stayed whole and apparently the pilots are all awake, or at least the important ones are.
When I sleep, I'll dream of lions and South African sunsets.
This is a recent development. When I was younger I loved it, the prospect of going to a new place, the novelty and to-do of packing, floating through security, discovering secret snacks and notes my mother had slipped into my backpack, drinking from my special Little Mermaid sippy cup. Then I got older and the Little Mermaid cup lid was lost, the snacks and notes stopped, the security became more complicated. 9/11 happened, and I steadily declined from loving flying to neutrality to hating it. My parents are no longer involved; instead, I book flights and arrange transportation and print out my boarding pass. It's worse when going overseas--there is the constant panic in my abdomen that I have forgotten my passport, that the airline will have lost my booking, that I'll forget something, that a different country's laws about airport security will affect my carry-on, that the plane's mechanics weren't properly checked or the captain will fall asleep or Something Bad Will Happen.
I'm on a plane now, scrawling this on the barf bag. It's the end of spring break and we're en route back to Cape Town from Johannesburg. My head is full of words and words, and if I never hear anyone speak again I could die a happy woman. Animals, on the other hand (I am delighted to relate to you), don't actually talk.
Let me tell you this about African animals and me:
upon watching a nature documentary in my parents' sunny living room in Lubbock, my impression of Africa involves a vague open savanna and perpetual dry season. I was always impressed by the tenacity of the filmmakers, thinking they must have hiked through land sharp with lions and splashed through water oily with crocodiles to arrive at a water hole maybe three people were aware of in order to sit in what I imagined was a ThighMaster position for 12 hours behind some marula tree, waiting for something interesting to happen, like death or sex.
Then I went on safari.
Waking up before sunrise was in line with my idea of African game drives. But we neglected any (imaginary) remote parts of the country; instead, we traveled to Kruger National Park in South Africa and game reserves in Swaziland, where we bounced over paved and well-graded dirt roads in pickup trucks to view game on the side of the road in a place where animals were official. While there was something eerie and magical and, to use the word of my friend Allison, humbling, to watch a family of elephants lumber with their slow easy grace across a savanna sunrise, or the sudden butterfly discovery of male lions arrogantly lying in the tall grass, or waiting as four cheetah with flicking tails crossed the road un-self-consciously, or stumbling, heart pounding, six inches away from the fenced-in face of a roaring behemoth lioness--despite all this, I felt disconnected. All of this together was an experience that reminded me of driving through Yellowstone to see bison or the elusive grizzly; I felt segregated from the land, as though there was a denial that we were a part of one another. There seemed to be an attitude that land should be kept at arm's length, viewed but not touched, like television or Victorian children who may not speak. Unsupervised hikes in the national park were not allowed. I wondered what to do to prevent meeting a lion in the bush, but anyone I asked seemed not to know, and upon reflection I don't blame them: in their eyes, it's irrelevant. How would you risk meeting a lion in the bush if you never go walking in the bush?
I wondered where the Africa everyone dreams about had gone, and found that it has disappeared, along with the frontier in America and wilderness around the world. The truth about Africa has less to do with lions and cheetah and wildebeests, and more with the hard glittering buildings of Johannesburg and the polyester uniforms of schoolkids. Rural KwaZulu-Natal prvince has round Zulu huts, but roofs are tiled now instead of thatched, and jeans have replaced whatever loincloth existed in the imaginations of Western people. Breasts are sexualized, and covered. The jarring juxtaposition of old Africa and new is fascinating and incessantly fresh and raw and surprising. It applies too to the African take on animals and conservation. At Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Sanctuary in Limpopo province, the white Afrikaner presenter derided "natives" for killing leopards for traditional uses. This is what I, as an environmentalist and an anthropologist, learned: in order for conservation to be sustainable, its ideals must be reconciled with those of locals, be they Montana ranchers or Limpopo Tswana. Otherwise, conservation is a synonym for imperialism.
In other news, my passport is accumulating exotic stamps. Swaziland is a tiny country squeezed between South Africa and Mozambique. It's an absolute monarchy, one of three left in the world, and the king has I think about 16 or 17 wives. Things I know about Swaziland: it's a leader in Southern Africa in virginity testing of young unmarried women, a movement led by older women who claim the practice reduces HIV/AIDS. Its currency is pegged to match South African rand. The South African border control was a boxy, industrial brick building, and I got a quick exit stamp under a glass window. I walked twenty feet to the Swaziland border control, made of wood and falling apart; the officer received my passport with curiosity. He noted the nationality. "Obama country," he murmured. He stamped it and handed it back to me, grinning. He was missing a canine. "Welcome to Swaziland!"
Durban has Victoria Street Market (Indian wedding garlands and red spices piled in bowls and women with babies tied in towels around their bodies and big containers on their heads and meat markets and people, this is where people go to Live) and the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere. Johannesburg is like Fort Worth or Philadelphia, tall gleaming buildings and smokestacks and highways. Rural South Africa is indescribable, almost laughably photogenic. The mountains are tall and green, the fields are terraced like Peru except not as cold and wet and high, the tree farms line the roads with tall straight vegetation that has white peeling bark and sunlight seeping through to the leafy ground. The light is perfect somehow no matter what time of day it is, but sunrise and sunset are intoxicating, and require dreamy concentration.
And now we're landing, and my hatred of flying, of being so far away from earth, is becoming immaterial as we get closer and closer to the ground. Nothing was forgotten and the plane stayed whole and apparently the pilots are all awake, or at least the important ones are.
When I sleep, I'll dream of lions and South African sunsets.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
on food and fairies
I found a food store store the other day, in a mall, and I thought I was in America.
I walked in and there was Lindt's chocolate, gourmet spelt, coconut healthy junk food, expensive candles and organic towels, rows of lotions made in California. I rubbed my fingers over the yoga mats semi-reverently. I found a tiny bag of black beans tucked into a dusty corner, and bought it along with some fancy American cherry chapstick.
Then I wanted more: soymilk, whole wheat tortillas. What I miss most about home, after the people, is the food. I want Cowboy Queso from Kerbey Lane. I want my mom's Halloween chili. I want the waiter to know what I'm talking about when I pronounce "pollo" with a "y". I want to be able to buy frosting ready-made from the store, and Pilsbury chocolate chip cookie dough.
This craving for familiarity is bizarre, because the food here is high-quality, and undeniably better than most food at home. I have sensual, almost religious experiences with strawberries, guava juice, carrots. This morning time stopped when I bit into a slice of pineapple. My first banana on this continent was on campus, and in public, and really it should have been in private. My roommate dedicated her facebook status to a nectarine. Bunches of grapes in the cafeteria are 5 rand, or about 50 cents, and I eat them like candy, and they burst in my mouth like the best kind of ambrosia.
I have a spiritual affinity with the produce here.
Food, though, is the physical manifestation of your relationship with a place; here the spices are curry and masala and peri-peri, and all I wanted was chili powder. I have yet to eat a sandwich without mayonnaise. There is no ketchup, only tomato sauce which is thin and translucent and sugary. No hope of mustard.
Being something of a health freak, I am aware that the number one source of saturated fat in the average American's diet is ground beef; hoping to avoid this, I search in vain for ground turkey. Instead, I locate ground ostrich, which I have tasted, and which has a wetter stringier taste than ground beef. It's neither bad nor particularly good.
Yesterday I accidentally made a cake with springbok butter.
I was not previously aware anyone had ever milked an antelope.
The small things transform your experience of a place so that you discover your new between-classes lunch: a chicken peri-peri toasted whole wheat sub, inside which mayonnaise is unavoidable. You make a cake, and the icing tastes unusually creamy and exotic. You eat a a burger and it's bird meat. Fries are consumed with a condiment that's not quite ketchup. You try to make chili, but there are no black beans and no chili powder.
It's not that the food is bad. It's actually fresher, sweeter, stronger, fuller. But food is one of the few things in the world that is equally a product of the land and the human, since humans give it back. In the old Irish fairy legends, you were never supposed to ingest anything in the fairyland because otherwise time slipped and you stayed there, intoxicated, for hundreds of years or forever, unaware that you were under a spell. There's a reason food has this power:
food is the most intimate connection a human can ever have with a place.
Food was the first inkling I had that I was in a foreign country. Things taste different here. You can try African or Chinese or Mexican or Indian or French or Japanese cuisine in the U.S., but it will lend an American spin to your palate. Just as if you tried it in India, it would taste Indian.
I've eaten food here, sustained myself on plants grown in another country, consumed meals that have never heard of America, let alone been Americanized. Browsing through a store with food made in California, I blink, I feel a sudden sneaking euphoria, and I suspect I've been in Africa the fairyland. Time has stopped.
I'm under a spell.
I walked in and there was Lindt's chocolate, gourmet spelt, coconut healthy junk food, expensive candles and organic towels, rows of lotions made in California. I rubbed my fingers over the yoga mats semi-reverently. I found a tiny bag of black beans tucked into a dusty corner, and bought it along with some fancy American cherry chapstick.
Then I wanted more: soymilk, whole wheat tortillas. What I miss most about home, after the people, is the food. I want Cowboy Queso from Kerbey Lane. I want my mom's Halloween chili. I want the waiter to know what I'm talking about when I pronounce "pollo" with a "y". I want to be able to buy frosting ready-made from the store, and Pilsbury chocolate chip cookie dough.
This craving for familiarity is bizarre, because the food here is high-quality, and undeniably better than most food at home. I have sensual, almost religious experiences with strawberries, guava juice, carrots. This morning time stopped when I bit into a slice of pineapple. My first banana on this continent was on campus, and in public, and really it should have been in private. My roommate dedicated her facebook status to a nectarine. Bunches of grapes in the cafeteria are 5 rand, or about 50 cents, and I eat them like candy, and they burst in my mouth like the best kind of ambrosia.
I have a spiritual affinity with the produce here.
Food, though, is the physical manifestation of your relationship with a place; here the spices are curry and masala and peri-peri, and all I wanted was chili powder. I have yet to eat a sandwich without mayonnaise. There is no ketchup, only tomato sauce which is thin and translucent and sugary. No hope of mustard.
Being something of a health freak, I am aware that the number one source of saturated fat in the average American's diet is ground beef; hoping to avoid this, I search in vain for ground turkey. Instead, I locate ground ostrich, which I have tasted, and which has a wetter stringier taste than ground beef. It's neither bad nor particularly good.
Yesterday I accidentally made a cake with springbok butter.
I was not previously aware anyone had ever milked an antelope.
The small things transform your experience of a place so that you discover your new between-classes lunch: a chicken peri-peri toasted whole wheat sub, inside which mayonnaise is unavoidable. You make a cake, and the icing tastes unusually creamy and exotic. You eat a a burger and it's bird meat. Fries are consumed with a condiment that's not quite ketchup. You try to make chili, but there are no black beans and no chili powder.
It's not that the food is bad. It's actually fresher, sweeter, stronger, fuller. But food is one of the few things in the world that is equally a product of the land and the human, since humans give it back. In the old Irish fairy legends, you were never supposed to ingest anything in the fairyland because otherwise time slipped and you stayed there, intoxicated, for hundreds of years or forever, unaware that you were under a spell. There's a reason food has this power:
food is the most intimate connection a human can ever have with a place.
Food was the first inkling I had that I was in a foreign country. Things taste different here. You can try African or Chinese or Mexican or Indian or French or Japanese cuisine in the U.S., but it will lend an American spin to your palate. Just as if you tried it in India, it would taste Indian.
I've eaten food here, sustained myself on plants grown in another country, consumed meals that have never heard of America, let alone been Americanized. Browsing through a store with food made in California, I blink, I feel a sudden sneaking euphoria, and I suspect I've been in Africa the fairyland. Time has stopped.
I'm under a spell.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
yes, we have no squatters
"How are you, ma'am?"
This is how the nights here go:
I recognize him, vaguely maybe, he has a mustache and he is shining a flashlight in my face. I blink at him and I do not answer and the torch beam slides to the innards of my dark room, under my bed, across my desk.
"Just checking for squatters, ma'am. Thank you, none here, good morning!"
It is 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I have no squatters.
Or another:
I fell into a hard dreamless REM two hours ago and now there are sirens, red with blaring sound, ripping through my head and my room and my sleep, and voices on megaphones, and I sit up the way they tell you not to in yoga, in savasana, you're supposed to roll over right fetal up slow eyes closed but no, I fly, awake before I am aware, out of bed clothes on and it's a fire drill.
I knock on Leigh's door, and then I knock on Funeka's, and they both stare at me blankly as though they have never heard of a megaphone or a siren or even a fire. We walk outside and there are lights flashing, blinking, people running by in dark pajama'd blurs, and we stand until Funeka sighs and locks the door and starts for the stairs, and we follow, and I am blazingly awake, and I notice the robes and the towels on heads and the negligees and I laugh because what ridiculous creatures we are, and our children aren't even born yet to show their incredulity at what we use to cover our bodies.
This is what I think about when I am jolted out of bed for a fire that does not exist.
And then we go downstairs and This Is Africa: fourteen minutes for 500 people to escape a fictional fire, now stand in a never-ending clump of pushing grumpy people and sign your name or we will fine you. I am on the top of the world, giddy, maybe I am drunk, I love this and I am the only one.
Funeka signs my name.
Or last night:
Some number that is meaningless, someone said forty and attached to that a degree, and I shrugged, but what it means is windows thrown open and not a chance of a breeze in the hottest night you can imagine. So there are no covers and I stare at the ceiling and then I get up and wet a washcloth and sponge myself off, and it's cool for a minute, but it dries quickly and as it dries it itches, and once it's dried it still itches, and then I hear a high sharp bzzzzzz, and I realize I have thirty-four mosquito bites on my body, and so when you are sticky and salty and itchy and hot and you are on your back and then on your left side and then on your right and you're considering venturing into the unexplored terrain of your stomach, you turn on the lights.
I take a 4 a.m. bath.
Or most nights:
I sleep straight through, and maybe something happens but I am unaware and I wake up with a solid barrier guarding the day before and all the days preceding.
One night the mountain was on fire.
We galloped to a friend's room and hung out the window, watching like it was a movie, the orange burn across the mountain behind our university. We could smell it, and the next day too, and as I rode the bus and went to class and turned in my paper I thought, the mountain is on fire.
These are things that happen at night in Africa, but also in everywhere, and that is what is in my head: I am everywhere.
Things are normal.
We ride on the left side of the road and we drink soda out of tiny tin cans and we get sick and we get healthy and we go rafting and we go visiting, and we are in Africa, but we are also everywhere.
We are tourists and we are students and people sleep in Africa like they sleep everywhere else, Americans and Africans and Everywherians. And when you are awake because of the squatter inspectors or the mosquito or the heat or the fictional fire or the real fire and you you stare into the hard gaze of a flashlight, you are aware suddenly in a way you cannot be anytime else of the bizarre juxtaposition of humanity and non-American.
There is a moment, which you do not remember and you cannot later identify, when you slip from Being In A Foreign Country to just Being.
This is how the nights here go:
I recognize him, vaguely maybe, he has a mustache and he is shining a flashlight in my face. I blink at him and I do not answer and the torch beam slides to the innards of my dark room, under my bed, across my desk.
"Just checking for squatters, ma'am. Thank you, none here, good morning!"
It is 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I have no squatters.
Or another:
I fell into a hard dreamless REM two hours ago and now there are sirens, red with blaring sound, ripping through my head and my room and my sleep, and voices on megaphones, and I sit up the way they tell you not to in yoga, in savasana, you're supposed to roll over right fetal up slow eyes closed but no, I fly, awake before I am aware, out of bed clothes on and it's a fire drill.
I knock on Leigh's door, and then I knock on Funeka's, and they both stare at me blankly as though they have never heard of a megaphone or a siren or even a fire. We walk outside and there are lights flashing, blinking, people running by in dark pajama'd blurs, and we stand until Funeka sighs and locks the door and starts for the stairs, and we follow, and I am blazingly awake, and I notice the robes and the towels on heads and the negligees and I laugh because what ridiculous creatures we are, and our children aren't even born yet to show their incredulity at what we use to cover our bodies.
This is what I think about when I am jolted out of bed for a fire that does not exist.
And then we go downstairs and This Is Africa: fourteen minutes for 500 people to escape a fictional fire, now stand in a never-ending clump of pushing grumpy people and sign your name or we will fine you. I am on the top of the world, giddy, maybe I am drunk, I love this and I am the only one.
Funeka signs my name.
Or last night:
Some number that is meaningless, someone said forty and attached to that a degree, and I shrugged, but what it means is windows thrown open and not a chance of a breeze in the hottest night you can imagine. So there are no covers and I stare at the ceiling and then I get up and wet a washcloth and sponge myself off, and it's cool for a minute, but it dries quickly and as it dries it itches, and once it's dried it still itches, and then I hear a high sharp bzzzzzz, and I realize I have thirty-four mosquito bites on my body, and so when you are sticky and salty and itchy and hot and you are on your back and then on your left side and then on your right and you're considering venturing into the unexplored terrain of your stomach, you turn on the lights.
I take a 4 a.m. bath.
Or most nights:
I sleep straight through, and maybe something happens but I am unaware and I wake up with a solid barrier guarding the day before and all the days preceding.
One night the mountain was on fire.
We galloped to a friend's room and hung out the window, watching like it was a movie, the orange burn across the mountain behind our university. We could smell it, and the next day too, and as I rode the bus and went to class and turned in my paper I thought, the mountain is on fire.
These are things that happen at night in Africa, but also in everywhere, and that is what is in my head: I am everywhere.
Things are normal.
We ride on the left side of the road and we drink soda out of tiny tin cans and we get sick and we get healthy and we go rafting and we go visiting, and we are in Africa, but we are also everywhere.
We are tourists and we are students and people sleep in Africa like they sleep everywhere else, Americans and Africans and Everywherians. And when you are awake because of the squatter inspectors or the mosquito or the heat or the fictional fire or the real fire and you you stare into the hard gaze of a flashlight, you are aware suddenly in a way you cannot be anytime else of the bizarre juxtaposition of humanity and non-American.
There is a moment, which you do not remember and you cannot later identify, when you slip from Being In A Foreign Country to just Being.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
pictures
During a braai (barbecue)
Fishermen in Ocean View
Baboons on the side of the road
Concert at Kirstenbosch Gardens
Fan at a soccer game
Rugby
World's highest commercial bungee jump
Driving on the left side of the road
Cape of Good Hope
Jackass penguins
Main building on UCT campus
View of Cape Town from Signal Hill
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
good morning
It starts with a hot sun ray oozing languidly over my face.
I open my eyes, an awakening, and take note of my failure last night to pull the heavy blue curtains all the way across the windows which occupy an entire wall of my room. I view my alarm clock; the face is partially obscured by a black digital liquid which follows the cracks that appeared last week when I dropped it violently (and accidentally) on the hard wooden tile floor. I see that the hour is 7, and the minute begins with something that has an L-shaped bottom left corner.
I won't fix it.
I can hear, from my bed, the street five stories below: the heavy out-of-breath diesel busses which pass my res (dorm) en route to downtown from the townships, the private cars which I cannot see from here but which I know are small and European- and Asian-made, and the minibus taxis honking at potential customers on the sidewalk as their front-seat passengers screech destinations: Mowbray, Wynberg, Waterfront. I hear also people, and I know that the teenagers are walking to (public) school in blue or green uniforms: sensible shoes, button-down shirts, vests, blazers, sweaters, berets, knee-length skirts for girls and crisply ironed pants for boys.
A month ago this cacophony would have been merely that, an indistinguishable wall of African city sound. Now, though, it is navigable, identifiable, almost friendly and familiar.
I want to tell you every detail, but I don't know how.
I don't know how to tell you that I dress in cotton skirts because in this heat denim sticks to your skin like a sweaty hand, and yet by evening I am shivering for want of a sweater. I don't know how to tell you that I haven't seen my whole body all at once in weeks, since the mirror in our bathroom shows only my face and part of my shoulders, with rust spots obscuring my chin. I don't know how to tell you outside my bedroom window I see only the balcony with stained tile and paint-chipped metal rails, and beyond that the sky, which at seven a.m. is already thoroughly ablaze with sun.
I don't know how to tell you about the people. I never know how to tell you about the people who are able to view my skin from the red underside. But the others: the professor whose father died before he found the cure for an illness no one's ever heard of, the township secondary schoolkid who knows more about American politics than most Americans, the girl you sit next to on the bus who tells you about her struggles with religion versus spirituality.
These people, too, are seeping through to wherever it is inside of me that good people go.
And then there is everything else.
There is the beige institutional metal condom dispenser in every thinkable and unthinkable location inside campus buildings, especially res: on stair landings, in bathrooms, in the laundry room. There is the anonymous government HIV test in class with accompanying survey, testing the prevalence and knowledge of the disease in universities. There is the rumor that somewhere in rural places there is cholera, TB, sick poor people I have never seen.
There is Zimbabwe.
There is the broken alarm clock which is like the broken elevator and the cracked tile and the missing bricks and the gate that needs oil. Things do not get fixed, and people seem unperturbed. Meals last hours, and people seem unperturbed. When the elevator is broken you take the stairs, two at a time. When the bricks are missing you skip over them. When the gate creaks you know the bus is here. When the food is slow in coming you drink wine and you talk about souls.
When your alarm clock breaks you don't fix it because if you did, the elevator might work and the bricks might return and the gate might go silent and the food might come quickly. Then your legs would be weak and your agility would be compromised and you would miss the bus and you would never talk about souls.
There is life and there is Africa, all on the same plane, and there at their intersection is a broken clock.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
they shrug and say, TIA. this is Africa
Africa is a new car and a hot paved road and fluorescent painted lines and people who have no cars using the highway also to walk.
Africa is exhilaration.
Africa is supposedly racist and really racist and people who talk up to you because you're white and people who talk down to you because you're white and people who look at you with a half-quashed idealistic glint in their eye because you're American and people who spit half-heartedly in your presence because you're American.
Africa is a soccer game with no score.
Africa is English and Afrikaans and Xhosa and Zulu and others and others and others, is English, is a whole set of languages which in my ignorance I do not understand why do they speak English if they speak this language or why do they speak this language if they speak English?
Africa is a plant with leaves and cactus-like thorns. Africa is an enormous black beetle. Africa is the dormant fear that swimming leads to great white sharks and walking leads to cobras.
Africa is the fullest brightest moon you have ever seen.
I try sea kayaking for the first time.
I sit in the boat and paddle and ride waves straight-on, tensely, confidently, patiently, wearily. I sit in the boat and I paddle hard, it hurts, and I do not move and another wave comes and I crest it and it rolls on beneath me and I do not look round to watch it spread on the beach but paddle stationarily.
I paddle and I do not move and finally I look round and the small waves are gone and I look ahead and the big waves are gone and I am past and I am free and I hold up my paddle because I am home but I forget I am in Africa.
I look and there it is, bigger than me or anything I know, a wave I cannot imagine, and I lean back into it, point the bow of my vessel into its flank, skewer it ineffectively with my paddle, and it breaks over me, and I am alone and I open my eyes and I see white and I feel hard sand against my face against my stomach and my legs and neck and arms and everywhere, hard water, hard salt, hard sand, I swallow and I breathe salt salt water, and my boat is gone, shot gloriously into the air followed by the paddle, and I am alone in the only way you can be alone, when a wave you loved does not reciprocate.
I surface, a little big head in the indisputably big banging ocean, and someone has got my boat and I retrieve my paddle and I walk, sluggishly, stumbling like a drunk man on the elusive sand grains of the Indian Ocean, and I think, this is Africa.
I can't put my finger on Africa. I can't put my feet on it either, or any other part of my body, and yet here am I putting every part of me on Africa, and having very little idea what it is I am eating and walking on and and (inadvertently) swimming in and rubbing and wearing and listening to and watching and living.
I came because I wanted to touch Africa so I could know it existed.
It does.
I am bemused to find that I do not know what comes next.
Maybe Africa.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
the beginning
I could tell you about how when you walk into the international terminal at D/FW, the windows are suddenly tall and glassy and slanted, the floors shiny, the art modern, the accents over the loudspeakers crisp and smooth and thoroughly foreign.
But you've been in an airport before.
I could tell you about the Scottish flight attendant, and my mild shock at finding that people other than Mel Gibson speak that way in real life, and moreover they are under the impression it's normal. I could tell you about the plane or the airports or the jet lag or, upon arrival, the hours of repetitive orientation lectures regarding culture shock and registration and dorms and details. I could tell you about the unacknowledged terror of being alone in an utterly unfamiliar country, about the attempt to rationalize the fear away, about the subsequent comfort at easily forging relationships with a gamut of people.
But you've moved before.
I'll tell you something you don't know.
I will tell you that when you fly over the coast of the UK before sunrise, the water glows ethereally with underneath tunnels. I will tell you that my first view of Cape Town was just after a hot sunrise, and as we landed I stared numbly below before I realized that what I was looking at was not a yard of junk metal, but was arranged symmetrically into tiny mismatched squares covered alternatively in tin or wood or black plastic.
A township. I'd heard about these. They are the incredibly poor neighborhoods on the edge of the city into which blacks were sent to live during Apartheid with very little or no help from the government, and in which the majority of Capetonians still live. Education opportunities, good health care, and solid infrastructure are nonexistent, while crime and HIV/AIDS abound. (Over 20% of South Africans are infected with HIV, more per capita than any other country in the world.) In a first world/third world nation, South African townships are the hot fetid sticky aching heart of the third world.
But there is more.
I will tell you about the baobab trees and the mountains and the sea, the unbelievable beauty, the open spaces that remind me of the best parts of the United States with an additional exotic allure. I will tell you that the accent is Australian, is Dutch, is British, is something else I don't recognize but which I suspect is wholly African. I will tell you about the 11 official languages of this country, and that on the street and in my dorm and aboard the bus I hear sharp syllables and rolling r's and clicks and long prickly words I can't break down to pronounce. I will tell you about the minibuses which honk as they careen by, the man in the front passenger seat leaning far out the window to holler an incomprehensible destination while passersby fear he will tumble out. I will tell you about my daily decreasing confusion regarding which way to look before crossing the street (right, then left).
I could tell you every detail.
But I won't.
I will tell you that I am venturing into the precarious vulnerability of falling hard in love with this country and maybe this continent and all the people in it.
But you've been in an airport before.
I could tell you about the Scottish flight attendant, and my mild shock at finding that people other than Mel Gibson speak that way in real life, and moreover they are under the impression it's normal. I could tell you about the plane or the airports or the jet lag or, upon arrival, the hours of repetitive orientation lectures regarding culture shock and registration and dorms and details. I could tell you about the unacknowledged terror of being alone in an utterly unfamiliar country, about the attempt to rationalize the fear away, about the subsequent comfort at easily forging relationships with a gamut of people.
But you've moved before.
I'll tell you something you don't know.
I will tell you that when you fly over the coast of the UK before sunrise, the water glows ethereally with underneath tunnels. I will tell you that my first view of Cape Town was just after a hot sunrise, and as we landed I stared numbly below before I realized that what I was looking at was not a yard of junk metal, but was arranged symmetrically into tiny mismatched squares covered alternatively in tin or wood or black plastic.
A township. I'd heard about these. They are the incredibly poor neighborhoods on the edge of the city into which blacks were sent to live during Apartheid with very little or no help from the government, and in which the majority of Capetonians still live. Education opportunities, good health care, and solid infrastructure are nonexistent, while crime and HIV/AIDS abound. (Over 20% of South Africans are infected with HIV, more per capita than any other country in the world.) In a first world/third world nation, South African townships are the hot fetid sticky aching heart of the third world.
But there is more.
I will tell you about the baobab trees and the mountains and the sea, the unbelievable beauty, the open spaces that remind me of the best parts of the United States with an additional exotic allure. I will tell you that the accent is Australian, is Dutch, is British, is something else I don't recognize but which I suspect is wholly African. I will tell you about the 11 official languages of this country, and that on the street and in my dorm and aboard the bus I hear sharp syllables and rolling r's and clicks and long prickly words I can't break down to pronounce. I will tell you about the minibuses which honk as they careen by, the man in the front passenger seat leaning far out the window to holler an incomprehensible destination while passersby fear he will tumble out. I will tell you about my daily decreasing confusion regarding which way to look before crossing the street (right, then left).
I could tell you every detail.
But I won't.
I will tell you that I am venturing into the precarious vulnerability of falling hard in love with this country and maybe this continent and all the people in it.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
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