the bus: seat mates

Next time you are looking for an interesting place to go, get on a bus. It doesn't matter where you are going or which bus service you use, it is the bus trip itself that is so interesting. I travel on the Wits bus sometimes, and it is usually crowded. It was unsurprising that today there was only standing room for me. As the bus took off (like a space shuttle! I wish...) I happened to look down at an Indian girl typing an sms. She was a little round, but prettily so, with long dark hair falling thickly over her shoulders and dull-gold eyeshadow accentuating the slanting shape of her eyes. What caught me however was her rapidly changing facial expressions as she typed the sms. Her face was flirting. She gave little half-smiles and her lips formed words sometimes. Her fingers moved rapidly across the keys, and the clear pleasure at saying something clever and attractive and a little naughty was so plainly written on her face I couldn't help but be fascinated by this intensely personal exchange that was happening - strictly speaking - with the cellphone clutched between her fingers. People - for me - are always interesting, even if I never exchange a word with them. Admittedly, seat mates are not always pleasantly interesting. I sat next to a man once who carefully decanted brandy and coke into one glass after another as he steadily became more talkative and intrusive. Even in sleep he intruded on my space as his body sprawled outwards onto my seat, pushing me into the aisle. I spent the night fitfully, eventually pushing his partly comatose form back onto his side. The most important etiquette on a long bus trip is to give the person next to you their space. Unless it is impossible, as happened on a Cityliner bus trip I was on once during the Translux strike. The seats were so small and the bus so packed that the black woman sitting on the aisle seat had to strap herself into keep from falling off. It was so uncomfortable, we could do little more than dose, and woke frequently in the night to have long conversations I don't remember now. Not all intrusions are an affront. A blonde, handsome teenager sat next to me on his first bus trip and after asking me what grade I was in (not the best start) turned out to be really friendly and a biltong-maker. After a long chat (and an attempt to buy me some food from one of the garage stops) he said he was going to sleep and promptly settled himself on my shoulder. He clearly had no idea one doesn't sleep on strangers' shoulders in buses. I felt strangely protective of this naive boy who happily placed his sleep (such a vulnerable activity in a public space) in my hands. Foreigners (I've discovered) love to act with chivalry (or something) and often buy me food despite my numerous and vehement protestations. A sweet, silent Mozambican returned from the garage once with a coke for me without us having exchanged more than a few sentences. Another foreigner (I think he was Nigerian) bought me a jar of Lays Stax and offered me a job working in one of his uncle's clothing shops after a lengthy conversation about the nature of business in South Africa. There was another girl - friendly and self-assured - who spent most of the bus trip telling me how wonderful being a Jehovah's Witness was, and probably trying to convert me. We got on so well (chatting over her well-thumbed bible) that we even exchanged numbers but neither of us ever kept in touch. Some passengers want your number for no good reason. There was a large black man from Durban who I spotted talking to the only other white girl on the bus when we stopped for a midnight break at a garage. She left, and he then started talking to me. Quite early on in the conversation he asked for my number because he said he wanted to be my friend. I managed to convince him that although he looked like a friendly person, I am not in the habit of giving out my number. He finally gave a great laugh and said that he would ask me again when he got off the bus in Durban. I half expected him to follow through, but thankfully he left without a murmur in my direction at Durban Station. There was also an over-confident, thin white boy from Grahamstown who tried to get my number and get me to commit to going out with him after we got there. His pick-up line logic needed a little work. He began by telling me that he believed beauty was on the inside (no really, he did believe it). Only a little later (after he discovered I have a boyfriend) he said sadly, "All the pretty girls are always taken". I was flattered but almost disappointed at the ease with which his lines were shown up. I've had to entertain a little red-headed eleven-year old (thank-goodness I've seen the Twilight movies or I would have been in trouble) for a whole day while her mother kept her satisfied with one snack after another packed with refined sugar; I listened to a mentally slow white racist rant halfway from Maritzburg; and listened to another white, sporty teenager tell us (a group of us sitting near the front of the bus) her entire life story, including the intimate details of her mother and sister's sex lives. Perhaps the most interesting conversation happened in the throes of Joburg traffic. I was talking to a Nigerian Cage Fighter about religion and anger management. He was suffering the most excruciating head pains from being on the bus for too long, and I was trying to keep him distracted by chatting. He said that he was a religious man, but also a hard-core cage fighter, and that he had issues with road rage. He said he actually got so far as to get out of his car once to remonstrate with someone but stopped himself before it was too late as he said he didn't want to cause any damage. Towards the end of our conversation, he smiled at me and said I was a good person. Sometimes truth really is stranger (and more fun) than fiction. P.S.- for some reason, my "enter" button refuses on register on the Wits server. Apologies for the whack layout.

promotheus (self-inflicted)

Emotion spills, gushes and congeals in corners, in clumps like tumours. I could - instead of my usual constructed arguments and careful blend of personal and social anecdote - throw out words like blood spatters, emptying out my too-painful entrails so that I would no longer need to bear the weight of them moving in my breast. They would make chaotic violent spatters, pulpy and odorous, sticky to the touch deeply and almost ridiculously red. How can I tell where one emotion begins and my thoughts end? Perhaps I will pull too much out by mistake, perhaps cause an explosion. My central skeleton would shatter, sharp fragments of bone thrown outwards to embed themselves in the page, the soft tissue of my lungs indistinguishable from the bloody mass. I would be left not only free of the pain but unable to breathe, a ghost unaware of the terrible, fibrous hole between the breastplate and the pelvis.

But by the time the words are read they would be the mundane colour of rust, dried out and flaking off. Crawling creatures in need of such vital sustenance will have consumed the more substantial clots, only a sour smell and something metaphorically insidious and intangible would remain.

I cannot feel whether it would be a relief to be rid it (how can it be qualified) or whether my internal organs would grow back in the night, excruciating and raw, ready to be torn out and mounted once again for display.

astronomy lessons

Last Tuesday night, I made my way across to the Johannesburg Planetarium for the first "Introduction to Astronomy" course. I thought it would be about the same size as my Latin class at Rhodes: an older person who always wanted to learn this but never got around to it, some really smart students, maybe the odd science student dabbling in astronomy and me getting all misty-eyed about the awesomeness that is the Planetarium.

The courtyard was swarming with people: couples, students, solitary people trying not to look awkward in the throng, pensioners, married people holding hands as if the kids just left home and me, staring wide-eyed at the long queue in front of the registration table.

The course has been completely worth it. I have learnt about constellations, planets, eclipses (bookmark the 15 June, 2011. There is a total lunar eclipse and it is happening between 8pm and midnight), an idea of how big the universe is and how to find out when satellites will be crossing the sky. We also get to see fun little snippets NASA videos. There was one of a man trying to explain what zero gravity does to playing basketball (he could do five spins in the air before getting the ball into the basket. Which is actually quite tough in space as the ball just floats upwards out of the basket). There is another video about the different areas they could land their next Mars explorer: a robot called Curiosity. My favourite fact was that the wake-up call for astronauts on the space station is the Star Trek theme song. Life imitating art?

Sometimes, Astronomy even makes me think about other things that the stars and planets could teach us about life in general. What completely blew my mind last night was a little lesson on perspective and how two people can have a totally right, totally different answer, depending on the different places they are standing. If a person stands in the Southern Hemisphere, "looking up" (so to speak), the earth is spinning in a clockwise direction. If another person stands in the Northern Hemisphere, "looking down", the earth is spinning in an anti-clockwise direction. In other words, which way the entire earth is spinning depends on which part of the earth you are standing on. Learning this is - for me - one of the best examples to explain how the world is full of vastly differing yet almost all valid opinions: they are right from the perspective one has according to where one comes from. How can two people have different answers about which way the earth (the huge (compared to us) planet we live on) is spinning and both have the right answer? It is mind-boggling.

One has to say "almost" though. Every society or cultural group always has one or more (metaphorical) equivalents of the flat earth society. Some things can't be right no matter where you stand because the place where you think you are standing doesn't exist.

"Introduction to Astronomy": Learn about everything. No, really. Everything...

on book lists

One of the things that always fascinates me is what books make it onto "those" lists: those lists that send you scurrying away feeling mortified that you never read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. I suppose I don't have a problem with most of what is on these lists: the books I have read were brilliant (except I couldn't finish The Lord of the Rings or Catch 22. Yes, that does make me a cretin). And books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sneak into one or two of them. Sigh. The problem - for me - is what they leave off those lists.

A little while ago I got such a list on facebook. Apart from the annoying way they made "(36)The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" and "(33)The Chronicles of Narnia" and "(14) Complete Works of Shakespeare" and then "(98) Hamlet" like they were mutually exclusive; it is the assumption that those books are the measure of a person's intelligence or erudition.

In some way, they (yes, "they" and "them": like the hegemonic publicity team of Exclusive Books who publish a must-have list at the end of the year that you have to pay to be on) are trying to tell me what to read. If I just followed those must-read lists, I would miss out on SO much. So I am going to write about some of the books that aren't on this list that are really worth reading (in my opinion. Not telling you what to read, I promise. Except for Country of my Skull. Hypocrisy can be worth it to say you have to read this book).

1.) Beloved - Toni Morrison

I picked up this novel one afternoon at about 3pm as I had bought it second hand at a flea-market I went to with my friend Marijke. I put the book down again at 11pm after having devoured every word. I was shaking with the powerful emotion and raw beauty that this novel of slave-era USA communicates. It is phenomenal because it describes the events in a way that left me deeply moved (I could say it rocked my foundations) and brought me to an awareness of the legacy of suffering that forms part of America's present.

2.) Poetry. by almost anyone. 'cause there is nothing on the list.

I am more of a prose girl myself. One of my biggest problems studying Wordsworth's The Prelude was that I kept falling asleep over it. I would - however - never cut out the poetry I have studied. Byron's Don Juan is a comic and satirical work of genius. Admittedly you have to know the background before you can appreciate it, but it is bawdy, sophisticated and beautifully written all at once. I am also sure Dr. Margot Beard had no small part in making it so wonderful for anyone who studied it.

Then there is the madness of William Blake; the quiet sublimity of William Carlos Williams and Sydney Clouts and the infinite sweetness of e.e cummings. Tennyson's "Maud" was a recent find for me: melancholic and densely evocative. Then there are those sticky Shakespearean sonnets and the holy trinity of metaphysical poets: John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell.

I'm sure you get the point: how can one leave out the poets???

3.) Country of My Skull - Antjie Krog

As I read it (for the second time) this past week, I couldn't help thinking that every white person should read this book, and possibly every other person in South Africa too. Krog weaves fictions about her own life and research and philosophical musings (at times agonised questionings) around the facts and stories of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order for the telling of this story to be true, and the result is that each piece of narrative is like a beautifully wrapped parcel. I learnt so much about our country. Like the wages of black workers didn't change at all between 1911 and 1970. In fact, wages for black miners were less in 1972 than they were in 1911. The terms "minimum wage" takes on a whole new meaning after that. And when some black, female farm workers came to register to vote for the first time in 1994, they had no fingerprints because their hands had been worked smooth. It also shed some light on the sad state of the Eastern Cape:
1.) Queenstown had the highest number of necklace killings.

2.) Mdantsane is the second-biggest township in the country (bigger than the city it feeds, East London) and yet it has no library (that wasn't from the book. That was a scary fact from my old opera coach, Mkhululi, resident of Mdantsane).

3.) All the crazily-violent ex-army men (black and white) who came back to the country from service in Africa were hidden away in the Eastern Cape to work there. As a result, some of the most senseless torture and killing occurred in this area.

The book is a heady mix of violence and depression; anger and futility; hopefulness for the future and a complex exploration of everything surrounding guilt, complicity, reconciliation, compassion and fear. Most of all, what is a common thread is the importance in the healing proess of people being given a voice to tell their stories. I will leave you with the closing words of Lucas Baba Sikwepere from the Eastern Cape. He was shot many times for approaching the white van of a policeman and asking what was going on. He still has bullets lodged in his neck and face: some of them visible. He was a big man before he was shot, but now he has numerous ailments including excruciating headaches and has "lost all [his] body". He does not really know what he looks like now though, because he is blind.

"I feel what - what has brought my eyesight back is to come back here and tell the story. But I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. But now I - it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story".

on (English) white liberals

Near the beginning of last year, a Mail and Guardian journalist named Verashni Pillay wrote a column called "The Indian Cringe List". Many people wrote in to say how much they enjoyed the column and its comedy with a pointed purpose, many of them white people. Then, just a few weeks later, she wrote a column called "Stuff White Liberals Say and Do". The same people who congratulated her on writing about Indian people turned around and wrote what borders on hate speech because she had dared to criticise the great white. I didn't have a blog back then, so maybe I would have written this in support a lot earlier. As with my moon cup blog, I suppose it is better late than never.

Even the words "white liberal" make me twitch a little with distaste, even as I admit that I am one. I wear African print skirts and I went on a march or two about human rights and Zimbabwe. I continue to try (unsuccessfully) to learn Zulu and I am writing my thesis on South African literature. So far so liberal, but these harmless pursuits are not what makes my skin crawl about being associated with (English) white liberals.

Firstly, the white liberals I'm talking about are (English) precisely because we are liberal towards everyone except Afrikaners. And Christians. And everyone who can't speak English "properly". And orthodox Muslims ('cause all Muslims treat women really badly). And "Twilight" readers. And black people who call us racist (we're not racist! We have lots of black friends) or black people who take "our" jobs. And people who associate us with fake white liberals who are just hiding under a veneer of liberality. And "stupid" people, which is pretty much everyone except me and my coterie of friends. But apart from that we are, like, totally accepting.

Let's start with first things first: Afrikaners (also known as "Dutchmen" or "Rock Spiders"). We all had to learn Afrikaans at school (most of us learnt it badly) but we don't really care because it's just Afrikaans. There are much more important languages to know, like English and Zulu and...all those other African languages (but English is still the most important because it is an "international" language). Afrikaans people legislated Apartheid so they are automatically more responsible for all racism. All English people just watched helplessly as atrocities were carried out and were not complicit at all. Even worse, Afrikaans music is kitsch, and Afrikaans people are probably not so smart because they say things like "jean pant" and "I'm going to frow you wif a stone".

Ditto black people with black accents. Trevor Noah has already covered this topic really well in his show, Daywalker. Nevertheless, it must be said that if our black learners or our black leaders mispronounce words (in their second, third, fourth or fifth languages) they also must be stupid and incapable of learning what they are taught or leading our country (in which the number of native English speakers tie joint fifth out of eleven official languages). Obviously English is the language of business and politics in South Africa, so politicians and businessmen must learn to speak English properly (because there is definitely a proper English that all proper English people speak all over the world and it all sounds exactly the same). I mean, when French businessmen or politicians conduct business in English with French accents it isn't because they're stupid, they just have a different international language. So, French people with accents are smart, it's just that Zulu people or people who speak...all those other African languages who have one of their accents when they speak English aren't smart (? oh dear! Moving on...)

It's like Christians, you know? They all believe that evolution is a myth and that dinosaurs are a conspiracy to test faith (they didn't really exist). I mean, how stupid can they be? It's almost as bad as that Mormon woman churning out Vampire romances that aren't even about proper vampires, they glitter in the sunlight. I mean that's so gay (not that we're homophobic! It's just a word...)

And Muslims are almost as bad as Christians. I mean, at least they don't hound us to try and convert us, but we know they treat their women really badly and they have a tendency towards fanaticism and bombing buildings.

Don't even get us started on black people taking our jobs. It's so hard to get a job now, and they will probably just give it to some unqualified buffoon for window dressing. I mean, life is hard, hey (takes another sip of beer and takes out blackberry to check new messages. Pulls Diesel jacket a little closer).

But seriously: I know putting unqualified people in jobs is a problem: the millions of unspent money in the Government Health Department is proof of this. I would still nevertheless argue that it was easier for me to get a job in retail last year than it would have been for a black woman with a black accent. I may not have diesel jackets or a shmart cellphone, but my rounded English tones and non-threatening short, white body ensure that my life (certainly) is really not that hard. At the same time, I don't wish to trivialise people's problems. Many families - white and black and all the shades and cultures in between - are struggling in the recession.

What I am really talking about is - in part - my own personal journey of self-realisation. I have held many of the prejudices I write about and have been embarrassingly ignorant about the complexity and variety within cultures other than my own. One of my earliest memories (I must have been about five) is telling my mother how I knew black people were all dirty and all criminals. She quickly put my young mind straight, but it makes me realise that racist propaganda was being pumped into my ears somewhere: whether it was at my beloved pre-primary school or at the houses of friends. Maybe a peer or an adult had instilled this belief in me, but either way I rattled it off because it made me a part of a group to hold the same (misguided) beliefs.

Some English white people are past and beyond my level of investigation into the nature of my inherited prejudices. A (fortunate few) never held these beliefs. There are - however - still too many (English) white liberals who fall into the kind of reasoning I have detailed because their prejudice binds them together in an exclusionary group where they feel a sense of belonging and superiority over others. Perhaps I should say "our prejudice binds us together in an exclusionary group" because no doubt I will continue to find more slippery and subtle prejudices and superiority complexes residing in my own breast that I will need to root out.

What makes it so difficult to change these habits is perfectly put by Karen Armstrong: most people (and I'm not restricting this statement to English white liberals) would rather be "right" than compassionate. Admitting one is prejudiced means admitting that one is wrong, or at the very least clumsily judging others. Never mind getting a job, this is one of the really hard parts of life: to go through this painful process and come out the other side a little less superior. But then, the less superior you are, the less hard it will get. And that is something to look forward to.

Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with compassion | Video on TED.com

Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with compassion Video on TED.com

A few people have asked what I am writing about in my thesis. I am writing about compassion and the haze of emotions associated with it. I can't write too much about it yet as it needs a lot of work before I can do such a complex and important ethic even the smallest bit of justice, but this TED talk inspired me and so I wanted to post it and get it out there, because it is lovely.

Enjoy.

what I'm reading

I've thought up the perfect description for how my eyes feel after staring at the computer screen for too long. They begin to feel like teeth feel when you wake up in the morning and (for whatever reason) you never brushed them the night before. There is that thin, unpleasant furry yet slimy sensation when your tongue runs along them. That is how my eyes feel now because I have speant the past few hours looking for intriguing blogs written by complete strangers to follow. I found surprisingly few. Maybe I am not looking well enough, but I found so many blogs that were little more than "watch this video of ...[include link to YouTube] hahaha. Or pseudo-poetry accompanied by stylistic/artistic photos of really thin models looking "pensive" (to quote the fabulously facile joke at Joey's expense in 10 Things I Hate About You. Dont you dare judge me for referring to this movie. It's wickedly cool: partly because the geek gets the girl without undergoing a geek-to-cool transformation. I mean geeks are cool already). Even the many SA politics blogs begin to annoy me. They all sound like Mail and Guardian articles. I love the Mail and Guardian articles...in the Mail and Guardian. Surely blogs should experiment with different styles?

Anyway, enough whining. The point is that I eventually did find a cool blog by Mridu Khullar Relph: an independent journalist from India. As I am a technological retard, I can't actually figure out how to follow her page, but I'm going to add it to my favourites and see how that works. I digress, the point is that she has a regular blog called "What I'm reading" that lists a whole host of things she is reading without the pressure of having to produce a formal book review on the particular book.

So, in the spirit of Mridu Khullar Relph,
What I'm Reading (or rather, what I've read this month so far):

The Devil's Chimney - Anne Landsman

I wanted to like this book. It is written by a South African woman, set in South Africa and is about South African women. It is a "magic-realist" text and is set in the Karroo, one of the most mysterious and eerie South African landscapes.

But I didn't like it. Anne Landsman lives in New York (since 1981). I only read this after I had put down the novel and had felt profoundly dissatisfied. Some of my dissatisfaction suddenly made sense because I felt like it was written like a white trauma-experienced-by-women-by-numbers text, not an intricate engagement with the subtlties of South African interactions, something which has to be experienced on the ground.

There were great moments and the effort to focus the text through a poor white, alcoholic woman with a rich imagination unschooled by academies was startlingly orginal. I started losing faith when it became more and more depressing (I don't mind difficult and depressing: I love J.M. Coetzee and Sello K. Duiker) but then ended with a unconvincingly happily: alcoholic woman embraces alcoholic abusive husband after forty (?) years of non-conversation after the (deeply movingly rendered) loss of their child. Because all the years of masculinity-issues abuse and dangerous drug abuse will suddenly cease because of a hug. Then there are some mystical black folk thrown in who have (equally mystical) relations to the San. Fail.

Thirteen Cents - K. Sello Duiker

This book - by contrast - was unremittingly disturbingly brilliant. It is the tale of a street kid in Cape Town who discovers just how soulless the city can be. The so-called liberal "gay capital" of South Africa is shown to be a misnomer: how gay-friendly is it when this kid makes a lot of his money having sex with in-the-closet, married businessmen who have no problem having sex with a thirteen-year-old? All his efforts at improving himself are betrayed by adults he should be able to trust and friends who constantly betray themselves because of crippling addictions.

One of the gang bosses enforced on him tells him his mother never loved him and that he (the gang leader) is the only one who ever did. Azure - the name of the protagonist - loves Cape Town: the "mother city" of South Africa. The novel shows that Mother Cape Town sure doesn't love Azure and other black people like him.

The Power Book - Jeanette Winterson

I love love this author. Really, words escape me and I am reduced to the gibbering idotish "I love love". I will just quote her and you can see for yourself how revolutionary (I mean that word in its best possible sense) she is. Hopefully, reading these quotes will direct you to her website full of insightful articles and prose.

"The heart. Carbon based primitive in a silicone world" (40).
"That's the size of [love], the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable" (51).
"Did I write this story, or was it you, writing through me the way the sun sparks the fire through a piece of glass?" (209).

And finally, the favourite that I have placed at the top of this blog:
"The world is a mirror of the mind's abundance" (223).

Reading is a large part of what makes my mind abundant enough to see riches in the world. I can only hope that with time and reflection, it will only increase.