Overport swirls. The morning scoops schoolchildren
into buses and commuter vehicles form long chains to the city, a huge
caravanserai stretching to the port. The air fills up with heat and is
inhaled; it’s humidity an offence to thinly membraned lungs. Sunlight wastes no
time in burning up your skin. Soon the streets are emptied and lie bare.
Only the sparsely snowed litter which seems to emerge from the street itself,
serves as a reminder of the hour just past. A new life begins now and I
am revealed to the world against a backdrop of silence. This new silence
is like the inside of a cave; the protrusions guarding the entrance are jagged
but inside it is silent and warm. You are safe within the ignorance of
what is outside.
Sometimes I walk down the street and I could swear
that I’m in Cape Town, the light shining a blinding white upon everything and
the houses bunched like jostling piano keys. Sometimes I feel it would be
no different to be standing in a shop in India, sifting through stacked,
all-purpose shelves and wondering, in amazement, at the shop-owners ability to
remember the precise location of even the most arbitrary product.
Sometimes it is a movie, revealing America in everything to be seen. Very
seldom am I forced to realise that this is Africa in the traditional sense. It
seems lost here – somehow misplaced – a white lie about our history, about how
we’ve come to be here. A written history can be re-written. Even
the Bible was a re-write of Christianity which left us lost in Athanasius’s
world.
Pretty soon the Azaan is sounded. This is the
month of the fast where Muslim men, women and children will abstain from all
physical nourishment from sunrise to sunset every day until the birth of the
new moon. Men who have families, men who are addicts, men who fuck other
women, men who beat their wives, men who truly love, and men who live
harmlessly are all one and the same in this binding execution of faith,
tradition and belief. Soon the streets sway in the whiteness of
religiously clad male individuals and groups, some of them smoking, getting in
a few breaths before bowing to the east to commence the days purging.
The sun’s crimson envelope filters onto rooftops,
between trees and into grassy patches where children run their soft breath into
the air. Our children are beautiful, many of them born from young women
who have conceived unintentionally, too early in their lives to comprehend the
great burden that fate has placed upon them. The responsibility of
rearing the child is often only partially assumed by the young parents; the
grandparents usually assuming greater responsibility for everyday
child-raising. The grandparents are usually old and weary, with not
enough energy to chase a young energetic child around the neighbourhood parks
and streets. The child wanders in and out of love in an extensive
community of absent fathers, young girlish disco-going mothers, uncles, aunts,
cousins, street hustlers, bullies, pimps and prostitutes but often emerges with
no real authority figure and is soon free to do whatever he or she
desires.
From a young age we are softened to alcohol abuse,
drug abuse and physical abuse to such an extent that it becomes our
normality. It is therefore easy for most of us to continue swimming in
these waters. Our buoyancy is an illusion which masks a slow
drowning. In this place the innocence of childhood is short-lived. Our
children are robbed of that sacred period of innocence that makes their
foundation. Aren’t the lexicons of psycho-spirituality formed then? The question
is inevitable; who makes our childhood what it is? Who destroys its innocence?
There are many who say we do it to ourselves.
Just over the hill the suburb appears to be a
mirror of ours, but on closer inspection it is considerably different.
The streets are clean, the gardens are noticeably bigger. In the streets,
parked cars note the absence of people. Wide pavements line the streets. And
the mansions; they cast shadows upon you as you walk by, every second and every
step confirming a world that you will never be a part of; that you don’t belong
to. This legacy is written there, Apartheid ingrained in a suburban
geography that is not about to change. Master and middleman accompanying
two sides of a ridge; the servant, slave or whatever you will is located
farther away on hills which escape my blurred vision. They are not a part
of this world.
Every morning, I find myself staring out a bus
window at the rows of apartment blocks that line the streets of Brickfield
Road, the journey a further testimony to the distance between me and the world
outside Overport. It confirms my unmitigated inequality and irrelevance
as a voting citizen. “Citizen of what?” … my citizenship is restricted to
Overport. This is where I’ve spent my life, the only place where I have
rights. This is where I claim them, by force if necessary.
People sway and those who are standing lurch like
infants as the bus is ground into winding roads until a stop is seen.
Here, people spew out of the door and spill out onto the pavement where they
find their separate paths. The process is an ongoing one, with a constant
consumption and regurgitation. To me, the bus has always been an insect.
The windows of the city shops drift by like
drowning polished mirrors, each submerged in the next, dreaming out a mosaic of
reflections, advertisements and “For Sale” signs that stay up all year
round. The lower part of town is third world, a bazaar atmosphere
penetrating every existing breath of space. It bustles and ropes through
arcades, alleyways, sideways and street crossings. So powerful is this
muscular foot of the city that I am drawn into it to further nourish the
lifeblood of the city; its people. Being consumer orientated, every
aspect of the city is magnetic. Attraction is the basis for selling, the
consumer is the lap-dog of the seller, who is also his fortune teller, his mate
and lover at a reasonable price. Even the inevitable hunger is a
barricade to buy ones way out of. Smells waft in and out of existence while
people hunt en masse; trophy hunters of products, only to retire
them within their homes where they can judge their progress by it, and assure
themselves that they are providing for their children. I wonder if they
really know what their children need.
Sometimes I take a walk up to Um’s house where we
discuss the futility of South African Indian culture over several whiskeys.
“All you have to do is take one look at Impressions to realise
how truly lost we are as a community!”
Sometimes we argue against our own ideas,
laughingly accepting the irrational, dogged, misguided nature of the community
as its only vice in its survival against the continual onslaught of
change. Each day that we meet we spend picking out the savoury from the
unsavoury in what has become our most aggressive healer – this culture, this
clan culture; it does everything to protect its own.
Our favourite thing though, is to hit the streets
at night. Subtropical cover shrouds the night in a deeper darkness.
One often can’t see into the shadows. They seem infinitely dark, hiding
everything with infinite nothingness. The contrast to the day is
striking. Where the day yields the full breadth of a deep blue African
sky, the night hides the sky from you in numerous thickly vegetated hills and
valleys which trap the heat and humidity from the day that had past. The
smell of the earth seems stronger at night, like it’s matured enough through
the day to bring about its full radiance now.
Often, the pungent aroma of dagga wafts through the
sickly humid heat, complementing the smell of the earth from which it is grown.
‘Durban poison’, as it is proudly and more commonly known. Or further up North
in Empangeni and Richards Bay, where it is known more simply as
“Zulu-guay” (‘Zulu-cigarette’). It was a way of giving a
stamp of informal cultural approval to dagga. Often, the reason why young
guys are out at night is to meet up with a few friends and share a joint and a
few cigarettes. Alcohol is used, but it isn’t an everyday drug, at least
not until they get older, have kids and can’t get out the house often enough to
blast a joint.
We’re always armed. We don’t feel protected
by anybody else but ourselves and each other. Even that is sometimes
shaky though, and one is never quite sure of whose jealousies may
surface. Often it is in drink-fuelled tirades that one discovers how
somebody close to you may actually resent you for things you were completely
unaware of, or who actually has it out for whom in the group. The dark
night holds many surprises and often I feel if I listen closely enough I will
hear the night warn me of its next surprise.
Boredom is a difficult feeling to shrug off
here. Any drama soon becomes entertainment and captures the restlessness
of everybody around and mirrors it. It is tacitly understood that if a
person is pushed over the edge they may react in a murderous way. In
fact, among most of us the latent potential for homicidal reaction to a
perceived injustice is a sign of strength. The young are infected with
this kind of defensive attitude; an attitude that says, “Don’t fuck with me!”
It becomes a mark of independence, and in the same way as an animal that needs
to mark its territory does, it makes for a clear display of the social
boundaries that the individual which bears the attitude holds. It is an
attitude derived from generations of being fucked with.
What makes a human being? It seems that this
is a question with which we are obsessed, yet we cannot comprehend the meaning
of the question itself. To ask, “what makes a human being?” is like
asking ‘what makes an ocean’ or ‘what makes a colour?’ It is to tie us to
definition, which we naturally resist. Why is it not more useful to ask
‘what makes a good human being?’ Old South Africa defined us all for us; you
are this and you are that – so who needs a question like “what makes a human
being?”, or even, a ‘good’ human being? All we’re concerned with is ‘what
makes a man’ and ‘what makes a woman’. This is the basis of the
sectarianism. It starts at the loins.
Upstairs there is a woman who never speaks.
She is seldom seen without her daughter and wears a scarf whenever she goes
out. She looks strong, and carries herself with a grace that betrays her
sadness. Her husband is a big man who often sneaks women into his
flat when she’s not around. He’s civil, a good man, feeding of boyhood
for fear of his balding scalp. I often wonder who, between the two of
them, has a more striking impotence.
Not far down the corridor live his relatives.
They see everything but say nothing, at least to her. There is no reason
to, for she knows the man she chose to marry. Her daughter is her focus,
her life force, the reason she is still here. One day her daughter is going
to grow up. Her mother will probably be praised for what she has lived
with, but there will always be more, and for how long can any human being
remain indifferent? She will wait until he is old, and unattractive, to
take back her power and dominate him.
I like him for the fact that he is helpful.
He doesn’t make a show of his religious convictions although he rules over his
wife Islamically. This is common where I live. One night I came in
late and as I lay in bed I heard a woman in the throes of lovemaking. I
just knew it wasn’t her. I wondered whether she was at a funeral or had
just decided to leave but in the morning she was there as she would always be,
leaving the chain unbroken for her child to enter into … an eternity of
suffering for women of her kind, who break gently, permanently.
We forget them as they are spewed out of the
phallus, every idea a product of its viscosity and every thought determined by
its factory. We forget quickly what it is to be human. In a
predatory world we sometimes burrow under the walls of sanity to survive.
Our failure is a product of our belief. The message is preached clearly;
stand up, rise above the mob too high and you will be lynched. They
cannot allow you to win for the very basis for its – and their – survival
crumbles. Their system is faulted and laid to rest. They become
aliens in a new world and their protests are mere knocks on the insides of
coffins.
So this leaves her motherhood, her last bastion of
hope and purpose, a pillar to which she clings, and will in turn hide her in
its shadow. The pillar grows stronger as the bones of her kind bind the
earth in which it is placed. There is the distinct stench of death here,
a death in all cycles; the past, the present and the future. These are
women who worship a God who has defined a role for them and accept it as part
of their fate and responsibility on earth. Their chains are their
redemption and their children blossom in the shade of the pillar.
I am awake but I am still in it. Breathing
all around me this life exhales impurity like a disease. With the windows
open I can feel the local air penetrating, frictionless to the point of being
forgotten, but I can feel it. I live in a building which is shared by
many people. I live alone, but we’re all living in the same residue of
Apartheid planning; the basis of our thought is totally sectarian in
nature. We are comforted by being told not only what to think, but how to
think.
Born here, you cannot escape what you are born
into. An umbilical mass shapes over you and drenches you in its blood. It
will forever feed your thought. It is not easy to live where we do.
Out here it is not a trend to feed off depression. Pain is for
real. Emotions aren’t on display and very little is talked about.
My land is a picture painted by a hand who knew only the extremities of
humanity – a hand of absent soul. I have friends who are forever destined
to live out their lives in self-crafted shells; hard as they come. Life
starts as a challenge and ends as an unjust duel to which death is imminent, a
mere formality. We struggle to exhume ourselves from the stagnance in
which we live. Our fathers lived here. They too were born out of
coffins and carry a wooden scent, firm and unyielding.
What is reconciliation if we can’t reconcile the
past with the present? How can there be a real future that we can all
participate in when the past has been rewritten in the text and speech all
around us? The reality of our past is written into the minds of generations
through a myriad of experiences, and a million stories ensure that the reality
cannot be forgotten – but unless it is written and acknowledged that reality
remains one of the proletariat, an aside to mainstream culture, media and the
way in which the future unfolds for us all. We know how easily a history
can be rewritten and have learnt how to preserve our history whilst our
oppressor re-writes it for his purposes. We pass it on through our
children, through the consciousness imbued in every step and movement; the way
we talk, the way we walk, and the way we look at you when you drive through our
neighbourhoods.
