On Being Content in a Confusing World: A Few Pointers on Love, Success and Friendship

This piece was originally written as a letter to my son, so that he could turn to it in my absence for guidance when he needs it. After contemplating it for a while I decided to post it, as it may be useful to others, and especially in the society we live in today.

This Confusing World

In this fast-moving and ever-changing world there are many values, beliefs and norms that we can adopt in daily life. These influence our behaviours and impact upon the world and ourselves. Our behaviours reinforce the values, beliefs and norms we adopt, and increase their capacity to influence others in the world. Our behaviours also come to shape our personalities, how we see ourselves and how others see us. Most of all, our behaviours become a window into what motivates us, whether we are content with ourselves or not, and reveal what we expect of others and the world.

It is easy to lose oneself in the values, beliefs and norms that are imposed on us by conventional society. It is easy to mimic the behaviours of those around us in the quest for love, success, happiness and friendship. Yet all too often these result in deep unhappiness within us, as we struggle to match our inner selves with the conventions expected of us in daily society. Many people, young and old, rich and poor, suffer from a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness in modern society, yet are unable to step off the treadmill and gain clarity on why that is so.

We become so obsessed with chasing fulfilment and prescribed notions of success that we often do not stop to figure out what it means to us. Hence we are unable to disentangle ourselves from the myths that are fed to us about what will fulfil us, and remain chained to expectations of ourselves that will never yield the peace we desire within ourselves. This piece deals with a few of these myths, and attempts to simplify the path towards fulfilment in our lives.

Success

Worldly success can never fulfil you.

Fulfilment comes from being present in every moment, every action, every gesture, every thought that arises, and every affection that graces you. Fulfilment does not arise from achievement or accomplishment. It does not come from ownership. It arises from self-knowledge and comfort with the self. It arises from being content (note; not happy, as happiness is transient) with who you are. It comes from being able to see yourself and your place in the world clearly, and taking action to enable that.

We live in a world that celebrates success in conventional terms. To be famous, lauded, respected, wealthy, desired, beautiful, even notorious, is how the notion of conventional success is defined. It is based on how one appears to others. Yet how one presents to others, is never the same as how one presents to oneself. It can never be the same. The gap between the two is always tangible, it can never be breached. Even if one is multiple within, how multiplicity manifests without can never be mirrored – in totality and with precision – in the minds of others. That is a fact of the human condition.

A fulfilled person overflows, has much to give; is generous without making a show of it. A fulfilled person can serve in the background of affairs, ensuring that visions come to fruition and achieve their ends. A fulfilled person is abundant within, with love, ideas, creativity to match their discontent, futility and despair with the world. They give despite having full knowledge of the vagaries and pitfalls of the human condition. A fulfilled person is patient, without greed, and without the compulsion to be enviable.

There is a class of people, and among them are many accomplished people who have achieved conventional success. I’ve had the opportunity to observe them up close. There are many qualities that can be discerned if you are attentive to their words and actions. The first is narcissism; as people grow more successful they often gravitate more to the centre of their own existences. It becomes more difficult for the successful narcissist to see people as anything other than pawns in their own agendas. This kind of success is fragile because it always needs more, it is unfulfilled and there is no end to whom and what it will exploit in the quest for fulfilment.

The anti-winner is the true success of this era; one who negotiates the trappings of convention wide-eyed and aware of what is transpiring in the societal milieu and how it relates to their own liberation within it. Despite what the Donald Trumps of the world may preach, and how many people may believe it, that kind of success is a false god; a desperate attempt to maintain a consistent notion of one’s own superiority over others; to be envied, enviable. And many are the fools in this society who embrace such falsehoods. It is their emptiness that draws them to leaders of that ilk, and to be sure, they are empty. Contrary to the physics of matter, the mutual emptiness of people serve as a source of attraction, as much as the fulfilled attract the empty.

Flattery and Adoration

Be very wary of people who flatter you, or hold you up on a pedestal.

Flattery is not respect. People may flatter you, but that does not mean they respect you. Flattery is a form of manipulation, and if you respond to it, you will find yourself being easily and deftly manipulated by a wily operator. You will become a tool in their hands, with which they can achieve their own ends. That is why the old adage goes “flattery will get you everywhere”.

As soon as they do not think they need you anymore, or you do not meet their expectations, they will attempt to exercise control over you. Narcissists, in particular, are very adept at this form of manipulation; they will flatter you in order to get what they want from you, and when they don’t get what they want (which, in turn, is usually flattery and adoration) they will chastise you and attempt to make you feel small or inferior. Don’t fall for it! Once you spot the pattern, just move on. There is no need to explain yourself, they will only view that as weakness, feign regret, and attempt to launch another series of manipulations. Move on and don’t look back, whatever time and effort is lost is lost and you are better off for it.

People who put you up on a pedestal are not seeing your qualities in a balanced perspective. They are projecting their deepest desires upon you, and will come to expect you to fulfil their desires. They will not help you fulfil yours. As soon as you begin to disappoint them, by not matching the projection they have imposed on you, they will turn on you. And be aware that they can turn on you in an extremely vicious manner. Many leaders and celebrities experience this; they go from “hero to zero” very quickly in the eyes of the once-adoring public.

Friendship

Not everyone who calls themselves your friend is your friend.

Many people associate themselves with others because they need something from them. They may need protection. They may need company, because they struggle to be alone and in their own company. They may need social status, and feel that associating with you provides them with it. True friends are rare. Eventually, you will be able to count them on one hand. The rest are acquaintances, people who you may know superficially and associate with, but who do not have your interests at heart. A true friend will always be truthful with you, even when you may not want them to. They have your interests at heart because they love you like you are family. It may take a lot of time, but you will eventually learn the difference between the two.

Love

When someone loves you their ultimate desire is to see you fulfilled.

They will support you in your endeavours to fulfil yourself, not just themselves. It is not always easy to discern what is transpiring when you are in love – in particular – because the emotions associated with love are so amplified and deep-rooted, especially at the outset of a relationship when romance takes hold. Everyone who knows love also knows what it means to have a broken heart. Don’t despair when your heart breaks, it means your heart is honest and true and is open enough to allow someone else into it. Don’t close your heart if it is broken, lest you lose that quality that enables you to fall in love again. Love comes and goes unexpectedly, such is its nature. You have to keep your heart open in order to receive love again. You may have to walk away, you may have to not look back, but never close your heart off; there are people in the world who can share your heart with you. That much I know to be true.

Anxiety and Existence

To exist means that you will encounter anxieties.

It is normal to feel anxious about the future, the past and even the present. There are many practises that can alleviate anxiety. The best are the natural ones; exercise, meditation, practising awareness and so forth. The danger in turning to drugs, sex, love and ‘gurus’ in the quest for relief from anxiety is that it breeds addiction. To some extent, practises such as exercise and meditation can also become addictive, so the key is to maintain it as a practise, and not become obsessed with it. Do it without compulsion, and keep it within balance, so that you can enjoy these activities and the rewards they bring.

Going Within

Don’t be afraid to go within.

There are times when you have to delve deep within yourself, your emotions and your thoughts in order to disentangle a mess that may have established itself without you noticing. Don’t be too hard on yourself, it will only make it more difficult to work through. Accept that you are flawed, that you are human, and that despite your misgivings you deserve to be loved and can love yourself regardless. By doing so, it will make you more forgiving of those you love in turn, and help you navigate the difficulties that loving others is bound to impose on you. As the late bard Leonard Cohen sang, “Love is a broken Hallelujah”, it is not perfection, it can never complete you, but it can bring wonders into your life if you give it a chance.

Don’t hold on to things obsessively, all obsessions can only be alleviated by going within and discovering what fulfilment is lacking within you. So go deep within – without fear, and without recklessness – and when you emerge, pull yourself into the present and appreciate what is there to be appreciated. You cannot undo the past, you can only learn from it – and you cannot ensure the future, you can only shape it as you move into it. Where you are now, is where you can make your fulfilment, if you listen closely to what lies within you.

Freeing Yourself of the World

Practise freeing yourself of worldly attachments.

Practise sitting quietly with your feelings rather than trying to outrun them. Go against the grain when your intuition nags at you to do so. Appreciate those who love you, and make an effort to let them know you care. Be amongst people, but spend time with yourself when you can. It builds character and presence to be comfortable in your own skin, and to be at peace with the decisions you’ve made. All decisions require sacrifice of something or another, so be careful and attentive to what you may lose by proceeding on a prescribed treadmill. Lastly, while happiness is fleeting, so is unhappiness, learn to let go of both.

#13

The Noise (2005)

I will be the first to admit that when my anger finally arrived, in its totality, it raised my vanities with it. I lost myself to superfluity to cope with it. I buried myself in the superficial, rather than burn in the fire of rage. I pivoted and whirled, threw myself into the reckless oblivion of the night, and awoke many times devoid of any coherent memory of it. But as I sobered the memories would return, and I would throw myself back into it all again. On and on it went, many faces and naked bodies, many empty glasses and dusty panels, yet precious few moments of truth.

Indeed, my vanity became a crutch, but it could not hold against the inevitability of emotion. It could not hold in the spaces where I found myself alone. I ceased to look into mirrors, as I could barely stand to see what I saw. For what does vanity bring but itself? It is not an offering, neither is it a gift. A false commodity is what it is; fragile, wicked and untrue. But as is its nature, it went deeper and deeper, infecting the host down to its roots.

That original interruption – that estrangement – set in motion a series of twists and turns that led me to lose my way. In hindsight, it was but a small push, a slight that contained hidden meanings that I would have done best not to dwell on, but it sat within me like a surgeon’s scalpel that had been sown up within me, forgotten deep within the folds of tissue that had now healed over it, and around it.

But its incisive edge seemed to respond to my movements, splitting me from within, dividing me inch by inch. I entered into the process of becoming two just to cope with the agony of it. It so assailed me that I created another half to hide from it.

I could feel it doing its work, but I couldn’t fathom why it mattered so much. It was as though it was merely a product of something else that I could no longer reach, no longer touch, something left behind in the passage between being and becoming. I became determined to find it, determined to track down the origins of this pain, the roots of it, the ultimate causes of it.

And so I began my descent into the fractal geometry of memory, and my mind bore the burden of multiplicity like it had never done before. The deeper I searched, the more it appeared that there would always be more, that there was a chain of infinite causes, and I could never reach the end of it. They blurred, sometimes appearing as one, sometimes as infinite.

Eventually, I lost sight of the origins. I unhinged from the present and spiralled into chaos. Memory, sense and emotion combined. I lost myself to the noise, and joined the all-pervasive tremble of the origins of the universe, of everything.

I broke, became untethered, and floated into the unreal; where truths and falsehoods became one, where distinction ceased. I was no more, neither was the mind. Only the body remained, haunted by an uncertain spirit.

Yes … I broke. And in breaking, the vanities that had once sustained me, became the very demons that I had sought to avoid by inflating myself. They circled in on me and took possession of my mind, as though a wizard had wrought a spell upon me. I bumbled through each day, my only thought of sleep, of escape from this breaking, this brokenness that laid me bare before the world.

The spirits of the necropolis embraced me. I felt them encircling my chest, restricting my breath, drawing me inward. Fear accompanied the stifling weight of it. It was ever so slight, yet it still wrought a tension within me, so that it felt more like a contraction; a confinement that grew tighter as the yoke was wrestled.

A strangling ensued, but it was not of the quick type; it lingered for a long time and did not conclude. Even when it had released, it still held on. It released and reset, encircling me more with each reprieve, contracting thereafter again. I needed a way out but the compression, and the agony of that scalpel within, combined to fix me into a state of dull oblivion. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. What way out of this insanity?

So what began my descent - that spiral - into the fractal geometry of memory, ceased to matter anymore. What mattered was the dance I enacted to avoid the descent into chaos. The dance that gave meaning to it all; even if objectively there was none to speak of.

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments please click here.

# 12

Augna 25980 (1884)

Slavery didn’t end when it did. Ask Bhagoo’s son. Ask him what the good decent Mr Meikle and his wife did to him. Ask him – if you can find him – what the lash of a riding crop feels like, his feet trussed up to the rafters, his body hanging powerless, face to the floor, unable to escape, wishing that the ropes would break and he would crush his head in the fall. But they let him hang there for over an hour instead, so that his ankles distended and the blood pooled in his head till it was ready to burst. Bhagoo’s son, upside-down, dying of thirst, writhing in agony with each lash. Ask Bhagoo’s son what all of that feels like, at ten years of age, and then pray do tell me, please offer me your version of history, of that neatly cauterised historical date that speaks of your beneficence, your civilisation; of how slavery ended across the empire through the virtue of good church-goers who said no to sugar in their tea.

Ask Bhagoo, how his heart disintegrated, when his child disappeared forever, never to be seen again. That child that he had nursed through fevers, fed with paltry rations, and hoped against hope, would move an inch beyond the existence that his father endured on this strange, new continent so that he could give him a better life. Ask Bhagoo where his appeals for release from his master went, ask him what it means to be powerless, no longer a father, no longer a man, no longer able to endure the tragedies that his existence thrust upon him. Forcing him, beating him into a servility and acquiescence that belied his slow burning rage. Ask Bhagoo what it means to be unable to protect your child when your master and his wife take possession of his young body and determine that he should be punished.

It’s time to reveal a family secret. My great grandfather killed a white man with a half-brick while working on the railroad. We never talk about it. It didn’t sit well with our residency in the Christian middle classes, and with our upward mobility from the railway barracks. Apparently, that white man was filled with hate. He vilified and disparaged men who worked far harder than he did because he felt it was his place to do so. It was as though it was his birth-right to violate them, as though their bodies didn’t break, as though their pores didn’t open under the burden of the great heat and dust of the railways, as though they were beasts of burden, to be whipped until they dropped, until they surrendered to their ends.

So my great grandfather opened up his skull with a half-brick as the rest of them looked on. Yet none of them ever uttered a word of it. They unionised, and organised, and made men of themselves with what little they could.

So my great grandfather was a murderer, yet he is my hero, as he was to my father. He was a hard man with hardened hands, but a great teacher of the strength of the spirit, of the courage it takes to refuse oppression, to claim your humanity through brute force, through direct confrontation. Gandhi defeated the British Empire without firing a single bullet you say, but you know little of how tyrants are defeated. You are merely repeating what you’ve heard said, it does not come from the reality of struggle; from the fire that persecution casts you into, that fire that transforms you, remakes  you, for better or for worse.

And we were remade worse in many ways. There was no limit to the remaking of suffering, to the extent to which man’s cruelty can be continued. As Bhagoo’s son Augna learned, his body was not his, it was not even his fathers. It belonged to a white man and a white woman, and they could do with it what they liked, when they liked. Yet trauma is a strange thing, it makes more of itself. And as a ten year old boy, I found myself threatened with a phrase repeated so often that it had become a casual trope. That phrase so often reiterated as threats to mere  children,

“I’ll hang you up from the rafters and whip you!”

So it came to be that some parents hung up their children up from the rafters and whipped them in service of a discipline that was meted out to slaves. That our parents became our slave-masters before we encountered them in the world. That they came to believe that they were preparing us for the world. That they remade us in the image of slaves, so fearful were they that we would dream of another existence. “Spare the rod and spoil the child!” they regurgitated, echoing a history that they could by then scarcely remember. It is indeed true that history repeats itself, but it is little appreciated what myriad avenues that repetition recurs along.

And as the waters part, after many centuries, this is a moment that we must seize for ourselves, and our own. A moment that necessitates moving inward as much as outward. That it is time to confront ourselves about our complicity with that oppression we claim to want to leave behind. That we trace it through every channel that it manifests, that we call it – and ourselves – to order.

That it is time to challenge our teachers and their teachings, for too long borrowed without reflection for the world they make and remake, and in whose image they make it. That it is time to police the police and remake our prisons. That it is time, above all, to ask our parents why they do our oppressor’s work for them. So that we can break with the chains of history, and remake love within us, and pass that on instead to the children we will bear as we make the world anew. That it is time to reach for a new heaven and a new earth.

So the time has come. The time is now. There is no other time to leave it to. It is time to rise up with the millions of voices and bodies that are mounting as a giant wave across the planet. And yet, I still have to ask you,

“Do you know that it is time?"

***Note: For the next chapter of Fragments click here.


***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here.

# 11

For when all was said and done …

And yet what was this liberation? For when all was said and done, those who had lurked in the shadows and in the background of affairs, came forward to claim their share.

They had not cast their bodies against barbed wire, they had not faced bricks and bullets at the barricades. They had never seen the inside of a prison or missed a day of school.

They quietly went on, making ordinary of the abnormal, servicing the system that oppressed those around them. They got on with the business of their own progress, while the others broke their backs, lay in pools of blood, and were lain in shallow graves; their lives – and those they loved – shattered under the terror and the jackboot of the system they resisted.

Spare a thought, they would say, for those of us who “don’t want any trouble”. We are simple people, we just want to get on with our lives. Spare at thought, for those of us who have much to lose, for whom the immediacy of things cannot be broken, not for others, not for the future, not even for the present. You are asking us to interrupt our lives, and for what? What will all this achieve, anyway? Things stay the same, they do not change!

But when freedom was won they celebrated with us, invited us in to eat with them, and poured praise upon us. “Heroes”, they called us.

Over time, they revised their histories, laid claim to suffering, and to struggle, and made heroes of themselves, as though they had been the ones on the streets, facing the bullets. More and more they claimed our suffering and made it theirs. They confused their oppression, their brokenness, with struggle.

They became heroes to themselves. They convinced themselves of their own suffering and sacrifice, and quickly made currency of it in the new. After all, their uninterrupted lives – of studies completed, the acquisition of wealth, security and assets their ever-present priority – enabled them to exploit freedom better than those who had languished in the camps and prisons, or had fought on the streets.

And when the spoils of victory were to be awarded, they jostled and wrangled to the front of the queue. Every memory became filled with themselves, and soon; every path, every avenue, was quickly jammed by them. So in the end, there was nothing left for the others, namely those who had suffered the most.

Yet they claimed more, and consolidated, and re-consolidated, until the new became a vessel for re-birthing and reproducing the old. They colonised the corridors of power, like those who came before them, held on tightly to their gains, and defended them dutifully.

There was no measure, for how restrictive they became about maintaining the status quo, which was to retain the inherited abnormal; a charade, a performance. The language of duplicity replaced the language of hate; ‘cosmetic change’ it was dubbed. The cosmetics were superfluous, but they spread like a mould in wet climes nonetheless, covering everything in its path, sucking up nutrients, growing into a dense forest that could not be penetrated.

They became the infection that we had once feared, yet their claims were tendered as noble; their virtue beyond reproach. Comfortably ensconced in their neat living rooms, they preached volumes of their own good.

Those who had faded into the background when the struggles were at its height now moved to the front and centre of things. They occupied the centres of power, and strengthened themselves and their own through it, all the while, preening their new hair, proudly announcing their new cars and large houses for all to see; evidence they claimed, of success, of change. The new bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche, and the elite, became fishers of men and wealth, and they set in their hooks gleefully.

And those who had once suffered were robbed once again, but this time by those who understood the creeping passage of time, by those who effected the “slow effacement” of the breath on the mirror when freedom was won; the promise of a new future. How fragile our dreams of the new proved to be amidst the secure among us, among those who wanted no trouble. What was lost, was not to be regained, and they were the ones who made sure of it.

So when you ask me to spare a thought for those, who have no thought for others, I will spare a thought, but it will be just one. For a single thought is more than they deserve.

***Note: To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here

# 10

Euphoria (1995)

 With the advent of the new came many wonders and delights. The great potentials of natality afforded us by transition ushered in a wave of new creations and experiences. We all rode the wave, giddy with the euphoria of newly discovered freedoms. We rose and crashed together upon the new shores, which held so much promise and discovery. New treasures they were, and we gobbled them up greedily, without noting their transience; that they too were ghosts in the night.

And yet there was so much that was new, so much that we celebrated; that the gaping wounds of the city became set without us noticing it. And what the city’s photographer had dubbed it, “Imperial Ghetto”, accelerated into its next phase; the dissolution of the city’s whiteness.

The first to go were the boutique shops; they moved out to the suburban malls that had sprung up in the wake of the first signs of our new freedom; the freedom of the cardboard city.

To the businessmen and owners of property, freedom meant re-joining the world, and having access to all it had to offer. The end of sanctions also held the promise of prosperity. Yet prosperity depended on having a good threshold of clientele; if they were uncomfortable frequenting your location, then it was best to move to somewhere they felt safer, protected, comfortably separated from the milieu that had descended upon the spaces that they had once exclusively enjoyed.

So they broke from the city, and wrenched out its artificial heart, a heart that had beaten for decades, maintaining a synthetic life, a masquerade of it. Yet even though that heart was false, its removal took much with it. White faces became rarer, they retreated to the suburbs to the north, where they were comfortably hidden, protected from the ‘invasion’; that quiet encroachment that had descended upon the city proper.

Yet we, the youth, were oblivious to the hollowing out of the city that was to become the re-segregation of it. We were caught in the midst of an explosion of music, art and celebration; exuberance characterised our existence and we couldn’t wait to see what happened next. The norms, we thought, were being broken. We were convinced that the new was emerging, and we rushed in to witness it, to be with it, and part of it. We saw the sun set and rise, and we joined hands to salute its departure, and usher in its arrival; sand between our toes, the ocean before us, our journey just beginning.

***Note: To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here.

#9

Cardboard City (1993)

The land grew thirsty on the eve of liberation. That experiment – the ruralisation of African people – was failing. The land refused to bear them any longer. What the apartheid project inherited from colonialism and had formalised, was giving way to the forces of 20^th Century society. The “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”, as it is now termed, had begun its work of undoing a reality that had established and maintained itself for decades in the post-war South African Apartheid-era world. The city had become a site of struggle once again, and those who had been removed from sight for over 40 years began to creep into the city.

Yet it still wasn’t a daytime struggle. It was hidden in the darkness of night, shrouded by long grass in the open fields of traffic islands, and the recesses afforded by shop doorways and alleys across the city. It was a “quiet encroachment” indeed, but there was nothing ‘ordinary’ about it. It was a shadow that fell upon the city, a shadow hidden in the moonlight of the night. It cast a new face upon the city, and even though it would be gone in the morning, each night it appeared as though some errant artist had sketched over the previously overlooked parts of the city that hosted the unrecognised potential for settlement – albeit temporary – that had now become exploited to its hilt. These sketches had popped up into three dimensions, and its outlines were that of jagged cardboard edges; the bricks and mortar of this makeshift city. 

I witnessed it first-hand.

Each Friday and Saturday night I worked a shift at Fun Land. Each night I got on the microphone,

“Everybody’s a winner at the Camel Derby!”

Ten per cent of the takings is what it took for me to give myself to such dubious employment. “The city where the fun never sets” blared the advertisements as I enticed minors into the transient excitement of consumption, one that was disguised as play by the blinking lights and honking hooters of the Camel Derby.

The walk home was a long midnight one, from Point road to Overport, one that took me through the full swathe of the city proper. I saw many huddled up bodies, eyes closed, yet foreheads crinkling as if to ward off the dull glow of the sodium lights that lined the streets. A cardboard box the only shelter from the night air, thick and humid, rendering this shelter unnecessary, except as a demarcation of territory, however transient, however small. A reminder that each claims a space in the world, and must defend it, whether actively or passively, to remain in it.

I claimed my pay each night and walked home through the shapeshifting city intent to defend it come what may. Yet I never encountered any harm. I never encountered anything to fear. I encountered nothing more than the stillness of night, and I feared the walk through the white neighbourhoods far more than I feared the cardboard city.

The city’s established residents began to arm themselves more than they had before. The fear of crime and violence merged with the fear of the shadow that the informal, shifting and discontinuous refugee camp – one that had seeded and cultivated rapidly within the city – had cast upon their everyday expectations; of maintaining an abnormal arrangement undisturbed. And refugees they were, from centuries of ignominy, deception and greed. People who had lost everything; whose new beginnings had been skewed to meet the ends of their oppressors. Yet they were met with suspicion, beatings and bullets, as was historical tradition.

Humanity failed itself, as it would do so over and over again in the city of my birth, and elsewhere. That impulse, that automatic reaction, too often rising before compassion, before empathy, before insight. That notion of possession, would negate society’s evolution, its potential to go beyond the normal scuppered by the average of us. And so the average of us is what we reaped in the transition of the city. 

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here.

***Note: To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

#8

Ghetto Metaphors: A Life without History (1994)

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[1] 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.

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[1] A local South African Indian television show.

***Note: To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

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