1987. History remembers riots. Older South Africans remember uncertainty: the summer sun burning their fear and excitement.
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I was a fresh baby flower- not one of the innocent born-frees, but almost.
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The only blood I knew was the blood of raspberries that stained our feet as we adventured in the forests above Mbabane. The innocent lives I cried for were the lives of two small fish. I had been carrying them in a bucket up from the Ballito beach when I tripped. Their slimy bodies were lost in the green grass and no amount of searching could bring them back.
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Back then, my sister and I wore mud instead of make up. I never knew what apartheid was, but I knew it was something that ended a really, really long time ago. It had to be- we learnt about it in history class. We saw it printed in books along with World War I and the pyramids.
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But from a young age I understood that naughtiness must be punished- sometimes in the strangest ways. I spent many afternoons being made to stare at the toilet until boredom replaced my anger. At three years old I tried to dig my mother’s potatoes out of the brown Zimbabwe earth. My punishment was seeing our house’s blue front door close without me in it. The horror.
Heritage
09.26
instead i write this
08.17
Angela pushed her locker closed and the Wednesday afternoon air sighed in its boredom. Her Greek black hair kinked against her blue school dress. A pale hand twirled in the hair, next to the ear with the stud through the top of it.
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I sat on a wooden desk. Angela took out a pile of exercise books. She thumbed through them, looking but not reading. She knew what was written there. I watched her eyes on the pages, and next to the white wooden windows of Mrs Peach’s English classroom, it started. For me: Std 9.
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She was unattractive, but she didn’t care. She was rumoured to have taken e. She would leave her lipstick on the penises of boys at parties. Kissed girls. Did witch craft. Once she let me smoke a cigarette with her. Down by the wattle trees, our takkies floating in the mud. I didn’t know how to smoke and it scared me.
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But Angela was teenage angst. In the books, the musky school locker books. She wrote poetry. Her wild heart soaking through the paper. Getting high and blowing boys was just the dried blood on the wounds. The secrets- her mouselike ears, the boys that touched her in the dark gym, that father or mother or someone who wasn’t quite there- she wrapped those in paper. Scrawled them on the centre folds of text books.
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They expelled her a few months later. But it was too late for me. I couldn’t unwatch her. Instead I took my bra off in the cemetery and kissed James with the breath of bones at my feet. We smsed the bold things we wouldn’t say to our meek faces. Jerked each other off in our minds.
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And after he went back to his ex, I sat in the bottom of my bedroom cupboard. On top of the shoes. And I began to write him off on paper. In books. My own musky books. Late nights listening to the radio, squeezing my heart like a sponge. The stories are written in blood. The ones that count.
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But really I began my life long before that. With the heart ache of the bubble machine. When I knew. Absolutely knew that my bubbles poem was going to win the bubble making machine. I even wrote it in the shape of a circle. A bubble. Mailed it to the Sunday Times. I don’t own a bubble machine.
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I wrote poems before I could spell. For Bridget, “My little angle”. She took my hand on the first day of grade three. She had strawberry blonde hair and a wendy house full of her mom’s evening dresses. Photos of her mom “when she was thin” on the fridge. Ex-boyfriends cut out the pictures, leaving a lone arm wrapped around her skinny shoulder.
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And then I stopped writing. I spoke a million words about Europe. About travelling. The boys, the girl, the cities and smoke and coats and alcohol. We sang songs on the roof in the winter sunshine. Claire and I. Super skinny in our jeans. We didn’t eat. And I didn’t write. Not a sentence. Soaked in accents, penises not pens.
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But I did write one story. In Prague on a Saturday. I worked the entire day and through the night. One story. I am still not sure if it was true. An application to a university explaining why scientists could become journalists. That my low marks were not because I drank too much and cared too little. Scientists should become journalists.
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And even on a Sunday night in bed I can hear Jean calling my name. And I jump. Every time. “Yes Jean?” slightly frightened. “What are you working on?” asks the desk. “I want to see you on the front page” she says. She doesn’t know its Angela. Not me. I just watched her one day.
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I receive an email from myself at the exact time I did yesterday. I’m confused. And I consider looking Angela up on facebook. See if she is dead, or does she still write? Instead I write this. And then I rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Sleep.
This work is my life
05.20
| Art or death? Cruising around Saxonwold in takkies and a blue anorak, Zesanzi Mayaliso says this piece of art is his life. My sister Claire and I turned the car around fast when we saw his glimmering installation being wheeling down the street. Under the dappled light of the leafy burbs, Mayaliso’s combination of cds, flags, ribbons and teddy bears is happiness bottled in a trolley. “It looks even better at night,” he said.We managed to get snippets of Mayliso’s story in our extremely broken Afrikaans (he laughed at us). He created the piece two weeks ago. “Ek het alles gekry van die madam,” he said. When asked if people often stop to ask him about his art he said “too much”. “The white people love it, but the darkies, not so much.” He doesn’t make money from his work, but he has kos, klere en geld. “Ek het alles dat ek noodig.” Joburgers… keep your eyes peeled for this artist in Saxonwold, Holland or along Oxford road. Stop for a chat. He is one of our city’s untold treasures. |
The nun diaries
05.19
When we travelled Europe we visited the Vatican. I took on a little project- I stalked nuns. Literally followed them down the street trying to take their photographs, like some morbid member of the paparazzi. I don’t know who I thought I was, or what my real aim was. I think in my delusion I thought I was a grandiose journalist, going when no reporter had gone before. My photographs of Rome are contaminated by this dark period in my existence- when I was a harasser of nuns.
We all have that (well some of us). Those drunken nights when you look back and think “Who the hell is that person?” Being plagued by these kind of questions is tough. How can you trust yourself when you look back on your past with such distaste. She who stalks nuns today… tomorrow maybe attaining untold levels of mania. When I was in Rome I stalked nuns. I will always be recovering nun stalker- I can never truly be healed. And I must deal with this horrible burden every day.
Cape to Jozi: being new in the city
05.14
In my first 36 hours in Johannesburg I visited the same shopping mall twice. And I don’t like shopping. Santon City, it seems, is Joburg’s Camp’s Bay: locals go there to be seen and outsiders are mind boggled by the tight jeans/tiny bikinis. I knew: I needed something else to keep me busy.
So I went drinking. On my first night out, I was brought my first hand grenade. A shot of tequila and a shot of jager, splashed with red bull. And it bore my first piece of writing in the new city: “Ode to a hand grenade”. A sonnet co-written with my new friend: a Phil Collins look alike I met at the bar. I can’t remember how the sonnet went, but it was a wild jozi night- complete with a designated driver.
What I do remember, rather clearly, is feeling suicidal on my second day of work in “Africa’s New York”. I was wedged into my cubicle, phone to my ear, with the baby pictures and old notebooks and general crap of the reporter before me on every surface. I was largely ignored. I wished for a real hand grenade. Alternatively, I needed the weekend, and fast.
On Friday afternoons in Cape Town the journ interns would jump in a taxi after work and head for the beach. We would laugh at the Gaatjie as he shrieked, “Wyyyynberg!”, and then suddenly broke into an 80s love song which ended abruptly so he could swear at a passing bus driver. We would sit in the back seat, our sweaty thighs glued to the seats and argue about Clifton 1st beach vs. Camps bay. SG wanted the quiet rocks of Clifton to keep his black labels cool. Mpiletso wanted a coke from the Camps Bay PnP.
Joburg is obnoxiously inland. There are no beaches. There is no table mountain. You have to search for a park. When I walked in Delta park and later in the week, in the Botanical Gardens; the green hills and the rolling autumn leaves stretched so far around me that I almost couldn’t see Hillbrow tower. Or hear the bass from a Wits party streaming across the city. It was a depressing slice of nature.
In desperation I met up with a guy I know from Cape Town. I was in Melville for the two-for-one cocktail special at Ratz. He was meeting a friend from Japan. He followed me to the toilet and offered me coke. It was all very Cape Town. And I declined.
But on Sunday afternoon, with Monday morning hours away, I begin yearning for the beach, feeling miserable in this concrete cage. But then the Phil Collins look alike facebooks me to come do time trials and have a laugh at his running club. A simple invitation, but there is the inkling of potential awesomeness. This is a vast, ungovernable hub. If I search, I might find, beaches in Joburg.
Sleeping Lady
03.31
The lushious Jess, freelance journalist, takes a short nap on a squishy media centre couch while working at the Cape Town Jazz Fest 2011
rhino
03.16
333 Rhinos were killed and dehorned last year. 71 have already been killed this year. This is a small (tiny) contribution to the fight for the rhino. It’s a photograph I have converted into an “artwork” I like to call rhino in abstract.
