Guest Blog: More Thoughts About “Home”:

I received a number of  interesting responses to my comments about “home”. They seem to have struck a chord.  So I plan to post some “Guest Blogs”. 

The first one is from Dan O’Meara who lives in Montreal.  He is the friend I wrote about in the very first blog, the one who asked me to “Define my terms, Comrade”.  He lived in exile in Dar es Salaam and then in Maputo for a many of years. He now lives in Montreal.

This is what he wrote:

I found myself grinning while reading about your trip to the supermarket. I never got the Provita fad myself —nor even Marmite—but boerewors, biltong and Black Cat Peanut Butter do it for me every time. On one trip back a few years ago, tried a Lunchbar. Used to be addicted to the things, now find them teeth-on-edge sweet. Life moves on.

But, yes, food, or vistas, or the smell of a road after a summer rainstorm, or of the ozone washing over the beach front in Sea Point, any and all of these tear my heart in two and leave me both with a deep sense of belonging and of loss. Childhood brain synapses fire the longest they say.

Evenings with friends and a shared culture, not having to explain so much.

Afrikaans, Christ, I miss Afrikaans...in all of its brutally direct, cynical expressiveness. Have never, ever found a word to replace hardegat nor sworn so obscenely, so satisfactorily and so politically incorrectly as in Cape Afrikaans of the street variety (Jou ma’s...). English doesn’t enter into the same ballpark.

But then, oy vey, the rest of your blog. South Africa in its painful “it could happen to me because it’s happened to so many people I know” – reality/paranoia.

And the dogs! The country’s real ruling class; those beautiful animals who are the shock troops of the  ongoing race war. I remember, on my last visit four years ago, walking up the very long hill from my sister’s house to the place where thousands of domestic workers go to catch the taxi to the townships (my family went hysterical at the very idea that Pauline and I would walk on the street, my father persuaded himself that he would never see me again). And as we passed every house, the brutes raged, barking their brains out, teeth bared and snarling (we even saw a warning sign “Beware of Cobras”).  

Pauline was seeing this for the first time. Horrified, she remarked” “Imagine if you were a black domestic worker here. Twice a day you have to run the gauntlet of these beasts, who exist to kill you and whose furious barking translates into ‘You don’t belong, here. Go away! Come a step closer and I will eat you alive! And this is their country.”

I knew then that it was no longer mine! And that I no longer even wanted it to be mine. No amount of biltong or even close friends could ever bring me to feel at home there again. It has taken almost forty years for me to get to this point. And now, to answer for myself the question that I asked you in Maputo over a quarter of a century ago, I console myself with an extract from Stephen Clingman’s biography of another culturally-unrooted compatriot, Bram Fischer (who was always trying to answer the question of what did it mean to feel ‘at home’?):

“It is my feeling...that if anyone, anywhere, anytime, feels fully ‘at home’, they are not paying attention.  There is a political, moral and existential price for it: feeling at home means that we are ignoring all those imperfections that need to be addressed, all those absences that create the potential of future improvement.”

Dan O’Meara

February 13, 2011

Glossary:

Boerewors:  Literally farmer’s sausage, but oy vey, none like it anywhere

Biltong:  Dried, spiced meat.  And Americans, don’t think  beef jerky.  It is nothing like it.

Hardegat:  Hardnosed, stubborn

Jou Ma’s..  (Your mother’s .... – well, take a guess!)

Matumi Reflections

I think of Matumi. 

I feel at odds, wrenched out of place, because Matumi is, for me, no longer. Because Matumi was more than a place.  It was the home of Eve and Tony Hall. 

From Matumi the continent spreads out in spiral formations and it felt right. I knew I was in Africa.

A tradition was established during my visits “home” / my "coming back".  It went like this:

I arrive at Johannesburg airport.  Alan or Pippa meets me and takes me to their house in Pretoria. I see Mathew again: “My how you have grown”, I think but refrain from saying.  I begin to unwind, to disconnect from America.  We catch up.  I sleep.  We walk the dogs up the mountain. If the weather is right, I swim.  Slowly, slowly I am drawn back in.  I relax my shoulders, take a deep breath of Gauteng air and say to myself “I’m here”.  I enjoy the glow that comes with reconnecting with good friends, friends for close to 30 years. 

Then I head for Matumi.

Matumi is a little piece of paradise.  It is on a nature reserve in Mpumulanga Province.  You turn off the N4 before reaching Nelspruit, drive less than a mile, see the sign “Matumi” on your left and turn up a dirt driveway, past dense intertwined bush and low trees aware that baboons are most probably watching you.  Perched on an escarpment which drops away on one side, below a mountain on the other, is the beautiful house.  It has high ceilings, and views, a large open plan that melds with the surroundings.  It is usually winter or autumn, hot enough to swim during the day, cold enough to light the fire in the living room area as soon as the sun goes down or to sit outside in front of a fire overlooking a long view, wrapped in shawls. 

 

View of the nature reserve from the garden   (photo:  Phil Hall)

A small table and chair set outside a little patio beyond the French doors of ‘my’ room await me.  Here I perch my laptop and write away the days and drink in the view, the flowering trees, the rolling hills.  There were the breakfasts (ah, those paw paws), sometimes on the weathered table looking over the plateau, or in the nook outside the kitchen when it was too hot or too cold. For lunch Tony would gather this and that until a veritable feast would be waiting.  We would linger over the dinners which I often prepared, trying during later visits, to find something that would appeal to Eve, a task which became more and more challenging as time went by.

At Matumi I began to take the first tentative steps towards working on the memoir I am writing. Eve and Tony egged me on as I falteringly began to describe what I was thinking of doing, as I shared some initial drafts so that I began to believe I had a story to tell.

 

One of my writing spots  (Photo:  Phil Hall)



The lowveld, as that region of south Africa is referred to, began to resonate with a sense of being home.  More so than my visits to Cape Town.  “Cape Town is not South Africa”.  I would hear this a lot.  I would think it myself despite the fact that Africa is a vast, diverse continent, far more diverse than the countries of Europe.  So why is Cape Town not Africa?  But this is for later musings. 

What it meant  to me was that at Matumi  I felt connected with the Africa – east, southern - where I have spent so much time in since I emigrated to the United States in 1967.  With my feet on the lowveld soil, with its pungent smells that rise up from the earth and join those of the African foliage, with its sounds from birds to baboons, I knew that the continent stretched from where I stood all the way up the east coast of Africa – Mozambique, Kenya, and beyond.  I felt connected.

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I first insinuated myself into the Hall family – Eve, Tony, 12-year-old Phil and ten-year old Andy and Chris -  in Nairobi in 1973. 

I had just arrived from Addis on a trip I felt compelled to make after being in the US for six years.  I had become increasingly consumed with the notion that I get to know at least some of the vast continent I was born on.  All I seemed to imbibe from my Apartheid education was a view of Africa as a vast stretch of continent, a virtually empty space between South Africa and the UK.  As I got more involved in the US anti-apartheid and solidarity movements, as I devoured book after banned book about Africa and African independence in the 60’s,  I felt a magnetic pull.    

And so, in February 1973 carrying a large blue backpack I disembarked in Cairo and worked my way down to Dar es Salaam for six months.   In my wallet was  a white covered US State Department  travel document, a letter signed by Oliver Tambo attesting to my being a “good” South African, and a list of contacts from friends.  Among them was the telephone number of the Halls. I called them the day after I arrived in Nairobi. “Come for tea!”   I did.  I stayed six weeks.

Eve already a feminist was isolated from the tangible excitement of the women’s movement in the US, and the way women connected, the new sisterhood.  We gravitated towards each other immediately, and our conversations– about the women’s liberation in the US (me) and about the realities of women in the anti-apartheid struggle in Africa (she) went on late into the night. 



Eve and Me - 1983-ish



Within six months after returning to the US, I was back in Nairobi.  It was February 1974.  We were planning a book together on the role of women in the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism and travelled via Nairobi to discuss it.  I had an invitation to visit the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau as the war continued.  Eve was waiting for confirmation of a trip to liberated areas of Mozambique. 

For three weeks in Nairobi I walked and climbed and ran, a get fit regimen for the eight hour per day marches ahead of me. 



Photo I took of Eve and To in the Ngong Hills, 1974



Ready for Guinea-Bissau!

Photo To took of me - Rift Valley in the background

In the end I wrote a book.  But without Eve and only on Guinea-Bissau.  (Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau, 1979) By the time permission would have been granted to Eve, the anti-colonial struggles had been won. 

Clustered with PAIGC militants around a small, battered short-wave radio to listen as we did each evening to the news from Portugal, we heard on April 25^th 1974, that a coup had toppled the fascist government of Caetano.  Within just over a year, flags would be raised over the newly independent nations of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola.

It was sometime in 1999 or 2000 when I received news from Eve that she had Stage III breast cancer.  Her email with its usual humor and cheeriness, upset me terribly.  I am a breast cancer survivor myself but her outlook did not match mine.  She was cautioned that she had perhaps five years to live.  She lived over seven.  She refused to relinquish her tough hide, her  feisty self.  Every remission was a triumph.  Every recurrence a challenge.



Eve at Matumi, 2007 (Photo: Phil Hall)



Tony at Matumi, 2007       (Photo: Phil Hall)



I visited Matumi for the last time in March 2007.

Eve died in November.

Then without warning Tony died in his sleep from a heart attack at Matumi the following February.

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My current visit to south Africa is the second since their deaths.  The reminder that they are not here is sharp and painful.  It is not about nostalgia.  It is about sheer and sad missing. It’s about loss.   

And so, with no side trip to Matumi, no opportunity to work on my now near-completed book in the beauty of Matumi and the comfort of my departed friends,  I head tomorrow for that “this-is-not-Africa” beautiful city of Cape Town. 

And begin my trip in earnest.

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Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011

'Home' yet?

Hanaa emails:  Does it feel like ‘home’ yet?

No, not yet.

I am Pretoria.  I have not yet got to Cape Town.  That’s for  Wednesday next week (February 16^th). 

And I am still working on what is  ‘home’ to me, a subject of another blog.

But inching closer....

Are you Australian? Asks the petrol attendant -- after I have stopped to buy petrol for the red Ford Focus I have generously been lent;  after I have accelerated wildly into the petrol station which is suddenly there, through the exit lane so my car is facing the wrong way;  after I have been unable to locate the lever to release the petrol cap; after he points out he needs the car key to open it;  after I have been unable to find the lever to release the hood which he points out... yes.. the car key; after he fills the tank and hands me the credit card slip to sign.  I smile and say, no I was born here (I thicken my South Africa accent which sounds fake because I cannot remember what my South African accent was). I have been living in New York.  He smiles back at me and I hand him the six rand that have been clutched in my sweaty palm – it’s a hot day – waiting to be dispensed as a tip which I only remember to dispense when he politely stays next to the car.  I drive off, this time through the exit.

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I  am, I guess, grateful that he didn’t think I am American. 

Australia is closer.

I go to the Pick n Pay supermarket.  I walk through the aisles. Matabela. Curry powders. Masala. Marmite. Provita. Biltong. Mrs. Balls Chutney, Tinned youngberries. Cape style multi-grain bread. Koo apricot jam. Lunchbars. Crunchies. Lemon creams. Ginger biscuits.  Rooibos. Shelves and shelves of South African wine.  I add biltong to my cart.  And Provita. And as a greedy afterthought, a Lunchbar. 

I am barely out of the store before I rip open the plastic package of biltong and stop to savor the sliced dried game meat.  The flavor is warm and fills the mouth.  I have to chew hard but it only increases the flavor.  Later I eat a Lunchbar and close my eyes to the mix of chocolate and nuts and caramel.  Sigh.  Delicious. 

When I get back to my friends’ house I fight with the package of Provita to release the 1 ½” by 3” whole wheat crackers and spread butter, then Marmite.  I always have Marmite in my kitchen in New Jersey, but it’s not as mellow as the south African variety, and certainly never with Provita.  The combined flavors crunch in my mouth.  I eat two more. Aaah. 

Yes, I am inching closer.

I add Rajah Hot Curry Powder to the onions I am browning for the evening meal of prawn coconut curry: Whoosh! Its pungent aroma blasts out of the pan and travels deep into my nostrils and startles to the memory part of my brain.  I breath it in again, and again.

I sit on the veranda with my computer. Leitmotif of incessantly cooing doves, so that it is fixed in my head like a recurring tune.  Twittering of small birds.  Cawing of large, charcoal crows.

The air soft, the sky high and light blue, above the forever clumpy cumulus clouds.  

Rebecca and Anna, the domestic staff who come a few times a week to clean and iron seem genuinely pleased to see me.  Anna chatters to me in Afrikaans which I can more or less follow except when she talks very fast. She refers to John as “Oupa”! (Grandpa).  I manage to dredge my memory for appropriate words while she helpfully fills in the blanks.

I quickly adapt to driving on the left side of the road and the right side of the car.  I chant my mantra.  “Driver in the middle.  Driver in the middle.”  And when ready to turn it’s “Tight Left” or “Far Right”, and not once do I make a mistake until I am once again driving without having to think about it.

Slowly familiarity is seeping in.

UNTIL....

Alan and I walk the dogs.  Three.  Two German Shepherds, Dusty and Rex who greet me as if they remember me from my previous visits while barking furiously. Which they do a lot.  I take it as a welcome.  I know them and their barking ways.  I wait for them to calm so I can greet them with fond strokes and head pats and ear scratches.  Mojo the two-year old Golden is new.  He is easy to adore.  We walk past the houses which have high fences, walls topped by electrified thin wire, signs that declare “Armed Response”.  As we near each house a cacophony of sound erupts and dogs of all sizes but mostly large and fierce looking, rush to the fence in a whirl of frenzied barking.  I have no doubt if given the chance they would tear me limb from limb.  They continue to bark as we pass, then fade as the dogs ahead pick up their fury.

And oh yes, I also found avocados imported from Spain.  One step back.  It’s not avo season which is winter.

A friend tells me she is having trouble sleeping.   Have you tried sleeping pills? I offer helpfully, thinking I can give her some of the ones I brought to aid getting over jetlag.  “No, I can’t.  I need to be able to wake up alert in the middle of the night if....” and she trails off her incomplete but very clear sentence.

I drive to Joburg.  On the other side of the road there is a bad accident.  The cars stretch for miles behind it.  On my side, the traffic has not slowed down one even by one km/hr.  People are so used to accidents that there is no rubbernecking.  Except for me, although I make sure I don’t slow down.

Someone I knew as a teenager is mourning a friend who surprised a burglar and was killed.  I find myself indulging in a strange math.  The number of friends who experienced direct violence: a riend being tied up in her bathroom which her house was removed of all valuables; a friend who thought she heard something at night but ignored it, only that her living room had been emptied of all electronic equipment.  Luckily they were not disturbed enough to investigate.  The friend who’s brother was killed in a carjacking.  The friend who’s father  was killed.  If they themselves didn’t experience violence, they can relate terrible stories, more than one, of friends who were stabbed in bed, held up, robbed blind, murdered.  Just one degree of separation.  True for everyone I meet.  The lists of both go on and on, and will be added to weekly if not daily.

Don’t drive alone at night, I am cautioned.

Don’t leave your handbag on the seat next to you, I am cautioned.

If you do drive at night, don’t stop at red traffic lights, don’t even slow down unless you have to.

In disassembling the notion of ‘home”, nostalgia demands a space.  What is nostalgia?  A longing that defies  sense?  One that plays havoc with smells, and sounds and tastes that are hard wired into one’s brain, and then tantalizes the selective memory.  Nostalgia for the past in South Africa?  It goes far beyond smells and sounds and tastes.  Can it be divorced from the memories that come with a deeper, harsher more overriding reality: apartheid?

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Hanaa, you will have to wait for an answer. 

Other than, I am getting there. 

Other than, I am so content, so looking forward to being in South Africa and Cape Town for the next three months that life at this moment feels sweet. 

I am trying my best to hang onto to this.