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!)
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