Here I am-a South African from Johannesburg in Pune, India. More than a year has passed since I have touched African soil. I do not know about this ‘Mother’ anymore, our communication is scarce. I do not know what gripes she now has, who is upsetting her and which politicians are making all the usually wrong decisions for her in her best interests. I do not know what music she is singing from the mouths of new and upcoming artists. I do not know how the rain has slanted or the sun beat on her expansive back over the last year. I do not know none of these things, yet I tell of her like a fierce fog horn blowing through the cultural mist of India.
I am patriotic. Now that I have been gone for so long, I am patriotic. The narratives that I deliver are like dessert, sweet to the taste and colourful to the eye, yet small in proportion so as not to make the recipient wary of the contents being placed before them. I have wiped up the dessert bowl, removed every water stain from the spoon and placed a cherry on the top. I have abandoned all stories of racial animosity; a rape every six seconds, a man shot every ten, the paranoia of high fences, burglar guards, poverty, AIDS and my dad’s frantic calls to see that I have arrived safely at the party. Home is now a white-washed, watered down rendition of what it actually is.
Perhaps an Artist would say that I now have the creative distance that is necessary when one seeks to represent. When you are at home, Home is of little consequence. It is never afforded the grand attention that it receives from the foreigner. Home enters centre stage in the play of alienation. For me, representing this Home has begun to feel an awful lot like forgetting. The funny thing about lack is that you yearn for things that you never cared too much for in the first place. It was never really how you spent your time when you were actually at Home. It creates obsessions out of the ordinary; it affords a new magnitude for the mundane- Bacon was never my heralded joy, nor wine my endless song. Home is only made present in its absence and is always absent in its presence. In this curious paradox, I find that the more I speak of my ‘Mother’, the more she seems to move further away from me- Like I am sucking at her left breast, exhaustibly.
This is where Brecht, the German playwright shows his importance to me. He too had problems with representation. He felt that the way narratives were told and life, as enacted on stage, were chummy reflections of fantasy. He felt that these fantasises were cheap forms of escapism that prevented people from asking the really important questions. It was Brecht who brought forward ideas that through alienation and distanciation we can create a much more intelligent form of theatre. He used methods of foregrounding the technical aspects of theatre in order to show and examine the very constructedness from which dramatic narratives arise.
And so, according to Brecht’s suggestion…I will cast aside the performative glory to engage in act (or lack thereof) of honesty; as I desire to delve into the ‘heart’ of Home. I abandon the tiresome tricks…no white-fluffy rabbit; no multi-coloured scarves, no shiny bunch of plastic flowers! I no longer wish to pull these things from inside the black top-hat. I wipe of the make-up. I tell the drummer to rest his ‘ta-da’ cymbal. I turn my gaze to the black top-hat. To feel my way along it edges, to understand the blackness of its fabric, the texture of its treads…to draw closer to the vessel in which we contain and manufacture shiny dreams out of a phantasmagorical void.
Fade to black…
Home, like the hat, is concrete, rigid; material-it is a forever hat. A state of stasis….as bound as the photographs I last took before I left home: streets in an innocent state of suburban tranquillity, green trees and open clean expanses, faces of friends and family in captured happiness, mouths open in loud silent laughter. When I hear accounts of home and the reality of experience of living in South Africa from my friends, I suffer from iNeRtIa, a back and forth struggling of my will, and like the nausea that arises, I seek to repress it(as opposed to express it) and return to my atemporal completeness.
I am overwhelmed by a world changing and transforming, morphing into something other than what I know. It is as if this Grand ‘Mother’ has come home from a fancy ball and I watch her sit at her dressing table and remove all her make-up and fine jewellery-and I am horrified! Devastated that her face is aged, wrinkled, weathered by time…older. There is a recalcitrant and childish wish in me to not see the wrinkles, to not see that time has tampered with her fine edges and sharp eyes, that time has sunken into her skin and slackened her muscles.
Is it merely a knee-jerk reaction to the chaos of India in which I must find stability elsewhere…back home? Or is there something more profound to be said about our temporal nature as human beings? Can we only live through one temporal experience at a time? Does my being in India equate a denial of time transformations in South Africa? At the heart of our Being, is Space and Time; so it is argued, so it is said. Then, is where we experience place, by necessity where we experience time? Are they inextricably linked and married at the hip for all of eternity until death does (or undoes) us apart? As temporal beings, we only afforded time in its singularity, it seems, and while being in India, the ‘Mother’ and her land can undergo no, or little, simultaneous temporal progression…like a spoilt child; I condemn her to my infantile dream of stasis.
Soon, I will return to a place in which my family and friends have changed, their lives marked in South African time, their hearts altered by South African experiences. All of which I escaped from, or escapes me. My parents will be older, my sister will be married, my friends have jobs, new homes, and different lives-they will have dug trenches in the soil, made cosy over the two years that I have been away…and me? I return home, ironically-displaced. Indeed there is a fear that urges me to cling to a home I remember; a home in which I was as well aquatinted as everyone else, a home, in which I could also claim ground through experience. The shoes that I left at home will no longer fit, or be stiff from lack of use, old-fashioned…how will I begin to thread the ground again? Home is not free of fear, of insecurity-as a construction of safeness, it does not precede, but is rather, born out of our human needs.
I recently met a man who goes by the self-description “An African in Indian skin.” Naturally, a personality of interest to me…his name is Hartman De Souza. His family is from Goa, but soon left for Kenya where he was subsequently born. He returned to India in his early youth and has never returned to Africa. His bookshelf is an over exploding allegiance to African literature. He is a practicing director of theatre in India and he mostly stages South African plays. On regular occasion he evokes the spirit of “Woza Albert” and “Playland”, plays by Athol Fugard, in the halls of India. Fugard’s plays are often staged in South Africa, more so in the spirit of homage to an undisputed giant of South African theatre. Fugard’s plays are a means by which South Africans engage or rather, re-engage with a period we clearly identify as our past-the era of Apartheid. School children are ushered in, in the bus loads for these performances, so that they too can have a taste of the strife that came before them, so that they may connect with the past that has passed before they were born. Fugard in South Africa has a definite space, the past…part of the fabric of our social history.
It is curious then, that Hartman chooses to stage them with current zest, in India. How and why do they continue to hold relevance to him? It appears as if Africa has a certain sense of staged viability for him, it is a theatrical display. Africa to him is an ethnic, organic experience. I imagine his mental landscape: red-dusty, dry, arid lands, the drought ridden expanses and the children with swollen bellies and dry-snotty noses crying for food and comfort. It is of the agrarian strain in which nature abides with man as he lives close to the earth, of men with black hard flesh and luminescent white eyes. It is of bare-breasted women delivering their own babies; sans medical intervention. It is an expression of wood, earth and nature….I dislike these tropes. These tropes that condemn an entire continent to an eternal state of primitivism-has Hitchcock not taught us that it is indeed Psychotic to embalm our Mothers?
Just as India is no longer a land of maharaja’s and maharani’s, of wealth and jewels and exquisite fabrics, Africa too, has developed, grown out of primitivism or a colonialist gaze. This is not to say that these National Geographic images do not exist, but it denies the Africa that is addressing its poverty, rural development, crime, etc, etc… the list continues. Africa has a long list of addressees-this it does not seek to deny. Ultimately, Africa is growing towards global capitalist demands, no matter how questionable a route this is.
Hartman has and shows little intention of ever returning to Africa, his ‘Mother’-land. He has little intention of disrupting this vision of antiquity. As I began spending more time with him, I realised that Hartman’s relationship to Africa, can only be understood in context, i.e., India. As a middle-aged man, he finds himself befuddled by the shifting India; he broaches the changes with cynicism and pessimism. Hartman is constantly angered at the manner in which India is embracing global capitalism, in which children are becoming more precocious and western in their attitudes, in which life is escaping him…his generation…..the ground is slipping underneath him and he needs ground….he needs a place to park his feet and not feel jolted! I rarely heard him celebrate India, and I began to wonder if his African allegiance is a means by which to denounce India-to claim difference and to set himself, as a man apart.
His Africa is frozen; it is a lollipop he sucks on in the eternal heat of India. Its pleasure is marked in that it offers a contrast and relief to the current climate of India.
Africa is frozen and cold in an India where heat and reality are hard to hold. Home thus, is a place where our Egos go to nest. Home becomes a reason for us to feel ourselves different and sometimes superior-there is some safety in this.
Hartman and I-we meet on a precarious crossroads: I, of Indian ancestry, yet profoundly African in constitution and him: of great Indian forbearance, yet with an ancestral-like longing for Africa. From different ends of the bridge we are crossing the same sea.
Ancient Africa
Ancient India
My meeting with Hartman has been so intriguing because his expression of Africa is so similar to that of the South African Indian population with regards to India. South African Indians have little or no idea about current India. They access India in the same way every other tourist would, by taking trips to Majestic Rajasthan and the luscious Keralan Backwaters, by buying, buying, and buying the exoticism! They suppress India into their suitcase size memories and jewellery box size hearts. To South African Indians, India is a means by which they stand-out and this performance is exploited in varying amount, sans the inconvenience of actually understanding ‘Mother’ India when you peel away her Super-Sequinned, Shiny and Silver Sari.
South Africans of Indian origin are an orphaned bunch. It’s like a gymnast falling off the balance beam (getting hit in the groin in the process) and now sitting astride on it with two legs flailing out helplessly on either side of the bar, hoping and waiting for balance and stability to return. The integration of Indian people into South African society has not been an easy one. It’s like a story that would be told on a Jackson Pollock canvas- a social, racial and cultural cacophony of chaos. In South Africa, I am not referred to as a South African of Indian origin, nor am I called a South African-Indian or an Indian-South African. I am simply an Indian, (which is something I scoff at in an even more cynical tone than before) the criteria for this being; a brown skin and greater than average endurance for everything spicy. We are distinguished and defined against the backdrop of the larger society. The very thing that sets me apart in South Africa is the very thing I lack in India- Indianness.
Home now, is a somewhere in-between two cities, it is a tale in translation. For how can I explain what South African men are like without comparing them with their Indian counterparts? How can I evoke the full-bodied taste of South African beer in my Indian friends without interjections such as ‘it’s not as bitter as’, or ‘not as crisp as’ a Kingfisher? Our cities are not as crowded, our food not as cheap, our roads not quite so narrow; Johannesburg is not as big as Mumbai. What home is, is what it is not-a bland binary. I have begun to betray the nuances of the country that bore me, bred me and often scolded and shamed me until I cried. Or is there some true essence, a real sense of Home in this cultural comparison? Or is it completely lost in translation?
I have been thinking about Gandhi a lot lately. He made a journey just like me from South Africa to India, and I wonder if he had a more profound way of reflecting on what he had seen and experienced during his brief stay in South Africa. I do not know very much about the man, but from what I gather, is that unlike me, he was a man of similarities, not differences. He seemed to gaze upon both pieces of soil and say ‘Oh look, we are all struggling under the ruin of colonialism’. He saw a similar circumstance, a similar revolution and most importantly, a similar people.
Over a century ago, my ancestors were placed on a boat to South Africa as part of the indentured labour system that served many of the economic needs of the English colonies. Through these many births and deaths of the passing generations, India has always held some weight as the quintessential homeland, the true site of belonging. I remember my many friends jeering at me at my farewell party that I was going back to my homeland, that I was going to this land to find myself(in which case they were implying that I had lost myself in South Africa). I would be going to a land where people looked like me, had the same culinary preferences as myself and who had a penchant too for a quasi-global and traditional use of colour and clothing. True to the thoughts of my imaginary Gandhi, I would be part of a similar people.
I arrived at difference. This is not to say that I had any expectation of meeting myself in India. This was conveyed to me through my general dislike for and my inability to relate to the thematic concerns of Bollywood Cinema (though, its debatable if any one can).I cannot relate to the idea of being Indian. I cannot say who I would have become in this context. I amuse myself with ponderances of what kind of life I would have lead had my forefathers missed the Boat. Would I be rich or poor, what jobs would my parents have had, what language would I speak, where would I live, what hopes would I have had for my future, what would my interests and hobbies be? How would I think and feel about the world and my place in it?
There is something undeniably uncanny about my Being in India. I marvel at the miracle of looking around at people who look like me, yet know nothing of who I am. It is remarkable to often see the shock and the dropped jaws of people when I fail to complete conversations in an Indian tongue. It is remarkable to walk on the streets and feel so alien yet have no one acknowledge this with stares and pointed fingers. It is remarkable to have the little boys who often play outside my home call out to me, their ‘didi’. A while back, I walked into a little restaurant in the South of India. I ordered a meal just like I would any other meal but I almost cried as the food touched my lips. The dhal tasted just like my Granny’s. It was like I stepped back into my home of which my lips were the doors. This unassuming meal, served on banana leaf, at an interstate bus station drove me to old comfort using the memory of my mouth as a vehicle. Though I have been here for over a year, I still sometimes see people on the streets that look like people I know back home, I want to call out to these familiar faces, but only to realise that they are wholly and soully, different people.
Though when it comes to uncanny we must acknowledge the uncanny consists of both recognition and also, of subsequent disavowal. It is as if you move close into the mirror in an attempt to look intimately at yourself and stub your nose against the glass, when the process of trying to recognise yourself becomes all too painful and you shrug away in disgust. The uncanny Being is bound to this fate of dualism as I was soon to discover…
A while ago, I took a solo trip to Kerala. This trip turned into a series of nightmare encounters with overbearing and dangerous Indian men. I have subsequently labelled it as my ‘harassment holiday’. All through this trip, I was haggled and partly harassed by Indian men who wanted to ‘protect me’, all stating that it wasn’t right for me to be out on my own, “its simply not safe” and yet at the same time, completely violating my space, my sense of safety and sometimes my body. This was undoubtedly a question of colour, or race, in which I was being perceived as an Indian woman. It became clear to me that if I were a tourist of a different ‘race’, I would not have to explain and legitimise myself in the public context. Indian women have all the domestic legitimacy they could ever dream of, but none in the public sphere. My willingness to travel alone was a ‘rebellion’ of sorts against ‘the natural order of things’- where a woman should not be alone in public without a husband, a father or any other masculine bearer of her public identity (even a younger brother would do I imagine). And so the dirty defiance of my solo flight was welcomed by the chidings and provocations from men of all ages.
The harassment I suffered was about threat; Indian men where trying to prove the strength of the prophetic axiom- “it’s not safe to travel on your own”- by deliberately making it unsafe for me to be alone in public. The harassment was a deliberate attempt to prod me, with hands, penises and dart-like eyes, back into the kitchen so that the ‘natural order of things’ could be maintained. Many Indian women too, seemed to be sympathisers of the ‘natural order of things’. Perhaps if I told them what had happened to me, they would have thought that the treatment I received was fitting, thinking that I should have known better. In India, it appears as if women still ‘ask for it’ and men still loudly answer. These women all too complacently clicked their tongues at me, “it’s not safe to travel on your own…” Experiencing this burden of the Indian woman, which they themselves could not recognise; I felt happy, relieved, to come from a Home that has doors that do not only enclose me but are equally happy to let me out on to the streets-alone.
During this trip, a man initiated conversation on the train. He asks all the regular questions that every foreigner should be expected to answer: where I was from, why I was where I was, what kind of work my family does and the earning potential of my parents-the standard set of questions. Though he probes further, my ‘looking same as Indian’ attributes are intriguing to people and so I am used to this conversation by now, “Yes yes-about one hundred years ago…” He asks what my surname is and I tell him- it is Moonsamy. His face lights up in recognition “Mooniswami! A proper Tamil!” Just like him, I was a proper Tamil. He is very excited and goes on to stress the apparent ‘high’ caste origins of my surname. He then asks about my mother’s surname, so I tell him; “it was Pillay, before she married”. Again the same response, I am a proper Tamil and a proper Brahmin to boot! He says he could tell from my features and body structure that I was a Tamil Brahmin. However, he pauses suddenly in reflection…”but it is not right for Mooniswami to marry Pillay, they are different families, it’s not right.” I marvel at the chutzpah of this strange man telling me that my parents shouldn’t have married each other. In a tone of amusement I tell him that no one follows the caste system in South Africa and love seems to be the main motive for marriage, that in South Africa the caste system is generally frowned upon. He shakes his head…“not right, not right.” He reasserts himself through further interrogation: “will you marry anyone for love?” To which I answer; “yes, I probably would”. “Anyone?” he asks…”Anyone!” I reply. He pauses again to draw strength from his cultural framework, he comes back with his counter argument; “you mean….you mean….even a Negro?” The hairs on my neck stand up and to curb my rage I answer the most emphatic “YES!!!” I can muster. A cloud of disgust pulls slowly across his face, just as the moody Kerala breezes pull clouds across the omniscient sun outside the train. All he can do is shake his head; he clicks his tongue in deep disgust…”We are loosing our Tamil culture.” As the journey proceeds, he continues to mourn “We are loosing our Tamil culture in South Africa.”
Here was an answer to my origins, albeit from a potentially dubious and unreliable source, though it was a sufficient dosage to repulse me from the very idea of finding one. I imagine Darwin (perhaps equally as dubious and unreliable as my past-life prophet) wheeling an ape around in a cage saying “look people, your ancestors” and here is me, running amongst the Catholic crowd, preferring to construct history out of the dusts of Paradise. Though the difference must be noted- Darwin seemed to be celebrating growth- the progress of humanity, the birth of human consciousness, whereas my past-life prophet was about decline, mourning for my pre-lapsarian soul. Like the Catholics of Darwin’s era, he too, was invested in a more fantastic point of origin (I later learnt through his mode of self-narration that he too was “a good catholic”) Darwin was celebrating the inevitable laws of nature which show the ability to change; mould and morph-to evolve. It was an expression of life as a fluidity, in which movement is a central feature of our existence.
It is in this ever too lucid experience of ‘what life could have been like if I was Indian’ that my trip into the Backwaters turned into a literal translation. Back-waters: Waters that pull back in an endless emotional ebb, an avarice ebb that drowns, suffocates, stagnates- a back current that offers no release for a natural forward thrust of nature, in which waters break and touch fresh foreign soil, new ideas, with the open embrace of the tide’s wide hand which grabs hungrily at the shore; a miserly ebb which holds and hoards-a stubborn backward glance, a one-foot dance, a sucking in of breath- resisting-no, these are still waters, reluctant to shift, change, move, feeding only the greedy multitudes of coconut trees that line its banks.
In Kerala, travelling was an impossibility as I felt myself trapped in this regressionist deluge. All of this reverse propelling however, made me realise that I could only locate myself as far as the shores of South Africa. I realised that this is where my history begins; I can only recognise myself in those early caricatures of twiggy-legged Indian labourers who came on boats steamed by the burning of false promises and blind dreams. It is a history of suffering, pain, humiliation and sweat that I can relate to. It is the underdog endurance of living through both colonialism and apartheid that serves as a sounding board. It is in the sacrifice of personal comfort and complacency, the prospective commitment to Africa, that I can still hear a resonance.
Everything that precedes this point is a site of misrecognition, of disavowal. My relationship to people in India has begun to feel like bullets fired from the same gun. The shell casings are all the same, yet the trajectory of our directions are utterly and completely different. But am I too, fighting against the image of the ‘ape’? Locating Paradise in Africa? Am I, like a tardy stage-hand, only drawing the curtain open in the moment of my ancestors’ peripeteia? Am I, like Oedipus, who in his moment of self-recognition, gouges out his eyes in anger? Indeed it seems that when the reality of who we are or could have been becomes too painful to recognise, when it instills us with anger and rage, we do have to retract our vision-the naked truth being too ugly a sight, it seems.
Though, what I take away from Oedipus Rex is the fatality not of misrecognising oneself, but rather, the crime against the ‘natural order of things’ in which one misrecognises one’s Mother. If Oedipus had not misrecognised his Mother in the first place, he would have not have reached his tragic end. Sophocles shows us that it is indeed a noble thing to spend a lifetime in search of one’s Mother, to endure countless feats and challenges along the way, but most importantly, that when we find her, we should make sure to recognise her. What is a tragedy, if not to warn us that we do not have to reach the same tragic end as our hero- that our reunion with our Mother can indeed be a happy one. History, in its most organic form seems to be about the ebb and the flow, of regression and progression. History too, has a dramatic structure-in the ‘natural order of things’ it appears to be cyclic, in which we must return to arrive, and arrive to return. Thus in the eternal ebb of India, I find my flow, my freedom.
I have a South African friend here in Pune. Her name is Nonthla; she is Zulu (yet another culture I do not fully understand and language I cannot speak!). No one questions her authenticity as a South African. We meet to reminisce about people, music and food. We have become reasonably close. Back home, we would not even be acquainted. Back home we are two girls from two completely different cultural backgrounds. Back home we would live in a state of tolerable harmony which we call diversity. Back home we would not be friends. In Pune, it is like we are wearing binoculars, we miss the mountains ranges that divide us and get close-up profiles of each other. Or are we just in denial of our myopia? Blind to our homes, we turn to each other in order to see again. We have become each other’s visions and versions of Home. Home is a gaping hole of smells, tastes, sounds, faces, colours and emotions into which we pour each others insights. It is the constant craving for biltong, boerewors, loud African voices and the sight of ebony skin which we cure through anecdotes.
So indeed India has been homecoming of sorts, it has brought South Africa to me. When I close the door on India, I often do, I find this necessary, I find Her sometimes creeping up on me. This is the Mother I cannot tell about, she refuses to be talked about. She is the Mother that shuns press interviews, poetic description and metaphoric analogies. She is the voiceless, text-less Mother, and I cannot tell about her. She is the sensational sensation, a visceral explosion. I wish I could tell bout her, but her tales only have authority in them being secrets knitted in my body. This Mother is one that refuses translation. She only summons me through my moods, through my melancholia, my longing. But once again, I only arrive at belonging through longing. If then, my Mother only makes long distance calls, I have no choice but to evade her in order to experience her and enjoy her. In order to love her, I have to continually escape, like a delinquent runaway child. So I have resigned myself to perpetually yo-yo on her apron strings, this is my tug of affection, for how will she remember me if I do not jostle at her sides?
