Word Factory

# 18

2017-08-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Signal

A fragmented existence,

In combination with,

Fragmented histories,

In the era of the product,

Produces Lazarus of Lazaraen ontology,

Bewildered, un-rooted, unhinged ...

Part this,

Part that,

All simultaneously unfolding,

Amidst the noise,

And confusion,

Its depths and width,

Seemingly infinite.

To be alive in it,

And with it,

Wholly present,

In the awareness of the multiple,

To be wholly in what we are of,

The angels and demons,

The bliss and the pain,

The loss and the gain,

The sane and the insane.

To sit with it all,

Until the knots relax,

And slip/slip,

Oh what struggle for clarity amidst the noise,

When you are deafened, enveloped,

By the endless crackling,

Creeping in through every crevice,

Penetrating every crack,

Filtering through every seam,

Infiltrating to the core,

Colouring all within and without.

The signal only emerges from this awareness,

An uncompromisingly inviting one,

One that does not seek to block or delete,

But releases what it grasps,

That lets it slip through one’s fingers,

Light, gentle,

Like a whisper, a soft breeze.

If it settles,

Let it be only a momentary settling,

Breath on a window pane,

That cannot hold its place.

When you act, act completely,

And when you pause, let it be the same,

For action and non-action are actions all the same,

Each to be employed with care, with devotion,

Lest the demons rise up through the cracks in our awareness,

And take over,

Leading us to who knows where,

And to who knows what.

The fight always moves both inward and outward,

It is never unidirectional,

That awareness,

Is the mark of true action,

That seeks real change,

Action that unlocks the cycles from their loci,

That breaks with the past,

That births the new,

And restores life to the living,

Raising Lazarus from the dead,

Breathing life into the necropolis.

To view the previous Fragment click here

Fatima Chapter 10 | 1949: Johnny-Bhai & Suleiman

2017-08-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Raj Mahal Hotel sat awkwardly between the main shopping centre and the bus terminal; a large squat building that was devoid of any decoration or flourish. It was, in many ways, a no man’s land within the community, neither here nor there. Only men frequented it, and the ‘hotel’ served more as a hostel for men who had migrated into the neighbourhood from the countryside in search of work. Its primary function was as a beer hall, and it was loved and loathed in equal measure.

It must be said, however, that the Raj Mahal’s bar and kitchen qualified it as an establishment with a little more to offer than your average hostel. Its kitchen offered the finest quality chicken giblets, covered in mixed masala, deep fried and served covered in a curry sauce that had simmered for many hours. If one was really hungry there were mutton, chicken and vegetable curries – with rice – on offer. Alternatively, one could order a curry with roti instead.

The Raj Mahal’s exterior may have been drab and unremarkable, but its bar was lively and animated, serving as the local watering hole for the neighbourhood’s men. Although the local men who frequented the bar knew that there were also ‘ladies of the night’ on offer upstairs, they fiercely denied it to their wives.

It was in that bar that Suleiman first met Johnny-Bhai. At the time, he was a mere twenty four years old, but he had already acquired a world-weary disposure. Johhny-Bhai was slightly older than Suleiman, and – as a teacher at a local school – had the benefit of an education over him. Nonetheless, he quickly recognized the intensity that lay behind Suleiman’s thickly browed eyes. They revealed a man who was beyond his physical years in experience and intellect. His limited education did nothing to hide the vast universe of thoughts and emotions he held within him. He was a proud man, even at his young age, and Johnny-Bhai was intrigued by him.

In turn, Suleiman was struck by Johnny-Bhai’s ability to articulate the affairs of the world with clarity and economy. Despite Suleiman’s usual conceptual fluency, and his ability to deploy cogent arguments, events of late proved of such magnitude that Suleiman struggled to adequately marshal his thoughts about it into speech.

These days, Suleiman seemed restless. Most people put it down to his possession of a mind that was made to do much more outside of the cage that it found itself in. After all, he was already well-known for his endless questioning, and his proclivity for issuing abrupt statements that jumped out at the person he was speaking to, jolting them out of the familiarity of routine exchanges. But to those who knew him well, or were perceptive enough to gauge his character, it was evident that recently, when he put his thoughts into words, they were often delivered too bluntly, devoid of any finesse or subtlety.

To Suleiman, the ability to articulate one’s thoughts was an enviable talent, as it promised a release of a kind, one that now evaded him at every turn. His over-active mind, perpetually characterised by disquiet, never seemed to be able to find a suitable outlet.

The recent turn of events in the country vexed him greatly. There was an unmistakeable heaviness about Suleiman as he went about his daily interactions, and his usual wit had given way to a dark cynicism. He seemed to be searching for an explanation for how things had come to be the way they were, but it was precisely that, that constantly eluded his sensibilities. His emotions rose up and his face reddened whenever he tried to make sense of the inexplicable manner in which change had occasioned itself upon the land.

Suleiman had already indulged in several drinks before introducing himself to Johnny-Bhai at the bar. Perhaps his recent travails had driven him to consume more than his usual amount of alcohol because he was more amorous than his usual self, leaning over to introduce himself to Johnny-Bhai unprompted. Johnny-Bhai had, for the briefest moment, raised his eyebrows when he’d heard the name ‘Suleiman’ being offered. Sensing the nature of his inquiry, Suleiman took a matter-of-fact tone,

“I know, I’m a Muslim, but you know where I’m from it’s not wrong to take a few drinks. In India people aren’t always as strict as people here think. You know, we like to have a good time too, and enjoy the same things as everybody else.”

“Oh you’re not alone,” Johnny-Bhai replied, “most of my Muslim friends also take a drink. I’m no-one to judge you bhai; even my wife gets upset with me for my ‘daroo-love’ she calls it. She says I come here to see my ‘daroo-love’, my other woman is this bar to her. She thinks all I do is come here to sit and talk shit with the boys. Anyways, it’s better if that’s what she thinks. She’s a good woman my wife.”

“So you don’t come here to talk shit then?” Suleiman joked clumsily, his youthfulness betraying him. His eyes swept across the room as he leaned forward.

“All I hear is people talking shit most of the time!”

He smiled, as if to joke, but there was a distinct cynicism in his voice. His brow had furrowed and his eyes had glowered when he said it. There was no doubt. His contempt for the world had spilled over and breached the facade of his smiling demeanour, his furrowed brow betraying his feelings.

To Johnny-Bhai something was obviously brewing in Suleiman. Its intensity was palpable. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but he paused instead, inhaling the words that were about to be released. The pause served as an invitation to Suleiman, who burst into a monologue of sorts. Perhaps the alcohol had loosened his tongue because he spoke as though he were actually continuing a monologue that had until now been contained within him.

“You know, where I come from there wasn’t this ‘race classification thing’. What is this now; this Ghetto Bill? I escaped the caste system in India to have to deal with this? What will my children be now? They won’t be Indian? They must be something else? My friend, this world is a crazy place. For some it is easy, for others it is a battle let me tell you.”

Johnny-Bhai sympathised with this young chap. His sincerity and honesty was indisputable. He asked after Suleiman’s age,

“If you don’t mind me asking bhai, how old are you?”

“I’m 24!” Suleiman blurted out from his bearded chin.

Johnny Bhai’s surprise showed. Suleiman seemed much older. His beard and his bearing gave him an age beyond his years. Sensing Johnny-Bhai’s surprise, Suleiman expounded;

“I’ve been on my own since I was ten years old. I’ve worked most of my life; fourteen years now!”

“That’s a long time bhai!” Johnny-Bhai nodded.

“Not a lot of people understand” Suleiman sighed. “They don’t even usually want to hear about it. People don’t really talk; they just want to laugh and joke a bit. I like to laugh too, but ... I don’t know … sometimes things frustrate me. Tell me, Johnny-Bhai,” he paused for a while and caught his breath, “why … whyyy these politicians …” he flustered.

His eyes squeezed up tight when he’d said ‘why’. It seemed to lock up his brain. Johnny-Bhai’s lips pursed, but no words came out. He drew in a breath as Suleiman continued …

“Why they say they going to do something if they don’t?”

“I mean … why?” he pleaded.

Johnny-Bhai sensed that Suleiman’s life had left many scars on him, too many to speak all at once, but all recorded and carried. When you make every triumph over adversity a mark of strength you carry a record with you, like a memorial of battles fought and lost. If you forgot them you forgot your way in life, so they had to be carried. A personal history informs a person’s internal world. Their history – its narrative – becomes a metaphor for their existence. They are indelibly tied to it through struggle, loss and triumph. As the last survivors of the Nazi death camps still wheel themselves over snow covered roads to the sites of mechanised death every year, so too did the survivors of this new diaspora make constant pilgrimages to the sites of their pain and loss. The painful points of separation and loss – from family, community, their homes and their land – echoed through the ages and were transferred from one generation to the next. It was unavoidable in their world because their every action and reaction was to the past and could be traced back to these events. The events of the past shaped the realities of the present.

Johnny-Bhai paused for a moment. Speaking in English he asked,

“Solly? You ok with me calling you ‘Solly’ eh?”

“Ya”, Suleiman answered, clearly disinterested in his name. Suleiman nodded to indicate that he wanted to hear what Johnny-Bhai had to say. Johnny-Bhai shifted position on his bar stool and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, they know that society has a short memory Solly. You see, they know that they can tell us one thing five years ago and change it to another later because people tend to forget. With all these different faces all the time one is never quite sure who is promising what and on behalf of whom. The whites are the most guilty of this because as long as things work out well for them they forget even more quickly, but some of our people behave the same too – especially the merchants. You see this NIC, ‘congress’; I know Gandhi-ji was involved but it is mainly run by the rich fullahs, the merchant castes. They negotiate our survival under them with the white man; we get the raw end of the stick again. They are not really for us.”

“My father came here to cut cane bhai; he was like you, started looking after himself very young, a very strong man. He died after being beaten on the farm one day. It affected his mind and started acting strange, you know, like he was shell-shocked or something. One day he went down to the river and drowned himself. My mother couldn’t support me after that and I went away to a missionary school. There was a Christian family on the farm who helped get me in there. They had good relations with the priests. That’s why I have the name ‘Johnny’ – the nuns used to call me Johnny coz I was always asking to be baptised when I was little; you know, like John the Baptist. They always used to laugh when I said that, so I kept saying it over and over. You know, fate is strange, that is where I learnt to read and write properly and got a good education. But after I finished school there was nowhere for me to go. I had to go to India to study further.”

At this point in the conversation the bartender shuffled down the length of the bar – as was his routine – rubbing down the thick wooden bar top with a greyish-brown all-purpose cloth. His large arms ground the cloth so far into the wooden slab that despite the daily dribs and drabs of beer and hot curried chicken giblets that had settled on it over the years, it dutifully shone with a dull gleam when he was done. He tossed the cloth over his right shoulder and stood back to admire his work, before moving down the bar to check on his patrons. That cloth would remain on his right shoulder for the remainder of the day and night, until he departed the bar and headed home for a late supper.

Suleiman studied Johnny-Bhai carefully. His gaze gave the impression that he was both present and absent at the same time; it went into and through Johnny-Bhai, so much so that he felt a bit uncomfortable. Suleiman didn’t trust easily, and it was his way to carefully examine the people he interacted with; to test them with questions, even rhetorical ones, and gauge their responses. He proceeded, gesticulating with his large, spade shaped hands towards the ceiling.

“And why they spend so much money on the army when the war is over instead of building schools for us? They tax us so why can’t they build some schools for our children.”

“There are two answers to those two questions Solly,” Johnny-Bhai shrugged, tilting his head up from atop his gangly neck so his eyes met Suleiman’s. His left eyebrow raised in unison with the movement of his head.

Suleiman nodded in expectation. His eyes remained fixed in anticipation on the face of Johnny-Bhai. Johnny Bhai gesticulated upwards from the elbow with a light-bulb screw of the left hand, his long fingers flowering outwards.

“They need us as labour, that’s why they don’t build schools. And the reason why they are spending so much on the army is that they’ve always had to enforce their civilisation through the barrel of a gun. It is not a civilisation that spreads naturally; it isn’t even really based on religion but on the greed and ideas of man. It is based on migrating slave labour to wage labour. Why school us ... to replace them?” He sniggered at the absurdity of the question.

Suleiman eyed him curiously. He had answered him with such clarity that Suleiman felt a need to open up to this man with more of the bouncing balls in his head, the ones that bounced highest when he was indoors.

Johnny-Bhai took in the scene around him before moving in closer to Suleiman, as though his words were now for Suleiman’s ears only. He raised the index finger of his right hand for emphasis. It hovered near Suleiman’s left ear,

“Things are going to get worse for us, as bad as it’s been for the native Africans all along.”

“The working man has always been a slave to the capitalists. Even their own people lived like rats in the sewers of their great industrial revolution. They created the first ghettoes in their own cities, with the rich infected with pleasure and luxury, the poor working like slaves from a young age. It’s a pattern that the rich have continued through the ages. It just takes different forms.”

Johnny-Bhai rested his right hand on his knee, tapping it repeatedly with his long fingers for emphasis while he spoke, his head nodding in agreement with his own words,

“You know, in India the Sidhars promised the Indian indentured labourers a lot! But when they got here they found that laws had been passed that made them little more than slaves. They could be arrested for straying a distance of more than two miles from the residence of the farm-owner or businessman employing them. And they used the Africans to arrest us. They know what they’re doing Solly! Even in India they’re busy dividing and conquering. They are masters at oppression and take-over, of looting and pillaging, not of civilisation.”

Suleiman thirsted after knowledge. His busy, juggling mind was always looking to pick up a new concept to throw into its framework and test it, but he lacked the inputs he needed to develop it. He had spent time teaching himself to read, but his reading was laboured and slow. Johnny-Bhai seemed to have uncovered answers where Suleiman had spent much of his life struggling. He was always occupied with questions but he rarely produced answers that satisfied him. He lacked the knowledge of the world around him to be able to take a position on things.

Until meeting Johnny-Bhai that day he’d been growing inside his own mind, drawing on his own life experience to make judgements about the world he observed around him. He’d always looked inwards for answers and for strength. He had to; there was no-one he could turn to. Perhaps God had put Johnny-Bhai here so that he could satisfy his appetite for questions and help make some order of his jumbled up head. He wondered if Johnny-Bhai had answers about what alternatives there were and he rather apathetically half-commented and questioned at the same time,

“Well Johnny-Bhai you know a lot! I respect that. I’m a simple man and for me it feels like the world is a hard place that never changes. Is there any other way that it will ever work?”

Johnny-Bhai shifted position on his stool, and turned to face Suleiman, his beer in his right hand and a stubby half-drawn cigarette in his left hand.

“That depends on how you look at the situation. Power is not absolute and it isn’t really controlled through the barrel of a gun. It is enforced through it but that often renders both powerless to some degree.”

Suleiman listened. He felt as though all the neurons in his brain were alight at the same time. He was experiencing the thrill of discovery, when ideas meet reality. He felt elevated, ironically enlightened while sat in the dark recesses of the bar.

“Their economies are built on the backs of the working man. If the working man manages to unite then he has some power to negotiate changes. If he doesn’t, he remains divided and conquered; a source of labour and a human being without representation in the world.”

A shadow of someone entering the bar on Johnny-Bhai’s right distracted him for a second, and Suleiman was quick to notice. Despite giving the impression of being somewhat distracted he was always keenly aware of his surroundings. He looked over his left shoulder and saw a short, stout man with a broad grin on his face sauntering in. His nickname was known to Suleiman – “Billy” Pather – and Suleiman quickly registered Johnny-Bhai’s discomfort. Billy was a well-known “sellout” who served as an informant to the police. It was wise to guard one’s words around him.

They surveyed the room, and spotting an empty metal trestle in the corner of the room, made their way over towards it. Suleiman placed an order for some snacks, so it would appear that they had moved to a more comfortable location where they could eat.

Once seated and assured of their privacy, Johnny-Bhai continued his Marxist exposition in Gujerati,

“If the working man can educate himself then he can represent himself. That is why they deny us opportunities to get educated. They know that our ignorance is their strength. They make money from it.”

“So what can the working man do?” asked Suleiman.

“The fact is,” Johnny-Bhai laboured, “if we don’t work their economies don’t run!”

“But then we starve,” said Suleiman.

“Yes,” said Johnny-Bhai, “but we are starving most of the time. When we stop working they start to starve too, and for the first time they feel vulnerable. They need to know what kind of power can be demonstrated through mass action of the working classes. This is what chokes them up; when their pockets are hit.”

He paused, anticipating more questions from Suleiman, but when none came, he continued.

“I don’t think fighting them is the solution. It only gives them more reason to dig in. If we fight then they say they are justified in their violence, even though theirs came first. You see, their society – I told you – has a short memory, but ours is very long. Every generation of ours has suffered worse and worse under the British and we suffer it every day so we don’t forget that easily.”

“You see, what makes us different is simple. The poor man has little to lose but his integrity. A rich man has no need for integrity; he has his wealth, and will sacrifice his integrity to keep it. That’s all there is to it, and that is why we can win against them. Integrity is always worth more than gold. Gold is unreliable.”

Suleiman sat back in his chair. His beer seemed to draw back into the metal trestle table upon which it rested; it had lunged into the metal surface when he’d drawn himself back into the chair. He couldn’t really be that drunk, he thought. Maybe it was that his mind was wobbling from having all these new ideas thrown at it. It had been pushed beyond a limit, and was now in flux. He would probably not be able to sleep tonight.

Yet, it was only his skitterish eyes that betrayed the impact of this assault of information upon his mind. The simplicity with which Johnny-Bhai had swept away a vast array of thoughts, ideas and questions that had plagued Suleiman through most of his life left him somewhat unhinged, but optimistic. He had always been in ‘why’ mode. Now it seemed there were answers out there. The world was a big place, and he realised that looking inwards was not the way to grow his understanding of it.

He knew what excellence was, it was achieved when he could pick up and throw a concept out with ease, intermediating it with a few others before catching it again safely, placed on the ground or launching it into the air again, into the mind-ether of his juggled-up head. He would have to be able to learn from some of the people around him in order to reach that place.

They paused, and the silence between them grew until Suleiman continued.

“I haven’t met many men like you, you know; educated. I learnt to read, but I didn’t finish school because I had to work. I’ve worked hard, with my hands, for years but it doesn’t seem to get any easier bhai.”

“My father died young and my mother was forced to send me away. Things were very difficult for her and she thought that it was better to send me away to a possibility of an orphan’s future here than the certainty of a beggars future in India. I didn’t understand it when I was a child but now that I’m a father with two children I am being forced to make the same choice."

"... I fought in the war for this country and now I am being told that my family and I are not the same! I am Indian and they are coloured? Because of their hair?” he spluttered; with his rage overflowing, his spittle had also welled up in his mouth, edged over the corners of his lips and was now making little flecks appear on the metal table in front of them. It was as if a fountain had sprayed around Suleiman’s beer.

“What kind of man am I to allow this?”

He was pitiful now, and his pain manifested physically; little trembles developed into patterns and scattered across his cheeks – like spidered aneurisms – his face reddening more all the time. The look of concentration and fixation now long disappeared, the boy in him had begun to show through. He was still a young man after all and he was churning in a well of pain, trapped in his own mind.

He downed the dregs of his drink in a single gulp, stood up, and fondly extended his farewell greetings to Johnny Bhai,

“Thank you bhai, thank you, you bring me comfort. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to truly speak! I will see you again?” he said, leaning slightly backward again but now standing in his famous posture.

“I’m here most days after work,” he said, “I stop by before going home for supper. It’s a chance to meet all the men and get an idea of what is going on.”

Their relationship would grow and Johnny-Bhai would be in Suleiman’s life all through the years into his second marriage with Mariam. It was his meetings with Johnny-Bhai where Suleiman would have a few drinks and Mariam was averse to this. She harboured no feelings of animosity against Johnny-Bhai, she just preferred that Suleiman wouldn’t drink. Their friendship though, was never about alcohol. It was about having someone to talk to. It was something human.

To view the previous chapter of Fatima click here.

# 17

2017-06-24T08:24:00.002-07:00

The Trials

So when the trials and tests are presented, we have but one choice if we are to move beyond mere survival. We must reach into the shadows and pull out the monsters, bring them into the light. We can hope that they will change, transform, but we must never again falter in our vigilance. We must always hold them to account. And we must always test them against principle.

Whether the monsters are ours, or that of our conquerors, we must level them against principle. We must measure and bind them with principle. For principles are not relative. They can be agreed upon, and so guide us beyond into the new that we desire. Principles must be the sentinels that guard the path to the future if we are to overcome that which has bound us in the past, and that which binds us today. A new world is not possible without it.

The breaking of cycles,

The birth of the new,

The emerging Proteus rises up out of the sea only when it can overcome the thick binding sameness of it – its constancy, its viscosity – and elevate above it. Birth is never easy, it requires rupture, and pain, the anxiety and anticipation of it churning and wrenching in the belly.

We must enter into the shadows with principle as our talisman, our guard against the monsters that lurk within the depths. We must root them out, like demons, and force them into a great purging, so that we may clean them out of our souls, and that of our conquerors. We must not relent, we must not give in. We must go into it with courage. We must never surrender.

We can retreat, we can change tack. We can adapt with the flow of events. But we must never back down from monsters, lest they rule over us forever and render us slaves to their will.

New worlds are born out of the violent death of the old. It must be severed from it, yet it must suckle it. Herein the contradiction that is central to it, that the new emerges in intimate embrace with the past.

It rises up from the sea, breaking with it, but always in and of it. And so, we must never cease to take our hunt into the darknesses and the recesses that monsters make their beds in; where they fester and work their wicked magic. We must rudely awaken them from their slumbers. We must shake them out of their comforts and draw them out from the shadows. For only in the cold light of day can they be slain, laid to rest, rendered bare and naked before us.

Our monsters, and theirs, must all be brought out into the open, so that we can make sense of them, before dismantling them. Yes, we must yet still sever their heads, and hold them up in victory. We must still sound our battle cries out loud. But we must return from the sacrificial altar without our monsters; and we must not acquire new ones in the process of freeing ourselves from the old. We must break free of them at every turn; remain vigilant to the shape-shifters amongst them. Oh what perseverance freedom requires; what a marathon freedom is ...

***Note: To view the previous Fragment click here.

***Note: To view the next Fragment click here.

# 16

2017-05-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

Shadows

And so, as it begins with every philosophical quest, I began with the shadows; shadows ever resident, that accompany all that is present, dependent only on the illumination of the sun during daytime. Growing and receding as it approaches and surpasses its zenith, at its height hiding all shadows, but only for a moment. For momentary reprieves are all we can hope for. To be alive is to be resident with all histories, to live with time as multiplicity.

What fraught existence is this? To be forever arrested by shadows, that dip beneath the waves only to disperse, collect and re-emerge again? Where what hell we make on earth can never be outlived. The higher we construct our myths the longer their shadows.

Oh what torture for the would-be architects of the mind, and the soul. Oh what purgatory is everyday existence? Where emotions lurking in the shadows become windows on the fabric of our inheritance.

For is it not true that it is the poverty of our souls, that emptiness within us where our treasure should lie, that prevented us, time and time again, from rising up? That if we eventually freed ourselves we could have done it all along? It is that absence that becomes visible in the shadows.

Is it not true that this is not healing that we speak of, but restoring? And that in order to restore we must first search for what has been lost?

There are objects that have been lost, and they lie in plain view, but can the re-acquisition of them restore us? Or must we look to the shadows if we are to un-yoke? If we are to become whole again, un-break ourselves, free ourselves from the ever-resident spectre of the whip? If we are to out-stride the fear of the noose? If we are to love again, to feel again, and seek comfort in the glow of our fullness, that like the sun, brightens the landscape so that shadows are made visible, reach-able, tangible.

What is this restoration, that requires us to carry wounds and fears forward with us?

It is what the realm of the possible offers us, a breaking of cycles, an end to systems that can only be actualised through full awareness; through carrying but not monopolising that pain of being reduced, erased, rendered invisible to our conquerors as much as ourselves.

When there is no romance in the overt, there is often poetry in the covert. Where there is no freedom in the explicit there can be freedom in the implicit. The external cannot restore the internal. Making true strength is not a matter of the procedures of success, or of ownership. It is a matter of going within, and finding relation to what lies without.

This is not metaphysical, but psychological. It is what has been re-rooted within us over and again by centuries of abuse. And to address the psychology we are compelled to embrace philosophy. For it is only philosophy that can provide an entry point to the unresolvable, the unimaginable.

For as it is only within the fullness of the sun that shadows become visible, it is only with philosophy that the deeper movements of the mind and soul become discernible. Philosophy is the vessel with which we travel within so that we can understand what we chart without. Legality cannot free anyone, neither can repossession; freedom is the product of understanding, and understanding is the work of philosophy.

That is, philosophy is the light that reaches into the darkness of ourselves and into history; the present and the future. It both illuminates and facilitates navigation of the shadows, and affords us the opportunity to venture into them, so what we may wrest our freedom from within the heart of the darkness that lies within. So that we may turn its gravity outward. For the shadows are where past and present coalesce, and the potentials for change arise.

To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here.

#15

2017-02-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

Robben Island (2005)

I can see the island from here. White sunlight beams through the open window, accompanying the cool Atlantic sea air in a complement of warmth and cold to choose from. Warmth and cold dapple through and onto me like the colours of a spotted dog. The mix self-regulates, and renders itself pleasurable.

On some mornings the island is barely visible. The air thickens around it forming a laced veil which deceives the mind into recognizing it as some distant section of the peninsula. Could this be why it fades from memory so easily? Because it is always elusive; sometimes there, sometimes not. It blends with the background, seemingly indistinct from the sea.

In the mind there is a conscious distinction between past and present but subconsciously and unconsciously we brush up against our personal past with every experience we have. Every experience teases out our experiences of the past and we live out the past in the present in this way. On a personal level we are indivisible from the past and manifest this past in present experience as a means of confronting the demons which the self must conquer in order to actualise itself.

Similarly, as a society, we are indivisible from our past, from generations of experiences, so we play out ancient dramas in the present. While conceptually we imagine a past from which we neatly divide ourselves, the emotional state of a society or individual brings the past into the present as if time were irrelevant. Tempers run hot over centuries, long trends and the scars of yesterday remain with us, supported and reinforced by emotional transfer from one generation to the next.

Scientifically, we love the idea of chronology, placing one event next to the other, creating discreteness between events in time so that we may reason the distance between us and the past. Emotionally though, we are bound to our most significant experiences and events, the ones which had more impact, and can draw up into our experience of the present in a single breath.

What if then, in the emotional world, time is not absolute and neither is space? What if all history is constantly superimposed in the present; through cycles which both individuals and mankind are bound to? A constant recycling of the past with every moment, where nothing is discrete and separate but everything continues; sometimes contiguous, sometimes non-linear, jumbled up, collapsing time and space?

What if every moment in the past were as relevant as if it occurred only yesterday? Would that not explain the world we see today? How can something as significant as the island so easily disappear from memory? When Leopold’s ghost still haunts the Congo today, how can we forget our past in just fifteen years?

Is it more that we have become distracted, that consciously our avoidance and obsession with material gain, power and entry into the ‘new world’ of commerce and democracy has blinded us to the fact that we still rub up against our not too distant past with every new step we take into this ‘new’ future; where the poor are still hungry and the rich still greedy?"

To view the next chapter of Fragments click here.

To view the previous Fragment click here.

# 14

2017-02-05T23:23:00.000-08:00

That meeting point ...

That meeting point, between literature and philosophy, began to occupy my every waking moment. Soon, it had arrested me entirely, and I could no longer stop myself from writing. I felt I had to write myself in to that interface, that meeting point.

There are rhythms that emerge when writing. Words, ideas, senses and emotions combine, dissolve, disperse and recombine. Meaning is transmitted in the interplay. The quest of writing is finding the words that unlock meaning. Writing is modelling and remodelling how words come together; about finding the combination that unlocks meaning, and gives expression to, or transmits sense and emotion the most aptly or accurately.

The interface is a place of discovery, a place of surprise, emergence. There is a chemistry between words and ideas that hosts the potential to yield unpredictable outcomes when philosophy meets literature. And as I wrote and rewrote with devotion, that chemistry became the sea in which life began to swim in me again.

At the interface I could dance. I could sketch and feint my way around the edges, dip into the abyss and return. The writing – or rather, the process of it – acted as a lifeline. I could plunge into the depths and be ensured of return.

I had already answered the question of what would ensue if I became lost in the deep, but I came to find it irresistible. For madness does not exist alone; it exists in combination, and the cocktail was a mix of the terrifying, the exciting, the mundane, the banal, and the enduring. To be at the edge of chaos, and to be able to pass into and out of it, made me feel powerful again.

My fears and anxieties retreated when I enacted the dance, and life flowed palpably within me during the moments of engagement. But perhaps the greatest awareness that grew within me, was the reality of infinity; that it was not just abstraction, but real, and that everything depended upon it. That without it there could be no existence; no finite, no real. These things possessed each other, and co-evolved to make things as they were. From this there was, and could be no escape.

The asymptotic was undeniably palpable. It resided in every judgement, every observation, every measurement – and yes – every emotion. Everything that we experienced was approximation. It is all we are capable of. We are always at the edges, always caught in cycles. It is in this sense that our existence embraces the infinite.

Nothing as absence – in its absolute sense – cannot exist without the infinite. They are a complex duality. There is noise in silence as much as there is silence in noise.

To view the next Fragment click here.

To view the previous fragment click here.

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

2016-11-29T02:32:00.001-08:00

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

2016-10-22T04:39:00.004-07:00

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

2016-10-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

# 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

2016-09-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

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

2016-09-24T02:09:00.001-07:00

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

2016-09-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

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

2016-09-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

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.

[1] A local South African Indian television show.

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

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

#7

2016-08-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

Yet what was there to be learnt

Yet what was there to be learnt when the troubles had duly passed,

But that struggle meant sacrifice and that sacrifice was unending.

That what was lost could never be reclaimed,

That there was no salvaging of it.

And so it is,

That there are many tales of glory,

But few of sacrifice,

In the myths and fables,

Of struggle and revolution.

For struggle is not momentary,

It is ever-ongoing,

And what is endured is a thing of sacrifice,

A thing that time cannot repair.

A thing of endurance,

And not of interruption.

A rupture in time that can never be sealed,

Like the scarred flesh of a wound,

A rupture in time that can never be sown back,

That can never be remade whole.

A mark never born alone,

That’s what sacrifice is.

There are tales of struggle that soar very high,

But they can never convey with the fullness of truth,

What sacrifice wreaks in the circles and cycles of life.

And it does not do it once,

And it does not do it twice,

But it does it still.

It spreads outwards into the lives of others,

And they are bound to it as were you.

It is an unending trauma that sacrifice inflicts,

An open wound that will not heal.

Between pain and loss it moves,

Yet sacrifice is not brokenness,

And about this I must be clear,

For sacrifice is not a dearth of spirit,

But a commitment to it.

For brokenness reigns when you are unable to struggle.

Brokenness is not struggle.

Yet painful it is,

It is not struggle.

Yet lasting it is,

It is not struggle.

It does not sacrifice,

It hasn’t the choice,

But to endure its plight.

Brokenness does not know,

And it does not venture to seek out choice.

Yet that is not the whole of it,

For there are those that know not either,

Neither sacrifice nor brokenness have they endured.

And yet their notions duly fool them,

That struggle is their pledge.

For that struggle that they pledge,

Knows nothing of the edge,

Of revolution.

That severs as it turns,

And turns for evermore.

The spirit is its engine,

And struggle is its chore.

Space may bend,

And time may follow,

And matter may call them both,

But of struggle it is certain,

It knows no safely guarded berth.

***Note: To read the next chapter of Fragments click here

***Note: To read the previous poem from Fragments click here.

Ageless Leo

2016-08-05T02:08:00.004-07:00

This age thing,

I was hoping,

It would be a sage thing,

But somedays,

It feels like nothing,

But an age thing,

A not to slumber on thing,

But a gauge thing,

Like a weather thing,

Where any thing,

Is everything

But for a moment,

I am not a thing,

And a birthday brings,

More rings,

And more greetings,

To remind me,

That life flings,

More numbers,

And more learnings,

More slumbers,

And more churnings,

Every cell is replaced,

Every 11 months

How then,

Can an age thing,

Define anything?

I am more,

Than anybody can sing,

Than any poets words can ring,

I am not a thing,

But an ageless everything

#6

2016-07-31T01:57:00.001-07:00

The Butterfly Effect

Everywhere in chains,

It rustles,

Bustles,

And ropes around him,

Whether crouched,

Or rising,

Every sweep of his hands,

Seeking freedom,

Only drawing,

The world towards him,

A whole globe,

Of hidden connections,

Unsettled,
With every movement.

To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here

To view the next chapter of Fragments click here

Fatima Chapter 9 |1962: Like Father Like Son

2016-07-31T00:33:00.000-07:00

Between the 60s and the 80s, Shakes’ was the countries best black batsmen, on paper and in person. Perhaps he could have been as good as Barry Richards, who’d been reared and nurtured on the best facilities available in the country and was coached by some of the best players in the world.

Shake’s, however, was forced to leave Natal at six, in 1954 by order to live in Volksrust in Transvaal, where he had 3 teachers in his school. His father Ahmed had been born in the Transvaal, and under the Immigration Act of 1905 which restricted Indians from moving between provinces he had to go back. Ahmed had married Hanifa in Durban and had wished to stay there with her sister and his brother and their new family, but was forced to leave after a series of attempts to find a solution to their woes. It was a cruel system, which wore heavily on them and there was a deep sadness when they were forced to pack up.

“Mahomed?”

“Yes … what is it?”

“There’s someone at the door!”

“Why do they always have to come so early, at 3 ‘o clock in the morning? Don’t they know we have children? They don’t have any feeling these people. They just want our land, to chase us back to India so they can take everything we built.”

“Shush ma, it’s not the time now.”

“Tell them that!”

Shakes could hear shuffling, while his father got out of bed, found his slippers and made his way to the door. He had a dugu behind the door in his right hand but placed it next to the wall, but within reach, after he’d looked out the window. It was cold. In these parts of Natal, in "cane country", the valleys held cold pockets which could freeze the water dripping out of a tap, forming a long icicle to the floor by morning. He knew who it was. They always came at this hour to make the point that you should feel harassed. These were the herders, they herded people out of their homes and onto long journeys to faraway places, often away from family.

“Hey Sammy!”

“Open up man! We can’t stand here all morning waiting for you. I saw you in the window there!”

He turned to his partner and muttered under his breath,

“These focken coolies kry geen slaap met al daai Kerrie. Hulle’s te besig om te kak!”

(“These coolies get no sleep with all that curry. They’re too busy shitting themselves”)

Mahomed opened the door and felt the freshness of the morning air. It was crisp and clean, marred only by the occasion of two policemen, dressed in suits, who looked like they’d been up drinking all night. Their ties were loosened, and their pants had creased in various junctions, indicating long periods of sitting or lying down. The one policeman had a smudge of red to the right of his collar along the side of his neck. He looked quite happy with himself, and held a piece of paper in his hand, which he waved in Mahomeds face,

“You see this? You know what it means? It means you must get out of Natal!”

“You, and your brother!”

“It means you have to leave before the end of this month. It’s official. I don’t know why I have to keep coming here over and over again. This is the last time! Next time we come here you will be under arrest … you hear me?”

He leaned forward now, peering at Mahomed through glazed eyes. Mahomed reached out and wordlessly accepted the paper. He took a look at it briefly and scanned over the page.

“It says here, that I have to vacate the province by 1955”

“Look here, don’t get funny with me eh? I’m tired, I’m not here to put up with your shit. All you coolies have a story. What’s the story now?”

Mahomed passed the piece of paper back to him. He looked at it, squinted for a while and looked over at his partner, “Hennie, can’t you fucking type man? You put next year’s date on this thing!”

“What … oh shit, never mind, I’ll do it again!”

“Should I be expecting you tomorrow at this time again?”

“What? Did you say something coolie? I don’t remember asking you to speak! We’ll be back whenever the hell we want and you can be damn sure that you’re not going to be here in a month’s time!”

Mahomed asked them with a straight face, deadpan and person-less in its gaze. He didn’t want to antagonise them. It was best to play a simpleton role and say as little as possible. He didn’t trust the whites anymore. In the old days things had been okay, but now there was a new more sinister force at work. They were feared and revered and expected it of everyone.

“Could you perhaps drop off the next notice at my shop during the day? I’m sure it would be easier for you too …”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that my wife is worried about disturbing the children this way - They have to go to school!”

“Your wife?” he looked at Mahomed mockingly. “Tell that Mary to do as you say and not to try to get you into shit eh? Our job is not under your command. I’m not a patient man and you’ll find that out if we have to arrest you. We will see you again when we are ready with your documents. You should start packing soon – and your brother too!”

The policeman spoke as though he was the law. In reality, this is exactly what was achieved by the repeated and systematic use of the police to enforce obscene political and economic agendas rather than to protect and serve society. Many individuals became the face of the law and were actually criminals within the law.

The Immigration Act had placed severe restraints on an Indian community which generally thrives on interaction, economic, social and cultural. It was a way of trying to address ‘The Indian Question’, much like the hitherto ‘Native Question’. White settlers were equally afraid of brown settlers as they were of natives. This is why brown settlers are not the same, even though they are often viewed in that light. While they may have no customary rights, they do bring a custom of their own, which takes root and finds a place amongst the already existing customs.

In Volksrust, they settled next to each other again, brother and brother, sister and sister, and started up a new business. They would live here until 1962, whereupon a change in legislation allowed them to move back to Natal. They did so immediately. It was more than just a will to go back to a place full of family; it was also to right the grievous wrong that was done against them as a family. Shake’s had no formal instruction in cricket as a result until, at 14, he returned to Durban.

Here, he attended high school in the city, at Orient High. The Orient High school playground lies behind Curries fountain, with only a wall raised high up at the back of the playground as an obstacle, overlooked by the back of a large stadium score board. The classroom windows look out onto Greyville race-course and Sydenham road, at the foothills of which Orient High School found itself.

At first, he found Natal Indians a bit strange. Their accents were different and they spoke faster. He learnt quickly about the school and was chosen for the first team while he was still sixteen. There was no coach for the team like in most Indian schools, even over the next thirty years. Shakes would spend hours reading and searching for cricketing books and advice. He knew that knowledge was essential for success. He’d learnt that from his father.

Later, he played for local cricket teams which were multi-racial. He would always refuse to play for a team which only accepted one colour or race of player and not another, even if they were an Indians only team. This mould had been cast by his fore-runner, Ali Parker. Parker was already a legend, having played for a whole variety of brown teams; Indian, coloured and Malay. He probably only never played for a black team because he didn’t look black enough, but he’d set the precedent for Shakes when it came to integrated sport. Sporting symbols were powerful symbols for the public under apartheid and Shake’s walked in his steps, even taking over the coveted captaincy of Natal Province when Ali would retire. Shakes was the provincial captain of Natal Schools and Orient high from 1966 to 1969, when Natal won the inter-provincial cup for the first time in its history. There were the makings of a legend in him, but it was to be of a different kind. The world would complicate his plans, his desires to play cricket would have to play second fiddle to his desire to be an equal.

“Equality first!” would be his essential consistent message throughout his career.

I guess he also had a certain bloody-mindedness about him which hung loosely upon his frame … which Fatima loved about him. He was a man after her own heart. He knew where to stand his ground and where to give way.

He was elevated to great heights in the local Indian newspapers and community and was widely known among non-whites in three provinces. However, the white press never even heard of him until 1972, until he attended a coaching session at Natal University, along with a few other players. It was controversial to accept white help at this stage in the seventies, when the struggle had intensified and black consciousness and student uprisings had grown to an explosive state. The Natal Mercury reported it as if they’d found diamonds in the ghetto. It hid the fact that there were so many other players and so many ordinary cricket loving fans who’d thrown their support into the survival of the sport for their children and others. He felt disappointed at how they’d represented it, even though they’d mentioned him favourably. They were pulling the old trick; they wanted to isolate and elevate a few token black players as a ‘shining example of their own nobility’ towards these underclass races which so desperately required their charity.

“Fucking goras,” he thought, “always the fucking same! They steal everything we fucking own and then we have to beg for scraps from them. They’re thieves, nothing better, nothing less! I’m not their fucking coolie – they can get someone else to go play in their ‘tea-garden’ games with the natives for entertainment. I’m a professional, I want to compete!”

His mind turned to an earlier meeting he’d had with some senior SACBOC members who’d told him with regret and urgency that there was ‘no future’ for him in South Africa. The white fullahs didn’t want to budge. For all the modernisation and nobility they claimed it was just another rue of theirs; something they could hold up as an example of a happy country to the world outside, which was still largely inactive in its response to Apartheid. White South Africa was doing well and didn’t need Shakes – he would have to play abroad if he wanted to get anywhere.

In 1972 white South Africans were living large. The economy was strong (at over 2 pounds to the rand) and they could afford anything and go anywhere in the world. The by then forcibly removed minions had been forced out into the townships, Bantustans and homelands, limbless coloured and Indian suburbs and a Nazi styled ‘lebensraum’ had been accomplished with great gusto. They were happy. They were comfortable. They had wars and fears, but they were rich enough to continue them with impunity. Nothing could shake them from their arrogance. Southern Africa was to be of their design.

Ironically, they benefited out of the cold war by pretending to be a considerable anti-communist power. In actual fact, the international community had armed a Nazi state on the tip of Africa and charged it with ‘bringing stability’ to the region. Even if it was a Nazi outpost, to the west, white Nazi’s were still better than black communists. The Nazis went ahead and created large social infrastructures and state organs to administrate them – actually a white socialism.

Armed with deterministic vision they recreated the landscapes, skyscapes and peoplescapes of the country by the pen and the gun, while the western world turned its head away, preferring white capitalist Nazis over black skinned communists, even though those black-skinned communists represented the majority of their peoples at the time. Much like Vietnam, their cold war ‘help’ was un-invited and resulted in a repressive State which presided over 1.5 million deaths and 4 million homeless in the Southern African region. Apartheid was declared a ‘crime against humanity’ by the UN in 1973[1]. Everybody knew about it; it’s just that nobody could be bothered to make the effort to do anything substantial about it because,

“Hell, if we need Nazis to fight off the communists, then so be it!”

Without the red-fear that gripped the capitalist world Apartheid would probably not have existed. It probably wouldn’t have got very far without a considerably well-armed state that was propped up and armed by countries that are foreign to the continent (like Israel is today).

In 1976 all hell would break loose when black school children would be shot and slaughtered indiscriminately across the country, starting with the Soweto uprisings. The apartheid government would mow down the children in Soweto like skittles, and it seemed like a game to them; firing indiscriminately into crowds and groups of people where-ever they saw fit. They would drag whole school loads of children off to jail and regularly shot and killed children with live ammunition, claiming (very much like Israeli soldiers do) that ‘stones and rocks’ were being thrown at them. A generation of criminalised children developed a deep hatred, along with their parents and the communities, for the police and the army. The hate already ran so deep that communities often preferred their own internal forms of vigilante policing to the police itself. This was also responsible for the rise of many gangs and protection rackets in the communities accompanied by the spread of weapons, gambling, black-market goods and alcohol and drugs, as various groups, whether gangs, families or rings of businessmen took up the challenge of control and supply.

Apartheid was not just enforced by the Afrikaner; it was endorsed by the west in its double language of duplicitous diplomacy. Everybody wanted South African gold, diamonds, fruit, wine, maize, stock, minerals, etc. Why sully their relationships over another ‘African’ problem? In a sense it was true. The Afrikaners were settlers with no traceable origin and place to return to and were thus Africans – they had nowhere to go! It was thus just another African dictatorship which they had to deal with! They happened to be white and capitalist enough – that made it easier. The Afrikaner, originally a farmer, a boer; a person who farmed the earth and lived by knowing its ways, would now be exposed to the onslaught of the American capitalist dream, without even a real democracy.

“Yelll; this was nice!”

But it would ruin them too, creating generations of racist ignorant newly elevated white working class yobs who would grow further and further from their origins, creating myths and legends of their origins already having initially stolen the patois language of slaves and calling it their own to start with. The first written Afrikaans is written in Arabic script, by Malay craftsmen, artisans or slaves. The Afrikaners had hijacked a language in the quest for a valid sense of nationalism and used it to define themselves. The fact that millions of coloured people also spoke Afrikaans didn’t cross their minds in any significant way. They were ‘mixed’, but if you were light enough and had straight hair then you could qualify as white - it was a programme of genetic correction. This would tear coloured families apart, leaving some parts stranded in ghettoes and prisons and some parts or individuals elevated to ‘white’ status. White families too would hide and disguise their mixed looking children, developing deep psychologies of denial, entrenching further the social lie in their minds further; that being white was a culture and not just a colour.

In 1972, Shakes would leave South Africa to England. His overseas fair was funded by a game played in support of his talent by team-mates and adversaries alike. Even though he played for Natal, the Transvaal Cricket Board organised the fund-raising event in his honour. Non-white players were easily united into a cause. Their everyday lives gave them a deep empathy for players trapped within this everyday system of robbery. They were desperate to prove to the world that they shouldn’t be ignored, that they weren’t worthless, that only the South African government hid them from view and that ultimately it hid all of us from view. It was easy to unite when the enemy was so clear. It was not without penalty though, and Shakes would learn that these attitudes weren’t only confined to South Africa. In England, although employed as a club professional he would live through the unfamiliar cold and rain in a leaky caravan until the manager took pity on him and took him into his home. The conditions were unfamiliar but he still played well, averaging 30 and making 720 runs that season. He was hard to hold down, even under difficult conditions.

His contract wasn’t renewed though, and after facing bowling from the groundsmen (an intentional slight) at Lancashire tryouts he could see that there was little hope for him. He had lived in Natal and understood the English manner of humiliating you without direct comment. He felt humiliated, and he left, as they wished. With him went the dreams and hopes of a child, a man and a community of well-wishers who’d come to adore and believe in him.

When Fatima had told him she was pregnant there was a moment of joy in him. He knew that now there were only two people who needed him for his real person, his wife and the baby in her womb.

“I can’t feed them with cricket,” he thought, sitting on the plane home from England.

Even in the plane cabin he felt the claustrophobic atmosphere that a mixed group of South Africans always had. They were all more or less silent, nobody wanted to hear what each other really had to say. Banal conversations, alluding to anything other than politics filled up the plane in a low background murmur. Only a loud Zulu voice could be heard laughing away somewhere. Looks of disdain passed from the white female passengers to each other. They curled their noses up as if they expected to smell him in his voice.

***First posted on 31 July 2016. Thereafter lightly edited.

[1] 14 December 1973 The General Assembly declared that the South African regime has "no right to represent the people of South Africa" and that the liberation movements recognised by the OAU are "the authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the South African people". [Resolution 3151 G (XXVIII)]

To view the previous chapter of Fatima click here.

To view the next chapter of Fatima click here

The Bus Ride

2016-07-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

This is weird!

I’m on a bus in the Karoo,

B-grade movies blasting away,

Unsettling,

Offending,

Disturbing me

I can’t understand why,

Or who chose them for me,

Watching movies here?

It just highlights the house of cards that this global society is,

A simulation of life is what it is,

And out here,

There is no hiding from it

All you have to do is look,

Look out at what this semi-arid golden hilled,

Natural piece of land,

Spinning through space,

Actually is:

Reality,

The nature of nature,

Even what man does out here looks natural,

His fencing and rails and roads look insecure,

Dwarfed!

This is what I’ve always loved about the Karoo

When you look out at this,

You feel alone,

But not like you do in the city,

Here you feel alone,

But you feel presence,

Am I the only person on earth who feels this?

This craving to re-join or be a part of …

When I see the clouds meet the horizon so far away that it becomes indiscernible,

Distant,

And all around you,

You feel the globe of the earth

This is what it means to feel infinity,

To know it,

To savour it,

And find your place in it

I am no longer a child,

But I am a child!

Colours so subtle,

But so deep,

They lure you in to join them,

Purples and golds,

I wish I could dive into it,

Like some big swimming pool

Ah,

Time moves slowly here,

With lots of blues slowing it down,

Those clouds …

Here,

I can drink in the earth,

With this big moon-ball,

Hanging high above the horizon,

Clouds streaming towards it,

Like great water highways of rivers,

Niagaring towards the big blue,

Indiscernible in the distance

I know this was needed,

The Bus Ride,

The moon,

Like a rock-locked pebble,

Rocks in and out of these great rivers,

And the poetry,

For once,

Lies outside this window

The sun leaves only hues of purple-blue to remind us of the day

Its wake, every day,

Leaves our consciousness refreshed,

Rested, unstressed,

With its hues challenging boxed perceptions,

Colours blending of their own accord

Beauty lies in process,

Aesthetic is what is left behind,

The scraps off the table,

The Maya,

Left behind for everyone else to piece together!

What is this world if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

So here we are making more movie violence,

This time ancient violence

It seems this theme is persistent,

Our ever present madness!

Until we truly lose this we will be bound by it,

Never to truly live,

So we are trapped in a hell of our own making!

Fatima Chapter 8 |1974: Shakes the Samurai

2016-06-30T02:13:00.000-07:00

In those days lives, families and customs were differently crafted in society, and while they were doing the same things we do now, they did them differently. Each generation is bound to this cycle. The Chinese say that it is tradition to break tradition. The forms of tradition and ritual are complex entities, they are weaved into collective and individual psyches, actions, reactions, processes and objects that surround us, driving us one way or another towards the four corners of our cages. Members of south African prison gangs in this country call their world ‘die vier hoeke’ and we have similarly metaphoric corners that manufacture the various shapes and shadows of our experiences, while the themes remain the same; love, betrayal, status, jealousy, revenge, slavery, domination, and occasional redemption. .

Shakes was born into a large family, who were upper caste orthodox Muslims who had come to South Africa as ‘passenger Indians’. These were Indians who had paid their own fare to South Africa and had emigrated specifically to start up businesses that could reap the benefits of a large newly settled population of indentured labourers from India, and the opportunities that a new land teeming with resources and activities afforded.

His father presided over a large extended family and they all lived on the same street on the North Coast of Natal, in sugar cane country. There were many brothers and sisters, and while little quarrels and differences occurred, they were part of everyday life and there was a middle-class, Victorian dignity about how conflicts were handled. His father was a busy but kind and gentle man who handled the extended family affairs and was the residing patriarch of the family. All decisions were passed through him, and he was the leader amongst the group of elders in the family. He was an excellent role model to those around him and took a personal interest in each and every family member. He was slow to disapprove and the children of the family loved him dearly while still holding a deep respect for him, which they learnt from the adults around them.

His mother was the love of his life. She adored him as her youngest and he grew up in her company as a little boy always doted upon and loved by her. He would sit on her lap as she cleaned dahl, beans or shelled peas on long childhood afternoons. She was a saint to him; a simple woman with a graceful manner about her, never angering easily or prone to self-pity. She accepted the path that life opened up for her with a grace and ease that few manage and was the image of charity, never acquiring more than she needed. She always cleaned out her closet of an old item whenever a new item was acquired for her, leaving her closet always a reflection of her mind, uncluttered by owing too much excess and the proliferation of choice. She lived simply, ate simply, loved simply and was imbued with a deep wisdom of things because she always stayed focussed on what was most important. Maybe it was this quality that made Shakes such a good cricketer and batsmen in particular; the ability to stay calm and keep focussed on the task at hand is something he learnt by an osmosis of a kind, just from being around her so much.

It left him with a kind of essential zen in his nature and this gave him a regal bearing. It was this nature that most women found irresistible. He was a calm, highly attractive guy who was a huge success and didn’t flaunt it around. He treated everyone with the same good natured interest, and while he wasn’t a conversation maker he was always sincere in his interactions. Sometimes he joked, and one would get a glimpse of the lightness in his mind and the softness of his nature. It was the seventies and he was a player of sorts, whose philandering was as normal a role to play as his un-touted status as a sportsman. He was a jock, but not a braggart, and this drew women to him in flocks and droves. His good looks and high-caste notwithstanding, he was the model fantasy for a new generation of women both in South Africa and abroad. South African Indian women viewed him as a Bollywood movie star is, lauded and cheered. It did not sit comfortably with his modest inner nature, but he reaped the rewards of it anyway. He was a samurai on the field and with women. His cricket bat and his dick were instruments of desire where he found the deeper parts of himself, explored his creative impulses fully and became more known to himself through spontaneous invention through form. He loved women; they gave him the comfort of his mother and eased the loneliness of travel, new cities and new faces.

There were many changes occurring in South Africa. Forced removal had already taken place and the group areas act had already done a good job of separating races from each other physically, psychologically and spiritually.

The churches had split, with the right wing Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) taking the role of an active agent of apartheid, selling it as a spiritually inspired dream, and the Anglican and Catholic churches on the left, staying true to their original parishes of a mix of black and white citizens. To the right wing NG Kerk, the Afrikaners were like the Jews, Gods chosen people in Africa who had once made a covenant with God. The discourse in the other churches was too liberal, the Catholic Church even had communist bishops. The bishop of Rio, Dom Helder Camara had once said,

“When I feed the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why the poor are starving they call me a communist.”

It was the protestant churches that flourished under apartheid however, as they had played an active evangelical role in poorer communities which were isolated from main-stream South Africa and the economy. These communities had a deep need for knowledge of their place in the world, and in a variety of ways the churches helped people escape the indignity of being brown. If one was a Christian, one was somehow more acceptable in mainstream society, even though you were still a second class citizen you could still be ‘trusted’.

Shakes was a Muslim raised in a family where spiritual virtue was paramount. He didn’t flaunt his spirituality but it was always a strong part of who he was. He learnt religion from his mother and father. In Islam, the mothers are the main spiritual teachers to boys and girls. There is thus a strong maternal influence in the essential spirituality and the love of God and one’s own mother are often intricately interwoven. A betrayal to God is like a betrayal to one’s mother and vice versa. The Koran teaches;

“Heaven lies beneath your mothers feet …”

Thus, wherever he was he ensured that his religious obligations as a Muslim were fulfilled through the noon prayer every Friday. When his mother would die, much later in his life, this would become a deeper way of connecting with her again and he would pray more often. His prayers ensured his mothers spirit would rest easily, and was his way of showing her his love, despite his greater knowledge of the limitations of a purely spiritual view on the world. In his world, the secular and spiritual worlds had different junctions and intersections from others but he never missed Friday noon prayers at a Mosque. To miss three Fridays was to denounce one’s membership to Islam and this was something he could never do, despite his knowledge of different ways of existence. Even when his travels took him abroad, he found a way to observe this basic rite of piety.

Shakes would break with tradition in a number of ways though. The first would be when he travelled abroad to play county cricket as a professional in England, refusing to bow to the South African race restrictions on sport that were encoded in law by Dr Verwoerd. The second would be to marry a woman of lower caste than himself, who was also from a family much poorer than his own. In Indian tradition, the girls’ family pays for the wedding.

Being low caste but rich still ensured an acceptability of a kind amongst the higher castes here in South Africa, but a low caste person who was poor was still largely an ‘untouchable’, even amongst Muslims. In the Muslim Indian community caste was still rife and the lower castes were generically termed ‘Heddroos’ (pronounced quickly as ‘hair-throoze’). They were Urdu speaking Muslims who had originated from Hyderabad. The ‘Soorties’ were the upper caste Gujarati speaking Muslims. They had originated from Gujarat and had mainly arrived in South Africa as ‘passenger Indians’ and had started up their own businesses and bought their own land.

It was fortunate that Fatima was both Muslim and had Gujarati speaking origins. It was thanks to their joint faith, Islam, that he was able to bend and break some of the old Indian traditions. He was a Muslim, and he maintained, was required only to marry another Muslim. After all, all were equal in Islam. This ensured the support of his family in his decision, and to his credit, it was their respect for him and not just his achievements that enabled him to get away with this unorthodox arrangement.

The one tradition he kept though, would create a number of unorthodox arrangements throughout his life. His later philandering during marriage, although adequately discreet, would have a toll on his family that he would never envisage.

In England, there were many girls who took to him quickly, and at the end of the sixties it was still a sexually vibrant environment where sex was regarded as a normal part of dating and interacting with a potential partner. His sword was always out for action in those days, and it was hard to retreat from battle, even after marriage. His instincts were still alive, having been cultivated in an environment where the psychology of casual sex and free love were encouraged. He found it hard to separate this part of himself from the person he would be required to be when married. Indeed,

“Even Islam acknowledges that a man can have more than one wife. Why is that?” he thought.

His first trip to the UK had come during his courtship with Fatima. She had been patient, still at school, awaiting the return of her great love with yearning. She wrote him regularly and it fed a secret part of him while he was away. He knew that he didn’t love her less because he had relations with other women as well. She knew that he probably enjoyed the attention of other women but never entertained herself with the tortuous thought that he may find someone else. Whenever she received a letter from him she would burst with joy at the slightest affections he wrote down. Every declaration of love to her and allusions to their future married life together would restore her to her centre, making her stable and secure in his love. As long as he loved her, she could take on the world – he would be her house built on rock. He would be the four corners of her existence, providing her with meaning to her boundaries and enduring, constant love and support. Unfortunately, he didn’t think that being faithful was necessary. It is understandable why.

By the time he’d laid eyes on her he’d already been abroad and lived in the UK. This was during the late 60s and he’d been thoroughly exposed to the principles of free love and casual relationships. It was a changing world ideology and he’d been exposed to it at every level and felt a part of the socio-political winds of change that were sweeping the first world. He knew that being a man or a woman in this society would mean something different in future, and he strayed from the example set for him by his own parents. His father and his uncle had married two sisters. It had been an arranged marriage, and the closeness of each of the siblings to each other guaranteed that they would always be there for each other, and they were to the very end of their days inseparable from each other as a family. It was their tandem marriage that ensured the survival of the extended family unit, and formed the hub around which the other families revolved. They brought everyone together. Much later, when the older generation had begun to die out the extended family would become fragmented and while they were not completely apart, were never really together as they were in the old days.

Co-location is the key to the success of extended family hierarchies. When this was later savaged by the various apartheid relocations and removal schemes these family structures fell apart, and with them, their hierarchies and influence over each other decreased. It increased a feeling of having to be sustainable within ones nuclear family units, rather than depend too greatly upon the extended network. It wasn’t there every day in your face to remind you of its function in a real and meaningful way. After all, clans and tribes are like any animal community, they stay together in order to reaffirm collectivist bonds and instincts. Even sports teams are the same. Face to face contact is important to maintain normal human relations and intuitions. Shakes would find himself growing older in a world where his responsibilities were rapidly increasing, family bonds weakening and his cricketing career indelibly tied to the anti-apartheid struggle of the time with all its dilemmas, conflicts, surprises and forgotten promises. The parts of the family that had managed to remain together would have to become a more dominant priority in his life. The moment Nadia had been born he had ended his cricketing career and retired from professional sport.

To view the previous chapter of Fatima click here

To view the next chapter of Fatima click here.

Fatima Chapter 7 |1973: Two Mothers to a Mother

2016-06-15T03:23:00.002-07:00

Mariam was Fatima’s mother until the age of seventeen. That was the year she married and moved to Durban, where she lived with Shakes’ extended family. Until that point, her only real role model as a woman had been her own mother but in Durban she found a new woman to act as her role model into woman-hood. Shakes’ mother would become her own, but her example was not an easy one for a young woman, who was also soon pregnant, to follow. At the age of eighteen she would have her first child.

At first, the shock of entering an upper caste household at such a young age was trying. She was young and had been raised in a much bigger city than Durban and their provinciality often irritated her. They thought the entire world should live by their rules and going out to parties and discos or dressing less modestly than stipulated by Muslim traditions was frowned upon. Shakes managed to bend rules where he could but by and large they had to respect the rules of the household and the extended family. He had already gone against his mother’s wishes to marry Fatima. A cousin had already been chosen for him but he had broken with family tradition and chosen his own bride.

Shakes’ mother was named Hanifa but Fatima never thought of her by name. She always thought of her as ‘Shakes’ mother. He trusted this woman more than anybody and it intrigued Fatima. There were many reasons why Fatima adopted the new example set for her in the Ahmed household by Shakes mother. Most of all, her own idealism, inspired by her father, led her to recognise the deep virtues in the non-materialistic wisdom of Shakes’ mother. She saw how, despite their riches, she had no desire to be known for that. She would rather be good to people and be remembered by her respect for other people. This Fatima found truly admirable, and the deep sincerity of Shakes’ mother touched her. She found a person who could live her beliefs, without the need for her father’s constant remonstrations, analyses, rationalisations and justifications. It was the example that would become hers, but the constant remonstrations, analyses, rationalisations and justifications of her father would never leave her.

She knew how much Shakes respected and loved his mother. Secretly she wished she would enjoy the same love and respect he gave her. She knew he wanted his children to be mothered in the same way he was and she desperately wanted to please him. However, she was always unsure of herself. She was young and the changes in her world had taken a toll on her. While he would grow to love her more deeply over time she would not be the mother she’d wished to be to her first child.

The relationship between mother and child starts before birth. There are many who believe that it is not only flesh that grows within the womb. The emotional and psychological states from which a child originates are formed in the womb, absorbed from the mother. Fatima was still being mothered while becoming a mother. A child born from a young mother, herself struggling to grasp the rules and boundaries of her new environment and her own role in it, would experience the fears and insecurities of her mother too. She’d been extremely rebellious upon first arrival into Shakes’ house and had returned heavily pregnant and moody from England to give birth to their first child Nadia. She found herself in constant conflict with those around her in this new household.

Nadia, the first of two girls, was born with a deep fear of an un-accepting world, the origins of which she would never quite understand herself. She, like Fatima, would look to Shakes’ mother for instruction. Her relationship with her own mother would be much more complex. Fatima was still discovering who she was in a world of new people, new rules and new experiences. Her anchors were few in this more orthodox upper caste world and her fear of rejection had riled her in many ways so at first she was oversensitive even to the slightest comment. Most of all, deep within her she could not acknowledge her own worth fully at that stage and felt that she was not good enough for a man of Shakes’ stature. However, the girl in her believed that their union was destiny. It was a fragile belief that was often tested by her suspicions of his philandering and drove her to fits of jealous anger which found no tolerated outlet in his extended family household.

Emotions need to be vented, and these emotions became invested in her child whenever her inadequacies assailed her. She would later pick fights with a teenage Nadia when Shake’s was away on ‘golf-holidays’ and ‘business-trips’. She couldn’t find a way to share this deep shame that she thought was her own and it burst to the surface whenever she perceived mild transgressions in Nadia. It was as if Nadia’s own actions would define her herself, and she found her father’s rage spouting over into her relationship with her child. It vexed her greatly but she was trapped in an emotional well which flooded regularly, hurting her child. It was as if by hurting her child she was hurting herself more, keeping the pain bounded between them, so that at least someone could understand her deepest pain.

Nadia’s quick development as a child masked her emotional confusion with adults. It seemed they had a dark side, difficult to understand or predict. Nadia was never sure whether she was going to end up in trouble. Moreover, she was an intelligent child with a penchant for testing boundaries and it increased her chances of angering her mother and sometimes even her grandmother. Once, at the age of thirteen she loudly pronounced that she would be married in a church!

“Thoba, thoba!” her grandmother had shouted. She hadn’t heard her paternal grandmother use that expression liberally and knew she had unseated her considerably with the statement.

“Don’t say that or it will come true!” her grandmother shouted after her.

Fatima knew where that streak in her child originated and it shamed her. It was her own quality in her child. Perhaps her genes would betray her caste through the behaviour of the child. Besides, she didn’t want her child to suffer the same disgraces her own adolescent outbursts had betrayed. It revealed a lack of good breeding, an inability to deal with the world as it is, a weakness in a world where a woman’s reality is hard to accept if you spend too much time on dreams.

Ironically, this made the fantasy world of the women more unreal and far-reaching than most could imagine. When one’s only escape to oneself is through fantasy and is only allowed in fantasy, the fantasies are more abstracted to the ideal. Like Bollywood movies, it becomes a place where reality is completely suspended and it is only the soap-opera’d version of reality that is cast onto the big screen of the mind. Like the abstraction of mathematics it becomes a world of symbols and features that help explain a landscape of concepts. Sometimes, just like mathematics, it can be amazingly wondrous but fail to connect with the world as we know it in any meaningful way, until we discover a way to use it. That is why her grandmother reacted so strongly to what she had said. Words bring about reality and reflect the world of fantasy going on in our minds. If you listen closely enough to the words we speak the fantasies we hold become apparent, and too much talking up of a fantasy often brings it into reality. It is bad to covet, but even worse to let it be revealed and realised. Nothing good came of it.

Fantasy of this kind could be dangerous if the mind dwelt on it too long, making desires grow and dreams flourish. The role of a woman was carefully worked out in this society and too much fantasy could harm a growing mind. It needed to be rooted firmly in the reality of its immediate surroundings in order to be able to perform the role required of women. You see, fantasy is the domain of the child. It is learnt in childhood. A child explores the world through a mixture of fantasy and reality. That is why learning is often a painful process; the fantasized will of the child often goes against the reality we establish for them and disappointment and suffering are learnt. Fantasy is where a child can be free, in the imagination. How can one dream without fantasy?

Nadia, the child would be free to develop in a world not imagined by her parents or grandparents, and would be able to dream more and fantasize in worlds they’d never dreamt of. This would bring her into constant conflict with the narrow reality she would be confronted with in a community where too much dreaming can be dangerous. Perhaps, the generations preceding ours, with their shorter childhoods, had less time to develop the fantasy enough to imagine a new reality. Maybe their dreams were limited by a world that looked harshly upon them in a variety of ways.

If one does not experience fantasy in childhood, then the ability to play is also lost to a considerable degree. Play is central to learning. Without the essence of play, failures are absolute and not an opportunity to learn and successes mask insecurity. Without humour, learning can be painful. Safi, Fatima’s next door neighbour and childhood role model had known how to ‘play’ with life and its varying situations. She was thus extremely socially skilled and knew that learning involved failure and humour turned failure into a setback. ‘Play’ enables us not to take ourselves too seriously, as even issues of identity are more flexible with an attitude of play. The generations before us had identity imposed upon them through a long colonial history which led them into the world wars, only to be welcomed by the rigorous classification schemes of Apartheid soon after they ended. They weren’t allowed to play too long, especially with identity. Identities were well worked out in the days of old. This next generation would begin a change, having had a taste of the concept of ‘play’, just enough to liberate them from reality and enable them to dream and fantasize a new way of doing things. They were not sure what the new way was and how it would work, but they were sure if they played with it long enough it would all work out in the end.

There was another issue which weighed heavily on Fatima’s mind. She always felt like she’d abandoned her own mother Mariam, to an unhappy life with her father, who was becoming more unreasonable in his later years. Furthermore, she’d adopted a new role model for motherhood when she herself had, had a child and this made her feel her own mother’s inadequacies more acutely, as she abandoned behaviours she’d learnt from her mother. Mostly though, she wished she could help them see better ways of living and relating to each other but felt guilty that her wishes were an elitist manifestation of her new-found life.

Her father was another issue. If she felt sympathy for her mother she felt only a painful cocktail of anger, pity and occasional disgust for her father. He had become a man she struggled to respect, and the distance between them had ceased to be just physical. She had been glad to leave her home because of him, his abusive tirades towards his mother and Tiks and his inevitable alcoholic misadventures. A doctor had once told him that ‘two vodkas a day’ would prevent illness. He was always open to different theories and he’d decided he liked this one. He didn’t really drink to a point where he was drunk and disorderly, but in a Muslim household alcohol is viewed as a poison to the soul and a person’s humanity is suspect when he is under the influence. In a world where alcohol is seldom seen and used, when it does appear it is viewed with deep suspicion.

Her mother Mariam viewed his alcohol use as a dangerous sign. She knew his temperament as one that is already volatile. She never considered that it may calm him, only that it may make him more prone to depression or anger. Her own mother had died during her birth, and her father had remarried and raised another family. She had been left to her aunt’s guardianship and had been raised by her. Her aunt had regarded men with suspicion, died a spinster and had never even lost her virginity. To her, men were crude and unpredictable. She never quite understood men and was quite happy to never have married. To her, a man who drank alcohol was akin to a beast; an animal fired up by lusts, anger, depression or glazed-eyed happiness devoid of real joy. Besides, alcohol was always portrayed as a destructive agent to love, family and religion in all the Hindi movies that they watched.

He’d been a drinker from a young age but told her he was a social drinker when he met her. He was 35 then, many years her senior, and seemed to be a man of the world. She’d first seen him in his pride and joy of the time – a red two door Ford Mustang convertible. He looked so confident and secure, like a real man, and she’d been drawn to his sense of knowing. Years later he would seem a shell of this young, bold man full of thoughts, ideas and opinions and he would become a bit like a caged animal – once proud, now lashing out against a world that had overcome him, knowing that the end was near. Perhaps it was this spirit that would eventually keep him alive longer than her, his reactions to the world keeping him bound to it, like binary stars in an eternal cosmic dance bound to each other by gravity’s laws.

He had begun drinking as a teenager. By then he’d had no family around him to root him adequately. He knew his parents had sent him here for a better future but also felt like they had to get rid of him due to their poverty. His experience of family started to fade, and unable to voice this pain it started to build up a space between him and the world. He found it hard to share emotions with anyone honestly. It was only after a few drinks that he would get more emotional, romantic and sometimes happy.

When he’d first started courting girls there were times he would sit with their families, attempting to fit in and to ‘be’ one of the family as best he could imagine, showing respect to everyone and speaking decently. However, whenever they would start arguing or bickering the way families do, he would become extremely uncomfortable. The roof would feel lower and he would feel a claustrophobia of the soul overtake him. He couldn’t handle the emotional world. He didn’t know that this is how families ‘play’. They don’t have to like each other to love each other and play can sometimes become nasty, but the injuries are there for learning. Never having had an opportunity to play within a family himself, he had constructed a fantasy of family life that was too abstract. Even when we are taught not to fantasize we still do. The fantasies are just more abstract and removed from reality because the fantasy has had no interaction with any reality, and has remained untested. Family life was not the perfection he’d imagined he missed, but yet more emotional tangles and webs, dramas and soap operas. He felt vulnerable when exposed to emotional conflict. This made him try to appear more aloof. He could only really open up a bit more of his tortured soul when he’d had a few drinks in him. This often proved disastrous in itself.

He had been married twice before meeting her. His first marriage had been to a coloured woman, with whom he’d had two children. His second had been to a woman who couldn’t bear children. He’d divorced her, married Mariam and started a family with her. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted and knew how to make decisions clearly. It was this that drew her to him. It was also what Fatima believed at a young age, that her father knew exactly what to do in each situation. It was only when she would become an adult herself that she would realise how he flailed about as a parent, struggling constantly to provide leadership in an uncertain world. Her other parent, Shakes’ mother, would be her way of mediating her first two role models in the world and provide her with a simple set of beliefs that impressed her.

It was her mother's skills, however, which had helped save her father from a history of business explosions and implosions. Her ability to sew beautiful and reliable garments had secured her a small reputation in the neighbourhood when he hit upon an idea. He would make overalls, reliable clothing worth their price and wear. It would later be chorused under the phrase,

“Dikrah, working clothes for the working man!”

There was an ideological satisfaction to it. His industry, far from exploiting the working man, merely sought to better equip him to work safely and confidently. He would sleep well at night knowing that his customers were people of the working class who were glad to have garments made at much lower expense, by his wife. With a small amount of capital he’d managed to borrow he established a small business in his back yard which soon became the sole breadwinning avenue of income for the family. Soon, the careful, attentive manner in which Mariam made her garments became more widely known in Lenz and a long list of richer women had settled upon her as a seamstress of choice. She made extra income preparing garments for special occasions, weddings and religious festivals. Suleiman was not quite sure how to handle this unexpected outcome except to say he was glad of the income. With six mouths to feed including his own he would have to be prepared to compromise on certain issues. He reasoned;

“As long as the main business remains devoted to the working man and is not the exclusive preserve of the rich fullahs then it remains something that I as a Muslim can be proud of.”

He’d long since been forging the links between the tenets of Islam and ideas of equality and socialism. Socialism and equality were being espoused in Russia, a country which he knew consisted one Muslim out of every three people. Indeed, in India, Islam had offered up an escape from some of the caste injustices thrust upon them by the ruling castes. Perhaps Islam and socialism, while differing in some admittedly irreconcilable ways were of the same fundamental ilk when it came to how its tenets on people should be treated. Stalin had supported the Boers in what he saw as a ‘war against imperialism’ and saw them, quite rightly, as champions of resistance to empire, the colonial masters. The colonists had built their considerable economies on nothing but slavery and looting on a world scale, and finally, in Stalin’s view, even the settlers were now taking power back from the puppet-masters. He had little way of knowing the twists and turns of fate that would unfold in the South African arena so Suleiman forgave him his naivety. It was clear though that the socialists stood against the bastard imperialists who’d raped the world and offered up a vision of a world where every man deserved the humanitarian reward of dignity, a dignity most often stripped by poverty more than anything else. He had observed how many people who in India would be regarded of low caste, but had elevated themselves and their family names to positions of status and respect in the community. There was a new feeling of how to do things here and he felt that as a Muslim, this was the kind of vision he could believe in.

Mariam was the best Suleiman could possibly have done in choosing a wife. She was the epitome of calm and acceptance, while his juggling mind was a constant source of anxiety and denial. He was outward where she was inward, and somehow they both felt protected by this about each other. They could never stray too far into themselves with each other around. They kept each other alive with the cycle of creation and destruction between them, each bound in an orbit of opposites … establishing another more subtle cycle. They felt their marriage worked because they were able to hold each other in check to some degree and that this was made possible by their essential differences in nature. This is not always true, but they came to believe it, which gradually enforced the reality around them. Thus, even in the subtler models of governance imposed by The Leader there were reminiscences of this approach. Tiks’s effeminacy could only be countered by gross masculine punishment, tears and painful feelings were met with shouts of indignation and recrimination, sympathy was for the weak. Only in his moments alone with Mariam and Fatima did he allow a hidden tenderness to show, and it showed more outdoors.

Mariams nature was what enabled her to work so hard while still rearing and nurturing a family. Her role was a very demanding one and Suleiman often appeared unsympathetic, expecting her to work hard at sewing and also to attend to household duties. It was not unlike most men of the time and even their mothers would have shuddered to see them make a cup of tea for themselves. What then, would be the role of women? In their world, men and women had very clearly defined roles. She spent the day in small outbuilding in the back yard sewing labourers’ clothes, finishing up the odd jobs she did for the neighbourhood’s wealthier women and had a quiet dignity about how she carried herself. She was also very thrifty and knew poverty intimately. She never wasted and had a sense of duty about making full use of things before getting rid of anything. She even kept the various off-cuts from the variety of beautiful fabrics that would have been brought along to her by her wealthier customers. Various colours and textures of fabrics from the furthest corners of India made its way into her little outbuilding in the back yard and her collection would find a unique purpose.

Fatima learnt how to sew from an early age too, and played a strong part in the family business as soon as she was old enough to do so. Suleiman was careful, to his credit, never to let her work so hard as to neglect her studies and always held a vision for his daughter; she needed an education – she would be an equal too. She developed into an adept dress-maker under her mother’s instruction and soon learnt to sew her own garments for herself. She had an eye and feel for quality that seemed innate, and she took an equal pleasure as her mother did from the feel and texture of cloth, of making form from the formlessness of uncut fabric. This would turn out to be a role that would benefit her far more than her education did, and work to the advantage of her husband as much as her mother's sewing had her father. Being exposed to real work also gave Fatima an opportunity to grow up quicker through the myriad of experiences that everyday business offers up. She saw how her mother treated people, and how much it was her father’s role to handle what her mother would naturally be uncomfortable with. Negotiations etc. were best left to him. Fatima had decided that she would need both their strengths in future and endeavoured to deal with business in a diplomatic firm manner which conveyed respect but no weakness.

There were many different people who would frequent the outbuilding in the back and Fatima had observed their various gestures and mannerisms. All people were respected in the way that they showed it, and she quickly learnt little mannerisms which showed respect; like not accepting payment or paying change with the left hand and used various greetings in a variety of languages to service the wide range of customers. As she grew older and desired more knowledge of how to behave appropriately as a woman she would observe the female customers who arrived. The wealthier Muslim women carried themselves with a dignity and grace that betrayed great strength. Often, she would find herself imitating and repeating a new phrase or attitude she’d observed at work, sometimes to the delight of Safi who would exclaim with delight;

“He’ey where you learnt that – you growing up fast neh?”

People react differently to news of marriage or news of a first child, and both Mariam and Suleiman would react in two telling ways to each event. Suleiman’s would be an outburst of affection and love, while hers would be a more subtle intimate contribution. When Suleiman first saw Nadia’s face he also recognised a look that he hadn’t seen in 18 years; that on the face of Fatima. It was himself, he acknowledged, in the child. It couldn’t be the father or the grandmother – they were far too calm – it had to be his genes, his inheritance. His emotions churned; the little girl had much of his qualities and would be trapped by the daughter he rose. He saw how the daughter he fathered had inevitably become a mother to him and he glimpsed a vision of the great order of things. He saw the balance of things in the universe with God; the juggler relinquished himself to the laws of give and take,

“What goes up dikrah, must come down!”

The next day he went out and bought a large pram. It had huge, multi-spoked wheels, an elaborate overhang which served the dual purpose of sunshade and rain-cover. The overhang could be drawn back in an elaborate combination of lever pulls which left the effect of a convertible sedan.

“Dikrah, if my first car was a convertible then this child’s first pram will be one too.”

It was important to Suleiman in his world of symbolism. He knew, from the outset that this child would appreciate being able to have an open sky above her. She would be an equal from the start too. He knew secretly that she was already his. She would go on to construct her own spaces, in her mind and in the world, where yet more buildings and skylines would change at the command of her pen. Unlike Suleiman, she would attempt to sketch and draw the world she juggled in her head instead of explain it through words. She would still however, prefer the freedom of the open sky, even though it clashed with her freckled face. As her mother would constantly remind her,

“Stay out of the sun baby, they join hands!”

The pram made a proud showing in three provinces of South Africa, sometimes to applause of onlookers. It was indeed a rare item and had a kind of largeness that finds more appropriate placement in the American dream. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, years later, it seemed to have disappeared from memory. The babies were all grown up and the old pram seemed to have been mislaid somewhere during their many movements as a family. Fatima was never certain where it had been mislaid but was quite sure it was somewhere with someone they knew and that it was probably best where it was, as it may find some use. From both her mothers, old and new, she had inherited and reinforced a practise of not hoarding things which could be used by others. Her only secret hoard remained her growing collection of newspaper cuttings.

Mariam made a less obvious but equally symbolic contribution to her daughter. When she knew that Fatima would be married she consulted her collection of off-cuts. It was a wondrous mosaic of fabrics, by now a considerable by-collection of the various dress-making projects she’d taken on for the neighbourhoods’ wealthy women. She had eyed them with a look of concern, rather than awe – she needed to make something beautiful for her daughter to wear when she entered her in-laws home. She knew that she would be looked upon as an outsider in a wealthy home, and would have to rely on her character rather than her wealth to find acceptance, but still wished she could make her a dress that highlighted her beauty and character.

She proceeded to weave a masterpiece of quilt-work, producing a garment of simple but obvious beauty. It had the love of a master in it, and was almost a costume constructed in her mind long before she had attempted it, like she’d been thinking about how to weave these beautiful lonely pieces of fabric into something that reflected a greater whole. The patchwork quilt costume would indeed be a powerful symbol of which Fatima would be extremely conscious, and she had first arrived at Shakes’ house wearing it because it reminded her of who she was. It represented her character, her ‘costume’ as she called it, the costume we players in the world theatre all wear. It was something patched together from the various people she interacted with and admired. In a world of diverse experiences she learnt different things from different people and would have to continue to do so in her new life. The true diversity of experiences she would be faced with would render her childhood role models inadequate and she would have to learn from others, patching little pieces of behaviour onto herself where she found them useful, like little tools that helped her along in a life journey that would far exceed her expectations.

To view the next chapter of Fatima click here

To view the previous chapter of Fatima click here

Who you calling a Settler?

2016-05-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Professor Mamdani;

I am a settler and a native,

I am both,

You don’t speak,

Of us,

The marginalised shame of this continent!

How can a settler become a native?

You ask,

When even natives become settlers in Africa,

And settlers are migrants and trekkers,

Of various colours,

Including Black,

And Brown

Is there a New way?

You ask,

For civil and customary right to be erased from memory?

Am I a settler,

With nowhere to go?

I have a way,

I am the way,

I am the New,

The Un-bordered,

The Un-divided,

The Un-colonised,

The Un-ethnic,

The Un-everything,

Which is everything!

I cannot hold either of the rights of which you speak,

My right is that to life,

And humanity,

Long denied,

Since Slavery, Smuts and Verwoerd,

Lost in the woods

I am the New,
Which can emerge from the old,

From the mixes of settler and ethnic,

Like the Xhosa,

Who know how to mix sources!

We are all mixed here anyway,

And we’re all settlers in some way or another,

Except the Khoisan,

And there’s a bit of him in me,

Am I then the true native?

Or is it Australopithecus?

What sense does all this make?

I am a native of the Now!

A mix of the past,

And my future,

Will be written,

As old words die!

I am free!

Fatima Chapter 6 |1971: Fate

2016-05-21T04:17:00.001-07:00

Fatima and Shakes had first met officially when Shakes had been offered a place to stay at a local residence, near the cricket grounds, in Lenz. He stayed with Suleiman, who was responsible for tending the local cricket pitch. Suleiman was a man who had taken his role so seriously that he guarded his front lawn like it was his own personal cricket pitch experiment, his laboratory. His main thesis was that the pitch should be grown with the surface unbroken, from the very start. Nobody was allowed to walk on his lawn with shoes, and sometimes even going barefoot in a careless manner could warrant a bark from Suleiman. The only sentient beings he preferred on his lawn were birds, especially pigeons. Each afternoon he would scatter the remaining day’s crumbs from the breadbin out to them.

“Pigeon shit, very good for the soil dikrah. Like gold it is!”

This lawn was his pristine experiment, his baseline from which all other pitches could be judged, a perfect, pristine, unused and never to be used cricket pitch lying on a thin strip of grass in front of a council house in Lenz, an unlikely location for such a rare item indeed.

When his grandchildren would later in life arrive to visit him from Durban they would rush across the lawn, ecstatic to see their grandparents. His voice would boom loudly (but not un-lovingly) as he would sit up, one hand in the air, finger pointing to the sky,

“Not on the lawn, dikrah, not on the lawn!”

To which Shakes would mutter under his breath in Gujerati and roll his eyes skyward,

“Kassam thi, maro warso gah na niche che!”

(“I swear my inheritance lies under that lawn!”)

Shakes was impressed by the man though, and thought his eccentricity a sign of independence, of not wanting to fit into the stereotypes imposed upon a whole generation of older men. Suleiman had always wanted a cricketer for a son, and having Shakes, a virtual prodigy, in his home, delighted him.

He would tire Shakes with questions, comments and remonstrations about cricket but Shakes would always pay him his due respect and made him feel valued. It was deeply ingrained in Shakes to pay respect to his elders – their family was based upon these hierarchies and they preserved the role of everyone within them. Suleiman could sense that Shakes had come from a good family, which had its history intact, not the fragmented existence that had been his own. Even though he knew his history the lack of a living extended family meant that he was somehow without a history.

Fatima served them tea and biscuits and later cool-drinks in the living room while her father and Shake’s spoke. She was quiet and very much in awe of him. She couldn’t believe that he was actually in her home and was deeply infatuated from the start. It is reasonable; he was a superstar at 22, having already established himself at provincial level and abroad as one of the finest cricketers in the country. Newspapers followed his progress and women adored him. She was a 15 year old girl coming of age, beginning to understand her own womanhood and he was a catalyst to her. Her skin would feel his nearness to her, the warmth from his body and she would feel warm inside. At the time, Shakes was 22 and Fatima 15, seven years between them. It may seem a large amount of time between them, but it was not out of place then, and she looked older than she was. She was already very attractive, and perhaps there was also the Lolita appeal for Shakes in having a woman much younger than him. She was still a girl, but he saw more in her.

When he had four front teeth knocked out by a well hit ball into his face at silly point he had only grabbed his mouth with one hand and hung his head to the side. He was like a wounded animal that didn’t know how bad the injury really was. He just moved off to the side to show his face to the wicket-keeper who was running over when he removed his hand and saw the blood. Then the pain hit him. Until then everything was in slow motion but now he could hear the exclamations of pain around him and started to feel the looseness and dull ache of his gums, blood filling his mouth up, forcing him to bow down on one leg and release the thickened red spittle onto the grass. Lying in them, like newfound pearls, were his teeth.

“Fuck!” he thought, “what now eh? Better not lose the teeth.”

By now everyone had rushed over and team-mates were consoling him and organising help for him.

“Was there a doctor on the field?”

“Where’s he?”

“Oh, call that fullah then, that one who said he knows Chookie bhai!”

He could sense confusion amongst them, and with some help started to make his way up from his knees and started to move off the field. He didn’t want to hold up the game and make a drama of it. These things happened. He would take many full blows to the mouth in his career, some from his trusted peers, but most from the apartheid state sporting machines and white press, which sought first to buy him out, and then to diminish him when he refused their offers of concession to him. He didn’t want to be seen as ‘special’. Like Suleiman, he was also infected with the idea of equality.

When he looked up from his pearls amidst the ground there was a now familiar voice;

“Shakes - you alright?”

“Here, let me get those for you,” she said, reaching down into his pool of spittle and blood with her feminine henna framed fingers and quite matter of factly grabbing the loosened teeth out of them.”

“My fathers friend Johnny-Bhai will take you to the doctor. There’s one just around the corner and he’s still open. Don’t worry; he’s got a dentist next door so they can both have a look at you.”

She said it so matter of factly that he obeyed her without thinking. He didn’t even stop to think that she wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He took it in his stride and let himself be led by her off the field. He thought,

“She’s quite grown-up for such a young-one!”

It was a pattern in their relationship. Where he was strong, she was weak and where he weakened she grew to great strength. They would grow into an eternally locked dance of the cosmos – they were yin and yang, each with enough of the other to overlap and have a unified experience of the world that is satisfying. There was much love in that overlapping space, but it is only because of their sharing and appreciation of each others' respective yins and yangs that they were able to move forward together, sharing and bearing each others' burdens for each other when they faltered alone.

There can be no absolutes where yin and yang are concerned and both of them were no exceptions. Shakes was yang on the outside; a pillar of strength, the warrior, the jock, the samurai who could stand up against the rogue powers of the time but he was really yin on the inside. His yin came from his mother, her nature had found itself into his inner core. It was a patient core, at ease with the cycles of things, with the ability to wait and plot and see before taking action. Like water, he could feel everything in this state, making him sensitive to even the slightest inflection or deviation in the behaviours around him. He was more connected to everything because he was calm inside. Leaping fish are easier to view in calmer waters.

Cricket and women appealed to him because of their cyclic nature. In human history, most things cyclic are given a feminine essence in its interpretation and is hence yin in nature. As a batsmen; he was not bored at the change of overs and change of fielding positions every six balls. It was something which broke the nerve of other players. They would become taken up by the cycle, finding a hypnotic rhythm in them. As soon as the hypnosis would set in they would start to feel tired. They would start to feel the stiffness in their legs and backs every time they had to change overs, walking slowly across the pitch. It reminded them that there were still more cycles of overs to go and they would start to wane in focus, hitting loose shots and trying to sneak impossible runs with tired legs. The heat would drone in on their hot heads like a microwave and eventually, the cycle of each run would become an effort. They would then try to hit for the boundaries, flailing at good deliveries and starting to unravel themselves. Often, it was the psychology of a player that eroded before his performance did.

Shake’s was of a different ilk and constitution. For him, every ball was a new one. The cycle was just an opportunity to take a breather and assess things. He had the patience of a saint. His soft yin had given him what the Asian fighting masters call ‘beginners mind!’ He approached every new ball as a totally new opportunity. He didn’t labour himself trying to figure too much out when a ball was hurtling towards him. He saw it as new thing entirely from whatever came before, a new universe trapped in red which he felt out like a panther eyeing its prey. He sharpened only at the point of action. There, his yin would guide him into a flawless execution of form. Like a cracking whip all the yang that the ball had arrived with would be dispatched back to it at exactly the right angle he desired. It was like magic, but he knew his own secret. He was patient. He carried no anxiety in his frame but an open-ness to each new event, a calm with the winds of change. His yang was only perceived by those around him who didn’t understand the graceful source of his actions. He appeared as a hero, a titan, and indeed, we needed him to be one. He, like Suleiman, stepped up to a fate which went against his nature, but which he saw as a calling. When there is a call to arms, many different types of soldiers answer. He was indeed a soldier in his heart, but it was a soldiering born of love and a desire for peace, not one born of revenge.

Fatima by comparison was all yin on the outside, but she had to keep all her yang within the shade of Suleiman’s large shadow and it always remained hidden, in her core, until she had the occasion and reason to show it. On the outside, she was her costume; a patchwork of identities crafted to ease her interaction with the world, to please them with her presence. Maybe it was the way the thickness of the Transvaal accent creeped into her conversation every now and again that gave away the bits of yang waiting to emerge. Even though she was yin on the outside there was a firmness that revealed the great yang on the inside. One knew that she had boundaries if you met her in public.

Their complementary natures would provide each other with support each time one faltered or weakened. He would put her through clothing design school, from which she would quickly establish a small business which expanded into an entire factory. She wouldn’t stop there though. She would set up clinics for underprivileged women and teach them how to source, sell and sow garments. She passed her skills on without prejudice and thought for monopoly. She even withdrew when her business grew too big, selling it and using the sales to help Shake’s establish a haberdashery warehouse who was then selling women’s swimwear out of the back of his car in various neighbourhoods. He was not a person fuelled by personal pride; he would make an effort to feed his family. His pride was a collective one, one which rested in a belief system rather than his personal make-up. But it was not a job without hazards,

“Imagine having one of the most desirable men in the country appear at your home with bikini’s to sell? I wonder how women responded to that?”

Fatima would taunt herself with these thoughts and grow jealous. Maybe she had serious ulterior motivations for funding his new business effort so heavily, but it was in her nature to deal with things rather than dwell on the sources of unhappiness.

In her marriage to him she’d arrive wearing her costume to his home. She was aware, that it was an item of great beauty but still felt inside that it was ‘pieced together’. It wasn’t real!

“Maybe like me?”

She would feel guilty when these thoughts assailed her and she would push them out of her mind. She loved strongly and her mothers love meant so much to her that she refused to allow herself to desecrate this love with these thoughts. She fought it and wore her costume proudly every day. After all, she did have a history, even though it was wrapped up in a patchwork of people, places and identities that only she knew of. Hers came from the close family she’d grown up in. Suleimans brothers who’d arrived in South Africa had also had families by the time she was a child and they were a poorer but loving network of people who openly hugged and made displays of affection towards each other. In spite of hardships, she’d always felt that this family was what had carried them all through. Everyone knew how difficult Suleiman could be, so other family members took on different roles, imparting little bits of knowledge they thought would help her in the world.

She had already learnt a value system, and it came into conflict with her new family at first as she interpreted their inability to hug and kiss, or allow boys and girls or even fathers and daughters (after a certain age) from being too physically close. She saw it as cold family, but she later learnt that she was mistaken. They were just not outward about their feelings in the same way. In their family, not everything you felt needed to be spoken or demonstrated. She was still young then, a student at technikon, taking in the sights and sounds of Durban, getting accustomed to the differences from the Transvaal. It must have been difficult for her in many ways but every time she faltered, Shakes would be there standing strong. She knew he was there for her and he knew she needed to know that. They argued a lot at first too; but he soon, with his inner wisdom of yin and patience, was able to assess her nature and make the leap that he was not required to talk too much; just to provide love and support. She would come to him when she needed his opinion, and she respected it deeply. He loved that about her.

To view the previous chapter of Fatima please click here

To view the next chapter of Fatima click here

Searching for you

2016-04-28T02:08:00.001-07:00

Searching for you,

I found,

Eternity,

Through you,

I can see,

Through my tempest seas,

And into me,

How every moment,

And every touch,

Has brought me,

To you,

Eternally you,

I hungered,

After you,

In every life,

Through every inch of strife,

To be near you,

I chose any fate,

Thrown to earth,

I clamoured in the Guff,

And called Gods bluff,

To be near you,

I carved through stone,

And every thing I know,

Says I cannot grow,

Cannot go,

A real day,

Without you,

I need you,

And can’t leave you,

Alone

I stand accused,

My reluctant muse,

Of thoughts unspoken,

And held too close,

Dishonest words,

And bravado jokes

I hoped my poetry,

And attempts at books you see,

Would bring you close to me,

The real side of me,

Always playing with you,

My childhood friend,

I would bend time,

To find that rhyme,

That makes you mine

Am I Kahlil?

Seeking out his cup,

Again,

In another lifetime

Even now,

I wait in vain,

And I knew how to do my thing,

Until I felt your sting,

And went bumbling within,

To find you,

And find you I did,

A million lifetimes with kids,

And every time you hid,

And teased me just a bit,

To let me know,

That I should never quit

And quit I never will,

I know your heart isn’t still,

I know it rustles and shakes,

When my voice breaks,

So, on my knees I’ll beg,

Please don’t leave me here again

Real love is Magical,

Mystical,

Spiritual

I adore you,

And want more of you,

Addiction,

To worship you,

Constantly you,

Everywhere

My pretense,

Is past tense,

Strengthened and weakened,

Leaning over your fence,

I have no defence,

It makes no sense,

Like Incense,

How long,

I burn,

For you,

Everywhere I turn,

It’s you,

And only you,

My Eternal glue,

Now unbounded,

Clearly I see you

2005: Juju’s Secret

2016-04-28T01:58:00.002-07:00

The darkroom had unlocked the hidden secret that accompanied his elevated consciousness whenever caught in the flash of the camera … as the illustration emerged on each page when placed in the developer, he would see both the complete pasts and futures of all those he had photographed. It was as if that lightning strike had connected him to the Universe, and by taking his mother, he had become its prescience guided child, enfolded in an inter-dimensional universe whenever light captured an image, and fixed it into time. The camera, as he saw it, was more than a window upon the world, it was a microscope, and his gift, was being able to penetrate the mysteries of the voyeur lust that accompanies every camera purchase – a greed to capture moments in history that convey meaning about who we are, and what we want to be. He could actually know, for those moments, everything about what was happening, and why. The realisation left him reeling. He had only just completed a degree in journalism and got himself a desk-job with a local paper, writing up petty (and sometimes not so petty) crimes for a senior writer, to whom he was apprenticed. He’d always focused on writing, but he had no idea that the camera would eventually provide him with his ultimate lens on reality, so to speak. He’d decided to take the introductory photography class more as an afterthought than an action. What on earth could this all mean? Was he some kind of superhero, with special powers, or was he a madman?There was nothing to do but wait and see.

To read the previous chapter of Juju click here

Fatima Chapter 5 |1970: Newspaper Cuttings

2016-04-28T01:54:00.003-07:00

She had a favourite picture of him, a newspaper cutting, which she carried in her school blazer pocket for two years until it fell out one day making her secret known to Safi. It didn’t matter by then though, for every second girl in her school had a picture of him hidden away somewhere, and it didn’t seem at all abnormal. It seemed quite healthy for a teenage girl to be smitten by an idol in contemporary culture. By then, her love had grown to epic proportions. She was one of the few girls she knew who actually had contact with him, and her personality had begun to blossom outwards from the status that brought her within the peer group. Suleimans occupation had ensured her the opportunity of having regular contact (albeit innocent at this stage) with Shakes.

She was fifteen when he made his intentions known by starting to pay courtship visits to her home. Who could disapprove? He was the decent type;

“Could have any girl he wanted.”

What was it that attracted him to her? Was it her sense of duty or her teenage infatuation and her excitability at the very sight of him, which she would never lose throughout her life. Maybe it was all these things or maybe it was a simple desire on his part to have a girl whom he felt he could mould into a woman and thus ensure that she embodied all the characteristics he desired. It’s not easy to tell. History and memories can be muddled by our need to preserve what is contemporary. Sometimes we’d rather not know the truth because it makes the present impossible to bear. Too much history weights us down because our tools of analysis are too plain to give justice to experience. To miss the experience is to miss it forever. No amount of digging can reveal more than possible motivations for an action and his actions made sense in the time they occurred. There can be no doubt that love had taken hold, and no rational explanations need be given to explain that.

There are some who believe that we never truly love more than we project affections that we have an intrinsic need to share, into somebody else. We elevate them and invest them with qualities we wish we could enjoy forever. When love fails, it is our failure to realise these qualities that hurt most. We have needs, powerful needs that drive us to the limits of sanity in order to satisfy them.

Fatima had strong needs. She’d inherited her father’s idealism. It reflected in her need to order the world around her. She had an expert feel for creating an ordered environment. Everything had its place. Strangely, this would manifest itself through her life in many ways, the ultimate of which would be her need to find a place into which she could fit herself. It would be as if the need for order around her had actually been a need to define herself constantly, so that she could be secure and sure of the constancy of things. This had a profound effect on the way she loved. She invested the object of her affections with the qualities she most desired in order to preserve her need for constancy and security. He became the ideal man. He could do no wrong, Shakes was everything in her life. He would be all she would need. It was truly a naïve teenage love, and reality was still being painted into the years of her life.

She looked forward to her moments alone with him. They were mostly supervised. He was careful to preserve the authority of her parents, obeying the traditional manner of courtship to an admirable degree. There was no doubting his intentions or his sincerity and he was admired by all in her family. There were impressed by his mixture of humility and quiet charm and it was evident in his success that his quiet strength ran deep. They were grateful of his demeanour and he soon became a guest in their home.

She adored him, doted on him, yet in her girlish way she teased him; trying here and there to provoke a response from his seemingly immovable calm. It would be a constant theme in their love. His contentment with himself – as if he was an individual without a need for anyone else - would always provide her with a challenge of sorts; she would always have to extract affection from him. This was new to her, her family had always openly displayed affection and hugs and kisses were exchanged between the sexes without hesitation. For him though, affection wasn’t for open display. It was something that came in small doses and was dealt out in private.

“He was almost displaced in his nature sometimes,” she thought.

His reserve was always intact. It was an immovable veneer which never left him, even when he angered. This was the ultimate source of stability and security in her life; that he was immovable in this way. It also made her feel somehow disconnected to him though, and this would be a constant source of tension for her, the oscillating desire for stability and the need to be closer to his being would drive her to behave like a girl more than a woman later in their marriage life. Knowing him and loving him from such a young age would leave her knowing no other way to love. He knew this, and it increased his responsibility towards her and he became, in a sense, a father to her. It was only through this that she could trust him to be a father to her children.

***To view the previous chapter of Fatima please click here.
***To view the next chapter of Fatima please click here