10/29/2017 0 Comments Gogo and the Network of Live ThingsGogo: You are a true African khulu, King James. Me; What does that mean? Gogo: It means you tapped into the network. Me: The network? Gogo: The network, the network of live things. You found a rhino and you tracked it. Me: I did? Gogo: You did. I have inherited a 'gogo' here, from occult sources. "Gogo" is informal Ndebele for grandmother. I am learning Ndebele at the Alliance Francaise, twice a week. We've covered greetings -- salibonani, y'all. I am learning that Ndebele has a whole case for expressing greetings and inquiries at elders, monarchs, and rich people. Gogo Cynthia is my age, not a grandmother. But she has divined that she is, in fact, a grandmother, and it is a fact that is universally acknowledged and respected by all those who know her. She facilitates things for people, a connector between this and that, this person and that person. A 'fixer' in some registers, a 'hustler' in others, with none of the negative connotations of either, trust me. She is scrappy and delightful. She found (out/about/) herself at the Matopos, a spiritual place for the Ndebele, full of centuries-old rock art, and unfettered wildlife, and the grave of Cecil Rhodes. I went there yesterday in my new beat-up old blue Mazda, Sheryl, to be distinguished from the old new blue Mazda at home, nameless. Sheryl merits a name because she merits praise; a low-bottomed two-wheel-driver, she navigates rocky, uneven, one-track dirt roads like a real pro. I praise her every time we lever over a gully or ditch, every time I forget there are unmarked speed bumps on the busy road to campus, every time her acceleration falters and then grabs, every time her brakes slam shut when a herd of slowmoving sable skeptically cross the road. I didn't expect to see as much as I saw, through the grey hanging mist of a deeply unseasonably cold spring day. It seemed the herald of the rainy season, but we've had two false starts already. I was driving along a gutted road that suddenly opened in a high valley nestled in the bald grey domes of the hills. Out of the corner of my eye something large lumbered; impossibly; 100 meters away. It oscillated between pendulous, butt-first lengthwise ambling and perpendicular profile glory. It was a rhinoceros. It was glorious. Above, blood lily. Below, gratuitous dikdik pic. Photo Credit: James Arnett, @Matopos National Park. N.b. Not all of my posts are going to be about literature, although you must click here for a glorious short story by Doris Lessing called 'Sunrise on the Veld,' about a young man - much younger than I - contemplating maturity in the terrible scene of the death of a small antelope.
No dikdiks were harmed in the taking of that photo. That dikdik was just insolently picking his way across the clearing on his beautifully prancy hooftoes.
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10/17/2017 0 Comments Of Mines & Migrants in Johannesburgfor Chattanooga Organized for Action, a perpetual source of inspiration Last week, my Zimbabwean bureaucracy saga finally came to a temporary close, with a requisite trip from Bulawayo to Harare to pick up the temporary employment permit that means I can finally begin teaching at the university here. One hasn’t always had to go to Harare for such things, but that is apparently The Way of Things Now. I’ve taken plenty of buses in my life, and Zimbabwean buses are no better or worse than any others, but a seven-hour bus ride is a seven-hour bus ride, and in my time-sensitive haste to organize travel – I was given seven days to organize the trip up before I was unable, even, to renew a tourist visa – I tacked on a weekend trip to Johannesburg, one last relaxing hurrah before teaching began in earnest. One of the most interesting things about Johannesburg, noticeable immediately from air and land, is how much of the urban area of the city – population around eight million all told – is colonized by active or discarded mining sites. Johannesburg as a population and economic center specifically grew up around mining, and on the backs of the enslaved, pressed, extorted, and migrant labourers who backbreakingly shovelled the earth’s wealth out by hand. The underbelly of many cities is ecologically and economically grotesque – although you might enjoy drinking Goose Island beer, for instance, from Chicago, the brewery is located atop an old slaughterhouse/abbatoir run-off site; much of lower Manhattan is built up on discarded trash and oyster shells from its earliest inhabitants; and there are giant hills circling the city of Sour (Tyre), Lebanon, just outside of the city center – which are composed entirely of snail shells that were discarded in the labor-intensive practice of extracting purple dyes from them during the Phoenician eras; and the elevated park in downtown Atlanta is built on the architecture left behind by elevated urban railways meant to convey goods from warehouse to warehouse (see also NYC’s Highline Park). But in all of the above cases, these places were creatively reclaimed – and in many cases aggressively gentrified – in the service of creating urban density. Johannesburg’s inner city has, for decades, been a place of concentrated poverty, crime, and despair. Indeed, when I spoke to a police officer there, he told me to leave – get out of downtown before sundown because there was no way I’d get out alive. Everyone everywhere knows of the spectacular violence of South African cities. Zimbabweans inclined to complain about their own economy and muse wistfully about the wealth that side nevertheless pull themselves up and remark on the terrible violence. At least that’s not a concern here, everyone will say; we can at least live our lives here. But the crime that side...eish. In Jo’burg, not so much. The first time I flew over Jozi, I noticed that the land beneath was urban sprawl – lateral, attenuated stretches of asphalt and streetlights and highway stretching out in all directions. And like many megalopolises – one might think of Dallas/Forth Worth, where I grew up, or the Austin-San Antonio corridor, or the entire upper East Coast of America – city blends into city, as Pretoria stretches south to Jozi’s northward grasp. But in the middle of all of this: flattened pyramidal shapes of shifted land, guttering leftover flats, barren, trash-filled craters. In downtown, in the ‘Newtown’ section of the city, where urban rehabilitation is slowly moving forward, crystallizing around a theatre and museum complex, there is the Worker’s Museum. Not wholly impressive as a museum – there are only a handful of informative signs, and a lofted room with a timeline of South African labour – it is nevertheless evocative, a preserved example of a worker’s hostel from the early 20th century. Worker’s hostels have been a feature of Jozi life from its inception; after all, the interior of South Africa was colonized hastily precisely because of the discovery of mineral wealth – diamonds and gold – that in turn pushed the rapacious Rhodes north in what he called Rhodesia, and I now live in as Zimbabwe. From the beginning, Africans were pressed into mining labour by the colonial government – often due to the invention and imposition of hut, dog, and poll taxes – whereby colonizers could require the locals who had always lived there to suddenly have to “pay” for their “keep.” And so able-bodied men were often tricked into signing labour contracts that kept them bonded to mining companies for six months, a year, two years, five. On a beautifully breezy Saturday morning, I parked my car in Braamfontein and sought out the Neighbourgoods Market. Housed in a reclaimed parking deck, this once-a-week market concentrates all sorts of delicious foods – from biltong to milk tarts to paella – and the sorts of hipster handicrafts that people in my class adore. I bought a framed picture of a dinosaur. (I am no immune to acculturated charms.) I stood on the breezy patio, looking up and down the street, to see an emerging single-file line of people in black tshirts, with duct tape over their mouths. I strained and squinted and caught a sign; it was a protest against slavery, which it should not surprise any of us continues to this day, in spite of our smug proclamations against in the 19th century. It goes by so many other forms now that it can be hard to recognize, but it’s there. “The white man who drives the lorry puts his head out and looks back. He looks long at Jabavu and at his brother, and then his head goes inside. Then a black man gets out of the front and walks back. He wears clothes like the white men and walks jauntily...’Yes, yes –you boys there! Want a lift?’ Mining labor is intensive, sometimes terrifying labor. At Newtown, just outside the Worker’s Museum, is a small boulder with a round iron plaque, in memory of all those who died in mining disasters over the decades. There’s little else to commemorate them, although all of this abuts Mary Fitzgerald Square, named after a female labor activist. Commemoration is a funny thing; it can create the conditions of official memorialisation while also discouraging active memory. In Fitzgerald Square, unattached men sprawl out on small grassy berms under smaller, shrubby trees; a man sat on an iron bench reading a paperback. I had parked nearby, and always a feature of South African life, a car attendant deputized himself to walk me to the Museum, although he didn’t know where it was. “You don’t want to go down there,” he said, pointing to an open gate next to a walled compound leading to the museum; “a woman went there yesterday and was screaming for the police, but no one came.” The terrifying echoes of the terrified woman judder in my head, reminding me of the fearless, laid-bare scholarly work of Pumla Gqola’s Rape: A South African Nightmare. We walked in the bright light of the morning, a cool spring air burning off under the crystalline sun, and he chattered at me, always reminding me that his work is remunerated, don’t I know, since I’m not from around here? The guidebook reminds you that car attendants are generally meant to be paid five rand, or ten, depending on the traffic, the likelihood that they prevented theft, the length of your parking stay. There aren’t any public parking spots that are metered or privatized, at least not nearly as many as in an American city. Chattanooga’s downtown is almost entirely parking-privatized; while the cost isn’t necessarily exorbitant, meter attendants are assiduous in applying fines and tickets to cars that haven’t coughed up the requested fees. Car attendants are therefore an entrepreneurial ambivalence: better to pay an un- or underemployed man to do passive labor in a space he otherwise inhabits than to feed a parking meter that drifts into the pockets of the owners of publicly-privatized spaces. Better to give a man money to eat and drink than pay rent on a parking space for two hours. When we celebrate entrepreneurialism, we reserve our bouquets for the Cult of Disrupters, celebrating those few whose stabs at carving an economic niche defy logic and reason, who create a need to consume where there wasn’t one before. “An ever-rising stream of shining rocks and pebbles and fine dust would travel upwards to be sifted, crushed and sorted for the fine yellow metal men love and call gold...and gold dust streamed upwards to make men wealthy and powerful.” (Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy) The inside of the workers’ quarters steam under the corrugated tin roofing in the heat of the sun. A sign explains that there were separate quarters for white men working in the mines and black men; the white mens’ quarters were no good, but the black mens’ quarters were no good at all. While the former had easier access to water, shade, and a small amount of space to share with their families, the Africans’ dormitories resemble prison camps, or concentration camps, or the hold of a slave ship: concrete three-foot-wide bed-slots running across the wall, a platform of wooden planks demarcating further sleeping areas stacked above those. African men were pointedly not allowed to have women, or children, or wives-and-families, anywhere near the mines, and as contracts often required six- or seven-days’ labour a week for a fixed period of time, few if any could return to their families, who lived outside of the towns in their traditional villages and homes. Colonialists concern-trolled these families, explaining that the conditions were too unsanitary for women and children -- but apparently not for the white women and children who lived on site, or the black men who lived on site in even worse conditions. The effect was that urban centers – especially Johannesburg – were deeply weighted towards bachelors, and women who lived in cities – a trope that continues culturally to this day in some areas – were considered immoral and fast women, present only to be taken advantage of by migrant and itinerant men. For unattached women, that was sometimes the case; if a woman was considered or considered herself unmarriageable, she might make her way to the city to try to carve out a life by hook or by crook, serving skokiaan (homebrewed ethyl alcohol spirits) or maize beer (cloudy, fermented maize-meal drinks) at shebeens (ramshackle watering holes/bars) and/or working in brothels. Under the economic and social pressures of colonialism, the family structure in Southern Africa took an immediate beating – and in South Africa in particular, the demographic patterns that were established continued apace for most of the twentieth century, even as urban spaces in Africa tended toward greater economic diversity and (slightly) less stratification. The story of any modern urban space is the story of continuous dislocation – moving the poor and undesirable to new, more undesirable places. In Chattanooga, the downtown plaza where the homeless gather during the day has been sold, rendering a public land private under the auspices of development. But the city would prefer to reserve the space – as the signs say all over southern Africa, “right of admission reserved” – for wealthier newcomers courted relentlessly with condo developments, tax incentives, and publicity campaigns. Even migrant labourers located in the heart of Johannesburg in the 1940s, formerly historically housed in city center hostels like the one that the Worker’s Museum has preserved, were also shifted off-site and out-of-mind, as the wealth of the city attracted more white workers whose white-collar skills were needed to calculate and keep track of the mineral wealth snaking its way through accounts and pockets. Townships were invented further away from the city centers, requiring workers to resettle and then shift themselves through the urban periphery to mining jobs and other menial labours. “They were near the little township now. They could see the houses clearly. And the people moving about in the yards and by the sides of the houses. This side of the township had mostly coloured people. The other side was where the native people were. This off-siting was further complicated by proto-apartheid pass laws, requiring all men to carry a paper book with the name, address and signature of their employer in the city centres that permitted them police-supervised access into and out of the city, sometimes in gates and turnstiles and entryways marked “Native” or “Coloured.” The Apartheid Museum’s opening gambit is to randomly assign its visitors “White” or “Coloured” status on the backs of their tickets, and which one you receive determines which entryway you pass through to get into the museum. It’s a crucible of sorts whose effect is minor: the white ticket holders are given access to a gently rising concrete slope, easier to stroll up than the set of stairs that confront the coloured ticket holders. The stairs aren’t enough to dissuade or tire any museum-goer, but it’s a small reminder that the way up is always more arduous for the underclass. Apartheid laws enforced the segregation of black from white, and in the ways of such things, reserved the best of all worlds for the civilized white people, leaving a carefully-maintained minimum for the unfavoured. One of the most chilling quotes adorning the walls of the Worker’s Museum was from an official government report at the turn of the 20th century wherein a Boer social scientist mused that Africans seemed to prefer airless, claustrophobic, unsanitary conditions, and so the worker’s hostels were constructed accordingly, to give them what they want. That level of insane delusion was propped up by the “science” of the day, just as phrenology and physiognomy ostensibly “proved” the savagery and criminality of nonwhites, or the Moynihan Report pointed out the faux-inherent instability of black American families. Conditions in the townships were sometimes worse than in the city-center workers’ hostels, lacking even basic sanitation and water access, lacking formal construction and creating “high-density” peri-urban spaces that persist to this day. The founding of Bulawayo, for instance, pioneered just such an urban construction, leaving the wide avenues of the city for whites to live, do business in, and play; the peri-urban high-density areas of Mzilikazi and Makokoba were constructed in the obviously less salubrious Western districts of the city, upwind from the abbatoirs and slaughterhouses, and literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. “He turned a corner and suddenly became aware of Malay Camp. Became aware of it as he had not been before. When I left the Apartheid Museum, located next to the Disneyfication of Johannesburg’s mining past – Gold Reef City, a gaudy theme park with rollercoasters and festival foods – I pulled out in search of a bookstore I knew to be located on the other side of town. But the GPS unit in the car told me the address was surprisingly near, and I followed it, driving through industrial parks that fronted and fringed former mining sites. A few turns past crypto-suburban strip malls, and I passed a sign that blazoned “Welcome to Soweto!” In front of the sign, a group of beaming white teenagers stood and mugged and snapped photos, making peace signs. The guidebook advises that there are now dozens of tour operators in Soweto and other former townships, and that they are all really quite good, and worth the half-day trip to walk the winding streets, taking note of historical violences and peering at the houses of South Africa’s 20th century great men, who streamed up from Soweto, emboldened and angered by the enstructured poverty and violence that attended their youths. I’ve written elsewhere about poverty tourism; many people have. I fear that it encourages the preservation of unequal economic conditions under the neoliberal celebration of resilience and packaged under the rubric of ethical bourgeois consumption. These white teens did nothing to ameliorate these fears, and although I too enjoy visiting sites that point to the triumph of human spirit over adversity, Soweto is a real, still living place. It is not evacuated, emptied of still-suffering human life; nor is it anymore as bad as it once was, although never uniformly. The streets I now steered down erroneously showed the density of these urban spaces even as many of the shanties and shacks were gone, replaced by cement-walled, small houses, spaces for a burgeoning lower-middle-class, tiny postage stamp yards with squares of petunias. The streets were recently-paved and riddled with debris; the pedestrians on the street peered curiously at me, likely unfazed by the presence of yet another white person visiting their neighbourhood, however erroneously. Plots erupted from these ordered homes irregularly, trash-strewn shortcuts between blocks, ringed with murals that proclaimed sensible policies about safe sex and against child abuse, letters fading on crumbling walls. There were street-stall barbershops and shebeens, produce vendors and a “sneaker washer” industriously polishing the white shell leather of Adidas kicks to a sheen. The Apartheid Museum displayed in a half-dozen places and a half-dozen different contexts, images of the political organization that came out of the density and shared grievances of the townships. These images are famous markers of the cruelty of the apartheid system and its enforcement. There is the self-shocking joy of the men holding their passbooks, flames crawling up its pages and twisting the image, casting light on this act of supreme civil resistance. Police men on the backs of trucks gripping weapons, seconds before opening fire on the massing crowds in Sharpeville. The most iconic image from this terrible event appears to be from a horror film, or stolen from the darkest recesses of the Vietnam War: men and women frantically scattering across a field, penned in by barbed-wire fences, gunned down, live bodies leaping over fallen ones in a desperate attempt to break away from the death pulsing towards them in short bursts. These photos don’t differ too much from the violent response to student protests in Soweto, also captured in black and white, men and women frantically craning their heads back to take stock of those taking aim at them, sprinting towards the unseeable cameraman dutifully recording the slaughter. “The pulsating motion of Malay Camp at night was everywhere. Warm and intense and throbbing. And while Soweto and other townships were the crossroads of spectacular resistance and even more spectacular violence, there was nothing fantastic about Soweto now that you might note except, precisely, its normalcy. Gone were the armoured vehicles of apartheid, now planted in museums, broken glass panes testifying to their heavy use. Gone, too, are the pass books, replaced in some ways by the minibuses plying the roads, taking poor workers in and out of the city center to work retail, clean offices, drive buses, service hotels, man garages, gather scrap, sell goods, make a living. There is no pass book but there is bus fare, small as it might be, and the gears of capitalism replace obvious boundary lines with intangibly priced barriers to entry and passage. A persistent beggar’s refrain was no different from the stories encountered at American gas stations and no less tragic for it: “Please, sir, I just need a few rand to catch the bus home to my family. I need to catch a bus, any amount will help.” Even if Soweto has stabilized, mainstreaming towards the de rigeur economic stratification of the 21st century, South Africa is still a deeply unequal society. While living conditions for Africans have improved – the cities boast potable water and regular electricity, infrastructure developed and developing, wages governed by on-the-books minimums – its distribution is wildly unequal and some of the inequality has turned. The internalized barriers between racial haves and have-nots is still everywhere apparent in the leafy and traffic-jammed suburb of Sandton, whose billboards boast it has the wealthiest square kilometres in Africa and whose malls contain Western chains and luxury stores, from Guess to Gucci. Workers clump on street sides there, waiting for minibuses to take them back to lives of decidedly less luxury, as apartment buildings fringed with cement walls and stationed security guards rise up on each side of the jammed streets, while the white and black middle and upper classes steer their gleaming cars into parking garages and down thoroughfares glutted with the visible trappings of consumption. Instead of racial bars, there are class-based shibboleths; there are cars and minibuses; there are tailored buttondown shirts and blouses, and blue-and-neon jumpsuits. And there is also the persistent and pervasive logics of belonging and not-belonging. Even the poorest South African is impressed by the utopian promises of the post-Apartheid constitution, a document that promises equality even for groups whose recognition in the 1990s was tenuous at best in more developed countries – queer people and disabled people were explicitly recognized as critical segments of society. But this logic of belonging has taken on its own potent logics of exclusion, too. The beacon of South African democracy and its post-Apartheid success story act as a draw to suffering African others fleeing violence and instability elsewhere. South Africa, like America, has learned to make places for the most accomplished migrants, capitalizing on the educational successes and costs borne elsewhere by now-less-successful societies that have succumbed to disorder or kleptocracies. And migrant labour is still the beating heart of South Africa’s industrial and service sectors, hostels still exist everywhere throughout Johannesburg, although not quite as concentrated and segregated as before. In the 1990s, migrants to South Africa were white Rhodesians who could not accustom themselves to living in an independent Zimbabwe, or Mozambicans fleeing the continuing civil unrest after decades of civil war. In the 20th century, especially after the Zimbabwean hyperinflationary crisis of 2008, the border at Beitbridge saw a stream of people fleeing from suddenly boneshattering poverty, teachers and civil servants now un- or underpaid for the labor that required educational investments. The scripts for who belongs and who doesn’t are always-already in place, demarcating social boundaries inside geographical ones. But the self-same scripts that circulated black African bodies out of town centers and into locations, townships, and Bantustans, and which still exert force as economic vectors, are also mobilized through false consciousness to describe the otherness of foreign nationals within the coalescing logic of post-Apartheid South African nationalism. “’Yes, it must be the migrant workers from the hostels,’ various people in the crowd shouted angrily. ‘They have killed a lot of our people, and all we do is sit here and keep on talking peace. Are we men or just scared rats?’ Money coalesces fear, drives violence. Age-old logics of scarcity and unequal distribution beget burgeoning fears of an invasive other come to take what little has trickled down. Accumulation is not seen to be the, or a, problem, but rather it is the undesirable and unknowable other who has come to carve out a living from the little there is to go around. This fear motivates xenophobia elsewhere, as in the spectral Mexicans crossing the border to take “our” jobs in America, or the spectrally violent “Mexican rapists” that Trump decried in his opening salvo at the presidency. No matter that such proclivities are violent, projective phantasies; no matter that statistics, in the American context anyway, bear out that immigrants are far less violent, and far more socially stable than most white Americans. Xenophobia crystallizes fear in at-hand scripts handily generated by the 19th-century logics of nationalism and nation-state. Kopano Matlwa’s novel Period Pain records precisely this xenophobia, depicting educated Zimbabweans in South Africa seeking stable employment but met at every turn with crude beliefs and cruel shunning. The things that “everyone” in Mda’s novel “knows” – that the foreign other is beholden to some power other than the one that every local bows down to – be it Mammon or Parliament – are convenient fictions that work as well as physical borders in ascertaining belonging. Violence has erupted since the exodus of Zimbabweans from the crumbling 21st century economy, a torrent in the wake of hyperinflation, but a continuous stream of temporary and migrant workers, students seeking a better education from their own rightful teachers who have fled south for liveable wages. “Throughout the day the TV has been ablaze with burning shacks, burning shops and burnt people. The streets are crawling with bloodthirsty men calling for foreigners to leave the country. Nyasha came home after me and went straight to her room and hasn’t stirred since. So I watched the news alone with the sound on mute. They showed images of a naked man being dragged by a mob of boys, blood gushing from his head, and then an image of a group of policemen pouring water over the body of an elderly woman. Hammers, axes, knives, bottles, sticks, rocks, men, women, children, animals everywhere. In spontaneous eruptions of xenophobic violence, foreigners were often brutally attacked, seemingly at random, collared with tyres that were set on fire. Neil Blomkamp’s movie District 9 famously metaphorizes this “alien invasion” as real aliens invading Johannesburg, absorbing the fierce ire of South Africans angry and fearful at the perceived loss of their small chances at success. Xenophobia quite apparently contains the roots of the language of aliens – “xeno,” which the dictionary notes can be glossed as “alien,” “strange,” or “guest,” each of these roots spelling an entirely different tenor. “Alien” is the language preferred by those who aspire to paint the other as radically other, unassimilable; see the American language of “illegal alien,” that curiously redundant construction that denies both hope and humanity to the immigrant. They are “illegal,” and thus contravening by their essential nature the laws of ‘our’ land; they are “aliens,” marauding extraterrestrials bent on eating our brains, and land, and wealth. An indelible image from America’s recent xenophobic past is burnt into my brain. Honduran children, bravely navigating absolutely treacherous pathways through Central America and Mexico, arrived at the border of Texas seeking asylum from certain death and damning impoverishment. They were funnelled onto buses to be shipped to frigid holding cells where they awaited trial and were often returned; although surely in that moment, the children held out a small hope that they might find shelter and stability. That minor hope was shattered by a self-appointed cadre of white women who frisked up and down the side of those recommissioned schoolbuses, slamming the panels and shouting “GO BACK” and other things too disgusting to repeat. Children who had faced violence and had the wherewithal to flee it were ruthlessly singled out by self-righteous vigilantes bent on protecting us from them – they who knew they were not themselves strong enough to withstand violence, nor desirous of becoming one with a system that might require them, in turn, to inflict violence on those smaller than themselves. Home fires are burning – others, and for self. “Things are spiralling out of control. One of the Nigerian doctors was spat on by a patient yesterday. According to the other interns, the patient said she didn’t want to be examined by a cockroach. Many of the foreign doctors are now saying they don’t feel safe coming to work... On my last morning in Johannesburg, I stopped by a Maboneng coffee stall to get a smoothie and to sit on the sidewalk, basking for better or worse in the familiar bourgeois comforts of urban gentrification. I struck up a conversation with the bespectacled woman spinning the hissing steamwand and shaking out my smoothie into a plastic cup. I asked her how things were, and heard the familiar “Eishhh,” at which I let drop that I was visiting from Bulawayo.
“Bulawayo! So you are from Zimbabwe!” Well, not quite, but for the time being, yes. “Did you take the bus? I am from that area. Gwanda: do you know it? You passed through it on the road to Beitbridge.” No, I said, I took a plane; but I was familiar with Gwanda, a growing town with a new university, a growth-point in the chain stretching down towards South Africa’s economic safety. “Ehhhh, and how much does a plane ticket cost to this side?” (“This side,” I smiled to myself. This side, that side, the ambiguous linguistic markers that supplant ‘here’ and ‘there’ in Zimbabwean speech.) “Oh, not a lot, but still too much. $350 US if you’re lucky?” “Eishhh, that is too much. At Christmas” (Anthony, the trainer at the gym, just asked me today if I was going home to ‘that side’ – America – at “Kissimuss,” which he gleefully told me is Ndebele from “Christmas”)—“At Christmas, I will go home to my family in Gwanda on the Intercape.” Oh! I take the Intercape all the time between Bulawayo and Harare, I said. It is a nice bus. “Oh yes, it is niiice, although the border takes so long to cross,” she said, referencing the long queues at Beitbridge chocked with runners and migrants and tourists. “I will only go home at Christmas,” she said crisply. She glazed over a little, clearly nostalgic for a home that was no longer economically viable. There was too little space for success for her in Zim, at least at the moment, but always the hope of returning for more than a holiday. I have no idea who, or how many, she has left behind. I know nothing more of her than she told me, and that I could construct out of the dregs of sociology and statistics. “Next year in Jerusalem,” observant and repentant Jewish people say at the conclusion of Yom Kippur services – next year in the home of their fathers, to be buried and find peace in ancestral homelands. “Babylon system is the vampire, yeah / sucking the children day by day, yeah / I say the Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire / sucking the blood of the sufferers, yeah / Building church and university, yeah / Deceiving the people continually, yeah / I say they are graduating thieves and murderers, yeah, / Look out now, they are sucking the blood of the sufferers,” goes Bob Marley. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion,” goes the Psalm. “Now the joy of my world is in Zion,” goes Lauryn Hill. Either way, we’re looking for home, a place to belong to that’s more enduring than the world we inhabit. We are cast out into the world, seeking shelter and success, a space to call home, aliens everywhere but here, this side, where home is, or there, that side, where home was. [speech given at Pamberi Trust's 'Celebration of Yvonne Vera,' Harare, National Gallery, October 3, 2017]
In Memory There is no question that Yvonne Vera’s work holds a special place in both Zimbabwean and African literature. But by virtue of her lyricism, her ambition to depict a broad sweeps of histories otherwise swept under the rug, her literature is a truly world literature – uncovering common humanity, carving out a space for the experience of women under colonial violences, revealing and reevaluating, too, the societies meant to give black African women rights and shelter. She spares no one, but her voice is not overwhelming or condemning. Like Nonceba’s survival in The Stone Virgins, there is a way through history, a way to live with and past the terrible violences that continue to haunt contemporary Zimbabwe. In this way, I see a tremendous affinity between Vera’s work and those of the American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Her mother, Ericah Gwetai, makes mention of the fact that Vera re-read The Bluest Eye every year on her birthday; that novel, about the essential confusion about growing up black and abused, in a world that fetishized whiteness and power, has clear echoes all across Vera’s work, which poignantly looks at the racial dynamics intertwined with colonial dynamics in Rhodesia’s, and then Zimbabwe’s, 20th century. Both women write of the heinous violences inflicted on the most vulnerabled – and I use this in the past tense to foreground that vulnerability to violence is anything but essential, but rather something ideologically imposed. And both women skirt the usually bland celebratory bromides about women’s strength. In October 2017, I attended the Women, Wine, and Words event as part of Bulawayo’s Intwasa Arts Festival. Five talented female poets from Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and the UK came together to perform their work. One of the common threads that ran through almost all of the poets’ work was this: “I’m tired” – tired of many things – of being underappreciated and rhetorically overvalued, denigrated and vaunted simultaneously. Indigo Williams’s take on this theme was particularly poignant; she began by talking about how, paradoxically, it is frustrating and wonderful to be taken as a “strong black woman.” But what of the days, she wondered, when it was hard to get out of bed? What of the times when her vulnerability was at the fore, and strength something hard to muster? How does one live in between strength and vulnerability without being consumed? Vera’s work, like Morrison’s, isn’t afraid of boasting of the resilience of women and also depicting their vulnerability. Vera gives us women that fight as much as they can – as much as can be expected – and break, too. No one can stand the onslaught of dehumanizing violence without cracking, and Vera’s lyrical novels assemble those broken pieces into something like stained glass – illuminating and awe-inspiring. We Need New Names “Muzhanje is the name of a fruit from Chimanimani, in the eastern highlands, whose seed this man has brought stuck to the bottom of his pocket, then planted it in her mouth like a gift, days and days after they have met. She has stopped considering time and only considers him.” (Stone Virgins 43) The passion with which Vera writes characters whose lives have already been – or about to be – ruthlessly scarred by violence and by history – serves as a tonic to run-of-the-mill arguments that representations of violence are abstractly dehumanizing. The way Vera writes violence does precisely the opposite – it renders their humanity palpable and real, not dominated by their place in history, but continuous with history, running alongside it, occasionally, cruelly, pierced by it. The opening section of The Stone Virgins – the lull before the violence consumes us – depicts Kezi, and the Thandabantu Store, and Thenjiwe, and her lover. Thenjiwe hones in on her lover, full of him: “She brings home the man who gives her all her hips, who embraces her foot, who collects her shadow and places it right back in her body as though it were a missing part of herself, and she lets him gaze into her eyes till they both see stars through their tears. In the deep dark pool of her eyes the man sees places he has never been, she has never been” (SV 43). He has brought this strange fruit to her – the muzhanje, the name Thenjiwe chooses for her dream child, impossibly conceived in mind only. She understands this native fruit – native, unlike the “Host of eucaplytus trees redolent; their scent euphoric,” or the jacarandas casting their blooms over Bulawayo’s streets, or the “fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia and mauve petrea bushes” in Centenary Park, each of these plants an importation, a colonial transplant from the Antipodes and Caribbean and the reaches of the British Empire (SV 10). There can be a beauty in these transplants, Vera observes, but the muzhanje is the fruit that ignites Thenjiwe’s fascination. It is local and not – brought from a distant within, exotically local. The colonial place names that open The Stone Virgins, its catalogue of Selborne, Fort, Main, Grey, Abercorn, Fife, Rhodes, Borrow streets, depict Bulawayo as it could officially be known and indexed, not unlike the catalogue of imported flowers that brighten Centenary Park. But that Bulawayo is one that is ultimately condemned to living as the past, a town prey to the homogenizing urban forces that render cities similar. Instead, Thenjiwe’s lover wants to taste the real place, not ‘Rhodesia,’ but Zimbabwe: to see “more than Bulawayo, after coming all the way from Chimanimani he wanted to see the Mopani shrubs, the Mtshwankela, the Dololenkonyane, the balancing Matopo Hills, the gigantic anthills of Kezi.” (45) Colonialism didn’t make Africa go away, not under its gridded streets and imported street names, nor under its imported jacaranda trees. Africa lived alongside imperial Africa, contained in the places whose names are not forgotten, nor replaced, the flora native and indigenous and resilient. The work of reclaiming spaces, Vera writes, is only partially about effacing the names of the colonizers who controlled and wrangled and dictated. It is also about recognizing that the old names were always the names, no matter what dressing was applied. Strange Fruit There is much strange fruit in Vera’s work – fruit that is literally strange, that compels consumption, like the native-but-distant muzhanje fruit. Thenjiwe wants to know all about it, suspects that there is something important, resilient, productive in it. “She rises...to ask him on what soil the muzhanje grows, how long before each new plant bears fruit, how fertile its branches, how broad its leaf. She rises to ask what kind of tree the seed comes from, the shape of its leaves, the size of its trunk, the shape of its branches, the colour of its bloom, the measure of its veins” (46). The muzhanje, Thenjiwe believes, may give her access to tradition and place in a way that street signs misdirected and obfuscate. She, like Alex Haley’s displaced Africans in America, wants to understand roots – literal and figurative. “Thenjiwe knows that the roots of trees have shapes more definite than leaves,” Vera writes in The Stone Virgins. The surface is merely coincidental to the way that the tree grows in ground, rooted in place. Thenjiwe, before the violence that forecloses her life, seeks the strength of rootedness, of rediscovering place, and of forging a real relationship to it, grounded in loving and knowing. This phrase “strange fruit” has a particularly American history; it is the name of the famous Billie Holliday song, penned by Abel Meeropol, it decries the American practice of extradjudicial killings of black men – a practice we historically call lynching, but these days I fear we just call “policing.” It metaphorized the lynched bodies of black men, darkly describing the methods of white supremacy to control and subjugate populations of color. Chester Himes, the African-American writer, remarked that “no one, no one, writes about violence the way Americans do. As a matter of fact for the simple reason that no one understand or expresses violence like the American civilians do. American violence is public life, it is a public way of life, it became a form...” But that isn’t exclusively true – black Zimbabwean writers have managed to develop a sophisticated language to describe the unspeakable, and Vera’s associative novels leave the reader breathless in the wake of horror, not unlike this moment in The Stone Virgins, the prevision of finality that afflicts Thenjiwe suddenly: “Muzhanje. Thenjiwe flicks the seed to the roof of her mouth and pushes the man aside, way off the bed. She has been hit by an illumination so profound, so total, she has to breathe deep and think about it some more. She wants to lie down, in silence.” (SV 44) But there is other strange fruit, too, in Vera, as in the grisly tableau that opens Butterfly Burning, of the mass hanging of men...”The dead men remain in the tree for days. Their legs tied together, their hands hanging close to their stomachs. Toes are turned down to the ground as though the body would leap to safety. The foot curls like a fist, facing down. The feet of dancers who have left the ground. Caught. Surprised by something in the air which they thought free. The limbs smooth and taut, of dancers in a song with no words spoken. A dance denied. A blossom in a wind. A dark elegy” (BB 11). It takes great creativity and fortitude to render such a horrific scene so approachable and, dare I say, beautiful. It is not a beauty that celebrates violence or death in any way, but one that, as I argued before, humanizes its victims. In this passage, seventeen men are lynched in 1896, strange fruit overripe, cut short by the overzealous, overreaching, paranoiac violence at the heart of the founding of Rhodesia. “It is not a place with large trees,” Vera writes with dismay and wonder, “This tree, like these deaths, is a surprise. Away from the Umguza River which sings a lullaby each morning whatever the season, there are no trees” (BB 12). Terence Ranger recalls of Vera their trip to the Cyrene Mission outside of Bulawayo, where she went to see the art and murals, and where Vera “saw for the first time the enlarged version of the photo of African men, captured in 1896 [during the Second Matabeleland War, as the English call it; the first Chimurenga as it should be known], hanging from a tree. She was astonished that the photograph fitted so exactly with her description of hanging men at the beginning of Butterfly Burning, the sense of the men swimming in the air, being as vivid in the photograph as in the book” (Petal Thoughts 90). Vera’s historical imagination was strong enough to conjure the horror of the scene, so in touch was she with history and culture, and with what Toni Morrison in Beloved, calls “re-memory.” Rememory In Morrison’s Beloved, when Sethe is escaping the unthinkable violence of her slave plantation, seeking to give birth to her last child in freedom, she encounters the kindly Amy Denver, who massages her feet, and remarks, “Anything dead coming back to life hurts,” a painful description and a prophecy. Vera writes, continuing the gruesome scene, “[The women] are not allowed to touch the bodies. They do not grieve. It is better that the murdered are not returned to the living: the living are not dead. The women keep the most vital details of their men buried in their mouths” (BB 12). The women of Vera’s novel know that there is no live return from the space of the dead, no amelioration or respite, just names and impressions held silently until mourning breaks. Vera is also haunted by the permanence of violence, as if linked to troubled spots, crossroads of tribal, colonial, and nationalist violence. One of the things most relished and valued about Morrison’s work – and the work of most canonical African-American writers – is its unflagging attention to historical truths, revealing the dark side of the American colonial enterprise, with its attendant slavery; Vera’s refusal to shy away from these historical violences makes her kin to Morrison. Sethe, in Beloved, ruminates, “I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” Vera’s affirming discovery of the photo of the hanged men demonstrates the vital power of rememory – the resurgence and reality of violence in places where trauma has occurred, where the attempt to efface or move beyond that violence is fraught with its perpetual recurrence. Vera is the guardian of Zimbabwean rememory, holder of truths that are, in some cases inconvenient, or disappointing, or regrettable. Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? Her short story “Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals” gives insight, I think, into the difficulty of the work of writing Zimbabwe. The conversation between street artists - a carver and a painter - illuminates the differences between two-dimensional art, where you can add, revise, cover over, and three-dimensional art, like sculpture, that achieves a finished form that is true, even if it isn’t accurate. The painter, on the one hand, “puts the final touches on the image of the Victoria Falls which he paints from a memory gathered from newspapers and magazines. He has never seen the Falls. The water must be blue,” he thinks. He relies on this hodgepodge of hearsay and observation, but gives beauty and control the uppermost, inductively reasoning that the Falls must be blue – if water on maps is blue, if the sky is blue. He “realizes that a lot of spray from the falls must be reaching the lovers, so he paints off their heads with a red umbrella. He notices suddenly that something is missing in the picture, so he extends the lovers’ free hands, and gives them some yellow ice cream. The picture is now full of life,” he thinks (73). The painter and writer can revise, can insert, can alter and shift and move around, staying true to inductive principles but honoring beauty. But beauty is not the only end, and while Keats encourages us to believe that beauty is truth, and truth beauty, and that’s all we need to know, Vera knows better. Art is also the purview of dream and imagination. “The carver has never seen the elephant or the giraffe that he carves so ardently,” her story observes, placing him in the same category of unknowing as the painter. But unlike the painter, who aims to achieve beauty through reason and truth, the sculptor knows there are other avenues for art. “He picks up a piece of unformed wood. Will it be a giraffe or an elephant? His carving is also his dreaming” (73). Like his dreaming, each carving is different, unique; spoiled, even, like his giraffe whose paint has run, and whose neck is comically short. He may seem the lesser artist by strictly aesthetic standards, but there is no question that he is an honest man, making honest art. The “unformed wood” is the wholecloth of history, the unknowable archive of all that has been, and the writer’s access to truth is contingent on honouring the materials she works with. The two artists – the painter and the sculptor – represent the collaborative pull between beauty and honesty, between pleasure and pain, thinking and dreaming. I was doing research last year at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn’t looking for Vera’s work, but I found among Charles Larson’s papers a copy of Vera’s final, unpublished work, Obedience. I was at the end of my stay at the library – quite literally; it was to close for the weekend in an hour and I was scheduled to leave town just after. But I couldn’t help but open up and thumb through the manuscript – which begins, indelibly, with a description of the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe. These birds don’t look exactly like an extant bird – but this is not the point at all, even if it might have been a good-faith effort at mimesis. Instead, they simply are: they endure, they are beautiful. In spite of colonial thefts, an independent Zimbabwe achieved their return; they roost once more at the site of rememory, presiding near the complex stone ruins that have fascinated throughout history. The painter asks the carver in the story, “Why don’t you carve other animals?...Why do you never carve a dog or a cat? Something that city people have seen. Even a rat would be good there are lots of rats in the township!” (73). Why didn’t Vera write her stories and novels exclusively about the fascinating life she saw unfolding before her in the present? – a present that Zimbabwean readers could recognize immediately as their own? Why instead did she lyrically inhabit the past, the full sweep of local history? Probably because she understood that the greatest foundations of art lie not in the mimetic transcription of things exactly as they are now, but rather in the imaginative flight through the past into the present and back again. Rememory exists anywhere where trauma, pain, violence, extremity has occurred, and there is no place where that is not true. Petina Gappah, a vital contemporary Zimbabwean writer, recently swore in a talk at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town that she was done with writing contemporary Zimbabwe after her impressive Rotten Row appeared in print – she wanted to explore the possibilities of writing elsewheres and elsewhens, to delve into history and unearth new old stories. These modes are not mutually exclusive, but this move reverberates with Vera’s temporal rangings, and describes the difficulty and ambivalence about approaching contemporary Zimbabwe without also attending to its past. In Rememory The Harry Ransom Center holds another crucial Zimbabwean manuscript – the unfinished manuscript of Doris Lessing’s novel “The Memorykeepers.” Tendai Huchu, in a story just published in the 2017 anthology Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories by ‘amaBooks in Bulawayo, recounts this piece of local folklore: “The Great Zimbabwe Empire was built by kings under the instructions of the Memorykeepers. You have heard of them, no? Of course not. It is an old – for lack of a better word – guild that has been there for as long as our people have been around. The Memorykeepers’ task is to remember everything.” The Memorykeepers are entrusted with the whole sweep of time, of remembering all that has been in order to inform what is to come. Memorykeepers are rare indeed; not even every African literature has such an honest, exposed, and vulnerable writer. Indeed, not every African literature is capable of absorbing the persisting, the inconvenient truths. There will always be those who seek to wrest the past in service of a future that they desire, instead of honouring the past for the truths it has produced, in spite of its violences. Such manipulators of truth and history – regardless of their position or power – should never supplant those brave enough to tell us unpalatable truths about ourselves. There is no honor in easy deceit, in palatable fictions. If, as Huchu worries, “now there are fewer Memorykeepers than at any stage in the past and they cannot hold all the new knowledge that flows from the four corners of the world,” we must learn to celebrate those who have walked amongst us – giants like Vera – and those few who remain, who have access still to rememory in an era where information deceives, and truth slides, and lives nevertheless hang in the balance, feebly swimming against the wind. REFERENCES Gwetai, Ericah. Petal Thoughts. Gweru, Mambo Press, 2008. Morris, Jane, Ed. Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories. Bulawayo, ‘Amabooks, 2017. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eyes. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. --. Beloved. New York, Knopf, 1987. Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning. Harare, Baobab, 1998. --. The Stone Virgins. Harare, Weaver Press, 2002. --. Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? Toronto, TSAR, 1992. |
AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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