“In My Country” Crónica

12 July, 2005 Los Angeles, CA.
For Wim Lindeque, Melanie “Miss Mellie” Maree and Shaun Levin Para Eunice Van Wagner Chávez, in memoriam

Afrikaans words and phrases insinuate themselves into my head, my consciousness, aun sin querer. Meer en meer. Not sure I even want them in there, presies, although tengo que admitir they do stir something in me. Algo del orden de (pace Andrea Gutiérrez, your fave phrase, o al menos, one of them) la añoranza. Yebo, longing, comfort, long ago pain. Memory.

Of my self hace años, en Pretoria. Después de casi un año, holding myself apart, gingerly beginning to let the words–and those who spoke them from birth–touch me, assuage the biting loneliness. Kom ons jol! Ag, nee man. Lekker, my china.

Still not sure about–hasta ahora, desde aquí, después de todos estos años and even with all this reading, these movies, trying to prepare myself, somehow, for my return, mi iminente retorno a Sudafrica, después de 20 años–my relationship to that taal.

Hace unos días, more terrorist bombings. En Londres. Impotencia. Miedo. Ons kannie anywhere trek anymore, it seems. Last night I watched John Boorman’s film, “In My Country.” Basado en ese libro, which I haven’t found yet, but which that girl told me to read, esa niña que había estado de Study Abroad in South Africa, cuando fui a leer en la University of Redlands, invitada por mi amiga la Eva Valle. Anygüey, you know the boek I’m talking about, “The Country of my Skull” (weird title: Pierre dixit, claro, es adrede, pero it sounds pirate-y to me, not poetic) by Antjie Kroeg. The movie was sappy, a bit Manichean, pero even so, not bad.

And you know me, anygüey, for so many years the slightest reference to Suid-Afrika, just the slightest mention and I’d get teary, nostalgic, angry: I was there. I lived there. I know that place. When did that reaksie change? Was it when I began to embrace my Latinidad, con ahinco, en serio, for reals, como quien dice, my self en relación a mi Latinidad, a California, L.A., to a feeling of home, belonging, en vez de mi yo, for years siempre y siempre en relación al Africa?

Oh, why did I leave? Was it right to come back here, to come home? Is this home?

Pero anygüey, sentí una immediate–y al principio inexplicable– repugnancia atroz toward the character played by el Samuel L. Jackson. Pero luego it hit me: that was precisely how I felt and acted when I first pitched up in So. Africa. Shit, and I’m not even noire! Y bueno, antes, en la universidad, en la graduate school: oh little Miss Divestment, little Miss Anti-apartheid. Miss Marxista. Al nada más llegar, eché la culpa de 40 años de historia on poor Howard, en su familia. He never had a chance. We never had a chance!

So righteous, tan superior porque nunca había tenido una empleada doméstica. Never had a maid (a meid). If you get right down to it, rompí con Howard porque no podía bregar con la gran culpabilidad que sentí. It overwhelmed me como una ola: sudden, nauseating.

From the minute my feet hit the tarmac at Jan Smuts International airport, en agosto del ’82, it hit me: el peso de la culpabilidad, of whiteness, y de todo lo que ese whiteness implicaba en Sudafrica. Porque that’s the way I was read there: como blanca. En la paranoia taxonómica del apartheid, no había modo de leer a una Chicana. And besides, bueno, let’s face it: casi nunca me reconocen como Raza, not even in the USA. Anygüey, ni modo. La cosa es que I couldn’t get out from under it.

Pero, vaya arrogancia. What assumptions. Ag, I feel such retroactive self-loathing now, después de ver ese film, for the way I was then: intransigente, smug. Seeing myself now in Samuel Jackson’s periodista. A white-skinned, Jewish brown girl whose skin could not be read “properly” en ese país and so, para que los Afrikaners no me pensaran uno de ellos I kept myself apart: insular yet achingly lonely, angry, accusatory and aloof. My own private apartheid del corazón.

It was only my innate, insatiable linguistic curiosidad–y el que mi amigo negro, Mmome Neppe Selabe, who worked in the photocopying department at UNISA, me dijera, “oh come on Suzi, you’ve got to learn their language, girl. To understand therm. To understand all of us!”—que finalmente me indujo hacia el deshielo. To begin, grudgingly, tentative, to thaw. To listen. To speak.

Oh Wim, you helped me melt then, learn to laugh, live. You who grew up entre Engels and Afrikaner, me enseñaste a negociar con las posibilidades–and the limitations–de lo que podíamos hacer. Om te speel, even! Entonces. Oh Father (you, un cura católico ahora: adiós Mr. Polisie, tot siens bifeliz party boytjie, hey?), forgive me now. Bless me. Ayúdame a perdonarme…

Ah, but I did learn (didn’t I?). Ese learning que sólo viene de vivir en un lugar. Conocer. Living in and among. Los pactos, la rabia e impotencia y el júbilo diarios. Seeing. Writing.

Such shame and anger, de repente, at myself. De nuevo. Just like 20 years ago and just from a movie! Ay, cómo eres susceptible. Pierre me dijo: no te odies tanto. You need your own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, niña.

Hot tears spill down; I cringe, al escuchar los (after all only) skin-deep, righteous, outraged pronouncements del suddenly so glaringly American Sam Jackson, as the African American reportero del Washington Post at the TRC. Mientras tanto los otros, los non-hyphenated africanos– Africans a secas, South Africans black and white– try to explain to him, to show him, to make him understand ubuntu: forgiveness. Interconnectedness.

Ay, sha sé que it’s only a movie. Pero still, there’s a knot inside me, este nudo a need to be there again. Ahora, nou-nou, hot tears spilling onto the tarmac, onto that red rooi roja tierra. I want to apologize (por mi presencia? Por mi ausencia?) Quiero agradecer.

I know so much less now, a veces pienso. And yet, I feel even more, si cabe (yet so much more ambiguously) than ever before.

Mi Agüela Eunice, tras un fulminante debate entre life and death, falleció hace dos días. Mi hijo Etienne está lejos. Oh, I want to fuzz his hair, look into his almond-shaped dark eyes, see them, see me seeing him in them, ojalá fueran sus ojos no nublados de rabia, resentimiento. What I miss isn’t here any more. Isn’t him any more. (Bueno OB-vio). Oh my god, parezco esa canción “Los recuerdos no abrazan”, bien sappy y completely oxymoronic de Luciano “El Pibe de Luján” Pereyra.

That’s what I want. Estar…allí, de nuevo. Or, patrás al futuro. Hoping we can be…algo, juntos. Saam. Again.

Tengo miedo. Stomach a knot of apprehension, nausea, no puedo comer, duermo pésimo. What will you be like? What will we all be like, together again? Pero I’m dreaming about you, Wimmie en Mellie. My skatties, so far away pero ever closer. Pronto, pronto. Julle en Afrika, my Afrika, every night. Goeie naand.