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In my final year of school, I was a prefect. Each prefect was assigned a register class. If the register teacher couldn’t be there for some reason, the prefect had to keep an eye on the class.
Izak was a teacher fresh out of college. He taught history. I was assigned his class. We became friends. I owe him a debt of thanks for a chunk of my cultural education. Yesterday morning, we met for breakfast here in Pretoria, where I am visiting my mother. In all the years, I’d lived in Cape Town, did I ever miss Pretoria, he wanted to know?
I hadn’t.
A sense of oppression and smallness drove me away. Pretoria in the Eighties was the engine of apartheid. I didn’t have the consciousness or words for it, but one had this sense of living inside a fist. It wasn’t squeezing me — I am white — but it could. One night, drunk and silly, a friend and her sister arrived back at her sister’s flat in Sunnyside whooping ‘Free Nelson Mandela’. The cops arrived as they were brushing their teeth.
They were warned.
We lived in the fist. If you were white, it didn’t squeeze you much.
Police often drove around slowly in unmarked cars, their elbows out the window. Uniforms abounded. Soldiers with big guns.
Cape Town felt different.
No. I don’t miss Pretoria when I am away. But I miss it when I am here. I never saw what was beautiful about the place back then. The koppies that undulate all around. The teeming aliveness of nature, which persists despite development. The clouds — those tall thunderbears that stack themselves on summer afternoons and seem to flex their muscles like a row of body builders at a Mr Olympia competition.
Just like individuals do not automatically reflect the politics of their government, places are not the people who conquer them.
It takes age and wisdom to separate places and people from their contexts.
This week’s top hits
I’ve been listening to Chavela Vargas’s Paloma Negra. It builds and builds like a storm.
Music has a moral dimension in that it is good in itself. It works to improve matters.
(Nick Cave)
Krista Tippett interviewed Nick Cave on her show On Being. Cave is slow and thoughtful and surprising in his answers. Do you know Cave’s The Red Hand Files?
We watched Boy Swallows Universe. I’m listening to ‘Paloma Negra’ right now and as I typed ‘Boy Swallows Universe’, I got a flush of goosebumps from head to toe. I don’t know whether it was the memory of the series or the song. Please watch Boy Swallows Universe.
I enjoyed this interview with the director Steven Soderbergh on the New York Times The Book Review podcast about his year in reading.
I am listening to Steven Friedman. His book Good Jew, Bad Jew appeared last year.
Today is the birthday of the South African cartoonist Dov Fedler. His book Starlite Memories was warm and funny. I have yet to read Gagman about a man who survives the concentration camps of World War II by making a tormentor laugh.
In Jerusalem
Mahmoud Darwish
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy … ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die.
With love,
K.
Thank you for introducing me to Nick Cave’s website... I can see myself disappearing down that rabbit hole for days.