| I adore the night. It reveals the many different shades of blackness. Shy midnight blues exude thoughtfulness and nobility. Sensual purples invite gentle probing from fingertips, much like bruises. Pitch black, as solid as the heart, grows into a mass of increasing impenetrability, like my father's retreats into liquor, jazz and memories.
Ostracism has its shades as well. That which is exotic is seen as an inviting challenge to the adventurer, but there is another kind which calls up that which is all too familiar, like a dysfunctional family where one is reminded of the role that they played in creating and maintaining the isolation. People who make their homes in foreign lands are not trying to re-create the ones they have left behind, but unless individuals come to terms with every home they have ever known, the painfully familiar has a way of hooking on to a person and dutifully following them wherever their path may lead.
When I come to corners where it is difficult to find respect for myself, I remember who I was when I was eleven. I was proud, strong, intelligent, assertive, and funny. A natural leader, I had my own definite ideas on feminism. These came to life in a picture I drew in crayon of a woman in a business suit juggling a pot, a baby, a briefcase and the planet. She was inspired by my mother. I won contests for my writing long before I would claim it as my life's passion. I had black friends and white friends and I spoke freely about race, politics and my firm belief that the school's gym teacher was sexist. I was magic.
I was schizophrenic. I felt unwanted and unloved at home, and I battled with my parents, especially my mother, as a daily ritual. I was convinced that my sisters were agents sent from forces in the universe that despised me, with the mission to torture me into complete submission. My prayers to God were full of fear. I was American in my world, listened to Queen Latifah, wore Nikes and loved roller-skating more than anything else in the world. I was an exiled South African in my house. Home, for my parents, was a place far away from where we were living as a family. The thought of leaving my home, America, Providence, Rhode Island for this place was a heart-shattering nightmare.
The day that Nelson Mandela was released from prison, a life lesson was carved into my heart. I did not celebrate with the rest of the world. I cried and called all of my friends who were supposed to come to my birthday party and cancelled. My father, in his excitement about the prospect of returning to the only land he had ever known as home, had suggested that I go to boarding school with all of the finesse of a man who had spent the greater part of his childhood in boarding schools when he was not being beaten by his father. For him, the closeness of intimacy left no room for tact. It was brutal. I imagine that during the course of his tumultuous abusive childhood, boarding school became a place of safety. In my world, I could not imagine being further away from home than I already was inside my own skin.
School was the heaven that saved me. There were no straight lines in Mrs Sasken's class. The desks were arranged in a horseshoe pattern that hugged an inner circle of desks. Later in the year we patterned ourselves into clusters of four or five, like satellites bound together in a constellation spanning the entire room. We were a community of equals. Even now, I cannot remember a single lesson, a game plan of grammar and spelling for the day, but I do remember savouring the unexpectedness of learning, spontaneity, and creativity.
While the other classes rehashed the same old green and red decorations with tired snowmen made out of cotton-balls at Christmas, we ate potato latkes with apple butter. When the school board introduced plans for a school uniform, we put posters on the walls of the corridors in defiance. Later on, we were forced to take them down. Our principal, a closet fascist, banned our protest for being a fire hazard.
I began keeping a journal in Mrs Sasken's class. It was my first space of free thought, the first time I had a collection of my ideas and feelings down on paper.
It didn't feel like school, it felt like an adventure, and of course we brimmed with confidence and brilliance. We were fifth-graders. We owned EW Flynn Model Elementary School, having evolved from primitive babyish first-graders to the regality of prepubescent seniority. 1990 fleshed itself out into one of the best years of my life without my even knowing it.
In South Africa, my generation is bearing the first fruits of freedom. We are the legacy of hope and battles, some won, some still being fought. Included in this post-Apartheid kaleidoscope is a small group of in-betweeners. Young people who bear the tastes and colours of the many different countries around the world in which they were born, the offspring of parents who did not know when or if they would ever return to the beloved country of their birth.
South Africa now extends the possibility of world travel to all of its citizens, provided that one has the access via a big purse or even bigger dreams. Children born in other parts of the world are similar to us, but very different from us. It is a new history.
We bear the scars of exile, of forced silences and dislocation. Our childhoods were spent, in part, marinating in the frustrations of isolation, immigration and the struggle against Apartheid. We are foreigners in the countries of our birth and in the lands that we now call home, including South Africa. We are an anomaly that is an intrinsic thread in the fabric of South Africa's history, one of many contradictions in a complicated national identity still in its infancy.
10 February 1990 slid firmly into the shortest, coldest month of the calendar year in the United States, known to gregarious Aquarians as the beginning of a new year and to the descendants of Africans exiled in America for more than 400 years as Black History Month.
For 28 days, schools around the country butcher the integral role played by slaves and their descendants in building American society. This rich history, both proud and shameful, is fractured into manageable, insulting sound bites on Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Marin Luther King. The same tracks are rewound and replayed every year. While the American consciousness pays homage to its collective guilt, African-Americans seep deeper and deeper into the recesses of invisibility. Somehow slavery remains an unemotional intellectual issue. Somehow the modern history of an ancient people is not afforded the dignity of being acknowledged as a systematic holocaust which continues to this very day.
Every classroom at Flynn had a display case just beside the door. When you walked through the corridors, you were exposed to a mélange of uninspired kitsch. Mrs Sasken was avante-garde. During the month of February our display case became a triumph of free thought and poignant minimalistic expression.
We studied Eyes on the Prize during Black History Month. Armed with films, pictures, books and debates on the Civil Rights Movement, we undertook an excavation of America's underbelly and what we unearthed was an oppressive history so deep and so painful that we were left with no choice other than to create.
When confronted with the challenge of choosing a display for that month, of condensing our ideas and emotions into a vision that would exemplify Room 16, we came up with one single image, that of a lone black figure casting a vote in an election booth.
On the 12th of February, the Monday following former President Mandela's release from prison after 27 years of incarceration, a newspaper clipping of a smiling free Nelson Mandela was added to our diorama. For weeks, I passed through the doorway of our classroom to be greeted by this image. For the first time in my life, the challenge and hope of my family, my heritage and my skin were affirmed daily by my slice of America.
Lawrence Shepherd was a classmate of mine at Flynn, and a sensitive, creative, compassionate and intelligent individual. I would learn a few years later that Lawrence's mother had been a drug addict for much of his childhood. Lawrence - or Squeaky, as he was affectionately known - would eventually become a small-time drug dealer himself and lose a substantial part of his youth to the correctional facilities of Rhode Island. The person whom the state courts would later refer to as a "menace to society", I knew as my classmate and friend.
The Flynn Science Fair could have been held on Broadway. Each year, as the science projects got more complicated, I noticed more mothers and fathers sweating anxiously during the prize-giving. I often thought that certain parents were more deserving of the awards than their offspring.
Squeaky came to school with a glass mug filled with water. In the absence of a limestone, he had placed a pencil in the liquid. There was an explanation about the project written in blue ink on a frayed piece of paper that had been torn from a notebook. Compared with the other projects, Squeaky's lacked the muscle and body fat of a colourful elaborate display. When I asked him what it was about, he gently picked up the experiment and held it in the winter sunlight that shone through the window of the cafeteria-cum-gymnasium. There appeared, like magic, a rainbow in the water running from the tip of the immersed pencil to the surface of the liquid. He said, "There are rainbows hidden where you wouldn't expect; someone just has to show you where to look."
I am a poet, one who chases rainbows, and I often find them in places where my blinded eyes saw only the ordinariness of things until a teacher showed me where to look. I have been given new eyes through the wisdom of great people: Baca, Biko, Kuti, Shepherd, Morrison, Walker, Lourde, Joplin, X, Lennon, Cobain, Angelou, Emecheta, Achebe, Marechera, Hooks, Head, Ginsberg, Kgositsile, Mattera, Matima, Mashile, Mandela, Sasken and many others.
In the summer of 1990, after I had graduated from EW Flynn Elementary School, my family saw Nelson and Winnie Mandela along with crowds of several thousand people in New York City. Two summers later, we would travel to South Africa and be reunited with an enormous tree of extended family for the first time. No words could ever accurately describe these events or their meaning for my life.
It is through new eyes that I am now able to look back on the expanse of night sky that is my childhood, and amongst the many beautiful shades and hues of blackness I can also see stars: like the brave and loving members of my family, like Mrs Sasken, who taught me that teaching, like leadership, is about the ability to inspire, and like a fierce eleven-year-old with a rainbow heart.
And I am reminded, once again, that I am magic.
|
Lebogang Mashile is a writer, performer and actor who
began writing in 1995 after she and her family moved back
to South Africa after spending many years in the United States.
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix!