Al lê die berge nog so blou

Freedom Day.

Whilst people at home celebrate the first democratic elections of 1994, I did yoga, cleaned the apartment and went to the market. When people yell supposedly cheap prices at me I cannot retain the semblance of self-control and end up buying 3kg of grapes for 2€ that I will never be able to eat by myself. Luckily tomorrow we are meeting up for a brunch at a friend's place, where a fruit salad will come in handy share some of my purchases (mangos! watermelon! strawberries!). This meet-up is a bit of a ruse as well: I am apartment scouting, as one of the rooms is freeing itself up in June and it might be an opportunity to move.

Always moving and living out of suitcases and boxes. I think my grandmother emigrated to SA with one large crate of things, and that was it. A life encased.

What is it that makes us want our things, want our clothes, want our spaces to belong to us? What is it about having and owning that drives us?

Waiting for my flight to Berlin in March I noted in my diary:

On the way back.
Say what you will, but this remains home. Maybe it is the people, maybe it is those still here; what remains is binding.
I couldn't lessen this, because this is simply part of what moulded me.
Despite my whiteness, despite other influences, I'll always be South African.
A strange thing to write.
This clinging to nationhood in far-away places. The taking along of reminders of home.
Peppermint Crisp. Marula Jelly. Cushions.
Things my mother gave me.
The boys in the queue behind me doing the same: brandewyn, chutney, aromat, sweet chili sauce.
The tastes of home we take with us. Rooibos. Baking powder in a metal 'blikkie'. Spray 'n Cook. 

The tastes of home ringing true - I went to Galeria Kaufhof yesterday just to buy Mrs HS Balls Chutney.

Future People

Tomorrow marks a month of having left the motherland. Having left the mother, who sends me images of recipes she is going to try out and FaceTimes with me while I sort through my books. Having left the friends who communicate through words on screens. Having left the sun, as here the cold holds on tightly to the days and the nights. Having left having to drive. Having left Afrikaans being spoken. Having left a strange sense of belonging.

Berlin offers up bureaucracy. I have never signed my name to so many papers in all of my years. Paperwork left and right, that is what uncertainty means here. But Berlin also offers up hope in many forms: that spring may come soon, that summer will be good and that somehow, somewhere, things will start falling into place.

Growing Up

I like closing my door and being by myself. Call it me-time, call it loneliness, call it isolation, but not having had a room of my own in the past six months and two weeks the politics of space are weighing on my sense of contentment.

For a week I am occupying a friend's apartment as she and her roommate have both left over Easter. It is the greatest feeling, just walking around in my pyjamas and refusing to leave the bed. Elsewhere, my bed is a couch in a room that needs to be used by other people. As grateful as I am for the couch and the accommodation, I miss not having to behave like an eternal guest. The guest has to remain polite, avoid confrontation, be clean and tidy and offer to help (whether this be with the dishes or the washing or going grocery shopping or whatever), whereas in your own space you can be wholly yourself. There is no stringent adherence to the polite rules of being a visitor, there is no obligation of feeling grateful and adjusting to the daily flow of a home that is not your own.

I miss not being a reduced version of myself. I miss organising my day according to my own desires and rules, and not having to coordinate every movement. I miss my own bedding, the futon mattress in storage five floors under the couch, I miss not looking for underpants in one box and winter coats in another.

Since coming to Berlin, I have felt a dreaded darkness that descends slowly when things aren't working out as quickly as I had hoped, when life is stagnating and I don't know how to kick its ass back into gear. I factored homesickness, a lack of sunshine and the insecurity of my current situation into the encroaching darkness, but my friend Des added that space is another element contributing to feeling out of place here. The inability to unpack my things somewhere that feels like home correlates with the other aspects. Basically, I miss having a door I can close.

But is this experienced lack not also a form of privilege? Had I grown up in a shack in Khayelitsha, in the slums of Delhi or a Brazilian favela I might not have the same need for square metres that belong to me, that I can occupy all by myself and do with as I please. Perhaps representative of a middle-class sense of entitlement, I grew up with the large houses with large gardens and swimming pools in suburbia that needed gardeners and cleaning ladies from rural areas to come by each week and maintain the property. The neighbours were inaudible presences behind tall walls that separated their lives from ours unless we wanted these to meet at an occasional braai or when someone's dogs had to be taken care of during the holidays.

Here, people literally live on top of one another. I can hear the muted voices of men or people shuffling furniture above me. Still, I think no one makes an effort to know their neighbours beyond short chats in the hallways. Even here, people need their space.  

You are one of us

There is something about pilgrimages, about being on the long road with a certain goal that appeals to my inner wild child. Travelling, moving somewhere out of the ordinary, means breaking away (at least for a while)  from responsibilities. My mother and I have road-tripped together most often, so it is hard for me to hear about her driving alone to fetch my gran in Jeffrey's Bay. It is hard not being there, not helping to pack the car, not taking the longer shifts. I know the road they are taking: Jansenville, Graaff-Reinet, Middelburg, Colesberg, Bloemfontein. When driving down from Pretoria my grandmother would call at intervals, asking where we were, calculating how fast we were reaching each milepost along the road.

The family was trekking into the heart of the country for a reunion of epic proportions. Cousins, great-cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone related in some way, everyone wanting to see how the others had changed. Underneath it all a current of familiar strife, people having fallen out and not spoken to one another in years. This frustrates me extremely. My cousin Emce calls me 'kwaai katjie' and the other day my mother and grandmother laughed as they said I was a 'kwaaitjie kabouter' (it translates into an angry kitten and an angry little gnome). They say this without listening. I am angry, it is true, but at them, for never talking about anything. Avoiding conflict and pretending at everything being a-ok runs in their veins, with the end result being no one talking to one another. If we do not speak about it, it is not happening.

I fully understand that not everyone wants to talk at length about their feelings. We are not on Freud's couch, there is no need for psychoanalysis. But I will insist on honesty. I will insist on making things a-ok, on working at it, instead of feigning ignorance at the problems in our midst. They do not understand this being-far-away-thing. I appreciate the videos, the voice messages, the photographs of togetherness being sent over social media more than they know. I thank the Gods for WhatsApp and FaceTime. Yet the sentence "When are you coming for a visit?" stresses me, because I have no answer. I don't know if or when I'll come back. Personal aspirations clash with familiar desires, wanting to see more with wanting to be there.

It won't be an easy choice, when I eventually make it. It won't be a permanent one, probably. But it will mean more years in far away places, not coming to Sunday lunches, Christmas dinners or helping to drive the long road. It means building a life so apart form them that I fear at some point the voice notes will stop, the photographs won't be shared, and I will no longer be one of them.

Glacier

I've decided to dance when gravity becomes too much. So I twirl around, never on my own in a world of sound.