Born into poverty with my family divided and my dad the thieving reverend, my mom: the saint, a domestic worker footing the bill for the cost of our lives. Two brothers and one sister hovering over my head like a Frida Khalo-dream I had since I was a little boy obsessed with fonts. Letters. My earliest memory of reading was lying on my grandmothers’ settee; she raised me until I was about nine I think, smelling the ink on the freshly printed magazine. I loved it so much. I thought it was reading. I spent most of my free time doing this as a five and six year old. My grandmother never spoke of it to anyone, except maybe my mother who was her best friend and visited her six days out of seven to talk for hours in the background whilst I sniffed ink. My mother never mentioned it to me, ever. I sniffed a lot of things back then but mostly books that my eldest brother had in his room as he was in high school at the time and had them lying all over the place. I loved going in there and lying on his threadbare blue and green carpet with a paint-by-numbers swan motif just holding the books, investigating all the parts of it and smelling it from time to time. The magazines he had, some old some new were my best to smell as they were inkier than most of the books printed on thick soft cotton I always thought.
Since I started the journey in search of my soul I found more and more of these memories falling down the back of my shirt like rueful insects in the summer. You know they’re not harmful but they make you wriggle and squeal and jump and bounce and shake and lose your concentration and squish them and feel sorry when you look at the black dirt on your fingers that used to be a son or daughter or even a friend. These memories are what I wished I had cognisance of earlier in my life and then knew that my destiny was to be a writer. I always wrote though. My first book I hand made and handwrote when I was eleven and nobody thought anything of it. It was like showing my mother that I had a pimple. She looked. Made nasal sound and the day went on as unplanned; as my dad was in jail and my mother worked two jobs and my brother was not doing good at school and I was silly and my sister was somewhere far in the background. I don’t even remember her from that time of my life as an eleven year old being physically abused by everyone I knew. Sometimes even people I didn’t know. I guess I had that look at the time that eventually gave introduction to being sexually abused by everyone just to make sure that I would stay in the ghetto forever and never amount to anything and perpetuate the cycle of the Brown people of the Western Cape. I find it strange that my Brown/-ness comes from a euphoric people, and the only reason I do not possess that euphoria today is because it belongs to them. They giveth and the bastards taketh away. All of this before you turn thirteen. In the search of my soul, I find myself in search of that pain I do not want but desire to confront. I could not possibly have come full circle at the age of thirty-six and stand on guard with my palms turned inwards and my fingers firmly pressed against each other. Ready to strike with open hands. My knees slightly bent and my ears alert to the shadow talk of my old nemesis, my People.
A people that taught me to be hateful towards Blacks, even in my own home by my parents, belittling Blacks and renewing for us daily that we are better and closer to being White than them at our feet. My parents watching television and not laughing at Sidney Pointier like they usually do when other Black people come on screen. I always thought he was a white actor in blackface. He spoke different and seemed to be the only Black liked by whites, on television, other that the old cardboard-mug shot-police-composites, which flooded the news bulletins in the late seventies and early eighties. (When South Africa finally got television.) A scary window; to rest of the world, for a young boy under the old regime, both in the Parliament and at home. I even found myself on a bad day when I was filled with anger that I had a racist thought about two black men that passed me and felt bad and knew they were not of my creation but of my handywork.
And now standing here at the entrance to the turn pike with roads going every where and all the places I can see no further than vast nothingness with Table Mountain to my back and a history stretched out before me like a future. A Brown boy trapped in a brown body in a country divided; by not being white enough to be white and not black enough to be black and not brown enough to consider caring about my hateful people to be Brown. White people say we have culture to make us feel better and we do because they say so and then we feel better because they must know what they’re talking about because they are White and they know stuff and so we slip underneath the auspices of them being superior and then they become superior. We yield.
When will the penny drop, or rather... when will the A.K.47 shell drop for my community?
When you find yourself at the junction I’m at you don’t know weather to commit genocide or suicide or your old friend repress-cide. You choose the latter and become a sheep and forget about the dreams of becoming a Shepard and start reading newspapers and watching the news and believe it’s happening to other people and everything is decided for you and you book your fat ass into Hotel Complacent where five star treatment is commonplace. Mm, now that’s nice, now I don’t have to kill my People and I can start looking my parents in the eye and kiss my sister on her lips at her birthday and shake hands with all the rapists and offer them cigarettes to initiate a conversation about the old days and how young we all were they’d say while I wonder when they’d get round to the part were I was gagging on their semen for a bout of vicarious entertainment before I fold my cigarette double and kill it in the ashtray wishing a glass of rum found my hand and a silver-spoon my heart. All the way through this the constant ear piercing sound of a gazillion AK-47 shells falling all around me and the voice of the Lord calmly in my neck whispering not to listen to the shells dropping on the ground but instead to listen to the bullets ripping their flesh while he’s trying to compose a prayer that will be strong enough to forgive my daily sin as quite simply I posses only one: Who I am.
