This lengthy meditation on Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying was published in the Mail & Guardian in May:
I recently returned home to Cape Town from Oxford, where I live. On landing, my fellow passengers and I trailed along to passport control, where we were met with a five-minute delay in a queue for those of us travelling on South African passports.
While waiting, I inadvertently caught the eye of the woman behind me who was clearly annoyed by the hold-up. She rolled her eyes at me in that awful assumed complicity and muttered something along the lines of “only in this country…”
I was about to ask her if she had ever endured Heathrow, but it was my turn to go forward and present my passport. The woman examining it hesitated, stamp in the air. She looked at my picture, then at me, then back at my picture. “I know,” I said, “it doesn’t look anything like me any more”.
My passport photo shows me with long red hair and I now have short blonde hair. She smiled, brought the stamp down, and, as she handed the passport back, said, “Well, it’s not your home any more”.
I was too stunned to say anything in return. But it was an exchange which spoke to a central question in my life, and in the lives of the other South Africans with whom I share a strange, dislocated although committed and engaged community in Oxford: is South Africa still our home? It is the central question too, of Kevin Bloom’s new book, Ways of Staying Picador Africa, an extended meditation on the crises of identity and belonging facing South Africans who, for one reason or another, feel alienated and alien in their country.
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July 2nd, 2009 @14:58 #
Thoughtful piece by Kelly. I can see I'm going to have to read Ways of Staying, even tho part of me dreads it. I'm either luckier than Kelly or more thick-skinned: I don't feel alien or alienated in my own country. It would break my heart if it came to that.
July 2nd, 2009 @15:35 #
Home is where the heart is, home is so remote. That wonderful Lene Lovich song sums it up. Home is always in a sense nostalgic, in the past, pre-lapserian. Kelly writes of a 'a more profound sense of not being entitled to call South Africa home any more.' But those notions of home, of 'heim' are so close to the feeling of uncanniness, 'unheimlich'. I've lived in two countries - Namibia and South AFrica - that shifted from one thing to another around that invisible time pivot of transition from one state (apartheid which was by definition unheimlich) to another. the newness of the New South Africa means that one has to find a purchase on the surface of it, find a way of hooking oneself into a new identity. No one is entitled to a feeling of being at home. It is a sense that slips up on one unexpectedly and often undeservedly, like happiness does. And then its gone again (like happiness) and we are left with a trace of it - the feeling of home/heart but it is always remote. Not only here. I think South Africans just had a collective fantasy that because the home we lived in pre-94 was so abuse, so dysfunctional that by getting rid of it we would all be born again into a state of oneness, of belonging, of feeling part of....what? You can go, you can stay, you can go for a while, you can stay for a while, but that feeling of being not at home in the world will always follow.
July 2nd, 2009 @16:44 #
Very interesting, and disconcerting reading this article having just returned from a funeral of a family friend who was brutally murdered last week. The concept of home for me has always been about people, friends, family, never a place. But violence, especially brutal, senseless violence, throws this into flux, makes the ground shift. I'm fascinated by your take on the concept of home, Margie.
Helen, you should read Ways of Staying - it's an extraordinary book and Bloom's writing is superb, understated yet quietly passionate. A first-rate piece of non fiction writing. I'll admit I skipped the account of the rape, though.
July 2nd, 2009 @17:02 #
Oh Sarah, I am so, so sorry. Go for a ride or a long walk, and then come home to cuddle your child and make love to yr hubby. I visited Luke Stubbs this morning in the hospice, and there was real peace (along with dreadful sadness) in my glimpse of his slow transition from life as we know it to whatever is next. Made me realise anew that violent death takes even that from us.
Also fascinated (but not entirely convinced) by Margie's sense of home being like that of happiness, and equally transient. Remembering Danny Pearl's posthumously collected writings, called At Home in the World, cos he was emphatically that. Although cynics (and realists?) could argue that this was what killed him in the end...