i am here because...

Each day, I seem to place a few more pieces where they belong as I continue the process of realizing why I am here. Yesterday, it came in the form of paying R30 (the equivalent of about $3) for 53 minutes that had me convinced that I am here for the sole purpose of connecting with my family history. I returned to my leaky-eyed self in the middle of a play about journeying through stories of loss and memory and displacement, and was painfully reminded of my relative lack of connection to and knowledge about an entire half of my own family. Those tears, coupled with a particular email I received last week from my uncle about the possibility of my paternal great grandfather having lived here in Cape Town, was enough for me to decide that I’m here to belatedly connect with my dad through piecing together patchwork stories of his – and my – family history. (And remind me again why I had to come just about as far away from home as possible to do that?) But that’s another story for another day…

Today, it was an upsetting moment I had in the lagging space that comes while waiting for a mini-bus taxi to fill up in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest township. I realized, or perhaps articulated in a way that I had not been able to up until now, that I think I came here hoping to be proven wrong about the world and all the painful realities it holds. I had been telling myself that maybe, just maybe, I would learn a new way for a society to exist – one that actively engages with the realities of its past and works to move through them towards the creation of a just, healthy, safe space for everyone involved. In a word, I guess I was looking for hope.

I’m in no way saying that there isn’t good work going on here. There is, by all means, and I know that so much more remains out there to be discovered. But in all honesty, I’m starting to be convinced that things just aren’t that different here when it comes to the ways that injustice and inequity operate.

I say this tentatively. I hesitate because I don’t quite feel like I’ve been here long enough to make any sort of authoritative statement about “the way South Africa works.” (That said, there may always be an element of walking on eggshells when making this sort of sweeping generalization as a foreigner.) But more so, I hesitate because, in beginning to admit defeat, I feel like I’m giving up on something I had both hoped with all my heart would be true, and also known in my heart never would.

I also make this statement with certain traces of guilt and naïveté. I admit guilt because I have been working very hard at convincing myself that I arrived here without preconceptions of what I would find; without a need to impose the paradigms through which I see the world on this version of it. I claim naïveté because one might think I would know better than to hope for anything different than those paradigms I already know, especially given my consistently spouting analysis of the interconnected nature of structural injustice, oppression, power, privilege, all that intellectual speak.

These hesitations reflect a process that has begun to delicately and gently wake me up; one that is not ready to dramatically scream at me that the world is really just made up of different incarnations of the same shit everywhere, even if I’m starting to believe that’s the truth.

I see it in the way that the white South African woman I met on the plane – who, it is important to note, is only coming back for a visit and has decided to “raise her kids somewhere safer” – fiercely cautions me not to take public transportation anywhere in this country. She very obviously claims every reason in the books other than the fact that I will undoubtedly be the only white person on board.

I see it in the way that the white director of a recent Cape Town street theater festival, despite being incredibly well intentioned in his efforts to “bring art to the people”, answers the question of why there were no black South Africans involved in designing the shows. “They just didn’t answer the call for submissions,” he explains. “I put out three separate calls, and the only people who responded were white gay men!”

I see it the way that my neighbor, who is a white gay man, tramples all over the deep offense that many people take to the incredibly racist and insensitive theme of this year’s Cape Town Pride Festival, brushing off such concerns because they come from whiners without valid reason to be upset. (And I see it in the ways that the queer community – no, the multiple queer communities are burdened with the same plague of racial divisions and the pain they cause.)

And these are just the subtle ways I see it playing out – intellectualizing, rationalizing, unnamed fear. The bigger, more glaring structural things, those have to be another story for another day…