I washed up on the south african shores in a sinking lifeboat, wrists and ankles bound in star-spangled chains with a blue passport in one hand and my bleeding heart in the other. A man met me on the beach with a hot water bottle and a kind smile. “You must put those away,” he said, “before they get stolen. There’s a place for your kind in South Africa, there’s a place for everyone here.” Here’s what I remember about that place.
Tell me about Africa.
Well what do you want to hear? Do you want to hear about adventures you think I had saving children with swollen bellies and cancerous dreams? Do you want to hear about lions and giraffes and dark skinned people who speak like birds? Or do you want to hear about my life in one tiny corner of a continent where I sat in a cafe sipping blood red tea while a kilometer away a boy stands in a classroom because there aren’t enough desks, and eats nails everyday so his bones will grow hard as steel and because there isn’t quite enough money for corn mealy and school shoes and AZT.
How was it?
Well, it was.. Dark. Around midnight I drove out into the countryside outside of Cape Town and the light from the Southern cross glinted off the tin roofs of the Kayaleitcha township and I wondered how could so many people could live beneath so many roofs and it still be so dark?
And you were studying?
Yep, I was studying. I was studying the way a road could be a law that keeps communities apart, I studies the properties of wine, the way it can enslave babies before they take their first breath and the way it can transform a bad day into the preamble to a festival for body and mind and soul around a candle-lit table, but was mystified by how it drains like an hour glass, leaving hazy red memories and headaches behind. I studied the death of mountains, became an anthropologist as I memorized the rocky spine of the world and hypothesized about the reflection in my ancestor’s eyes when these hills were soaring stairways to the sky. The mountains that would protect them from the pale demons that would one day haunt their shores. I studied the intricacies of an argument you have with a friend that you would have never made under normal circumstances, how to love a person who didn’t ask you to, how to care for someone who cared for you before you had a name. I studied the art and the science of nourishing and being nourished, I learned that if I had listened harder I could have heard my feet thirst to touch the earth and my skin hunger to stare unguarded into the sun and feel what the chameleon feels. I tried to study change, but I found the concepts hard to grasp. I studied long and hard but when the test came the professor just handed me a mirror and I couldn’t remember if America was a country or a continent. So I just drew North America across my t-shirt and labeled it “Nobody’s perfect.”
Did you learn anything?
I learned why watches are round, that time, no matter how full you fill it or how much you waste it, you will never get those hands to March in a straight line. A toddler grabbed my wrist while I kneeled in a crèche and with the dexterity of tiny fingers started spinning the hands around and around and around, flying through hours like seconds and days in blinks, and when he looked up with a wrinkled brow he said “Broke”. I said thank you.
Did you learn the click language?
It startled me the first time someone shook my hand and we started spinning, borne up on a cultural and linguistic confusion, two satellites sending signals into the darkness, accumulating data, digesting it into understanding, writing together a language that will die the moment we walk away but recording it on the wind anyway in the hope that birds will hear our duet and sing our song to the stars as they have since the mountains were young.
Did you get sick?
If there was a moment I wasn’t sick, I don’t remember, but never once in 200 days was I unwell. South Africa is full of sickness, soil stained with blood and feces and inequality feed plants that grow in apathy, molested into counterfeit food that poisons the poor with the only nutrients they can afford. I sipped Lindt hot chocolate while the barista dreams of one day owning a home with a deed, it caused the milk to spoil and gave me a terrible case of travelers heart.
Did you miss home?
However much I missed my parents and friends, home was never far away. America grows like a tumor on South Africa’s heart, TV, movies, music, food and tradition infiltrate minds ill-equipped for the sharpness of our sarcasm, the sweetness of our salesmanship, and the bitterness of our apathy. The invasive species of CNN and Doritos and Coca-Cola had to be cleared away before I could craft for myself a home.
Did people live in huts?
I wonder if people know exactly how chic a shack can be, or what it’s like to live in a dorm like a prison cell barred with isolation and electricity, the chains of an ethernet chord wrapped around your ankles, and to long for a simple shack where the doors don’t lock and the inside and outside are equally home.
Where you the only white person?
Unfortunately, no.
Was it like The Lion King?
Why yes, South Africa is just like The Lion King, a land full of pride, fathers who love their sons, who have died to see them safe, a land full of lost sons, in need of the guidance of fathers. A place where old men are full of wisdom that is difficult to understand, where friends are loyal and true.
Was it really that different?
Is a bumble bee is really any different from a butterfly, or a penguin so different from a pigeon. How do I explain that everything looked the same and worked the same and smelled the same but there, now means later and shoes are optional so people treat the earth like a carpet and take naps on the sidewalk because it gets hot, like 40 degrees hot and you’ll see a man jogging along the highway in jeans because running is another way to get from point A to where we need to be and nice is the highest complement. In South Africa, the clouds are a different species.
Was it what you expect?
Thinking back now, I wonder what it is that I expected.
Was it dangerous?
It was terribly dangerous, I was in constant danger of being discovered as the American I was, I was at risk or having my heart stolen by some shoeless child or a quiet view of the sea and having to chase them over the rocky hills and along forgotten roads only to see them set it free in an open field and watch it float away across the endless South African sky. I fear I will never find all the things that I’ve lost there.
Did you make any friends?
Are friends something to be carved from stone of molded from chocolate-brown clay? Because I didn’t make any friends. I stumbled across people in hotel rooms and on backroads and in houses built into the treetops, on benches at the edge of the world. Like a book you find in a second-hand store that you’d forgotten you use to love, I discovered friends, like diamonds in the most picturesque mine where we never went on strike because we received proper wages in stargazing around campfires while listening to love songs, and enough Sunday morning brunch to ward off the melancholy and heartache.
Do you think you’ll go back?
I always have to look around to remember that I’m not already there. Most nights in my dreams I haunt that old life like the smoky haze after a fireworks show on a balmy New Years Day, because in my dreams the 31st of December is hot as lions breath and I can feel the gravitational pull of Antarctica just beyond the horizon like a cloud feels the ocean, like a place I will eventually know but not in this life. In my heart I still gasp when I see the earth’s skeleton in stone for the first time, and when I think the thought that the earth I stand on has never moved.
What was the biggest difference?
I guess while I was there I never heard someone argue over the difference between a donkey and an ass. People don’t assume that assumptions are true because it’s easier to leave the big questions up to an invisible hand when we know that sometimes that hand is balled into a fist or otherwise occupied scratching a back to offer a hand up. There is a healthy amount of dissent, and equal measure of hard fact and feces are thrown at politicians who don’t keep their word.
What are people like there?
The children, I think, the children don’t want to be president. I sat in a classroom full of young people and taught them how to turn paper into beads and they told me they want to be teachers…
Are you glad to be back?
Back where, I think, back to the life a different Sarah use to live? There are some occasions in life that alter you on a plane you never realized existed, and the word back metamorphosizes, becomes synonymous with home. Maybe I’ve become a migratory soul, for something in my brain tells me that I will be eternally going back, back, back. Always back to where I’ve been, always forward, always back. But please, please, please keep asking me about it, I would like to take you back when I go, I want to show you my dreams, or I fear that they might go back to where they came from.
Butt Naked Travels 