Where is home?
Is it the space inside the walls on the street where you live? Maybe it’s in the arms of your favourite person. What about the ground on which you took your first steps… or the place you breathed your first breath? Or is it here, right now—the air filling your lungs this very moment?
Some say home is where the heart is. Like it’s a warm, cuddly pillow. The candyfloss foam we fall into with our hurt and happiness. A rainbow of comfort. But really, the vessel that holds our hearts is made up of gristle, muscle and tissue, tendons, ligaments, bone and fluid—wrapping around the bloody, beating beast that pulsates life into our core…slogging for our existence. Until it malfunctions. It stops. And ultimately succumbs.
This reality. This heart. This home. Is strange, imperfect, fragile, grotesque, yet determined, mercenary, hopeful and beautiful in its complexity. Home, life, is an oxymoron. It envelopes us, observing as we dream and grow, holding childhood in the palm of its hand and as the oblivion of youth is eroded by the friction-induced sweat as we collide with the world, the rainbow falters—turning dull under the scrutiny of looming adulthood. Then a weird thing happens. Nostalgia. Life floods past and the rainbow is refashioned.
My name is Andrea. I am South African—sometimes proudly, sometimes embarrassingly (it was our president who washed AIDS off in the shower, right?) but always unavoidably. And I have a bloody, beating, meaty mess of a rainbow-tinted heart that exists, unashamedly, in a discombobulated state of combat, with itself.
I’ve lived in London since 2008, with my husband and five very lekker, albeit anglicised, children who flit between “ja” and “yeah” depending how long the school holiday has been. Not so long ago – in fact, the day before the Rugby World Cup 2019 final – I sat in my daughter’s school assembly wearing my Springbok rugby jersey, vintage ‘95 (aweh!); there were two of us in green and gold although Leah, my Zambian friend, declared that she was wearing her colours for the last time, having sold her soul to the Roses. The capitulating immigrant. We were debating the intricacies of this very obvious and unequivocal betrayal until the buzz in the hall quietened and Amelia’s class stood for their opening song. Thirty seconds into A World in Union I was chewing my lip raw in an effort to hold back tears. The heart of the song beat in the air as unfeigned voices imagined the far-off Utopia of a united world—I felt it in my bones. South Africa’s song—not really but it could so easily have been written for ’95, when the country stood on the precipice of a new age. So much hope. Yet there I sat, in England in a Springbok jersey, listening to my pseudo-South African child, in an English school, singing a song that, to me, is home. The weight of the moment made visceral something that I have always known but not ever articulated in thought or emotion; that there’s a brutal sense of loss associated with the de-homing of the soul (and the person)—whether that de-homing is by choice or by force.
There was no weeping and gnashing of teeth or pulling at shrouds of black when Warren and I (married two years and ready to see the world) boarded a plane outa town. No. We left peacefully and almost facetiously, like petulant children, stamping our feet and demanding more, better—testing the stretch of the umbilical cord. Ready to see the world and live dreams. Of course, we didn’t know it was for good. Mitigating perhaps. Yet I was sure to visit all the old places I loved, just in case—my old house, my schools, the park where my brothers and I played hide-and-seek and argued over the unequal distribution of gumballs in bright blue bubble-gum ice-creams that were bigger than our faces. I drove down the streets where my childhood friends lived and remembered sleepovers, made-up languages, whispered conversations about tween crushes and who had asked who to dance at Remy Cano’s disco the weekend before. These atmospheres now live in my dreams. I knew their time was up—as tangible realities, which is why I went to say goodbye. I had decided before I was ready to admit that I had.
The heartache might have taken me by surprise but, really, I’d been getting used to it for some time without being fully cognisant, and so the emotional aftermath has been almost anticlimactic. Loss is not justified by excess. This kind was a slow burn. It’s just…I finally noticed the wound; grisly and festering but not entirely unfamiliar. How does it feel to be broken hearted when it wasn’t a person that did the pulverising but a place—home? Agonising—yes. Tragic—of course. The catalyst was the Rugby World Cup (2019), which incited a tidal wave of nostalgia to crash violently down on my unsuspecting psyche (poor thing), as I watched South Africa rise to glory with my friends and family in North London. Rugby—really? I know, it sounds doff. Let me explain. Rugby is home. Home is gone. I’ve lived with that for longer than I’ve been an expat (albeit unsuspectingly) because the existential catastrophe is that home is not the South Africa that exists today; the South Africa of my childhood—a reality made all the more poignant with the perspective of immigration. This might sound obvious: no country is the same now as it was then. This is true. But South Africa had everything to gain because change was rife and the subjective South Africa of my childhood was a pretty messed up place… but she faltered at the brink of epic and then floundered, and is still floundering like a fish out of water, struggling to breathe. I’ve not merely lost time and even place, that’s quite natural; I’ve lost (as have all South Africans) what could have and should have been—a future in the land of my birth.
Then, plonked on top of all that is the very real truth that the rose-tinted childhood I bequeath to my adult-self was the product of apartheid—a fascist, racist, dehumanising system of bullshit. Sigh. What did I know in 1990? I was seven. But I do know now. I know. What exactly do I do with that? —With knowing? Also, do I not have a right to my memories without the guilt of what that that cost to the broken people in my country. Cringe. In Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize winning novel The Promise, Amor sits in her bedroom while the country parties itself into oblivion as Francois Pienaar accepts the William Web Ellis trophy from Nelson Mandela and hoists it above his head in triumph—a victory for all, she “…thinks about the meeting that’s recently happened and what was said and what was not said, and her place in all of it. There seems to be no centre to the situation and it feels hard to separate one thing from another, so that she feels tangled in little questions, each in need of an answer.” (152) I love this so much because it captures the awkward, vague cloud of emotion that resonates in my mind as a delayed reaction to being a white child in the nineties in South Africa. The dishevelled, magical, crazy, terrible place I call home—abandoned.
Am I a traitor to that which formed me; the dust and wind fraternising in the hands of the motherland as she lovingly sculpted her offspring into perfect shape before belching me from her belly; to be awoken by the rain, hardened by the sun. Pledged to the land. Naked. Exposed. Me, you, all South Africans. And then rescued by the embrace of family that has come before. Traitor. The word reverberates through my being and yet there is resistance because home has hurt me, spat me out; and I am still wading through the weight of wet sticky pain-infused saliva. The kind that makes you gag.
Perhaps I am being a tad dramatic. Over exaggerating? The truth is that it comes and goes. My mom sends me another voice note about the loadshedding, and I roll my eyes, and then a 40-year-old mom with two sons is stabbed by a 17-year-old around the corner from my flat and I wish for the violence back home that makes no sense but also makes more sense. See what I mean? It’s a gemorse. When I see an orange sunset or hear thunder rumble across the sky, I ache for the beauty of my South Africa. She makes me angry, still – her disregard and indifference – and I mourn what almost was. Often, I have to fight the feeling that I am passing on to my children a vague silhouette, an inkling, a ghost, of something that shaped me, that is important to me, that lives in me but is not really real, anymore. And yet I need it to be real. I need to remember—to slosh around in bottomless nostalgia. I need to reclaim my home. Go back in time. But also forge boldly ahead because home is here. Home is now. Home is my faith, my family—Warren, my children. England. Home is England—London, North London. The place of my ancestors. Simple? I guess. But why, then, is saying it so damn hard? Dumb question. I know why.
Such is the plight of the immigrant, a great self-inflicted void. I have chosen somewhere else, and yet South Africa is me, my family, my heart and, yes, my home. I want my children to know her. I want to remember her. It’s my mission, my passion. To preserve her legacy. For my children—for their children. And so I do what I must, which is to sit, carefully crafting back together, with cello tape, glue and some sketchy needle-and-thread skills, the pieces of a shattered heart, retching through the pain and awkwardness.
I tell and I write…how else do we remember if not through stories—altered by time and confused by the fragility and fallibility of memory. The messy, tragic, beautiful, funny fables that make us who we are. The South Africa of our childhood and our parents’ childhood and their parents’ childhood and their aunty’s uncle’s mother’s friend’s childhood. And the South Africa of now, of course. Remember the Tok Tokkies on the koppie, the little boy who hid under a bed at a boarding school in Zambia, a conversation about Allan Boesak in the car on the way to school, meeting Interpol in Malawi, the story of a man-eating lion, faux crocodiles in a river, a Parktown Prawn stuck in a shoe all through church and a boy who put the crusts of his toast into the education inspector’s pocket at afternoon tea, a great escape through Italy and back to Africa, the rinderpest of 1897 and a Millennium foam party at Mascerades (bra!) in Boxburg ‘99. Family yarns, strewn through time, on the wind—without chronology because they are never told in this way; they spring up in a moment, and change shape in the next.
These tales are the fabric of identity and there is so much more to unearth in my own family, imagine an entire country? The more I tell and re-tell and re-forge, the more conscious I am that this is just the tip of a great sandy iceberg that will crumble without the glue of intention. South Africa is rich in untold tales. Your tales, dear reader – dear South African. The stories you share in passing—they matter. This is not merely me engorging on the past (although it totally is), this is about preserving a tradition that is integral to the fabric of the land that courses through my veins. And yours. This is about me, you, everyone. Stories told around fires, in books and letters, around dinner tables, in cars…people’s lives—the little moments and the big ones. They all matter. They’re all part of a great tapestry that will unravel if no one weaves it together. It’s bigger because South Africans of all lived experience are scattered over the globe, missing home – the soil, the sunset, the spirit, the people – but also happy not to be at home. And those who aren’t sissies like us expats, have stayed home to keep it real for the rest of us.
So, I offer up my raw, palpitating heart on a platter and hope that some of the dry grass and red sand perforates your soul. And I mean that. Vulnerability is flippen uncomfortable but these tales spewed out of me. I just couldn’t help myself. Some words tiptoed onto the page from a dream space that is barely recognisable to me and others are so loud and obnoxious that I almost had to klap them into order. There are moments, reflections, quietude and there is shouting, raging and confusion. There are tales so epic that my efforts barely do them justice and there are memories so personal that they almost didn’t make it. Each tale exists for its own sake and can be read as such but they are also part of a greater narrative—an identity of self, family and home. You may recognise yourself and your South Africa as you read, maybe not, but either way, my greatest ambition for you – dear reader, brother and sister South African, precious human being, fellow immigrant – is that you would pardon my indulgence but also, allow yourself the space to revel, as the buffalo on the wide-open planes of home—to feel, to remember, to wallow, laugh, cry, roll your eyes, ululate and to allow your heart to break. And then you’ll pick up the pieces, dust them off and put them back together, perhaps with shaking, unsteady hands, and get back to life…because this is what it means to be South African, hey.