by Lisa Grekul
This is what I came here for, I know – to see apartheid, first-hand. To see what it’s really like. But the reality of it knocks the wind out of me.
The only girl to stand up to the microphone is Natasha, a Form Five student. She speaks slowly as she shares the details of her best friend’s death eleven years ago. This isn’t make-believe either. Natasha was there, walking home from school one day, hand in hand with her friend, when, for one reason or another, the friend stepped out onto the road. At precisely that moment, an ambulance happened to be passing and it struck her – struck Natasha’s friend – leaving the little girl bleeding and unconscious.
The assembly hall is so quiet, I can hear the girl beside me breathing.
According to Natasha, the ambulance that struck her friend was a Whites Only ambulance. So the ambulance driver raced away from the scene of the accident to call a second ambulance. But by the time the other ambulance arrived, Natasha’s friend had stopped breathing. Her heart had stopped beating.
I sniffle quietly for the next few minutes, hardly listening to the other stories and speeches. There are girls crying all around me, dabbing their eyes with tissues. By the time I’ve pulled myself together enough to focus again on the stage, Mr. Harrington is paying tribute to Nelson Mandela.
“Let us never forget,” he says, “the suffering of this great man. Let us remember the years that he gave to us, the years that he gave to all the people of South Africa, white and black. Let us celebrate his role in the struggle for freedom in South Africa!”
The assembly hall breaks into applause.
“Let us celebrate his leadership in the struggle for freedom in South Africa!”
More applause, cheering. Whistles.
“Let us celebrate his achievements in the struggle for freedom in South Africa!”
Students pound the benches with their fists, stamp their feet. They stand up, clapping their hands high over their heads.
“Freedom for South Africa! Freedom for Mandela!”
Mr. Harrington raises his voice to a feverish pitch over the cheering of the crowd. His face is red now.
“Amandla!” he yells.
“Awetu!” the crowd explodes, hundreds of fists raised.
“Amandla!”
“Awetu!”
Then several senior girls rush to the front of the assembly hall, anc banners in hand. They tack the banners onto the curtains at the back of the stage. Across the front of the stage, ten senior boys in gumboots line up in a row. A group of forty or fifty students from the lower and the upper forms crowd in behind them. Waist-high cowhide drums are pulled onto the stage from the wings. One of the Spanish teachers runs onstage with his guitar. Mrs. McBain rolls out the college piano.
Thandiwe starts the singing, and everyone onstage joins in. As I listen to her lead the other voices, I remember her talking to me beside the ironing board. I remember the sound of her voice – a half-whisper. She hardly parted her lips then. Now, her jaw is dropped, her throat is open. She fills the assembly hall with her singing. Hers is a woman’s voice, deep and full with a rich, controlled vibrato. She stands with her legs spread wide, back arched. Chin lifted. There is power in her voice, in her posture, in her stance. Thandiwe’s whole body is singing.
Watching Thandiwe sing, hearing her voice soar above the crowd, I don’t want to join her: I want to be her. I want to sing with my eyes closed and my arms out – not thinking about the notes or the words but feeling them in my belly, and making everyone else feel them too, in their bones. I’ve never seen a singer like Thandiwe. I’ve never heard singing like this. I’ve never sung like her. I wonder if I can. If it’s even in me to try.
It seems to me that the students onstage have rehearsed beforehand – that they’ve all rehearsed their parts. They must have. But there are two, maybe three hundred voices in total now – onstage and off – singing song after song in perfect four-part harmony. They all couldn’t have rehearsed together. How do they know what to sing, and when? They don’t just sing, either. They dance too. Girls swinging their hips and their arms in unison, boys lifting their knees to their chests. As though their movements were choreographed. And after nearly every song, the fists. The refrain.
“Amandla!”
“Awetu!”
“Amandla!”
“Awetu!”
Over the course of the singing, more students and teachers flood down the steps of the assembly hall in groups of two or three until the stage is packed tight with bodies. Katja and Nikola, I notice, are among the first to go running to the front, their fists raised. Maria follows, holding hands with Hannah. Shelagh trails behind.
Before long, the assembly hall benches are almost completely empty. Everyone, it seems, is onstage. Some students stand with their arms around each other as they sing, some hold hands while they dance together. I start to feel ridiculous sitting in the audience. Sitting alone and silent, watching the crowd perform. Sitting with my guitar beside me – my mute guitar in its unopened case. I feel as though my face is glowing white.
It’s different, of course, for other white students. For scholarship students like Maria and Nikola and Katja. They have a right to be onstage because they’ve been oppressed. They belong. I don’t. I’ve never survived hardships or struggles or strife. I’d feel like a fraud if I joined them onstage. Katja would probably push me off.
So I stay seated. As the celebration continues onstage, I open my diary across my lap. Try to look busy with writing.
On the bench in front of me, another girl is also still seated. I hadn’t noticed her before. Though I have no classes with her, I know that she’s a senior student. She’s sitting in the section of the assembly hall reserved for senior students. She’s writing, too. Like me. Drawing, actually, in a small sketchbook bound with metal rings. With a charcoal pencil, she’s making lines, then smudging them with the back of her fist. Her arms and hands are freckled, her hair is long and strawberry blonde. From time to time, her hair falls over her eyes, but she can’t use her hands to sweep it back because they’re covered in charcoal. Instead, she throws her head back and to the side, swinging her hair over her shoulder.
She’s drawing a globe, I think. Her picture isn’t quite finished.
I’m guessing that her sketch is political. The globe represents a new world: new because Mandela is free and apartheid is collapsing. It’s not a very subtle symbol, really. And I’m not sure about the girl’s talent. The continents on the globe aren’t recognizable at all.
The girl catches me staring and says something to me, but I can’t make out the words over the singing onstage.
“Are you spying on me?”
The girl swings her hair over her shoulder as she steps over the bench and settles in beside me. Her voice is teasing, though, not angry. She’s Australian. Her accent is a dead giveaway.
“Just admiring your artwork.”
“Artwork,” she repeats, enunciating her r’s. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
I wince.
“Oops. Sorry. Canadian, then?”
I nod.
“I know how it feels. I’m from New Zealand. I’ve only ever been to Australia twice. But when people hear me talk, they always assume I’m an Aussie. It drives me nuts.”
While the singing onstage continues, we introduce ourselves, shake hands. With the music so loud, we have to raise our voices when we talk, and lean in close.
Her name is Rosalind Richardson. I can call her Rosalind or Rosa. Or Richardson, even. Anything but Rose. She won’t answer to Rose.
“Rose,” she says, “is an old lady’s name. The kind of old lady who wears flowered housedresses and puts a blue rinse through her hair every month –”
“And has a moustache –”
“– and whiskers growing out of a mole on her chin.”
Rosa and I giggle.
Onstage, the drumming stops.
I look around me to see what’s going on. Why has the music stopped?
&n
bsp; Maybe Rosa and I are in trouble. We’ve been caught talking about trivial things on a historic day when we should be singing and dancing with everybody else.
But as Rosa and I turn our attention to the front of the assembly hall, Thandiwe starts another song. No drums this time. No guitar or piano. She sings the first line by herself, “Nkosi sikelel’i Afrika,” then the other voices join in.
“It’s the African National Anthem,” Rosa says. “Sacred song.”
“Why aren’t you up there?”
Rosa shrugs her shoulders. “I just don’t feel like it’s my celebration.”
For a moment, we listen. The boys onstage sing, “Woza moya.” The girls echo back, “Woza moya,” an octave higher.
“How about you?” says Rosa. “Why aren’t you up there?”
“Same reason, I guess.”
Nkosi sikelela
Thina lusapho lwayo
“What about your drawing, though?”
Rosa is staring at the stage, so I give her a poke to get her attention.
“What about your picture?” I ask. “Your globe. Isn’t it sort of a celebration of a new world? A new world free from injustice?”
“What?” Rosa looks confused.
I try to repeat myself but the singing is too loud now.
Sechaba saheso
Sechaba sa Afrika
The songs ends. There are more Amandla - Awetu calls. And the assembly finally draws to a close. Mr. Harrington announces that there will be a half-hour break followed by more celebrations on the playing field.
“Your globe,” I say to Rosa, pointing to her sketchbook as we stroll back to the hostel. “It’s a celebration of a new world free from injustice. Right?”
“Oh, my embryo! Yes, I suppose it does look something like a globe, doesn’t it? But – no. Sorry to disappoint you. It’s an embryo, not a globe.”
Which explains why the continents on her drawing don’t look like continents.
“Nothing political about it,” she says. “I don’t do politics. It’s just not my thing. I’m sort of infatuated with embryos and fetuses. What’s the plural of fetus? Feti?” She laughs. “Come on. Let me show you something.”
Rosa’s cubie is on the opposite end of the girls’ hostel, far from my cubie, in the other corridor. That’s why we’ve never run into each other before.
It’s wall-to-wall embryos.
She’s drawn them in pencil crayon, in oil pastels. In ink. Over her desk, there are dozens of charcoal sketches of wombs, each filled with swirls of black and white fluid and one tiny, rounded body. In every drawing, the face is featureless, save for a half-formed eye, the beginnings of a nose. The hands are more detailed. Long, delicate fingers reaching out beyond the uterus walls. Above her bed there are plump watercolour embryos in pale blues and pinks and greens. They have enormous heads, smiling mouths, and shrunken bodies. Some are underwater, surrounded by coral and seaweed and fish of all sizes. Words rise out from the lips of one embryo that rests on a sand-yellow sea floor. Hello fish! Hello fish!
She has several darker pieces leaning up against the wall under her desk. Paintings done in oil, I think, because the canvas is textured with thick paint. The oil embryos are long and thin, their bodies sinewy, fleshless. Their faces are grey, and wrinkled with age, like the faces of old men and old women. Like corpses, even, wrapped in a dark green – almost black – shroud of womb.
I stare for a long time at Rosa’s art, then at Rosa herself. Her freckled face is framed by soft, curly tufts of hair. She looks like the girl-next-door, like a cheerleader. Not like an artist. Where do these paintings come from?
And then, as though she’s heard my question, Rosa tells me.
“It started about a year, year and a half ago. By accident. I was studying for my A-Levels. Biology, actually. I’m good at sciences. And art, too. Though art is supposed to be my hobby. My parents want me to be a doctor. They’re both doctors, and my two aunts. I get a ton of grief from my parents for doing art. They think it’s a colossal waste of time. But I found a way to put my art classes to use when I was studying for my A-Levels. I started drawing these amazing diagrams of zygotes. Have you studied biology?”
I nod.
“Okay, then you know that zygotes are fertilized eggs.”
I nod again.
“Which eventually become embryos.”
She stops, then, grinning. Waiting for me to respond.
“All animals start out as zygotes,” she continues. “And all zygotes look the same. They’re identical.”
I feel as though I should say something, but I don’t know what Rosa is getting at. So they’re identical. So what?
“I-den-ti-cal,” she says, repeating herself. “Can you grasp it? Can you see what it means?”
I can’t. I give her a blank look.
“It means that for a brief, beautiful period in their initial developmental stages, every single animal from every single animal species looks identical to every other animal from every other animal species.”
Rosa sits back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest.
“That’s political,” I say. “You said that you don’t do politics, but that’s the most political idea I’ve ever heard. Equality. You’re talking about the equality of all living things.”
“Uh-uh,” Rosa shakes her head. “It’s science, not politics. Put two animal embryos in front of us, and we couldn’t tell them apart. Pig, cat, horse, cow, sheep, mule. Human. They’re all the same. We are all the same.”
“Sounds political,” I say.
Rosa ignores me.
“So when I draw an embryo, I’m not drawing one single thing. I’m drawing everything. Figuratively, I mean. I’m drawing the whole spectrum, the whole taxonomy, of living, breathing creatures. What artist can say that he – or she – has captured the entire living, breathing universe in one picture? What artist in the history of the world?”
“So you really don’t see your art as political?”
“After my first embryo,” says Rosa, pointing to a pencil sketch beside her window, “there was no going back for me. I knew that I’d found my lifelong passion. The art teachers aren’t exactly thrilled about it. They want me to make still-life portraits of – I don’t know – cabbages, I guess. Or avocados. Or pears. I refuse. Pears have been done to death. I’m never going to draw anything but embryos. It’s my calling.”
I still think that her art is political, but I don’t think that I should mention it again. I’m starting to sound like a broken record.
“Enough about me!” says Rosa, clapping her hands. “Get me started on embryos and I can’t stop. How about you? What are you into?”
I pause, unsure of what to say. I think Rosa is fascinating. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before. I’d like to impress her. Should I talk about my piano playing? My music? It’s not the same as her embryos. I wish that I had a weird, all-consuming, lifelong passion, too. Sister Maria’s eyes sparkled like Rosa’s, when she talked about her transcriptions of Ukrainian music. I want to sparkle too.
“Wait a second,” says Rosa, before I have a chance to speak. “Hold that thought. I want to show you something else. One more thing and then I’m shutting my mouth for good. I promise.”
Rummaging in her cupboard, Rosa pulls out a piece of yellow fabric. She spreads it across her bed. In the centre of the cloth, there’s an outline of two embryos, their heads and tails touching to form a complete circle.
“I’m experimenting with different art forms, and different media. This is my first batik. And my first set of twins.”
Batik, Rosa explains, is an ancient Indonesian art form. A Javanese art form, actually, that dates back at least two thousand years.
“The word batik comes from the Javanese word ambatik, which means drawing and writing. Artists in Java discovered that when portions of fabric are covered in wax they repel dye. So it’s possible to make pictures on pieces of cloth by drawing on the fabric with wax, and then d
ipping the fabric in different coloured dyes.”
“Sure. Like pysanky.”
“Piss-on-what?”
“Pysanky. Ukrainian Easter eggs.”
Then I talk.
I tell Rosa everything I know about pysanky. How Ukrainian women have been drawing on eggs each spring for two thousand years, maybe longer, with beeswax and kistky. To celebrate the renewal of the natural world. You start with a white egg, and you draw designs on it with a writing tool that transfers hot wax onto the shell. When the egg is dipped into yellow dye, the white parts of the egg that are covered in beeswax stay white. I explain that pysanky-making is based on the same principles as batik. The egg goes through several dyes – yellow, orange, sometimes green or blue, and red – before it’s dipped in the final black dye. After the egg has been dyed black, you hold it next to a flame, to melt off the layers of beeswax. And the egg comes to life with colour.
Pysanky. I teach Rosa to pronounce the word properly. I tell her that it’s exactly like batik. Pysanky comes from the word pysaty, to write.
When I’ve finished, Rosa grabs hold of both my hands.
“I want to learn,” she says. “Teach me. Will you teach me? Promise you’ll teach me.”
I try to cut in, to explain that it’s not as simple as teaching and learning. There are special materials involved, special tools. Where would we find beeswax and kistky? We’d need the proper dyes, and fresh farm eggs. Dye doesn’t stick to eggs that have been washed with chemicals.
Rosa doesn’t hear me, though.
“This is fate. You know that? It’s destiny. You think it’s an accident? A coincidence? That you just happened to come all this way to Africa, all the way from Canada, to Swaziland of all places?”