Always Another Country

by Sisonke Msimang

  His messages are always muted. He doesn’t say ‘I love you’ any more but I know he wants to. Sometimes he still writes me notes the way he used to, brimming with detail – with observations about the weather and the wind and the sun. He was a man who had been a boy who had lived by the sea and these movements, the changes associated with the seasons, matter to him and carry a poignancy I simply hadn’t thought about until we met. Other times he just says, ‘How are you?’ and the brevity of these messages makes me think maybe his love is fading, makes me worry about what might happen if he got fed up and left my life completely.

  Mummy asks after him often and I’m always short with her.

  ‘Where is that nice Simon?’ My answer is always the same. ‘I have no idea, Mummy.’ It is none of her business we are still in touch. I refuse to acknowledge her questions as a subtle signal of acceptance. In her quiet Swazi way Mummy is saying, ‘He is as different from you as he is and still you love him, and so will I. If you love him, then I will too.’

  * * *

  It is 1999 and Nelson Mandela is no longer the president and South Africa is still free. Freedom means many things in the new South Africa. For Zeng and me it means sleeping in on a rainy Cape morning. Sheets of rain blow past the little garden flat Zeng is renting in Woodstock. It is grey and foggy and our heads are sore – mine more than hers. We are lying on her bed.

  We drank too much last night. I was so drunk I smoked cigarettes and pretended to be French. Zeng holds her liquor better – more practice. So she took care of me. It was a nice role reversal, the little sister guiding her sloppy drunk big sis to the car. She is in her second year at UCT and I’ve quit my job to pursue a second degree. Baba and Uncle Stan have been adamant I won’t progress in my career if I don’t get a postgraduate degree. So I have just started my master’s in the politics department while working a part-­time job.

  My stomach is churning. I don’t know whether to sit or stand. I don’t let myself get drunk often so when it happens there is always a story. I am a hilarious drunk.

  Zeng relishes the moment. She’s usually the one with a hangover so she is smug and amused. I think I might vomit. I get up and immediately I have to lie down again. I will never drink again, I groan. Zeng laughs. She is sunlight, even when I feel like death. She has no pity but I’m glad we’re together. I missed her when she moved to Cape Town. The house in Pretoria wasn’t the same without her. Mummy and Baba were rarely there – busy with their projects. So we’ve reconnected and in Cape Town she has her crew but she makes time for me. She no longer adores me – we are peers now. Something has happened to shift her, to make her capable of dispensing advice, not just of receiving my wisdom.

  In spite of my sorry state, she wants to talk. I don’t want to listen but I’m too discombobulated to object. She shifts to stand next to the window because she knows cigarettes bug me. I watch the smoke curl and disappear – translucent against the grey sky. I wish vaguely that I could be more like her – unconcerned with what Mummy and Baba think and, so, able to drink and wear their sighs with a shrug. I was too scared of them to experiment with smoking as a teenager and, even now, their disapproval looms large. Even being here is – at least, in part – a function of my desire to make them proud. Zeng seems – at least, on the surface – to suffer no such desires. She is who she is and she does what she likes.

  So classically ‘first’ and ‘last’ born are we that it binds us. We seem cast in stone. Mandla is still in America but she is as much a middle child as we are first and last. Often, our advice to one another emanates from this knowledge – that our birth order has determined our stance towards Mummy and Baba, but it also plays a role in how we see the world. We may be grown-up but in some ways our parents are still the planets around which we orbit. In so many of my decisions – even when I am not in direct conversation with them – I seek their approval. Mandla, on the other hand, is constantly fighting to be herself – to be recognised and heard – so she is headstrong even in her relative silence. And of course Zeng – the lovely one who lags – manages to appear as though she doesn’t care even when she does.

  So today I lie in bed and it hurts my head to even breathe, but she’s cracking me up, reminding me of last night. Thinking about it in retrospect, the scene – the conversation, the smoke, the nausea – is a marker of how we are becoming women.

  She is talking about the French man whose accent I imitated last night. I had blanked that out. We laugh. ‘Can I ’ave a cigarette?’ she says, reminding me of my ridiculousness. ‘Babes, you talked like that all night. To the guy’s face.’ If it didn’t hurt, I would laugh harder. ‘Shame, poor Frenchman. He didn’t know what hit him. He was cute, though.’ I’m about to roll my eyes but she changes the subject again – so quickly I feel dizzy.

  ‘Speaking of cute white boys, babes, can we talk about the shocking hypocrisy of breaking up with someone because he’s white?’

  My cheeks flush. I am embarrassed and angry. Black Power angry.

  ‘How is that hypocrisy?’ I retort.

  ‘It’s hypocrisy because you love him.’

  She is telling the truth.

  ‘I am not sure if I do.’

  I’m lying.

  ‘Please, babes. You weren’t scared off by the fact that he has kids. It doesn’t bother you that he is a decade older than you. You aren’t disturbed by the existence of an ex-wife. You’re not worried about the fact that he lives in bloody Australia – Over There or Down Under or whatever they call it. You’ve got over all these pretty major things. After all that, you break up with him for no real reason? Please. You’re just worried about what people will say.’

  I am quiet because I know she is right.

  ‘Yup. All your activist radical talk, and look, you’ve fallen in love with a white guy.’ She is not saying this unkindly. She is just stating the obvious.

  I stay quiet because she is still right. My silence gives her permission to continue. I keep listening.

  ‘And I get it. I mean, I don’t really because I’d be psyched if anyone loved me like that. But I get it. And maybe you need to rethink the politics so they fit you better. Like maybe the theories are like pointers, like general guidelines. Then there’s how you practise them. I mean, if you took it all to its logical conclusion you’d be married to a black lesbian who is five foot nine with dreads because the only lover who can ever know what it’s like to be you is you. It’s crazy, babes.’

  She is right again.

  Rejecting Simon is mainly about this idea I have in my head of who I am. I’m stubbornly clinging to a political position I arrived at in the absence of love – when I was in college and charged with a righteousness that was deeply powerful and naively abstract – instead of deciding that it’s more complex than I want it to be. I’m not powerless in the face of love, but, simplistic and naive as they sounded, I can’t ignore the two core tenets of my upbringing, the big ideas that guided my life until college. The first is that race is fiction, a myth the Boers and the slavers in America made up to oppress us. Growing up, families like the Jeles and the Mfenes – where the mothers were white and the fathers were African – were testament to the absurdity of race. The second was that kindness and fairness were important. Objections to interracial love in a racist world make sense to me. I can’t reject them. In the end, though, it boils down to this: I prefer having Simon in my life to not having him. I would rather work through our disagreements and fight until we are exhausted than walk away from this man I love – who loves me more completely than any man ever has. This knowledge is more powerful than any intellectual debate. I have to learn to accept the contradictions. This is one that I will wrestle with over and over across the years; some questions are never resolved. Clichéd as it sounds, we live the questions and it is in the joy and the pain of asking them – of being asked the questions in sometimes sharp and hard ways – that we find meaning.

  So, still half-drunk and vomity, I listen to my sister. Then
I text him: ‘Come see me in Cape Town?’ He says yes.

  * * *

  Simon and I married in 2003. We have two children. Over the years, we have made our way and the making of our way has become our way – our path and our progress. We have learnt that it is not us against the world; that sometimes our fights are precisely about us and how we are in the world. His love and patience have taught me that love is a grappling, and ours is like every other love on the planet: often too hard and sometimes bitter but always available in abundance. In our hardest moments, we have still loved one another.

  Simon does not talk about -isms in the same way I do. He understands them and tries his best. His views are sensible and smart and sometimes profound. He believes in God and I am sceptical about God. I have learnt not to be bothered by his faith just as he is unperturbed by the lack of mine. I have learnt to respect and admire his belief, to respect the fact that he goes to church when he wants to and that when he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t. He is freer of dogma than anyone I have met, yet he has an unshakeable sense of himself and I have come to understand that he owes a large part of his emotional stability to his belief in God.

  I have learnt to appreciate his commitment to and love for the ocean. It enriches me and gives me a sense of wonder. I admire his feeling for the seas because I know that it carried him through a childhood that was sometimes lonelier than it ought to have been.

  He has taught me that love is not based on sameness or difference. Through him I have discovered that love lives in its own dimension and whereas it is connected to real life – to objects and systems and elements that are solid – it is also mysterious.

  I love his children. When I meet her, Gabi is coltish and scared. She is only eleven and has her father’s uncertain smile and she carries in her the same hurt in her eyes, the same determination to be okay even when she is not. Nick is laid back. He is eight when I first set eyes on him and he is wearing a necklace with a shark’s tooth on the end. He loves the sea. He is naturally cool. He wants his father to love him so he laughs at my jokes.

  In time, we all grow to love one another because we decide that we will love one another. They are part of him but my love for them must be worked on. They have a mother and I am only a young woman – someone who knows nothing about children in Australia. But I love him so I decide to love them. They make it easy. Their mother is good and honest and kind and she makes it easier still. We live our way into our life. I don’t know how else to say this: our life is our life and we learn not to explain or apologise. We learn only to give in to what it is that life and love are asking of us.

  Mummy and Baba love Simon. They are too kind themselves, too human and filled with the morality of their generation, to ignore the kindness in his eyes. Mummy makes him her son, and his gratitude for her love and acceptance is a joy to observe.

  In the early days I have moments where I wonder whether this was the right thing to do. Sometimes, for long stretches I lose my patience because, when you are young and there is much to do, even love seems expendable. During these times I pepper him with questions and expect him to give textbook answers. He fails all my tests. Even when he sees them coming, he fails my quizzes. In time we both realise he will never pass any test designed as a trap.

  He has his doubts too. His fears are about my capacity to be better behaved than I often am. He will wonder whether he should believe in me or whether he should just accept me as I am. He will wonder if he should leave and sometimes the answer is not clear because I give him so little to hold onto.

  He is kinder, gentler, more thoughtful and more steadfast than anyone I know. He is my patience and in time I learn to be his temper. When he encounters meanness I take his side. I am loyal to who he is at his best and even when he is at his lowest I know who he can be and when he doesn’t remember, I do. If he is wrong we figure it out together but because so often he is too quick to blame himself I learn that he is seldom wrong in matters of the heart. Still, we have our complications.

  Simon teaches me how to be in love. He teaches me that living in love means existing, over long and sometimes painful periods, as no one but yourself in the presence of another. To be yourself alone is one thing. To be yourself in a partnership is a gift.

  I let him love me. I love him and my love grows fiercer and less liable to fall apart when it is tested.

  Anyone who has ever loved and been loved will know what I mean when I say that I resigned myself to loving Simon. I have learnt to hold us close and that means shrugging at attempts to define us in ways that diminish what we have gone through and who we are to each other simply because others are curious about my blackness and his whiteness, as if that could ever be the most definitive thing there is to say about us.

  Aids

  The transition – which has been fluid and exciting in these early years – is suddenly turning into something hard and unyielding. Aids is everywhere. Every newspaper headline, every billboard. Suddenly it seems everyone is dying at once. Aunties are dying quietly and uncles are slipping away. No one wants to say what it is, even though we all know. At work, people begin to disappear slowly into their clothes, their mouths drying out and their tongues turning to cotton wool.

  Aids oozes and puses and leaks across the country, winding its way into every community, into even the hardest hearts. Everybody it seems is sick or sad or both.

  The only person in the country who seems not to be grieving is the president. Instead, he seems outraged that our glorious story is turning to shit because of this Aids nonsense. He seems convinced the media is over-reporting it. Worse, he begins to flirt with denialists, spending time reading up on the subject and communicating, in imperious and confusing ways, about an epidemic he says is about poverty rather than disease. The points he makes are academic. He pontificates and his words get bigger and bigger and he sounds more and more pompous until I think to myself one day he might fly away like a balloon full of self-generated helium. He skirts around what he wants to say but his actions are clear. He does nothing. This slows down the machinery of the state.

  As the denial deepens and his stubbornness and inability to accept he is wrong deepen into a crisis, there comes a point where I cannot bear to look at him any more. But he does not fly away and I cannot ignore the president of the country that has gradually become mine.

  President Mbeki stays firmly tethered to the ground, kept in place by a political party that is growing more and more cowardly in the face of his outrageous conduct. Because his tone is never fiery, and because he is known for his erudition, his denialism wears the robes of reasonableness. He sounds statesmanlike, even when the implications of his ‘reasoning’ are so bleak.

  His Aids dissidence is met with increasing outrage. Journalists write and editors editorialise but nothing happens. Instead, those who question the weird science he endorses are accused of racism and of undermining the president. We are all told we want to see an uppity black man fail.

  The more Mbeki is pushed to change his approach, the more loudly he is told to hurry up and help the sick and the dying by providing the medicines they need, the more obstinate he becomes.

  These years are difficult for me because Aids is not simply an issue in the headlines. I am now working for the United Nations, and the focus of my work is sexual and reproductive health. Aids sits firmly in the middle of my portfolio. I live and breathe statistics. I work with a team of activists who believe Aids is the struggle of our generation. Whereas our parents were called upon to fight racism, our job will be to address socioeconomic rights, to ensure the Constitution isn’t simply an empty document that lets South Africa’s people down.

  So, Aids arrives as a painful syndrome that strips the best and brightest of our generation of energy and, in too many cases, of life itself. When the president begins to deny it, many of us are shocked. At first, we try to engage him. We listen respectfully as he pronounces on the matter. But it becomes clear very quickly that the fight we must tak
e on is as much about the right to health as it is about the rights we have to question, to protest and to influence government policy.

  President Mbeki’s dismissiveness jolts us out of complacency and reminds us that democracy will have to be defended.

  The president’s official spokesman – a man who has issued statements on his behalf for years, a man who has sat beside him in aeroplanes as he has crisscrossed the globe, a man who has fielded media requests and honed his speeches over a period of years, a man the president may be tempted to call a brother – begins to shrink. He is not-so-slowly dying of Aids even as the president insists the illness exists as a function of poverty rather than being a virus that can be directly identified.

  The public shakes its head, disbelieving of the spectacle that is unfolding in the most awful way possible. The president is naked and the man who said he wears the finest clothes in the land is now dead – killed by the very virus they refute.

  The spokesperson is a man named Parks Mankahlana. He has been one of Mbeki’s faithful, which means that he was struck by the same peculiar strain of madness that afflicted his boss. Mbeki seems to be embarrassed to admit that an STD is ruining our economy and diminishing our human development indicators. It seems somehow beneath us.

  Mbeki can’t see that apartheid has written this virus into our landscape, that it is evident that the virus spread because of the infrastructure of apartheid, because of the social dynamics created by that system. Instead, Mbeki looks for bogeymen – Western aid agencies over-inflating the statistics and pharmaceutical companies looking to find cheap markets in Africa.

  I attend National AIDS Council meetings. There are many updates about who is doing what. There are announcements about comrades who have passed away. There are resolutions about letters that need to be written. But as the crisis deepens, the meetings become bigger, more impassioned. The comrades from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) swell our ranks. There are marches. Zackie Achmat stops taking his ARVs until all South Africans have access to them and Nelson Mandela is sent to tell him to resume treatment – for the sake of the country, the old man says, we need you alive.