I write because when I was in high school Baba marked up my essays with a red pen.
I write because Mummy taught me how to spell, just like she taught me the only true thing that counts, which is that you are always only one breath away from death.
I write because – as Nikki Giovanni said about love – there is nothing for me, but to write.
Mothers and daughters
Mummy doesn’t always agree with everything I write. She is pragmatic and unsure how all this public rabble-rousing will do anything but provoke retribution. I am as idealistic as ever. I believe it makes a difference. It is absurd to think my speaking out will have any negative consequences but I have always been an idealist and Mummy has always been correct about most things. We spar gently. We rarely fight directly. It is not in the nature of our dynamic to do this. Mummy has a strong sense of decorum. She thinks it is unbecoming to argue and fight. Yet she believes in telling the truth. So, we work out a system. Now that we are all grown, we revisit the rules.
As the ANC falls apart, and as South Africa becomes politically unsettling, we find our stride as a family of adults.
Mummy and Baba are still part of our daily lives. We are like five fingers on a hand – separate but deeply connected. Mummy and Baba have moved out from under the shadows of the Menlyn Park mall. Their house sits on a big plot of land halfway between Pretoria and Johannesburg. The property used to be owned by a vet. The vet and his family emigrated and Mummy and Baba bought the place. It has stables and a long driveway and the whole neighbourhood is full of horses and quiet privilege.
We are all doing well. Mandla is working – making her mark in telecommunications. Zeng has finished university and is making a go of events management and conferencing. Simon and I are married and the kids have come and we are busy with our travels.
We see each other on most weekends. Mummy and I speak on the phone every day. Mandla and Zeng and I speak on the phone every day. Mummy talks to the Mandla and Zeng every day. The three of us talk to Baba every few days. Mummy of course talks to him all day, every day – phoning him to remind him of this or that. It’s as though cell phones were invented for our family.
If I am angry at Mummy, I call Mandla to tell her. Mandla calls Mummy to tell her, ‘Sonke is upset. You better call her.’
If Mandla is angry with Zeng she lets me know. She says something like, ‘Your sister is so wack.’ (We love the word ‘wack’ because somehow in our teens it found its way into Mummy’s vocabulary and the incongruence of it – the hip-hop-infected slang of it – coming out of her mouth is hilarious. After a while it just becomes habit. We use it well past its sell-by date.)
‘Why is she wack?’ I ask, putting on Mummy’s voice to lighten the mood.
‘She always does this. I’m sick of her always coming to me at the last minute with this stuff.’
I call Zeng.
‘Your sister is mad at you. She said you’re wack. You better call her.’
This system works. We aren’t simply a telephone exchange, though. We are one another’s intermediaries and sounding boards. Our conversations sometimes require that we take sides. The one who gets the call can always push back.
‘Yes she is last-minute, but you also never take her into account. You know this is going to happen. Why not plan for it?’
Or: ‘But aren’t you the one who told her to call you if she needed a ride? Don’t say it if you don’t mean it, babes. Stop offering if you know it bugs you.’
We are a web of conversations, an intricate pattern of strings held together by love and loyalty. Mummy has opted to pick up a new instrument as she gets older. She is no longer the conductor. She has taken her place alongside us. We do not notice at first, that she is no longer at the front. That she is sitting beside us.
We are an imperfect quartet.
We love Baba very much. He is not like us though, because he is a man. Our allegiance tilts slightly, so that we hold her more closely and let him go a little bit. He is the best man we know but we no longer need to adore him. Now we are women and not simply daughters so we have begun to see the ways in which Mummy needs us now. It has been hard for her to be strong for so long without knowing when she might be loved back rather than simply needed. It is her time to need. She needs our eyes to shine when we look at her. She needs to know we see her for who she has always been. She does not tell us any of this but somehow we begin to know it quietly and without discussion.
The end
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
On a holiday in 2011, just after E was born, we decided to buy a small piece of land in Mozambique. We thought we’d build a vacation house on it, and use it for family holidays. It is in Inhambane, which is either a short flight or a long drive from Joburg.
After our return from the US, Simon begins to put in place a plan for swapping our hectic lives in Joburg for more and better time together. The kids are growing up quickly. Joburg has him spooked and I no longer have the job to hide behind. We can work from anywhere.
So, in January of 2014, after months of planning, we move to Inhambane. Inhambane is a small town in southern Mozambique. Mozambique is not without its complications. With its long independence struggle and a bitter civil war that was prolonged and exacerbated by the apartheid government’s support for Renamo, Mozambique is a complex place. Still, it is somewhere else, a place where we can feel that the problems – the poverty and hunger, the political dramas – aren’t ours.
For South Africans Mozambique is easy. In Mozambique there are easy smiles and there is the appearance of a que sera, sera attitude towards race relations. As a consequence, many white South Africans think of it as a paradise where the black people aren’t aggressive and angry about racism. At the same time, a small but growing number of black South Africans of means see it as a warm getaway. In Mozambique the rand takes you very far. During school holidays and over the festive season, cars with Gauteng licence plates overwhelm the town. There are quad bikes and loud voices and bad South African beer everywhere. In the off-season, though, Inhambane is quiet and simple. The boats go out at five and the catch of the day is spread out on sandy market tables by nine.
I have lined up a few consultancy contracts and we have found a sweet school for the kids, and a builder to begin to put up the house. We have enlisted JP to design something for us. We don’t know how long we will stay but Mozambique represents a happy compromise. Simon has the beach and a chance to be free of the pace and jitters of Joburg. I ostensibly have enough distance from South Africa and its politics to focus on him and the kids. To say I have been a distracted mother since becoming a writer is an understatement. I am on the computer, writing, or on the phone, talking about politics, or on the radio, being interviewed, or at seminars, talking about what I think about the state of the nation.
The Daily Maverick column has led to more columns. One of those columns leads to an invitation to a television show and on social media it has turned me into a writer. People read my words and think about what I am saying – even if it is only to dismiss me or contradict me. My love affair with South Africa has deepened. The country feels toxic, yet I’m obsessed with it. I swing between depression and euphoria.
So, by the time we escape to paradise, Simon is at his wits’ end with me. I understand at an intellectual level that I need to unplug, to focus on the kids and Simon and not on the state of the nation. But in my heart I am just grateful Inhambane is so close. It’s a forty-five-minute plane ride and there is a daily flight.
M
ummy is not happy about the move. She understands our need to be together as a family on a beach in a far-flung place. She also sees my ambivalence about leaving South Africa and Simon’s lack of equivocation and she worries about the rift this might cause. We want such different things.
She knows too that the only way to resolve it is to test it out – to step away from the city that is pushing Simon away, the city I love. She doesn’t say it, but I can see the wheels turning. She has always been our biggest supporter. In part this is because she has become the respectable mother who wants her daughter who is enviably married to be happy. But it is also because she loves Simon. She loves him for his kindness, for the moderating influence he has on me. Mummy knows that leaving will prove to both of us that I love him more than the country of my heart.
On the day we leave, Mummy is emotional. She does not cry but her eyes are full of feeling. As Simon loads the last items into the car, she is already talking about her and Baba’s first visit. As we get in the car she says, ‘Take care of my children.’
‘Of course, Mummy,’ I say.
We both pretend that she’s not sad.
The kids will miss her. They have become used to her unannounced arrivals and her insistence on swooping in on Friday afternoons and taking them from us for the weekend. I will miss her too: especially her hawkishness. Who will cast a stern eye on everyone who comes into contact with S and E? Who will be suspicious on my behalf, allowing me to be the big-hearted naive madam? I will even miss her unsolicited advice.
I know she will be there to visit in a few weeks. She’ll never leave us alone. Still, I mark the moment, knowing what we must look like. We are mirror images of one another: mother and daughter with the same face, holding their heads in the same way, both pretending to be fine.
To know your mother as an adult is to finally see that she has lived many more years as a woman than you have been alive. To be a grown woman who loves her mother is to understand that it is no easy thing to raise children so beautifully that they don’t worry about you until they are grown up and ready to carry the complex burden of that anxiety.
I was not a child who took care of her mother, although I have realised that some do, from a very young age. Some children learn to worry about their mother’s health and they know how to soothe their tempers and gauge their moods, because their mothers are volatile or inconsistent or not fully ready to be mothers even though their children have arrived. I had the good fortune not to have to worry about Mummy until I was a fully grown woman and even then it was only for short periods. She was never sick, never broke, never heartbroken enough to warrant needing me. She was her own even as she was fully mine.
As a girl I sometimes had an inkling of this other being when I watched her with her friends. I got this sense that she was a full human and would have been one with or without me. That feeling was fleeting, though. I would get a sense of it sometimes as I stood at the kitchen door waiting for her to notice me so I could ask her permission to let some girls come upstairs to our bedroom, or to get more cool drinks for the kids in the back, or whatever it was I needed. In those moments before she noticed me I would see her – just briefly – as a woman who was someone else as well, someone who was more than simply my mother.
Or she would be drinking wine and laughing until tears ran, making jokes I couldn’t understand, and she would look like somebody free, someone who wasn’t tied down to three little hearts bound in skinny ribcages. She didn’t look at all like a woman who had planted three umbilical cords beneath the forests of Mbuluzi. You couldn’t tell she was a woman who had once slipped on ice on an Ottawa street and picked herself up and kept walking. Still, you’d sense she was the sort of woman who loved herself enough to turn her back on everything known and safe.
* * *
Five months later Mummy died. Her departure was abrupt – too sudden to comprehend, even now.
We happened to be in Johannesburg visiting when she died. We were staying at home with her and Baba in the house where we married and where Mandla and Siya married too. The house where S and E had walked with her too many times to count – down the long path to the chicken coop to fetch eggs for breakfast in the morning with the dogs wagging their tails and the neighbours waving. We were all in that house when it happened. We were all there yet she left us as if we didn’t even exist, as if we weren’t there, visiting her.
It was school holidays and even though Mummy and Baba were with us in Inhambane just a week before, we were with them again. The babies were asleep in one bedroom and Simon and I were in another. All of us were upstairs behind the security gate at the top of the stairs and behind the burglar bars on the windows – safe from harm.
Baba came into our bedroom tentatively and woke me. He told me he was worried that Mummy was not rousing and she had been in the tub too long.
I padded over to the bathtub and then got Simon because surely he could do something but it was too late. The night was a blur of emergency calls and Simon on his knees in the bathroom giving her CPR and the sound of his breath pumping into and out of her mouth. The paramedics arrived and they tried too, even though they could tell that it was too late.
They noted the time. The zipper bag went down the stairs. Zeng arrived as they left and she kissed her. I had no such courage. I stayed upstairs clutching the overnight bag I had packed when we thought the CPR might work. I called Mandla. She was in Cairo on a work trip. She screamed at me and told me to stop talking – she didn’t want to listen any more so she just kept saying stop. I repeated it. ‘Mummy’s gone.’ She screamed again. ‘What do you mean? Sonk? Sonk?’ She kept saying my name like that and I stopped talking. I couldn’t talk. Then I found my voice again and I told her to come home.
Afterwards – for weeks – I couldn’t stop the blood from pounding in my belly. There was a pinpoint in my navel and it was there for weeks and then months and even now. I smiled so that the kids wouldn’t fall apart. They were so confused. S was a little rag doll and sometimes I wondered if she could ever be right again. Simon held us all in his arms even though he loved her so very much and his heart was also broken.
In her goneness the choices before us were even starker. She was our children’s biggest advocate, morbidly obsessed with their survival. Suddenly, ‘Go!’ was scrawled across every wall in my parents’ house; it hissed at me in every room she occupied. ‘Go.’ And so we did.
Simon was ready and I finally accepted that, given everything that had happened – the betrayal and the sadness and Mummy’s no-longerness – I would rather be homesick than home. Without her, I was free to belong wherever it was that I happened to be and so, finally – finally – we left.
* * *
When Mummy died I felt a profound sense of loss. I also became profoundly lost. I was – as Rebecca Solnit describes it – both ‘missing [an] element’ and in entirely new terrain. I was suddenly aware that the world was ‘larger than [my] knowledge of it’. In many ways perhaps more than lost, I felt homeless. I did not know where to go to feel at home. Our house felt haunted, no longer there for any particular purpose except as a meeting place for the grieving. There was nowhere on Earth I could go where I might find her so I felt that, quite abruptly, I had gone from knowing who I was and where I was going to belonging to no one and knowing nothing. When she died I lost the surest home I ever had. Her death helped me to understand I had always had a home, even as I was searching for a country.
Mummy was the best kind of role model for how to be a partner who is both in love and able to love herself. The three of us girls often teased her about her ‘boyfriend’, Baba. They loved each other deeply over a span of forty-two years. They had their troubles but they drew close when it was necessary and they knew how to let each other be.
The enduring memory of my childhood is of hearing them waking up in the morning and turning on the old Grundig radio. Three short sharp beeps. Then: ‘This is the BBC World Service.’ Then I would hear their voices murmuring
, the sounds of them running the bath and talking and laughing. It seemed they never ran out of words for each other. They were making plans and talking and laughing until the very end.
I still had Mandla and Zeng and Baba and Simon and the kids, so I had love. But it was not that I felt unloved – it was that I was suddenly unmothered. I felt strangely homesick. I was lonely without Mummy. I had no one to ask, ‘What should I do?’
I am still that way. I miss her most when things are hard. I miss her too when I have done something wonderful and I know she would be proud. I miss her when I am bored. I miss her all the time and the missing will not stop.
Until her death I believed that geography and belonging were intertwined. I had this idea that who you were was tied to where you came from. I envied people who had grown up in a particular house on a certain street in a single town. I wanted to be anchored like those who only leave a place when they are old enough to go of their own volition. I was jealous.
I thought that where people were from inevitably wound its way into who they ultimately became, and so, because I had never had a spatial connection to the place I called home, I always longed for a physical address. Instead, I grew up with a succession of PO boxes, staying for long enough to know my way around but never long enough to know any place with depth.
Mummy suffered no such worries about her sense of place. She was always able to make herself at home. Wherever she was, she made things work. Somewhere along the way she figured out that, for her freedom fighter husband and the girls she had borne in exile, freedom wasn’t simply about the end goal. She knew that the journey itself was freedom.
In her own quiet and steady way, Mummy spent her whole life teaching us that it was having a map, rather than belonging to a country, that would make us free; that it was those we loved, and not where we lived, that would make us belong, and that it was open hearts, rather than closed fists, that would help us navigate the world.
Always Another Country Page 29