MEET ME INSIDE:
Releasing the bird and scaling down to the ant’s eye view on things.
what i ate today
we were woken up at dawn this morning by
a bird i had never heard before in Harlem, or anywhere really.
it had an angry, ominous call in two tones.
through the curtains, the day was yawning and
decidedly grey and begrudging
just like the song of the bird,
which printed its melancholy onto this last portion of night.
my husband Warren grabbed his ear plugs.
i got up to go to the bathroom for the umpteenth time since falling asleep at 11:16
and when i got back in bed, i wore my ear plugs and
struggled against the new top sheet we have been trying out
i have this ingrained perception that having a top sheet makes you a better person,
more serious and better at performing adulthood, especially now that i’m Married.
i’ve always just slept with a fitted sheet and a duvet but something about that at 40 feels juvenile.
my mother and my aunt and hotel rooms have top sheets.
they are serious women.
to me, their towering beds with gaudy headboards and shimmering brocade bed spreads
are symbols of their accomplishments in life, along with trays and tray cloths,
porcelain tea sets that have milk jars,
microwaves, multiple televisions and bedrooms that
that have ceiling fans and extra cupboards for their formal clothes,
clothes that are fighting for their lives on hangers that live too close together.
we took our ceiling fan down because gross.
we don’t have a really in-use microwave, only one we picked up for $14 at a yard sale to occasionally make popcorn,
which we’ve done a total of 2 times in one year.
my mother literally climbs up onto her beds, i fall into mine
because we sleep on a super thin japanese mattress and a low wooden base that Warren made.
my mother and aunts have two cars each,
one for weekdays and one for Sundays.
They are insured to the high hills and have insurance for each of their children and relatives.
they have hat closets.
they are uniformed senior members of the Methodist Women’s Manyano (bangoomama bebhatyi)
they know how to sing worship songs without hymn books
at 53 and 70,
they know how to pray:
black mom prayers in the form of commands rather than suggestions to uThixo
i’m wondering what it means to develop so far away from my reference points
for what it means to be a mature person.
i have some of these things, like life insurance and a hymn book.
i know how to pray on my own but one day, i’m gonna become a black mom
and i don’t know how to do that Thixo’olungileyo!!!! Thixo’onamandla!!!! Messiy’olungileyo!!!!
out loud on-my-knees-praying-for-my-children-and-family-and-against-my-enemies Xhosa prayer.
“We aren’t top sheet people love”, Warren said with certainty when we woke up,
trying to figure out why we slept so badly.
i didn’t quite know how much i needed to hear this.
we’ve been sleeping with a top sheet for a week now
and each morning it ends up at the bottom of the bed looking like a piece of
gum that you want to throw away but you haven’t found a rubbish bin yet
so you keep chewing and the more you chew, the more irritated you become that you can’t find a bin already
so you find the nearest tissue or piece of paper and put it in your handbag or car or pocket because
the desperation to eject this material from your person reaches feverish levels.
living in New York has felt a little bit like this,
except i am the gum and the city has felt like a giant mastication machine.
life here has absolutely been more challenging than my life was in South Africa
(the cost of everything, not being able to work for months cof of permits, the small and
big cultural differences, the unhinged levels of small talk involved in the quest
to make new friends as a grown up and the difficulty of aligning schedules
with existing friends, the noise, the overwhelming menu of choices for everything,
perpetual exposure to mental illness and drug abuse bursts in public are just a few things)
but all of these are standard challenges that many people experience when they make this place home.
18 months in, I’m actually starting to enjoy my day to day life here (because it’s not freezing), i got all my papers (greencard and work permit) and i’ve stopped comparing it to a life i chose to leave, not because i didn’t like it anymore,
but because i met someone and he was worth moving countries for.
but if i were to draw the anatomy of just what has made this transition so difficult, i would say it’s two overarching things:
a) suddenly having to change what the word “work” means in my life.
when i was in Joburg, my priorities were global in their scale and concerned with important political issues that the world is facing like decolonisation, racism, sexism, historical trauma, healing generational wounds etc. as a writer, storyteller and cultural worker, my work was in the field of articulating and eradicating these issues. i chose most of my friends based on our shared interests in these concerns and i wasn’t the only one. i was part of a huge community of multidisciplinary artists and practitioners in a very rich tradition of integrating political work into our everyday lives. i even made my NY friends with this metric and i thought we could build friendships based on our ideological interests, which i did for a while but that’s not the case today.
in the last 18 months, this metric has transformed to reflect my main reason for moving to NY, which was honestly to build my relationship with my man, even though i have career prospects here and am privileged to be exposed to so many cultural institutions which have embraced my work. the truth is, i didn’t come to NY for my career first, hoping to meet someone as a second priority. it was the other way around. but it took me a while to understand this.
when my everyday life began to be reflected in how much domestic life i was cultivating, i became stressed and confused about what i was doing here. i’ve never really taken this personal side of life seriously enough as something to “work” on. but that’s exactly what i’ve been doing. i’ve had to change the scale of my priorities from global to extremely local, meaning i’ve been learning to deal with personal, intrinsic, immediate surroundings issues like cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, understanding my body, dealing with the fear of true intimacy and other things buried deep underneath the more exhibited aspects of my identity like race, gender etc.
b: the compounding effects of so many big and small things being new at the same time
- moving house
- moving countries and accidentally becoming an immigrant
- living with a man for the first time
- marriage
- learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road
- the confidence see-saw that happens with meeting new people who don’t end up sticking around
- not being around my language and vernacular culture (not being around ABANTU)
- not being around my long term friendships which were very easy and well worn
- the battle of the schedules
- walking to and from getting groceries and up 3 flights of stairs with said groceries
- money and how much that money nerve in your brain is always throbbing in new york
- navigating the street cleaning parking reality (which i lowkey love as a way of cutting one’s teeth in this city)
- not having help from random men of the society to help you lift and carry things like we do in SA
- having to do laundry outside the home cos there are generally no washing machines in individual flats
- cleaning. not tidying up, real cleaning without Handy Andy or Domestos yehova!!!!
- not having a dishwasher
- Jenny, my former domestic helper in Joburg would come every second Wednesday for 11 years to
help me manage the upkeep of my home, which was also my office. she used to iron. i don’t know how to iron.
i feel a little unserious (like, okay girl miss Africa we get it) writing this list down
in the midst of serious global catastrophes in the middle east, parts of Africa
and the very serious and painful challenges for immigrants happening in this city, this country and the world,
but these are the stubborn set of things that i have actually been dealing with
which have reduced my computer time and forced
me to focus on life at a much smaller, more provincial scale and to recognise that actually,
that is also political, not that i need to frame things that way to legitimate my existence,
but it’s been instructive because this is what the outside work i did was actually fighting for,
the ability to live one’s unremarkable life.
the reduction has also come with some painful friendship losses, an inertia about
what’s next and how to be in this new skin,
but also more clarity about what is important in these uncertain times,
and what role i can play from where i am to engage and be in concert with
humanity.
i’ve been trying to create at a solid structure for the last 18 months
and aluta continua comrades.
today i woke up at 6.30 and snoozed until 7.10
last week i tried ursula leguin’s famous writing schedule, which involves waking up at 5.30
taking it easy during the day and sleeping in the afternoon like i used to do
seems a bit embarrassing in a high productivity place like NY but i’m trying not to let that get to me
MILISUTHANDO the film is getting ready to be released in
North America in July, and on a special streaming platform on 1 October.
my team and i are working on a plan for where the film will become available in SA and the rest of the world.
i’m writing some new things but have no idea where they will end up or what they will be yet,
Warren put a couch in my office for me to read more, which i really appreciate.
i’m reading a few books that sweep the inertia out of me. (on Xhosa folk tales and their history)
i’m trying to rebuild my spiritual life in new continent
being a lot more gentle to my body
and i’m cooking all the time.
this is where i am this season,
which i want to call The Season of Tending
today i ate a home made bowl of ramen that i wish i could have taken a photo of cos it was so good.
i bought chicken feet from Mast Market on the Upper West Side where I got on Tuesdays (amazing matcha latte)
and cooked them for 5 hours with water, onions, garlic, sesame oil and black peppercorns.
then i added some taiwanese pork floss (umami forward dried pork dust) and
cooked it for another hour. Warren drained the broth, which was opaque and stored it in the
fridge for 3 days. then i bought gluten free ramen noodles, cooked them in a separate pot,
boiled 2 eggs for 8 minutes each, chopped up some spring onion and warmed up the broth with some kale.
when it was hot, i dished it in two big bowls, added the noodles, deshelled and cut the eggs in half, placed them on top of the ramen, sprinkled some sesame seeds on there, some sesame oil, some tamari and served.
happy youth day South Africa. happy Juneteeth America.