letting it all hang out

The map spills over the side of the bed. It's marked with black penned notes like, "elephants!" or "rock art" or "women's art co-op" and highlighted autoroutes make colourful purple and green snakes basking across South Africa's surface. Durban is our axis, Cape Town is our endpoint, and our goalposts are everywhere in between.

Meg and I are flying out of Cape Town at 7h30 this Saturday, and we're renting a car from Durban and driving north to Swaziland. We don't really know what there is to see and do; Lonely Planet allocates only a mere 20 pages to the entire country in its guide to Southern Africa and details its various hiking trails, villages, and craft fairs. Honestly, I think I want to go to Swaziland just because I love its name. I've always judged books by their covers. It's one of my greatest flaws. But something baptised with such a vibrant face must hold something equally rich, and so we're driving on our impulses with wide hope.

We leave Swazi to re-enter Kwazulu-Natal, a province of South Africa, and from this point forward, everything and everywhere is a hypothesis. The city has worn down our resistance, and so we're driving clear of any starred circle on our map; instead, we're drifting toward the roads without names, where our African friends have told us to drive carefully because cows and other animals randomly and without warning decide to plop themselves in the center of our straight, straight path. We're abandoning touristy beaches for the mountains in Drakensberg where the caves are stamped with thousands of cave paintings, then falling back to the coast in the Eastern Cape to explore the secluded inlets, forests, surfing beaches with white sand, and Xhosa homes whose faces are tattooed with black, brick red and cream triangles.

I'm packing a swim suit. A turquoise and lime sari skirt. Sneakers. A yellow scarf for my hair. A fleece. A Nikon D40. Soap. A book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. A pen. Rand. The map. A good friend. And not much else.

diversity

America knows diversity. Since second grade I've sung praises of the "melting pot," the most grossly overused metaphor in American history; I stand facing our flag and prostrate my identity to this prayer of indivisibility in unity of difference; I travel the country and see people of different languages, some with heavy dark wool itching their necks and others gliding and sweating under transparent bright silks, I see fishing villages without fences to separate neighbours and I've lived in apartments where I did not know who lived in the flats beside me, I've tasted hot greasy apple doughnuts from an orchard in Massachusetts and iced milky horchata in jumbo styrofoam cups from a stand in Los Angeles. America knows diversity. But it has never known diversity as concentrated and congealed as this country knows diversity.

We talk about race openly. Half the students at University are white. Half are black or coloured. Yes, there is a differentiation between black and coloured here, black versus lighter-skinned black, markers created by apartheid but are still used as labels today because we need those labels to understand the way the economic, political and social strata are arranged here. There are Indians, Malays, Xhosa, Zulu, Africans from Ivory Coast, Congo, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda. Colours are different. Facial features are different. Religious beliefs, accents, styles of dress, music, all are different. A black African from the DRC is an entirely different person from a black African from Jo-burg. There are people who evade all attempts at labeling, like a fabric dipped in 5 or 6 dyes, colours bleeding in the center, colours collecting in the corners, and others remaining untouched. Where does America know this great collection of skin colour and culture so intermeshed? My high school had not one black girl in my graduating class. We had one Asian, a Vietnamese girl who most everyone peered at curiously but avoided. We were all white, rich, straightened hair with highlights, sporting our Uggs with our plaid kilts. How does a strict culture like this allow for the incorporation of novelty?

Of course, I am being a harsh judge on my country because there are strict divisions here that evade disruption. The division between townships and white surburbia is just one harsh example of South Africa's struggle to break down fences and ideologies. I have, however, never had the opportunity before to dance with so many beautiful black men and be seen as beautiful in return, to not be judged as white or rich or American. I have never had the opportunity to share my apartment with a woman from Zimbabwe who belts gospel music every morning, or a man from Jo-burg who is the biggest diva, frustrated when his instant coffee doesn't have enough sugar (he adds about 5 spoonfuls), or when his fingers will not form Mozart's Don Giovanni on his viola. I can walk 15 minutes from my flat and buy fresh seed bread, or clear plastic packets of shortbread or pistachios. I can walk 5 minutes from my flat and enjoy a bunny chow, a scooped out loaf of bread filled with buttered chicken curry (a hidden curry spot that even Oprah has enjoyed). I can walk 10 minutes from my flat to the train station and hop on a train going towards the beach where I can find surfers or Jewish delis. Or I can walk 5 minutes from my flat and catch a minibus heading downtown for only R5 and dance in my seat to the house music they're playing and then get off downtown, walk 15 minutes to de Waterkant, and taste the most supreme coffee I've ever known.

This is what I came here for. This diversity and a culture and community actively engaging in a transformation from segregation to integration.

surfing in mecca

I have had a very difficult time accepting this new reality.  I am accustomed to transplanting my feet in new soil and shifting my lenses, my perceptions, my language, my internal clock.  It is something I enjoy and anticipate.  But South Africa has been different, and I have been unable to pinpoint the source of my complex settling process.  It is a complex process, to be sure.  At first glance, Cape Town could be a city everywhere and anywhere; I could equally be in Australia, in Los Angeles, in Hawaii, in France.  The mountains and oceans mirror my wallpaper in LA.  The devil-may-care veneer of students, the boho chic that appears nonchalant but is actually carefully coordinated, reminds me of Berkeley.  Walking along bustling streets, one is equally likely to hear conversations in English as well as French, Xhosa, Zulu, or German.  The UCT Library is generous and filled with a surplus of scrumptiously creased hardbacks, but I typically must leave myself an hour with which to print a two page paper, as the printers frequently catch the flu and obstinately refuse to function.  Cape Town fails to sit comfortably in any distinct category.  It frequently morphs without warning.  And thus, I have felt equally without category and equally placeless.  I have been circumscribing my life here, drifting in the corners, rationally aware of its truth yet fundamentally unable to accept it.

Surfing has been my grounding force.  When I enter the water, I must be vigilant to every successive wave pulling at my side.  I do not possess space in my mind to consider the numbness of my fingers in the cold water, the numbness of my fingers when the girls at the shelter clasp them tightly for two hours, the numbness I force myself to feel when refusing money to the young girl knocking on the door to my flat who calls herself "Miss September."  In Muizenberg where I surf, I am cradled by the strength of mountains.  There are mountains behind me, to my right and left, across the stretch of ocean before me, misted blue and violet in the fog.  And every day I surf, there are rainbows.

At first, I did not want to learn to surf.  I was terrified of the waves, of taking a nose dive on my board and wiping out.  I fall off my board often, and I will probably take a nose dive one day.  Fear is not, however, a legitimate excuse to not do something.  Quite the opposite.  Fear is the reason to embrace everything worth embracing.

winetasting in stellenbosch

Sharing some images from a vineyard in Stellenbosch, a 30 minute drive out of Cape Town (one of South Africa's major exports is wine, an export they are seeking to expand in their effort to increase export in manufactured goods rather than solely raw materials), including a couple pictures of Aya (with whom I will be spending 10 days in Dakar, Senegal with her family) and one of Megan, another dear friend.