Procession to Godmother courageous

Bandile Gumbi

I have contemplated this notion of freedom for a good many years now but I am yet to pin it down. Some anarchist yelled from my stereo in a beautiful, scratchy voice that freedom is when you have nothing more to lose. I can get used to a "not giving a damn" attitude. It is appealing, especially if you do not have any fortune to speak of. It reminds me of this girlfriend of mine from back home, Kwazi: she gives off this tough sista attitude of a loud voice and ready-made insults for every stupidity you can think of. Especially if some silly men try to throw a word or two, she really becomes a loudmouth bitch. She is the kind of girl most people respect even though they will not admit to it because she is amazingly talented and she knows it. There is a sort of innocence and sincerity about her deeds even if they are dangerous; I guess she has learned that her tongue can get her out of any situation. Kwazi can travel from Jozi to Kapa with R5 in her pocket and a toothbrush and she will have a fabulous time and make more friends. She exudes charm - a born entertainer and manipulator. She is the bitch I wanted to be. In my mind she always seems to be the epitome of freedom. Freedom to be wild, brave to take risks and still have a humility that welcomes you with open arms.

She reinforced my wish to give up the fight. This constant battle to be righteous. The Christian virtue to treat others as you like to be treated and to do as I please with very little regard for the next person. To take and take and take some more. I know people who live like that and they are not any more miserable than the next person; in fact, some seem to have more joy than the average South African.

This talk of religion still makes me consider this spiritual path to goodness I have based my existence on. "Is truth freedom?" I once asked this brother who seemed to have it together. How men are self-appointed prophets? Even the humble ones will preach to any captive audience, even if it is down to a minority of one, the faithful girlfriend. He mumbled something unintelligible about wisdom and men being the chosen leaders.

I have since discovered from the gurus of this world that a virtuous woman is basically obedient while intelligent, beautiful and independent. In my short life experience I have since realised that such a woman only exists in Father Christmas's wish list, not in the streets nor a home.

I am thinking now that I should spend my energies in overcoming fears, facing my ghosts in the mirror so to speak. My life story should be about loving the girlchild within, facing the insecurities, accepting their source, exorcising the demons that chain you to the physical spaces you live in.

If I have to face the ugliness of these ghosts, the colour of their stench and smell, the familiar fears that you bury deep in your psyche in shame … As I sit and contemplate the work and the potential pain, procrastination sets in and I have to ask the self that is so reckless: "What are you up to? Do you aim to play games with my sanity for the sake of your amusement?" I still hope to have the chance to sit down with each of my ghosts to a conversation about faith and power.

These thoughts takes me back to a time when the religion I was brought up in was not fulfilling all the spaces of my spirituality, when it was not bringing me closer to community but highlighting the contradictions of the lives we live. My family instilled those values in us because that is their understanding of bringing children up to be balanced, valuable members of their communities. Community, I learnt during my church-going days, means social gatherings under the pretext of spirituality. A space where you can define your social class. It was a perpetuation of the class system which is based on Western hierarchal values. It was manifested by the seating arrangements at our church. The wealthy sat in front, nearest to the pulpit and god's glory, and the masses of ordinary people in our poverty-stricken communities filled up the rest of the church while they're aspiring firstly to be counted amongst the wealthy and thus hopefully to experience god's bountiful mercy. If not in this lifetime than in the next one. Definitely.

Mentally switching back to the task at hand, I read the notes I have in front of me. After all this is my reality, and work needs to be done …

"I guess if one should academically analyse the predicament of being uMulti one can say it is social class systems which inform lifestyles. The one that is usually perceived by outsiders to be this clique and the fantasy/reality, which is lived by the ones who qualify to be members of this group. The clinical definition of Multi, one can say, are the black children who attend white-dominated school and those who grew up in exile where their lifestyles and education were largely Eurocentric.

"This phenomenon is a class issue in the sense that those who are multi usually perceive themselves at a higher civilised level, which means having Eurocentric mannerisms and having mastered the English language; they are usually treated with hostility by those blacks who do not qualify to be omalti. The education system in South Africa created this predicament and it is up to it to solve it. It has been largely perceived that to qualify to be part of this grouping one has to be wealthy but in fact it's early educational background which is the determinant."

That is the start of the paper I am going to present to my sociology class and I am struggling to find source material because no academic as taken the time to study the social issues facing our communities today. I guess with the promotion of indigenous knowledge systems to supplement our lacking knowledge about our South African society I have to chat to a lot of multis and their families, as it is our oral tradition, after all.

There is a knock on my door. Lulama shows her head around the door like she is hanging on it. "So, Ngane, coming out for drinks?" I look at my notes and when I look up she is already shouting from down the hall, "Hurry up, our lift is on the way!"

I shout back, "I did not say I was coming!"

The reply I got reminded me that she knows me too well. "Put on something sexy. A woman never knowss where the night might take her," she reminds me with a mischievous laugh in her voice. "Sine transport mngane!" she screams, I guess from her room. I was not getting anywhere fast with this paper and I needed to go out and unwind. The fact that we have transport which obviously comes with spending money, I would be a foolish child not to enjoy a financially free night out; those do not come around as often as they used to. The older you get the fussier you become. I know for a fact that tonight has no strings or danger issues attached. Lulama and I have decided that if it is not safe it is not worth it - a nice guy who wants to spend his money on us has to be a gentleman or else he must go chase after some eighteen-year-old who does not know better. We have played this game long enough, so know what's what.

So I put on my blue low-cut jeans and a top which has been confirmed sexy by the fashionists in my life, namely Lulama and my sisters, and I can not decided whether to dress the outfit down with takkies or up with stilettos, so I shout at Lulama, "Ngane, who is this person we going with?"

"Wait, I am coming there." She walks into my room in her white low-cut dress. I knew it was stilettos before I repeated the question. She perches herself on my desk while gaaning on about the leather interior of a Volvo. The minute I interrupt her with, "Wait a minute, how old is this person?" she reassures me that he is in his 30s and does not have a beer belly. I guess that's a relief - we will all be comfortable at the same spots. The rest of the biography I did not hear while I was fastening the shoes I hardly wear, the buckle has such tiny holes. So I look up at her. "Ngane, please go do your face and your hair; you know after I am finished with these shoes I'm done." So she rushes out of my room as I shout after her, "I do not want to entertain him while you fix your hair or something, okay!"

She shouts back, "I will not be long." As I apply my lipstick I see a reflection of my notes and I ask myself, why do I have to make my life so difficult, why didn't I choose something that someone has already studied in America or something? There will definitely be plenty of sources.

I quickly squashed that thought - after all, tonight is about fun not work. I did not finish my thought before the buzzer announced our night of fun.

Driving at night always make me nostalgic, so tonight for some reason I could not help thinking back to when I first moved away from my parents' home and all my family to this city. To finally have a place of my own and new beginnings.

"I seemed to be facing rooftops of buildings in this city those days. Taking in the landscape shifting between the ground and the sky. The trick of the games in this confinement: I workshop myself with every interaction taking in a difficult facet of myself, sometimes holding in the madness to contain a sense of sanity out of fear of been judged. The critic of my desires is a mental image of myself. I still avoid mirrors out of fear of the reflection, so I try to see myself through the eyes of another's subjective view since I have long stopped in believing in objectivity. I aim to swim in their gaze but I sink to their judgement. I torture my soul with misconceived/preconceived notions of what I should be forgetting to accept who I am. I am judge, jury and prosecutor of my actions. Breathing out is not as simple as breathing in. It is the art and skill of meditation. It is the challenge over oneself. It is in the wild and wide brush strokes of artists, in the timbre of a musician's horn. It is also in the language of aggression and frustration, but I can still chase rainbows riding on the back side of the wind. I fight in my mental spaces for a place under the shadows of the sun, pushing and shoving and occasionally pausing for a breather in all this empty chaos. I am in the gut of machinery with windows only for ventilation enough to keep me alive in order to fulfil another's ambitions. Space and air are luxuries for the mental ghetto; you laugh at yourself not with yourself. I know the textures of the ghetto. I can see them with my third eye, the one that never fails to look at the inside and is also constantly roving on the outside. Tranquility is the aloneness of your ghetto. Life is a ghetto when it leads to confinement. It is childishness playing dress-up. I vowed since to take mental pictures of ghettos, fine-tune their songs and trace their origins so I can relate to them. When I look at my fears I think of failure and its reputations. The idea of been stuck at one point without direction. As I finish that thought my mind channels me immediately to means of escaping the process not the situation, thus it is easy to jump from one ghetto to another constantly roaming back and forth between dead end streets. I guess a ghetto mind is always seeking pleasure aimlessly. It never arrives at a destination because of the distractions that a low self-image poses. The road is paved with mirrors reflecting temptation for unfulfilling pleasures. It gets to a numb state of mind. When I visualise the ghetto, cluttered images are at the forefront. The trick is to sift through the clutter to see the complexities of shapes, objects and philosophies that inform the ghetto.

"It is the fleshy parts of a woman's inner thigh, the rolls and folds around her midriff. It is never far from the complexities of her smiles, which change, with an expression of a particular emotion. It is the smell of sweat and sex that cling in the air reminding one of pleasure and labour. It is never in simple lines. It is the convolutions of a simple lifestyle. It is acceptance of the silences amongst the screams. It pollinates like the smoke from a relighted cigarette. You move with it into sterile corners of your psyche. In the momentum you touch fire, igniting an old wound, healing mediocrity. You learn early the anxieties of skeletons in closets, you face demands that prey on innocence. The walls are paper thin, secrets are communal gossip.

"It is the whirlpool of our shame like hiding behind your thumb. I never did understand why people who live in glass houses dared to throw stones. We used to distinguish contours of our lives. They are as common as a whore's pubic hairs. Our shame yet our reality. It makes one realise that sometimes sex has nothing to do with love, makes you think maybe love is one of those tall tales that adults use to discipline their children. I guess when life bites you in the face you forget romance and lose your innocence forever.

"I ask myself why do men idolise innocence and naivety in women when they are disgusted by the same characteristics in themselves. Relationships between men and women are a riddle of gender politics. I guess sometimes you play into the stereotypes to understand the workings of certain minds, you play a role to gain acceptance in order to appear unthreatening. I am not sure whether to call that a strength or a weakness. I think it works in a similar fashion to prostitution. It's a question of who is exploiting who. Some argue that it is mutually beneficial, money for services rendered. I wonder if it is that simple. Old-school feminists argue that it is an exploitation of women's bodies, thus affecting the female psyche, perpetuating power stereotypes. Thus subjugating women to abuse from men. Maybe that might be the case, but such thinking decomposes a woman, undermining her intelligence. For the oldest profession in the history of womanhood it is a rather limited point of view."

I woke up around noon the next day, thirsty like I have not had a drop of water for at least a week, with a song from the night before still chooning in my head, and I did not see Lulama until I woke her up for supper.

My flatmate Lulama and I have the most visibly unlikely connection. I guess what makes us soul sisters is our search for this elusive freedom to define our identities. In everyday living it is easy to miss the essential ingredients of being human. The tricky survival tactic of embracing the contradictions, finding the wholesomeness in them. Our soul bond was cemented on the day she told me a story I will take to my grave if need be or shout in the streets for all to witness if it has to be.

"It was a day not so different from this one, neither too cold nor too hot," her story began. "I am in the bedroom packing a bag with the essentials for a woman who will be away from home for a weekend, thus the bulk of my belongings in that black patent leather bag were my toiletries. The only difference between myself and the ordinary woman who packs an overnight bag to visit her man for the weekend is that this was mid-morning on a Tuesday.

"The weak mid-morning light cast a line from the bedroom window to the neatly-made bed where my bag sat open as I moved around the room trying to figure out what I am forgetting. I paused by the window hesitating, then I decided to leave the curtains not drawn. It is funny that on most days such a thought does not cross my mind. The complex is fairly safe: everyone who is not a resident signs in and out at the gate. I zip up my bag, cast a last look around the room before I head for the door past the lounge out the front door, down the stairs to the courtyard path leading to the gate.

"As I walked towards the taxi rank the street I have lived in for the past three years was almost deserted as the children were at school and the workers at work and those who stayed home were busy with morning chores. When I turned right on to the main road I was greeted with the buzz of traffic from vehicles and people trading. If it was another working day, I might be going to class or my part-time job. I did not mind the flexible hours if the pay was not peanuts. I have never been caught in queues, I started working between 11 am and 6 pm and I cover errands in town before I need to clock in.

"On this day the badly paying job, school and traffic were minor thoughts. There was a bigger situation to face. Once it was all done I could move on with my life. I just needed to get through today. I kept reminding myself that I hardly remembered the taxi ride and the walk to the clinic.

"The first person I talked to that day was the receptionist at the clinic. I reminded myself to speak clearly so that I did not have to repeat the most humiliating words I have ever said: 'I have an appointment for an abortion.' The woman, who looked about my age, just said with no judgement or kindness, 'Take a seat and fill out the form; the doctor will be with you in a moment and that will be R800.' Half an hour later I repeated the words to the doctor, less self-consciously, and three hours later I was back at home and no one was the wiser."

After she'd finished the only thing I could say was, "Why pack an overnight bag?" She answered in her usual mischievous self, "Mngani, you never know where you might spend a night."

Bandile Gumbi a poet, writer and arts practitioner. Since 2000 she has performed around South Africa. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in magazines and journals. In 2004 she launched her first poetry collection, Pangs of initiation. She is a founding member of 3rd Eye Vision, an artist-administered interdisciplinary arts organisation, and a partner in Waiting For the Music!, a youth band-based music event. She is currently working as a co-ordinator for the Durban International Film Festival..

LitNet: 2 August 2005

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