Sorry, Not Sorry Read online

  SORRY, NOT SORRY

  SORRY, NOT SORRY

  Experiences of a brown woman in a white South Africa

  HAJI MOHAMED DAWJEE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by Penguin Books an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

  Reg. No. 1953/000441/07

  The Estuaries No. 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441 PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za

  First published 2018

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  Publication © Penguin Random House 2018

  Text © Haji Mohamed Dawjee 2018

  Cover photograph © Neo Baepi

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

  PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer

  MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer

  EDITOR: Lauren Smith

  PROOFREADER: Bronwen Maynier

  COVER AND TEXT DESIGNER: Ryan Africa

  TYPESETTER: Ryan Africa

  Set in 11.5 pt on 16 pt Adobe Caslon

  Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet.

  ISBN 978-1-77609-266-6 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-77609-267-3 (ePub)

  For my grandfather, who said:

  People will steal the milk from your tea

  But they cannot steal the knowledge from your mind

  Contents

  Foreword

  We don’t really write what we like

  A brain tumour can change your mind

  Don’t touch me on my tekkies

  Jane of all trades, master of none

  Begging to be white?

  And how the women of Islam did slay

  Bar brawl with my brother

  Zwelenzima Vavi and Helen Zille are starting a super party

  A resignation letter to performative whites

  Depression: A journal

  Why I’m down with Downton Abbey

  My Islamic state of mind

  My mother, the true radical

  Tinder is a pocket full of rejection, in two parts

  A better life with Bollywood

  The curious case of the old white architect

  When Nelson Mandela died

  Joining a cult is a terrible idea

  My anti-establishment hero, or, Grandad, what are you doing?

  Sorry, not sorry

  Acknowledgements

  Notes and references

  Foreword

  The other day, a young man proclaiming to be a ‘woke white’ asked me very nicely to be on his podcast, which sounded like an effort to teach other whites to be woke.

  I was uncharacteristically sharp in my decline. ‘Sorry, sir, but I think woke politics are fast asleep. Well, they certainly bore me to death.’ Needless to say, the young man did not respond. I’m sorry for being the sharp matriarch I am determined not to be, but I was true to my view. In my experience, it can be a movement that excludes and punishes, speaking a language that bamboozles.

  In its writing, it can often speak at and not to.

  I’m in a phase of my writing that seeks to include, to tell stories and to find solutions, so I often find woke writing dense with didacticism but low on style. Sorry, Not Sorry upends my notions and has me alive, again, to the potential – it has woken me up and made me take a second look at the cultural and racial questioning essential to our time.

  New political trends interest me and the self-proclaimed ‘woke’ generation are vital and interesting. Using social media as a mass urban medium, they are changing norms faster than my generation did with their digital smarts.

  Take the film, Inxeba (The Wound). A love story that takes place in a Xhosa initiation school, it has set South Africa alight as traditionalists claw against the film. Some scaredy-cat movie houses cancelled screenings when a particularly forbidding woman from the hitherto unknown Icamagu Institute staged a sit-in at the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of the Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (the Orwellian flower in our bouquet of Chapter 9 institutions which protect and advance constitutional rights).

  I’ve seen this show-reel before. Every time the SABC tried to screen a documentary on why so many young initiates were dying in the two initiation seasons, it would be hauled off the air as tradition clashed with transparency.

  And I know, rather intimately, how freedom of artistic impression has been trumped by the rights to culture and religion: I’m the editor who published images of the prophet Muhammad and of The Spear painting by Brett Murray, and got damned for them.

  We are a country that primes peace and stability over free expression (in an often false binary, I might add) and one that, until now, assumed the unassailable right to cultural and traditional protection, certainly over artistic production.

  That changed with Inxeba, as the woke generation adopted the film and turned its screening into a cultural movement against being told what it could or could not watch.

  So, I am in a season of new love with woke people. And Haji Mohamed Dawjee has enhanced my affection with this collection of touching, loving, incendiary, searing and intimate essays. She’s both woke and funny, and she can write.

  * * *

  One of the reasons I divorced woke politics (and it divorced me too, I have to be frank) is that it can often be tedious and insider. Also, I’m a non-racialist rainbow nation adherent, which is a bit of a profanity in that world. The language of woke can handicap. Take this. I work at HuffPost SA, the South African sister to the Huffington Post family. We write headlines snappily and quickly – I labelled something a politician did as ‘dumb’ and left.

  The news editor called. ‘Some people are complaining. Your language is ableist.’

  ‘What?’

  She explained that it could be read as a slur on people who couldn’t speak. I was, well, dumbfounded. I still am when I get hit by phrases like ‘cis-het normativity’. Come on, own up: you don’t know what that means either.

  There is none of that in Haji’s screamingly funny, achingly painful, excoriatingly honest Sorry, Not Sorry. It’s norm-challenging without the lazy descent into the rhetoric of slogan. It shows and doesn’t tell, except at the very end, where the author explains the title.

  I don’t know where to begin to introduce you to the little pearls dotted in this first (but not last) book by Haji. So let’s start at the top: an essay called ‘We don’t really write what we like’ – a response, of course, to Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like.

  She starts: ‘No one owns their stories and the telling of them like white male writers. They are given endless opportunities for it. They can write about anything. They can pen rants about white-men problems and white-men wealth. They can wax lyrical about cars and boats and spaceships … the cherry on the vanilla cake is that they also get to write the soft, sensitive, soulful stuff.’

  Such freedom, she notes, is not available to writers of colour: ‘When was the last time you saw a piece of writing in mass-produced, commercial media by a person of colour who stitched together lengthy, breathtaking sentences about, let’s say, a nostalgic song they happened to hear on the bus, or the train, or the aeroplane while on their way to deliver a handwritten note to an ex-lover they were trying to win back?’

  And so, Haji writes.

  She writes about tekkies, her grandpa, her mom and dad, a night at a pub. She writes about Serena Williams and her own aborted tennis career and she writes about her love for her wife.

  Read it al
l, but if you dip in and out, make sure that you read ‘A brain tumour can change your mind’, the essay featuring the speech Haji’s dad made at her wedding to the equally gifted journalist and writer Rebecca Davis. You will smile and dab away a tear for days. And while you’re there, read about her ‘anti-establishment’ grandpa too. She makes his character come alive as he drives her to school in his olive-green Merc, and cooks exploding soup at their home in Laudium, Pretoria.

  She writes what she likes. She writes about Bollywood movies, about tweeting Nelson Mandela’s death, and she writes a journal about depression that is quite the best piece of mental-health writing I’ve read. In ‘The curious case of the old white architect’, she writes what a media establishment that Haji says is still white-dominated would not let her write, because it has pigeonholes for what black women must write.

  As a black woman writer only now starting to break out of my own pigeonholes, this book has been a guide. I’ve not felt the media establishment weight as Haji has, but mine has been self-imposed by my historical view that all art, all writing, had to serve the struggle for justice – there was to be no art for art’s sake. This is not to say the anthology is not profoundly political. It is. It is hard but compelling and often funny in its grappling with South Africa’s race politics.

  * * *

  If I weren’t afraid of catching it for days from her, I’d say Haji was South Africa’s answer to a young Salman Rushdie.

  That’s too glib, but her essays on religion are considered and resonated with me. Haji was raised Muslim and is highly educated in the Islamic faith, so she goes toe-to-toe when bigotry masquerades as a religion, but also celebrates when it is vanquished.

  Choosing a favourite essay is like trying to choose among all the young journalists I read with such avid joy. They are all good, but if you are interested, as I am, in female heroines, don’t skip her story of the Prophet’s wives, Bibi Aisha and Khadija, in ‘And how the women of Islam did slay’.

  Haji writes: ‘Women in Islam have slayed (with the sword and otherwise) for years. It’s a fact. But these facts are secrets. Just don’t read the Quran properly, or delve into the research and historical books, okay? Most Muslim people I know don’t bother anyway. They’re afraid of seeing things they don’t want to know. Like how women have lots of rights and are just as entitled to freedoms as men. But why trade in facts when you can trade in the degradation and exploitation of women? Such fun.’

  This set of essays will discomfort, and you will find yourself shouting back at the author when she is particularly incendiary. But you will come away edified and challenged and in touch with a generation that questions shibboleths with charm and ease.

  FERIAL HAFFAJEE

  We don’t really write what we like

  No one owns their stories and the telling of them like white male writers. They are given endless opportunities for it. They can write about anything. They can pen rants about white-men problems and white-men wealth. They can wax lyrical about cars and boats and spaceships. They can have reams and reams of motivational articles published about being ‘bosses’. Without, mind you, ever having to refer to sexual harassment, unequal opportunities, discrimination or unequal pay. But the cherry on the vanilla cake is that they also get to write the soft, sensitive, soulful stuff. You know?

  Like that time one of them – many of them, all of them – got paid to take a five-star hot air balloon across the universe until they reached the Northern Lights or whatever. It must be really nice that, over and above the aches and pains stuff, they get to scribble beautiful, elaborate stories neatly threaded with free trips and once-in-a-lifetime excursions. Wonderful experiences complete with decadent buffets. Charming. No lives of servitude here. No minds of servitude either. They are just out there, writing what they like. And media outlets cannot get enough of it.

  Let’s talk about Steve Biko for a second. In 1978, Biko’s collection of essays, I Write What I Like, was published in South Africa. Penned between 1969 and 1972, it was prohibited from being published before that because … well, we all know why. The name of the book – now famous and regularly quoted – comes from the title under which he published his writing in the South African Student Organisation newsletter using the pen name Frank Talk.

  Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, remains a powerful figure in South Africa. He was a courageous fighter against apartheid whose writing and insight is testament to not only his wisdom but also his passion and courage.

  He is also extremely cool. Biko is so cool, man. He resonates because of his mind, but he is also relatable because he is so damn cool. That’s why a lot of young people like him. Many of them have not even read I Write What I Like, but tons can emulate his vibe. I’ve met a few of these youths. A lot, actually. Biko’s image endures. The way he lived and the way he died are romanticised, and in this time of youth rising and buildings falling, no revolutionary encompasses the iconic aesthetic of young heroism more than he does. His is an image of rock-star proportions neatly tied up with charisma. Today’s youth may not have read the literature, but they have certainly adopted Biko’s definitive image, which in Millennial terms can only be described as #radicalfleek.

  The key precept in the Black Consciousness Movement can be summarised in one quote from said book: ‘The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.’ This central tenet refers to the relationship between liberation and servitude. The quote extends beyond the physical properties of servitude and addresses mental slavery. It urges black people to own their stories, to break free from the shackles of predetermined narratives imposed on them by the people history ‘belongs to’. It is a calculated statement. Firm in its determination to inspire black people to discover their own pasts, their own values and their own selves. And more importantly, it is a reminder that they must be the ones to own and tell of those discoveries. It’s a powerful ideology, one that resonates with me when I think about writing what we like today.

  But let’s get back to basics. The second half of the Biko quote I cited above goes like this: ‘So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.’

  Let’s focus on the ‘whites (think they) are superior’ bit. How can we make whites realise that they are not superior but only human, and, in turn, how can we rise out of inferiority if we cannot tell superior stories? Even if we take ownership of our stories and claim the rights to them, we are still – in many instances – unable to paint the entire picture. Let’s admit that we may write, but we definitely may not write just anything.

  When was the last time you saw a piece of writing in mass-produced, commercial media by a person of colour who stitched together lengthy, breathtaking sentences about, let’s say, a nostalgic song they happened to hear on the bus, or the train, or the aeroplane while on their way to deliver a handwritten note to an ex-lover they were trying to win back? Or what about reading a long-form essay by a person of colour who wrote a story about a story about a story they once heard about a great-aunt’s kettle somehow discovered in a second-hand store, and in some strange way this kettle played a massive role in reuniting a pair of twins who were separated at birth? Or some crap … It could happen. These kinds of real-life experiences happen to white male writers all the time. I know this because they get to tell us about it.

  They get published and they get paid and they get praised for stories like these. Stories that often have little point, except to entertain and inspire. Beautiful thoughts written by white men get published on full pages of weekly newspapers, or posted on websites to be shared until kingdom come. Simply because they were ‘brave’ enough to tell it. ‘Brave’ enough to spread joy and magic, and sprinkle fairy dust over the gravesite of news we’re offered every day.

  Dear public, this is not brave. This is opportunity. This is privilege. I am questioning, and have questioned for a
long time, whether another pretty story about a white man’s life is altogether necessary.

  Their work need not contain stark revelations about race or religion or revolution. These kinds of stories are empty of confrontation and that’s considered okay. They do not have to be educational. They need not investigate transformation and discrimination. There is no demand for factual statements of intersectional feminism, for example. There is no struggle in their sentences. All features, by the way, that must be present to the max in stories by people of colour. When last did you read a piece by someone who wasn’t white that did not embody one or more of the aforementioned themes?

  I am not saying we, as people of colour, should stay away from writing about the ‘isms’ and more. Baby Jesus, Moses and Muhammad know that if we don’t write about those pressing and necessary issues, no one will. Or worse, the ones who do write about them will be the ones who have no claim to those stories. They do not own the experiences, and therefore, should not write the experiences. That would be filth and lies, although it happens nevertheless. We call it appropriation. It comes in many shapes and sizes.

  We own the hard stuff. We really do. We own the struggles. And if we don’t write about them, the country will forever dwell in the lily-white utopia that once was. If we do not claim and drive these conversations, we leave room for our minds to be colonised once more. But here’s the truth (and strike me if you will): the struggle is exhausting. And we are not just the struggle. And so sometimes (by which I mean a lot but not all of the time), I wish I could get paid to write the nice stuff. Because, you know what? We also like nice things.

  We too have nice experiences. We think about things and dream and have magic in us. We have fuzzy fables to share. But here is the other truth: no one cares about the wonders of a day in the life of a person of colour, how they felt when they saw that rainbow rise over the abandoned railway track in the middle of some small town. We even travel, you know. How come no one wants to know that? The readers are not interested and, more importantly, the editors are not interested. Isn’t this a kind of oppression as well? To keep me down you must deny me my experience. Perpetuate the stereotypical narrative. People of colour are not allowed to have nice things. Those are reserved for whites.