Sorry, Not Sorry Read online

  Excuse me while I shed my modesty for a paragraph or two in the sharing of this here tale: I once wrote this gorgeous piece about India. My god, was it gorgeous. I went deep and then I went drippy and then I brought it all back with some real, hard truths about demographics and that sort of thing. In 1 200 words or so, this story had everything. Everything. It was the kind of story that makes a reader weep, then think, then laugh, then weep some more, then dream, then think again. It was a thing of beauty. Real beauty. I submitted it everywhere. And that is where the paragraph of pride ends and the multiple paragraphs of humiliation begin.

  I was insecure about my work. I had no white-superiority complex to speak of. My asking price for the story was R1.50 per word. A joke, really. I ended up getting nothing. First, because absolutely no one in South Africa wanted it, and second, because the US website that ended up publishing it was a contributor site and, well, they did not pay. I don’t think I expected too much. In fact, I think my goals for the entire project were fairly standard grade. I failed. But you know who passes their writing goals with flying colours every single time? White men. Had a white dude written that piece, it would have been engraved on a platinum plaque and put on display for the entire world to see, because we simply cannot miss out on their stories.

  Not so long ago, in fact, I read something similar. It was about India as well. White-man byline intact. Shouting at me. Loud. Proud. Aggressive. A firm reminder of my little place in the world. Or in the writing industry. My little space. Thank god for the media. Honestly, if they do not do their best to remind us of opportunity-discrimination I do not know who in the hell will. By the way, I know what you’re thinking: Just don’t read it then. Well, how would I ever have anything to write about and how would I ever get published if I didn’t continue to torture myself with the harsh truths of a struggle? Must pen struggle. Must keep it fresh. Only way to get published and make living. Those words are on my bathroom mirror. Oh, by the way, we have mirrors.

  But I digress. This India story. It paled in comparison to mine. Truly. To be honest, it paled in comparison to anything I have ever read about India, ever. Including those ridiculous, offensive Buzzfeed listicles white youth throw together when they are done finding themselves in Delhi. But there it stood on the website. Praised. Worshipped, even. Each comment underneath it a standing ovation. A public handjob. The majority of commenters were white. I often find it’s this demographic who are most likely to have time to sign up on Disqus so they can post comments on websites. And troll people. They ate the India story up.

  They devoured the part about the mud on the banks of the Ganges, how it felt and how it smelt. They sipped on the long, soothing sentence about the moon, and the light it threw over the dead Indian night in a small village too poor to afford the comforts of electricity. They swallowed whole the metaphor spewed out towards the end about the subcontinent’s hot sun tearing through the polluted sky like a hurried surgeon slicing through a cadaver during an emergency research project. And then they laughed heartily at how the entire story had no point except to let everyone know that India sucks and the author is never returning. He could not pass up the opportunity to visit because of the silver platter it came on, but, he reiterated, India does suck.

  Well, ain’t life grand, buddy?

  Again, I question whether the stories about the grandeur and the grand opportunities of buddy’s life have any role to play.

  They do not change my life in any deep, meaningful way. They do not challenge my disposition on political economy, race relations or cultural wisdom. Do they contribute to the discourse of a fractured country trying to sew itself up in a multitude of ways? No. But it must be said that, while they are meaningless, they sure are pretty. And let’s be fair: it is nice to be distracted. In the deep winter of policy and principles and editorials and analyses, we need a seasonal change. Why not stop in the middle of reading all the other depressing stuff and smell the roses?

  I will tell you this: I am so tired of smelling the same damn roses.

  Do I want something beautiful to read? Absolutely. I just want to be able to write it as well. I want us to be able to write those stories. Those stories garnished with life’s experiences. If escape is part of the journey of reading, then why is my only getaway through the eyes of white men? I also want to write about catching up with lost friends over warm cups of coffee in foreign places and have that be acceptable and ‘newsworthy’. We too have souls to bare in a personal way that reveals how we love, regret and feel gratitude, among other things.

  When I read these stories, the ones written by white men, the ones about their privileged lives, all I am reminded of is a beautiful lie made of hard truths. And when I start to pick apart not only the content but also the freedom to be able to write that way, ugly monsters start to surface: anger, envy and frustration at my comparatively limited opportunities. As a writer of colour, these monsters haunt me. They tear away at my self-esteem while I stick to something I’m more ‘worthy’ of writing, because there is no value in any of my other stories.

  We talk about white privilege, we talk about entitlement and we talk about the complex intricacies of racial superiority and white power. We are aware of the imbalance of wealth distribution that results in inequality and selective opportunity. But this same privilege is not confined to economics and education and, and, and. White power is also creative liberty. And creative liberty means that if you want to write about the dewy flowers growing from the dry ground in the middle of the Mojave Desert, you can, as long as you fit the profile of white patriarchy. Because those are the ones who write what they like. They are free. They are not constrained by the shackles of literary servitude in the media industry.

  We are. South African travel magazines, for example, don’t have stories written by black women who were sent to Spain to eat a home-cooked meal on a mountain pass. Those little write-ups are few and far between, if they exist at all.

  The only home-cooked meals writers of colour eat are the ones they make themselves in between trying to meet deadlines. Deadlines for pieces about things that are falling. Fees. Statues. Humpty Dumpty. I can’t even listen to that Alicia Keys song any more. And I really like her. But everything is falling and we’re all writing while the white dudes are flying. Flying from this side of the ocean to the other. The only travel vaccination they need? Immunisation from the manacles of responsible writing.

  As a writer of colour, my opinion is forced to embrace a responsible theme – race, politics, equality, righteousness. I am constrained by needing to make some kind of point. I cannot write a column for a popular media organisation that details how many push-ups I did, or what song I sang in the shower. If I pitched a weekly column like that to a newspaper the response would be a hard no. No one cares. But ask me what lovely thing some white male saw on his Sunday walk the other day, and I will be able to tell you. The majority of news consumers will be able to tell you. Because that shit gets picked up. And they are good at it. I’m not saying they’re not good writers. But I too would like to take a rocket to the clouds in my writing sometimes, instead of having to be on the frontlines of critical thinking.

  There are, of course, the crowd-pleasers. The talking heads, painted in shades of brown and black. The writers of colour you sometimes find among the crowds at literary festivals. They aim to please. They agree with every white liberal on the panel. They soothe the crowds and make for easy listening by throwing pigeon crap (with their words) at the idea of cultural appropriation. They openly give permission to white writers to write about anything. ‘Want to write in a black accent? … Sure, go ahead. The fact that these things are out of bounds is bullshit.’ They say stuff like this to the roaring applause of a majority white audience. And when they leave, they leave to write about the things they are allowed to write about as people of colour. Oppressed minds.

  ‘So why don’t you just do it? No one is stopping you,’ you say. Well, I have. I have tried to break free before.
There are times when I’ve crossed the border into that enchanting world of rainbows and I went ahead and wrote fun, leisurely columns. But instead of readers finding them charming or the column making someone’s day better, I apparently made their day worse. I was blatantly told so. By any number of trolls.

  The only way I can publish stories like these is by starting some lame blog no one is ever going to read because I am being too self-indulgent for a brown lady.

  Biko has passed, but his truth has not. Here’s some frank talk for you: why does it piss white people off so much when brown people are happy?

  A brain tumour can change your mind

  My dad was not an easy father.

  Guests once came to visit us for tea in Pretoria with their two young boys. These kids were out of control. When they left, my dad – burning to say something about their atrocious behaviour and lack of discipline – turned to my mom and said, ‘We used to control our kids with our eyes.’

  True story. Not a word had to be spoken. A look from my dad was all it took to set us straight.

  I enjoyed a portion of my childhood, but I also spent a lot of time forgetting it. Many hours have been dedicated to erasing my father’s expectations of me. Only four things mattered to him. The first was that we get an education, and always continue striving to get one. The second was that we be successful; academically outperforming everyone else was crucial. The third was that we find absolute financial independence.

  And the fourth most important thing to my dad, or so it seemed to me, was that tasks be more difficult than I already found them. Relentless criticism seemed to be the order of the day, every day. His expectations, and his threshold for satisfaction, were so impossibly high that I would never meet them. I tried. But failure stained all my efforts. And then, when I stopped trying, failure spilt into my lack of effort as well.

  I used to think we didn’t get much from my dad as kids. My grandfather provided spending money, toys and plenty of playtime. My dad was a behind-the-scenes dad. When he appeared for his cameo, he came with life lessons. Hard lessons. And a survival kit. He passed his survival kit around like a toolbox from which we could fashion our own hard shells. He had collected each piece of equipment through the course of his life and neatly packed them away to hand over to us as we grew up. We did not want these tools. They presented themselves in the form of lectures, reprimands and the silent treatment, to name a few. But what the tools ended up teaching us is invaluable.

  He taught us to ask for nothing and work for everything. He erased the idea of entitlement from our hearts and minds. He enforced rules and regulations, not only to instil in us a sense of responsibility, but so that we knew to break them only if we could face the consequences with accountability. Because, in life, everything has consequences and we must be strong enough to face them in order to survive. And he hammered home his most important ideology: success is the biggest and best form of revenge.

  My dad is a tough man. His life has made him resilient. His is a typical zero-to-hero story, but it’s not run-of-the-mill. A boy from the slums of Marabastad managing to become a professor of orthodontics at the University of Pretoria is not an average narrative. It’s the opposite. It’s a plot thick with struggle and adversity. Each sentence heavy with overcoming: overcoming race, economics and social power. All these variables and more have made him a hard man.

  There are many intermissions in the course of a life, and it’s usually in those intermissions that we take a step back to collect our thoughts and compose ourselves. We take a moment to compile the notes in the margins of our lives and construct full sentences that give an account of our lives thus far.

  What have we been up to? Where have we been? What do we have to repent for? Whom have we hurt and whom have we forgiven? What do we mean to the world, if anything? What do we mean to ourselves and what do we mean to the ones we love most? All questions whose answers make us who and what we are.

  These intermissions can take the form of a job interview, a birthday or anniversary, the death of a parent or another close family member. They can even exist as that little space of time after you’ve ordered your drink and you’re waiting for your food. All you have left to do is think. You take your intermission. You take stock.

  And in some cases, the intermission is the chapter where you have a life-threatening illness.

  It’s at this period in his life that my dad closed one chapter so he could start another. So he could start another ‘him’.

  In Islam, death is not the end; it is only the beginning. Life in this world, with all its material inclusions, is a borrowed experience. It is an exam a Muslim must write for the reward of an eternal life. This world ends. The next goes on forever.

  This is an important theme in Islamic theology. If a Muslim lives well, and has used their one chance on earth to prepare for an eternal life to come, death is only a transition. A bridge between the seen and the unseen universe. Death is nothing to fear, especially to the faithful and the righteous.

  To those people, death is love. It arrives with affection and departs tenderly with their souls. To the faithful and righteous, the angel of death brings divine perfume and a shroud for the deceased. The last breath exits the body with pleasure into the angel’s keeping and is taken to the seventh heaven.

  In 2015 my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He told us on Mother’s Day. We were out for lunch and he just kind of slipped it in like it was no big deal. He played it down so much that I don’t think we grasped its seriousness until my mom shared the symptoms he’d been experiencing for some time. He was going deaf in one ear. He got dizzy occasionally and had started to bump his car on kerbs and pillars, or veer off the road. His balance was completely off so it affected his eyesight. He was hallucinating.

  The tumour wasn’t a little thing. It was a big thing. As big as a golf ball, in fact, and it sat on a web of nerves in the lower portion of his brain. Just waiting for tee off by a neurosurgeon.

  There is nothing more frightening for a child than to sit face-to-face with your father, who looks perfectly healthy, while he picks apart his own last will and testament with you the night before life-threatening surgery. There is nothing more frightening than looking into the desperate face of your mother, whose eyes are begging for some semblance of understanding. The last thing on her mind? Administration.

  My sister took notes. She jotted down details of where things were stored, what passwords unlocked which files, which family member we could trust to ask for help in an emergency.

  My brother made mental notes of timelines. A will is a document that arrives after death and lives for a long time after someone has passed, especially if the person’s life was as full as my dad’s. He is wealthy with knowledge and experience and security. My brother also asked the important questions. He went digging for answers to questions we didn’t know needed answering.

  Me? I sat mute, listening. My ears tied up with the talking happening around me, my thoughts prisoner to what I was hearing. The reading of my father’s will scared me more than the news of the tumour. Today he was reciting that will in his own voice; tomorrow his speech might be a memory. The survival rate for the surgery wasn’t high.

  A part of me prayed for ease. I have a healthy relationship with death. My relationship with loss, however, is less secure. To manage that emptiness I filled the space with a thought I still feel guilty about: Perhaps, when he passes, I can live a life out of the closet without the fear of disappointing him.

  To be clear, I would choose a life of secrecy over losing my father. Still, when death is about to close a door, all kinds of strange comforts come in through the window. The idea of avoiding the same degree of disapproval I evoked in him as a child brought me some kind of relief, and I figured that perhaps he could die in peace without knowing I was gay, our relationship intact.

  The Quran doesn’t say much about homosexuality. Religious texts as a whole assume a theme of heteronormativity. In fact, in Jud
aism, Christianity and Islam there is only one central story that relates to a traditional condemnation of homosexuality. Male homosexuality, to be more specific. And that is the story of Sodom. What conservatives forget is that this story is not about love or consensual sex at all. It is about rape and inhospitality.

  One night, a mob gathers outside the house of Lot (Lut in Arabic) and demands access to Lot’s visitors, who we have come to interpret (in all three religions) as male. The mob wants to rape them as a punishment for suspected espionage. To maintain both his status as a good host and the trust of his guests, Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead. Perhaps he considers the rape of his daughters a lesser evil than the rape of his male guests. Raping a woman, it seems, is somehow more permissible than raping a man.

  The story’s reference to actual homosexuality is unclear, yet it is used to prove its sinfulness in all circumstances. It’s because of the propagation of confused sermons like these that believers often find themselves discarding portions of the population based on whom they choose to love.

  This was my fear. I had enough experience of my father’s thinking, the map of his mind, to know that telling him his daughter was a sinner was no throwaway statement. The only thing in danger of being thrown away was me. I was not ready. In this way, living (in Islam) is more unsettling than dying.

  But illness is change, by its very nature. It sees the body morph into something different. It pushes the physiology of its victim to an unthinkable edge. And at that edge, where the ill are faced with either falling or turning back and walking away, values start to change. The things that matter come alive and the things you have yet to figure out start to surface. There is a new appreciation and respect for time. The figuring out starts to happen very quickly. Any time left to spare is safeguarded for the moments you will need it most. For when you will need mere seconds to change your point of view on something, or for that short moment you have to say ‘goodbye’ or ‘I’m sorry’. And while you stand there, you play everything back to yourself. You see the scene where you say goodbye. You wish you didn’t have to, but you have little choice in that matter.