Complete fragment

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defence to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing at shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defence, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

The tram approaches a stopping place and a girl takes up her position near the step, ready to alight. She is distinct to me as if I had run my hands over her. She is dressed in black, the pleats of her skirt hang almost still, her blouse is tight and has a collar of white fine-meshed lace, her left hand is braced flat against the side of the tram, the umbrella in her right hand rests on the top step. Her face is brown, her nose, slightly pinched at the sides, has a broad round tip. She has a lot of brown hair and stray tendrils on the right temple. Her small ear is close set, but since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it.

At that point I ask myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?

Franz Kafka

I am the existentially confused commuter, atomised and strangely not alone in the luminal space of public transportation.

I want to be the woman prepared to alight before the tram driver slams the brakes, composed and discriminate in my display of self in public.

And I dearly want to get back to blogging.

"It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine." Gandhi

Rebel- The surly,ungroomed, tobacco chewing biker on a road to nowhere with scruffy boots and matted clothes that are a narrative of otherness in a world of people rushing blindly towards a plateau of sameness. But there's another rebel, softer, a more subtle version, the person who forces their way past boundaries, who challenges socialisation practices, who battles the fiercest opposition from those who mean well but essentially, mean otherwise, these rebels must duck, dive, swim with fish, and find more empathy from hibernating bears and yet trudge through, searching for an elusivity but forging an individuality all the same. And with a heart full of thankful sighs to a higher being for the opportunity to realise that, the rebel's on the right path.

"If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it..."
Rudyard Kipling

"Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. Not whom I want you to be, but to who you are." Antoine de Saint Exupery

I scored a hardcover collection of Ted Hughes' poetry cheap cheap last night. While bonding with the pages I came across this:

To be a Girl's Diary

Crumblings, glanced into
By strange smiles, in a saleroom,
Where the dust is of eyes and hearts, in proportion,
As well as of old shoes, meteors, and dung ...

To be an heirloom spoon, blackening
Among roots in a thorn-hedge, forgetful
Of flavours as of tongues,
Fleeting towards heavenly dispersal,
Walked by spiders...

Nightfall collects the stars
Only in a manner of speaking.

Everything is inheriting everything.

Indeed.

Disenchantment

The past few days I've been disinclined towards blogging. I've met such wonderful people through blogging but now that blogging is not my only link to the great minds of the blogging world, I'm somewhat adverse to blogging. In his childhood memoirs, Words, Sartre remarks that each time he writes a book, he feels it's better than the last then he gets ready to disown it. He claims it to be a familiar experience for all writers. I'm not a writer, too much expectation attached to that one, I prefer language practitioner simply for its bafflement inducing potential. I haven't thought about my blog as better than anything else I've done, I haven't done enough to make such a comparison, but I am wishing this blog away. I'm writing this in an effort to understand why.

I don't like using my blog as an angstologist, if I did, I'd be at about two hundred posts already. There, I'm starting to feel better about blogging already.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Oliver Wendell Holmes

My life et mes livres

'When we are collecting books we are collecting happiness', I've used the quote before but it's so apt to my mood. Our neighbor's are temporarily relocating to the great Doo-baa-yeee and although they are keeping their home in this corner of the world, they've decided their imminent departure to be a great reason to declutter. So Aunty Sal sends over a box of books and asks ever so sweetly if we'd oblige her by adopting a few. Suffice to say Eid came around twice this week... I've adopted:

1. Lord of the flies, William Golding
2. A Dry White Season, Andre Brink
3. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margret Atwood
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
5. John Keats Selected Poems
6. From Jo’burg to Jozi Heidi Holland Adam Roberts (eds)

7. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

'Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.' William Shakespeare

Now where to put them?

‘The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.’ Samuel Johnson

We all have our moments of madness. I venture out, guided only by my capacity to get into too many situations. I enjoy solitude, my own space- what Virginia Woolf termed a 'room of one's own', but how wonderful to emerge from the depths of my inner self to the smiles of my father. There is something humbling in the love of family, something that rises you to lofty heights but keeps you grounded all the same. May it always be so.

I'm using too many Samuel Johnson quotables.

‘Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ Samuel Johnson

I started journaling in my matric year. Then, it was lots of fluff- inane and prosaic. But once I got to undergrad English where journaling was strongly advocated, I felt vindicated in seeing my pen fly over the page. When Dew, earlier this week, talked of starting a diary, I heartily encouraged her. I'm not altogether regular in my journaling any more. I pick it up only when mood strikes whereas there was a time when writing in my journal was a daily lifeline. In my journals I collect experience. It's different to blogging in that here I write mindful of an audience, a cosseting audience, perhaps, but still an audience. In the journal it's just me, so an inward honesty is demanded. It is also, by the way, how I keep the quotation habit alive-All my journals are riddled with snippets from my reading and contrary to popular belief, I don't always remember all of them exactly, so when I'm looking to confirm the wording of any memorable snippet, instead of google, it's in my journals that I go ogle.

Earlier, remembering a Ramadan past, and friends elsewhere, I skimmed through a volume absently and saw this:

There is a peace I find in writing that is absent everywhere else. I am the first to admit that I am not a prodigious auto biographer, good fiction is beyond me, my poetry is amateurish and yet the pen is my only true solace. (9 December 2003)

It made me smile, words for the morning indeed, and so I thumbed through a few more pages and found this:

13 September 2004

A little exercise in one of my English modules asked me to write a 'story', or at least, begin one that is called, 'An old woman reminisces about the past'.

The following is what I mustered:

'The ink from my journals has faded. I haven't the courage, anyway, to look at them. They say people who keep journals live life twice. If only that were true. If only I could live once more. No, not to avert the horror of a broken heart, nor even to linger at the feasts of joy. I want only to look at the world with fresh eyes again. I want to meet defeat with a sob. I want to be surprised to learn that everybody doesn't mean well. I want to stare back, entranced, by the green-eyed man in front of the shoe store.'

Daughter of Eve I am

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry- and often find it too- whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonise with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical...

Anne Brontë in Agnes Grey

All the warm effusiveness with which the dawn of the month was greeted has faded against a reality of the inner struggle. The novelty has worn off, the promises made to self and the Divine asking that bit more to be seen through. Ramadan is a scenic detour from the humdrum of conventionality. In itself it is sublime, unchanged through the years, the first ten days of mercy, the second ten of forgiveness and the last of freedom of hell, asking the same, offering the same, the potential for inner peace the same. The difference in experience is within us. I'm trying to cut down on the quotation habit but I find Mandela's words so relevant here, 'There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.'

Despite the sombre note in the overture above, I'm not particularly sorrowful or anxious. I'm just pensive. So in a prolonged moment of mental yoga I went digging though my archives for some conciliatory whispers from Christina Rossetti:

Daughter of Eve

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:--
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Christina Rossetti

Forbidden Fruit

Perhaps the oddest-sounding temptation remedy comes from Baumeister, the Florida psychology professor. He claims that any kind of self-discipline-holding your breath, fasting, writing like a southpaw if you're right handed-can strengthen will power.

Don't laugh...It's really just a modern spin on ancient wisdom. 'The old spiritual masters understood that if you're good at fasting, you're probably good at overcoming other desires. The human will works very much like a muscle...If you train yourself not to do something in one arena, it spills over.'

That's the theory behind Ramadan. During the month-long observance, Muslims practice a daily fast from food and sex, believing it will hot-wire their ability to resist temptation the rest of the year.

Roy Rivenburg, Surfing the urge, The Sunday Independent, April 18 2004

In the kitchen for the first time this Ramadan, not as patron but presiding as chef of the post-Taraweeh pâtisserie. My worthy subjects, after much deliberation, requested strawberry mousse. I scurry around fetching and carrying fresh cream, strawberries, eggs, white chocolate and cantankerous gelatine. Forty, perfect, individually set strawberry mousse my objective. My maitre d', affectionately known as Mum, has lofty standards. With the cream whipped, and chocolate chopped and patiently awaiting its passage to melted oblivion, I haul out the blender. The dual blades worked perfectly in sync to crush the strawberries to a blood-like pulp. Using my fingers as a spatula, I trailed the rim of the blender, lifting the last of the stubborn fruit, and gifting it to the pair of hungry blades. As the blades chomped anew at my bounteous gift, I looked at my strawberry stained hands and wondered whether the fruit was sweet enough. Would I need to add extra sugar? Like an automaton, I lifted my fingers to my lips, licking at the strawberry residue. Something was amiss, I just couldn't understand what. The strawberries now a confirmed pulp, I use a real spatula this time to eke out the last of the hidden bits. The taste hovered on my tongue. Something about it wasn't right. The pulp deposited into the awaiting vessel, I touch my fingers to the spatula. Another taste. It's sweet enough. Well, as sweet as strawberries can be but still something wasn't right. Another taste. Then a yelp of realisation. Of course something was wrong, I was fasting.

Rinsing my mouth of any trace of the strawberries, I was struck by how mechanistically I had reacted to the strawberries. Self-gratification-indiscipline with regard to sensuous pleasures. How often do I react to food like that ordinarily?

Ramadan tempers the beastly instinct. In consciously eschewing nourishment, it is to humanity we aspire.

'Our Lord do not take us to task if we forget or make a mistake. Our Lord, do not place such a burden on us as You placed on those before us. Our Lord, burden us not with that which we have not the strength to bear. Pardon us, grant us forgiveness and have mercy on us. You are our Protector so help us to victory.' Ameen!

'If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.' Thoreau

Me and you,
We fastened onto hope
Building airy castles
With giddy height.
No concrete foundation
Just me and you
on dreamy flights.

You
Me
Between us
Separate lives of
Space
and
Time.

Growing up too fast?

I find myself thinking that bringing back National Service for men between the ages of 15 and 35 might be an excellent thing. I also entertain pleasant fantasies about the compulsory culling of those who obstinately refuse to learn the rules of the apostrophe.

(Lynne Truss in Talk to The Hand The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life)

Mum called me to the dining room just now. Her face a picture of panic. 'Look at this. Aamena's writing letters to boys. Zehir and Zahid. She's only eight years old...' I felt the world collapsing around my ears. I've witnessed first-hand the proficiency of primary school flirts. At least they were nine years-old. Surely we still have a year to bask in her disarmingly innocent world view. Mum's in a panic. The hand-made envelope says, 'To Zahid and Zehir Thank you From Aamena.' Do I rip it open? Will it signal an end to thinking of Aamena as a child? She still watches the Cartoon Network. She hasn't even latched onto Hannah Montana yet. Is it a sister's place to peek into personal correspondence thus? Her life suddenly passes before my eyes. It's unethical. I can't. How would I feel if my correspondence was so haplessly subjected to public scrutiny? No, I would fear more for the public than my correspondence. But little Aamena. Sweet, little Aamena. Eight years old! She did pick up the art of ordering a latte rather early. But writing letters to boys! Nonsense! We'll nip this in the bud. With little deference to the envelope, I rip it open. Mum watches, expectant. Doom has come a-knocking.

To: Zahid & Zehir

From: Aamena

I am very sorry for teezing you. Please forgive me. I am really sorry. I didn't mean it. I was just playing with you. I beg please forgive me.

THANK YOU

I breathe a sigh of relief. Not juvenile flirtation. Just one spelling mistake. Apostrophe used correctly. But teasing other kids? Hadn't we taught her any better? Aamena....

A savoury idea

(Compliments to Saaleha)

Societies need to produce materially to continue- they need food, shelter, warmth, goods to exchange with other societies; a transport and information structure to carry those processes. Also they have to produce ideologically....They need knowledges to keep material production going- diverse technical skills and wisdoms in agriculture, industry, science, medicine, economics, law, geography, languages, politics, and so on. And they need understandings, intuitive and explicit, of a system of social relationships within the whole process can take place more or less evenly. Ideology produces, makes plausible, concepts and systems to explain who we are, who others are, how the world works.

Alan Sinfield

Among the people I know, and those that they know, all schools of thought informing kitchen related activity, are industriously encouraging the harvest of that Ramadan obligation, the savoury. Traditionally, assuming the form of the humble samoosa and pie, today's savoury, all clicked out for the appeal of the gourmet-fare quaffing, has generated a new variety of food.

Singleguy's recent post has got me thinking. Particularly this part, 'I've never met anyone who doesn't like children before, let alone a woman?' No, I'm not going on a feminist rant (again), rambling on how love for children is not intuitive to women, that bit is obvious. I'm wondering rather about fulfilment. Where do we find fulfilment? Shouldn't all women find fulfilment in children? Shouldn't the possibility of a child of one's own, be driving us? I'll be honest to admit that I derive some sense of fulfilment from writing. It releases me into an autre universe when a present set of sullied circumstances don't give me much reason to stay within. In taking from others and giving of my own, I feel fulfilled. It's not so much the release from within me as much as touching others that drives me here. So too, my studies fulfil me, or so the more noble me would claim, but it is a selfish kind of fulfilment. I wonder if the present set of circumstances would turn out to be more perfect would I still find fulfilment in doing this? And then there's this person of my acquaintance, everything to which I aspire, married, a beautiful baby girl, educated to an advanced post-grad level, critically-acclaimed work in her field, yet she spends every second she can claim, chatting on facebook and IM while her home lays in abject squalor. Surely to be seeking out through facebook and IM, the present circumstances can't be that fulfilling? Is it just the individual? If she's fulfilled in all that she is why can't she be prevailed upon to maintain her fulfilment? Or do I have a warped sense of fulfilment? Perhaps fulfilment doesn't lay in the ever-after. I remember someone telling me of an Egyptian actress, who had said that she had been married to Saudi men, Egyptian men and Lebanese men (if I remember correctly she was quite a rival to Elizabeth Taylor) but said she was never truly fulfilled until she tasted the feeling of prostrating to a higher deity. Perhaps that's it. Because it would be unfair if the unmarried an un-motherly among us, were to never taste fulfilment. Beyond the material world we crave, beyond the ideologies we create, beyond the socialisation patterns spawned to maintain the material, fulfilment is spiritual.

I remember years ago, watching an episode of Ready, Steady, Cook when a contestant confessed he didn't like puddings, he much preferred savouries. Ainsley Harriot, remarked on his use of the word 'savouries' , calling it old-fashioned. In the UK, perhaps, but in this part of the world, a weighty section of the South African Indian Delights (Indian cooking for dummies) is devoted to savouries. Who am I to argue with Zuleikha Mayet? I'd like however, to propose a slight alteration to the definition, seeing as we do use the word more than the British whose lexicographers have labelled it a small dish, served before a meal.

Savoury, n , South African Indian English, A small dish, pricked, prodded and packed to contain a semblance of a large meal, consumed in large, movement-impeding quantities by the ravenous and harvested with aplomb in the weeks preceding Ramadan.

On losing a prince of narrative and entering a stream of consciousness

When Al Jazeera English was first founded, the champion of novelty that I am, eagerly signed up as a correspondent on the Riz Khan Show. In those early days, when Al Jazeera had yet to feature in the DSTV bouquet, I received an email almost daily from the Riz Khan team in DC, detailing future shows and asking my pithy contribution. I stayed glued to Arabsat just as often, waiting to see if my two-cents worth had made it to the screen. Sometimes I was rewarded, 'Ha there's mine! There! Mum come quick Look! Oh darn it it's gone now.' Most times, I just watched, and had lengthy interactions with the show's guests all the same. A labour of love, if ever there was.

I don't watch Riz Khan as much as I'd like anymore (I blame it on blogging) but I do still receive emails from the Riz Khan team, entreating me to give blogging a break and interact with them instead. Today's email shook me: 'With the loss of Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish who do you think will speak the Palestinian narrative?' Yes, Darwish, the great poet had passed on, I knew, but suddenly I felt a dearth in the world that is for us to fill.

Darwish was a poet and a fine one at that. Just a few days ago I discussed with bint battuta the merits of Al Khansaa's poetry, and how, even in translation it holds up well, belying the French who say, 'Translating a great poem is like kissing another man's bride through a veil.' Reading and listening to Darwish in Arabic is a profound experience and listening to him today has left me aggrieved. But his words do live on, haunting those left behind. Here he is, in English:

Psalm Three

On the day when my words

were earth...

I was a friend to stalks of wheat.

***

On the day when my words

were wrath

I was a friend to chains.

***

On the day when my words

were stones

I was a friend to streams.

***

On the day when my words

were a rebellion

I was a friend to earthquakes.

***

On the day when my words

were bitter apples

I was a friend to the optimist.

***

But when my words became

honey...

flies covered

my lips!...

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye commenting on Darwish's work,

"Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging..."

I have suddenly developed the urge to write fiction. I thought I was adverse to it. But I have this great idea running through my head. It's so poignantly me and now. I have to write. I'm starting to think I can write. I blame it on blogging.

Between a fixed place and a happy house

So my cousin's been bursting with the news that her friend has been 'fixed'. 'She's so lucky!' exclaims Cousin Flighty, 'Only in grade eleven and already she's fixed!' Our doyenne of sharp wit, eight year old Aamena, asks incredulously, 'Was she broken?'

I dream of a fruitful life, Insha Allah Al Aziz, in which I can ultimately settle into a charming, little cottage, a truly ancient building, circa 1930, amid a lush English garden (that maintains itself), in Parktown North perhaps, or the midlands even, or perhaps further abroad... Allah A3lam! But the floor boards will sing of bygone times, and the windows, like a photograph, will take me back to halcyon days. Essentially, it will be a house in which I can surround myself with books, with unadulterated happiness. Yes, I've referenced that, it's Vincent Starrett who said, "When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."

I am rather chuffed with one of my most recent bookstore acquisitions, Fay Weldon's What makes women happy. When I first came across the volume a few weeks back, on the literary criticism shelf incidentally... I really don't venture near self-help, in all endeavours, requiring the prefix self, I know myself, quite confidently, to be helpless. Weldon's writing, is the kind of writing to which I aspire, witty, insightful, purposeful, knowledgeable and female. I highly recommend the only other book of hers I've read, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, to anyone with even a remote interest in literature, literary theory or indeed, Jane Austen. Most memorable from there, 'To believe a Mills and Boon novel reflects real life, is to live in perpetual disappointment' and this, 'The inner excitement when a writer realises for the first time that this whole new world of invention and meaning lies waiting to be explored, is intense and overwhelming and exhilarating. It is like falling in love. The feeling of being singled out, of suddenly discovering, that you are different from other people, and in some way special, is powerful.' She really is good.

Back to What makes women happy, knowing that it is available on amazon.com for under a dollar, which with postage, would still cost me less than what was expropriated from me, I had to have the book. If for nothing else than this endearingly insightful opening:

Women can be wonderfully happy. When they're in love, when someone gives them flowers, when they've finally found the right pair of shoes and they even fit. I remember once, in love and properly loved, dancing round a room singing, 'They can't take this away from me.' I remember holding the green shoes with the green satin ribbon (it was the sixties) to my bosom and rejoicing. I remember my joy when the midwife said, 'But this is the most beautiful baby I've ever seen. Look at him, he's golden!'

The wonderful happiness lasts for ten minutes or so. After that little niggles begin to arise. 'Will he think I'm too fat?' 'Are the flowers his way of saying goodbye?' 'Do the shoes pinch?' 'Will his allegedly separated wife take this away from me?' 'Is solitary dancing a sign of insanity?' 'How come I've produced so wonderful a baby- did they get the name tags wrong?'

Anxiety and guilt come hot on the heels of happiness. So the brutal answer to what makes women happy is 'Nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time.' But the perfect ten minutes are worth living for, and the almost perfect hours that circle them are worth fighting for, and examining, the better to prolong them.

So taking the cue from Aamena, I'm looking into the etymology of this fixedness. Certainly, it smacks of an arranged marriage and while the match in question isn't, it speaks of a culture where it was once a norm, but as a concept isn't it rather archaic? Why not get engaged? Or married? Why fixed? It does imply that we are indeed broken without the promise of a husband somewhere down the years.

Aamena, still troubled, asks, 'You mean she's engaged?' 'No...' 'So is she married then?' 'No...'

These are murky times.

CAUTION: Written under duress: A fatigued brain under the unyielding influence of caffeine

The truth seems to be, ... that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or life-mates.

Nataniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter

Blogging, for me, is like being granted immigrant status in a parallel universe but my permit, grudgingly granted, clearly stipulates temporary residence only. Xenophobia, I tell ya.

I'm not sure how lucid this post will be. I may wake up tomorrow morning, and while groggily sipping my morning dose of green tea, cringe at this drivel and dutifully reach for an elusive undo button... For now however, morning is a distant dream.

I had vowed, well not vowed exactly, but solemnly and earnestly promised the trees of this fair land that I would curb my book buying ways. I had to! My shelves, already groaning under the weight of my indulgence, had just last week tacitly informed me that they could not admit another book. Not even a second-hand poetry volume. Now for those with the luxury of a house of their own, some swanky, sturdy new shelves are the quick fix here, but hélas, for me, subordinate of my parent's home, I must make do. I am an ardent follower of whoever it was that said, 'When we are collecting books we are collecting happiness'. (Note to self, do reference this) I have lived these past years trying to emulate the New York author and bibliophile (he had books in his kitchen cupboards, his stair case, the floor... you get the picture...) who, when told by his mate of similar habits, that people, when seeing his books, ask if he had indeed read all of them, replied, 'You obviously don't have enough books'. Now I had been able to stay faithful to my promise to the trees through the lack of proximity to the Exclusive Books sale. Tonight however, I have broken my promise and the trees, I fear, will turn away from me hence. I thought I would just take a peek at the sale tables, and congratulate myself on my self-discipline. It was of course, not to be. Stacks upon stacks called out to me, begging for a home away from the din of the Greek music gratuitously forced upon them by the neighboring Papa's restaurant. My wallet, the major victim in the state of gainful unemployment, could not support them all. So, I've brought home just one, a bargain at twenty odd rands, paid in coins, Roget's Thesaurus. Pleased to announce the acquisition of a Roget's.

Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ça change?

Perusing the mini-history lesson ensconced in Safiyyah's holiday pictures, I found her caption to one particular picture interesting, 'The fascinating Nourias (water wheels) in Hama, from back in the day, when Muslims used to think'. 'What led the wheels turning the mental processes of Muslims to grind to a halt?'I wondered. Later that evening, I began reading The Measure of Reality, Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600, and was astounded by the opening page:

In the mid-ninth century AD Ibn Khurradadhbeh described Western Europe as a source of "eunuchs, slave girls and boys, brocade, beaver skins, glue, sables, and swords," and not much more. A century later another Muslim geographer, the great Masudi, wrote that Europeans were dull in mind and heavy in speech, and the "farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are". This was what any Muslim sophisticate would have expected of Christians, particularly the "Franks", as Western Europeans were known in the Islamic world, because these people, barbarians most of them, lived at the remote Atlantic margin of Eurasia, far from the hearthlands of its high cultures.

(Crosby AW 1997:3)

Such were the Muslims of afore! To have held others in such censure their achievements were cetainly great. Yet today, the converse rings true.

Later in the week my interest was piqued by the headline 'A Saudi King's Western Dream' on the LA Times blog, From Babylon and beyond:

Up the corniche, along the Saudi Arabian coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.
Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.
The West may be dependent on Saudi crude, now as high as $145 a barrel, but this campus outside the ancient fishing village of Thuwal is a recognition that the country that is home to Islam's holiest shrines needs the likes of USC, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survive globalization.

How times change! As Crosby notes in The Measure of Reality, six centuries subsequent to writings of Masudi, the Franks had not only equalled, but in some aspects also progressed ahead of the Muslims and the rest of the world. He sees the change to have been determined by a change in the pervasive mentalité of the day. The dire disregard for education, of any form, in my own Muslim community is to be lamented. The fervour with which knowledge was once sought, now serves only to drive the pursuit of the trappings of hedonism.

The first word of the Quraan revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was Iqraa, an invocation to read. The Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) has said "The pursuit of knowledge is compulsory on every Muslim man and women." The credence Islam gives to education is thus clear. In another tradition of the Prophet (Peace be upon him), he is reported to have said, "Seek knowledge, even unto China." How sad, that a Muslim's quest for knowledge should now be looked at as strange!

Reading the world

'The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.' Jean Paul

We are privileged to have learned to read, not just the signs that constitute written language but the world too, is a text, a complex system of signs, which should be read. The world is open to interpretation, we construct meaning out of just about anything, the frivolous, the mundane, the essential, they all take turns to boldly shout, 'It's a sign!' But for better or for worse, our readings of the world are not fixed. As we grow older and become more proficient at reading the world, the people, images, ideas and places that constitute our individual worlds constantly invite 'second' readings. Our world-views then, are constantly in flux. Would it not be tragic if we looked at the world everyday with the same eyes, refusing to make sense of it? As Alvin Toffler said, 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

Getting reacquainted with my scholarly self

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.

Russ Rymer

That's a lot of blood for me to wade through!

Wise words

'Hope is itself a species of happiness and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.'

Samuel Johnson

'Love, all of other sights controls. And makes one little room an everywhere.'

John Donne

South Africa--My huisie by die see

Language, the code behind which we rally to forge out an identity. Language, the code, against which we rally,its derision of that identity. No more so than in the multi-cultural, multilingual hodgepodge that South Africa is language a more a sensitive issue. June 16th, a national holiday in South Africa, Youth Day. We commemorate the heroism of the Soweto youth in 1976, who protested against the compulsion of an Afrikaans-medium curriculum. To a generation not born at the time, not quite fully understanding the impact of what has become an Apocalypse of history, we are haunted by the spectre of Hecter Peterson and indeed, others like him.



I found myself in the curious position of having to tutor Afrikaans today, Youth day, to the daughter of Paskistani immigrants. The irony has afforded a somewhat less affable understanding of the present. June 16, 2008, South Africa is now the unwitting home of an ever-growing immigrant population, a population who we have denied the very freedoms Hecter Peterson died for.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes,

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions-about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.

(Said, 1994: 1)

We fail to realise that history is not neat. It is not a neat procession of events tucked away in a textbook. We are the products of history. This, the present circumstances, sullied and imperfect, it may well be, is the product of our history. We may look back to lay the blame for the imperfection on the colonialists and Aphartheid, or we may look back to learn, and take a step forward.

As I explained to my incredulous student, who has the name Benazir to live up to by the way, I am quite taken by the following poem. It may well be in Afrikaans, a language that will for a long time be tainted for being the tongue of Apartheid, but Afrikaans itself is uniquely African. While others continue to look at Africa as the other, the Dark Continent that affords no hope to its peoples and still others have rushed to point South Africa as no less mismanaged as any other state in Africa in the aftermath of the xenophobic riots. But surely the very presence of these immigrants indicate that South Africa is something of a beacon of hope in Africa. Indeed we have not acquited ourselves well these past weeks but as this poem describes a little house by the sea, being ravaged by the darkness of night, the unrelenting anger of the ocean against the rocks it is built upon and the merciless wind that is like a lost soul that finds no rest, I see South Africa, there, a little house by the sea. Battered and bruised, indeed, but deep inside, a fire roars, warming the heart, and a little candle (no thanks to Eskom :p) gives its light.

Ek het 'n huisie by die see
H.A. Fagan

Ek het 'n huisie by die see. Dis nag.
Ek hoor aaneen, aaneen die golwe slaan
teenaan die rots waarop my huisie staan
met al die oseaan se woeste krag.

Ek hoor die winde huil-'n kreun, 'n klag,
soos van verlore siele in hul nood
al dwalend, klagend, wat in graf en dood
geen rus kan vind nie, maar nog soek en smag.
My vuurtjie brand, my kersie gee sy lig.
Ek hoor dan meer hoe loei die storm daar buite,
ek hoor hoe ruk die winde aan my ruite.
Hier binne is dit veilig, warm en dig.

Kom nag, kom weer en wind, kom oseaan-
Dit is 'n rots waarop my huisie staan.