Sundry Sunday Thought
On being a spoke in the third wheel - A clarification
And from Lady Kim, words from the Mevlana to put it all in perspective: "You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?"
That's all for tonight folks, tune in next time for more off-the-cuff entertainment from the life and wiles of the distant planet that is Khadija.
Okay, that was vain but au revoir mes amis.
Towards the construction of a new identity
...date stamped 31 August 2002, ... 25,000 supporters of the APF, LPM, and many other organisations marching from the poverty of Johannesburg's Alexandra township to the steps of the UN's Summit for Sustainable Development in wealthy Sandton. The world's leaders, safe in air-conditioned luxury, are protected by South African police and troops, and a minister representing the local mediators of globalisation is booed off the demonstrators' stage. Most of the protesters have dark brown skins, but some are lighter in complexion, and some are quite pale. There are men and women, young and old, people who are HIV-negative and others who are Positive, gays and straights, communists, Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus. Many languages are spoken, but almost everyone understands the English of the platform speakers. Most of the marchers are poor and unemployed, but among them are many workers, some of them are union members. There are representatives from other countries, and there is even a sprinkling of students and lecturers from local universities. This is a new identity of difference, and with one voice it loudly proclaims: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!Peter Alexander
"The re-evaluation of the world cannot be indefinitely deferred." Trevor Manuel
But if we refuse to face any of our awkward and deepest truths, then sooner or later, we are going to have to become deaf and blind. And then, eventually, we are going to have to silence our dreams, and the dreams of others. In otherwords, we die. We die in life.
Where do the squeamish go in Gaza?
When caked up, pungent rivers of blood shore up against your front door
When human waste is let out to marshal streets of destruction and woe
When children, frail and forlorn, hold on fiercely to a mother two days dead
When a father, a dying child laying limply in his arms runs to a hospital nowhere near
When a daughter returns to a heap of rubble that was home just ten days before
When that daughter finds the corpse of a child two weeks dead-
So long dead, it hasn't rated a statistic and even as a belated statistic she cannot tell whether it is a girl or a boy
When the nails from the shells flying precariously close above are as long as your hand
When a child's brain is bombed out of his head with no reference to superlative metaphor- just a grim litreality
When a brother himself no more than ten is burdened with the weight of a bleeding, burned brother
When over on the hill in the distance the fall of each bomb is celebrated by another pair of brothers
When the head of a girl protrudes from a heap of rubble like an artistic echo of the world's complicity
When the unborn child listens to their mother wailing for a husband who is never to hear the wailing of his child-
Who closes their eyes and walks away?
And then you realise, squeamishness is a privilege few can afford.
A room of one’s own
If opinions on any of these subjects had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour.
Virginia Woolf
Let's say you receive a tip off, someone, like the national intelligence agency, or even your pesky aunty Poppy, had successfully applied to the courts for a warrant, authorising them to search your hovel/room/home. What would you hide?
After divesting of the forgotten perlemoen and its less legal narcotic cousins there are the little inanities that make up our lives, the seemingly insignificant things we pack our lives into that we'd protect from the prying eyes of the world, simply because they are our own. Some people guard their phones with the fierceness of a weaver bird tearing down a rejected nest, perhaps because they have something to hide but perhaps too, they have more to protect. There's something so humiliating, dehumanising in fact, in coercing another to bare all.
I'd hide:
My journals: As evidence to past misdeeds they are about as good as a perlemoen stash and I'd also like to preserve some semblance of the well-formed opinion the world has of me.
There's that gift, its ambiguity confused me so I keep it in its original gift packaging on one of my book shelves. I've only ever peeked at it once and I wouldn't want to explain how it got there.
I'll tell you what I'd hide, I'd tell you where I hid it, but I wouldn't let you get to it because there's too much in there that's just mine.
What would you hide? Or are you an open-book, unperturbed about the world roaming about? You know they say a lot of open minds should be closed for repairs, so I'd venture, a few open books need a trip to the bindery. What would you hide?
I may heretofore be accused of being the Grinch who stole Christmas
There are a mind-numbing number of Christmasy movies on TV. Taken in doses of one, it's charming, in pairs, tediously predictable and anything more constitutes an overdose, nausea at the sight of schmaltz being a common symptom.
I have a vague recollection of a group in the UK who launched a campaign against Christmas decorations in the work place, claiming it alienated those who held no affinity with December tinsel. I also recall there being a Muslim man at the helm of the campaign which somehow catapulted the campaign into that all too familiar world of contemptous scrutiny from those certain Muslims are trying to take over the world.
It is a pity that my only reference to it is a sketchy memory of a Sky News anchor quizzing an outspoken campaigner, more comprehensive googling would likely dig up a reference, but a lazy google has found David Cameron, leader of the British Tories, saying :
Christmas is something that we celebrate as a country and should be in schools. Of course Muslims want to celebrate Eid and Jews, Passover, but you don't build a stronger country by denying Christmas.
This has never made any sense to me at all. And the idea that anyone ever could be offended by a Christmas card that says "Merry Christmas and happy new year" and we've got to send one saying "Season's greetings"; I think it's just insulting tosh.
In fact, people - Muslims and Jews - are offended because it's treating them in a silly and politically correct way.
(Source)
Why thank you Mr. Cameron for volunteering so enthusiastically for the job of spokesperson for the Muslim population-and the Jewish population too. With sa benchmark like this you'd be better suited to being a peace envoy in the Middle East. A highly sought after position, I'd reckon, posterity among the perks. But while we wait on your CV to be approved, I'd like to clarify to ye, valued readers, that I'm not anti-Christmas. I respect the traditions of my fellow citizens of the world and I sincerely wish them a very merry Christmas. But while I do understand that there may be a significant slice of the population pie celebrating Christmas, I wonder if it isn't a tad presumptuous to assume that subjecting the whole to the whims of a few could foster nationalism. Might I further add that the irony of democracy is that it inherently protects minorities.We get Christmas, we understand it, we empathise with its traditions, but I'm not really party to any of it, so please, oh please, could you tone down on the Christmas hullabaloo? It really doesn't go with my South Africaness.
A colleague who is very keen on telling stories while puffing away on Camels, as mindless of Anti Smoking regulations in public spaces as he is of actually working, tells me of his wife's experience as an au pair to the brat of a banking executive in New York. The executive kindly asks her au pair when Christmas is celebrated in South Africa. 'December 25th,' says the au pair. 'But it's ummer in the southern hemisphere then,' says the executive, 'you can't celebrate Christmas in summer.... ' With reasoning like this it's little wonder the banks are crumbling. And then there's Africa's own DSTV, flighting ads, sporting a well endowed snowman complete with snow storm attached, wishing their viewers a Merry Christmas. Yep, I can see how sunny, hardly ever snowed upon, sub-Saharan Africans are relating the idea of the snowman to their idea of Christmas. Cultural hegemony, I tell ya.
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
Lighting up a Sunday night
I light an incense candle, a gift from the spa at the gym, their way of saying sorry for lifting the skin off my face, it was all a mistake, I wouldn't have complained, mum insisted, it's one of those designer fragrances, nothing elementary, it's meant to be restful, it usually stands a constant vigil in the bathroom, I'm using it tonight as an accompaniment to a spa bath, the home version, I light it, wasting three matches, it's one of those things that have always evaded me, I should've had girl scout classes, I'm better with a lighter, when I was twelve I tested the flick of my thumb on my grandmother's lighter, the thrill of the light was enough, cigarettes never did hold any attraction, the candle is lit, there's no smell, maybe it's supposed to be subtle, but I lean in closer anyway, expecting soft notes like classical instrumental at hotel breakfasts, if I lean any closer my nostrils will be charred by the hungry flame, I move away, content to let it burn it's own way, I like to think I'm unobtrusive, I want to campaign, spa baths for all, the scent, whether it's there I can't tell but as I move into my room, I carry the candle with me, leaving it there while I join the others for the frenetic finish of the formula one season, I'm disappointed, I like the red cars, maybe it's the fickleness of sporting fortunes that attracts me to it, I return to my room, all the nuances of the incense now fill my room like a philharmonic orchestra, maybe I was too severe, I should have given it time, but tonight I want an early night, I fear the week ahead will be unwilling to compromise with fatigue, I crouch over, reminding myself of the picture of the two year old me bent over birthday cake in the album I was meant to return, I close my eyes, summoning my own south wester, to sssh its silent passage, now, I don't have to lean any closer to catch the smell of burn, the smell of boorish waste, hell on a candle wick, a lonely cloud of smoke escapes, very dramatic, the smell of burn permeates the room, me, it's quicker, more enduring. It's still here.
Diversifying into Bono world
Dear Bono,
Parasputin and I have come up with some lyrics. If you do use them, kindly remember us when your company's paying out royalties , 85% Parasputin, 15% Khadija.
soul like a devil sick of sin
can't access His love
won't let me in
'cos I'm unaware
of His mercy
mercy
looking for perdition
from up above
I can't give in
'cos I'm unaware
of His mercy
mercy
And for the bridge:
you think you need a bridge
but really it's a key
to open up your heart
and truly see.
We thank you in eager anticipation of fame and fortune,
Khadija and Parasputin.
Perception is a convenience store
A riposte so fine, I had to share, 'Lady, I know I'm in jeans and you're all throwing that scarf around over your suit, but two years of blogging has left me pretty confident that my thought is rigorous'.
(From, here)
Perception is the squalid, little corner store you know since childhood, where the old man, now long dead, stood smiling behind a bright counter pouring free chappies into your clammy hands. You know the store so well now, you serve yourself in its dingy recesses only to learn that the currency of pompous prejudice is least likely to get you out of there alive.
‘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.'
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
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.
Notes from the underbelly of a weekend
Friday:
Let the truth be told, this has been one of the most unproductive weeks in the history of studious slacking. My desk is a necropolis, every scrap of paper, a tombstone at the grave of time lost. And here I sit, it's Friday, not thanking God in a gracious TGIF, but throttled in a relentless juggernaut, jarred between the week that was and the weekend that may be.
It's Friday and I'm sitting at my desk, dividing my attention between my journal and the blog, both of them exercises in self-aggrandisement.
Saturday:
It's a sad state of affairs that has me browsing online news on a Saturday night. Best I don't expound on the confluence of near-tragedies leading to the fact but instead share with you a snippet from an article très intéressant. An exposition on population related problems from The Independent, takes off from a recent study into global warming that warned Britons to cease procreating as a measure to curb dwindling resources, whereas, conversely, birth rates in Europe are alarmingly low. A worthy read, but I took exception to this:
The world's highest fertility rates are to be found in the most religious countries. People there seem to adhere to traditional views of how the world works. "Food, sex and procreation are core elements of humanity and changes to them are often met with fierce hostility," says Cleland.
That is true of Christians in the US, Hindus in India and Muslims in many states. The more fundamentalist the leadership, the higher the fertility rate, says Kenneth W Wachter, the Professor of Demography and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Is this because Muslim countries are by and large poor? "In my view the evidence is that there is something intrinsic to the culture. It's there in the rich Muslim states in the Gulf, in Saudi Arabia and in the Muslim provinces of the former Soviet Union. It is perhaps bound up with the status of women ." (my italics)
(Paul Vallely in The Independent)
Sê weer? So all the Muslims of the world gather around at their annual conference of otherliness and year after year consistently reach accord that women are mere objects of procreation?
Sunday:
Where's the weekend gone then?
PS. I'm finally done with Weldon, all the head banging about happiness ultimately had me pouting. Deciding to channel my reading habits to more scholarly pursuits this week, Discourse and Identity.
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.
Looking into the mirror that is ‘ink’
I'm wondering about us, y'know, us, the legion of dispassionate, somewhat educated, laptop-wielding, gourmet fare-quaffing, self-appointed purveyors of social correction: Quick to the fault of the way things are and even quicker to advocate the way things ought to be, complete with road-map attached. Surely, we cannot be held blameless in the grander scheme of things. If the faults of society are so glaringly obvious to us, then what of our own shortcomings as a faction, as a clique, as a generation? Do we choose to be blissfully blinded to them? Are our own shortcomings not as glaringly obvious to the society we happily critique?
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!
