On Writing, (not)Knowing, and Endings

End of November, sunset coming down from Lion’s Head

Draft after draft of blog posts have piled up behind the scenes of this blog in the past month (month and a half? two months?) , as I wrestled with what to write, what to say, what to think. In the week after the election I was shell-shocked, hollowed out. I couldn’t put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard; everything I wrote seemed trite, over or under blown. I thought about Toni Morrison’s words, tried to keep writing. Failed. Tried. Failed some more. The days rolled forward, I read, I interviewed, I hiked, I wrote rarely, I slept fitfully. My South African housemate asked me why I looked so harried; many people asked me what I thought of the developments back home. The election of Donald Trump, I told them, was the confirmation of many things I had understood about America, about the interlocking web of racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, that underpins and arches over our lives. I told them we were headed for dark(er) times, that I was heartbroken, that I was angry, that I was sad.

It’s been surreal, in a Twilight Zone/Black Mirror way, to watch this unfold from the other side of the world. As the Canadian immigration server crashed, as reports of hate crimes came pouring in, as I reached out to the people I loved, I wanted desperately to be home. I wanted to be among the people that I loved, the people that I feared for more than ever. I wanted to scream, and cry. Later, I did both.

I thought about the place that I was in. Almost seventy years ago, in 1948, the National Party was voted into power in South Africa – the party that campaigned on the promise of apartheid. The party that stayed in power until the 90s, when apartheid was abolished and democracy established. The comparison gets drawn quite often between the rise of Trump and the rise of Hitler – not that much of a stretch, truly – but being in South Africa has made me think about other historical atrocities, other tides of fascism, hatred, and fear. Apartheid didn’t just happen organically; it happened because people created it, supported it, enforced it. It didn’t fall on its own, either. Decades upon decades of struggle ended apartheid as an explicit political and economic system, but its effects will take more than just this one generation to combat. This isn’t to say that the election of the National Party and the election of Donald Trump are the same thing; it is to say that we must look at the lines between movements of oppression and draw our lessons from them.

I titled this post “On Writing, (not)Knowing, and Endings” because I don’t know yet – I don’t know if I ever will  know – what exactly those lessons are. It would take more time, and embedding, and study, than just two and a half months in a place to begin to grasp them. But I can keep writing about what I experience, what I see, what I think; my fledgling thoughts can bounce around in the heads of the people who read them and maybe they can see threads, or further roads, that I at first cannot. It’s important to write through the not-knowing, which can be terrifying and treacherous. We’re used to writing being the product of absolute knowledge, absolute certainty, or at least something approximating that. We are used to our politics seeming that way, too.

Mid-December, in the misty Amathole Mountains after a day of rain

The illusion of absolute knowledge can produce absolute ignorance. I spent part of December crawling up the South African coast, hopping from hostel to hostel, heading towards Christmas and Hanukkah in Coffee Bay. One night, high up in the mountains that indirectly inspired Lord of the Rings, an Afrikaner bartender sat down with me and the Dutch girls I had befriended, and after only a minute or two of polite small-talk, launched into his diatribe: Mandela was a terrorist and a monster, the ANC was evil, and apartheid, in his direct words, “wasn’t bad”. He spoke from the height of ignorance – “Nobody died” was something he actually said.

“Have you heard of Hector Pieterson?” asked one of the girls, a South African-born Dutch adoptee, the only person of color in the conversation. She was also the only person still calm; the rest of us had already told the bartender where he could go and what he could do with his apartheid thoughts. He said no, and she recommended he take the train down from Pretoria sometime and visit the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto, or the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg – both, basically, on his doorstep.

After realizing that none of the women in this group would be charmed by his opinions, the bartender departed. I drained my beer; my hands were shaking; it was the first time that I had been confronted, in person, with such blatant apartheid-apologism. The other girls exchanged a rueful laugh. “We’ve had a conversation like that, with a guy who looks just like him, in every hostel we’ve stayed in,” they told me.

After conversations with UCT students about #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall, about Black Consciousness and the erosion of the Rainbow Nation idea, this argument left me feeling as if I’d fallen through a hole in space and time, dumped at the intersection of 1960 and 2016. Here was a guy who would have voted for Trump, for Verwoerd; the logic of their arguments, of his arguments, transcended time while remaining deeply tethered to their historical moments. Trump has risen as a direct response to America’s refusal to reckon with its racist past and present, riding on neoliberal capitalism’s hollow promise of “freedom” and its displacement of market failures from systems to people. He has articulated an old racism in response to a new context; Verwoerd, who once described apartheid as “a policy of good neighborliness,” similarly restructured the old colonial policy (during a time of de-colonization) into a newly “liberal” and “enlightened” system of economic, social, political, educational apartheid.

Some in America believed that Obama’s election was proof of a post-race America; many in South Africa believed the same after the election of Mandela. 2016 has proven both to be patently false, dispelling that illusion for anyone who was still trying to cling to it. Verwoerd and his Acts (the Group Areas Act, the Pass Laws Act) are dead, but their legacies live on in South Africa’s continued geographic stratification, and in the hearts and minds of people like the bartender I had the displeasure of meeting. Slavery is over, the Jim Crow laws have been repealed, but American policing, its prison-industrial complex, its #AllLivesMatter supporters, are its living legacies.

Late December, on a cliff walk in Coffee Bay

The word “endings” in this post has numerous meanings: this blog post is finally coming to an end, after a month of addition, revision, agonizing, deleting; 2016, a year both horrifying and miraculous, is about to expire; my time in South Africa, too, is in its final weeks; the ideas I’m writing about – racism, apartheid, neoliberalism – have proven resistant to ending. They mutate and shape-shift instead. It’s one of the themes of my year: that ideas, embedded and embodied in people’s lives, don’t really end. We change, they change, we carry them with us. We do the work of understanding them, unraveling them, or we don’t, and either way we end up with the results.

I started writing this post in the early days of November, and am finishing it up on December 31st, the last day of this vicious year. The threads I’m trying to tie together here span time, generations, continents; it’s something many other people are doing, in more cohesive and coherent ways; this is just one wanderer’s first try at it. I’ve been carrying these thoughts around with me for about two months now, walking down the streets of Cape Town, hiking up Lion’s Head and through the Amathole Mountains and across Coffee Bay, airing them in conversations with strangers (some of whom became friends), turning them over in my head and on the page at all hours of the day and night.

May 2017 bring more trying, more blog posts, more wandering, more nuanced and complicated and radical discussions, more resistance, more survival, more conversations, more solidarity, more writing, more art, more listening, more hiking, more reading, more contemplation,  more connection. More (not) knowing.

Late November, sunset from Lion’s Head

I have a hard time with endings. See you in the New Year.