Two things happened to me recently. A little over a week ago, I started a new job (thankfully, it is going well, there is nothing blogworthy to report - I go to work, I do worky stuff, I come home and do not sob/talk about work constantly - it's the dream). You'll know that as part of the new job routine, you have to get set up with an e-mail account, and have your name put on the company website. The woman who does all this at this new place is from the country of my birth, she speaks my first language, and she knows what the full version of my name is. This might not seem too significant, but it is: I have been living in South Africa for about 18 years altogether (give or take a 4 year return to the birth country). As a South African resident, I use the shortened version of my first name. It's punchy (2 syllables down from 4), and pronounceable (as I said, 2 syllables down from 4), and I use it because it helps to avoid the racial-xenophobic-etc awkward conversation the full version elicits. Anyhow, this woman knows my full name, as people from my country do. So when it came time to set up my e-mail address, she naturally assumed that I would be using this full name. I didn't correct her, probably because I was in awe at the fact that for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I didn't have to carefully and awkwardly spell my name ("D - for dog, M - for mother..."). So for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I am using my full name on an e-mail account.
The second thing that happened was that I read The New York Times's magazine this morning. I do so love the Times, and I especially enjoy the essays that I find in the Sunday magazine. They are invariably thoughtful, intelligent pieces that make me want to be a better writer (one day, New York Times, one day...) so I can be a better person. Their cover story this week is about mob violence in South Africa. Before you go to that link, I have to warn you: it is not an easy read. It tells in excruciating detail (I believe there is also accompanying video footage - I'm not willing to go there, frankly) the story of a Zimbabwean man brutally beaten to death by a mob that was out to catch criminals who had done something (stolen? killed? raped? what is the scale used to determine which transgression deserves what punishment?!). He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his cell phone, probably speaking the wrong African language. The story goes that the mob assumed he was a thief because that's one of the discourses out there about foreign black Africans in South Africa (we steal - jobs, women, cell phones, whatever you got, we want it!). I think it could just as easily have been about him being a black foreigner. You don't need to have actually physically taken anything, the fact that you're here makes you a thief. Anyway, they meted out the punishment they had decided on, and he is dead.
These two things seem worlds apart. I have recently started a job that affords me financial security, and an e-mail account. I'm on the company website. This man was working as a painter for a (by the Times piece's account) racist man, and was living far away from his home and from his wife and child, in a South African township. I am alive, he is dead. And although I am a black foreigner, like he is, I have never considered myself as that. Because I moved here when I was so young, much of my life, and my story is tied up with this country. I often refer to myself as a South African, not because I am posturing but because I feel South African, often. I grew up here, I studied here, I work here, I love here and I live here. Nothing about my relationship with this country and its people feels temporary. But as I say, I often feel South African; I don't always feel South African. There will always be a part of me that will never belong here. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that, well - I'm not from here. My birth country (which the observant reader will note I do not call my home country) is my birth country, and as complicated as my relationship with it is, there is still a relationship I cannot easily disavow (or make sense of). It's pretty visceral and unexplainable, and I can't put it cleverly except to say that I will probably never say that I am from Cape Town when I am asked. I am just not from here. When I read a story like the one I read this morning, what will jump out at me and bring me to frustrated tears is not the appalling levels of crime and poverty that are robbing people of their humanity (though there is that), but the xenophobia that can push human beings to kill another human being with their bare hands. When I meet someone who can pronounce and spell my name without skipping a beat, I will always feel a tiny frisson of...I'm not sure - excitement? recognition? comfort?
I read that story this morning and I cried. Because it is just so godawfully beyond-words terrible. But also because it brought up the fear that comes from living in a place where you don't belong (not fully, anyway). It's a fear that I meticulously bury and deny because I am kind-of South African, and because I live far away from the 'danger zones' where xenophobic attacks are rampant. But when my new co-worker instantly recognised my name, and I felt that rush of inexplicable emotion, I realised in that moment, as I did this morning that The Fear is never far from the surface. It sits in all of us, whether we are here because we need to keep the people we left behind in our home fed and clothed, or because we consider South Africa our home.
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