Category: Getting Personal

Personal reflections shared with all and sundry.

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Getting Personal

‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of Mankind is Man.’

 

to be a fraud you have to know what you really are in order to know what you’re misrepresenting….this is why i somehow feel i can’t be a fraud (even when i feel like one) because i don’t know what the base position is from which i could be operating in order to be pretending to be other than i am…

(Source)

I’ve been blessed with so many opportunities recently. I’ve been blessed with so much all my life. I have not always been grateful. I don’t acknowledge that infinite fountain of mercies and blessings often enough. I am grateful now.

I’m too easily excited, too quickly dissuaded. I revel in this great spurt of enthusiasm on the first receipt of opportunity, it’s an infectious enthusiasm and then, when left alone, I force myself into a deep analysis to all the anticipated what-ifs and I wonder how much my enthusiasm will endure.

I do not want to be saddled with an object of my dissatisfaction. I know myself to tire easily once the challenge has worn thin. There’s not much point in it afterwards. Perhaps I’m over analytical of possibility or perhaps too I know myself. Aye, aye, Goethe, “To be pleased with one’s limitations is a wretched state.”

I could easily be a fraud.

 

 

Categories
Getting Personal Quoting Others

We are not more vile than our neighbours

 

I am not more vile than my neighbours but this disbelief in oneself is like a taint that spreads on everything one comes in contact with; on men, on things- on the very air one breathes. That’s why one sometimes wishes to be a stone-breaker. There’s no doubt about breaking a stone. But there’s doubt, fear-a black horror, in every page one writes.

Joseph Conrad

He is widely regarded as one of the finest writers in the English language, students who have suffered through Heart of Darkness in English 101 would especially attest to that. He is the anomaly of linguistics, not having English as a home language, he writes as only a master of the language can. Back in murky 101 days, I remember this whizz of a woman, she really was brilliant, constantly drawing the rest of us, minions’ attention to the fact that she was much more qualified to interpret Joseph Conrad’s work because she shared a heritage with him, Polish ancestry and Jewish. The lecturer of that particular part of the course, an ardent admirer of Ms Brilliant, also Jewish, frequently punched out jibes about Palestinians in that class. I was antagonised. Later when I spoke to my granddad about the jibes, he angrily demanded why I hadn’t responded to the jibes. Armed with hindsight, I should have but you see, therein lush Muckleneuk, in the seat of academia, the dividing lines were drawn. While we learned of the politics and philosophy of self and othering, there remained a distinctive sense of us and them.

And yet years before that, as a child of no more than six, my father had many Jewish associates, many of them became family friends, some still are. Uncle Ronnie was a particular friend. He once invited us to a fun day somewhere in the northern suburbs. My memory is not altogether clear, I remember throngs of people, I remember a windy day and sandy conditions underfoot, I remember rides, but what I remember most clearly is being stared at. Did I feel out of place? I was a kid; my place was wherever I was taken. There was something so incongruent in being stared at, something untoward that I could not understand. I don’t remember attending any other such events with Uncle Ronnie’s family. Post 1994, Uncle Ronnie emigrated to Perth, Australia. We lost all contact with him until last year when he pitched up unannounced at our front door. He had been visiting his ailing mother and was looking up old friends. While we all excitedly caught up, after the incumbent, “Jeez I knew when you were this small”, we soon found out that Uncle Ronnie had traded his wholesaler’s blue van for a confectioner’s hat, making nougat, Sally Williams style, only yummier, his daughter was happily married in Sydney, his son was in a kibbutz in Israel after recently being ordained as a rabbi and qualifying as a chartered accountant. My brother was over in Saudi Arabia, on a field trip with his Islamic seminary, after just having written semester exams for an accounting qualification.

We are the same and then we are different.

There are those who are happy to say, ‘aint my problem, and contentedly go about their lives unperturbed by recent events, and I am in no position to fault them, but I am not that person, perchance I’m too far away to matter, but I cannot be aloof to my own heart being ripped apart. Klna Gaza. We are all Gaza.

 

Categories
Getting Personal

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.

 

 

 

Categories
Getting Personal Pretty Pictures

Some of 2008 Through the eye of a phone-Updated with Sameerah’s wed-deeeng pictures

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6
1. In the place where the sun rises, the mist swirls theatrically and the rain falls as if it were God’s own fingers tapping gently onto verdant Earth  

The year started off driving though a Mpumalanga cloaked in mist and rain. The sight of the rolling hills being ravaged of its trees to support our penchant for paper, initiating a jostle between my green ambitions and accumulative ways.

 

2. And then there were rainbows

Every year, begins with a proliferation of the promise of new beginnings, but this year, I held on to the promise of rich rewards for patience and rainbows took precedence over grey skies, ’twas the best of times’. And then the little world in my head, the kingdom I had nurtured through the preceding year crashed and crumbled, ’twas the worst of times’.

 

3. ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.’ Khalil Gibran

 

Little Mohamed Ameen came along. Children, more than they need us, we need them. To forget the pettiness of self with which we build and stack, we need children. And so, Mohamed Ameen, came, forcing me to forget myself, my own trashed dreams, and look at the possibilities of the world. Circumstances had compouned on a relative, forcing him to ask us to take care of his one-year-old son. We took him in. I was not enjoying the hiatus between exams and results, disconcerted by having so much time on my hands, so Mohamed Ameen became an extension of me. For a little over three months, I arranged my life around him, filling bottles, waking up at ungodly hours to the sound of wailing, feeling around my room like a blind person looking for the bottle he unceremoniously chucked, carrying a napkin-laden bag on shopping trips, the sickly feeling at the pit of my stomach when he crawled into the garge and lodged himself beneath my car, the relief of getting him out unscathed, the joys of Ackermans kids department, having the Flings eaten before we get to the checkout, the weekly trips to the paediatrician, all the while watching him grow, encouraging him through his first step… And then his mum was better and I had to pack his bags and bundle him back to his parents. I really did feel like I was giving up a piece of myself, but then Khalil Gibran’s words ring true.

 

4 &5. Everybody say, “Wed-eeeng“
It was a bumper wedding season among the residents of our little enclave. I didn’t take photos at all of them, but the picture above (5) is at the wedding reception of Nabeela and Fareed. It was a beautiful wedding. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but then a picture couldn’t capture the heart of the moments as they pass, they remain, within us, enclosed, like a dream.

Subsequent to me expressing my regrets for not having taken pictures at Sameerah’s walimah. She kindly forwarded me some, I’ve posted my favourite (4). Beautiful, innit?

6.Risqué
While my confidence in my own driving abilities improved, and I clocked up a year on the licence, I took to taking pictures of the city lights from a moving car (not while being the driver of said car). The blurriness is not a token of amateur photography but rather, a metaphor of how much we actually see, when we do try to look outside ourselves without taking the time to pause. Or something like that, just stare at the words longs enough and they’ll make sense eventually. Or not.

I’ll stop here, practising some self-censorship. ‘People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.’ (Soren Kierkegaard) I’ll take up freedom of thought, mindful of destroying all your well-formed opinions of me.