Tandem blogpost: The Missing Voice
After a tumultuous few months away in South Africa I am finally home, settled and ready to blog again. Lucky for me because today marks the first of four tandem blog posts with other writers from South Africa. What a great way to get back into it! We were all given the same title to write to, and this week’s was “The Missing Voice.”
A few thoughts popped into my mind around the topic: the funniest of which was the time I lost my voice at a church camp in Grade 7 and, although I was mute and didn’t really know anyone very well, I still managed to get an older boy to develop a crush on me. Take that Convent school! So despite being unable to sing Kumbaya by starlight or shriek along with the other girls while being chased around our rondavel by the boys (all things that normally would show how talented and hilarious I am), I still got to feel the hot blush of young love while wearing soaked Tomy takkies and hearing bible stories. Ah the sweet memories of youth!
But, it also made me think more serious thoughts. I have been watching the race debates that have unfolded on social media with interest over the last few months and it has churned up a lot in me. I am here, far away from family and friends because I married an Aussie and decided that it presented an opportunity to live and work somewhere else, and so I watch things unfold now from a distance, but still feeling very much a part of it all. Being away has given me the space to look at my life in South Africa with new perspective, and I've been pleasantly surprised by some things and appalled by others.
A few days ago my daughter came home from school and told us about a discussion they’d had in class about freedom and revolution, and what it would take to make the kids feel the need to revolt against the school. She was stunned by the lack of depth of their answers: shortened break, change in uniform policy etc. This is something I noticed when I first got here too, and hearing my daughter talk about her classmates’ answers and how shocked she was by their naiveté and lack of understanding of real issues, I finally got it. It wasn’t a reflection on Australian society nearly as much as it was about our daily experience in South Africa.
Even if, like me, you were raised in the relative protection of a middle class family where you never experienced hunger or lack in any basic material way, from an early age we've all experienced our share of trauma, and despite being able to have moments of innocent fun like I did at church camp, no-one has escaped them. The child watches as their mother drives, too terrified to stop and help, past a man beating his wife on the roadside with a sjambok; the teenager hears of how her domestic worker's daughter was beaten to death by her boyfriend in the street and he is never charged with murder; the university student gets held at gunpoint in her apartment complex and forced to give her assailant a blowjob. These stories, and others like them, are in everyone's lives.
Most Australian children and their parents have no real understanding of poverty, lack of government support or daily threats to personal safety. Now, my daughter and I might scoff at that at first and think they are naïve and sheltered because of it, but quickly it turns into an overwhelming sadness for me and my countrymen and what we have experienced. Sadness because we are broken, and some are just lucky enough to be able to ignore our brokenness most of the time because of where we live and what we have. But the majority of us are more broken than someone like me could ever understand, receiving daily blows of injustice and violence and hopelessness.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that being a product of South Africa means that I can’t watch violence on TV and shrug it off immediately afterwards. I can’t read about someone being raped without imagining it happening to me. I can’t hear about a fatal domestic violence case or friends being held up in their home at gun-point and not have a visceral reaction. My husband’s nightmares are full of zombies. In mine, I’m being stabbed or chased, or watching someone I love die. I’m sure most people don’t experience it in the same way I do, but I believe we are all scared. This fear permeates everything. It’s why we are so aggressive, so angry, so destructive and so self-righteous as a nation. We are terrified all the time and we don’t want anyone to know. I'm sure it's also why so many South African expats berate the country once they've left - because they don't know how else to give words to their new found lack of fear, and the sweet bliss of noticing how it no longer clings to everything they do or say.
If we don’t want another generation growing up with fear embedded into their genes, we really need to acknowledge the silent voice inside each of us that fears for our life and those we love on a daily basis. Maybe that is where the reconciliation can really start? Maybe the missing voice from South African public debate is the one that acknowledges our collective fear, and maybe it could actually unite us, helping us to see each other as human and commit to do better and try harder. Just a thought.
If you’d like to read more of these tandem posts on today’s topic, first please check out Dave Luis’ post at his blog here: http://bloggsymalone.wordpress.com, then move on to the next one recommended on his. Thanks for reading!