One for the 'Old' Man

This is a story of a peculiar man that’s still a bit too young to be a grandpa but too old to be my gym buddy.

Once upon a time, he was born. Fair enough. However, that’s just about the only normal thing about his life.

Craving an adventure one day after caddying at the Johannesburg golf course in his early years, he thought, “Hmm. I wonder what it would be like to go and work for some abusive, middle-aged Indian man who would keep me as a slave under the guise of employment. Let me give it a go!” So, off went he went into the sunset, telling his mom that he had found a job. Sending him off with a gentle motherly smile, little did she know that his son was about to tempt fate, as he would do for much of his early adult life.

Lo and behold, the peculiar young man got the slave treatment. The Indian man wouldn’t even let him go back home to his family. His mom, of course, was not worried: peculiar man would bring home an income, after all. Anyway, to cut a long story short, peculiar man ended up having to escape in the dark of night when he realised that being enslaved under the guise of employment was no fun.

Was this enough adventure for him? ‘Course not! One sunny day, when peculiar man was older and could choose a career, he chose electricity of all things. Shocking decision. Be that as it may, he went ahead with it. While he was in training, he was put in a group with a much bigger, scary white man who could probably break peculiar man’s bones just by thinking about it (he had quite a small frame). Logic would now dictate that he stay as far away from big, scary man as possible.

Not peculiar man. He went right ahead and picked fights with big, scary man, not just once, or twice, or three times, but all the time. Did big, scary man end up squashing peculiar man’s body into a pile of beef? No. Should peculiar man thank his lucky stars that this was the case? Absolutely.

As he got older, peculiar man’s taste for danger showed no signs of diminishing. He would come home in the dark of night from work during the violent days of Apartheid’s twilight, gunshots all around him, and furthermore, he’d shout a few nice words to the hostile Boer policemen who were salivating for an excuse to give a black stubborn black man some nightmares, euphemistically speaking. He’d run through  “police dog”-infested fields, being chased halfway to death, and still lived to tell the tale

Peculiar man’s craziest exploit was still to come, though. At a friend’s wedding, he met hurricane Suzan. Did he run for cover? ‘Course not! Instead, he proceeded to court hurricane Suzan. Furthermore, when hurricane Suzan’s father basically pointed a shot-gun to his head (in not so many words), did he give up? Negative. He went on to marry hurricane Sue. HE MARRIED HURRICANE SUE!!

From this crazy act, however, came me (and two other atomic bombs). This essentially means that I owe my existence to peculiar man’s insanity. For this reason, as you can imagine, I quite like peculiar man.

 And if you haven’t figured it out already, peculiar man is my dad Norman Moyo, who celebrates his 49^th Birthday today. This is a tribute to him. Dad, thanks for all the craziness you have gone through, for and with us. Looking back at it now, there is method to your madness.

Happy Birthday

Teach Me How to Pray in Zulu

The title statement is normal if you're a missionary serving in the picturesque hills of KZN. However, if you're a 20 year old black male that checks the 'isiZulu' box under the 'Home Language' section of those yellow forms, it reads and sounds completely different. Almost controversial. I can almost hear the older generation muttering, "Tsk tsk tsk. Ulahle isiko lomfana!" (This boy has lost his heritage/ lost touch with his culture).

Actually, this entry has little to do with how well I can or cannot pray in or even speak isiZulu. Yes, the phrase 'teach me how to pray in zulu' popped into my head as I was listening to my dad pray in the language, and yes, he probably masters the phonetic intricacies of the language far better than I ever have. The crux, however, is this issue of creating and discovering identity. This identity thing just won't leave the youth of today, and in particular, the young black 'privileged' youth. It's like swag when you're Steve Harvey, it just won't go away!

Ethnic identity is becoming obsolete among us. Whether or not it's a good thing, and whether or not one even cares are beside the point. I'm finding that more and more, if I don't ask my fellow black peers at varsity what their language-group is, and if I don't know his/her surname, I can scarcely tell Zulu from Pedi. We seem to be increasingly content with leaving the blackness at the racial level, and the rest of our cultural commonality shall be made up of universal colloquialisms and what common interests we have. I'm not advocating for either side here. I'm not about to launch a campaign for all Zulu men to walk around campus in amaBheshu (covering made of animal skin), waving spears in the air and singing the Praises of uShaka. Neither am I going to encourage the bleaching of black skin and the tightening of nostrils so that the pronounciation of my people sets Buckingham Palace alight with delight.
No, all I'm doing is noting my observations.

So what am I getting at? Well, that perhaps either side is so obsessed with proving the other wrong that neither are learning lessons from each other. My father's fluent Zulu is beautiful to listen to, and is full of rich and profound insights that are embedded within the imagery and heavy metaphoric nature of the language itself. To see Zulu, Tswana, Pedi, and Xhosa youth all forgetting about how many clicks there are in their respective languages (and thereby forging a unity that the seperatist Apartheid regime rendered dead even among blacks) is equally as beautiful. And perhaps neither the dogmatic purists of ethnic vernac AND the neo-liberal 'coconuts' who have no care in the world about their ethnicity have a place in our society today.

Perhaps it's time all of us black people participate in the culture of learning from one another, Gucci jeans, amaBheshu and all.
And yes, I will pray that it happens, in isiZulu.

Oh Great! Another Good Writer (blog version, appendix omitted)

Here I sit with all the right ingredients a writer desires in order to produce a masterpiece, a passage of terminological genius: Soft light filters through my curtain, the unobtrusive chirping of late-summer birds, and a head full of philosophy and questions, theory and hypotheses, supposed wisdom to contribute to human kind. Oh, and of course the relative silence.

And yet I have absolutely nothing to write, no ambition to take this opportune moment to begin a novel that will rival Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, no inclination whatsoever to compose a sonnet that will rock Shakespeare’s tomb with jealousy, nor do I have the temperament to waffle on in short lines (with the occasional rhyme) and call it an epic poem.

What, then, is my mission here? Or what is my literary discovery?

Well, for one, that there is no given formula for a profound piece of writing; that the author cannot be lazy in his approach, even though he lives by writing, not to write. The fact that I make sense of my world by describing and dissecting it does not give me the license to sit here, string a few well-constructed but ultimately meaningless phrases together, ensuring that there are a few phonetic difficulties therein, and then publish it (after which I can claim that I have contributed something to society). That is not the author’s mission. If it is, he must rethink the reasons for his interaction with words, and if indeed he is guilty of using the (self-bestowed) vocation of Writer falsely, let him honourably take his work and shove it. Society is not interested.

What, then, makes a piece of writing profound? What makes a successful author?

Resonance.

A good writer will have to confront himself with these questions: to what extent is what I am producing here relevant to the reader? Am I able to communicate this to the reader? Beyond the grand use of words, what is the qualitative substance of the text, and can the reader identify with this substance?

One must not make the error of equating resonance to being boring and unoriginal, for if a challenging and new perspective is proposed by the author, this does not affect the relevance of the writing, or the readers’ ability to identify with it. On the contrary, a text may be rendered completely irrelevant if it seeks only to conform to cultural norms in the name of safety, simply because what it is saying would have been said many a time before, and thus the text is redundant. In an age where boundaries are constantly being pushed, reset and/or re-established, it is detrimental for the writer to merely describe these boundaries, for there is already a clear awareness of their nature if they are being constantly manipulated. So, in delightful post-modern frankness, this is how I would summarise what I have just said: Hey, man, give us something to think about! Don’t just tell us what we are thinking about in fancy words!

Resonance is what makes a good writer. Now let us look at what makes a great one.

A great wordsmith will not only give the reader something to think about by making his ideas and observations clear, accessible and challenging, but he will indeed change the way the reader thinks altogether. What shall we call his second ingredient, then?

Inspiration.

If through diction I can show the reader a) where he is in relation to the ideas and observations I am putting forward (Resonance) and b) where I propose he should be in relation to the ideas and observations put forward (through showing him that where he ‘should’ be is indeed different and better than where he is), then I have inspired him to make changes in his thinking. This change of thinking will probably not result in any action, but I have influenced his thought processes nonetheless. Did not Shakespeare change the way one thinks about traditional romance in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet? Did not Alan Paton bring a refreshing humanity to, and a tangible account of how the otherwise abstract (to Europe) ‘atrocity’ of Apartheid affected ordinary South Africans through Cry, The Beloved Country? What about the stir that Chika Onyeani caused when he challenged the Black population to wake up from economic slumber in Capitalist Nigger? Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, spin the notion of social taboo on its head, and cause us to think about a more open platform of discussion to deal with social ills, instead of just sweeping things under the rug.

A great writer, then, presents the text with such skill that he brainwashes the reader while entertaining him. It is an intricate interplay between deliberately chosen words and chapter titles, of theme and symbolism, of character development and plot, of complex language usage and simple exclamations, of omission and repetition. Behold, I use the word brainwash here as a good thing when one considers the abundance of pointless literary dirt out there.

After all, don’t great writers challenge the norm?