The pile of shit is the silence

“One day, a short blond haired blue eyed rebellious sometimes right sometimes wrong Afrikaans girl discovered a really big secret at the bottom of a dark dark pile of shit. Love will always come… This is the story about how she came to dig into the pile of shit that nobody wanted to touch.”

A few years ago something happened a day before I was to travel to Pretoria where Oupa (my grandfather) lived. Before this trip to South Africa I had been living in America for ten years. Although I had visited my relationship with Oupa was not a good one during my teens. When I was little I was close to him but the last time I had sat in his living room I yelled at him and called him a racist. He had told me I was too young to understand these things. My heart then pounded and my head hurt and I had been blinded by tears and self righteous fury.

On this day before leaving for Pretoria I was in Cape Town. I sat with a friend in Observatory and complained about these fights I had had with him. She did not humor my negativity. Having explored her own history and challenges around the word “Coloured”, she offered me a way of  dealing with my word “White.” She gave me advice she had lived herself. She told me to go and listen. Instead of arguing, or fighting, or blaming. Go and listen.

And so it was that every thing that he said I answered with a question. When I was told why there is a plastic snake in the front window of the ‘small’ white four by four I swallowed hard and asked, “What do you mean by saying it’s there to scare the two and four legged baboons away?”   When I was given a different knife, fork, cup, and plate to put on a different tray for the gardener, who was called Mannetjie (little man), I asked why he wasn’t using the same knife, fork, cup, plate and tray that we use. When I was told that death penalty must be brought back I stared at the velt fires we were driving by and asked “Why is the death penalty good?”

I wasn’t being condescending with my questions, he would have known. I chose to really try to understand and it made him speak. There are things I still struggle to choose to remember. There are things I struggle to find the ways to speak or to ever believe. But what I do know is that the more questions I asked the more I understood the answers or the reasons for them. The more I saw the fear and the more I felt the hatred, the more I realized its cost. The more I listened the more I loved and the more I loved the more I could listen…

After those weeks in Pretoria, in the years that would follow, I realized it was not just him. Some were gentle comments laced with misunderstanding, or statements filled with fear and shame. Some where blatant denials of people being human. It’s a slippery slope to decide who is racist and who is not, and to try to separate myself from this slope would not be daunting, it would be impossible.

One day on that trip I sat on the floor, leaning against the bathroom door for a moment of privacy and found that there wasn’t any anger left in me, just the sadness that lies underneath it. I sobbed quietly as I had been taught to do in my culture before coming out of the bathroom, acting as if I was fine and asking Oupa if he read poetry. He handed me a book of prose that had lines about ‘kaffirs’ and ‘savages’. Even as I wondered if it was actually ok not to argue, if certain statements didn’t mean you have to argue, I kept asking questions. It felt like poison was coming into my body and I didn’t know for sure if I could get it out again.

But as days went by I began to notice him. I began to notice the wrinkles in his hand. I began to notice how his eyes twinkle. I began to notice the drool running down the side of his mouth when he laughed. I noticed how seriously he took decisions he made and how convinced he was that he was doing the right thing. I realized how much he loved me even though I spent time with ‘those’ people. I appreciated making zebra sounds and sitting together drinking a gin and tonic. I noticed how he would watch the news, not what he would comment about it. I saw how he loved, how gently he held his grandson and how he taught him to wash the dishes. I realized he respected people by debating with them. I felt the way his belly made the hug feel when we would say goodbye. I saw how much more he was than hatred, and how much hatred had cost him. I no longer wanted to condemn him. I wanted to know him. I wanted to understand him. And I loved him.

Yesterday I read about Troy Davis who was executed in America, in spite of the possibility that he was innocent and in spite of the fact that he was human. On Saturday in South Africa I attended the Cape Town march opposing the Secrecy Bill. The realities of the two things, and two places, do not feel so separate. At the march Ronnie Kasrils spoke, “I have been asked by journalists why I, as a former minister, and a member of the African National Congress and the SA Communist Party, am at this march. The answer… is very simple. When your mother or father, brother or sister, your family, are doing the wrong thing…you raise your voice and say: ‘That is wrong, it must not be done!'”He said that it is because he loves them that he must speak out. It is also because I love Oupa that I must speak now.

Even as I am angry at Troy Davis’ execution I am reminded that Oupa was himself known as a Hanging Judge for sentencing people in South Africa to death.  What point is there in picking a side against my own blood? What point is there in picking a side against my friend, or my neighbour who makes a comment that burns? It is not about condoning nor condemning for me, not anymore. I do not need to condone or condemn to transform.

I remember my friend’s words now, as I try to find what it is that Oupa taught me, aside from a love so deep I cannot find words for it. Go and listen. Instead of arguing, or fighting, or blaming. Listen.

A really big secret

I have laid out my fears and I have acknowledged that this is a complicated story but now I must begin the telling. My story telling begins with a short tale. It does not come from my background or religion, I am not Jewish, and so if I have made an error in the telling please do let me know because I do not want to provide incorrect information. I have chosen to share this tale with you because I hear in it a lesson about all stories and all remembering. I first read it in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book “The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What Is Enough” I have adapted it in my own telling.

There was once a man known as the Baal Shem Tov. He was a beloved leader and intermediary for his people. One day the Baal Shem Tov knew his time had come and that soon he would not be in this world. He called his people to him and said, “I have taught you where to go on the mountain. I have taught you how to light the fire. I have taught you the prayer. Do these things, and God will always come.” His people were sad, and perhaps they even felt fear at carrying forward what their leader had taught them, but they knew where to go on the mountain, they knew how to light the fire and the knew the prayer. They did these things and God always came.

In the second generation the people struggled to remember the exact path on the mountain and so they did not try to go there. They lit the fire with care and they spoke the prayer. God always came. By the third generation people could not remember anything about a mountain and so they did not search for a path. They did not know the meaning of fire and so they did not light one. But they did say the prayer and God always came. By the fourth generation the mountain went unnoticed, fires were never made and the words of prayers had been forgotten.

But one man remembered the story of it all. He spoke the story out loud and God always came.

In my story, in my generation, we have forgotten to speak the story of it all. We have not forgotten God, but we have forgotten ourselves. And so how can love come?

Many white people stopped seeing other people as human. They stopped seeing parts of themselves as well. When they were filled with fear, when they were filled with hatred, when they were filled with shame, and most of all when they were filled with silence, they lost parts of themselves. In my life, I have discovered that pieces of me are missing.

When I become lost or don’t know the right thing to do, when I sit in moments of silence and struggle with my inner critic, the truth of who I really am, a human being, can always come back to me. In my life, through owning my mistakes and through my choices, I remembered the story of it all. I am speaking this story out loud. I know that it will hurt and I am afraid, but I also know that I will never again forget to love.

And so I end this blog post with the the beginning of my own story, “One day, a short blond haired blue eyed rebellious sometimes right sometimes wrong Afrikaans girl discovered a really big secret at the bottom of a dark dark pile of shit. Love will always come.”

Would we forget the good things?

When I speak about the challenges of being white I immediately feel fear that you, the reader, will not understand that there is a bigger picture. I am saying this one line, or telling this one part of the story, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many many more pieces of the puzzle. I’ve spent my whole life discovering these pieces and I’m so afraid I’ll miss an important one in the telling – that maybe you will judge me, or judge someone in my family, because of what I speak out loud. Maybe I struggle with judging myself most of all.

I want to start in the good places, the beautiful things. I want to honour the memories I have. Of him, there are many. It was the simple things. Sitting and having a cup of tea. Drinking a gin and tonic. Snorting with laughter. As a little girl, watching the news on his bed in the morning.  I miss him. I miss his study full of books and wisdom and questions I never heard. I miss watching him walk off to bed. I miss the way things between us never changed even though what I knew about him did. I miss my burning desire for his respect. I miss his eyes. I even miss his prejudiced jokes, the way he knew after making one that I would not laugh. I miss the way he saw through and into me, and never needed to speak love he showed. I miss knowing he is there.

Do I struggle to tell the story of how he changed me because I’m afraid you’d judge him, or me? Do you think that, if people knew the hard things about us they would no longer remember the good? Or is it that when we look at the hard things in ourselves, we forget to look at the good?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment. I hope that in this space I can share my story out loud so that we can interact and explore questions together rather than always on our own…

My story from silence

This is a reflection on my own story and how it has grown into Talking About It. This is the first post of many and the first part of a larger project, where I’m taking the step to go into the messy bits. My story is about the messiness of the distanced, labeled, concept of ‘oppression’. It is about the questions we don’t ask of ourselves because we don’t know how to.

I grew up in a silence of whiteness which offered me very little history of which I could be proud, little that I would want to claim as my own. I grew up in South Africa within the last of the apartheid years. From the age of 11 to 22 I lived in America. I found as much silence as in the history of my own country.

Why do we almost never tell the stories of what it is to be white? Why do we remain so quiet about what we struggle with?

For me, it is hard to worry that what I say might offend someone. It is hard to not want to know exactly where I come from. It is hard to be on the side of the oppressor, time and time again. It is hard to take responsibility for all the destruction my ancestors have reeked. It is hard to see the destruction when I know they were also just people. It is hard to say I love people who have hated and who have killed. It is harder even to say that those people had fears and challenges and that those fears and challenges are what made them human. It is hard to understand that the problems lie deeper than the people. It is hard to also take responsibility for a past I did not take part in. But without knowing where I come from, without owning the ways that the past does live on in the present, how can I move forward?

It is hard to speak a story that my lineage has kept silent. It is hard to admit that I’ve made assumptions about people. It is hard to say that I have racism within me. I do. It is hard to admit that there are many times I just don’t know what to do. It is hard to be so hard on myself. It is hard not to be…

It is hard to accept myself. I also want to be able to shout out proudly when I see other people claim their roots and stand with clarity as people with a clear indigenous history are doing. But in my history I read of men hung from trees, their penises cut off and stuffed in  their mouths. The stories I have to remember are painful, not liberating. I have heard of an Afrikaans man who kept the hand of a black man in a jar on his study desk. A man I loved dearly was known as the hanging judge because he sentenced so many people to die. In the history of my culture, I find few heroes and many silences. We have stories from before these times also, but I have to own the ugly parts of being white in order to own the joy.

I, too, have been haunted by the silence. Many nights, long before I knew these stories and my own family secrets, I dreamed of myself as a murderer. The dream was always the same. I hid the body, cut in pieces, underneath the floorboards of my school. The smell gave me away. I awoke and felt sick with the guilt of having killed. Disgusted, horrified, as though the blood were really on my hands. These dreams first told me the stories that others didn’t want me to know. My unconscious was already aware.

It is the shame that this kind of brutality is possible, that I could commit such atrocities given the circumstance, which has fed my own silence. It reflects brutality that will continue to cycle until we speak the stories, accept our truth, and love ourselves enough to heal. Because from a place of authenticity our pain offers us the opportunity learn from our mistakes. It is hard to know where to even begin to transform the mess and how to remember the beauty of being human within the shame. It is hard to believe. It is hard to hope. But I do.

We have been quiet for too long and it is our time to speak. We play a part in creating the future. I am a white woman and I too must find my place in the world and I must too find belonging. I want to own who I am, all of it, and I believe that in my darkest parts lies my light. I am learning to tell my own story because I believe that, one story at a time, we can change oppression from within.

My story has become a story about choice. The question that I’m left with is about what we do with those choices. Talking about it begins with, “how did we get here?” It takes us to, “where are we going?” How can we choose compassion for our selves and others?

If I look hard enough at my own reflection, my eyes are not full of problems but full of life.

This is a bodymap I created from silence to decency.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

– The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran