Greetings, my dears, from my messy Cape Town desk. It’s a balmy, almost muggy Sunday night. Summer is starting to turn to fall here. I’ve seen some (non-native) oaks turning yellow, and we had a few minutes of warm rain this afternoon. I’m almost exactly in the middle of my stay right now. I’m having an amazingly rich, dense, challenging, inspiring time here. It is hard to write this column, because I have so many things I want to tell you about… Where should I start?
Maybe I’ll start by mentioning that people here talk about race all the time, as in, “This black guy came to the door,” or “I saw a couple of coloured kids playing,” (“coloured” being a complicated designation here which is different than black) or “Were you the only white person in the room?” It’s taken some getting used to, to my American ears. At first it sounded vulgar to me, but then I started liking it, because I was thinking about race all the time, and it was nice to be able to talk about it.
I find myself noticing what colors people are in a workplace or on the train. At the medical school at Tygerberg Hospital, which is the home base for some of my volunteer work, I notice that the students swarming in the hallways are of every race. And I notice that at the outdoor tables where students congregate for lunch or a smoke, you hardly ever see people of more than one race sitting together. And I notice that I have been invited to several people’s homes since I’ve been here and met a number of people for a coffee or a meal. And most of them have been white.
I notice how happy I am when I have a sweet connection with someone on the train, and how often it is a black or colored woman who goes to the trouble to talk with me, and how often they will say something religious or give me some kind of a blessing. I notice how excited I am when I go to any of the townships, especially when I go back over and over to Mama Maphosela’s orphanage in Nyanga. I notice how proud and happy I feel when someone there remembers my name, or when one of the kids recognizes me and jumps into my arms. I notice how excited I am when I know my way around a place here where most people are black or colored, how much I want to feel like I belong.
I notice how I want to write “especially black” in the middle of that last sentence, how feeling like I belong among black people has a little more charge for me than feeling like I belong among colored people.
I notice how I feel a little leap in my heart at the internet café when I open the Google homepage and it says that you can read it in Afrikaans and is Xhosa and Sesuthu and is Zulu as well as in English.
I notice a lot of Moslem women with their heads covered here, sometimes in jeans and sleeveless shirts and sometimes in long gowns, occasionally a full chador. And when I see them I feel mixed. On the one hand I like seeing people who dress differently and let their religion show that way. On the other I feel a bit provoked by the whole issue of women covering up. And so I feel both attracted and estranged.
I notice how I can really like someone who is less educated than I am, but I will probably feel a little more self-conscious when I talk than I might with someone who has gone to college or studied a lot in some other way.
I notice how, with all my own fluctuations and experimentations around money, I am pretty comfortable with people who have little and with people who have more, but at some point I start feeling nervous and frumpy and poorly-dressed if someone seems really rich.
I noticed, when I spent the night last week at the home of an Afrikaner Dutch Reformed family, who were very expressive about their Christian faith, that even though they were the most haimish people you could imagine, some little corner of my mind wondered if their great hosting was a form of evangelism.
I notice how I am craving Jews and how especially schmoozy and voluble I was when I had lunch last week with a young Jewish woman who is here working in orphanages as I am. I notice how, even though our friends, who have been hosting me with infinite graciousness, are happy to let me light candles on Friday night and make kiddush at the dinner table, it doesn’t feel as cozy and Shabbes-dik to me as if there were Jews at the table.
I keep noticing all this oscillation of craving and anxiety about the company of people who are different from me, especially people of different races and classes than mine. I notice how much I yearn to connect and at the same time how shy I often feel when I am with someone of a different race.
And then I think about how I went all-white schools until I was in college and lived in a totally white neighborhood. And how I still do (in Albion, not Cape Town.) And particularly here, where people talk about race all the time, I think a lot about how segregated my American life is and has been most of the time I have been alive. And I think about this with great regret but also with a bit of compassion, because I notice how it isn’t so easy, even with the best of intentions and a heart full of yearning, to connect across races and ethnicities and languages and classes. And I feel terribly sad about this, because I think it could have been easier. I realize that whatever I was exposed to when I was young feels natural to me now. And whatever was hidden from me makes me uneasy, no matter how much I want to engage. So that to walk through those doors now just takes so much more courage than it should, both for me and for the person on the other side.
And I think a lot here about the paradox of being Jewish, how I want to be in and build strong, close Jewish community and how I also want my community to be everyone. I think about how those two yearnings don’t necessarily easily mesh. I notice how I love that particular noisy, cozy, irritating, engaged intimacy of Jews – how it is like a certain very familiar, very comfortable scent. I notice how gatherings of other groups at which I am a guest, like occasions where I happen to go to church, sort of smell different. And I may like the scene very much, but I just don’t breathe quite as easily.
I know that there is nothing wrong –in fact there is something very right and beautiful – about loving what feels like your own, like home. And at the same time we need so much in our world to mix more comfortably and safely. I know just from writing this column and the lump I feel in my throat as I think about all this that I will be thinking about these questions for a long time.
I am having a fabulous, amazing, challenging, engaging, transformative time here in Cape Town. I wouldn’t trade away a minute of it. But I miss you all, and all that we do and are together, more than I can possibly say. I hope you are well, each and every one of you, and I look forward to seeing you all in the blink of an eye – with love, Margaret
© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 03/01/2006 (rge)