Wednesday, August 8, 2007

SUN AND SEPARATION

[being cool in Cape Town, copyright Jade Gibson]

The sun is out today, the harsh dry radiation-filled heat of South Africa, against a clear blue sky. I hear it is sunny in London too. There is an absence of the roar of traffic here; traffic, yes, but interspersed with birdsong and stillness. It is afternoon, and I've just returned from the University, where we discussed the concept of everyday life, an interesting yet troublesome one when one considers apartheid was once part of 'everyday life' in South Africa. Yesterday there was a seminar on the historical obtaining of freedom by a slave 'concubine' in the Western Cape.

My head addled with academia, I took refuge in a new experience; being 'cool' in a Cape Town music venue; semi-contemporary jazz, surrounded by designer dark dreadlocks in suits meandering between blonde six-foot-something men wearing sports gear (Dutch heritage, I'm told), all of them out with that contrived look of cool-ness, thinly masking the fear of not being as cool as everyone else. What does it mean to be 'cool' really, does it mean to be afraid, to ultimately be conventional, to always wear a social mask? That's what it seems, at least.

Cool-ness aside (interestingly, on the salsa floor, one strives to be known as 'hot'), the streets are beginning to look more familiar, and London is a distant smudge of bright lights and salsa floors, crowds and hurried encounters. Here, there is talk of liberation, and struggle in the past; histories of resistance and secret political meetings taking place in dance venues. Tomorrow is woman's day, a struggle in South Africa I feel still has much progress to make. As ever, a place of contradiction.

My dose of coolness over, I return to writing poetry. The wind was howling this morning, and it entered my poems, squoze between the words and infused them with gale-force emotion. When one travels, the wind bears new meaning, suggests places far away, is a means of connection with what you can't see. For the next few weeks, I think I will continue to feel there are parts of myself elsewhere, there are parts of me that others here cannot see, because they have not lived them.



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