White Noise

Dissonance. The neighbours are screaming  about a burnt pot, an unmade bed and a red bra that isn’t hers. The pot hits the brick and drywall divider between Unit 11 and Unit 12. Noise. Downstairs, an Etv Will Smith festival means an alien aircraft is hovering above my stove. A charismatic relationship expert is perched on the edge of my ceramic toilet seat, preaching to my shower curtain about how to win friends and influence people, and get laid in the process. Khumbulekhaya tells me to go home.

I can’t think. I can’t write. Sounds are a murky disembowelment of thought,swimming amongst themselves; broken, slimy, violent. Today, I am the girl the who is raped. Screaming. Today, I am the girl who was raped. Muffled.

Silence is revenge. Wild West Will sits in the corner of my room, polishing an engraved Smith a Wesson revolver. He turns it carefully in his hands, handing it to me by its shiny wooden handle.  A pistol to the head. A wordless invitation. To come with him to a world where the noise can be muted with one loud final bang. Khumbulekhaya tells me to go home.

The racket is brown. The racket is blue. The racket is a bomb embedded in my brain. Somewhere in my cerebral cortex, a tick-tick-ticking counts down the days of my life. I have a deadline. A story to write. The somewhat fictional account of a girl who can never wash off the semen spewed into her crack; the slightly honest story of a psyche that broke when a hymen did. The racket is blood-red and new. Will gingerly fingers three silver bullets, rolling them over each other in the palm of his calloused hand. One copper. One silver. One gold.  One night spent awake, wrestling the covers for sleep. One brain mechanically churning out pre-programmed responses. Brain says lie here. Brain says slide your fingers into the hollow of your thighs. Sex is revenge, even if it’s with yourself.

And then the waves, lazily at first, tease. Insinuating pleasure. Nuances of release.  Compounding pressure and rapid-fire heartbeat.  Heat. Folding itself into itself, becoming compact, and tight. A finite micro-atom of energy and then, implosion. Still no words, no rest for the wicked and weary. No sleep. Just a damp spot in over-priced panties no man will ever see.

Now the neighbours are making up. Making out.  Banging, and now banging against the cheaply plastered wall.  Fucking and now fucking with already fucked out sleep. Wolf-howling in between my sheets. I imagine his rotund belly flapping loudly against her back. Squelching as she squeels in practised response. That is not 

what feeling good sounds like.

Feeling good sounds like nothing. Silence is revenge. Sleep and sex , brief respite. The stillness of death is the first place trophy. One gold medal. One gold bullet passed from Hologram Will’s hand to mine, and if I don’t fall asleep tonight, I’m going to have to take matters into my own hand.

Kabelo has been screaming  “It’s my house!” for a solid six hours now. Its 3 am. Distorted warbles blow from the Tedelex Speakers that are perched on the wall seperating the two houses. Less than ten meters lie in between the boombox and the bedroom where I am trying to fall asleep.  The neighbours have always been friendly, but never really well-mannered. The much mused upon Sowetan charm; the ubuntu of shared cups of tea and gossip over low-lying face-brick dividers has never been accepting of the concept of politeness. How foreign then the notion that good fences making good neighbours? The same idea HF Verwoerd sold to the masses over the patriotic melody of Die Stem and the tri-colour apartheid flag.  The thunderous shouts of a splintered family at five o’ clock in the morning are our not-so-silent protest against good neighbourliness.

We’ve heard this term before. It meant little brown passbooks carried in the inside pockets of checked trenchcoats. It meant 60 year old men responding to the title of boy.

There’s a green and white tent erected in the middle of the street. It obstructs the flow of traffic. The houses located on its perimeter are barely accessible. The pavements are used as parking. Anyone who notices the tent, who hears the music blaring is invited to join in the festivities. The party-goers who drunkenly pass out in the tent will dissemble it the morning. The woman who lives five streets away will not complain about the noise and disruption, she will help wash the dishes. This is the true defiance. The signpost simply spelling out: We will not be good neighbours. We will be good people.

Invisible Cities

I’ve stumbled upon a blog called “The Death of Johannesburg”, the purpose of which is to document the “physical destruction of Johannesburg in the New South Africa.” The readers, mostly ex-pats who refer to themselves as refugees reflect nostalgically on the CBD that once was. They lament on the demise of the KFC on the corner of something and something, apparently, an integral part of South African culture. And those who are still stuck in this hellhole of a country congratulate the ones who left in the 80’s before the blacks took over. The ones who fled en masse, with their investment money and title deeds. Leaving behind buildings, derelict and filled with squatters, that can’t be sold.

I won’t pretend that the Jo’burg CBD is the most pleasant place to be. It’s the abolishment of pass laws. Our porous borders.  The choking piss smell and the Nigerian drugdealers in their flashy suits and snake skin shoes. The internet cafes where you can buy a ID book and a whore for the night. It’s the collapse of rent controls; the disregard for basic health and safety  that have transformed it from a bustling social hub of music, art and liberal politics; into one of the “unsafest areas of the world.” Not that it was meant to be the cosmopolitan district it evolved to, mind you. Designed and marketed as a sanatorium for the rich, Yeoville and its surrounding suburbs were created to give the wealthy a break from the mining smog and pollution. Except the rich didn’t quite buy into it, and now forty-something odd years later, misty-eyed investors and a pressurised government are pumping millions back into the city as part of their Urban Gentrification Programme.

Enter Invisible cities, a 12 part year-long cultural exhibition that has shunned the comforts of the sterile suburbs and taken residence in empty, decrepit concrete towers in the CBD. After navigating through a mini construction site, and up 6 flights of stairs , I (tight chest, short of breath) finally reach the rooftop of Revolution House, corner Kruger and Main. It’s fucking cold, the sun, a futile ornament in the wintry Jo’burg sky. Its half past four before the first band takes the stage.  

The Frown, fronted by a snarling Eve, drew varied response from the crowd. It could’ve been the cold. Maybe that typical Jozi mentality that prefers to make a band sweat before we allow ourselves to show that we’re actually have fun. Fun. Nice. Flat words that attempt to convey a sense enjoyment, but like the band, they seem to fall a little short. The synthesiser drowns out the violinist, who looks a little misplaced in her dainty white tiara. And for all her melodic howls, her aggressive gestures and clawed hands, Eve just looks like someone whose trying to appear intimidating. A good attempt though. A fair shot, but at what? I’m thinking Bjork. I’m thinking the forest that little Red Riding hood was warned not to enter; but walked through anyway. Just not imposing enough.

“We felt like everyone was leaving the city again. Like the hype had faded, y’know. You have people who came for the wrong reasons, made their money and left, but the city is still alive.” Mpumi from Blk Jks (one of the Invisible Cities organisers) leans against a graffiti’d wall. On the stage to the left, men in sequined leggings are preparing to perform. Painted onto the wall behind them, three words. WE WON’T MOVE! I ask Mpumi about the Sharpeville reference, and whether it not he finds a contradiction in terms. The empty buildings have been chosen as venues because “no longer what they once were, and not yet what they will soon become”. They were chosen for their transitory nature. Chosen to attract people back to the city, and the words on the wall imply that they never left.

“ We’ll we’re back now’” he says, smiling as if he’s just avoided a trap. “we’re taking ownership of our cities, and it’s as if we never left.” I ask if he thinks the Sharpeville reference is racially exclusive. “That’ll be easier to answer,” his smile fades. “No.”

I pushed a little too hard. Took a little too far and the interview has changed colour. I could apologise and ask something his motivation maybe; but The Brother Moves On is about to begin and I use this as an escape.

They are an intriguing enough bunch, grown men in shiny tights, furry jackets and war paint. In front of the stage; a man dressed as “Black Diamond Butterfly”  and a girl, “The Black Widow” grind and slide over each other suggestively, but with very little skill. They’re distracting; her in various states of undress, thrusting her hips towards him, towards the ground. It’s obvious that this is unrehearsed. It looks like something they decided over drinks last night. “It’ll be hilarious darling. I’ll carry my ANC Black Diamond Bag”.

Finally Siya, now known as Mr. Gold introduces himself and the band in that postcolonial amalgamated African accent popularised by Hollywood. A story –teller, he flows between mediums; shouting , singing, praying. The Human Insects try hard to keep our eyes on them, but with the band warmed up and in full swing, they’re easily ignorable. Mr Gold’s voice is unrestricted. He shouts into the mic with the abandon of a man who is fully aware of his voice. Who is familiar with its strengths and failing. The guitars complement each other. The drums are hard-hitting,the base mesmerising in its solemn reverberations.  The Deejay randomly scratches here and there, it takes nothing from the music, but it adds nothing either. The performance is enthralling. The crowd dances, or at least attempts to; bouncing from foot-to-foot to the traditional Xhosa music inspired funk.

In the ad-hoc interview, Mpumi mentions how he finds beauty in deconstruction. Earlier in the week,  they’d hauled a second-hand piano up the stairs, and filmed it burning on the rooftop. The image is projected on the side of one of the walls.  “Perception informs how people behave. We want to show them that everything is beautiful. Not just Sandton, your city is beautiful too.”

Bastards of a Dream Deferred 2

The military funeral at Hero’s Acre would purportedly provide a dignified end to what had been a shambolic and soulless existence. A man had been gutted in the street. A 30cm gash from below his third rib seeped plasma, blood cells and digestive fluids onto the red dust road that would fail to lead him home.

The men in my family have strange ways of dying; but like a long-running soapie with tired story-line, the premise is always the same. The dusty, Sowetan street. The shebeen  around the corner not too far from home; then the abrupt collapse in the dead of night, with no-one around to assist. With no-one willing to. In the indiscriminate, random temperament of death; patterns are reserved for conspiracy theorists. They function as a placebo for the hurt. They attempt to make life and death something more significant than natural process. A Disney-sized romanticism of the circle of life. A Shakespearian tragedy with a predictable end. Still , the men in my family have strange ways of dying; and the themes are always the same. 

The man was cold before the blood had leaked all signs of life from his imposing frame. For years he had been mere shadow. Marching out of a classroom on June 16, 1976 ; he had stuffed his childhood into the barrel of an AK-47 and kept marching till the armed revolution led him to Tanzania. He buried the fractured shards of his humanity the night he’d hid under the decimated body of his friend after The SADF tore through their camp and slaughtered every single exile. Only he survived. Now somewhere on the shores of Tanganyika, there’s a man who looks like him. He is unaware of the fact that the teenage soldier of the struggle who fathered him; the brave young man whose strength and conviction had forced into a rootless, militant survival; had died at the hands of two drunks on his way home for R50 and a cheap Nokia flashlight phone.

He did not get the 21-gun salute. This is reserved for higher-ranking militia. The ones who were rapidly pushed up the ranks to compensate them for placing their valuable surnames on the line. The footsoldiers with the interchangeable blackness and blood, get no such tribute. He did however get the regal, sombre procession, complete with a 12-piece brass band; and the solemn vow from Colonel Whomever to dedicate his life to finding the boys who murdered his colleague. Honorable. Distinguished, but the portly pallbearers in green, weak from years of pushing political correctness and pseudo-diplomacy, dropped the mahogany box as they carried it up the gravel pathway to the grave. And the trumpeters were out of tune. And the South African flag that adorned his coffin slipped off the top and landed in the mud.

Bastards of a Dream Deferred

No-one knows when he died exactly. They found him, dead on the streets in the early hours of Monday morning.Hypothermia, they say. I imagine he'd been lying there since the night before. The revelers who chill on the corner had been driven indoors by the cold. The stragglers, tired and drunk, had jumped over his lifeless body; or crossed to the other side of the road to avoid the man who probably couldn't handle his alcohol as well as they did.  Maybe he was a homeless streetwalker who made his bed for the night a few kilometers from the shebeen opposite the graveyard.

Its freezing.Its dark. A steady trickle of mourners comes to house off the corner of Nkosi street, Zondi to offer their condolences. To share the grief over a cup of tea or perhaps a warm plate of eats. We have very little to offer them. The electricity has been on for a total of two hours since Saturday afternoon. The gas heater in the middle of the four-roomed house does little to bring any warmth, the cracks he never got around to fixing are letting the icy chill in. We're boiling water in a 10-litre pot balanced on a Cadac braai stand. His son, my cousin lines his wheelchair up next to my seat. He reeks of alcohol. This is nothing new. He's always drunk, always belligerent, always starting a fight, asking for ten rand. Always swearing at someone and it seems today, I might be the lucky recipient. I get up and busy myself with making a cup of tea. I'm trying to avoid him, he knows this too; but i can hear his wheels squeaking behind me.

"We have no water, we have no electricity. The ANC is killing us man. They killed my father. They took my legs." I want to tell him that alcohol took his father. I want to tell him he lost his legs when the Military truck that he and his drunk soldier friends were in hit a pothole and flipped. Instead, I focus my energies on funneling the boiling water into three small teacups, whilst watching that he doesn't steal anything to trade for alcohol like he did last time. I'm cold and hungry. I'm thinking about the slow puncture I got trying to avoid a mound of cement the community had placed in the road when they realised the government would never get around to building speed humps on the road outside the school.The pot slips, water spills on the coals putting out the fire that had been burning for three days now. No worries, the gas stove has arrived, and I managed not to burn myself.

I place the tray on the table next to a few lit candles. The same table my frightened cousins and I huddled under a long time ago, hiding from the police and red-clad Inkatha Impi's who marched down the street armed with panga's and hatred. "It would get better," the older ones would say. The country would be free, my uncle would come back from exile.One day, we'd share in the freedoms that were currently only a privilege of the paler skinned South Africans. But theres no electricity, and the water has been on and off since December, and I still need to change my tire. They say the sub-station burnt. The broken dreams made love to the empty promises and ignited a baptism of fire. The decaying bodies of the poor and the black blocked the pipes and the water can not flow. The desolate tears choke the voice of the oppressed and their cries will not be heard.

Jacob Zuma's face smiles audaciously off a streetlamp has never, in my memory, been operational. " Vote ANC, " he grins. "Together we can do more..." A tall vandal has scribbled something in black marker over the ellipses. The campaign poster now reads: Together, we can do more crime.