Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters

V. In My Country Crónica

V In My Country Crónica 53 12 July 2005 Los Angeles For Wim Lindeque, Melanie “Miss Mellie” Maree, and Shaun Levin, y para Eunice Van Wagner Chávez, in memoriam Afrikaans words and phrases insinuate themselves into my head, my consciousness, aun sin querer. Meer en meer. Not sure I even want them in there, presies, although tengo que admitir they do stir something in me. Algo del orden de (pace Andrea Gutiérrez, your fave phrase, o al menos, one of them) la añoranza. Yebo: longing, comfort, long-ago pain. Memory. Of my self hace años, en Pretoria. Después de casi un año, a year of holding myself apart, gingerly beginning to let the words—and those who spoke them from birth—touch me, assuage the biting loneliness. Kom ons jol! Ag, nee man. Lekker, my china. Still not sure about—hasta ahora, desde aquí, después de todos estos años and even with all this reading, these movies, trying to prepare myself , somehow, for my return, mi iminente retorno a Sudáfrica, después de veinte años—my relationship to that taal. Hace unos días, more terrorist bombings. En Londres. Impotencia. Miedo. Ons kannie anywhere trek anymore nie, it seems. Last night I watched John Boorman’s film In My Country. Basado en ese libro, which I haven’t found yet, but which that girl told me to read, esa niña que había estado de study abroad in South Africa, cuando fui a leer en la University of Redlands, invitada por mi amiga la Eva Valle. Anygüey, julle, you know the boek I’m talking about, The Country of My Skull (weird title: Pierre dixit, claro que es adrede, pero it sounds pirate-y to me, not poetic) by Antjie Krog. The movie was sappy, a bit Manichean, pero all things considered, not bad. And you know me, anygüey; for so many years the slightest reference to Suid-Afrika, just the slightest mention, and I’d get teary, nostalgic, or angry: I was there. I lived there. I know that place. When did that reaksie change? Was it when I began to embrace my Latinidad, con ahinco, en serio, for reals, como quien dice? My self en relación a mi Latinidad, a California, Los Angeles, to a feeling of home, belonging, en vez de mi yo, for years siempre flotante, unmoored and always, always en relación al Africa? Oh, why did I leave? And was it right to come back here, a Califas, to come home? Is this home? Pero anygüey, volviendo al film, sentí una immediate—y al principio inexplicable—repugnancia atroz toward the character played by el Samuel L. Jackson. Pero luego it hit me: that was precisely how I felt and acted when I first pitched up in South Africa. Shit, and I’m not even noire! Y bueno, antes, en la universidad, en la graduate school, even in high school: oh, little Miss Divestment, little Miss AntiApartheid activista. Miss Marxista. 54 In My Country Crónica 55 In My Country Crónica Al nada más llegar, eché la culpa de cuarenta años de historia on Howard , en su familia. But especially on him. He never had a chance. We never had a chance! No en ese país, en su país. So righteous, tan superior porque nunca había tenido una empleada doméstica. Never had a maid (a meid ). If you get right down to it, rompí con Howard, essentially , porque no podía bregar con la gran culpabilidad que sentí. My guilt. It overwhelmed me como una ola: sudden, relentless, nauseating. From the minute my feet hit the tarmac at Jan Smuts International airport , en agosto del ’82, it hit me: el peso de la culpabilidad, of whiteness, y de todo lo que ese whiteness implicaba en Sudáfrica. Porque that’s the way I was read there: como blanca. En la paranoia taxonómica del apartheid , no había modo de leer a una Chicana. And besides, bueno, let’s face it: casi nunca me reconocen como raza, not even in the good ol’ U.S.A. Anygüey, la cosa es que I couldn’t get out from under it. Couldn’t stay with a white, South African man (no matter how gorgeous, intelligent , passionate, sexy, and trilingüe; no...