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We spend our lives looking for home — even if we’re
not aware of it. A CD stops halfway through a song, before the chords
have had a chance to wander back to the tonic key, and inexplicably,
we’re left with a sense of expectancy. Perhaps this explains
our need to know what happens at the end of a book, the conclusion
of a movie, or even the punchline of a friend’s story —
this need to know that the characters have come to a place to breath,
a sense of completion. And when they don’t, those of us who
hang on, those of us who haven’t yet realized that this life
is about the search that might never deliver what we’re longing
for, feel cheated and robbed.
As I drive past families strolling with young kids, dogs taking
their owners for walks, the health-conscious twentysomethings running,
and the occasional cyclist, all taking advantage of the cooler twilight
air, I realize that I’ve left home far too early and will
probably be the first to arrive at tonight’s event by at least
20 minutes. But I’m already in the car, so I carry on out
of my suburb for a drive through Stellenbosch, in the direction
of the setting sun.
It only takes me about five minutes to hit mid-town Stellenbosch,
and I decide to head through Coffeeshop Central. Not that this is
the official name of this part of town, but within this area of
three or four blocks you’ll find yourself in the range of
at least twenty restaurants and coffeeshops, a number of boutiques,
speciality and art shops, and apartments targeted specifically for
the tourists and the richer Stellenbosch locals. In those five minutes
I’ve left behind the relaxed feel of Suburbia with its grass-fronted
houses, flowering gardens and traffic-free streets, and headed into
a mess of anorexic one-way streets already quite clogged with cars.
Although Stellenbosch’s business hours can be frustrating
(most shops close by 14:00 on the weekend), this is Friday night.
And this means that most of the restaurants and coffee shops I drive
past are looking lively, not only because of the patches of blue,
red, white light from building signs and insides splashing across
sidewalks, but also because of the tables and chairs sprawling further
and further across the sidewalks as saturated restaurants end up
colonizing pedestrian walkways. This always looks rather charming
as you drive by, but ensures that the passerby is occasionally forced
to waltz a way through an obstacle course of people, chairs, tables,
lampposts, trees, all without falling off the sidewalk or onto cars-parked-incredibly-close-to-the-curb.
But this glamorous, dressed-up, commercial feel is a bit too frenetic
for me, so I carry on down and turn off into several sidestreets,
eventually finding myself amongst many of the university reses
and student houses. It’s a Friday night and everyone’s
kuiering. Firelight from braais in apartment frontyards
flicker as I drive past, and music from hastily put-together stereo
systems pounds competitively against neighbouring systems. Girls
and guys appear from nowhere into light cast by streetlamps or,
with typical student abandon, into the light cast by the headlights
of oncoming cars, and disappear again with shrieking laughter into
the darkness. All this action effectively means that both sides
of the two-way streets are packed with cars, turning two-way streets
into some of the most congested one-way streets in town. While waiting
for an oncoming car to pass (there’s no way we’re both
going to fit through at the same time), a thought irreverently flashes
through my head: “So this is what cholesterol must feel like.”
At that moment, it’s clear that Stellenbosch is bursting out
of its seams.
But that’s not something that I want to think about right
now when I feel as though I need an escape from people, buildings,
the busyness of modern living. A few streets later I’m taking
the drive out to Jonkershoek National Park. The road is an elongated
snake’s wriggle, curving between entrances of farms and homesteads,
following the trees with their rich summergreen foliage ever onwards.
And it is on this road that I’m reminded that Stellenbosch
is a valley, here on this road dominated by mountains on either
side. A bubble, some would say, a tiny piece of Neverland where
you don’t ever have to grow up or live anything less than
a semi-charmed life. By this time of the evening, the craggy, jagged
mountains are a purple-black against nightblack sky. All that can
be heard is the swish of my tires on the gravelly roads and the
fullness of night silence. Occasionally, through gaps in the trees
I can see lights from houses that appear like giant fireflies. And
driving past the forestwood encroaching onto the road, I imagine
the luxuriant vineyards beyond that I cannot see under the cover
of darkness.
Then I remember that I actually have an appointment. I glance at
the car clock and turn into a driveway. I reverse and head back
the way I came.
Why a place feels like home to one person is rarely translatable.
Try as we might to pinpoint exactly what it is that changes a
place into the place, we’ll never articulate this
in a satisfactory manner. And that, in part, is its magic –
that this feeling resonates so deeply inside you that it escapes
words.
In some ways, it is easy to describe Stellenbosch. It is a small
South African university town not far from Cape Town, situated in
the heart of the winelands. The predominance of leafy, squirrel-populated
oak trees give credibility to the town’s nickname Eikestad
(lit. ‘Oak town’). Little water furrows line many of
the main streets, providing not only the air of old-world charm
expected from a town as established as ours, but also many a parking
and driving hazard to drivers not yet used to the possibility of
ending up in their ditchlike depths. Protected historical buildings
peer out unapologetically from the shadows cast by modern flat complexes,
their old age according them a certain respect. University buildings
regularly purge themselves of streams of students escaping from
class. During summer, many an air-conditioned double-decker tourist
bus can be found halting traffic as a tour guide sees something
worth pointing out to the slightly pale (or, if they’ve already
spent some time in the South African sun, alarmingly red) European
tourists. It’s charming, endearing, and eclectic. Easy, right?
Yet, for some reason I feel as if there’s something I’m
leaving out. And it becomes clearer later that evening as I’m
watching some performance poets. One group, the Khoi Collective,
is made up of two Cape-Flats-Afrikaans accented guys, and one guy
of distinct Khoi heritage. Two of them play a mix of Khoi instruments,
and the other strums a semi-acoustic guitar while his huge afro
bobs along. They keep the audience entertained with hiphop rhymes,
instrumental beats, and jokes that fall naturally into the spaces
of missed cues and forgotten words. Before they end, they tell us,
they want to play us a song. However, they apologise, it might feel
as though it’s been put together hastily, but that’s
because it has. Written in the last 24 hours, it stems from the
nostalgia two of the members felt while reminiscing about the little
dorpie they’ve come from. They start playing, and
although the poignancy of this song is undercut by their evident
uncertainty, they all fall in to sing the chorus lustily. Wild applause
follows. But they have to end their act now, as they’ve already
performed for double the anticipated length of time. Next up, a
French-speaking African refugee who only learnt English when he
arrived in South Africa three years ago. And as he draws images
of home for his audience with his words, it’s then I understand:
I haven’t described a Stellenbosch that has space for them.
Not them, nor the Asian violinist providing background music earlier
in the foyer. And writing them out of Stellenbosch is not my call
to make, for Stellenbosch has place for them all. I know, ‘cause
for the Asian violinist at least, Stellenbosch IS home. I know,
‘cause that’s me.
Why do babies cry at birth? Because at birth, we are shoved
into a frightening new world. We cry for we have been forced to
leave the only home we know. When we burst out, we scream while
smiles descend on faces to greet us, not understanding our unworded
cries... And so we scream louder, splitting our souls into a thousand
fragments sent hurtling through the air – sent hurtling with
the force of our wails to find a new home. And so it is, that one
day we might find ourselves feeling that we have come home when
really, we have just found another piece of ourselves.
An Asian calling South Africa home?
Yes. In the colourful mosaic of skins, cultures, languages, hairstyles,
fashionstyles and faces already present in South Africa, I’ve
claimed my spot ever since my family moved here when I was two.
Because of my obvious difference, I’ve often been asked questions
about my identity. Some are just friendly attempts to find out how
long I’m visiting, or why I don’t have an accent. Others
demand deeper answers, like whether I’d consider myself more
Korean or more South African. This last question began to bother
me increasingly, the older I got, because I didn’t know how
to answer it. Until I went back to visit my family in Korea, that
is. So many people go overseas to ‘find themselves’,
but realize on coming back, that their 'selves' were waiting where
they’d left them all along. And being more generic than I
sometimes think I am, this was my experience as well. There was
one particular episode that stood out. Korea is a homogenous society
and has very few people living there who aren’t of Korean
ethnicity. I hadn’t realized how automatically I blended in
with everyone else until after a few weeks, when I saw a white person
— and was startled. It was at that moment that I realized
that even though I ‘fit’ into Korea, it was in South
Africa, where I was so obviously an outsider, that my heart belonged.
However, it is more complicated than that. Even though I have lived
in Stellenbosch for twenty years now, I am still a South Korean
citizen. Yet, I could happily live in South Africa for the rest
of my life. Having said that, something prevents me from cutting
myself off completely from my heritage. If my heart was truly 100%
South African, I wouldn’t feel the need to correct people
who assume that I’m Chinese or Japanese, something which I
do automatically. Something inside is holding me back – perhaps
because much of the way I act and think, I can trace back to being
Korean, not South African. I do not really know where I
belong, and sometimes a sense of rootlessness will shade my feelings
as I interact with others who can confidently claim allegiance to
one culture only. But this need not be a negative thing. I —
and my fellow third culture kids — (those born in one culture
and brought up in another) find that being rootless enables us to
claim the-world-at-large as home. Not belonging to one place, makes
every place a space for belonging. Accordingly, I am constantly
realigning my identity and rewriting myself.
And that’s probably why I feel
that Stellenbosch is a somewhere where I am someone.
Because just like me, Stellenbosch is the draft never quite
finished. Stellenbosch is a work-in-progress – a place that
keeps on changing, morphing, getting new ideas, and never settling
in one permanent identity. If it’s not being renovated or
restored, it’s being broken down and rebuilt. But it’s
more than the physical changes that it is constantly undergoing.
A place is ultimately the people it belongs to, and judging by its
current inhabitants, Stellenbosch will never fall into one easy
category. Stellenbosch belongs to the bergie with the mohawk who
lives in the parking lot at Brazenhead, playing pranks at passersby
or mock-running alongside joggers. It belongs to the long-haired,
sunglass-hidden, hand-bag-carrying cappuccino-drinking women at
Java, comparing their latest fashion buys. It belongs to the children’s
choir from Khayamandi (the township on the outskirts of town) dressed
in stereotypical African print, singing for the tourists on a street
corner. It belongs to the taxi driver with a minibus stuffed full
of passengers, who treats the circle as a four-way stop and the
four-way stop as his right of way. It belongs to the tie-dye-wearing,
barefooted, dreadlocked student having a smoke on the steps of one
of the local bars at ten in the morning. It belongs to the businessman
dressed smartly in a workshirt and black pants, talking loudly in
his phone as he walks down the street. It belongs to all of them.
And it belongs to me.
Coming home is like breathing with your heart again. It is like
arriving at a place you don’t need anyone to welcome you to,
because somehow it is as though you have been waiting there all
along, to be the first to welcome you back. And I say ‘back’,
because even if you don't remember being there before, that place
is a space your body recognises: where you can breathe easier, where
your heart pulses less tensely, and where you know that right here,
memories are waiting to be made. This does not mean that home will
always remain one place – it might be a few different places
that lie scattered throughout your lifetime. Whatever it is, you
know. Home is that messy living room you picture, with cushions
and last-drink glasses still scattered everywhere, as the pilot
announces that he is about to commence landing. Home is that couch
whose upholstery is worn in patches by your body, where sitting
down means sinking into yourself. Home is stepping off that transit
bus between airplane and airport lounge, stepping out into South
African sunlight – for it might be the same sun that shines
around the world, but your eyes know the light at home is different,
and your pupils change their size accordingly. It is stepping into
the airport, seeing a whole Smartie box of colours (black, coloured,
pale, and sunburnt red) and hearing a babel of languages. At this
point, you might berate yourself for still not knowing any words
of most of those indigenous languages. But although you might not
understand what they’re saying, neither can you quite explain
why this is home. And that’s okay. It is enough to know you
are back.
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