Race

Written Monday 01/02/10

Last night, the Gentle Giant and I went for a run/walk. I think I managed about one and a half km when a calf muscle started cramping. Ouch! And so we walked back, which took a long time. I wasn't impressed with myself, because I'd felt so strong while running, that I'd envisaged myself doing a nice run for most of the way.

Ok, so here's the part you may or may not understand: I always have music in my head, and last night I ran to a swing tempo, with "Take The 'A' Train" and "How High The Moon" going round and round in my head. As each song progresses, I remember every chord and think about how I feel when I play that part of the song.

Busy nurturing the seedlings of a new song, merging two themes I've been dealing with recently. We'll have to see what comes out.

Written Tuesday 02/02/10
And so tonight we went running again, my first February run. I felt so good! Felt like I had engaged a higher gear, running at a brisker tempo, almost getting my stride back from all those years ago. We run in the cool night air, which I love. And tonight I had another breakthrough - I chatted while I ran. I'm definitely getting fitter.

I really like the silence, though - you tune into your heartbeat and the rhythm of your body, and it's a whole new dimension, like meditation.

Initially, ran to a bossa beat, with "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise" coursing through my entire body. I've been learning to play it with a bass line underneath the chords, keeping some kind of groove. Wayne calls the bass "the essence of groove" - I know exactly what he means. Early days for me, with that kind of playing, so I have to practise, to get the right balance between the bass line and the chords.

I have so much on my mind, but today in particular I've been thinking about my identity as a black South African woman. This is something that many non-South Africans wouldn't understand. Basically, in apartheid SA, I was classified "Coloured", and as I grew in understanding of the political context I was living in, I developed a strong, proud identity, rejecting the negative labels, refusing to be a "non" anything. The point was, growing up in SA as someone labelled NOT white, you automatically have the identity of "black". Hard to explain - you can't be in the middle, just like you can't be a little pregnant.

In March last year, when I went to Salvador Bahia, in Brazil, my awareness of myself as black made me relate automatically to the indigenous people there, and in fact I felt at home there more so than I did in any of the other cities. I felt the sadness and the history, understood the slave-related issues. The irony was, anyone looking at me there would not have accepted me as a black person. It was so weird! I had to go out of my country and be a foreigner somewhere to realise how utterly ironic it all was.

How does one explain identity? Do South Africans of our generation experience it very differently to our children's generation? Of course we do. Do we have a right, in explaining our own history, to impose our identity issues on them? Two weeks ago, I almost burst a blood vessel when my daughter brought a form home from school for me to update her personal information, and there, staring me in the face like a huge boil, was the category, "RACE". Last year I put an asterisk next to it, with an arrow, and on the reverse of the document wrote an essay about how offensive I found it. I remembered all those years as a young adult, being faced with the same thing, and choosing to leave it blank - I remember vividly how it had made me feel.

But seriously, what do I fill in for my children? Their father was labelled one category and I another, in apartheid South Africa, so what, using that rhetoric, do I use to label my children? All their lives I've taught them they're South Africans, and that there's one race, the human race! So why would I now want to revert to that shameful vocabulary to classify them? And if, because one of their parents (me) was "NOT white", that automatically makes them the same as me, isn't that exactly the same sick pseudo-scientific crap we thought we'd been liberated from?

I'd really like someone to explain to me how much longer we're going to have to do that kind of thing. Surely there are more and more children in post-apartheid South Africa who defy that kind of categorisation. More than that, surely it's every South African's right not to have to endure those labels?