Like Virginia Woolf, pockets full of stones thinking of the river bed, anything that aims for the absolute base of reality has truth about it. It's not the truth of my own mind, of my ego bouyant and demanding to be heard. It's a truth which having given up all hope has acquired its own gravity and weight to guide it. Everything that aims for the bottom has its own truth.
I live with a certain dread of consumerist envy. The houses here are far too close together, invoking tension and distrust. The old ways of neighbourly concern and community togetherness have almost gone. I knocked on the door. My car engine was still running, but the car was locked, the keys inside. I would have to meet my neighbour. But I'd avoided meeting her until now. I am not that neighbourly myself. My fear of giving the open hand of friendship to those not brought up in a similar context to me, those who would not think before harming me, had made me reluctant to know anybody. The neighbour came out. If I paid her 40 cents, she certainly would let me use her phone, but otherwise not.
I more than happily accepted her offer.
It's not bad if you understand the quid pro quo of this society. You really have to understand it from the gut, though, otherwise it seems too jarring. She was gaining something from the newly found relationship as well. "Come inside and I will tell you all about my lonely life." It was an offer too good to refuse.
The kind of maturity you must have here is different. Look to the left of you. Look to the right. These are not your friends. Now look UP to the persona of your boss, your esteemed national businessman, the politician. These are truly your good friends!
It took me long to learn that friendship isn't horizontal but a vertical proposal. These were not my feelings and still are not, but related to the structure of this new class society. Failing to learn the nature of this one true moral principle as I had spent my days languishing in a colonial outpost -- this had surely held me back more than any one thing. Only now, upon understand the depth and breadth of this principle was I truly able to snuggle up against the nipples of the liberators -- those who held the key to the one true value of meaning and life. I could surely not be lonely licking up this milk of goodness. I was innovative, after all: one of the winners! (if you can call a person with no money and no home that), I would quickly adapt to this newfound milieu -- doing my duty as a right-wing Rhodesian to fulfil all of my promise. My movement to adapt to a mode of conformity would be quicker than a Gestapo's heal click. That had been my father's idea, and indeed it was written in the script for all white Rhodesians to follow (or to avoid following at their own peril). Quick adaptation is the key. No lying around and licking one's wounds day and night. Hop to it soldier! Show these new masters and wanna be controllers exactly what you're made of! Hup!
"When Australians ask you if you like their country, you should immediately say you like it very much. That is what Australians want to hear," my father told me, on the second day that I arrived.
We were staying in a caravan park at the base of a small range of hills. The sand was hot between my toes there. The food didn't taste like anything, in Australia. It must have been the shock of finding nothing was familiar. You could pour loads of salt onto it, but it still had no taste.
We moved after two weeks to some tiny house within the suburbs, where everything was unbelievably emerald-green. It reminded me of how I had experienced Britain. "Australians must hate themselves," I thought. There was so little of the natural vegetation being allowed to thrive. "They must not want to be here at all. They must want to live in Britain."
My father got a job in a printing factory, doing the work he had been teaching his students to do -- only now the printing industry was 20 years in advance of anything he'd actually taught his students. Whilst we had been in Zimbabwe, reality hadn't stayed still. It wasn't the 1940s any more (commanding us to soldier on), or even the 1950s (where exhibiting one's blandness was a ticket to success). Suddenly we were in the mid-80s, wherein everything could make no sense. There were swearwords written on the trees in the park. It made my bones creep.
I didn't have a particularly negative attitude, all said. However, during this period of time, my neck seemed to become my predominant feature. In the school photos it is a real giraffe neck, pale and translucent. It's as if I'm always in the process of reaching up, trying to get a vantage over everything to give me some perspective on it all. There is a little uncertain mouth and tiny head balanced on a huge beanstalk of a neck.
It didn't seem to matter whether the Australians accepted me, because they seemed to move around in a kaleidoscope of colour that wasn't guided by any principle I knew about. They all kept following in this rotation, from one class to another. None of it made sense.
I walked home from school, along concrete all the way, and came home and ate food that didn't taste of anything. The night didn't get really black, so there was no contrasting mode of being asleep didn't really replenish me. I wondered what it all meant, and whether this was a process and if so would it end.
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