Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Susan Fenner

Upminded

Pulika

My damp palms retrieve Pulika’s most recent letter tucked in my purse, creased from re-readings. The exotic stamp says: R4.60 South Africa.

Dear Suzan,

I am still well at Sabie, the only thing I had problems, my mum past away and my daughter was very ill. I started to be upminded. That is why I could not write or answer your letter, there was nobody who would stay at my mum’s house.   

            So few words to convey her emotional double-whammy, and I recall the anguish that runs through the death of a parent. Was her daughter ill from HIV? Did Pulika need someone to stay in her mother’s empty house because of South Africa’s raging crime? Here I go again – comparisons, stereotypes. I’m baffled: upminded? The word reminds me of “upbeat”, but that doesn’t fit the context. My eyes drop down to her letter.

            I am now back in cooking, cooking for my family and grandchildren because I am gogo. They want marogo and pinuts, my family enjoy it and mealie porridge. I am proud of my friend Suzan, I always think about my friend in Canada. The arrival coming of my friend in South Africa is a greate pleasure to me.

Yours faithfully,

Pulika

            Another new word –  marogo – another foreign riddle. Gogo means grandmother. Pulika has raised five children and now three grandchildren live with her. Surreal to think that in thirty-six hours I’ll be there to meet her. She used the word proud – does she mean prideful, enjoying the envy of her friends? Or maybe she means filled with enthusiasm. Like I am.

Letters

Pulika’s first letter had arrived eighteen months ago in a batch of twelve sent to our local Grannies à Gogo group. Our collection of middling to senior women support a community of South African grandmothers who now raise their grandchildren orphaned by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The night the letters arrived we celebrated with a potluck, feasted on grilled BC salmon and Amaretto chicken breasts. Anticipation scented the atmosphere: soon we would read our gogos’ letters. The twelve of us who would form the letter-writing partnerships read aloud in turn: I am an eighty one years old granny. I live with my two grandchildrens. Muzi 19 years and Liza 8 years. My house has electricity but not water. I like baking …   

Another read: I live at a 3 room shack have electricity. I like to grow plants spinach, cabbage, carrots, beetroot, and potato. I work at Timber Company as a labourer. I did go to school. I have pass grade 7. It will be nice to be a friend with you in letters …

We hesitated, tried to interpret, to correct grammar. Letter-writing is unfamiliar to the oral culture of these African grandmothers. English is their third or fourth language, learned after SiSwati, IsiZulu or one of their eleven official languages. Ginny, our volunteer administrator in South Africa, facilitated these new liaisons and had chosen a few gogos with some English education to answer our request for personal connections. Ginny had also attached a photo of each to their letters.

We heard: I am sorry I cannot write your language. My language is Sesotho. I asked my grand daughter Mxolisito to write for me. I am not much educated. Our town is blessed with beautiful plantations. I survive by selling fruits and vegetables. May you please send me a photo of you and your family …

We listened to vulnerable hope extended in descriptions of family, situation and involvements. We leaned forward, faces decorated with grins, and tingled with every word.

My turn: I  have a garden, many flowers and vegetables. I do sewing with Ginny at Sitabogogo Centre it is coming fine. Hollydays are over. Thanks God America has a new president. Please pray for us we have elections soon …

We dithered about how to choose our partners: put the letters in a pot and draw? or comment on which letter and photo resonated with each?

“Why don’t we each just keep the letter we read?” someone said. A murmur of nodded yeses, a rustle of patted letters that lay in each lap like a newborn. Something had shifted in each of us, a subtle bond already formed. Pulika was mine.

But a sense of disparity settled in my diaphragm. As a child of the 1950s, I’d been born into booming Western prosperity. My concept of Africa had been shaped by photos of glossy-breasted women in National Geographic magazines placed on our coffee table, testament to my parents’ newfound worldliness. But Pulika’s photo shows a crone’s wise face, skin the colour of whole almonds, unblanched. Her technicolour smock and head wrap would make a peacock jealous.

Africa was a twenty-five cent Saturday matinee, images of fetid jungle and Tarzan. But the landscape behind Pulika looks much like my own BC Interior – dry grasses, forested hillsides. In my see-saw teens and twenties Maclean’s magazine reported rebellion in the Belgian Congo and starving Biafrans. Throughout the next twenty years of my immersion in child-rearing and career-making, “Sesame Street” usurped “60 Minutes” while Belgian Congo reincarnated as Zaire, then as The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Biafra re-absorbed into Nigeria. Rumblings of problems in South Africa were eclipsed by peewee hockey tournaments and drama rehearsals.

Those events had occurred in an obscure other-world outside my consciousness. But these letters from African grandmothers rustled dry and frail in our hands. They were real. Tangible evidence of big differences that continue to exist amongst the world’s citizens. Between Pulika and me. I felt our separation/apartheid – of economics, culture, race, geography.

 

Up

A flight attendant offers champagne flutes. Feeling like an imposter, I tilt back in seat 2C, play with the seat gizmos to prop up my feet, lie flat, sit again, shoes tucked into the cubbyhole, airline socks cozied on my feet. The wine dozes my eyes, pampered for a price. Thought-swarms buzz around questions of luck and lack in life, around the accidents of birth: why me, silver spoon in mouth, and Pulika, apartheid stone in hers? A tenuous notion niggles, an archetypal thought not yet ripe for words. I feel upminded.

Our polarized differences unnerves me. The Johannesburg newspaper online is full of rampant crime in their country, often simplistically attributed to a backlash when democracy was hard won. Other black Africans – not Pulika – might project their loathing of the apartheid-era white South Africans onto me. My champagne-skin looks like theirs but my heart is not like those of the abusive land-owners and employers reported in the media.

At thirty-five thousand feet the attendant drapes a starched placemat, brings salmon carpaccio, rosemary tenderloin, mini glazed carrots with leafy tops, followed by crème brulée, port wine, fennel tea.

Morogo, Pulika had written. My mind goes into her kitchen – delicacy or staple? Likely a staple, as these gogos in the rural township near Sabie are a part of the world majority of have-nots. “Someday I’d like to taste your marogo and pinenuts,” I had replied.

I’ll stay awake on this ten hour flight so I’m able to sleep at the Frankfort airport’s Sheraton during the twelve hour lay-over before our long flight to Johannesburg. I’ll read, watch a movie or two, my head an uppity helium balloon. Pretend to be nonchalant like my husband who is. The shine wore off for him with repeated world travel for business … and frequent flyer points accumulated for me. Feeling like an imposter, I’ll savour this elite treat – thirty-six hours to teeter out here on the precipice of privilege. Insulated. Separate. Then jump off the high end into Africa.

My thoughts sweep wide around the women in our Canadian group, women cruising in life’s fourth gear with an abundance of love or time or wealth. What motivates us – guilt? atonement? altruism? Essentially, we subscribe to the power of one, to make a speck of the world better. So cliché. But so true. Since that first session we’ve forged strong connections with our African gogos, and when one of us receives a letter from her gogo partner, she flashes the news like a lottery winner to the others.

Pulika’s photo shows a lined face and, though we’re the same age, mine appears younger. (I’ll wear no make-up). I’m still anxious about comparative wealth/poverty issues. (I’ll dress down). Images of our arrival drift the hours away, a world away … music of multi-languages babbled uptempo; waves of humidity to smear my January-dry skin; syncopated movement of sun-bright humanity, close and glossy. I will clamber out of this dream and, during the four hour drive to Sabie, transition from 35,000 feet through equilibrium, try not to bump down with a thud.

 

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