I EMBRACE ROOTS OF MY HERITAGE

SOMEONE asked me what it was about Elsies River, Uitsig and Hemel Op Aarde Vallei of my youth that makes me tell stories about it. I replied it was about having the power to tell my own story before others tell it for me at the cost of my personal agency.

I explained that although this act of telling uses the “I” as referent, it is the social lens through which the collective experience of my “we”, as a locational and not group identarian reference, was and still is constructed and voiced.

But it is also more than that. It is what Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele in their book –There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobumvu Konile (2009) – refers to as an act of making sense and personal transformation though listening to your own telling. They explain:

“It is said we tell our stories so that we do not die of truth… to know who we are and to make sense of the world. We constitute our social identities through narrative. Although life is much more than stories, stories also create order in the chaos of our lives…

“We listen to one another’s stories so that we share carrying the truth… to become, for one brief moment, somebody else, to be somewhere we’ve not been before. We listen to stories in order to be changed. And at the end of the story we do not want to be the same person as the one who started listening.” [Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. (2009).]

In other words, it is about the personal journey into the past. That very act, is shaped by the social form and experience of location, shared time and collectively lived space. And I have lived collectively in: Elsies River, Tiervlei, Hemel op Aarde vallei, Uitsig, Robben Island, the ANC the SA Police Service, and my family.

Jeremy Vearey (‘Jeremy vannie Elsies’) | Mowbray