Mapping the mind of a Joburg flâneur
Why the fascination with maps as a young boy?
I was raised in a very comfortable, loving home. But I also always felt as if I didn’t quite belong. I think this was because of my budding sexuality, a sense of being different. I think maps were a way of transcending the laager of my suburban white South African childhood — but always being home in time for dinner, like Max from Where the Wild Things Are.
The “Dispatcher” game was clearly the starting point — how did you come to add the other elements to the story?
“Dispatcher” was a game I played in my childhood, with the streetguide of Johannesburg and the phone directory. It provided me with my “aha!” moment about apartheid. But although an account of the game begins the book, I actually started writing about photographs and only came to maps later. Maps, like photographs, provided a frame: both are about what’s inside the frame and — inevitably — what’s outside too. My book is about borders and boundaries: how we live within them, and how we transcend them.
You write that “something irrevocable changed” in your relationship with Joburg on the night you and your friends were attacked. How do you perceive that change?
I had not intended to write a book about crime and violence in Joburg. But at the very end of the process, as I was revising my manuscript, this terrible attack happened. If my book was about my relationship with Johannesburg, and about borders in the city, how could I ignore this violation of the most personal and intimate boundary: the home; even more so, the physical body? I had to deal with it. In so doing, I think I understood how much fear was part of Joburg life. But I also understood something that a friend once said to me: that Joburg is a “humanist” city, where people really care about one another — perhaps in response to the threat. The way the older Soweto men I met, suffering from what one of them called the “double trouble” of being black and being gay, found their place in the city, and managed to lead double lives under apartheid.
You travelled to Lithuania to research your family origins. Can you describe the experience and your response to what you found there?
Ninety-seven percent of Lithuanian Jews were wiped out in the Holocaust, and that is generally the narrative of a rootstrip there: “There’s not a trace!” But, amazingly, I found an extraordinary woman in Zelva, the shtetl [village] my grandfather came from, who had dedicated herself to making a museum, in which my own family’s history is also documented. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life — not least because of a map (!) that this woman had made, of the integrated village, Lithuanians and Jews together, before Nazism blew it apart. After the above, the biggest challenge was structure. I wanted to replicate the experience of being a flâneur in a city: wandering about with the intention of getting lost, and discovering things you did not know that you were looking for. But of course Joburg is no city to get lost in! I see my book as an act of “calculated flânerie” — because there is, of course, a route, a structure beneath the wandering.
Did the book bring about a healing or closure for you?
Writing about the attack, and plunging myself into the maelstrom of the township of Alexandra as a form of healing, definitely helped me. Still, I draw a strong boundary between personal writing and public writing: journals are for selfhealing whereas books like this one are for you, the reader.