DAYS OF CELEBRATION, DAYS OF MOURNING, DAYS TO REMEMBER

Addicted to the idea of distinct, simplistic heritages, we don’t know what to do with Heritage Day, so we braai, writes Haji Mohamed Dawjee

How do we explain who we are and which parts of us we should celebrate when we haven’t even begun to properly discover where we’ve come from? When we try to explain our roots we shut down. Sometimes it’s because the truth is almost too abstract. And it is. There are no records and if there are, names and places have been changed. Books have yet to be written about the history of a people whose ancestors’ footsteps are too complicated to convey.

So what do we do as a people? We stutter through the mess of our thoughts to try to unveil who we are. We remain forever questioning until, like an overheated computer, we just shut down and give in to an idea of who we are.

But mostly, we stop asking. We stop talking to each other. We, the remains of the unmarked graves left behind, are silent because we fear the complexity of our cultures.

Seawater trekked by slaves

When we talk about heritage we talk about societies, tapestries, melting pots. When we talk about heritage we associate physical attributes to the word, like food and sounds and clothes and smells. Heritage and celebration are tied together, and the union of custom and carnival has an entire day dedicated to it in South Africa that we just don’t know what to do with, so we braai. I often wonder if it’s to mask the sadness, the emptiness, the inability to explore. Because when we talk about heritage, we also have to talk about a motherland. To many South Africans, with passports from different countries, this is a sweet word, but to a bunch of others, the word has a troubling taste.

Sometimes it’s salty like the seawater trekked by our slave ancestors. Sometimes is tastes like the dried mud on the hands of a labourer. It sticks to the roof of our mouths and it won’t go away. Sometimes it tastes like home. Right here. The only place we know, where there are people all around us. In Cape Town for instance, people of my generation, walking around with that mishmash of sensitivities about who their forefathers were, where they came from and who we are now.

Naked agenda

Then, of course, there’s love. With so many questions and so few answers of what makes us who we are, we are still undoubtedly South African. We are attached to the spaces we occupy. Whether those spaces were cut up and thrown to us, whether we’ve been able to reclaim spaces, or whether we’ve made liberated choices to move between spaces because we can do that now, we love them. We’re attached to the people in them, the culture, the food, the land itself — we’re devoted to the mountain and the sea. But at the same time we’re hurt and angry.

Heritage Day brings this to the fore. It raises the mirror of despair and places it in front of us.

Democracy has marked the calendar with our significant days of suffering and celebration. Today we mourn. Tomorrow we celebrate. The day after we remember. But with all its public holidays, South Africa’s agenda remains naked of the things that are hard to measure. There is no statistical model for how many of us question where we’re from. There is no attention paid to the emotion attached to searching. No metric will tell us where our people come from and who married who. Who died? Who lived? Because that data is just not enough and as old as that information is, it is also really, really new. And when old information remains so new that it is yet to be discovered we become susceptible to the guidance of collective thought and misguided politics.

Social media starts to amplify the voices of those who believe they’re in the know. We divide ourselves into those who are searching for where we came from and those who are so, so sure. Our cultures become polarised and when we’re polarised with disinformation, we start to fill in those blanks with resentment, distrust and fear.

We forget that those blanks matter. They matter most of all. Those are the gaps that should be filled with facts and research.

Those gaps should be filled with bones that have risen to tell stories from Ghana and India and Indonesia and even Portugal. They should be filled with the feelings we feel when ask a complicated question: What is my heritage?

Our right to complexity

We’re essentially fighting the nuance of who we are. We’re in opposition to our sameness. And we deny ourselves the right to be complex.

Our right to complexity is our birthright and by far the only steadfast fact in the barren archival history of our people. We need to unlearn the simplicity of the silo and start to embrace that other fact: there are many parts of us. One pain doesn’t win over all others. We do not have to shrink our minds to find a sense of belonging in binaries, but rather widen our hearts.

We need to unlearn who we have been told we are, and start to search for all the parts that make us many things because our heritage isn’t pure. Purity is what created this mess in the first place. Purity is the mess.

Our heritage is not at home in a singular place or in a singular body, and we need to learn this. We are the children of nuance.