by Damon Galgut
So the situation is dire and the prospects not good. But still – although I can’t logically explain it – I am content. Maybe this is only the false peace of resignation. But I feel, somehow, that I have come into my own.
This might be just because, after seven years of waiting, I have shifted about twenty metres away, into Dr Ngema’s room. A small event, but it means a lot to me. A new room, bare and clean and empty: a good place to start again. I spread my things around and bought a few cloths and pictures to hang up. Anything to stamp myself on to the blankness. And now my life has taken root again. I know I won’t be stuck here for ever; other places, other people, will follow on.
A whole new sense of the future, because of one tiny change. Which makes me wonder if all of this might have happened differently if I’d never had to share my room.
Author’s Note
The homelands of South Africa were impoverished and underdeveloped areas of land set aside by the apartheid government for the ‘self-determination’ of its various black ‘nations’.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the National Arts Council of South Africa for supporting me as writer-in-residence at the University of Cape Town during the latter half of 1998.
Many thanks are also due to my agent Tony Peake for his honest eye and unwavering support; to Lyn Denny for helping me with a few stray facts; to Alison Lowry and Clara Farmer for their editorial input; and to Riyaz Ahmad Mir for keeping me company.
