by Ariel Levy
Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.
—
I ALWAYS GET TERRIFIED before I travel. I become convinced that this time I won’t be able to figure out the map, or communicate with non-English-speakers, or find the people I need in order to write the story I’ve been sent in search of. I will be lost and incompetent and vulnerable.
So it was with childbearing: I was afraid for almost a decade. I didn’t like childhood, and I was afraid that I’d have a child who didn’t, either. I was afraid I would be an awful mother. And I was afraid of being grounded, sessile—stuck in one spot for twenty years of oboe lessons and math homework that I hadn’t been able to finish the first time around.
I paid attention to what I saw and read on the subject. “A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties,” Elena Ferrante wrote in her novel The Lost Daughter. Her protagonist eventually rips herself away from her children, and enters an experience of the sublime: “Everything starting from zero. No habit, no sensations dulled by predictability. I was I, I produced thoughts not distracted by any concern other than the tangled thread of dreams and desires.” If you held a baby all night and day, your hands would not be free to cling to that tangled thread.
I once saw an interview with Joni Mitchell in which she explained why she didn’t marry Graham Nash and have his babies when they were a couple in the sixties. She turned her back on the domestic dream she had inspired him to canonize: “I’ll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase.” After he proposed, Mitchell found herself thinking about her grandmother, a frustrated musician who felt so trapped by motherhood and women’s work that one afternoon she “kicked the kitchen door off the hinges.” Her life would not be about self-expression. She resigned herself to her reality.
Mitchell thought that she would end up like her grandmother if she chose family and domesticity. So instead, as she sang in “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” she went roaming, “out on the vast and subtle plains of mystery.”
I wanted to meet those mysteries, too. I wanted to feel the limitless Mongolian steppe spread out in front of me. I wanted to know what it smells like in the morning in Rajasthan. Why? “I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart once wrote in a letter to her husband. “Women must try to do things as men have tried.”
I would not kick the door off its hinges. I would not choose the muffling comforts of home. I would be the explorer, not the mummy.
2
The night before I left, Africa was golden and pulsating in my mind. I imagined myself with pad in hand, furiously taking notes under a red sun. I would be fearless, in love with my work and the wide world. I would fall into bed at night exhilarated, my mind zooming with thought.
I was thirty-five years old and flying to Johannesburg to report the most ambitious story of my career. Over the course of a dozen years on the job, I’d grown accustomed to writing certain kinds of articles: compact profiles of public figures; essays about pop culture. This was something else. Everything I’d done before seemed like practice, preparation. This felt like the beginning of my adult life as a writer.
There was a runner from Limpopo, a rural region of South Africa on the borders of Botswana, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, whose picture I had seen in the paper and could not look away from. Her name was Caster Semenya. She had grown up in a remote village of small brick houses and sun-baked mud-and-dung huts, running barefoot with a track team that could not afford sneakers. She came from a place where few people had cars or indoor plumbing or opportunities for greatness, and she had kept on running until she was powerful and unstoppable. Semenya had been recruited by the University of Pretoria and, at eighteen, she had just won the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, setting a new national record for her event. She seemed destined for the Olympics.
But the other runners didn’t think it was fair. “For me, she is not a woman. She is a man,” said the Italian runner Elisa Cusma, who had come in sixth in Berlin. “These kind of people should not run with us.”
“Just look at her,” said the Russian who had finished fifth.
Semenya was breathtakingly butch. She had a strong jawline and a build that slid straight from her ribs to her hips; her torso was like the breastplate on a suit of armor. Even before she left Pretoria, there had been gossip about her appearance. In response, the International Association of Athletics Federations, the organization that governs Semenya’s sport, instructed her to undergo “gender testing”: she was taken to a doctor for an inspection of her genitals and given a blood test to measure her testosterone level. She was told she was being tested for doping, but she knew that this was something else, though she couldn’t say what. Like most people in her village, Semenya had never been to a gynecologist before.
In Berlin, Semenya saw a report on television that her test results had been leaked, and that they showed she had three times the amount of testosterone found in average females, possibly because she had been born with undescended testes instead of ovaries. They called her a hermaphrodite—a word she’d never heard. “We live by simple rules,” as her father put it later. “I don’t know what a chromosome is.” The story became an international tabloid sensation.
Semenya’s countrymen were appalled by the idea of a person who thought she was one thing suddenly being told that she was something else: The classification and reclassification of human beings has a haunted history in South Africa. When Semenya returned to Johannesburg, thousands of supporters waited to cheer her at O. R. Tambo International Airport. Nelson Mandela and President Jacob Zuma made a point of meeting her to offer their congratulations. People were outraged that a teenager had been examined and analyzed, like the Hottentot Venus before her, by European men who were fascinated by her exotic, anomalous appearance.
The truth is, I was fascinated, too. It was a story that made you question the meaning of gender: What makes a person female? A vagina? A womb? A chromosome? (What if someone has two out of three?) What, in the end, is a woman?
I convinced my editor to send me to South Africa, though I’d never written a real story in a foreign country before. I had no idea how I would find Semenya, who certainly didn’t have a publicist or a website. I didn’t know how to reach the athletic officials who were scandalizing her country with their mismanagement of the situation, or the politicians who were using it to foment populist rage. In fact, when I boarded the plane in New York, I did not have a single contact in Africa.
That had seemed like a mere detail the night before I left. But somewhere over the Atlantic, it became a crisis. What had I been thinking? I had entertained visions of sitting down in the bleachers at the University of Pretoria, where Semenya was a freshman, and looking up to find her speeding around the track. (Perhaps next I would pursue a story on the surviving Beatles by flying to London and waiting for them at the crosswalk on Abbey Road?) I tried to calm myself: We’ll just figure it out; this isn’t quantum physics. But I found myself unconvincing.
I had finally pushed it too far. I would be punished for my hubris with failure. Africa, so glorious and promising the night before, grew menacing in my mind. I thought of our safe, friendly house on Shelter Island, with its open windows and quilts folded in the linen closet, and I wished that I had never left.
—
BUT SOMEHOW, IF YOU want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach. You start by contacting people who are easy to find, even if they are only tangentially related to your subject. My first call when I got to South Africa was to the student council president at the University of Pretoria. He led me to the head of athletics, a big white man with a bushy mustache and a strong Afrikaans accent, who introduced me to Semenya’s trainer. Her trainer led me to her first coach, a bald black man with rheumy
eyes named Phineas Sako, whom I met on a dirt road in the middle of Limpopo, where he had gathered twenty teenage athletes for running practice.
Over the sound of the wind, I could hear music coming from a brick-front bar down the road, and chickens squawking in front yards, where they were kept in enclosures made out of tree branches. Most of the young runners in the Moletjie Athletics Club had walked at least half an hour from their villages to get to the meeting place. Practice for the sprinters was on a nearby track, where donkeys and goats were grazing on the sprouting spring grass. For cross-country, they trained in the miles of bush that spread out toward the mountains in the distance, but the land was webbed with brambles, and the thorns were a serious problem for the athletes, who ran barefoot. “We can’t stop and say we don’t have running shoes, because we don’t have money, the parents don’t have money,” Sako said. “So what must we do? We just go on.”
Joyce, a tiny girl in a pink sweater who was eighteen but looked about twelve, told me, “I want to be the world champion.” Her voice was so soft it was almost a whisper. “I will be the world champion. Caster is making me proud.”
Sako said that Semenya had always been an extraordinary runner. “I used to tell Caster that she must try her level best,” he said. “By performing the best, maybe good guys with big stomachs full of money will see her and help her with schooling and the likes. That is the motivation. And she always tried her level best.”
But throughout her childhood, her gender had been the subject of suspicion and curiosity wherever she went. “ ‘It looks like a boy’—that’s the right words,” Sako told me. “They used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ ” Semenya became accustomed to visiting the bathroom with a member of a competing team so that they could look at her private parts and then get on with the race. “They are doubting me,” she would explain to her coach, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory again.
After I had interviewed Sako’s runners, I gave him a ride home in my rental car on the dirt road that split the endless dry, golden bush. It became clear he had skepticism of his own—about my womanhood. He did not understand what I was doing in Limpopo. “Where are your children?” he wanted to know. When I told him that I didn’t have any, he shook his head in disbelief.
I tried to say that writing for me was like running for Caster Semenya: the thing I had to do. But Sako was still shaking his head when he got out of the car. “You Americans,” he said. “You know nothing.”
—
I WENT TO CAPE TOWN NEXT. A soft-spoken Ethiopian man named Zerihun picked me up at the airport. On the way to the hotel he told me about his wife, with whom he’d come to Cape Town seven years earlier; she loved the new landscape, the spiky greens and yellows of the fynbos plants. I told him about my article and all the people I had to find and he said that we would do it together—he would drive me everywhere, we would be a team of foreigners.
I stayed at the foot of the Bo-Kaap, the Cape Malay neighborhood where candy-colored houses crawl up the steep slope toward Signal Hill. I felt an uncanny sense of recognition when I got to town, something like the way you feel when you meet a new person whom you instantly know will be important to you. My closest friend, Emma, is the child of two Jewish South African émigrés, and I could hear the familiar cadence of her parents’ speech all around me. Expressions that I’d assumed were particular to her family turned out to be national turns of phrase. “Shame,” the woman behind the front desk at the Cape Heritage Hotel said with compassion when I mentioned I’d accidentally left my sneakers behind in Pretoria, just as Emma or her mom would say, “Shame,” if you stubbed your toe. Sentences often ended with “hey?”—a beguiling appeal for concord, as in “Semenya’s just a kid, hey?” I smiled every time I heard it, thinking of Emma in college: “This party stinks, hey? Let’s go home already.”
Zerihun and I were both nervous that we would get lost driving through Khayelitsha, a massive township on the outskirts of the city, where shacks made of corrugated tin and wooden boards sprawl for miles along mostly unmarked dirt roads, punctuated by beauty parlors and fruit stands in structures no bigger than telephone booths. But we had no trouble finding the solid brick house of an LGBT activist named Funeka Soldaat. She was a boisterous woman with a shaved head who spoke to me for hours with fearless warmth about the gender politics of black South Africa. She was joyful, even though she was on her way to court later that day to listen to the proceedings against several men accused of raping and murdering a lesbian in her neighborhood. “They are raping lesbians to ‘correct’ them,” she said. “In order that they can be a ‘proper woman.’ ” It was something she had experienced herself.
There was no leeway for a woman to deviate from the expectations of her gender, Soldaat said. Her differences would be either eliminated or ignored. Soldaat was responding, in part, to a public statement by a politician named Julius Malema, the head of the African National Congress’s radical, powerful Youth League, who had said he would “never accept the categorization of Caster Semenya as a hermaphrodite, because in South Africa and the entire world of sanity, such does not exist.” Malema had tried to frame the notion as an unwelcome Western import: “Don’t impose your hermaphrodite concepts on us.”
But South Africa has among the highest rates of intersex births in the world, though nobody knows why. Soldaat had a cousin, she said, “just like Caster: She don’t have breasts. She never get a period. Everybody thinks she’s a guy. We call them in Xhosa italisi.” It was a whispered term. “One thing that is so difficult for African people,” Soldaat continued, “there’s no way that you can discuss something that’s happened below the belt.” It pained her to imagine Semenya in Germany, puzzling through the reports on television, alone. “All the time you don’t know what is happening in your body. And there’s nobody that try to explain to you.”
—
BACK IN MY ROOM, with my notepads spread out on the big four-poster bed and the brilliant colors of Cape Town flashing outside the open window, I transcribed my recordings on my laptop. The opportunity in front of me made it difficult to sit still. This story had everything: a faraway place with its own taxonomy and atmosphere, the smell of wood smoke and dope blowing through the township, the hadeda ibises floating prehistorically through the pink sky. And at the center of it was a woman who was too strong, too powerful—too much.
I told everybody I met who knew Semenya that I wanted to interview her and asked them to help me plead my case. But a wall of lawyers had sprung up around her now, deflecting grotty tabloid requests from all over the world. And to Semenya herself, no doubt, reporters were the enemy, the people who had humiliated her in front of the eyes of the world at the very moment of triumph she had been working toward her entire life. I still wanted to be in her presence, however briefly, just to shake her hand and hear her voice. I wished we could have even a momentary encounter.
One morning, when I was back in Pretoria getting ready to interview an administrator at the university, I had the thought, I’m going to meet Caster Semenya today. I laughed at myself an hour later as I sat in the bleachers, killing time before my appointment. I was surrounded by a spread of neatly partitioned fields, as in a Bruegel painting, the land worked by athletes instead of farmers. Runners in little packs cruised past me into the distance. Spring sunlight flicked along the blue surface of the swimming pool.
A figure in a black sweatshirt with the hood up walked along the path about thirty yards in front of me. There was something about this person’s build and movements that drew my attention. I got up and followed along the path, until I caught up to the person behind the cafeteria, talking to a waiter and a cook, both of whom were much shorter than she was. It was Caster Semenya. She didn’t look like a teenage girl, or a teenage boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.
I told her I had come from New York City to write about her, and she asked me why. “Because you’re the champion,” I said.
She sno
rted and said, “You make me laugh.”
I asked her if she would talk to me, not about the tests, but about her evolution as an athlete, her progression from Limpopo to the world stage. She shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t say to anyone how I feel or what’s in my mind.”
I said I thought that must suck.
“No,” she said firmly. Her voice was strong and low. “It sucks when I was running and they were writing those things. That is when it sucks. Now I just have to walk away. That’s all I can do.” She made a very small, bemused smile. “Walk away from all of this, maybe forever.” Then she took a few steps backward, turned around, and did.
I had found the person I’d come looking for. At that moment, I felt for the first time that I could trust myself to attempt whatever I felt compelled to do as a reporter. It was time to go home.
—
BUT AS I PACKED my suitcase at the Cape Heritage, it occurred to me that I should take this chance to see some of Africa’s wildlife. Who knew when—or if—I’d ever be back in this part of the world? I did not, after all, have children. I was free to experience just a little more.
I decided I would spend a weekend in the Kruger National Park. I was eager to see the copper herds of impala, the leopards winding themselves in the trees. I imagined my fellow tourists would be like Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa—daring loners. Instead, they were suburban couples from England and Australia on romantic vacations. At mealtimes, I wrote in my journal or read Disgrace, while the husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, sat at their tables laughing and drinking wine. Every evening, the staff placed rose petals in the shape of a heart on all the beds and I brushed them off into the trash. I was very lonesome in the dark.
