One of the most important ingredients in storytelling is memory, because good storytelling is a lot like cooking a signature dish. You have to remember how to do it the same way again and again and again. If you do, the senses tingle and you smile with pride. It sends a ping to your heart, sometimes a sense of nostalgia and, every so often, a degree of self-worth. By adding some of your own secret spice, you can make any narrative gastronomic. Sometimes, your memory of how to make your signature meal, how to string the story together, fails. When that happens, you take the remains and try to concoct something new and delicious.
The second most important ingredient of storytelling is emotion. Your muscles have to move with what you’re saying. As the storyteller, though, you have to try your best to remain detached because the tale no longer belongs to you once you’ve served it. Word for word, it exits you and enters someone else. The audience must want the story more than you do. The point of telling it, after all, is that you hope they will make more of it. You want it to make them feel something real, something sincere and organic, whether it’s bitterness or beauty, anger or awe, sadness or soulfulness. It can be one of these things or it can be all. And so you must peel yourself away from your own words and feelings, and accept that your meaning is going to turn into someone else’s. When you tell a story, you teach someone something about yourself. More than that, what any good storyteller can hope for is that their story will teach the listener or reader something about themselves.
When you’re confident of both these ingredients, you put your chef’s hat on and show people what you can do. Sometimes, the results are bad. Maybe you ruined the dish. But that’s the risk any storyteller takes. It’s a gamble Basil was willing to take over and over again.
‘I’m writing a book about Russian Jews in South Africa,’ he told me once. ‘I’ve been working on it for the past twenty years. I have a computer: that’s where I write.’ He was wearing his favourite pink Puma T-shirt. It was a youth size so it fitted like a crop top. He paired this with synthetic white clam-diggers and the worn Hi-Tec sandals that he donned on his walks to Camps Bay and back. He invited me to join him for this lengthy stroll one Saturday morning. I politely declined. It was sweet of him, but I didn’t have a pair of trusty hiking sandals, and it was too long a walk for my liking.
By my estimation, Basil was at least seventy-something, which meant he’d started banging away at that old IBM when he was fifty years old or so. All his recollections and research into Cape Town’s history of the Russian Jews were safely tucked away in that dusty computer’s hard drive. No USB port, no backup. The only way to save something externally? A floppy disk. Those thin, black, square plastic diskettes, called floppies because they could literally bend in half, rendering them useless. So I assumed that Basil would never get rid of the dinosaur computer because there was no way, in this day and age, that he would find floppies to save stuff on. But on an elevator ride up with my brother one night, a Sherlock Holmes–looking uncle wearing a coat and a hounds-tooth hat joined us. He supported himself with a walking stick in one hand and in the other he carried a bunch of these archaic record-keeping ‘albums’. He was Basil’s friend and he was on his way to help back up the big book.
I don’t know how much one could write on the history of the Russian-Jewish people in Cape Town. Before Basil, I had no idea it was even a ‘movement’. I’d assumed that it was such a tiny book that a few floppies would suffice and that Basil was exaggerating when he said, over and over again, that he had already penned at least 20 000 pages and he was far from done. Basil was a good storyteller, but I always got the impression that he only spoke the language of illusion. I ate the fantasies he created without a knife or fork so that I could taste them with my own two hands, but a book on the Russian Jews of Cape Town that would turn out to be longer than five volumes of War and Peace? I still don’t think I could ever feast on that. I Googled the topic a couple of years later; Russia does not show up once in the entire Wikipedia entry of the history of Jewish people in South Africa. The Jewish genealogy database doesn’t throw out any information either.
Another one of Basil’s favourite topics was South African politics post 1994. ‘The ANC Youth League have disbanded because Zille and Vavi are scooping all of them up to have more power,’ he once said. ‘You see all that empty coastline?’ He pointed to the horizon from the balcony. ‘They’re going to fill that up with low-cost housing, overpopulate it and take over the country. They want to overthrow the government. Helen Zille and Zwelenzima Vavi are starting a super party. Just watch. I’m not a racist, but you can say goodbye to the Western Cape as you know it now.’
How to engage with something like this? Unclear.
What was clear at this stage, though, was that Basil traded fairy tale as fact and dragged the listener into moments of belief or disbelief so powerful that the facts mattered less than the story itself because he told them so well. He got the storytelling recipe right, again and again and again.
I still know nothing about the great Russian-Jewish exodus to South Africa. I do know I want to tell stories like Basil did. I want to lead the listener and, before I have taken them too far, or lost them forever, I want to leave them with stories of their own. I’ll trade facts instead of fairy tales, but I will definitely add some of my own secret spice.
A resignation letter to performative whites
Dear performative whites
Please accept this as my letter of resignation.
In the last few years I have been flooded with emotions when it comes to you. So much so that I could not focus on them. It has been an abusive relationship. There is a scientific term for it: Stockholm Syndrome.
This is difficult for me to admit. Embarrassing, even, but I have worked hard to find the courage to openly say this to you: I have allowed you to hold me captive for far too long. Your virtue signalling and performative wokeness have led me to try to make myself believe that I have some sort of psychological alliance with you. I have, on several occasions, tricked myself into having affection and trust for you. For far too long, I have struggled to reconcile these misplaced feelings with my true opinions about you. The very opinions I kept silent out of fear of you and a desperate need for you to like me more. I was trying to feel accepted.
We’re not all mean and out to get you. We’re not all that bad. Some of us are here to appreciate and help you. We recognise your efforts and we are grateful. These were words of inspiration I often uttered in my mind, and even out loud. I used them to drive myself further into your minds and your hearts. I used them as weapons to fight my way through the dark motherboard of your whiteness. I used them as a shield to defend your white fragility. I did not realise I was only using them to defend myself.
You see, for a long time I thought that making excuses for your inability to admit to ignorance (because you were so busy being better than the rest of your kind) sometimes made me feel like a better human being. But it did not make me feel like a better person at all. It only made you feel that I was a better person. That I was better than all the other people of colour. Passive. Nothing to be scared of here. And this is disturbing. This is exactly the same behaviour that open racists ask of people like me.
Well, I have had enough.
Perhaps my ‘loyalty’ towards your cause, my support for your willingness to lead the marches and write the op-eds, my eagerness to share your Facebook status updates, has made me feel lucky. Lucky, because I tricked myself into believing that you were charming little snowflakes in a sky tormented by dark clouds raining vitriol. But really, what you were doing was colonising the struggle. Our struggle.
You set up your tents of privilege on ground we fought hard to stand on. And we are only beginning. But your inability to recognise the wrongness of your actions leaves little room for us to develop. And so we have started to bravely approach the frontlines with our words, our thoughts. We will fight you for our space because we can.
Previously, I would h
ave educated you with carefully chosen words because I did not want to be the painful cause of your white tears. But I am hydrated now. Your white tears have ‘nourished’ me. I cannot drink from your fountain of self-induced sympathy any longer. I do not feel sorry for you. Going to protests and painting underprivileged schools in underprivileged areas does not remove your whiteness. And it does not remove our pain. You will not colonise our pain. You have no right to it. It is not yours, nor is this fight.
I cannot express in words how much your monopoly over the media makes me burn with agony. Your righteousness makes headlines, your wokeness occupies way too much space in newspapers and websites, and your virtue signalling at the forefront of any one of our fights makes me want to go blind so that I do not have to see you. What hurts the most is your inability to recognise how all of this is effectively working against any good intentions you might have. You often cannot admit to and face the role that your white privilege plays in all of this.
It sounds as though I am a silent observer harbouring an inherent anger towards white skin, regardless of the person who occupies it. That my words are the result of a gene that exists purely to hate you. That is not the case. I am the product of much personal experience with your kind. The good whites (those so tainted by their own moral superiority complex that they are unable to see the error of their ways) and the bad (those who openly wear their hatred on their sleeves).
My preference, for the record, is for the latter. Give me an open racist any day. At least they wear their ignorance with conviction. They do not demand an education and they are not exhausting to me. They are, in some ways, okay with their powerlessness. And their openness about their beliefs, however ill, makes me feel driven and empowered. They cannot take anything from me, and they do not try. If they do, I do not have to bother treating them with the same tender care woke whites demand. You drive me a bit mad. I have felt insane for long enough.
I do not appreciate your whitesplaining. I do not appreciate your armchair liberalism. I will no longer stand for the fact that you will speak on behalf of me, and take such great measures to separate yourself from your own kind because you think you are better. I no longer have time for that. I am entitled to my opinion. Listen, or walk away.
Your virtue signalling extends beyond the privilege of having a voice that shouts louder. You are parading your convictions. You think they separate you from your own communities and you try desperately to do so. However, your need to appear virtuous only distracts you, and you alone, from the fact that you are merely letting people know how good you are. You are asking us to believe in your goodness. Doing so makes you feel like a better person too.
We see through it. I have personally learnt to clear my mind of ‘appreciation’ for you. Your virtue signalling is a humblebrag. It is a way to camouflage your vanity and self-aggrandisement. You make statements and act out in ‘charitable’ ways to garner approval. You reach for this approval through Twitter and Instagram. Your photos with black children, your visits to the outskirts of town, are all for vanity, and this vanity is worse than any other kind because you drape it in selfless conviction. Is it selfless if it serves you so much? What’s more, you are less concerned with how much it serves you in the eyes of people of colour. Yes, you want to ‘stand out’ with us, but really, your virtue signalling is designed to present yourself as ‘woke’ among other white people. It’s ammo. It is a shallow, lazy way to rebut arguments and prove that you are better than the rest without actually educating yourself on how not to act like an authority on the issues of race relations and inequality. You are not cool. This is not cool. It is not clever either.
I know you are not perfect. I’m not resigning because of your imperfections. I am not perfect either. And before you ask me to qualify these things for you again, let me do it one last time: yes, you are or can be a good person. I know that you did not ask to be born white and I get that you try to not be racist and make efforts to avoid contributing to racist agendas. But understand that you still belong to an institution of privilege. An institution built on discrimination and racism. An institution that still benefits you in all the ways I mentioned above, and more.
How many times have you been followed around in a store? How many times have customers in an upmarket grocery store looked you up and down because they think you should be shopping somewhere else? How many times have you been asked to leave a place because of a white person who should have been asked to leave instead? How many times has a white person in a store come up to you and mistaken you for an employee? In an airport lounge recently, my friend Sarah was asked by an old white woman to ‘bring more cups’. This has never happened to any of my white friends.
How many times have you been called a terrorist? How many times has some failure of yours been cause to judge your entire race? How many times have you felt insecure in a public space because your skin was too dark? How many times have you been denied access to something? Anything? How many times has an estate agent questioned your income when you went to rent or purchase an apartment even though you came with receipts? Or just not got back to you? Zero.
Just because you consider yourself a woke white does not make you immune to the advantages society offers you. Admitting this is painful for you because you think you’re so different. But I do not care about that pain any longer. It is time to admit to it and educate yourself on it. Instead of virtue signalling, start getting real.
Start getting real about the fact that you have a lot to learn when it comes to noticing and acknowledging the privilege you have. I have had these conversations with you one too many times. You do not rise above your privilege because you consider yourself better. If you were better, my calling you out would not offend you. And I would not feel the need to tread carefully around you because you are sensitive and fragile. Think about it. I should not have to walk on eggshells around you and your efforts.
In conversation, I have so often been confronted by woke whites who are quick to use their privilege when it suits them simply because the option is available. When confronted with topics of race and discrimination and the inevitable role they play in all of it, regardless of whether they are openly racist or not, they often resort to victim-blaming. It goes something like this:
‘How do you expect us to help if you won’t change?’
‘How do you expect me to learn if you won’t respect my sensitive nature and pain?’
And then, of course, there is the stock response of ‘not all white people’. This is, in itself, a statement of power. You are part of the problem that perpetuates oppression when you say this. It is a way of walking away from accountability. Your privilege has been called out and it hurts you so you exert your superiority to escape the conversation. You feel entitled to do that. To not talk about it when you don’t want to. And you can pick your battles, usually according to one key factor: Will the battle make you feel like a better person? Will it serve your sense of self and inspire an Oscar-worthy performance of wokeness? Answer yes, and there you are. Present. Practising. Performing.
I once thanked you for your participation. And participated along with you. I once accepted the role of trainer, helper and scriptwriter even. But your personal and selective disengagement from your own privilege only says one thing to me: my ongoing struggle does not matter to you. So now you must coach yourselves.
Dear performative whites, I cannot separate my thoughts from how the world operates. I cannot leave the direct and negative implications of that world behind. I do not have the luxury or the privilege of extricating myself from it. I cannot afford that. I have no virtue to signal to you any more. I can no longer afford your voice and actions and humblebrags at the cost of my own silence. I will no longer pay for your journey with my pain.
I quit. With immediate effect.
Wishing you well on this journey you must take alone.
Sincerely,
HAJI MOHAMED DAWJEE
Depression: A journal
I hate being apart from my parents, yet I feel separated from them all the time. I feel invisible. When they go, I am afraid that they will not come back. I have learnt to watch the moon for safety. It anchors me and lets me know I am real and I exist. It gives me company and helps me believe they will return for me. I don’t mind feeling unseen in their presence, as long as I know they are there.
I am six years old and the anxiety of separation has not left me. I try to test myself and be brave. I hope that doing things like going for sleepovers at my cousin’s place will help me understand that separation is only temporary. I convince myself I can have a good time before things return to my normal. It never works. I have spent so many nights weeping. Keeping aunts awake. My insides unstable with fear like a ship caught in a storm with no end in sight. I feel like I will die and I wait for the day. The nights always feel long and lonely and endless. I do not know the smells. I do not know the sounds. They are strangers to me and they make me feel stranger.
Age 8
My sister joins me on sleepovers now. It’s nice. I get to take something I know with me. I enjoy the safety net she provides without even knowing that she does. She is younger than me so I pretend to be her guardian when actually she is mine.
My cousin, sister and I have endless roles to play in our world of adventure. We get lost in fiction. As time goes by and bedtime nears, the same weight of worry seeps into me. Things are about to change and I am about to feel terrible. It becomes harder to get lost in child’s play. I take a step back and as I exhale to compose myself I observe the confidence of my sibling. She is unperturbed. Unbothered. Consumed by fun. I try to take a page out of her book, but the fact that I am pretending is too real to me.
Sorry, Not Sorry Page 7
