It is 10 days since your birthday 18th July 2014 ...the first we cannot celebrate with you alive...here. I find myself revisiting a journaling around the time of your crossing. Perhaps not too belated a gift after all. 26 June 2013 Tata Madiba Three weeks now that you are in hospital in Pretoria for this recurring lung infection. Several hospital visits then last week after all the shrouding of family visits and no political comments…a statement closer to the truth at present is released. “A critical state of health”, your family and clan leaders gather at your Qunu homestead, discussions in private and gravity thick in the air. I guess this expected time draws near and tosses up all our own projections and fears. Having been asked to prepare a piece of honouring for you, I pay daily attention to the news broadcasts, the social media feeling on the net, the tread in everyday peoples’ conversations and the fragments of story – your chapters old and new- surfacing here and there. Seventeen years ago in 1996, during that euphoric era of your release and our complex entry into a “new” South African territory, I wrote, “Madiba plants his vision, his voice in the vacuum”. Most poets I know have a poem for you in print, over the years or held in their hearts. Even though we have seen less of you in the public realm, each time we did – was the tolling of a bell. How much time had surreptitiously passed and showed its marks on your skin, the growing spaciousness in your eyes, where once burned brilliant flames and piercing beams of light. Your eyes seemed to be emptying, so that even when you were helped to walk, sit, enter, exit vehicles, rooms, platforms – you seemed a bit bewildered. A memory flickering across our screens, perhaps across your mind – of how it had been to stand and stride on your own. The walk of a confident freedom, of a beloved welcomed home all over the world. Now I listen to these showers of words via speakers, on pages and screens – a cacophony of clichés and appropriate things to say, a few significant warnings of how we cannot forget what the gift of your life and legacy have meant and still call us to do – no matter how much longer these Earth days are given to you. I listen for something between the words, amidst the din – a strain of a song my heart in its honesty would want to lift up and sing. I wait in the spaces of typically busy days for the moments when a window in me opens so I will find a way to say what needs to be said at that time, on that day. I feel that vacuum in relation to you again, but with such converse meaning twenty one years later. Now it is about the vacuum you are leaving, the one opening up as your absence increases the emptiness that no other vision or voice can fill – the language of compassion that you spoke with such grace and ease. 29th June 2013 Tides of your image, story, current state of health, aliveness, keep flooding in Tata. Today amidst laughter-punctuated anecdotes between friends about the precious times of meeting you, the lives you have touched and shared. We are part of a fluctuating audience entering the “Reversing the Legacy of the Native Land Act of 1913” exhibition at the Cape Town Convention Centre, before it goes on national tour. At the final stages of the multi-media experiential exhibition journey we have to weave through, symbolizing highlights on our journey to liberation and all the land –related legislation impacting on the lives of our people…suddenly there are giant, radiant projections of you on screen and in large print. People of all generations, some local, others evidently tourists stop to take pictures of you, in a way - with you, their Tata. Even outside the main exhibition hall, the usually cold glass, white tile and steel corporate foyer now greets all who enter the revolving doors, with a massive full-colour photograph of you and an altar of tiny candles inviting us to individually light one in your name. Two beautifully designed bouquets of indigenous flowers stand on either side of this breathtaking portrait. As I drive home exiting the highway at the famous Groote Schuur hospital, where the bend in the road flanks a burial ground where 10 years ago I buried my tiny stillborn daughter, I come to a gradual stop at the traffic light at the bottom of the hill. I see the lights, hear the hum of the engine but I am suspended in time. Seemingly out of nowhere an elderly man dressed in tatty clothes and wearing a kufee gives me the open palms signal for a donation. As I lower the window to hand him some coins he smiles in gratitude then says, “Ma’am what do you say about this thing about Mandela dying or maybe even dead already? Who knows?” We share a few words about Madiba and then he as the lights change he says, “ I hope he lives a little longer, ” while I assert the other now widespread response: “We must release him in peace”. There are many of us now who have resigned ourselves to what is imminent. We send comfort to your family and through their letting go, as we all try to do more and more now, allow the sinking in of your words, your wisdom. We are beginning to appreciate more deeply, accept the profound gift of having lived at the same time as you.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 20:50:05 +0000
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