The words of the prophets

It might not be taxi poetry, but stuck and scribbled to taxi walls are smatterings of advice,  admonishments, requests and cliches. Some are banal appeals: "I like your lovely perm... But not on my windows", and some are a little more sagely: "Don't rush me, it's better to be late at work than early in hospital". Some have got me musing.

Written on the taxi door: "Keep the door open: ventilation stops the spread of TB." It's a sticker with the USAID logo. I can almost smell their good intentions. I know they didn't put it there, there next to the door handle. But it's just so damn metaphoric isn't it?

"Everyone is a foreigner somewhere..." Post 2008 maybe? Post the xenophobic hunting of foreigners? Some days, squeezed in between bodies and baggage, I hear conversations in French, Xhosa, Afrikaans, even the Dutch or German of blonde-haired tourists. Not some days as in never days, some days as in most days. One hundred percent guaranteed, unless you're a lonely commuter, you'll never be on a lonely-lingual taxi.

"Respect a fool to avoid noise." I've heard a version of this one before. My mom always tells me, as I gear up to start sniping with whichever fool has me red-faced and on the edge of violence: "never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."

The two that really got me into some potentially existential territory were stuck on opposite sides of the same taxi:

"A black man is always a suspect" / "Thank God I'm a black man"

Thank God I'm a suspect? No, I know, it's not an exercise in logic. And that isn't what spurned my entry in the world of what if's. See, I started to wonder then, when I read those twin signs, what it means to be a black man. I wonder how it feels. A different skin, a different body. But it's not just an internal state of being, is it? It's how the rest of the world engages with your skin, with your body. I remember a couple of years back reading the French phenomenologists and getting lost in their complicated ideas and I don't want to mozey into that terrain here, but it's something to think about: what if I were a black man, how would I be different?

The mental gymnastics get a bit much--particularly because I can't lean my unpermed 'fro on the taxi windows to rest my busily heavy head--so I zone out to the conversation on MetroFM and watch out the window as the buildings move by.