Hands in my pocket

I walk past the car dealership on the corner of Cranko Road on my commute home. The security guard always greets me. I smile. Then past Obs Gateway with its layers of empty of shopfronts, and then the pub on the corner where the chef smokes at the table next to the fence and waves or nods at me as I go by. Sometimes I pick up a discarded wrapper from the KFC or MacDonalds as I get to my driveway. And then, as I stand at my gate and look at the sometimes misty side of Devil's Peak, I take out the post. Yesterday afternoon there were two postcards--one for my boet, one for a friend c/o me--there was the weekly Shoprite brochure, there was a copy of a liquor license application and an invitation to a residents' meeting on Wednesday, and there was a small note.

A small white piece of paper with careful black stencilled lettering.
"White girls go out with black- black men." I read. "A lot of girls- degusting."
I stood in my kitchen and read the capitalized note again. "DEGUSTING."
Why did it catch my breath? This shitty little note written by an illiterate racist and left in my postbox anonymously? Why did it hurt me?

I sat at dinner a little while later and over my vegetarian risotto I chatted with a colleague who works at a think-tank in Germany. He's worked for years, for decades, in Africa, advising the European Union and the German government particularly on aid and investment. Smart man. We were talking about Rwanda, about intervention, about how to prioritize investment in a climate of instability and dysfunction. It's the age-old debate really: do you invest in an upside-country country that really needs investment but cannot do that much with it, or do you invest in a marginally more functional country where the need is perhaps not as great but there is more capacity to do something with that investment?

"It is an interesting question," he starts to explain, and I'm paraphrasing this next bit, "but even in the most dysfunctional places, there are pockets of effectiveness."
"Pockets of effectiveness?" I ask.
"Yes, take Rwanda for instance. The Minister of Health is studying towards her PhD, she is very keen on research, on innovation." He continues to explain the possibilities and potential of the Rwandan Ministry of Health.
"So you fund programmes in health?"
"Yes," he answers, "public health. The investment can grow there."

Pockets of effectiveness.

That note hurt me because as a South African, this is the kind of vitriol that almost robbed us all of our humanity. It's the kind of mistrust and hate that we have fought and continue to fight to marginalize. It's why we've built a constitutional fortress to protect us. As a citizen, it offends me. But you cannot always abstract the evil of the world. Sometimes it hurts because that evil is directed to you, to you and your life choices. To me and my life choices. To me, as a white girl, and to the black men that I've gone out with, that I've cared about, that I've introduced to my parents. Degusting.

Look, I know it's nothing close to what some homosexual or mixed-race couples go through daily, and I know it's just some fool who has no meaning in my life. But hurt is not always rational, or proportional. It just is. And it is here, in my shock and surprise that I realize I live not in dysfunction but in a pocket of effectiveness. This is the first time, the first time ever, that someone has articulated disgust at my white girl self dating a black man. No family, no friends, no colleagues, no acquaintances, no strangers on the street have ever felt it necessary to turn to me and say: "You are disgusting." No one. Never.

I can't quite shrug it off, not entirely, but I can see it for what it is: the dysfunctional raving of a loon who doesn't like that reality isn't quite what they think it should be. A loon who, like a paperclip or piece of gum, will first get lost in the pocket of possibility that is the world, and then will fall through the little hole squidged there at the bottom of the pocket into an abyss of absence and alienation.

I walk past the car dealership on the corner of Cranko Road on my commute to work. I walk past in my skinny jeans and sneakers--hands stuck deep in my pockets as is my way--I walk past with my stripey socks and short hair that sticks up at the front, back and sides. And I, I will go out with whomever I want.