The Salvation Army

Arts Entertainments

Port Elizabeth, compared to Johannesburg, was a strange and unattractive place.

The memory of the beauty of growing up in a city by the sea, the sun, the beach, the surf, where you can smell and almost taste the sea salt in the air. In Port Elizabeth the blue sky remains like a blue light that travels like a bird, cleanses like a ritual purification or a summer shower, disappears like Hollywood idols and spies. He is a friendly legend and is as relaxing as a glass of warm milk. In Johannesburg the air was like a sea mist that enveloped your body and soothed you in its fiercest heat and struck you cruelly with a disease in midwinter. In the early hours of the evening, as I walked home from the minibus taxi on the corner of Simmonds Street and Bree and I walked to the Salvation Army, these were the happiest times I experienced. He was free, alone, self-sufficient and independent. For ten minutes I didn’t have to answer anyone.

As a child I felt free and overprotected. As an adult he lacked common sense but was serious and intelligent. There were times when he seemed positively small and insignificant. The beginning of my career (working in a television company) was an invasion, the end of it was a cure for all my incurable madness and the deep feelings I felt of being deeply unfriendly and fearful and made me recognize what the empty. my life was – that I should talk to my mother more often. My confidence was misconstrued as arrogance. I had become the mean girl I hated in high school.

The oppressive and unbearable summer heat in Johannesburg made me sick. In winter, this was replaced by a numbing cold that ran through my entire body. It was immovable.

In both cities, cultures are terrified, people speak in tongues: there are eleven official languages; everything is blue or black, as serious as a heart attack where the sky often transcends this experience, this black supernaturality. The world exists upside down. Here women and children of color are not simply lost or a shell of a human being, tormented and abused by men, living in poverty without adequate sanitation, clean water or education (the many advantages that the countries of the first world), they are gone. His eyes are dead. They survive by any means necessary. They stay in a shelter for a short time, but since it is temporary, they leave and often return to their homes where there is domestic violence.

Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg are cities of sacrifice and survival. In both cities, the girls are radical and sublime, heavenly creatures who seem to age before their time. In Johannesburg they consume too much alcohol, drugs, loud parties, lines of cocaine, smoke marijuana while girls in Port Elizabeth get puppy fat, eat pudding, eat more portions, snack more between meals, have babies and unhappy marriages. Smart girls most of the time don’t make the smart decisions. They have a title, but then they take on a false life, a false identity: they make the ultimate sacrifice in time by shedding themselves, their intellect and their chutzpah in miniscule doses, and with it any sense of accomplishment.

In Johannesburg, the hard and successful faces masked the fragile hearts of the pale outsiders, the persecuted ‘old souls’ and the haunted. They were a minority in terms of thought; Shouts of unwavering triumph ignited their minds trapped in the seedy nightlife of Johannesburg and their lifestyles were seedy. Everything that was inherently beautiful and decent within them died and became utterly corrupt. They are only the dead whose neuroses are safely disguised without investigation and who are not disturbed by conscious and saved ghosts present and past.

The streets of the city are seductively mapped by color. Street vendors ply their trade outside of popular retail stores. The malls are clean; their surfaces are sanitary, shiny and new. The windows are brilliant and beautifully reveal the cool elegance of the store’s alien glowing interior.

Sometimes there are street children who sleep on the street. They are sullen, asleep, dreaming and calm: the fear is gone. At night, despite hunger, fire, episodes of spite, the deranged, the mentally ill or the emotionally unstable, they stay on the street because they have nowhere to go. When I feel that midnight has lasted all day, I think that they are even worse off than me. As I walk past them at night to get to the Salvation Army where I am staying, I realize how painful it is to see the vulnerability of a human being. I’m glad they can’t see mine.

It is addictive to believe that someone is in love with you because of who you are even though inside you know that it is a big lie. Without invitation, he kisses my face. He is cool, dangerous. He says I look beautiful but I don’t believe him. I know he only says that because he wants to sleep with me. Natasha, my friend says that he only wants to sleep with me because I’m a virgin. I am inclined to believe it. I am very inexperienced, shy, insecure and depressed. I think he looks like an angel with his blonde hair and brown eyes. This is just a phase I tell myself and I will get over it eventually.

A very famous jazz musician and composer shot his wife and then killed himself in the building where I worked. I was editing some of my work and fell asleep. The hunted are always as serious as the urge to flee from committing suicide. Did you feel that you had no face in this cold and unknown world? Was she dreamily sick of his rage? Could he have saved Moses Molelekwa?

The color of my skin distracts me: am I white, am I black? I’m colored It seems like all my dreams are incomplete just because of this very foundation.

How does a mother forget her own child’s birthday? How does a mother forget her own child? I’m the pale stranger with the fragile heart and the butterflies in my stomach when she gets nervous. Am I not fun enough, happy enough, satisfied enough, is it my fun clothes or my hairstyle that needs to be reassessed? Is it because maybe I’ve become a younger, more efficient version of her, updated and underestimated?

I wait all night for the phone to ring. For her to wish me ‘Happy Birthday’ but this is a completely heartless exercise and once again my world is intact but changed: I will never grow up. My mother, a mermaid, will always outshine me.

I don’t feel like drinking. I don’t feel like dancing. So I sit at the bar. People buy me drinks and sometimes I get up to dance because people come up to me and ask me too or talk to me, I think because I’m sitting alone. But I’m going crazy because I feel so tired and sad and I wonder why everyone is so nice to me. All I want to do is go to sleep and get a well-deserved rest. He just didn’t want to be alone tonight. But you’re worse when you’re alone in a crowd of people having fun because it’s the weekend. They want to party and forget the stress they experienced that week. Nothing erases and fades the rough edges of your world and makes it disappear.

Africa, Africa, Africa let me fall to where you are.

There are wild roads in Africa. Overhead, the clouds move in mysterious ways. Here there is no electricity on the ceiling to light the gifted children doing their homework. The power of my dreams feeds on hunger. It is no different from your motivation. The animals lick their young but deprived of that substitute; from touch, we die.

This is the end of the world: wild, dangerous, harmful and self-destructive. In its pure state of being Africa is wilder than the wind; she sighs in african fields of dreams and as in the survival of the prettiest there is pain behind her smile. For a woman, a girl, a daughter with no education, can’t love be the only escape we’ve ever known?

Africa kills me, nourishes me, you make me forgetful, capable of more beauties, you are like a mushroom explosion that inspires disorder, you are not invited, you destroy me, your red flowers bloom, you are a vampire, you stir shadows like a Black Forest in the night, nightmare of the devil, Africa is as intelligent as the occupation of the sun and beyond the reach of oblivion.

Africa you saved a terrified and insecure child. I am the phoenix that finally rose from the ashes and found the way out.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *