Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: kindness

  • Make Africa Great Again

    We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers in brands no one drinks in Europe. We sit there for hours eating chicken and fish with our fingers. Last week a white girl got up and went over to the bar, carrying her phone. She persuaded the barkeep, who is a rapper, to link up her tunes to his speaker. Within seconds this wholly fresh and salty sound bathed the scene, and at their work and in their seats everyone was dancing.

    Tonight a man sitting against the wall behind us had on a MAGA hat. A black man. I looked closer. MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN. I got up and went over. Close up his red baseball cap read MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN.

    I crouched beside his table to say hi as I do occasionally when a table of visitors have stiffed the boy dancers. “We can’t afford to give money every day,” they say, reasonably, demonstrating they can afford to eat out every day and I spread my hands, “I know, me too,” and persuade them that it’s ok not to give, it’s not ok to turn your stiffened faces away and keep eating while someone is standing there, sweating with performance, holding out an upturned cap. He is standing there. Treat him like a human. You are not greater nor less. Make whiteness great again.

    Since so much of our cruelty comes from diffidence, I offer scripts. “I say, I’m so sorry, I cannot help you this time.”

    “But then they don’t go away!”

    “Just be direct. It’s courteous. ‘I’ve said no three times, you have to leave now. Bye.’” I tell them the dancer who stuffed fire down his pants but was yet to bloom in puberty “came to our table after you, and he just looked so wounded.”

    Poverty is all around us like jackrabbits in the grass. Poverty, hard work, resourcefulness and struggle. We are like big birds of prayer gliding like clouds across the sun, idle on the air and wondering which one next we will swoop on to assist or exploit. Building our bullshit churches, insulting sufferers with thoughts & prayers in place of action, rendering free men into slaves, free woman into sex slaves. Calling the children they raise from rape ‘half caste’, as though only that portion of their humanity fell into any class we recognised.

    Next morning four boys came to the low wall around our house which keeps the goats out. Their upturned faces were lower than the wall and I had to go and peer over, to hear. “Please, we want you go buy us four bicycles.”

    Oho! I said. Well I would love to buy you four bicycles. I wish I could. I explained that I would love to have a bicycle, myself. But of course, I meant a second bicycle, here in my second home at which I arrive by jet plane.

    The spokesboy suggested, “Or maybe a ball.”

    My heart flooded with regret and shame, yearning and heat. Why shouldn’t these smiling, reasonable, kindly, and well spoken courteous boys have a ball? A ball to play with. A boy standing behind him said, “Bicycles!” and got cuffed for spoiling the deal. I asked, “Ee gon be how much?”

    They reasoned. “Well, ee cost 25 cedis.” Five dollars. The spokesboy explained, you can get them for 18 cedis, but… “They get spoilt?” I suggested, using a word that in the wealth world we use to describe unhappy children but which here means, I had a phone once, second hand from the markets, and now it doesn’t work.

    I tried to respond to this adventurous, eminently reasonable, and brave request the best way. I didn’t want them to feel that if this ball got spoilt they could just come ask the white lady for another, that a ball was nothing to me. I didn’t want them to feel I gave something which was nothing, it seemed insulting. I explained I had little money right now. All Africans know little money. It’s the most usual form of money. “But I will try. I’m going to try to find some money for you so we can buy a ball. I can’t promise you,” I said. “But I will do my best. Do you get me?”

    Of course I’m going to buy them a ball. I just want them to have a week of looking forward to it. I see school children carrying their homework under the awning of a shop which has a light. I see people eating yam for breakfast, just boiled yam. If you have a sauce on your rice, the sauce is a couple of spoonfuls of garnish; in Europe garnish is the main dish. The man in the MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN cap made me at home at his table and we spoke for some few minutes. Neither of us mentioned Trump. We exchanged our numbers, as Europe and Africa should do. We are so few and have so much. They are many, and have little. We, they. We spoke about the music. The rapper who brings beers played his own song again. Coming back to our table I was dancing, a little. In Ghana I always want to give everyone everything and as I build my tiny business I am finding out a way we might be able to do that, one transaction at a time. It’s not giving everything: it’s not giving at all. It’s giving up what we can afford of what we stole. It’s giving part of everything back.

  • story about an artist

    In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor.

    “This the art gallery?”

    Yes, I said. His hands were trembling and his fingers seamed with dirt.

    He had come down from the country on the bus: twelve hours. He set a bag down on the counter and began to open it very slowly. He said, “Got a painting for youse.”

    He unrolled a canvas and showed it to me. The painting seemed to me pretty awful but his courage and his straightforward, honest presumption moved me to tears. He’s a Queenslander, this is his art, this is the Queensland Art Gallery – why shouldn’t he bring it in here and offer to hang it? It made sense.

    I was too gauche to know how to deal with him and his imminent and crushing disappointment. I thought he might never have shown his work to anyone before. He had come all the way down here to make a fool out of himself – a noble, exemplary fool – and in doing so, he exposed the far greater foolishness of our urbanity, our conformity, our stupid ladders and pretentious mores. I saw all of this in an instant and it filled my sore heart with heat. I picked up the phone and called a kindly woman who worked in acquisitions, who had sometimes chatted with me in the lifts. I asked her to come down and see him. I hope she may have taken him out for coffee and talked with him about his work. I hope she encouraged him to paint more. I have often thought about this man and his simple human courage, his artist’s heart. He might be dead now and it’s possible his paintings may all have been thrown away.

  • parcel in cloth

    One thing I love in Ghana is people seem so good and kind. Not all of them, I guess, but daily life seems to me founded in a beautiful mutual respect and helpfulness. I watched the ‘mate’ in a grinding and crowded trotro (a tiny bus) jump down and help the man who was slowly climbing out, he lifted the man’s parcel wrapped in stained cloth – perhaps his stall – from the front passenger seat and set it down on the pavement. Then the two of them lifted it without a word, one side each, and settled it on the man’s head so he could carry it home.

    I saw a little boy tapping my Ghanaian boyfriend on the hip, offering a coin. “Boss – you dropped this.”

    Sometimes I think about Australian cities where these days people barely say hello. I think about New York, where I first visited in 2011 and New Yorkers were always saying to me, “You Australians are so friendly. In New York we hate each other.” Then I wonder how much of my experience of being in Ghana is filtered through the privilege of being a relatively well-off visitor, a white woman, someone from whom everybody can potentially benefit.

  • happy birthday from afar

    Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat in the rare sun last week, where the cups had not been cleared and someone else had opened presents and left the wrapping and these lettered candles behind. The two letters fit in the bright orange persimmon I had halved and set on a blue plate. I lit the candles and sang her happy birthday. Then she blew and I blew the candles out. I opened the tiny bottle of champagne I have saved in my fridge ever since summer. That special occasion had arrived. Mum had to rush off to meet her two sons and I have not yet told her about the deep massage I plan to enact by long-distance, now she’s had two hips and both knees replaced and requires some tender and gentle loving care. Imagine to be 80 and to have outlived your husband. That’s something hard and good, I think.

  • kink shaming

    On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.

    As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.

    I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?

    It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.

     

  • postcard torrent

    A few years ago I was living in Berlin and it felt indefinite. I had not made plans to stay and felt unable to leave. I felt homesick and unsure and one day I asked on facebook if anybody felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself.

    Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans are constituted of love.

  • her wild laugh, like birds

    My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh.

    It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its attention. People began to smile at each other over her head. A drunk guy tottered up to her, plump like a teddy bear, his arms comically held out, a skewed fishermen. The one that got away was this big.

    “Can I have a hug?” he asked the laughing girl, somberly. She couldn’t speak for squeaking but held up one hand for a high five. “Hug,” he said, nodding, insisting, reasonable. Drunk. So she opened up her arms and hugged him over the table. All the while her maniacal laugh was rising over his shoulder like a series of photos of the moon. Her male friend said, “She’s allergic to you.” Her female friend giggled. The drunk guy straightened and slowly smiled and only even slower realised, a bit hurt, a bit taken aback, “Really?”

    “Nah,” said the girl’s friend. “That’s really her laugh.” The girl’s shoulder’s shook and her honking squeals kept coming. By now everyone was laughing: the cute girl wiping the bar counter, the drunk guy’s drunk friends, my companion and I holding our sides, leaking tears. The hugged, drunken guy turned a sloppy somersault on his way back to his mates: an unforeseeable magical item.

    There was quite a lot of moon left in the high sky on the walk home but now these cold clouds have dulled it over. The exhaustion that comes from laughing too much is not like any other form of tiredness that I know of.

  • pedalling home

    Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. I had jammed on my brakes.

    He actually flung his legs up in the fall and took a few tips to settle, like a rocking horse set rocking. “Alles okay?” I leaned my bike and ran over. He was getting up painfully slowly and had that embarrassed expression that usually indicates want of serious injury. “Die Kante…” he explained as I reached him, the curbside had a camber…

    Falls, as we know, can be deadly in the elderly and I remember that Leonard Cohen had a serious fall, as so many older people do, in the days before his death. I remember locking myself in a wardrobe to cover my face and howl, when I heard that he had died, two weeks after Dad’s funeral. Our St Leonard of Koans.

    Shakily restored to his own feet, the man immediately turned to pick up his empty bottle and popped it in the open mouth of the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled with neatly sorted bottles, possibly heading for this same recycle station. They started to bounce and break all over the cobblestones. Before I could react a dozen people had swooped in to help, propping their own bikes and stooping like long-legged birds.

    I asked the elderly man, “Sind Sie verletzt?” Are you hurt? He passed a hand uncertainly over the crown of his head, showing me where there might be an injury, and in response to this mute plea for mothering I passed my own hand very softly over the tender scalp, as downy as a baby’s but for the sparse, short, grey, bristling old hairs. “How are you getting home?” I asked him, “you’re not driving, are you?” We stood there assuring each other. I told him the skin on his head was not broken. He told me he would be sure to be careful getting home. “Just be tender with yourself,” I told him, as I should rather more often tell myself.

    Nearer home I chatted on the phone for a long while with my dear friend, on a park bench under a stand of trees which were shedding their golden leaves as I watched. The light was just so. I found a stinking dog shit smear on the back of my hand, and made a face and started wiping it off on the grass, still talking. On the far side of the square a street dweller pulled from his breast pocket a little packet of paper handkerchiefs and drew out a fresh one and offered it to me. He bowed. I crossed over there and took it, still talking, thanking him.

    During the phone call I watched two dog owners whose dogs – one large, one small – had woven an enthusiastic wreath running counter-clockwise, passing the leashes over one another’s hands. They kept trying to untangle the beasts but the dogs running clockwise sniffing one another’s butts had passed into a blur. I saw a toddler pitched forward and running on the balls of his feet as he approached the road. There were no cars coming and his mother looked on unworried from a few paces behind but nonetheless a young girl stepping onto the pavement with her friend stopped her body in front of him, forming a kindly barrier. She stood mashing her feet and chatting to him, distracting him and making it a game, then stepped aside without a word when his mother had caught up with him and he was safe.

    This communal parenting moves me to tears. I told my friend and we both laughed with joy. I described to him the two dogs blurring themselves into a wreath on the cobbles, their owners doe-sie-doeing from above. It was dark when I put my phone back in my bag and walked uphill past the man who was still standing by his bench, with his beer, gazing up into the trees. He had on a leather hat with a feather to its brim and standing by him was a trussed wheelbarrow loaded with his things. I had gathered all my groceries in two hands and clutched them to my chest to stop them falling. “Thanks again,” I said, “for the handkerchief,” and the man said, ascending to the familiar or affectionate you, “You’re very welcome,” and I said, matching his informality, “That was love of you,” das war lieb von dir, and he bowed and pressed his hand upon his heart, and I pressed my crowded with bottles hand over my heart which was cluttered with a jar of honey, a bottle of biodegradable cleaning spray and a heavy bottle of milk; the other, free hand was splayed to keep hold of a second jar and a second bottle and I pressed the glass into my heart and we smiled at each other, at the end of an autumn day so beautiful it would make you want to resurrect belief of some kind in some kind of deity.

  • this German sweetness and its love

    The best thing about living in Berlin so long and getting better with my German again is I can really enjoy people. Quite often, Berliners are just sweethearts. Today I phoned the handmade brush and broom shop that stands not so far away, in a leafy street I covet and run by the man whose grandfather must have founded it. His name is the same. I said, I would like to buy one of your dustpans, and he said, Ach I just live upstairs! Come over and ring my doorbell and I will come down.

    I jumped on my bike, feeling a bit overexcited. Imagine buying a handmade dustpan which is prettily polished from steel. Imagine buying it from the fellow who made it.

    His shopfront is more of a billboard for his principles. He has filled it with neatly hand-lettered exhortations reminding us we are all Mitmenschen, fellow humans, and when I first passed the shop he had a giant orange inflatable louse suspended and slowly twirling in the front window, with the label on it, “TRUMP.”

    So I rang the doorbell and he let me in. The inner stairwell felt so cosy and sweet. Immaculately swept rush matting, a neat row of letterboxes, and more exhortations about common humanity. “My brothers are black,” I read, “my sisters are red.” From above I heard a decorous commotion as Mr Brush came down. Two other people gossiping at their upstairs doorway greeted him as he passed. “Hallo, ihr lieben,” he said: hello, you loves.

    He let me into the shop, by the back door, revealing an organised back room that resembled some earnest party headquarters. Pamphlets were stacked in boxes and on benches, a German flag stood furled in the umbrella stand. He gave me the dustpan and I explained to him, I have no heating at my place right now, I have been warming terracotta pots in the oven and then standing them in the living room to radiate heat. Today the Handarbeiter (the hand workers, that courteous term by which every German plumber, chimney sweep, and boilermaker is known) are coming to finish up and reconnect the heating. I’ve been wanting one of your dustpans for ages but today, I’m going to use it persuade these guys to clean up after themselves.

    I waved the dustpan at him like a pennant.

    Getting back on my bicycle I saw a woman in the accountant’s office next door, she was blowing up a silver foil balloon and we smiled at each other through her open window. The balloon was in the shape of a 3. “Machen Sie Party?” I asked, are you having a party. Nudging my chin towards the three: “Ihr kleinste Kollegin wird endlich drei?”

    Your littlest colleague is finally turning three.

    She started laughing into the balloon. “Keine Kindersklaverei mehr,” I encouraged her, “ist vorbei!”

    No more child slavery! we are done with it. She threw back her head laughing, the balloon for her three- or more likely 30-year-old colleague wobbled and squeaked in her fist. I rode home with the beautiful, perfectly polished dustpan reflecting an increasingly blue autumn sky. Trees passed in my basket as though I had caught them with this tray. At home I opened the door to my Handarbeiter, who set up in bathroom and kitchen and as I was typing I could hear the older guy, hammering in my bathroom, muttering to himself. “Well, that’s never going to work, what are you about, Micha? That’s better.” I emptied the garbage basket to get it out of his way and ran back downstairs, carrying compost in one hand and trash in the other. An incredibly tall, good-looking guy was standing by the rubbish bins. He opened the lid for me, courteously. “Wouldn’t it be good if we had separated rubbish collections,” I said.

    “Yes,” he said, “it’s so ridiculous that we cannot recycle. I tried talking to them about it.”

    “And?”

    “Didn’t get an answer. But maybe… if we all tried…”

    “Wow,” I said, “gute Idee, good idea! Maybe we can all apply at once. Or all sign something.” We stood smiling at each other. He was still holding the bin lid. His wife stood in the tiled hallway holding both their bicycles by the neck, like horses. She waved and I waved and we all dimpled at each other. “A beautiful rest of the day!” we wished in turn, as Germans do.

    When they opened the street door I glimpsed a woman walking past with her kid on a little training bike. This is how Germans teach their babies to ride bicycles with such confidence. A toddler training bike is walked rather than ridden as it has no pedals, thus it strengthens one’s walking and one’s riding at once. I heard a snatch of what she said to him: “weil die anderen Leute…” Because other people…

    This is how Germans socialise their kids, to keep brewing this lovely society in which if you find a scarf dropped in the street, likely you will drape it carefully round a nearby lantern so that its owner can retrace her steps and find it. The street door closed and I went back upstairs two steps at a time. The Handarbeiter was still telling himself off as he worked. His blue overalls were stained with plaster and he carried all his tools in a large bucket. I loved that people – if not our landlord – care that we should recycle and cherish everything. It seems to me ecological awareness is a form of appreciation, and appreciation is awakeness, is love. I loved that the man who makes brushes by hand as his forefathers did spends his spare time spreading leaflets which speak to our common humanity. I loved that the child who passed our door was looking up from his little bicycle to his mother; that she seemed to be explaining something.

  • late summerhaft

    Across town today I had the impulse to come through an overgrown island of trees that surrounds a church, and went wheeling my bike along its narrow, littered path where, if I tuned out the traffic, I could feel as though I were walking through a tiny woods. Someone is living there and had stacked their possessions under a low, clotty pine and strung their meagre collection of spare garments on a bush to dry. There’s still sun. Stringy and mean but sun nevertheless. We have had perhaps fourteen inconsecutive days of heat and sunshine this summer and already in August it is growing autumnal. As I was pushing my bike a man appeared beside me carrying a green plastic watering can. Berliners are busy when the sun comes out with their wild, colourful, shared public gardens. I’ve seen a woman dunking her can into the canal on a long rope so that she could tend the sunflowers she or someone else had planted and marked off with red and white striped tape. “What,” he said, cheerfully, “a man’s bicycle for a lady? Come now.”

    “It’s true,” I said: stimmt. And we both looked down at my voluminous skirts, two prints in varying shades of indigo laid one over the top of the other. I passed a tiny preschool or as they call them, children’s shop, with nine little bicycles locked together out front and two double-barrelled prams parked side by side. As I came round the corner I started to laugh. A teenage boy was standing outside his ground-floor window, holding the end of a huge scarlet canoe which his friend fed from inside. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes the enjoyment of his instant recollection of the picture they must have made. They started laughing, too. It’s not the weather which keeps me here.