My wife is away and contrary to the saying that the mice will play when the cat is away, it is all fetch, carry and cook for the children, to and from school, soccer, shopping and ballet. Whilst it is now obvious that I am going to appreciate her a lot more when she returns I am hoping that it will be the same for her. If, and when, she returns from her ceramics conservation courses somewhere in the Langkloof. I have learnt that we are engineered to sniff out a partner who is unlike oneself and thereby strengthening the gene pool. This rings true for our relationship and, like so many couples, we are as different as chalk is from cheese. I am not surprised that books on the subject have titles like ‘Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus’. I also understand that Afrikaans TV personality who called his female partner “Die Engelsman” (The Englishman). It illustrates the genetic joke played on our species. It seems that our partners are by design unlike us and therefore unlikely to be comprehensible to us nor are they likely to be comprehending of us. You could say they are from an entirely different culture and we are bewildered by one another.
In a cross pollination of culture this banana boy is going to Bloemfontein where I am to give a lecture and workshop and it has made me think of my connection with that part of the world. After my (original) father died we traveled from England to a farm called Langdraai, near Petrusberg which is half way between Bloemfontein and Kimberly. It was here that my (step) grandfather was a farmer, he provided a place for us to stay and the family was a support for my bereft mother. It was here that I uttered my first (Afrikaans) word which was “piesang” (banana). Later, after my second father’s demise, my mother returned to the ‘only had one shop’ village of Petrusberg and bought a house, where she intended to raise us. Fortunately, she managed to snare a new husband, they were married in Durban and he whisked us off to another remote village which was Tanga in Tanzania.
Perhaps the thought of going back to Bloemfontein has motivated me to make ‘Langdraai’ which is named after my Oupa’s farm. The name, which literally means long turn, also makes me think of the circuitous routes one travels only to return to ones roots. This work acknowledges a part of me that is connected to the platteland (flatlands or rural areas) a place so different from the hilly, forested and English speaking KwaZulu-Natal. I have a few memories of that place and those times. The images in my mind are of windmills, ice on the dam, chasing springbok in the veld, letting all the water out of the dam so that the fish were swimming between the carrots in the vegetable patch and the neighbours who had their coffin and death clothes permanently laid out on the dining room table, ready for the terminal day.
‘Langdraai’ and another small bronze or two have been cast in my back yard using a simple sand cast. These works are for me technically and aesthetically experimental. They are quickly carved in polystyrene, cast in sand moulds and then reworked. I am looking for an immediacy, expressive distortion, movement, texture and colour that is not often seen in bronze sculptures.
Strange as it may seem, part of my family has migrated from one culture to another. Not by marriage but by the deliberate cultivation of alien culture and as a result I have an Afrikaans cousin. We at the present time have a good historical perspective to understand this a rather strange thing to do. After all if I could, I would choose a culture where I would benefit from a host of cheap shares. Ironically it was easier for my Uncle as there was not an issue with pigmentation as he moved from a first class citizen to the ruling class and it primarily required learning a language. Thinking about it, those Sasol shares could have been a way to improve my Zulu, very quickly. It was however a bit of a cheek as this family came from English settler stock, went to English speaking schools and universities and to boot was also a family who (unsuccessfully) laid claim to the fortune left by the old Bonds of the Bond street in London.
A social advantage and the desire for money easily explain my family’s heritage hopping but do not explain the reason why genetically different people who cannot understand each other get together. My psychologist friends tell me that falling in love is a chemical trick your body plays on you in order to get you to breed. The chemistry must have worked as I remember our romance as intoxicating and I now have two children.
However, I think I am now past the chemical thing and am beginning to appreciate the intelligence of the genetic thing. Being different, my wife can do a lot which I can not. Her work is by its nature fastidious and painstaking whereas mine is creative and inventive. This separation has focused my mind on, and improved my appreciation for my wife, for the things she does differently and better than I do. Today, I will especially miss her editing my letters as I cannot spell, have no idea about punctuation, tenses and split infinitives, whatever they are. Whilst her editing is a painful ordeal my letters are infinitely better for her corrections and observations. It is perhaps a familiar refrain but in our unity and our diversity there is strength.