(Observations): Funny How The Absolute Loveliness of an Unbarred Window…
Here’s something which has been creeping into conscious thought more and more over the last few weeks. It must have been there since the first we came to Canada, but there was so much else that had to be overridden first that I didn’t notice it.
No fear. Not just a concentrated effort to ignore it – the complete absence of it.
No fear. This Canada. Everywhere I go I watch people. They get in and out of their cars and they don’t look around. They walk down streets and they don’t look around. They arrive at their homes. And they don’t look around.
Arriving at their homes – whether in the suburbs or in some more remote place, people don’t approach their driveways checking bushes and sidewalks, eyes flaring left and right. They don’t wait in their cars, hyper-vigilant and breathing a little harder, for their electric gates to open. There are no electric gates. There are no electric fences around properties. There are no fences at all. At least, not of the kind to which I am accustomed.
No razor wire. No signs on six foot concrete walls warning of security companies and that the homeowner is armed. No broken glass topping walls. Put there to prevent an intruder from climbing over the walls. Oh, there are the odd fences. I’ve seen them – quaint, low wooden things, put there to keep a pet in. Not to keep something fearful out.
Boundary walls and fences in South Africa
Windows. In the homes I see, the homes I have visited. Sheer, clean panes of glass with incredible views. Of yards with no electric fences. Empty of anything but glass. Beautiful scenes on the other side. Not one of these incredible view marred by bars, by the hi-tech, slam gates that barricade against smash-and-entry. Not one door, not one window, not one home fortified for defense.
Windows and doors in my South African home
Driving in towns, on the highways across this vast country? I notice that there is an order. People are observing the rules of the road. Oh, there are the odd few who break out of themselves occasionally to exceed a speed limit – bravely, they move perhaps ten, maybe fifteen kilometres over the speed limit. A certain braggadocio, perhaps. A bucking of a very well observed system that allows those few a sense of audacity. But no silly buggers. No careening taxis with violent braking systems. No hijackings as one waits for the lights to change. Here they drive with their windows open. All the way down, wind and an absence of fear blowing through their hair. And that constant terror of breaking down on the side of a road, fearful of what will happen, knowing what has happened to so many on the roads of my country? It’s just not here.
South Africa (2019)
My South African home was so beautiful. Full ceiling to floor windows all along the front, a view for miles all the way over the tops of incredible trees to the Indian Ocean. Seen through the bars of a cage. Every single window and door held by high-security slam doors, never opened but to let a visitor in, slammed shut behind after they were inside. Magnificent African sunsets seen through the bars. Dashing from the car to my front door, anxious even in daylight, the bright of it not allaying the fear of someone being in the yard, waiting to attack. And when the child of a friend from the UK visited me in my home, he paused as he entered and asked his mother" Why do they live in a cage?
And when my husband was away from home, travelling for business, which was fairly regularly, locking myself into our bedroom every night, my dog at my side on the bed and my weapon under my pillow. Alert to every sound in those sublime African nights, stars winking through the slam bars on the French doors of my bedroom.
My very own treehouse room – perched on that high second floor, view sublime, seen through bars. Sleeping with my dog, alert to her messages through the night. The lifting of her head, that low rumbling in her throat, ears twitched on high, pressing into my side. Only relaxing when she laid her head down again, always sure that the next time – the next time she lifted her head from the bed, it would be for real. That this time it would be my home invaded, my space and myself in trouble. It was always only a matter of time, news of it happening every day. Every. Single. Day. Every. Single. Night. Sirens through the dark. Gunshots.
Braais out at our pool on a Saturday afternoon. The smell of meat cooking on a fire, the sweet butter of potatoes, African sun a blistering loveliness high in the bluest of skies. Ice cold Castle Lagers, rugby on the TV. Friends. Most of the men armed, many of the women, too. Making sure all the other doors are locked, window grilles slammed shut so one has only poolside to surveil through the happy smoke from the braai fire... and the laughter?
Sometimes too loud as if we all felt some kind of defiance. Some kind of Fuck-You in our laughs. Turning the music up, dancing, laughing. And never mind that it might hide those other sounds. The ones that warn of yet another home invasion and this time, your home. Laugh. Laughter. And that slow, acid churn in your stomach, beneath the defiance, never relaxing, never quite sure when.
At home? At first it was news of someone else to whom it had happened. Then it became someone you knew. Only a matter of time before it happened to you. There? The steady, discordant brutalizations of a country in psychotic disarray. Africa. Once so full of an exquisite and savage grace. No grace now. Just the violent lashings of a people in chaos, terror and murder.
Perfect corruption. State capture. The squandering of billions. Failed systems and state engines. Student riots and the burning of learning institutions. "Service protests" which block highways and byways with the shells of burning vehicles. Everywhere so much pain. The vicious murder of farmers and their families. The wholesale rape and murder of our women and children. Xenophobia and the burning of people alive in our streets. My Africa.
Here? This absence of fences and shrill alert sounds in the dark, the normalcy of waiting safely at a traffic light, the quiet of a night without sirens and gunshots – and the clear and sheer loveliness of windows with views? Sometimes it makes me claustrophobic. Sometimes I am completely breathless. Funny how the absence of apprehension can cause a heart to beat too fast, strangely anxious, reluctant to accept that it might just be true..as if that absence is but the eye of a storm.
Funny how the absolute loveliness of an unbarred window can make one weep.