006 · Distance
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What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smokey, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass.1
Alexandra Fuller writes that she could only write about Africa once she had left. I had to leave too.
Distance altered the picture. Physical distance. Emotional distance. Things I took for granted sounded like sirens. It was like stepping outside a photograph. For the first time, I could see the frame.
In Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me, Bill Hayes arrives at a similar point from another angle:
I found I had to leave it in order to get a clear perspective on my life here and to write this book—most of which I did in Rome in a single five-week period less than six months after Oliver died.2
The difference lies in pace. Fuller looks back slowly. Hayes writes under pressure. Fuller meditates. Hayes rushes to get the words down before memory hardens.
My own practice sits somewhere between the two. ‘Photo-sketching’ lets me write quickly from visual stimulus, but it also depends on distance. Immediacy and delay. The first flash of thought, then the distortions that time permits. A drift between impulse and reflection.
There were things about South Africa I could not properly see until I left. They were too close. Too ordinary. Apartheid was more than just a historical system that shaped the world around me. It governed daily life, relationships, assumptions, and expectations. Its logic lingered in gestures, silences, mistrust, and the unspoken rules that remained after the official structure fell away.
In the environment I came from, drug use became one form of escape. Of personal collapse. A social symptom. It was a way to numb what history had left behind. By the time I saw those around me start using heroin, apartheid had officially ended years before, but its afterlife remained. The new nation arrived with its flag and constitution, but many of the deeper structures held. The surface changed faster than the foundations. Trauma lingered. My own family history made that reality harder to simplify. I carried both sides of the wound. The legacy of the oppressed and the oppressor.
In This Is Water, David Foster Wallace tells the story of two fish who do not know what water is because they have never known anything else. That was part of what leaving South Africa revealed to me. In England, I entered different water. Different pressure. Different invisible rules.
In South Africa, I had been submerged in histories and tensions so familiar that I could not fully register them. In England, other burdens emerged. A quieter sense of estrangement. A steady awareness of being slightly out of place. The question of where I belonged did not disappear.
To move between countries was also to move between versions of myself. Writing became one way to trace that movement. A way to work through memory, fracture, and ancestry. A way to work through drift. A way to see that a life is shaped not only by what is remembered and told, but also by what remains silent and partial. What remains unresolved.