I don't care what you say. They may look like two countries that happen to share a geopolitical border, but I submit that Botswana and South Africa are actually two wildly different dimensions.
I just got back from a week in ZA. The border nearest Gaborone (on the other side of Tlokweng (a sub-district that borders Gabs) closes at 10pm. I actually didn't know when it closed, especially on a Sunday, and spent the last 150km of road in South Africa in a bit of a panic, wondering if I would be turned away. (I imagined myself staying up all night, smoking an entirely pack of marlboro lights to keep myself awake, etc., etc.) I took the number of lorries I saw on the road headed towards the border as a good sign, though, assuming they knew more than I did.
I squeaked through the border at 9:30pm. I'm getting better at going through the strange complex of institutions that is the border, e.g., writing down my car registration number on both the ZA and Bots sides of the border, filling out the forms, standing in the right lines, getting various pieces of paper stamped. It's not all that different from any other border, I suppose, and a lot less hectic than most. That said, it's easier when one is familiar with where to go and what to do. Congratulations, border, on successful interpellation! Revel in the discipline your subjects take upon themselves!
... and that set of comments, my friends, should tell you enough about the week. If it's still unclear, the following list should suffice: I read more Adorno last week than I've read in the past year; I was asked to explain abductive reasoning off the top of my head (and couldn't do it); I found myself putting forth a critique about Jan Vansina's use of evidence in Paths in the Rainforests and his conceptualization of the sign; I suggested early childhood faux pas as a means of illustrating Goffmanian 'fronts'.
Someone out there has already coined the term 'Goffmania'. You can't win them all, I suppose. Do you see what I mean about this being another dimension?
Durban itself is lovely and bizarre. Much more lively than Gabs, but that doesn't take much, I suppose. It's very green and very hilly. It rained some while I was there, but most of it was a gentle mist that made even my shrubbery of hair feel soft. (My hair made a serious bid to stay in Durban.) The coffee was good, the conversation stimulating (if full to bursting with inuendos), and the sushi free (another story entirely). I smoked far,
far too many cigarettes. I appreciated on more than one level the fact that some women in Durbs say goodbye to each other with a kiss on the lips. Racial politics in Durban are a thing (but I'm not the person to elaborate on that, and I'm certainly not suggesting they're somehow
more of a thing than anywhere else in ZA).
Bunny chow is also a thing -- and a very tasty thing, too, though the name's proximity to an American racial slur never fails to freak me out.
The friend I was visiting, his sister and I went down to the beach to look at the mess made by the '
freak waves' that hit Durban the day before I arrived. The sand had been pushed up the beach all the way to the paved promenade that separates the beach proper from beachfront shops and restraurants, some of which had been flooded when the waves broke through glass windows and doors. We joined other 'voyeurs of destruction' -- oh, yes: we went there -- peering through the mixture of dirty windows and plywood to see cooking equipment and ice cream cones mingled on the floor with sand and debris.
That said, my impression of Durban is much of more of hills than beach, of pawn shops than uShaka Marine World, of nicotine than masala pineapple. This was not the 'Durban as Playground' experience, but, knowing my host as I do, I hardly expected that, and I've no complaints.
This could be yet another chapter in a bizarre retelling of
City Mouse and Country Mouse wherein urban ZA shatters whatever level of comfort I've built in Gabs. For a girl who felt like she'd switched planets rather than just crossed the border, I think I managed to conduct myself with some rudiments of grace, or at least not make a complete ass of myself. No... to be honest, I think I did make a complete ass of myself, and I am smarting from it. Smarting enough to want to break my rule about only smoking on Fridays and/or in ZA. Nothing is as bewildering to this girl as being blind-sided by her own feelings, or as embarrassing as doing a shit job of communicating them.
But Gabs refuses me the rain to go with the aesthetic of cigarettes and irony in which I might have, under different circumstances, indulged. And I could hoist my social theory sail to the wind and berate my project of self-understanding as the hallmark of a socio-historically situated middle-class, over-educated position. But I have a lot of writing to do, and, in the end, I need some data to hang my over-theorized positions on, so it's back to the daily grind of the paediatric clinic.
So many cubic metres the more in my cistern / Against a leonine summer...
