Danielle Bowler
contemplates the complexities that come with taking the issue of heritage
seriously. Eyewitness News
There is a line from an
Arthur Nortje poem that incessantly gnaws at me. It brings to the surface many
of the discontents that I have with Heritage Day and the sheer weight of all
that we have inherited. In Dogsbody-halfbreed, Nortje writes: “he who belongs
to nowhere is to nothing/deeply attached”.
Growing up in
KwaZulu-Natal, whenever Heritage Day came around, accompanied by “cultural day”
at school, a group of us would give each other bewildered glances and state “we
have no culture”. As coloured children, we assumed we had no cultural dress,
beyond the Levi’s jeans and Dickies sneakers that we coveted, the music of rap
group TRO seemed too recent and trivial to be regarded as “heritage”, and the
food we had grown up eating was an assortment of English breakfasts, umfino,
umgqusho, curries and breyanis, lavish Sunday roast lunches, and the
commonplace macaroni and cheese.
Far away from the Cape,
it seemed everyone else’s culture was embedded in our own, and we had nothing
to call our own. To that nothingness we were, like Nortje, deeply attached.
What we were trying to make sense of, and could not name, was an overwhelming
multiplicity because embedded in our bodies was a more complex history than the
kind Heritage Day sought to privilege. As Angelo Fick writes: “Heritage cannot
be more personal or immediate than when it is mapped on and inside the human
body.” Our bodies were complex maps that seemed to lead us both everywhere and
nowhere at once.
There were many things we
did not understand. Fundamentally, that culture is constructed and is therefore
not natural or ahistorical, that identity is performance and we have agency in
our interpretation of it, and that certain histories and heritages have been
systematically silenced. Encoded into our bodies was difference and an
abundance of culture that formed a rich and vibrant heritage we could not see
because we were thinking culture through the ideology of race, with its
problematic notions of “authenticity” and obsession with homogenous
experiences.
Years later, two years
into a degree at Rhodes University, I found myself sitting on the staircase of
the District Six museum. It should have been an innocuous visit, one more item
checked off a long list of tourist activities in Cape Town. Instead, it was a turning
point. As I sat on a staircase that bore the names of streets I had never
walked and a history that had been reduced to a mere footnote, a complex web of
emotions surfaced. I was angry, sad, elated, tearful, confused, bitter and torn
apart, all at once. The museum had revealed how much of myself I had been given
no access to. Chapters missing from the history books that had been prescribed.
Parts of my identity that had been so strategically silenced.
On those stairs, my
introspection that was at once both painful and liberating. That moment was one
of the most important points of my life and the start of a journey of
self-discovery. I delved into ancestral lines that remain both frustrating and
exhilarating, and contemplated the complexities that come with taking the issue
of heritage seriously.
Heritage Day is a
reminder of the complexities of the identity that I occupy, and how fraught the
question of coloured identity remains in contemporary South Africa. What could
have been a moment for contemplation is often reduced to a mere performance of
the nation, expressed in threadbare slogans like “the rainbow nation” and the
impotent and apolitical celebration that is “braai day”.
As TO Molefe so
eloquently argues, braai day’s hijacking of Heritage Day has rendered it “the
white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy’s day of sponsored forgetting”. This
interpretation of Heritage Day reduces the complex and critical matter of
heritage to surface markers of identity, designed to privilege certain
(unthreatening) aspects of the past at the expense of seriously engaging with
and wrestling with what it means to be, at this moment in our history. It
encourages compartmentalisation of our experiences and endorses the performance
of certain markers of identity. It demands that we all stay in our lanes.
For coloured people, this
emerges as fundamentally complex because the coloured experience is both marked
and defined by difference, which is often problematically reduced to the matter
of being “not black or white, yet both”, which hides the way that there is
difference within expressions of coloured identity itself.
From Cape Town to
Johannesburg to Durban and other cities, there are different and intersecting
experiences of colouredness as each different locale has made different sense
of what it means to be. However, a logic that is built on racial absolutism
cannot accommodate difference. It does not need nor want identities that
perform differently and raise questions about the structures that underpin
identity and the politics of heritage.
As children, trying to
make sense of what Heritage Day meant, we assumed our culture lacked the
richness of our Zulu, Jewish, Xhosa, Italian, Indian and Muslim friends. We
assumed this because many aspects of our heritage had been silenced, because we
thought culture needed to have existed from the beginning of time, because we
assumed that we had to be just one thing, and because we had never learnt that
our difference was something that could be celebrated. We did not know that if
we unhinged ourselves from the logic of race, bringing tripe or bobotie or
challah to school would not be a lie, that these were all part of ourselves
because our belonging can be found in multiple reference points, and that this
does not mean that we are reduced to cultural nothingness. We did not
understand that we can be Zulu, Xhosa, Jewish, Muslim, English and coloured all
at once.
Exploring my own heritage
saw stories emerge of a Malay great-grandmother on one side and a Zulu
great-grandmother on the other, and of great grandfathers who had travelled to
South Africa from England and Ireland. But accompanying these narratives were
the stories that will never be told, vague tales of surnames that had been
changed, and a family tree that is difficult to trace. Of dead roots that speak
of silences. Of abbreviated histories.
In her novel, NW, Zadie
Smith writes: “Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag.
Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different
wardrobe.” What she is remarking on is the fact that every identity requires a
performance of some sorts, the act of putting on some aspect of yourself in an
acknowledgement that identity and culture are constructed and created.
In the years since my
school days, I have learnt multiple lessons that challenge the reduction of
Heritage Day to braais and beads. I now know that I have agency that allows me
to self-identify and revel in my complex multiplicity. Beyond the existential
crisis that marked my university years, I live the meaning of Dabydeen’s words
when he says: “I have a multiple identity. There is no crisis. There is a kind
of delight as well as a kind of anguish in jumping from one identity to the
next.” I have learnt that we were wrong when we sat at our desks and said “we
have no culture”, because I now know that culture is created, and that “through
a combination of resilience, borrowings from other cultures, ingenuity and
creativity, coloureds have produced practices distinctly theirs”, as Grant
Farred writes.
Contemplating the issue
of heritage, I have come to understand that we are a complex, brilliant mix of
our ancestry, and this does not need to be filtered through the singular logic
that Heritage Day has come to embody. I am everything, and I embrace everything.
