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I’m floating in a most peculiar way
Saturday, 20 August 2011 05:19 pmToday I unearthed unexpectedly, from the clutter in my drawer, my Zimbabwean post office book. At the time I last used it, which was in 1996, its charmingly analogue columns attested to my ownership of Z$529.23.
This would have been the residue of all the saving I did from vac jobs when I was at school or in my first few years at university, less whatever I drew out for self-indulgence (usually books or fabric). If it's still there, and hasn't been closed down or whatever, it might have picked up a bit of interest in the intervening fifteen years. But let's take it from the actual depicted amount. It's currently worth a fraction over 10 South African rand, or approximatly 0.89 British pounds.
My mother has an older sister who is still in Zim - she's mentally disabled and lives in a retirement home. My grandparents left a trust fund for her when they died, which was designed to provide for her for the rest of her life. After Zim's economic collapse, my mother drew the entirety of the trust fund out of the bank, and used it to buy a milkshake and a toasted cheese sandwich at a local fast food joint.
I spent the first 20 years of my life in Zimbabwe. I don't know if it's possible to get across to someone who hasn't had their national identity whisked out from under them like a rug, exactly how odd it feels: your whole childhood, the validity of a whole nation's operation, taken away from you. The first twenty years of my life is unreal to the point where it may as well have been a fantasy, one which has been replaced with a reality which is horribly Kafkaesque. My stupid post office book is a ridiculous microcosm of the feeling my parents must have had, watching their entire working lives, plans, investments, gurgle down the drain in a matter of months. There are still people in Zim, and a government of sorts, and if you work in US$ apparently you can make a living there, but there is no coherent sense of stability or continuity such as would make a sense of identity feel legitimate.
They say you can't go home again, and in this particular case they're horribly right. I have enormous emotional attachment to Zimbabwe's landscapes, which at times I still miss with an almost physical ache, but the place is no longer the locus of any sense of a working country. I can't think of myself as a Zimbabwean any more, because Zimbabwe doesn't viably exist. But I still can't think of myself as a South African. At best, I'm a Capetonian. At worst, I know I'm not anything. There's not anything to be from. It does some very odd things to one's psyche.
This would have been the residue of all the saving I did from vac jobs when I was at school or in my first few years at university, less whatever I drew out for self-indulgence (usually books or fabric). If it's still there, and hasn't been closed down or whatever, it might have picked up a bit of interest in the intervening fifteen years. But let's take it from the actual depicted amount. It's currently worth a fraction over 10 South African rand, or approximatly 0.89 British pounds.
My mother has an older sister who is still in Zim - she's mentally disabled and lives in a retirement home. My grandparents left a trust fund for her when they died, which was designed to provide for her for the rest of her life. After Zim's economic collapse, my mother drew the entirety of the trust fund out of the bank, and used it to buy a milkshake and a toasted cheese sandwich at a local fast food joint.
I spent the first 20 years of my life in Zimbabwe. I don't know if it's possible to get across to someone who hasn't had their national identity whisked out from under them like a rug, exactly how odd it feels: your whole childhood, the validity of a whole nation's operation, taken away from you. The first twenty years of my life is unreal to the point where it may as well have been a fantasy, one which has been replaced with a reality which is horribly Kafkaesque. My stupid post office book is a ridiculous microcosm of the feeling my parents must have had, watching their entire working lives, plans, investments, gurgle down the drain in a matter of months. There are still people in Zim, and a government of sorts, and if you work in US$ apparently you can make a living there, but there is no coherent sense of stability or continuity such as would make a sense of identity feel legitimate.
They say you can't go home again, and in this particular case they're horribly right. I have enormous emotional attachment to Zimbabwe's landscapes, which at times I still miss with an almost physical ache, but the place is no longer the locus of any sense of a working country. I can't think of myself as a Zimbabwean any more, because Zimbabwe doesn't viably exist. But I still can't think of myself as a South African. At best, I'm a Capetonian. At worst, I know I'm not anything. There's not anything to be from. It does some very odd things to one's psyche.
