Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— Well never mind, everyone’s using it as what’s happening. Xenophobia. Same as anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim — can you come up with something else.—

Back at home Jabu and Wethu cook lunch together, he’s come to the kitchen to put beer in the fridge.

Wethu is stirring a sauce over a gas flame and conducting her own pulpit vehemence with gestures of the lifted wooden spoon scattering drips. She breaks from isiZulu to English, fluent with colloquialisms she’s picked up in the city, to include him in her congregation. — That rubbish, they must voetsak back to Mugabe, they are only here, come from that place to steal take our bags in the street, and shame, shame, look what they do to Mr Jake, they wanted to kill him to get his car, it’s only God’s will he’s still alive to see his children grow up, he can’t walk quite right, I see him there in the road, eish! They tell lies why they come here, the young ones are just tsotsis, Wonke umuntu makahlale ezweni lakhe alilungise! Everybody must stay at their country to make it right, not run away, we never ran away, we stayed in KwaZulu even while the Boers the whites at the coal mine were paying our men nothing not even for the children school, and getting sick, sick from down in the mines, we stayed we were strong for the country to come right — If those people don’t get out, we must chase them—

Someone who studied by correspondence before the era of Internet, Jabu has her store of reference books (in her father’s example). They stand on what is supposed to be the desk in the bedroom but has no space clear for anyone to work at, his dictionaries crowd it.

‘Xenos. Indicates the presence of a reference to that which is strange, foreign, different. From Greek, Xenos, stranger.’

‘Xenophobic. Characterised by fear of foreign persons or things.’

‘Xenophobia. Intense or irrational dislike of people from other countries.’ That’s the only one in three dictionaries which in its concision has relevance? But the refugees are not invaders from some other continent, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British all over again. They are the continent, African people, taking collective place in the entire world that’s in process of its makeover.

African unity. Eish!

She’s looked in to call him, food is on the table.

— What are you doing, forgotten how to spell, my professor.—

— This ‘xenophobia’…—

— I can spell it for you. — She smiles. She sees there’s something on his mind but this isn’t the time for them to talk alone. Lunch must be eat-and-run, Sindi must be driven to Aristotle, there’s a dress rehearsal of a school play, Sindiswa is Antigone, the standby of heroism invoked anytime, anywhere, that comrades performed in Robben Island prison. For Sindi, it’s the Aristotle adaptation of a plot to recent African history.

Jabu’s gone with her daughter to watch the rehearsal and Gary Elias — where’s the son — oh over at the Mkizes’. The looped circles of living.

The bed’s there; kick off your shoes and stretch out. The pillow has the scent of her, different from perfume, she’s present. Take it up; xenophobia. All of us mouthing for what’s happening, a condition we’re in, epidemic.

Isn’t it taking the way out, a denial, the country usefully finding diagnosis that doesn’t admit the facts, the truth (but let’s avoid grand absolutes), the reality.

The blacks-of-all-shades, South Africans at home in the townships and the shacks they’ve somehow put together; they don’t disown discard attack and set fire to their brother Africans as if they were foreigners: in last resort against their own condition they are desperately defending the means, scraps of substance, their own survival. No roofs that don’t leak rain and cold, no electricity, no privacy even to shit, no roads to clinics run out of medicine, few jobs for too many endless seekers — this is what they have , theirs, those with nothing are moving in to compete for it.

That’s the cause of what’s happening. Not ‘irrational fear or dislike of the Xenos, strange, foreign or different’. Familiar, African, black-like-me. She’s still there in him even if she’s with Sindi’s mythical transformation, Antigone demanding an updated version, the time of the Struggle, the return of her brother’s body from Robben Island. If you know one another intimately enough, mind as well as body, you can talk with the other, her, when she is absent. She’s ready to see, admit his explanation, everyone’s been letting themselves off the hook with the distancing of a catch-all term.

Himself. Within this reality he’s not achieving, won’t be achieving anything…get out. Get out! What will Sindiswa and Gary Elias’s life be. Get out.

And how about Elias Siphiwe Gumede’s Zulu people, her people — same village, same people who attack each other as tribalist traditionalist against African nationalist ANC…while one side isn’t a threat to the livelihood of the other in KwaZulu. Well, that’s political rivalry, that’s about power. Refugees don’t have any. The mobile is felt rather than heard against his thigh. Shift in the bed and draw in the stomach muscles to reach this intruder out of pants pocket.

Jonathan. Now it’s Jonathan. So far from in mind. His brother who always prefaces what he’s calling about by a litany of family exchanges, how you all are, how we are, what this one is doing, where that one is right now. And why feel impatient, this is the way communication out of absence of current contact is shown; as Jonathan calls me Stevie, we’re kids wrestling together on the grass.

Well, mother is selling the old home and going to move to somewhere around Cape Town, it’s not decided yet, Jonathan is looking into the apartment question, she’s had enough of the security situation, a break-in two houses away, I don’t suppose she told you, you know our independent Pauline.

But the purpose of the call is that the boy whose ritual ceremony of entry to manhood was attended by Jabu and Stevie, is now ready for postgraduate studies in engineering. Jonathan and Brenda want him to go overseas; what country, which university would the academic in the family recommend they choose, approach for admission. Brenda depends on good advice from Stevie, the one in the family whose opinion she trusts. And such an admirer of everything Jabu achieves, she’s really attached to her — she feels Jabu will understand her caution.

Engineering: it’s a science but it is not that of the faculty to which the man from whom they seek advice — and probably imagined influence through academic connections — belongs.

The boy did his undergraduate degree in Cape Town, doesn’t Stevie have a colleague there, who might be useful?

Again, not in engineering. But he’ll certainly speak to one of the professors in engineering at his own university and hope to come back with information. In the meantime able to say with genuine impulse, for himself — It’s good to hear he wants to be a highly qualified engineer — there’s a shortage in our country — we need him.—

His brother concludes the statement — And with that kind of qualification you can make your way in another country. — Jonathan perhaps is speaking of a decision.

Months gone by. Now Jabu has been to another school rehearsal with Sindi, they are in the flush of enthusiasm flood-lighting the room as if both are proud schoolmates. Jabu practitioner of the objective letter of the law is that other kind of comrade, that of her children, which he isn’t, doesn’t manage to be, even with the one of his own gender, Gary Elias. — Sindi’s so good . I’d never have had any idea she’d understand Antigone so well, she does, she does , you have to hear her — and the school of course, the literature teacher and the athletics coach he’s also in the arts dance group, they direct together.—