Whatshot
The Stork and the Crow
The Stork and the Crow
Date: 2024-09-27
Without reflection, without sorrow, without shame,
...they've built around me great, high walls. (C.F. Cavafy-1890s)
It's heritage month. My dear friend Kasia asks me to write something. I feel anxious. Born in England, I have travelled and made a home in many countries. From the souks of the Middle East to Timbuktu and the madness of the Balkans, life has been a whirling dervish of colour, language and adventure. In South Africa, I have nestled for almost three decades. 'I have crossed an ocean, I have lost my tongue. From the root of the old one, a new one has sprung' (Grace Nichols). A fusion of all these parts, a living kaleidoscope of identities. English? South African? Or just another mlungu in need of a tan?
In 1990, Norman Tebbit, member of the Conservative Party was aghast at the number of Caribbean and South Asian migrants who gave their allegiance to Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and West Indian cricket teams, even though they'd been born and brought up in Britain. For Tebbit, it reflected their lack of integration.
I would have failed the Tebbit Test. A die-hard fan of the West Indies!
All over the world, nations reinforce themselves by defining someone as an outsider. Politicians mobilise against migration using vicious stereotypes. In South Africa, the country's woes are blamed on 'the foreigners'. The pussy cat with an orange face tells supporters that Haitians are killing cats and eating them. So are the times.
Cavafy in the next lines of his poem, Walls, tells us:
And I sit here now and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate consumes my mind:
because I had so many things to do out there.
Can heritage be a time to recognise our common humanity? Or are we destined to build higher and higher walls? Elif Shafak, in her wonderful book, The Happiness of Blond People, dwells on the wisdom of Rumi, who writes of a sage seeing a crow and a stork together. He was amazed. These birds were so different. What could they have in common? On tiptoe, he crept closer. He saw that both were lame. They had become delinked from their flock. Theirs became a flight of the lonely. Until they bumped into each other... 'a stork and a crow, and they had become unlikely companions of the road.' Shafak goes on to tell us that 'the world we live in is full of lame birds who manage to learn to fly together. They share much in common, except appearance.'
I know that this sounds idealistic. But then I have always been a child out of joint, hoping for rhinos to always be horny and storks to crow.