Psychologically coloured

I was born in the hottest part of the year, December. On the night I was born, says my mum, it rained at last, after very many long breathless nights as heavy as she.

I was contemplating climate change one grey spring day when I remembered this domestic legend and then got to thinking that would make my proper name Nomvula, or Rain, like Rain Chiya - who, when I first met her was: a) shopsteward b) crane driver c) woman. Rain was the Rosie the Riveter of my then-youthful mind, the ultimate strong woman. She lived on the East Rand, and later she became mother to Marx – stubbornly pronounced so, though written ‘Max’ – whom she brought to one of our annual marxism days when his hair was still tender. He must be a teenager by now.

But I digress. I’ve toyed with the notion of what I would be called if I wasn’t white ever since an apartheid cop looked at me suspiciously, asked me to repeat my Italian surname and then dutifully but disgustedly wrote ‘Serote’ (like the author, Wally).

This was probably the earliest symptom of the phrase I stole from a friend and adapted: feeling psychologically coloured. To be honest I’m not too sure what my friend meant by the phrase. I do not mean that I have a psyche encompassing that group of people defined by apartheid as ‘kleurling/coloured’. Rather I’m referring to the state of being caught between two worlds. My neighbours are black, my closest comrades are most of them black, my favorite work colleagues are most of them black, and I identify politically with “the black working class”. When I see another white person in Yeoville I sometimes catch myself thinking, ‘what’s a whitey doing in Yeoville?’ as if I'm not. But my family is still white, and my purely-for-non-political-parties social circle is a weird mix of white foreign correspondents with a sprinkling of assorted Indians. I still speak only English and Afrikaans, with a smattering of Zulu words. And racists still assume I’ll agree with them and always seem a little hurt when they see my blood pressure rise visibly. When I walk around my neighbourhood I see my neighbours just as assorted people. I secretly ogle the cute ones, openly admire the central African outfits, scold kids for running in the road and sneer at the arseholes. But the neighbour kids hang over the wall specially to call me ‘mlungu’. After a particularly bad day at work I caught myself saying, indignantly: “How would you like it if I labeled you by the colour of your skin?” (Lucky for me they were young enough to miss the wonderful irony of hearing this from a white woman.)

A while back I was reading a lot of sociological stuff about identity and I thought of buying myself that tracksuit top with the silhouette of a young woman in sunglasses and a giant afro, labelled ‘identity’. See, that's me inside. But dressing my 40 year old white self in that would ironically capture the sociologist’s point that identity is not just how you see yourself but also how others see you. I cannot pretend for one second that I have any real understanding of growing up black under apartheid or for that matter after it, but occasionally these days, when I wander into my local and get that feeling that everyone is staring (which likely they are) I think, maybe that’s what it felt like for a black ou to walk into a white shopping area. I never ever had any issues with my body before, but these days I feel skinny and pale. And it’s not that I’m prejudiced against white men as such but I am impatient with people who live in bubbles.

It was while we were discussing what Spike Lee would uncharitably call our jungle fever (which I prefer to call bringing some balance to my sexual history) that my housemate and I came to the bizarre realization that black south African men never, ever seem to hit on us. We see a cutey, they see a whitey. I don’t feel particularly white but I am unmistakably white to everyone around me.

We’re near the tail of this small story now but the sting is not to bemoan my uncertain identity. I do feel terribly left out sometimes but I can’t say I’m oppressed. The real question is, how do they know I’m white? Skin colour, doh!

Not so fast. Truly I am lighter than the vast majority of South Africans but after I lay in the sun for two weeks the summer I turned 18, my brothers joked that I was going to be reclassified Indian and my parents were actually embarrassed until the top of my ears started to peel. I’m never going to be arrested as an illegal Congolese immigrant but pale as I am now, when I put my arm next to my coloured colleague I’m unmistakably darker by a couple of shades. Her eyes are blue. People sometimes wonder if she is white until she opens her mouth. Then they hear she’s from Paarl and then only do they know, ‘instantly’ and unmistakeably, what ‘race’ she is. My friend from the US is medium brown and wears a head scarf. She was mistaken for Indian in Fordsburg, Coloured in Cape Town and African by the muggers on the Nelson Mandela bridge, twice thwarted because she was long gone by the time they realised they were supposed to threaten her in English. Then she was reclassified white by a racist taxi driver, who assumed the same hurt expression I always get when racists realize they’ve encountered a traitor after she scolded him for telling her how much better things were under Apartheid. Was it the 'TV' accent that made her ‘white’? When I went to the more occupied part of occupied Palestine, otherwise known as Israel, I had some trouble with who was Arab and who was ‘Jewish’. The recent European immigrants were obvious but during a bus journey through the West Bank I was mystified by the rabbi traveling with his family of little girls in meringue dresses on a bus full of Palestinians. When the bus was stalled for hours by a breakdown, after several stops at minor checkpoints where some portion of young men inevitably got left behind for having wrong papers, he came over to ask what I thought about “how Israel treats us”. I swear Goebbels could have sold his profile to Hitler as an archetypal Jew. To my Arab friends in Israel, to the non-Arab shop-assistant who served my Arab friend so curtly, there was no mistaking who was Arab and who wasn’t just because of a little physical similarity. It was about the car, the clothes, the music coming out of the car, the hairstyles.

So much of what we assume to be purely about biology, skin colour, hair texture is a complex of these things combined with all sorts of very subtle cultural cues. So somewhere in my head I’m an inverted coconut but in the outside world I can’t even pass as some kind of kleurling model C kid, not only because I’m way too old but primarily because my accent is that unmistakable thing with the roundly elongated ‘o’ unique to whiteys who don’t hang with whiteys.

Then just yesterday the local kids’ gang crashes my garden. This grubby little girl eventually squints at me and says, ‘are you Indian?’ I’m not even tanned at the moment. ‘How do you know I’m Indian?’ I ask her. I ask,‘How do you know anyone’s Indian?’ The little boy jumps in, finger on forehead, proud to know the answer: ‘Because Indians have a mark here!’ (which I don’t have). The little girl thinks for a moment. She squints at me again. I’m not sure if she’s totally uninterested in my question or if it makes no sense. “My teacher’s Indian,” she fills in instead. “She’s pretty,” she adds dreamily, meaning her teacher, who she obviously has a little seven year old crush on. I think it’s one of the other kids who jumps wordlessly to touch my nose-stud.