Tag: exile

A responsible piece: Exile essay # 10

MONDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2001

There comes a time in your life when you have to stare some truths in the face. One of these nasty truths is that you may live forever – or at least until you’re so old and senile you can’t even remember you’ve ever lived. The inevitable question that one would ask yourself if you can’t shake this unpleasantness out of your head, is what on earth you’re going to do if you are indeed going to live for another forty or fifty years.

You currently find yourself in a position where you’re still relatively young. You’re still caught up in a struggle to get rid of hang-ups you’ve been dragging along since you were a teenager; you’re still trying to claim a small plot of land for yourself in the big, wide world, and you’re still arguing with yourself (and with your family) about exactly what it is you want to do with your life …

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[Another blunt ending. Not a good sign considering that this was supposed to be the long-awaited responsible piece, but there you are. It would be another fifteen months before the idea for this literary project (the original project, Personal Agenda: Book One) emerged. There was clearly no urgency to complete any pieces of writing in November 2001.]

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Exile 7/The 22 October 2001 declaration

MONDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2001

Six thousand boxes of green tea, six hundred packets of dried bean curd, sixty “Final Plans” and six Exile essays later I’m still here, behind my computer, trying to write about exactly why I am in “exile”, and about what I am going to do next.

(Should I now go into detail about my new post Belonging & Commitment theory? Should I talk about the book projects I’ve done this year, and the stories I want to write? Should I talk about the fact that I can already play Level C songs on my keyboard, and that it took me twenty minutes to learn how to play Battle Hymn of the Republic from memory? Should I talk about all the people I’ve met over the past few weeks? Should I save a line about the Boney M Gold CD I bought with the first money I earned as a freelance writer? Should I talk with clever twists about how I feel it is my moral duty to go and help my parents with their business? Should I neatly lay out in detail the current range of plans, with columns for advantages and disadvantages? Should I explain how I can pay off all my student loans if I stay here for another X number of months? How I can take my blue guitar and a bunch of books with me when I go home in April, and at the end of August – when my loans are paid off – relocate myself lock, stock and rest of the books to the farmhouse outside of Pongola? Or how I can return to South Africa at the end of February without a penny to my name, in the good faith that “everything will work out”? How about the latest one? Yes, ever heard of how they’re looking for teachers in London? How they pay something like £100 a day? Can I talk about how I can pay off all my debt in possibly a year’s time, and during holidays visit any European city or any First World War battlefield? How nice it would be to regularly see my older sister, and also to visit my parents and my younger sister more often? Is it really necessary to annex yet another exile essay with plans, visions, dreams, and reality? Or can I just say, “Howzit? Woof.”)

“Uhm … test-test, one-two-three-four … can anybody hear me? I think I’m going back to South Africa at the end of February next year on a one-way ticket, register at that teacher’s agency, and at the end of April, after [M] and that other fellow’s wedding, escape, uh … fly to London, and then pull my rear through three months of British substitute teaching, and then go to Berlin for a week … or visit a First World War battlefield. That’s all.”

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