fragment workers

Day Six
We are fragment workers, Mzi said that morning in our last gathering in Jo’burg. Our leaders repeatedly referred to that term, coined by Willie James Jennings, and our job, they said, is to pick up the fragments of our world — the fragments of faith, of colonialism, and of commodity — and try to put them back together again.

In the center of the circle, Mzi had arranged a variety of common South African beverages on the mat: red wine, amasi, stoney (ginger beer), some sort of a fermented drink that is meant to be sipped from a gourd, and fruit juice. Two baskets were heaped with a wide variety of bread: short bread, multigrain bread, steamed bread, flatbread, etc.

^{photo credit: Isaac Witmer}

In Iziko’s communion liturgy that we read outloud, each bread and each drink stood for a different group of people — the flat bread for the people of Palestine, the saltines for the “salty” elderly ones, the rye bread for the laboring class, and so on — and then we all converged on the food and drink, sharing communion with whoever, and with more than one person, too. 

I chose amasi for my communion beverage. I knew that amasi is the South African term for clabber, the thickened sour milk that I use to culture my cheeses, so I wanted to see if it was similar to what I make in my own kitchen. I poured myself a small bit (because I’m not keen on thickened sour milk beverages) and whaddyknow, it tasted exactly like clabber.

(So if you’re a cheesemaker in South Africa, try using a quarter cup amasi per gallon of milk as your cheese culture.)

***

Something I was noticing…
I don’t like flowery language about ordinary things, and God-talk makes me feel queasy, but in South Africa, the roundabout way of speaking, the scriptural references, and the layers of meaning they attributed to simple things like names and histories felt rooted — poetic and true. I kept waiting for my impatience to bubble up, but it never did. Which made me wonder: why not? 

And then I began to wonder if the artifice I often rail against in the states is a byproduct of colonialism? As white United Statesians, our physical place in the world is rooted in exploitation. We have so much to protect, and so much to fear, so perhaps that explained why I so often got the feeling that what we said and did (particularly in Christian/Mennonite circles) smacked of pretention.

I don’t think oppressed people, or any particular group of people, have all the answers (we’re all just people), but I was beginning to notice that the Black South Africans seemed able to access the depths of humanity in ways that didn’t seem that easily accessible to us white people — or just me, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I was just windbagging, myself?

What I did know is that when the South Africans were guiding our group, I somehow felt less skeptical. More open, maybe? Perhaps because, without my BS detector constantly going off, I was better able to hear them?

It’s something I’m still mulling over.

***

That afternoon we hopped on a plane to Cape Town.

^{photo credit: Seth Myers}

I immediately noticed that the city felt more European than African. Parts of it were utterly gorgeous, with Spanish-style architecture and riotous flowers and greenery, but then right there, on the other side of the two-lane road, there’d be an encampment of unhoused people. (A week after we’d left, Steve posted on Instagram that hundreds of police were evicting one of the communities of unhoused people. “This city is sick,” Steve said. “It has no moral center.”)

“It’s not ‘loss’ here,” he told us that evening. “It’s a robbing. And a blessing that comes at the expense of another is not a blessing, it’s a curse.” 

the view from my single(!) en suite(!!) room at Schoenstatt

Welcome to Cape Town.

This same time, years previous: what I don’t do, fight poem, the quotidian (11.19.18), spiced applesauce cake with caramel glaze, in my kitchen: noon, sock curls.