Obama Bulbs for a Mandela Moment

Yesterday I found myself once again on the sidelines, my green card and Canadian passport tucked away in a safe place with my reservations about America. I dropped Jim at the polling station and drove on to buy Dutch bulbs. It was a lovely day for voting and planting. I bought some daffodil, anemone, ranunculus and, with the colour of the day in mind: Blue Parrot Tulips. Gardening has long been a pathway to reflection.
I thought about the road I’ve come since I first rebelled against Apartheid and left South Africa in order to live a life uncompromised by racism. I took with me on this journey the unforgettable image of Nelson Mandela smiling in the dock during his trial in 1964. It was a face I would wear on the T-shirt of my heart with the hope against hope for a miracle; that somehow the collective spirit would be transformed and open the doors to all in South Africa.
Always more interested in poetry than politics, I was not an activist. Perhaps I was just a coward or maybe I had a developed a burnt child reaction to ideology and dogma after years of oppressive Christian Nationalist control over my thoughts and actions. Self-emancipation and raising children free from prejudice in a multi-cultural society took precedence over protest. I set about the laborious task of ridding myself of the racism with which I had been raised, teaching my children that it was the intrinsic value of a person that mattered, not the colour of one’s skin. Canada was a good place for this. Here we could be free to be ourselves, grow to our full potential, confident of the fact that the laws of the land encouraged and supported justice for all.
Once, I had a chance to relocate with my family to the US. With a list of key questions in hand, I visited the Rhode Island city where we would live. Would my children get a public school education comparable to the one they were getting in Canada? Keep away from public education in this city, said my husband’s prospective colleagues backing their warning with tales of knives, drugs and mayhem, all obliquely couched in racism. Would my children be able to walk to school?  Obviously not, if you’re sending them to private school. What happens when we get sick? What happens if my husband suddenly dies? The answers to all these questions revealed a pretty porous safety net, depicting layers of anxiety not even considered north of the border. So I returned to Canada where I remained securely cocooned until I married an American.
America after 9/11 brought back the nervous, tight-rope feeling I thought I had left behind forever. Growing up in South Africa I was fearful of terrorists – Communists, Africans, the ANC.  Now I was looking for abandoned parcels in Washington DC subway stations – Jihadists, Arabs, Al-Qaeda. A different place, a different race, a different ideology; the same panic button. Once again, by chance, I found myself belonging to a group targeted by the perpetrators of unexpected, indiscriminate, mindless violence. Soon, the same violations of personal liberty that drove me from South Africa began to appear. The police state of my youth was raising its ugly head in America with exactly the same rationalizations with which Afrikaners were persuaded to support the repressive methods of the Apartheid regime. And then came the Iraq war. Ironically I, who left South Africa because I did not want my taxes to fund a terrorist war with which I disagreed, was now paying taxes to a government doing the same thing. The prevailing mood of anxiety, which spawned a self-righteousness and arrogance, seemed like déja vu. I saw politicians ride roughshod over reason, dismissing concerns and deliberately misleading the whole nation. It seemed as though we were in the grip of the spirit of Lord of the Flies. A country is not a place; it is a state of mind.
Then appeared the face which reminds so much of the one committed to memory so long ago. Then came the message, echoing the same ideals about what is right and what is possible. A tiny flicker of hope lit my heart and America began to change as the ugly American made way for the kind and compassionate.
As one who once wrote (and luckily lost) an ‘Ode to Victory’ to Robert Mugabe, my enthusiasm is tempered by a small dose of scepticism. Because of the continuing catastrophe of that once hopeful situation, the pessimist in me is cautious.
But yesterday the optimist planted bulbs, Blue Parrot tulips for Barack, and Large Yellow daffodils for Madiba. Unless the squirrels get them, I should see them next spring and the next and the next.
And perhaps by then I will have traded my green card in for US citizenship!

Ipswich MA, 5 November 2008