Undocumented

Documenting my experiences in Namibia with photographs is important to me, and invaluable in helping me remember and describe what I've known.  But my camera is bulky, and heavy, and a potential thief-magnet, so I don’t lug it with me everywhere I go.  Thus, much of my quotidian life goes unrecorded, except when I make a special excursion to take pictures of the everyday, like I did with my posts about my typical day and my town.

The evening I happened to have my camera and could record street-corner singers felt a little bit magical, or fated.  Would I have remembered that sublime three minutes without the video?  (It’s not just the video itself, but also the additional effort, the activity, of creating it, that helps fix the moment in my mind.)

I needed a picture of the meatballs to prove to Andy that I'd
made them.  Quite successfully, I'm told.

Recently I had a new batch of shadows come to visit, so I invited Fabiola and Gideon for dinner.  Five of us ate outside, gazing at the Southern Cross and her companions, and a faint glimmer of Milky Way.  (My town is bright with streetlights at night, and there’s one right by my front yard that nullifies much of the Milky Way’s glow.  It's still a lot more glow than I got in suburban DC or Philadelphia.)  Toward the end of the meal, which was a pretty filling pasta with chunky vegetable sauce and meatballs for those who like that sort of thing, I asked Gideon if he would sing in Damara for us.  He did, happily and beautifully.  I sat back, content and comfortable, stuffed with good carbs, pleased with the company, delighted by the music, awed by the constellations above us.  When Gideon finished, I told him about the band I was going to see the next night.

Wakambi are a good drum-bass-guitar combo writing their own songs, with a talented, mixed-race I think singer on that guitar.  There’s a fourth member, I think mixed-race also or maybe Damara, who raps – in Afrikaans.  (Race or color matter; people are too often uncomfortable mixing socially, which I know is common in the US, too.  When I told one (black) colleague I was going to the Desert Tavern to see a band he might like, he immediately, slowly, said, “I don’t want this to sound racist, but...” and I was able to interrupt and tell him he might like Wakambi – as he would almost certainly not like the usually all-white, 70s-English-and-American-cock-rock cover bands that normally play there.)  Afrikaans rapping is good fun, “but what I want to hear is rapping in Damara,” I said.

Gideon immediately broke into a Damara rap.

He really POPPED those clicks and pops, and jerked his hands, arms and head with the rhythm, and even achieved a slightly tough cast on his wonderfully amiable face.  And for a moment I wished for my camera – I could run inside and grab it; ask him to do the rap (which he composed) again – I wanted to document this:  the percussive sound that communicated specific information to only, maybe, two hundred thousand people on earth; the sight of the performance and the stars, my wonky laundry line and the happily rapt audience; the near-perfect temperature and gentle breeze; the smell of basil and onions and mince and colder weather coming; and the feeling – oh, right.  My camera doesn’t have a setting for that.

So the feeling – not quite out-of-body, but certainly elevated, moving toward levitated, hugely conscious of the moment and the many sensory inputs, the grateful-eternally feeling – I tried to trigger a button, or something, in my brain, or somewhere, that would fix that feeling, the memory of this, in my being forever.  I hope it worked.

Okuhepa indeed.

The next weekend, PCV A. agreed to meet me at Swakop’s swimming beach, the Mole (pronounced like, but emphatically not, the delicious Mexican sauce made with cocoa powder and twelve million variations that I am definitely going to be eating next time I’m in a country with a decent Mexican restaurant).  He would watch my stuff so I could, finally and jubilantly, get right into this ocean and stick my head under.

He fixed himself in the sand, I unslung my sarong, positioned my goggles, and headed in to the wavelets.  As per, the water was delightful on my feet and ankles, etc., and when the shelf dropped abruptly and set me down thigh-deep, that was delightful, too.  Perhaps a bit brisk.  And I took a good inhale, swung my arms in a forward arc, and dove toward the other side of the inlet.

Oh, blessed Tara goddess of mercy, it was cold.  It was skull-cracking, heartbeat-skipping, gasping cold.  Gasping, hearth arrhythmia and swimming are a bad combination, but after what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably about 90 seconds, I’d adjusted and was breast-stroking as strongly as I ever do, and as happily as I ever have.

I made it from one strand to the other and back again in about 20 minutes, and lolled about at the shoreline, letting the sense impressions – mostly emotional; I do love the water – sink in deep.  I also chatted with some local kids who fled shrieking every time a wave washed toward them.  I offered to help them float a bit, but they couldn’t bring themselves to trust.  A large and ludicrously jolly woman in wet shorts and a wide open, sleeveless shirt took up my offer, but clung to my neck in a way that could have drowned us both.  Or me, anyway.  So I moved discreetly west and played with the waves until one aligned and I could body-surf it in zooom and take two palm-loads of gravel at speed but protect my face, and look up to see a police officer in serious confab with the naked-breasted woman.  They walked off the beach together, with two mufti-clad individuals talking vigorously.

A. told me the woman had, while I was on my return journey, sat down next to him and asked if I were his girlfriend.  On his negative, she offered to fill the role, and started building a sand-house where they could live.  He explained he has a girlfriend in America, so she asked if he knew any white men, as she would like a white boyfriend.  He negatived again, the crowd of kids arrived, apparently everyone but A. expressed excited concern that I would drown or was drowning, and as they saw me get close, they headed down to the water’s edge to greet.

This hardly gives you a sense of the thing.

We have no idea what prompted the police presence.  We speculated about her effective shirtlessness, but Himba women go topless here all the time.  Maybe they have an exemption on traditional-culture grounds.  Maybe our woman had bothered someone else – who were the two un-uniformed people? – maybe she just got some encouragement to leave tourists alone.  She did not seem to be under any duress, or unhappy as she walked away.

The swim was blissful; the accoutrements brain-reconfiguring and brand new.  No photos.  I did take a picture of A. at the cafë where I bought him hot tea on his preference instead of the promised beer, but mostly I just have to be certain I glue this one into my cells.

A week earlier, at that same Mole, an Afrikaner couple – 30s or early 40s – shouted at me, “Do you know those men?” pointing at two gracious and dignified older black gents walking near me.  While I was trying to formulate a polite and brief response indicating I do not understand why or how that is any concern of yours, they shouted, “They’re looking at you!  Watch your purse!  They’re looking at you!”  While I was trying to set them on fire telekinetically, one of the men said, with grave simplicity, “We are not thieves,” which apparently prompted the Afrikaner man to offer to fight them both.  I attempted an apology for the entire concept of European heritage, but am not sure it went over really well.  Then I wished them a wonderful day and walked away shuddering.

Incidentally, my purse was tucked deep into my armpit, I was juggling a bit of errant trash I’d scooped from the ocean, my hair was – call it ‘tousled,’ though ‘disastrous’ might be more accurate – my skirt was damped and tucked up into my swimsuit, and quite probably my shirt was wet, too.  Altogether, anyone could be forgiven for outright staring, and maybe contacting that police officer who shepherds unconventionally-dressed women off the beach.  No photos on that one, either.

And no photos this week.  Wednesday evenings are for English Improvement Group.  Usually three or four or five residents gather up with me, and we read a very brief essay together, and discuss it.  One night we listened to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car,’ and read the lyrics and talked about the story they tell and the language they use to tell it.  When we’d heard it a few times, and read it through, and discussed it a good bit, I played it once more and most of us sang along.  (I chose the song in part because I’ve heard it frequently in Namibia, including coming from a neighbour’s house, but none of the English Improvers were familiar with it.  One called it a country song, because acoustic guitar equals country.)  We watched the first 36 minutes of 'Star Wars' (IV, the first one made) another night, but that did not go as well.  The story and setting were confusing and the actors talked fast, and we didn’t have a script to read.

This week I decided we’d have a song again:  Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Down to You.’  At 16:00, the power failed, and Ritha down the hall told me it was a scheduled outage, town-wide, until 18:00, and the Improvers convene at 17:30.  But the laptop will run for an hour or more on battery, and most people’s phones have flashlights, and I had already printed and photocopied the lyrics, so I toddled home and collected a few headlamps and extra flashlights, and got back too late to grab a vital padlock from Gideon.  We’d have to hold class in my office, which has no lights, instead of Johanna’s, which is bigger and well-lit when there’s power available.  Still fine.

Priscilla, Daphne and Eveline in Johanna's lit office
on a less-dance-y day.

Four people attended (a few checked first), and we listened to the song, read the lyrics, talked about contractions and karma and endearments, and then sang it together at the end.  It’s a four-minute song with about two minutes of singing and then two minutes of Bonnie Raitt working her slide.  So I stood up and said, “Let’s all dance,” and we all did, for two minutes in the dark office with random flashlight and phone-light and headlamp beams providing spots of brightness.  I tried the camera, but it wasn’t interested in the low light and the flash would just have made a false picture by lighting what was dim and weird and silly and improvised.

We danced and laughed in the dark, thinking about slide guitars, what we call our boyfriends and girlfriends, and favourite songs.  And maybe some of them were thinking this was kind of crazy, but of course it wasn’t.  It was just great, and fleeting, but maybe it’s never gone.

PS:  While I composed this essay, at a café near the Mole, I saw a dark fin breach the water and submerge.  I was very sure I saw it, and searched the water for another sighting until I’d started to think I hadn’t, and then I saw it again.  Several times, and a kayak and a motor boat saw it, too, and moved in, and I’m pretty certain I saw a dolphin, in the Mole where dolphins just do not belong, and I stood in the sun scanning the water with my eyes wide and my smile too wide to be really a smile anymore, more like a frozen gasp, and my fingers up in front of my mouth, like a cliché of excitement.  It was gorgeous - and undocumented.

The Mole.  I managed a second swim, dolphin-less, a week after the first.  This was the day after that.

There are a couple of people against the wall on the opposite shore,
just past the left-hand rocks, to give some perspective.