Surviving School

Do you know those Tom and Jerry cartoon images where Tom has stuck his finger into a plug socket and is bolted up into the air, every hair on his body standing on end? Well, that's how I have felt for the last ten days. 

At my very first lecture last Tuesday I thought I was in the wrong place! All around me students who looked 19 (but couldn't possibly have been since this was a post-graduate course) spoke with American accents and the lecturer was explaining elementary things like where District Six was and that the boxer in the black and white photo from the 1950s was actually Nelson Mandela, not Muhammed Ali.

It made sense when I realised that the course was being run in conjunction with Brown University and that there was a large contingent of exchange students attending. The clarity lasted about five minutes before we were being told about setting up websites, creating Tumblr accounts and joining a Face Book group. All this would be used to monitor and assess our involvement!

Later in the week I was in a lecture on African Non-fiction Literature. This time the class was smaller and there was only one American voice, but listening to these young ones talk, I had the distinct feeling that I have missed out on a few steps...like studying English language and literature...

We are a group of diverse writers in the Creative Writing seminars and I am sure that we will learn much from each other and the many established authors who we will be meeting during the course of the year.

 Everyone assures me that I will be fine once I get into the swing of things. I just need to find a way to channel the adrenaline which seems to be coursing through my veins, clearly my body has been preparing for flight. My brain, however,  has prevailed and here I am gearing up for the second week. 

Orientation

If the walls could talk...Jameson Hall on Jammie Steps

The flashes of panic I was having about my impending academic journey had evolved into a more pervasive sense of bewilderment by the weekend.

Part of the bewilderment is that nothing is actually as it was – the library is not where I remember it, for example, and you can't drive down University Ave. And places are called by different names: The Steve Biko Lecture Theatre, The Molly Blackburn Hall...who would have thought? I feel like I have entered a parallel universe and someone has messed with my memory.

I was unprepared for the emotion I felt climbing up Jammie steps on Thursday on the way to the postgraduate orientation session. Thankfully, at 830 in the morning there were not many students around to see the middle-aged woman with wet cheeks pausing to soak up the moment. It seems like a lifetime since I first ventured up there.

It’s a long way from handwritten assignments in the Occupational Therapy department on the other side of the cemetery below Groote Schuur Hospital. At the orientation, someone from the library was talking about consultations by appointment, the writing centre person about developing writing and the IT manager about computer labs with uncapped bandwidth and free on-campus access to wireless.

Later I noticed that the change in student diversity has been as dramatic. Now it is only age that may make me stand out from the crowd but I am willing to believe that at UCT I will be treated with suitable irreverence. At least no one here will call me “Tannie”!

I haven’t met my whole group but probably the majority are half my age...and have been studying English and language and literature in the time that I have been raising children. I am envious of the ease with which they engage with lecturers and the certainty with which they are making choices.

After two tries, I have survived the registration process and am now in proud possession of a student card. I look forward to the week ahead when “all will be revealed”. Now I just need to remind my family that the toilet-paper fairy has left the building...!

As time goes by

When I was at university in the 80s, I took notes by hand, and rewrote them at night struggling to decipher my feverish scrawl at the small desk behind the door in the room I shared with my sister. My sister surrounded her bed with a ring of salt to ward off evil spirits which she feared may have come in with the black bag of bones I had brought home for my Anatomy studies.

But I digress. Back in the day, it was acceptable to hand in assignments which were "neatly hand-written" if you didn't have access to a typewriter. Computers were still a dream, like democracy.

My dad owned a small grey Olivetti typewriter. Every evening he would sit at the kitchen table and pound away at the black keys using two fingers to write his reports or exam papers.  The tick-tack-tick-tack rhythm of the machine interspersed with a “cling” and a “swish” as he got to the end of the line, was calming, like a bedtime story, when we were too old for a nightly installment from “365 Bedtime Stories”. Sometimes, when he wasn't busy, I would get to use it for a special assignment, correcting paper at the ready...and carbon paper for copies.

I was thinking about this while trying to decide what courses to do this year, now that I am planning to charge up the brain cells. “You can look everything up before you go to register,” said my daughter. For once she didn't roll her eyes at my technological challenges as she downloaded the faculty handbook and guided me through the 400 pages.

“Are you sure you need to go to orientation all day?” she asked. “You’ll probably find your way around just fine.” Well, having not spent any significant time on the main campus the first time around, I do need a bit of help trying to “navigate the administrative maze of post-graduate studies”. I would hate anyone to have to spread salt to still my spirit if it takes to rambling around the ivy-covered buildings! 

Images of Switzerland

Sharing History

I first heard Elif Shafak speak on one of the TED talks. Her gentle, accented voice drew me in to her story. She spoke about growing up with her traditional Turkish grandmother who was a healer in the community. People would come to her with warts which they wanted to get rid of. Her grandmother would draw circles around the warts and, in time, they would shrivel up and fall off. She made the analogy that when we draw circles around ourselves, or build walls to isolate ourselves from others, we are at risk of shrivelling up and dying.

It struck a chord with me, having grown up in apartheid SA and experiencing the walls that the government built around our communities in order to cut us off from each other. If we don’t interact and learn from each other we run the risk of shrivelling up and dying – if not physically, then at least in our attitudes, beliefs and compassion for each other.

I was delighted to be able to hear her speak on more than one occasion last week in Davos. As a child she straddled two worlds – the modern, western world of her educated mother, and the traditional, superstitious world of her uneducated grandmother. In her books she allows space for both voices.

Many societies have a rich oral culture which is deemed to be “lesser” because it is women who are telling the stories.  History is remembered differently by different people and who is to say what is important enough to provide a window of understanding on what went before? 

Listening to her speak I realised that in SA there are many stories which need to be told so that we can get on with the process of healing and move forward. Sometimes all that is needed is for our experiences to be acknowledged, to feel that our voices have been heard. We all need a voice.

Getting back to Normal

Yesterday I was doing a quick grocery shop to replenish the shelves after our trip. It seemed a terribly mundane activity after the week I have just had. In fact I think that you do need to be slightly schizophrenic to travel. One moment you are being exposed to bright minds, the next getting the bread and milk; or freezing at -15 degrees and then being blasted by temperatures of 30 deg as you get off the plane.

The World Economic Forum exceeded any expectations I might have had before I left. I was not sure about the “spouses’ programme” but I discovered that all the sessions were open to everyone with the proviso that, if they were full, partners/spouses might have to make way for participants. But that certainly did not happen at any sessions I attended. So no fondue- or chocolate-making sessions for me...

The rest of the week pretty much fulfilled the promise of my last blog. I have been stimulated and moved by talks on a variety of topics:  music, art, creativity; the future of museums in the digital age; the plight of girls around the world; and the challenges of doing business in Africa.

It is hard to settle down and be normal again after all this stimulation. I had an Oprah-style “aha” moment there at 4000 metres above sea level.  Writers like Henning Mankell and Elif Shafak made me realise why I want to write. Bear with me over the next few blogs and I will tell you more... 

Davos 2013

This morning when I woke up it took a few moments for me to remember what day it was. Since leaving 30 degree weather at home on Monday, I have landed in below-freezing temperatures and it has been go, go, go. In the last two days  I have met the president of Rwanda, listened to the PM of Italy talk about how his country has turned around, heard what three young global leaders think the future of business is, attended a session on de-risking Africa, which was televised for CNBC, and fallen in love with Henning Mankell. I have also had to put on and take off so many layers of clothing several times a day which at this altitude has left me breathless. 

After one too many persons telling me that I was stupid to not take the opportunity of attending the World Economic Forum with my husband, I decided to join him. Usually I don't travel with him on business trips as he gets into  a different zone and is not much fun...

This time, however, the programme is packed full of interesting presentations which I think that he would secretly like to attend, rather than the many meetings he is sitting in. Here there are 2500 business and political leaders, as well as artists, musicians and religious leaders...all putting their heads together to "improve the state of the world".

I'm not sure how much progress they are making but when I hear what the young leaders have to say, I am full of hope that maybe the next generation will get it right. Other than wondering whose bright idea it is to have a conference in sub-zero temperatures, I am in awe of the vision to create a think tank such as this, and the implication that we need an inter-disciplinary approach to create a better world.