Julie Barker is a South African writer and producer based in Glasgow. She produced a short film, The Hide, which won best drama at the 2017 WOF Festival in Brighton. She also wrote for the series Armchair Detectives which screened on BBC 1 in 2017. In 2015, she completed an MA in Creative Writing for which she wrote a novel called Other People’s Countries. From 2013 to 2016 she worked for River City as a Story Editor and Producer. She is currently working on a series of memoir pieces; Home is one of those extracts.
Home
My earliest recollection of home was of a geographical emptiness. Apartheid created the illusion that we lived in an unpopulated country. My first memory of travel was driving through the South African Karoo, a vast semi-desert which was once an ancient seabed straddling the centre of the country. We rattled for a day through searing heat. Our pale blue Peugeot climbed sluggishly up barren hills and emitted clouds of smoke, choking passing dung beetles. We were travelling from our home in Johannesburg to Cape Town. There is no other way to get there other than driving through the Karoo. It was the first time I had a sense of what infinity must be, felt that continual impulse to move forward in a landscape where the sun reached closer than anywhere else, its flames licking at my heels like a furious goddess.
As a young white child, I had a hollow awareness that my home wasn’t quite right. The adults that steered my upbringing seemed to suffer from relentless tension; half whispers described the masses plotting our demise. Their behaviour inferred an existence on the brink of annihilation.
When I was eleven, a woman called Elizabeth cleaned our house. It was the late 1970s and she did not have a pass–the document which allowed black people to travel from one province to the next. It was designed to constrain movement and keep black people out of white areas. One day Elizabeth and I were home when there was a knock on the door. Elizabeth begged me to tell whoever was there that I was alone while she hid beneath my bed. When I answered the door, two policemen asked me if there were any black people in my home. I was frightened and led them to Elizabeth. They took her away. I was so distraught that my mother took me to the police station to find her. We were told Elizabeth had been ‘sent away’. My mother gripped my hand hard as she was strongly warned never to employ anyone without a pass again. That was the day I learnt that women have no power, that black lives don’t matter, and black female lives matter the least. My home–‘my tribe’–made me angry and ashamed and I was driven by a single driving impulse to escape.
In the late nineties, when I was twenty-six, the country of my birth became a democracy. It was a heady time filled with the promise of possibility. Johannesburg is an intoxicating city, covered by a glittering acidic dust from the gold mine dumps that lurk on its outskirts. These lunar-sculpted hills are a constant reminder of how an astonishing city gave birth to itself. During the post-apartheid honeymoon, Johannesburg was seduced by its own political success. The first democratically elected government built houses and uplifted people.
I was thoroughly immersed in the changing status quo, an active participant in creating a new world. I wrote for a newly-created television show that reflected the changing society as it happened, so to speak. The first inter-racial romance, the first HIV-positive character, the first gay wedding, the first contrite apartheid assassin. I could do or say anything and the lack of censorship was breathtaking. It felt as if my innate ability as a writer was aligned with serving humanity. The show became the first television programme to be watched by both a white and black audience. It gave birth to the phrase ‘one nation viewing.’ I had finally come home.
However, there were the difficult and controversial aspects to re-creating the South African experience on screen–such as white writers creating black worlds. There needed to be a balance of my own inbuilt prejudice and my constant need to expand the limits of experiential understanding. I had to do this in ways that were honest and unpatronising. I created stories very far outside my immediate experiences. I embraced this; it felt like a re-education of what my country was.
Alongside my social immersion, the city’s growing affluence and a cheerful disregard for city regulations, there remained a menacing undertow–a desperate violence born from oppression and shame. It was a discordant nihilism which ran like an endless motif beneath a buoyant nation, inexorably exposing fault lines. The contradictions had been there all along. We had not known how to identify them in soft focus. Twenty years on, and the wealth divide between black and white was an even more corrosive wound. While no one can deny my sincerity, my inherent privilege blinded me to what should have been utterly obvious. No matter how well intentioned and how self-aware, if you do not play on a level field, you exist in an unfair universe.
My contribution to television began to feel less like a writer reflecting their world and uncomfortably more like a colonial reflection on ‘how to exist.’ My home once again felt ‘not quite right.’ Except now I was inducting my own children into the cult of privilege, inadvertently reliving apartheid, with a home being cordoned off by electric fencing, armed guards and dogs, and serviced by other people.
Idealistically or foolishly I wanted to recreate that seductive sense of infinity (it feels remarkably similar to living on the cusp of immense change) to exist in a space where everything is novel, unexpected and therefore life-changing. In my forties, it felt like this would be my last chance. Ironically, it was privilege of being born to a British father that gave me the opportunity to make another choice. Work and luck sent me to Scotland. Glasgow is nothing like the flamboyant chaos of Johannesburg. Scotland in the summer of 2013 was a year away from the Independence Referendum. It hung in the air like a dirty word for some, and the possibility of a new future for others. It was a captivating reminder of South Africa’s first democratic elections–a time when people would vote with their hearts.
In the first few weeks, I bathed in the serenity of the merchant city dancing with pink blossoms and the lime green of beginnings. On a particular walk alongside the Kelvin River I imagined myself back in Johannesburg. It was an immersive vision, a sensuous jangle of noise and dust, drenched in a brilliant and angry heat. I opened my eyes to pale wisps of cloud in a silvery sky. The city’s gentleness was a shocking contrast to my other home. I realised I would never be able to merge the two. Egalitarianism is the lifeblood of Glasgow. It is evidenced in simple wedding bands, the salesperson who suggests you go to the shop next door as the item you want is cheaper there, or the person who hangs your lost jumper on a tree in the woods, with the hope that you may find it on your next visit. But it doesn’t pulsate like a heartbeat out of control. It doesn’t roar from an unassailable pain, or sing from the ancient bones of millions. I ached for the complexity and dysfunction of Johannesburg. My new home felt like a photographic negative.
Loss tore into the epicentre of my gut. I was overwhelmed by a savage attack of what-ifs. I was alone in this pretty city. My family and the sanctuary I had built existed in a fading life. I had built a monument to familial functionality, the children’s bedrooms, their parties, our parties, the food we had cooked, the DIY we had done, the friends we had accrued over almost two decades. Not to mention the years of therapy to sort out my racist tendencies and other childhood torments. I now lived in a basement flat in the West End beneath the sprawling interconnected lives of another family. My family were to join me in three months, but what if we could never reclaim that refuge?
There are very few words which succinctly articulate sudden and visceral rootlessness. As I settled into new routines, I began to feel like a non-participant and an observer of someone else’s life. The sense of floating through a half-life in a grey city increased. I understood on some level I was depressed. Yet it felt like something far deeper than a lack of serotonin. It came to me that I was suffering from homesickness, an absurd ache for a country where, because of the actions of my forefathers, I did not have the right to call myself citizen.
One day, I attempted to plant shrubs in the garden, and could barely penetrate the thick clay ridden soil with my spade. I tried a gardening fork. The soil was so compacted and loamy that it took every ounce of strength I could muster. As I shovelled the compost into jagged holes I had managed to fashion, it began to rain. Of course it did; this was Glasgow. The clinging wetness clouded my vision and sorrow spurted out of every pore. I ignored the fact that weeping intensely over badly fashioned plant holes was perhaps an extreme reaction. I sobbed for my new home, which was small, and my new life, which was difficult. Not life-threatening or dysfunctional, but challenging, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I realised the sanctuary in Johannesburg with its lush Swamp Cypresses, which I never tended to with my own hands, and the shining parquet floors, which I walked on for nine years and never cleaned myself, were monuments to a subconscious drive towards creating ease. And I missed it like new sobriety tormented by its own violent addiction.
As I rode the tsunami of regret it came to me that believing I deserved a life of ease was the essence of entitlement, because to live with constant ease is to be numb and oblivious. It is to tourniquet self-awareness, pain and regret, which are the seeds of resilience, empathy and wisdom. While there is nothing wrong with creating a safe space for my family, it should not be used to shelter me from growth. It was the moment I finally understood why I had left.
In between the past and the future stretches the most challenging expanse of all–the present. It is strange waiting between the death of one identity and the birth of another. Home is a fairy tale–the constructs of a culture, brick walls, smells and memories. Home is surely the collection of all our selves, past, present and future, that bear witness to the environments they have learnt from and lived in. Just like we are more than one self, home can never be one fixed place. It is an internal sanctuary where we question, battle with and embrace the endless reimagining of who we are.
You can read Julie’s previous submission, Festina Lente, here.