My Brushes with The Party

For a decade or so starting in my late teens I fancied myself a leftist – perhaps even a revolutionary. I might’ve been brought up in a bourgeois home, but I could transcend it, I believed. I would be tough, and unsentimental. I would be loyal to an idea. I would disown my Jewish family. I would go to the newly revolutionised Cuba and be assigned manual work. I even bought a “Teach Yourself” book and started learning Spanish.

Now, 60 years later, I wonder why this was such an attractive proposition for me. Recently reading “Shashenka” by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I found that the main character seems to have been similarly attracted, albeit 40 years earlier and on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.  

One of the issues Montefiore addresses in the novel is one that has puzzled me for years: during all those purges of the Stalin era, why did loyal Party members confess their guilt? Ok, you could’ve put it down to the unbearable pain and humiliation of torture, the desperate need to escape it, the threats to loved ones and having no place or person to turn to. But why did the secret police and the dictators who ruled the Party want this particular script? It wasn’t as if the prisoners would be saving themselves – they knew they would be executed as traitors. Why did the state need them to confess?

The Unfolding of Memory

You could call me a hoarder but it seems that actually I am something of an archivist. I think I have kept almost every letter I have ever received before e-mails came and made letters redundant. But I also kept other kinds of souvenirs, like: a list of what my younger brother and I were planning to take on our voyage into outer space circa 1952!

Recently I decided it was time for a clear out. I've transported all this stuff across three continents without discarding almost anything. Going through my collection of papers, letters and photographs, I was at first disappointed at how little I felt I was able to throw out. But over time I've started to enjoy the process of discovering my younger selves. I contacted some old friends whom I'd forgotten, when I found information about them among my papers, and I managed to interest an archivist at the University of Cape Town Special Collections to take leaflets, newsletters and press cuttings from my undergraduate years.

The Scarf
I found a scarf I have had since I was at least a teenager and kept and can never remember wearing. It's a terrible colour for me! I was going to give it to the bric-a-brac shop at Oasis Recycling, when I decided to take a proper look at it i.e. unfold it. It has photos of movie stars from the 40's on it and some of their signatures, with a central photographic motif which says "Warners - Twentieth Anniversary of Talking Pictures". So, it was printed around 1949 then. 70 years ago!! I began to be curious about its origins. It was a bit like being at The Antiques Roadshow!

I had a feeling that it was perhaps the first "feminine" present I ever had and that was probably why I'd kept it. The most likely person to have given it to me was my Aunt Vera. She was beautiful, stylish, was great with presents and she liked me. There is another signature on it: Carli Gry. He started a fashion house in Denmark in the 40's. About two weeks later and not expecting much, I wrote to the company that bought the label some years ago, asking if they had any information about the scarf.

A Visit to Kings College, Cambridge

What a legacy I've received from my university friend Archie Mafeje! And it wasn't just his political mentoring I'm talking about.

I visited him twice in the 1960's at King's College, while he was studying there for his PhD. More than 50 years later, even though I'd invited myself, I was treated like an honored guest - all because of the photograph I have of him, which I'd scanned and sent to the University at the request of Tamsin Starr. She contacted me on behalf of The Black Cantabs Research Society, who wanted to have a photo exhibition of black graduates from Cambridge to counteract the mass of portraiture around the university, which is largely of white men and monarchs.

I was given my own personal guided tour by her, mischievously photographed on various illustrious senatorial thrones, interviewed for almost 2 hours by an academic in the Department of Social Anthropology and finally invited to High Table as the guest of the interviewer, who is a Fellow of the College.
It was an extraordinary day.




     

The Fellow who offered to host me was Dr Perveez Mody - a petite Indian woman who does research into love marriages in India. Even before I met her, when we were corresponding, I knew we would get on well. Why? Because she understood immediately that my big question about dining at High Table was sartorial. What was I going to wear? I was not going to spend days trying on dresses when I never wear them. Did I have to pack an extra pair of shoes? She reassured me - it was just before Easter so it would not be formal. Whew!

A Photograph of Archie

.

My first post on this blog in 2011 was about an exhibition that Andrew Banks mounted of Archie Mafeje's university life in Cape Town. Because the article had photographs of him, I have been contacted ever since by people wanting to use them. This one below is hanging up at the Department of Social Anthropology at Kings College Cambridge!

Last year 3 different people wanted pictures. Some were even prepared to pay for them.

But I didn't take the photograph! I wonder if someone could tell me whom it might have been? There were pavement photographers in the city who took pictures of people walking - mostly in Adderley Street - although I think this one from 1961 of Archie with Welsh Makanda, was taken in Darling Street.  The photographer would give you a ticket and you could collect the pictures some days later after they were developed. You were not obligated to buy them.

Archie and I used to meet together between the stacks of Jagger library - the main campus library. There were not many places that a black man and a white woman could meet in those years! On one occasion I noticed he had one of those tickets. (I had perhaps a half-dozen street pictures of myself at that time that I had collected.)

A Big Thank You to the Frankel 8

Two of the Frankel 8

In a year in which public life has sunk so low, only a few beacons stand out. There have been some protests which served to lift our spirits temporarily, but in the end seemed to have very little effect. And then there has been the court case brought by the Frankel Eight, over 30 years after their alleged abuse as children, which provided a landmark ruling and which will have significant consequences for survivors of sexual abuse in South Africa both now and in the future. The proscription period of 20 years for charges of sexual abuse has been ruled unconstitutional by the High Court! If this judgement is confirmed in the Constitutional Court it will open the way to a change in the law.
Countries vary with regard to the proscription period or statute of limitations as it is sometimes called. For example, Canada and the UK have no time limitation for cases of child sexual abuse; whereas the US, Europe and Australia do.

Miranda Friedmann

Miranda Friedmann (From Women and Men Against Child Abuse) laid out in a recent radio interview how events in the life of a survivor may contribute to "late disclosure" and their only be ready to lay charges against a paedophile abuser after 30 or 40 years (as is the case with the Frankel 8). This happens for survivors who actually remember being assaulted. How much more likely is late disclosure when a survivor discovers in therapy that they have unknowingly dissociated an experience of assault, which then became occluded from their consciousness for many years. This is not an unusual occurrence in my 40 years of practicing psychotherapy.

If I think back to the patients for whom this was true, very few of them would have brought a case against their abuser anyway. However, the realization that one could, and what that would be like would certainly add a component of empowerment to the healing process. As an example, I know of one person, assaulted countless times by Catholic priests over thirty years ago, who, in trying to bring a case, has been met with delaying tactics, helplessness, inaction, derision and ridicule. He is now hugely encouraged by this ruling.

I was abused by anti-Semitic nuns while in St. Joseph's Hospital (now the Vincent Palotti), Pinelands

Cape Town in 1945 or 46. Since the High Court ruling I have had a few wonderful peer counselling sessions, imagining bringing a court case against a couple of dead Palatine nuns and a hospital that no longer exists! I can afford to be lighthearted about this now - I have had the benefit of hundreds of hours of attention over several decades for what happened to me in just a few days. For incest survivors and victims of paedophiles, for whom the abuse can extend over years, and for whom the effects are so long lasting and damaging, this ruling is a big milestone in their journey of recovery whether or not they choose to take legal action.

Sunday 26 July

Hello from the famous Hotel Mille Collines (featured in the film Hotel Rwanda and in the book A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche). This was the treat I planned for myself today. The first time I came to Kigali I thought this place was far too grand for me - and it kinduv is. But I've wanted a swim all week, and I figured a hot walk uphill to get to this pool was better than the uphill walk I would have after my swim if I went to the Circle Sportif. So I have had a great day here, taking advantage of the free WiFi and trying to catch up on the readings for the 2nd week which is all about peacemaking, keeping and building. This is a bit dreary for me - it doesn't have the adrenaline rush of trauma and conflict!

The outstanding features of the first week of the course which concentrated on causes and actors of genocide were of-course my fellow students, our lecturers, the way one is forced to think about genocide and perpetration, and a terrible but extraordinary movie that we only watched because our eminent history lecturer had an emergency meeting with his vice-chancellor. (More about these below)

One of my goals was to meet with my fellow mental health professionals and at my instigation we had a formal meeting after class on Wednesday when 5 of us met and introduced ourselves and the work that we do. We have two men who are facilitators of a form of Social Therapy which has networks all over the country. People are recruited (I don't know how) and they meet for a week. The groups are mixed - from different social classes and gender and most importantly victim/survivors and perpetrators or the children thereof. With the safety they are able to create, people hear about each others experiences and with the expression of feelings that occurs, some kind of reconciliation happens. Another man is a psychotherapist, spiritual healer and cultural activist. He has lots of stories about how breaking cultural taboos causes mental illness - the biggest taboo being the killings that have occurred in the post-colonial era. The other woman, besides myself is a clinical psychologist, who has studied at the University of Johannesburg. But she has done many other things including being a local councillor here in Rwanda.

I'm getting behind so I'll just mention the name of the movie so you won't be left too much in suspense. It was "The Act of Killing". Joshua Oppenheimer, a documentary filmmaker made it about killers of communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965. These perpetrators won that "dirty war" so they are proud and boastful about what they did and were happy to re-enact their modes of killing. It has won a lot of prizes and there are many interviews online with Joshua O. because it is so horrific and almost unbelievable. The most telling interview of him that I read tells the story of how he came to make this film. He had been working with some survivors on the rubber plantations and he didn't think what he was filming was all that interesting - the sites of mass graves etc. The survivors themselves suggested he film the killers and so he did!

Rwandan Vignettes contd

I don't know how to change the order of these posts on my new tablet, so read the one below first. To cut a long story short - I decided not to go to Tanzania this weekend but I did go on a motorbike taxi - Fred on one and me on another - to order my wedding outfit (iterero) in a little shop at the end of a whole floor of wedding shops. I also found out how the ritual goes for a traditional wedding - the one I'm going to miss. The brides' parents bring out the wrong sister to the groom's wedding party and they go through the ritual of saying, "No she is not the one we came for," until the correct one is brought out from her father's house. Only then does the groom come forward. The picture here is of Fred helping me to choose the material for my garment in the shop.

Rwandan Vignettes

I feel I should write about the course today but it wasn't quite as interesting as my adventures in Kigali. I went to get a SIM card before class. The woman who had to fill in my passport details on her computer got distracted. Why? Because she said, "I can't believe how old you are! You look so strong...." I smiled. (I found out later that the average lifespan in Rwanda is 65 - so no wonder she was surprised.) She asked if I had lots of children. "No," I said trotting out my usual facetious response, "I forgot to have them." "You forgot?" She was wide-eyed and open-mouthed, "But didn't your neighbors remind you?" That was not a response I've ever had before!

It says a lot about Rwandan society and I told this story in class when we were discussing the intimacy of the violence that characterized the Rwandan genocide - neighbour killing neighbour, teammates killing former team members, Hutu husbands killing Tutsi wives on pain of death themselves - the local genocidaires knew their victims, had drunk banana beer with them and had traded cows with them. (Jean Hatzfeld: "Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak." (2006))

Fred, my Rwandan "son" - we adopted each other about 9 years ago - came to meet me after the course finished for the day. He is getting married in 3 weeks time. That's not wholly correct - he has been through month's of family negotiations and rituals and last week had a civil ceremony. He had yet to tell me the plans. He is a rather secretive person - as a genocide orphan, he is not used to confiding in anyone. He has a habit of surprising me. In Cape Town he was always opening new businesses in Belville and only telling me when they were up and running. So I ask him what are the plans for the wedding?
"Well we still have to have the introductions where the families meet."
"I thought you'd done that already?" I'm a bit taken aback.
"No, it's the traditional wedding. Do you want to come to that?" he asks.
"Sure, of-course. Don't I need a special garment? I've been asking around..."
"Yes," he says, "but that can be arranged - you are on my list."
"When is it?"  I' m wondering how much time I have to do this.
"This weekend."
 Good God! "Why didn't you tell me?!"
A little giggle, "it's in Tanzania."
 "WHAT?" I'm astounded, exasperated and clutching my head at the craziness of all this. He never told me his bride was from Tanzania!

Apparently, for Rwandans its no big deal to cross this border. The 35 members of his entourage are all sorted - he has hired a bus for them and they don't have to pay and, most importantly, they have been preparing themselves for this for months! I will have to pay twice, travel for about 14 hours all told in 30 degree heat, and stay overnight in Tanzania - uhrrr!!! I can't do it!!!

Not Yet "Beyond Trauma" - Genocide Travels

I'm in Kigali for the second time in a year. I'm going to use my blog as a kind of journal to keep me reflecting and communicating because I'm on a 2 - week course entitled "Genocide and Mass Atrocities: Actors, Causes and Responses to Violence." It's run by the Aegis Trust who not only set up the Genocide Museum here but who are now in the archive, busy digitizing the evidence of the gacaca courts - 25 million of handwritten pages! and something which has never been done before. We were sent readings for the course about 2 months ago and were told to read everything before we came. It has been a steep learning curve and I've loved it! I'm not quite done yet - a few more papers to go! Today was the first day - there are about 45 - 50 of us here sitting in a big U - shape.
A large Rwandan contingent - academics from faculties of Law and Education, government employees, people involved with local governance, heads of small NGOs concerned with community mental health, marginalized  Batwa - the small indigenous people of Rwanda - and Rwandan culture. There are people from Kenya and Uganda, from a Genocide Studies Department in Amsterdam, a group of Swiss anthropology students, a British guy from the Royal Commonwealth Society and me. I have found out that quite a few of the Rwandans have studied short courses in South Africa. We have a deal with Rwanda that their students pay the same rate as South Africans so guys have studied governance at the University of Pretoria and the assistant head of the Law School studied in "Potch" - his abbreviation!
There is lots of discussion; many different viewpoints. Phil Clark, the Australian course leader from SOAS is very encouraging and validating of comments and questions so we are seeing an open space being created. We touched on the sore point of whether we would be allowed to say ANYthing i.e. talking about who is Tutsi or Hutu or that there was not a genocide? Our Rwandan lecturer put it as a question: Is genocide denial a hate crime or part of freedom of speech? In Rwanda denying that there was genocide in 1994 is a criminal offense and chargeable in court. You cannot deny, minimize or trivialize the genocide. This is also the case in some European countries with regard to the Holocaust but not in the USA. There it is considered part of freedom of speech. With regard to definitions - whether mass violence is genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime - these should not be seen as describing a hierarchy of suffering. "Rather" he asked, "can you talk about these in a neutral way without being biased by the experience you have gone through?" This seems to be the difficulty the Rwandan refugees that I have met in the dialogue groups at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre seem to experience. They are not able to do this.

Rhodes Had To Rise in Order to "Fall"

Photograph by Tony Carr

In an ironic twist the Rhodes statue which was finally removed from the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT) this week - 9th April 2015 - had to be "lifted" in order to "fall". But it could have fallen :
 the occupiers of "Azania House" (the administration building) could easily have arranged it if vandalism was their intention. It clearly wasn't. There was much more at stake - the conscientizing of the whole academic community - not only at the University of Cape Town but nationwide. I think all those critics I have just read on the news24 website who were disgusted by the students' behaviour yesterday should realize this.

Furthermore, I watched on video as one young man bashed at Rhodes' carved face with a wooden plank, while another tied a bucket with red paint round his head and I wondered what was happening for them. It was as if they wanted to  destroy forever the greedy colonialist vision that his gaze over the Cape flats symbolized - the installation of white hegemony from Cape to Cairo. It's scary for many people to see this. But actually it's human to feel rage at centuries of injustice and at present humiliations. Its just that so few of us have ever been allowed to express this kind of rage, we get scared by it. I once saw some enlightened parents give their angry little boy a plastic baseball-bat to go hit against a tree. What was so different last Thursday afternoon? Its not just children who feel rage - we all do. By the time we are adults it's usually suppressed and our bodies pay the price. So if a couple of young men expressed their violent rage by bashing at Rhodes' head, I for one, am grateful to them - no-one was hurt in the process - they got to feel empowered and it was the perfect moment to savor their victory.

Photograph by Tony Carr

 Every young person should have that feeling at some point in their lives! I doubt they will ever forget what they did and what was achieved by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

Many of the occupiers of Azania House slept in the conference room named belatedly to honour Archie Mafeje. Having known Archie, who wrote from experience about white liberal hegemony at the universities of Southern Africa, I think he would've been pleased to have played a role in this first big step to effect a change, but he would in no way be satisfied with it....

The Quiet Demise of Zonnebloem

Sometime earlier this year, I arranged a meeting at St Marks District Six and when I gave people directions I told them to follow the signs to Zonnebloem. I was a bit surprised therefore when on my way there, I saw the sign had been changed to District Six. This was the original 1867 name of the area close to the Cape Town Central Business District (CBD) which for over a century housed a mixed community and then was declared to be for whites only in 1966.

It gave me a bit of a lift - Wow! the City had given the area back its rightful name - or so I thought.....

A few weeks later, I am walking around the Cape Town Art Fair and I chance upon a video made by Haroon Gunn-Salie. And what is it about? It is a film of 2 hoodies going out at night with ladders and rolls of wide tape replacing all the Zonnebloem signs. I am rather amazed to see this evidence of what actually had transpired. Far from this being a decision taken by the City Fathers (or in Cape Town's case, the Mothers) it turns out to be a "site-specific installation" by a young artist and his friends. And do you know? Its been up since August 2013 and not a single one has been removed! and I guarantee none will be. In addition it is probably illegal to do what Gunn-Salie did, but you will never hear of a court case about it. A terrible wrong - the apartheid government's forced removals in 1968 of thousands of people from a vibrant community - which was then euphemized by calling the area Zonnebloem (Sunflower) - was quietly addressed by a brilliant artist who sensed the time was right for a return to the place-name - "District Six". No-one has been offended or excluded by his action. In fact his works on the forced removals of District Six have won him great acclaim.

The University of Cape Town students currently protesting about the statue of Rhodes (Southern Africa's arch-colonialist) so prominently placed on campus, or even Max Price, the beleaguered Vice-Chancellor, could do a lot worse than consult with Haroon Gunn-Salie about what to do with the Rhodes statue and what to put in its place!

Andre Brink - an appreciation

When I was living in England in the 1970's and 80's, there were two major reactions to my being a white South African:
1) Taxi-drivers and the white middle- and owning- classes would suddenly feel free to express racist ideas and opinions, assuming that I would be in agreement with them or
2) I was ostracized by the social activists and left-wingers whose company I sought in the Women's Movement and in the other organisations I joined. I didn't always realize this. People would just turn away from me when they heard my accent. It wasn't violent - just isolating. And of-course, it led to feelings of self-hate and guilt. And I blamed and despised the Afrikaners who had devised apartheid and the racism it symbolized.

I don't know when I first discovered the books of Andre Brink - it was probably in the late 70's. Maybe it was when the English translations were published? They were a revelation. Here was a terrific writer - a white Afrikaner - writing great stories about the tense world I knew - full of the racial complexities with which I was familiar. I felt understood, validated, intrigued and informed by them. They made an enormous difference to how I perceived myself and other white South Africans. He was writing in very difficult circumstances but he did it anyway. Reading his books: Rumours of Rain, Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season and An Instant in the Wind - gave me courage. I could overcome the guilt, I could tackle the racism that I carried, I could maybe even love myself. He was a white South African of whom I was immensely proud and I recommended his books to anyone who showed an interest beyond the usual stereotyping. Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, from California, who in the early 80's had begun to run workshops for white people on Unlearning Racism, was one such person.

Andre Brink died last Friday at the age of 79. The obituaries and articles this week are very matter of fact - although starting to improve: for instance, click on the link to see one in the UK Guardian. He was considered a great writer and was highly honored and decorated. Somehow no-one was writing why. Novels engage our emotions - he did that in so many different ways exposing the pain inherent in the relationships we had and still have in our country, and he was especially great at revealing and recreating the danger and tensions that existed when ordinary human behaviour was forbidden and might be discovered and punished.

I know I am not alone in thanking him for what he gave to the world. Hamba Kahle Andre Brink!

An Intriguing Coincidence - World War One and the Rosetta Mission

In an almost perfect synchronization of events, the 96th Armistice Day marking the end of World War One which is always commemorated at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month was last year - the 100th anniversary of the start of the war in 1914 - followed on the next day by an extraordinary European collaboration. European scientists from those previously warring countries came together 10 years ago to send a spacecraft to explore a comet - Churyumov-Gerasimenko - 310 million miles from us and on the 12th November 1914, the small lander separated from the orbiting Rosetta, came in to land, bounced twice and was finally stable, sitting on very rocky terrain on 67P (the shortened name of the comet). Scientists waited with bated breath in an auditorium for a blip on a screen signalling the Philae landing and the place erupted in cheers and hugs.

It was heartening to see that the spirit of human comradeship which was present within the respective armies could almost a century later which included yet another World War, cross national boundaries for such an historic occasion. Maybe even the Middle East could succumb to peace and collaborative endeavors in 100 years time?

Now, a couple of months later, not many reprises of the year 2014 include the Philae landing - a testament to the fickleness and national chauvinism of the global media.

Where Is My Tree?

Everyone knew it was a crap present. Barmitzvah boys all over the country probably silently groaned when they opened the envelope and saw the certificate. Oh no! Not another tree in Israel! (Sometimes if the donor was flush, it was six trees in Israel!) But you couldn't say anything negative. How could we not be delighted and honored to help the Halutziot (the Pioneers) who were taming the land and making the desert bloom? The taboo against saying how you felt about this non-present was as heavy as speaking ill of the dead.

A parent's voice would change - become almost reverential - "How thoughtful!" You had been honored in some mysterious way. Thus generations of South African Jewish children were cajoled and persuaded into writing 'Thank You' letters to the people who gave us, as presents, trees in our name in Israel. These were usually older relatives or our parents' friends - people with - dare I say it - no imagination. If the aim was to make of us Zionists or at least supporters of Israel, it eventually did weave a kind of mysterious magic.

How could a tree be in my name? Did someone carve my name in the bark or were there plaques attached to each tree like in the botanical gardens? If I had been given a lot of trees, did they plant them in the shape of my name so that if I flew over in a helicopter I could see my name written in trees? If I went to Israel could I find my tree?

The Psychologist Adventurer

Maps Mapoyane and Gail Womersley

Earlier this year Gail Womersley gave a talk to the Cape Town Self-psychology group (CTPSPG) about her 2 years working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). It turned out that we were extremely fortunate to hear this plucky young clinical psychologist. MSF, recognising her qualities - she is creative, culturally sensitive, eloquent and charismatic - had sent her on an event-packed fund-raising tour to raise money for their projects in the war-torn Central African Republic.

It seems that self-psychology still provides something of an emotional and theoretical touchstone for Gail. With MSF, she had moved far into the field of trauma response in a very short space of time and probably felt the need for recognition and understanding from her former colleagues and mentors. I think she got that - we were spellbound. She had raised the question of whether the kind of short-term work she was doing was ethically acceptable from the viewpoint of promoting the kind of changes to which long-term therapy aspires. A question I felt plagued by myself at the Trauma Centre where I often felt that I was dispensing plasters for wounds that were never going to heal. I don't think many of us were too concerned about addressing, let alone answering such a question - it was the riveting adventure of it all that was so gripping.

"Outwitting History" - preserving Yiddish

Twenty-three years ago when I and my siblings were clearing up our parents' flat in Cape Town, I asked Lillian Dubb whom I'd met 10 years before at a summer Yiddish program in Oxford, what we should do with my mother's collection of Yiddish books. I think Chava Leah (which is how I knew her because we all used our Yiddish names that summer) referred us to the Kaplan Centre at UCT. Someone came to look at the books. They took some they didn't have copies of, I kept a few, including the two volume: "Jerusalem of Lithuania" (about the Jews of Vilna) and my sister took a copy of the Rakishok (Rokiskis) Yiskor-buch, but what of the rest? The person said we pack up the rest and when we have enough to fill a container or half or whatever, we send them to a Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seemed a bit sad that no-one would want them in South Africa (quite a few had originally come from the Western Hemisphere already - Argentina no less) but it was comforting to know that we didn't have to throw them away or bury them - something Jews do with worn out prayer books.

And that was pretty much all I knew or bothered to find out until a friend lent

me "Outwitting History", Aaron Lansky's account - both hilarious and moving - about saving a whole culture before it got thrown in the trash by hiring trucks, donning gloves and doing the hard dusty work of saving Yiddish books from attics, basements and garages all over the United States and beyond. Then subsequently setting up in a specially designed building, the  Yiddish Book Centre.

I've forgotten most of the Yiddish I learnt that summer in 1982 but the impact of what it meant to me to study it has stayed with me to this day. It was a form of cultural liberation. I wrote about the experience shortly after, in a booklet that some of us in the London Jewish Women's History Group published

The International Slavery Museum

On an autumn day last October, whilst on a visit to London, I travelled by train to Liverpool - a city which I had never visited in almost 30 years of living in the UK. A bitterly cold wind swept me down towards my waterfront hotel. I had come for an overnight visit in order to spend the next day at the International Slavery Museum which comprises one floor of the warehouse-like building housing the Maritime Museum.

What had led me to make this special trip?

Last year I attended a few day workshops organised by the Human Rights Media Centre (HRMC) in collaboration with the Cape Town Holocaust Centre. To these, the HRMC brought people from the refugee community together with South Africans who had experienced human rights violations during the apartheid years. Shirley Gunn of the HRMC had asked me to come in case people giving testimony needed emotional support.

The event is structured so that the Holocaust, the exhibition and the Centre's educators, provide both the containment and the catalyst for invoking feelings about the other atrocities the participants have experienced. Survivors being enabled to tell their stories in the context of the group listening and acknowledgement, serves to break down barriers between people and communities. This may not be the goal of the 2 organisations involved, but that is my viewpoint of what the workshops achieve.

I think it was the second time I went: we had been taken round the exhibition and were having a debrief about what came up for people. A Cameroonian refugee said: "I feel bad. It's as if we black people are not important. There is no museum for us. Slavery transported millions of Africans and many died - it was our holocaust."

Immigrant Analysts and the Search for an Emotional Home

Papers on the subject of the immigrant analyst seem to have floated into my awareness in recent weeks. There was a chapter by Kirloff about the consequences for psychoanalysis in the UK from the immigrant analysts who arrived there fleeing from the Third Reich. A recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues features papers by two very different analysts: Glenys Lobban - a white South African practising in New York and Dori Laub - a Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist, who has practised both in Israel and the USA. Now the International Association of Self-Psychology has sent out notices for their conference to be held in October this year in Jerusalem and lo-and-behold, the title is: "Where Do We Feel At Home?: Self Psychological Perspectives of Belonging and Not Belonging".

It seems the time has come for me to reflect on my own immigrant experience as a therapist, both in the UK and then when I returned to South Africa (which was both a homecoming and an immigration after 32 years away). Glenys Lobban uses the term "double consciousness" coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, to describe her experience of the multiple selves the immigrant has to negotiate in her new country. Among them was the position of both simultaneously being inside her own experience of foreignness and seeing herself and her foreignness through the eyes of someone living in her new host country - “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.   The keyword here is "always". Just in order to survive, an immigrant does need at times to perceive  themselves and their culture as others see them. (I would call this an "assimilating self"). But to be always having to do this and for it to be through the negative lens of racism - this is what I think was meant by "double consciousness".

"The Possibility of Love"

My title is a quote from Jeannette Winterson's wonderful memoir "Why be Happy When you Could

be Normal?" She writes about her relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson and her ultimately successful attempt to find her biological mother. It is also in my opinion, an extended love letter to her lover Susie Orbach, with whom she started a relationship as she was writing this book. She says in the memoir that in response to Susie's bestseller: "The Impossibility of Sex", (which she read before she met her), she had thought of writing a book called "The Possibility of Love." And this is partly what her book is about.

It made me think about the different ways we can express love and how the digital age gives us even more possibilities. About 30 years ago, Nancy Kline and Christopher Spence wrote "At Least a Hundred Principles of Love". Pity I didn't buy it when I could - probably a collector's item by now. I wonder whether attending the big events in one's family like weddings and important birthdays figured as a principle on their list? I somehow doubt it. But it certainly figures on the lists of some members of my immediate family! So when my brother who lives in London, recently celebrated an important birthday, it put me in a quandary I hadn't foreseen. My family knows me well enough and they excuse me when it comes to weddings (because I don't believe in marriage) or circumcisions (I boycott them!) but I can hardly muster a political objection to the birthday of a beloved brother. I spent a couple of days looking at flights and then my sister came up with a brilliant idea. We could collect memoirs and photos of my brother from family members and friends and compile a photobook as a surprise gift. It would be more lasting and memorable than turning up for a few days to attend a dinner and exchange a few pleasantries with cousins one hardly ever sees.

So I went into the organizing of this surprise with gusto. And my partner - who is a digital wiz - searched out photobooks online.

Why We Need a Language for Ethical Power

Last week the Jewish Community in Cape Town couldn't get enough of Peter Beinart. Though he is a controversial figure in Zionist circles who has spoken out against Israel's occupation of the West Bank, he was invited to speak from morning to night. On January 23rd at the Albow Centre Zionists who had come to heckle  found themselves charmed. Why? Well he is a brilliant speaker and a very erudite Jewish scholar. He also made a point of showing himself as a supporter of the existence of a Jewish state and a proud Jew before he explained his position about the crisis of Zionism. Furthermore, he is one of our own - his parents were Capetonians and when he wryly revealed that his most virulent critics were members of his own family, he pretty much had us in the palm of his hand.

That evening some members of the audience fully expecting to get heated at hearing another self-hating Jew, found themselves inexplicably calmed and soothed by Beinart's rootedness in Jewish religion and culture as well as his sensitivity to the priorities and fears within the Jewish community.

He made one really potently illuminating point: Throughout Jewish history we have seen ourselves as victims and this is part of the problem in Israeli politics today. Our festivals - Purim, Pesach, Hannukah - have as their theme: We were attacked, We survived, Let's eat! It is a language of victimhood. We don't go on to relate the stories of how our ancestors did battle afterwards and slayed multitudes in revenge, for instance. We lack a language to talk about the ethical responsibility of Jewish power. This lack is reflected in Israeli politics too. A country that has the fifth largest army in the world and is a global arms exporter still sees itself as needing to behave with impunity because of its Holocaust history. He made a plea for a broader panoply of images than just those of Holocaust victimhood or of military triumphalism.

Can you think of any? Do you know of any countries (or philosophers) that have a language to talk about the ethical responsibilities of power? Do any of these ever practice what they preach?