Next month it will be exactly thirty years ago that I turned 18 in the nick of time to vote in our first free and fair elections in South Africa. It was a tremendously hopeful time. I lay on my bedroom floor ugly crying while listening to Radio 702 on my red double cassette player with AM/FM radio that I got from my grandparents for Christmas (happy birthday on the other side Grandpa). That lil boombox was usually put to excellent use recording mixed tapes from Alex Jay’s show on Radio 5, but on that historical day I listened to interviews of all those standing in long queues to cast their first votes.
I had just matriculated and was burning to leave my hometown, Pretoria, seat of the Apartheid regime. That watershed year was of course a time for affirmative action and so all the accolades of one who peaks too soon did nothing to get me into the only Medical School I applied to (cocky!) at the University of Cape Town.
At the last minute I got into a BSc at the University of Pretoria and after 6 months they allowed the top percentile to transfer to Medicine. So that’s what happened. And I hated it. I would seek refuge in the Cinema Nouveau that screened art movies and try to ignore the sickly sweet stench of formaldehyde and death seeping from my pores after a day of dissecting Tannie Stinky, my cadaver. I remember almost nothing about the endless langdradige lectures on Microbiology, but recently when I stumbled upon an old folder of notes from Anatomy class I laughed at the cover which was a smoky image of silent screen star Greta Garbo. Perhaps the book of my life should be judged by that cover.
1994 was an excellent year for indie movies. As every older generation ever has said — they don’t make ‘em like they used to! Some of the favourites blazing through my veins three decades later: Pulp Fiction, Léon: The Professional, Bullets Over Broadway, Heavenly Creatures, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Natural Born Killers, Clerks, The Secret of Roan Inish, Vanya on 42nd Street, to name just a few. My mind said the only way to truly be of service in this world was to become a doctor, but my heart said the only way to make it through the day was to hide in the movies.
Three years later, while the Truth and Reconciliation Commision was on TV, I made a difficult decision that I was quite sure I would regret forever — I quit my dream of becoming a doctor. And I went as far away as I could, America, to study what I loved, Film.
I shed tears of delight in my lectures for a solid week at the wonders of a liberal arts education. I enrolled in double the necessary course load because I loved everything so much and didn’t want to miss a minute. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Film, I worked in Hollywood for a bit, got engaged, but ended up broken hearted and back home in Pretoria.
A couple of years later, my hubby and I moved to New York so I could study at NYU. The new career plan was academia. But after the Master’s, I was done. The atmosphere in that department was so terribly cold and I felt completely disenchanted with the ivory tower. So we got stuck into the “real world” and worked in humanitarian aid in Afghanistan after paying off our loan in Japan. Then it was motherhood to the power of two. Juggling two infants eight months apart in the Eastern Cape where we knew not a soul. That’s about as real as it gets.
After a move to Cape Town I ended up teaching at Stellenbosch University and have been there, save for a five year stint building up a Waldorf High School, ever since. This past Halloween I suddenly decided to apply for a PhD and thought it unlikely that I would get funding at this late stage of life and in this skin at this time. I quickly pulled together an application on the day of the deadline before I could let good sense prevail.
While facilitating at the Buddhist Retreat Centre in December I received the email I never expected. After weathering countless rejections from all corners for some years it was a “we’re pleased to inform you.” And so I enter this new year with a grateful heart. Joyfully beginning what I started three decades ago as an idealistic young woman.
It is now, at almost half a century, that I see how lucky it was not to get into the University of Cape Town in 1994. I’m quite sure that the delights of the Mother City would have kept me content enough to complete all six years of a MBChB. Perhaps I would have suffered through the two year internship and a year’s community service. All I know for sure is that it was never my path.
My son and I were walking and talking this holiday in Plett and I told him about the producer at New Regency Productions in LA who called me up begging me to stay on and how I could have continued in the film industry and lived a totally different life. But then again, that was not my path. The High School that I helped pioneer might not have been buried by salacious politics and I could still be sweating in those trenches. Again, not my path.
My only desire ever was to help the world. I wanted to relieve suffering. But it turns out there are so many ways we can help ourselves and others. I landed in the emergency room with a sliced toe within half an hour of arriving at my parents place at the start of the holidays and was so very grateful for the expert care of the medical staff and equally, that it was not my role to administer it.
This holiday I realised that we can rest in the profound understanding that our lives are exactly as they are meant to be, even when we think we’ve strayed far from the mark and hardly recognise who or where we are.
“As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion—usually while he’s lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina,” writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). “It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.” (from "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl read for free)
I found myself reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by accident, which I had read previously when my babies were babies. I’m going to excuse myself as having been too exhausted and hormonal in the year 2007 to have fully registered it until I was a quarter way through this second reading. It cries out for a screen adaptation. And reminds me somewhat of this season’s sensation Saltburn. TikTokkers are titillated by the kinky sexual shenanigans, but I’m more interested in Emerald Fennell’s feminist lens. I loved her Promising Young Woman (and her turn in Call the Midwife wearing her acting hat).
In listing off some of my favourite films from that seminal year 1994, I am keenly aware that almost all of them are headed by the Great White Male Auteur. In this boys’ club we have Tarantino, Luc Besson, Woody Allen, Peter Jackson, Mike Newell, Oliver Stone, Kevin Smith, John Sayles, Louis Malle, Ben Stiller (his debut as director was our Gen X wet dream Reality Bites, which I’m sorry to say isn’t nearly as good as you remember, it’s actually 100% cringe). But Jane Campion’s The Piano was my fave fetish. I could probably quote it line for line, shot by shot.
It is particularly telling that one of my very favourite directors Kelly Reichardt’s first film also came out in 1994, River of Grass. Did I see it? No, I did not. Nor did she get nearly as many opportunities as the other indie darlings — Todd Haynes, Wes Anderson, Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino…and the one woman (and nepo baby) Sofia Coppola. It took six years of hard hustle to get Reichardt’s next film Old Joy off the ground and then only thanks to an inheritance. It is a film I love and often think of. Most recently she completed her eighth, Showing Up, its quiet wisdom and humour hums through my days. As all good stories through time have done, her oeuvre helps us be more human, more attuned to our “place in the family of things” (Mary Oliver), it soothes and dare I say it, helps us heal. Reichardt used to teach at NYU and summed it up as “a zone of hacks and bad dudes.” I find that strangely reassuring since at almost every step I have thought the problem is me. Too sensitive, y’know. But the fact that an artist of such insight saw it too, helps me know that I wasn’t mistaken to leave when I did.
Although some of these fresh 90’s films, now somehow 30 years old, address queer (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and mental health (The Madness of King George) concerns, save for Once Were Warriors, a devastating Maori tale, and the mesmerising Scent of Green Papaya from Vietnam, they are all white stories.
The topic of my PhD will be a step towards repairing these erasures. Not least of all, within me. Coming to terms with my birthright as part of the problem, born from the cruelty of colonisers and not cut out to be a saver of lives in the ways I’d hoped, but learning how to be part of the endless process of healing… even as I literally hobble into this New Year on my wounded left foot (couldn’t resist a filmic allusion there).
If I’m quiet, it’s because I have plenty to read and write this year and the next. I am surrounded by my sweet writers group on this sunny windy morning in beautiful Cape Town and they’ve been chirping Dr. Louw in my direction. So, eventually and again, shall we begin?
Loved this, soon-to-be Dr Louw!! You have such a knack for writing beautifully about complex things.