Inception

As I make preparations for the move to Joburg after a successful week I can't help but think back to the beginning of my writing journey.

I was a few years into my boarding school experience. Taking connecting taxis while hitch hiking was a common occurrence- an inescapable reality really for those who had no mode of transport at home. Every Home Weekend it was the same thing. Grab your luggage, get a taxi and carry on until you finally get home. During this time and every other time since taxi drivers had carved out a reputation for themselves.

Uneducated, quick to anger black men who were forced daily to deal with the realisation that they would at no point be more than what they were at the time. It was the dictionary definition of "dead end" job. Where all dreams basically go to die. To say that they were the bottom of the food chain when it came to ambition and education would be putting it mildly. Uncultured angry black man was the consensus and resounding interpretation.

So I am in a taxi back home as usual. I am sitting directly behind the driver. He has phased all of us out- as they do- and he is simply focusing on the road and getting where he needs to be. He then rolls down his window, my eyes for some inexplicable reason follow his actions. After the window is all the way down, he reaches out his free hand. He proceeds to open up his palm, his hand facing the wind. And as we pick up speed, the wind runs through the spaces between his fingers. He starts to drum at the air with his fingertips as if finding music in the air breeze. To me it was almost like he was playing the piano and the notes all existed in the wind and in some place he alone knew of.

I remember feeling like I had somehow found this unsung kindred spirit. Someone who saw so much more than what was readily visible, this was a young man who found solace in his own mind. Someone who was connected to this underlying rhythm that had borrowed elements off of mother nature herself. Someone who existed beyond the here and now. Someone who found peace and belonging in some other realm of being that was outside his current circumstance. A daydreamer.

That was in that moment I witnessed the most extraordinary calling in the most ordinary circumstance. I had this insatiable need to write about this. To put it in black and white. Where this feeling and need came from I could never say. From that day on I drew from human experiences, I drew from the most basic human interactions and connections and coined that my "art".

As a young,black female from the Eastern Cape it never occurred to me that my interpretation of the world as I knew it could someday yield it's own career path. And yet here I am years later struggling to fully comprehend this moment in time for what it truly is. Am I really deserving? Is this some fluke? Am I really realising a dream I never even knew I had?

Much like that one taxi driver who helped me begin my journey by simply listening to and drumming his fingertips to the beat of the wind. I surrender myself to forces beyond myself. And I hope against all hope that my song will lead me and that one day when I am gone. It will be a song worth listening to.