Here is an excellent piece by one of my co-authors at 3QD, Evert Cilliers: ‘The World Cup, My White Africaner Skin, My Fascist Parents, Mandela, Obama, and Forgiveness’. Evert grew up in South Africa, left some decades ago, and now lives in the US. I learned a good deal about South Africa from his personal journey and from the everyday human details he relates. I particularly liked his take on the life he had in the upper crust of white society, his relationships, and various episodes from his past. His writing has a couple of things that are rather rare: honesty and heart. The piece is long for a blog post but definitely worth it.
Five weeks ago I said to my brilliant girlfriend: “I'd like to see my father before he dies.” She said: “Congratulations.” She'd been asking me on and off for two years whether I'd like to go and visit him where he lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and my stock answer had always been: “I don't have the slightest interest in ever seeing my father again.”
So what changed?
You here at 3quarksdaily know me as a passionate ranter against our irresponsible elites (for my favorite screed ever, google this title: “Government Is Not The Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism Of Al Qaeda, BP And Goldman Sachs”). However, that's not what I'm up to now. This time out, I'm autobiographical. Personal. Self-revelatory. Unbuttoned. A la Moll Flanders. Or Paris Hilton. Confessions of an Opium Eater or something, at double the length of my usual rants.
I made the big Gauguin move of my life two decades ago, when I walked out on my South African Jewish Princess wife in our seven-room, three-bathroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Except I didn't go to Tahiti. I went to a garret on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For fifteen years, while I was poor and wrote, wrote, wrote my seven unpublished novels (and became the 90s slam poet Evert Eden), my ex-wife and I didn't communicate. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from her.
"I'd like to see you,” she said.
"Why?” I asked.
"I'm dying.”
More here.
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