I pack ‘Kathy Acker’ in the safety of my suitcase; faux infantile doodles, Arabic script, decorated maps and scrambled genitalia. Bricolage, transgressive words read outside the city, in the rural bush where ossified conventions are laid to rest, words outside the real, outside the neon and the light; I am reading her words in the genuine, the authentic, the make believe. I pack ‘Kathy Acker’, with her tattoo patterned skin and trademark one long earring, away, absurdist theatre replaced with extravagant simple sea green trees.

 

We drive into Mozambique, through the Giryondo border post in the Kruger Park, into the Mozambique animal park, the great Transfrontier. As we leave the thatched, perfectly pristine customs office with computers and uniformed men in it, I wonder why I suddenly feel different. Why does crossing a border, an imaginary arbitrary line, make me believe that I am in a different place, a different space, another country, foreign and alien? I look outside; some indigenous impala gently graze the leaves off a ‘wag ‘n bietjie’ acacia tree. The thorns catch my doubts. Letaba, the camp in the Kruger Park where we spent the last night seems so far away, an ugly laager that someone bought in a cheap airport gift shop and stuck in the middle of the bush, painted badly, surrounding and capturing gigantic Maroela and Apple Leaf trees, devastating the idea of pure green and real wood. Somehow, across the border there is silence, it lasts forever. The tin radio that spewed out the news of the world at Letaba, no longer works.  And yet, for me, with western ears, the silence makes me afraid, at any moment will it tear into shrieks, gunfire, explosions, executions? The sound of institutions quietly, efficiently, unstoppably at work, slipping radioactive waste into the landscape, readying weapons for new wars. But it never does. Therein lies its power, its power to unmask.  ‘Kathy Acker’ lies peacefully; at rest under black lace underpants and sweat shirts and sun screen.

 

The policeman who checks the car at the border has tacked three photographs onto the pin board above his head, three photographs of three men, Boeremag escapees, men who want to overthrow freedom and bring fear. The policeman must do his duty to spoil the war on terror. “Have you seen these men,” he asks us?

 

“No,” my friend replies, and then he laughs, “but in this area having the name Flippie or Hendrick and a scar that lines your throat is the perfect disguise.”

 

I have never seen a Warhol movie, so I say nothing; the soup tins rustle in the wind and Marilyn Munro smiles.

 

The policeman laughs. “Sure,” he says.

 

A velveteen rabbit, the reality principle follows us even to the borderline; installed reality, a crude necessity, an enforced limit, object of terror and disgust.  And then we drive away into the wilderness; into the Mozambican zoo, not a laid out zoo, but a pretend zoo, a zoo where cows and people live. Massingir Velho, Mavodze, Machamba, Bingo…….  The words excite me.  

 

It takes two hours to drive twenty kilometres. We get lost; the roads make the car suffer. I am exhilarated, indifferent to the parody.

 

Outside the park, for inside it there is nowhere yet that one can stay, the developers have not yet moved in, they are still bidding their time, waiting for the idea of the tourist influx, we drive to Massingir. The Massingir dam is bulky; it captures the water of the Oliphant’s River that runs through South Africa and Mozambique. In 2000, the year of the floods, when outside Africa Aid industry planes could be heard making their daily runs from South Africa to Mozambique, it was here that a woman, immortalised in a photograph, gave birth to her daughter in a tree. Here, heroic, blond Americans saved the poor, made money and television shows.

 

We drive into Massingir.  “I don’t think that this is the town,” I say to my friend, for there are only two brick buildings, “this must just be the outskirts of it.” An aimless goat eats an Omega gold watch in a doorway, an elevated woman stands upright in front of a room, she crushes meilies with a wooden pestle, on her shoulder rests the head of a child, his hair is braded, Jamaican.

 

“I think that it is the town”, he replies. “If we follow that road,” he points to the only tarred road around, “we will only go outwards to the sea.”

 

“I’m not sure,” I reply, certain that a town must have bricks and shops and traffic lights, makeshift memorials of the identity that I know, pavements, intersections, balloons, and plastic flowers. We drive a little further; I notice a cement circle disguised by long grass and plastic bags. I remember the words of another friend who told me about the town. ‘At the circle you will find the police station, you will know it as it is the only building that has the national flag flying above it. If you get lost, find the circle, this is the town centre.’ “Oh,” I say, “I think that you must be right.” I feel ashamed, I was so sure that I knew a town. Never believe what is real. A circle marks the spot where my identity has become a victim. “Oh well, lets go and find the lodge,” I say, for what else can I say.  

 

I can’t read ‘Kathy Acker’ from cover to cover, she dislodges me, upsets me, so I just sample a few pages at a time, a split personality, the my self.

 

The lodge was established by a Mozambican community five years ago. I wonder silently what it will be like; the idea of community lodge for a kept white safe South African is that it may not be up to my middle class standards, it may be run down, it may just be a hut with no toilets or running water. We drive, through a village, through a forest of birds, down a dirt road. And there it is. As we get out of the car, a woman comes towards us. She smiles, “park the car there,” she says in Portuguese. The red scarf on her head holds it high; there are sequins on her cheekbones.

 

A man comes out of an office, he too is smiling. “How are you,” he says in English, “let me show you around?” he puts out his hand, “Solomon,” he continues. He shows us the tents, perfectly kept khaki safari tents, he shows us the indigenous cottages, the original, perfectly kept reeds and wood, he shows us the cabins; they have white painted walls and an attached bathroom.  He turns on a tap and the water runs.

 

“How did you learn this language,” I ask him?

 

“For many years I worked in South Africa, in Klerksdorp on the mines,” he replies, but now I am old, I am fifty, and I decided that the mine life was not a life, not a real life. And I wanted to come home, to come back to my country, I love my country. Now I manage this place. It needs a manager who can speak English.”

 

We take our bags and put them in the cabin. From the patio the blue water of the dam makes a splash, it glints. A white throated reed cormorant, its beak pointed and curved, flies low searching for a fish. It lands on a log, stretches out its wings, the sign of a cross. A small boat, there are four men with muscular arms in it, they to search for fish. Fishing nets scatter silver and black on the top of the water. We take out chairs and a bottle of wine and sit there silently. The sun is setting, a cloud, like a dance silhouetted against the curtains of an orange stage, flits against it, black; a chocolate box. In the water dead trunks of trees jut upwards, the home to thousands of sounds that carry in the breathless air. A mythological collage. ‘Never,’ I think, ‘never believe that what is real must be better.’  

 

Later, as it the night settles, buckets are brought and placed on a burner, we wash ourselves clean in hot water. There is no electricity, there is a generator for the dark, it makes a low pitched roaring sound; it disturbs the birds who wish to sleep. The shadows come softly, the generator is turned on, and then it goes off. I hear a man try to fix it. I take my torch and go down to where I hear him working. He has a low burning torch, the batteries are wearing out. I shine my torch light so that he can see the red and black live wires that he attaches to each other. In a minute the work is done, he turns the generator on, the machine roars, there is light.

 

In the morning we follow the road towards the dam. A flock of parrots flit in the trees, they have no cage, as I have a cage, they are green feathered and have brown heads, they scream and laugh at each other as they move from branch to branch. A vanga fly catcher leans forward to eat a fly, I catch him in my binoculars, for an instant he is mine, and then he moves off, I no longer own him. A scaly throated honey guide calls to us to follow him, yellow waxy honey. We trace his outline; I dig my fists into the sticky oozing sweetness and lick my fingers.  

 

In the night I wrap the mosquito net close to my face, the high pitched wing beat of these insects makes me hungry. I think how my absurd and implausible sense of superiority is sustained by the desire for the rest of the world to join me, to accept my values and have the same knowledge of what a town must be like. And then, when there is just a small sign that they have no need for this, there is a slight ebbing of that desire, the seductiveness of me and my world loses its appeal.

 

I fall asleep in the arms of a place that I do not know. And ‘Kathy Acker’ watches me and says, “let’s go to Mexico tomorrow where I will have a double mastectomy and ride the desert waves.”