Here's the Thing

By Haji Mohamed Dawjee

Here’s the Thing is a new collection of thought-provoking essays from Haji Mohamed Dawjee. Filled with stories and insights that are contemplative, comedic and controversial, you will find a touching letter to her father, the honest truth about the pain in the arse that is parenting and ponderings about struggling with the vicissitudes of the modern world filled with cancel culture and the controversies of appreciating the wrong artists. There is also a serving of the many wise lessons the game of tennis has to offer as well as hilarious insights and observations on dustbins, yes dustbins, and ageing, that ring true. Here’s the Thing is relatable, relevant, entertaining, soothingly self-deprecating and, at times, morally challenging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781770107939

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Here’s the Thing

Here’s the Thing

Haji Mohamed Dawjee

MACMILLAN

First published in 2022

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

2116

Johannesburg

South Africa

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-792-2

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-793-9

© Haji Mohamed Dawjee 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Katlego Tapala

Proofreading by Jane Bowman

Design and typesetting by Nyx Design

Cover design by Ayanda Phasha

Front cover photograph by Natasha Laurent

For my wife, Rebecca Davis, who lights the fire in my belly and puts the beef in my heart.

I will love you until I write my very last word and long after that still.

And for my son, Miles Salahuddien Davis-Dawjee:

‘Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose’.

A Note

Here’s the Thing includes both the terms ‘Black’ and ‘of colour’. While constitutionally in South Africa I am considered Black, I personally do not feel entirely comfortable with identifying as such because I am aware that I have to recognise that I have certain privileges that African Black citizens do not have, or have not had in the past. I can’t be Black; I do not comfortably identify as Indian because it simply isn’t true, and ‘mixed heritage’ sounds neither here nor there in terms of race because anyone can be mixed heritage. There are, however, cases in this book where I feel Black is more appropriate, and that is what I use, but in other pieces using ‘of colour’ feels more neutral, especially since internationally the term ‘Black’ does not apply to all people who are not Caucasian.

Foreword

There’s something I should probably disclose relatively early on in this foreword: I happen to be married to Haji Mohamed Dawjee. It’s quite likely that you already know this, since, whenever I google Haji to check what defamatory things she’s been saying on social media, Google always wants to auto-complete my search to ‘Haji Mohamed Dawjee wife’.

Why are people apparently so interested in Haji’s relationship status? Are they hoping she’s single since she is undeniably – to employ a jock-ish term from my youth – a complete belter? Or are they checking a fact they’ve heard as rumour but simply can’t believe is true: that she has a white partner?

Now that it’s out there, I have no choice but to hold up my hands and say: you got me. I am indeed a born and bred Caucasian. We may as well deal with this now, right at the start of her second book, seeing as it was a question that recurred with dizzying regularity during the publicity tour for her first book. Haji was asked repeatedly, and always with incredulity, whether it did not amount to a betrayal of her political principles to have hitched her romantic wagon to a saggy old white like me.

I tried not to take it personally and consoled myself with the reminder that on the other side of the local political spectrum, quite a lot of old white people seemed concerned that I was in some kind of a hostage situation. As Haji records in one of her essays, someone even asked the Press Ombudsman to investigate whether I was being abused. I’m not, for the record, unless you count the amount of time she makes me spend listening to Barbra Streisand songs.

Yes, Haji adores Barbra Streisand, in addition to hip-hop and jazz and other musical forms you might say match more seamlessly with her political radicalism. She also has a thing for various white-boy folk artists with beards and ukuleles and fantasies about barns.

I say this not to unmask her as some kind of hypocrite – ‘Behind closed doors, she LOVES white people!’ – but to make the point that Haji, more than anybody I have ever met in my four decades of life, truly embodies a now-hackneyed Walt Whitman line. She is vast; she contains multitudes. I have never met anybody with a more exciting, and less predictable, mind than Haji’s. And when you find someone like that, who also happens to be a complete belter and regularly makes you laugh till you cry, you damn well marry them.

Haji’s omnivorous intellectual curiosity is one of the reasons I’m so glad she has written this book, which you will find is quite different from the first. Her sharp wit is still very much on display, as are her unapologetic opinions, and the independence of mind which sets her apart from so many of her peers. In this second book, you will find a far wider array of subjects which have caught her interest. If her first book was akin to a battle cry, or a primal scream of rage, this book finds her in a more meditative – and sometimes mellower – mood.

In Here’s The Thing, Haji writes movingly about the loss of her father; relates the indignity of finding herself on the wrong end of a Twitter mob; addresses the challenges of female ageing with hilarious candour; and lays out the hard, unpopular truths about parenting. She brings a forensic analysis to the problem with contemporary dustbins; agonises about her controversial love for Michael Jackson and Woody Allen; chronicles her frustrating battle with Long Covid; and tells you what tennis can teach you about life. (As someone who plays tennis against Haji a lot, it mainly teaches me that I am a massive loser.)

It’s important to me to state clearly why I find this book so impressive and brave, and why I would happily agree to write this foreword even if I did not share a bed nightly with its author. I think readers who are not privy to the inner workings of the media may be oblivious to some of the industry dynamics which impress themselves very forcefully on those of us who work within it.

Throughout my career as a journalist, I have seen first-hand how certain types of people are put under various forms of pressure to write specific kinds of content. If you’re a female journalist who once wrote a strongly worded op-ed about feminism, for instance, you can expect to be assigned every story vaguely fitting the rubric of ‘women’s rights’ from now till kingdom come – however much you might want to protest that, perhaps, it might be more fitting for a male journalist to occasionally tackle a piece about gender-based violence.

I have also witnessed the ways in which Black journalists are often groomed for specific beats – social justice issues, for instance, and politics. Sometimes the reasoning might appear pragmatic: a journalist who grew up in a township might be assumed to have a particular passion for issues affecting South Africa’s poor; they also tend to be fluent in indigenous African languages other than Afrikaans, which most white journalists – including me, to my shame – are still not.

But what these unspoken – and sometimes even well-meaning – policies amount to in practice, is a drastic fencing-off of the writerly territory available to these Black journalists and columnists. How often – if ever – have you opened a local travel magazine and read a lengthy feature on luxury game reserves by a Black journalist? How often – if ever – have you leafed through the ‘culture’ section of a local newspaper and read a review of an orchestral performance, or a ballet programme, by a Black journalist?

Entire swathes of ‘lifestyle’ content in local publications are still almost entirely the province of white writers – who, it goes without saying, are equally at liberty to also write about politics, or economics, or almost anything else they might decide on, particularly if they are male.

Sometimes, it’s worth noting, this particular kind of censorship might be self-imposed. I can imagine travel and lifestyle editors reading this and crying in frustration: ‘We would do anything for more Black writers!’ But to quote an old activist saying: ‘You can’t be what you don’t see.’ In other words, if you’ve grown up never encountering a Black writer tackling subjects outside of politics and social justice, you may never consider that as a potential avenue for yourself either.

Then there’s the ‘H’ word: humour. In this regard, the Sunday Times veteran columnist, Ndumiso Ngcobo, is a notable and worthy outlier, who for years has been writing very funny weekly columns on his family, the oddities of South African society, his personal foibles and the annoying habits of others. This is all comedic territory upon which primarily white male columnists have built successful careers for decades, but Ngcobo remains the exception rather than the rule. Even in a majority Black country, almost three decades after democracy.

And when it comes to Black women writing humour: all bets are off. It says something that I cannot think of a single other collection of humorous essays by a woman of colour published in South Africa other than the one you are holding in your hands right now. It’s as if we, as a society, have grudgingly accepted in recent years that Black women can be radical, outspoken, smart and talented – but funny? In writing? Now you’re pushing it.

This is one of the reasons I consider Here’s the Thing a rare and beautiful achievement. Even though South African media was, for a long time, a patriarchal hellmouth, growing up in the mid-to-late 90s there were already funny and outrageous white female columnists that someone like me could look to for inspiration: Jani Allen, Lin Sampson, Marianne Thamm. They blazed a path that I could imagine myself walking one day, and I believe my career has been all the easier for it.

When Haji published her first book, I saw the impression it made on young women of colour in particular. I read the emails she received, thanking her for giving language to something they had felt, but dared not articulate.

I think this book may be even more significant, in the licence it gives those who come after her to explore their whole beings in writing. To be human, and complicated, and funny. Haji is all those things, and so is this wonderful book.

Rebecca Davis

Cape Town, February 2022

Letter to My Father: A Fire, a Torch, a Tree, and a Hero

Dear Dad,

You asked two things, repeatedly, in the last year of your life. The first thing you asked was: ‘When am I going to meet my grandson?’ And the second was: ‘When are you going to finish your book?’

Well, they’re both here now, and you are not. So, this one’s for you, Dad.

You were always my biggest fan. I remember you pushing me to write more from a very young age. I recall sitting around that kitchen counter, looking across at you thinking, ‘This man is crazy,’ as you constantly asked me to publish a book, as though it were so easy. And for me, it was an impossible dream. But I think your voice stuck somewhere deep inside me, like an old painting on a gallery wall, that people love but can never own until one day, somehow, it becomes theirs. A dream fulfilled.

And just like that, one day, it was as though the universe heard your wish and handed me my desire of being a writer – and so here we are. Here I am. Thinking of you as I pen book two, without you. It’s different from the first; it’s funnier in most bits, I hope. I think I chose this route because those were the kind of pieces you enjoyed most. The ones filled with both meaning and madness, humour and humility.

Then, of course, there is your grandson. Miles Salahuddien DavisDawjee.

I’ve heard it said that when a parent dies, a child feels their own mortality. And when a child dies, it’s immortality that a parent loses. One of the comforts of having children, they say, is knowing one’s youth has not fled, but merely been passed down to a new generation.

There was no youth to be remembered when your grandson entered our lives. All the adolescence that should have entered me anew abandoned me. I knew I loved him as soon as I held him, but that love lived outside my body. Perhaps, I thought, you took it with you. It was buried somewhere in a place of longing and mourning, and in a place where a deep, deep love was lost that could not be replaced – it seemed to me – by even the most wonderful gifts. A new life.

Your name lives on in him. Miles means ‘soldier’ and his second name, which was your first – Salahuddien – means ‘warrior’. And while he is a fighter – I saw it in his eyes the first time and I see it now – there was no fight in me at the time. Even three weeks after he came home, I saw nothing but my own mortality reflected in him. I was no warrior. There seemed to be no reason to live on. No generation to pass down. No comfort as promised.

I sought it but, perhaps, not hard enough because I would turn my face away every time I tried to look at him. In his eyes, I saw your eyes; in his smile, your smile, and although he could not speak yet, every breath mustered through his cherub-like mouth, so angelic and so innocent, echoed the words you spoke to me every time you called: ‘When is my grandson coming?’ And then he was here, and you were not.

The human psyche is conditioned to think that things happen in threes. I am not a believer in the tendency to group things in threes – good or bad – because it speaks to a kind of conspiracy, paranoia and esotericism that I am vehemently allergic to. There is no significance in that number for me – except to say that the timeline of my life between your passing and the starting of something new appeared to be framed around that ‘paranormal’ number. I had three days with you before you died; three weeks later we received a phone call to make our way back to Cape Town because we had been matched with a beautiful child; and three weeks after that, we were parents.

Initially I looked forward to coming home. To my sanctuary, where I could mourn fully and safely and succumb without any other family member crumbling around me; I expected it. I knew the swelling of grief that would spill out of me, that wanted to spill out of me, was due. At home, in our little flat that you never got to see, was the first time I cried for you. But what I didn’t know at the time, was that the city was not as safe a space for me to be in as I anticipated. The latent catharsis and release I had clutched onto for so long whilst in your home in Pretoriaprolonged itself even more as we reached our home in Cape Town, because it’s then that I realised this wasn’t my home alone, it was yours as well. It is where you grew up, where you lived in places carved out by the government and made the most of your experiences. Where you spent your childhood and your early adulthood. Where you experienced your first car accident, got your first degree, learnt to play bridge and made life-long friends. And you would never occupy space in it again – a hard pill to swallow because I know how much you longed to return.

Caught between the mountain and the sea, I grabbed hold of every memory of you. I couldn’t release the desolate air my body contained because each time I inhaled, I was only filled with more sadness.

No place was safe. Not outside, where I imagined you climbing those stairs to our front door so many times, eager to show you our loving home. Not inside, where the couch I once hoped you would rest your body on while we shared a cup of tea and savoured every bite of a Bo-Kaap koeksister, sat vacant. Do you know what it feels like to find yourself having lost one heart and gained another, in the form of a child, all seemingly at once?

On 11 November 2019, Mom and I checked you into hospital. Little did I know that our son was being born on that very same day. I can still feel the brave but weak grip of your fingers on my forearm that summer day in Pretoria – the support you needed to make your way to the doctor’s rooms, having refused a wheelchair. When, finally, you sat on that big leather couch in the foyer waiting for the neurosurgeon to brief us, your body gave in to the comfort of knowing it didn’t have to try so hard to hold itself up anymore. Finally, when we sat before the man who, mere hours later, would cut into your brain, I saw a calm fall upon your face.

‘I can make no promises, it’s a chance,’ the doctor said.

‘I know,’ you replied. ‘I’ll take it.’

The man who saved your life once before turned to Mom and me and asked if we had any questions or concerns, but once I heard your answer and saw the serenity in your eyes after your response, there was nothing else I needed to know. You seemed at peace, and I had no questions. I knew that those questions, the ones I could have asked, were not to be asked in that imperfect yet somehow perfect moment. And so, silently, we wheeled you away.

I remember the waiting room at the radiologist downstairs, where it seemed it would take forever before you were seen for your final scans.

‘Take a picture of my hands,’ you said.

I pulled out my phone and I did. I don’t know why you asked me to do that. You were never one to ask such things. It seemed a strange request at such a stressful time. But I have that picture, now; I have it printed and look at it often.

After a single snap of the camera, you said, ‘You can do