M is for Maze

Susan Fenner

A is for Access.

“Egg.” I say it exuberantly, as if announcing a lottery winner. Vinolia parrots me. With a purple crayon she traces E and e-g-g. Her intent head sprouts bunches of wiry hair, each banded at her scalp with rainbow elastics.

She sits in an overstuffed rattan chair on our veranda, shaded from the smack of afternoon sun. She scrutinizes the introductory “English Spelling and Colouring Book” that rests in the hollow made by her gangly crossed legs. A weaver bird flits between the birdbath and curious upside-down nests dangling from a nearby tree. It scatters watery sun-drops as it weaves and knots another globe-shaped home.

“Your turn, Vinolia.” I exaggerate my words with the amplified mouthing of a mime artist attempting to convey meaning. “What is the Sotho word for egg?” Although she’s nine, Vinolia has not yet had English at her government school. I used to think Canada’s two official languages complicated things. South Africa has eleven.

“Lee,” she leans forward and giggles into my face; her mouth mimics my intensity. I grin, amazed at her spunk. I’ve seen it ripen during our past few hours together, since her initial deference. Her brief closeness hints of paraffin smoke and cornmeal laced through her cotton dress.

I start to print l-e-e in green crayon under the egg drawing, then wonder if the spelling is as straightforward as it sounds. Vowel combinations in English are a puzzle solved by memory, not logic, so maybe the same is true in the Sotho language.

“Marjani?” I call through the open French doors to the living room where Vinolia’s mother has chosen to polish windows at the moment. A good choice: adequate distance to allow her daughter some independence in this new situation, close enough to monitor her.

“Ma’am?” Marjani appears quickly, hands cupped one in the other as if carrying an invisible lee. She confirms the l-e-e spelling. Marjani’s grasp of English is the key to her job with us, has granted her entry to our lives, our way of being. I’m in search of access to her ways.

Since beginning with A is for ape, tshwene, and B is for bird, nonyane), I’m pleased Vinolia has now warmed to me. She’s caught on to our pattern of I-teach-her-English, she-teaches-me-Sotho. The sugar-grit of chocolate chip cookies sticks in our teeth. Marjani says it’s as new in Vinolia’s mouth as these bits of English words.

L is for Language.

It has been three weeks since my husband, Ken, and I moved from Canada to this remote corner of South Africa for a four year stint. I’ve been pitched into gyroscopic disorientation – the angst of leaving behind newly-adult children, my eager anticipation to delve into the African culture. My senses have been on overload: women swaddled in primary colours babble as they balance bundles on their heads, babes on their backs; the zesty smell of peri-peri provokes my nostrils outside the shops. There’s an implied necessity for eyes in the back of my head as children offer to guard my parked car for a few coins.

In our desire to embrace this unfamiliar society, to be accepted, Ken and I have tried to learn some new words each day. I don’t know how to access their African world and I can’t just go sashaying into the township. Perhaps language will allow me to participate – learn their songs, drumming, gumboot dancing, share my skills in theatre and dance. When I approach our new neighbours for suggestions their replies are doubtful. Meneer van Wyk, a retired magistrate, tells me to watch myself, not to consort with the help, get too close to them. Unsafe, he says.

Mrs. Smythe, whose accent sounds like she’s just stepped off the boat from Devonshire, though she’s lived in South Africa all her life, suggests perhaps I join the ANC [African National Congress], they need a Western point of view. I plug up my words before they spill – there’d be no need of ANC if it weren’t for the arrogant history of the western viewpoint. But I fear blundering. I’ll make my way warily.

Ken has chosen Afrikaans, the Dutch derivative language spoken by descendents of those early settlers four hundred years ago. Afrikaans is the first language of most of the staff he’s inherited in his new position, though all speak English, too.

Each day home from the office, he auditions his new vocabulary with me. Gkhwea moora is how “good morning” sounds to me. I haven’t a clue how to spell it. But the first consonant is said as if a fish bone is caught in your throat. That gk hacking sound is in a ridiculous number of Afrikaans words. In the first weeks of meeting new people named Gerrit, Gert, and Gerrie, I’ve gone through dozens of throat lozenges.

E is for Edge.

Today I met Vinolia for the first time. She lives with her grandmother (gogo, I’ve learned), brother, and assorted aunts and cousins two hundred kilometres from here. Marjani is our domestic worker Mondays to Fridays, and lives in a cottage annexed to our house. She travels back to Bushbuckridge each weekend, her “homeland”. (The ironic term was designated by the apartheid government two generations ago when they herded the indigenous Africans to that remote, unfertile area.) I had suggested to Marjani, since there was a week’s school holiday, that she bring her daughter to spend it here.

This morning Vinolia had leaned into her mother’s generous hip as Marjani presented her. Though her eyes were cast down, they ricocheted like pinballs off facets of our company-supplied colonial-style house. The house overwhelmed her, as it did us three weeks ago – expansive rooms, sweeping terracotta tile floors, window-walls gazing onto the gardener-manicured grounds. Our sanctuary in the snarled labyrinth of our move.

My offered hand carried my enthusiasm, my welcome to new experience through this young girl. With a flash from her mother’s eyes like a push, Vinolia took my hand, our palms a matching colour. I led her out to the garden for a get-to-know-you walk, a search for inroads. Weaver birds frothed in the bird bath that anchors a circular bed planted with boxwood and phlox. She made a game of following the brick paving between the plantings of this pseudo mini-maze, attempting to reach the centre without jumping over. But it didn’t work and she flamingo stepped over to her goal. The birds at the centre flew off to their swinging spheres across the garden. We’re both exploring worlds.

I’d planned some activities ahead of time for the week with Vinolia. Retirement hadn’t taken the teacher out of me – the creative challenge to enrich, the bonus of unexpected lessons I might receive. I’d learned that she had never made cookies. “No oven at home, only a cook-top.” Therefore, an appetizing project to break the ice and entice.

After the garden meanderings, Marjani translated my carefully measured English words while creaming the butter. Vinolia dumped in brown sugar, three lee, flour, each ingredient an exploration of nesting spoons and cups. As she measured the chocolate chips a few spilled on the table. She poked at one with an inscrutable look, as if it might be a bird turd, or an exotic fruit pip. Thing was as foreign to her as I was.

“Eat it, you’ll like it.” I popped a chocolate bit into my mouth.

Vinolia’s eyes veered to her mother’s laughing face, then she crouched forward as if shortening the distance might be a good strategy. It may be necessary for this uncertain nib to be spit out in a hurry. She looked like she’d swallowed a giddy secret.

Last week I went to the city and found the perfect jigsaw puzzle, a map of the world bordered by flags of each country. Marjani had told me Vinolia’s never done a puzzle before. The cookies had barely dissolved on our tongues when I dumped the puzzle pieces on the veranda table after lunch, eager to engage with her process into this unknown.

I showed her the picture on the box, how to look for colour and pattern groupings, to try the inter-lockings. Vinolia was flummoxed. I thought back to my own three children, but how to put it side by side? Canadian children are exposed to wooden block puzzles as babes and graduate incrementally through levels of difficulty. Did I allow my little ones to figure it out on their own, twist and rotate, match and fit? Or did I show them how to do it and they copied? Yes, of course – I’m a Western parent eager to produce Einstein kids.

I helped Vinolia to start with a few conjoined pieces to build on. She picked up a bordering piece, straight on one side, tried to join it to the central amoeba. I showed her how to look for edges. It’s all about finding the edges and working inward.

C is for Chokes.

Vinolia and I continue through to L is for lion (tau), when I hear Ken arrive home. She skitters off with the colouring book and crayons to her Mma’s cottage in the side garden.

Ken steps onto the veranda like a stand-up comic onto a stage. He throws open his arms and proclaims something like mei kop vol met olifant kak. I raise my eyebrows, wait. I know my husband – there’ll be a punch-line. The secretarial pool at work delights in his Afrikaans blurtings. He drops his voice an octave and translates, “My head is full of elephant shit.”

I laugh, appreciative audience that I am, and he sinks into the chair with the sighing sound of stale-balloon lungs. His new job is a huge challenge: to turn around a two thousand-employee company that has failed for twelve years.

“I heard some of the guys use a new word today. It sounds something like moordeva.” He says it with a ham actor’s emphasis. “I think it means a large amount of something, as in ‘a forest is a moordeva lot of trees’.”

“Moordeva.” I roll it around, full in my mouth.

“Tomorrow I’ve got a meeting with all the senior management staff. Why don’t you come just before lunch and I’ll introduce you?”

Marjani morphs into our peripheral vision, a sleight-of-body trick I’ve not yet adjusted to. If I watch carefully I might find a way to slip into her world. She holds one of my recipe cards in her hand. My taste buds are timid, and teaching her some of my recipes is my self-preservation exercise against risky peri-peri dishes. Last week, though, I ventured for the first time into her local cookery. She taught me to make maize mealie, a white cornmeal porridge staple of the African diet. But any cross-cultural slipping I might do does not involve the reckless abandonment of the safety net crammed into my recipes from home.

“Ma’am, sorry, what is arty chokes in recipe you give for tonight?”

Ken shifts forward, eyes glinting. “You can leave them out, Marjani, those arties always make me gag,” and cues her to bewildered laughter with his own chuckle.

M is for Maze

The next day as I slip into the board room Ken has the rapt attention of twenty senior staff. Beaming a power-point graph, he dynamically asserts himself with good humour. With a televangelist’s arm waving, he preaches of “a moordevah lot of people who will need training”. It produces a collective seizure: the women’s eyebrows shoot up, their chins retract; the men puff their cheeks and cork laughter. Ken’s momentum is unbroken.

After the meeting he introduces me around, then breaks away to chat with a few men. Soon he takes my hand and escorts me toward the exit. Leaning into me, he whispers.

“You know that new word?”

I nod.

“Delete it for now. Apparently it roughly means a fucking lot of whatever.”

*                                                          *                                                          *

With my dignity in need of ethnic-shock therapy, I weave my car home to familiarity. Vinolia and I will insulate ourselves in cushioned chairs against nameless unknowns and begin with M is for maze (impambosi). Somehow I’ll have to communicate this is different from the maize she eats everyday. She will draw a crayoned squiggle to the labyrinth puzzle’s heart. I’ll watch with a dash of envy, and memorize the path to the centre. The twists and rotations have nothing to do with logic. The retreat out of the maze is important, too – it’s the same path. It’s all about finding the edges.

Vinolia will have another word-secret to my world; I’ll have one to hers. And when I sally forth from my upside-down nest into the dangling complexity of African culture to seek its heart, it will be with crayoned words in my mouth.