Writing about technology, software engineering, the craft, and coding
As I walk the plank, I lose heat, my eyes do fade
My feet, they freeze, the sun turns blue, then you appear
I say, I love you, I hurt, and that I’ll miss you
Will I live in your mind, will you let me stay there?
Will you allow my air to flare, in your quiet care?
As I drop to the wave, I hear a final groan
I ruled the weak like a king, and I made them fat
But the queen chose to live far, why I will never know
The Öresund train from Malmö to Landskrona. Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch on my knee. I lose myself in the rich, precise language, enjoying her craft, of how deftly she chisels forth the characters and their world.
A perfect Saturday is ahead of me: soccer, swimming in the sea, and a party. A friend with a car is going to pick me up from Landskrona station.
When I get off the train, balmy, delicious breezes blow from Öresund, turning me into Ernst Kirchsteiger. I find myself a bench and wait for my friend. I take off my shoes and I close my eyes to take in the sun.
“Excuse me?”
A woman and man of 25 years old. I recognize them, they were on my train; it came in from Copenhagen.
“Can we use your phone?” the woman asks. She smiles with tired eyes.
“Whom do you want to call?” I reply, handing her the phone. She unfolds a note with Arabic letters on it.
“Zero… zero… four… six,” she reads.
“That’s the country code for Sweden,” I interrupt her, “You don’t need to put that in.” They look at each other. I’m unsure if they understand. Her English is shaky and it looks like the guy’s is no better.
“We are in Sweden, after all,” I add.
They look at each other and let out a big laugh, light and carefree, as if they had hoped they were in Sweden, but didn’t dare to believe it.
“Where are you from?”
“Idlib.”
Idlib.
Syria.
They had been travelling for ten days straight: a boat from Turkey to Greece, car to Macedonia, on foot over the border to Serbia, the same to Hungary, a car ride to Germany, a train to Denmark. And thus the Öresund train to Sweden’s Landskrona.
I dial the number on their piece of paper and hand over the phone. A short call with the man’s brother who lives in Landskrona. Wide smiles.
“He’s on his way,” she says.
The couple sit on the bench next to me. They have no luggage, other than her ragged purse. They couldn’t take anything when they left Syria. The woman starts to explain. “Idlib… it is…”
The brother arrives. Exclamations of joy, tears, hugs. We say goodbye and the trio drive away. My friend arrives and we leave. A sweaty game on a manicured field. I blow a couple of chances in the beginning, but I nab the ball from the defender and luck be the top corner into the back of the net.
The swim afterwards is so good I want to scream. The salty water is 20 degrees, with added fresh seaweed. When I get to the party, my wife is already there, striking in her silver frock. All guests have chosen a color to come in. I got pink. It’s a fun party in a lush garden. We play some games on the porch and everyone is getting into it. Laughs all around.
The next morning, I google Idlib. Airstrikes against a hospital. Massacres. Chemical weapons. Photos of dead children.
“Many civilians were subjected to chlorine gas, in what is thought to be two attacks by chemical weapons, carried out by government forces in Idlib on Monday. The attacks meant that civilians, amongst them children, died a painful death.” — press release by Amnesty International, 18 March 2015
“Idlib’s streets are practically abandoned, a week after the city in the country’s northwestern region was taken over by Islamists, amongst them Jabhet al-Nusra, a jihadist group with ties to Al-Qaeda.” — Dagens Nyheter, 11 June 2015
“At least 20 Druze residents in Idlib province have been shot dead by Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhet al-Nusra. The jihadists consider the Druze faith as blasphemy.” — BBC 11 June 2015
I look out the window. It’s sunny again in Malmö. We cycle to Västra harbour and go for a swim. At night, it’s chicken falafel in sammoun bread. I read some more of The Goldfinch. I lose against my brother in Wordfeud.
This is a translation of Niklas Orrenius’ column in 29 August 2015 print issue of Dagens Nyheter.
Apologize
The cream polish sticks under my nails as ghee
And sweat dangling feet at the seam of my back
Apologize
This, my croaky confession at your still, cold feet
I wanted your stare to be level, not sink, fall
But I dreamt while I put you back on your stand
Your hands erect, sturdy, gallant at my neck’s valley
I’pologize.
Your breasts attest indifferent, brushed against me
I’pologize.
Your breath on my neck like feathers, drops of honey
I rejoiced
I’pologize.
My feet scurry, darting, flit ‘bout like flambé
I’pologize.
My bite nipped your lip for a minute exactly
I’pologize.
This year, I committed to reading 24 books before the end of December. Mission was accomplished about two months early. I found great satisfaction in the achievement and the process.
This is a short piece on the six most memorable books from this year’s challenge.
The One where You Can’t Think the Same Again. Karen E. Field’s Racecraft has left its mark on my thinking about politics, my own privilege, and how pervasive race is. The tripartite formula of race, racism, and racecraft seems inescapable to me now. Thank you, Dr. Field. And thank you to all friends who were patient as I spoke to them about it at great lengths. A friend, NYTimes journalist Ron Nixon, wrapped it up in a single sentence: “Race doesn’t exist, but it’s real.”
The One that Went Straight for the Heartular. The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. This one made me cry, more than my usual quota of tears (three merciless bouts every 5 or 6 years, followed by drought and emotional detachment), because I related to her as a musician and as the non-conformist. Wonderful writing, a wealth of powerful aphorisms, and courage imparted from Palmer’s fearless life. I’ve never cared for another stranger, through his life and death, as for her friend Anthony. I wished I could have been by his deathbed and at his funeral.
The One that Will Be Forgotten. Andy Weir’s The Martian is a blogpost gone nuclear. No literary value, no journey, no punch. Just worldly dialogue and a three-act structure.
The One that Had Me Creasing*. Best White and Other Anxious Delusions by South African journalist Rebecca Davis. She’s the patron saint of projectile spit from your mouth while laughing out loud at her cutting, thought-provoking, and sharp prose. An excellent book about South African politics, history, and current affairs. *London Cockney dysphemism about your stomach creasing when you laugh hard.
The One that Made Me GO WTF Mate. Every Spy a Prince is a detailed monograph about the history of the Israeli intelligence. It’s well-researched, well-written, and fascinating. I don’t put anything past Mossad anymore and I understand how Shin Bet tracked down the alleged killers of the two Jewish teenagers last year, the incident that started the war in Gaza.
The One where I Must Write a Novel. Ahmed Mourad’s Arabic-language Diamond Dust (Ar: ‘Torab al-Mas’) starts off with excruciating detail (think Joyce in Ulysses), and then accelerates into a superb novel about revenge and family, only marred by a romcom ending. Why you do zis, Ahmed? (I would recommend learning Arabic to read this novel.)
One thing changed the way I read this year and that’s keeping a journal, to note down great sentences, turns of phrase, ideas or other books to look into, or just thoughts generated while reading. Reading is no longer a race against time or a milestone or simply ticking off names on a list. It’s a way to become the owner of the process and phenomenon of thinking and developing your thinking. Shout out to Maria Popova, of Brainpickings.org, for the inspiration.
You can check out all the other books I read here: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/2425711
Her knuckles found home on the same line on the door. Her eyes hung low as she waited for her common sense to ebb. When that would happen, she would be assailed by the stench of pain and stale liquor reeking through the wood. True as death, it happened. Today, a stranger was present, too.
“Dora.”
It was the rare weakness in Zach’s voice. She hadn’t expected it or seen it in years.
“Dora…” Zach intoned again. Dora walked in, moving as slow as her fear. The stubborn cloud of smoke bit at her eyes. Nothing had really changed except mounds of mess around the couch and her attempts at impressionist painting had disappeared off the grimy walls. But looking down, her high heel colliding into the slimy broth of a dark night’s drinking, she saw vomit outline Zach’s leg and foot.
“Oh my god, Zach,” Dora squeezed out with her shock, as she tried to get around his body to get to him, “not again, dammit.”
She leaned down at his head, as he rolled up his head and looked at her. Her face looked like wet black chalk against the cream ether, but he saw those eyes he once loved. “Yeaaah… again, dammmmmittttt.”
“This is not cleaning up and finding peace…”
“I know… I f-f-ef-fucked up again.”
The crispness of the curse made her recoil, as she looked behind her to sink into a dry spot by her favorite chair behind her. That spot knew her droop from before she left this place called home for 3 years.
“Dorraaa… I love you… I-I-I-reallllyyy lovvvve you.”
“No, you don’t, Zach,” she shot back, with hot tears burning, “This is not love, what you’re doing to yourself. Look at this place. You’ve sucked the life out of it!”
“D… I do love you,” he said with crust around his lips, picking himself up, to sit in the locus of his life, “love is water, it’s all over you.”
It’s all over you? Says the pontificating drunk!
“Don’t be a dick, you’re a mess right now.” She pulled out her mirror from her purse and lunged it into his face.
“Look! Is this love! How is this love! My man of three years is this!”
“Love is water, baby, it’s waaater,” Zach repeated as he tried to make out the fuzzy outlines of his sunken face, “When you go swimming and you jump in, the water is all over you, it covers every part of you, and it’s there while you’re in there, riiiiight?”
The coherence and pithy of the words struck her. She pulled back her arm. She felt a tap against a door of her heart.
“When you-you-you’re done, and you, uh, uhm, get out, the water falls off you, it leaves you, it leeeeaves you, it faaalls you, riight? You get out and you get a drink, I need a drink, you say I say to myself, and then you sit in the sun, until the whatever’s left on you is absorbed. Love is absorbed, until whatever’s left on you is absorbed.”
The tap grew into a mad banging, along with floods of rain against the windows, as she looked at him.
“I can’t do this again, Zach,” Dora said.
“Love is water… love is water,” Zach chants in a whisper, as he turns around and lays back so that his head is near her legs, as he looks up to stare at his morning sun.
I call it the hollow, aching look in someone’s eyes when they see another friend married off.
They’ve been standing by and waiting or pretending to not do either, while they have been burning in agony on the inside. The wait has turned their insides into a beautiful effigy of resentment. We and they are all assured, it’s bound to happen. Because your privilege will not fail you. Your mother and father are of good stock. You’re educated and of good stock, too. It’s bound to happen.
Stock, the investment of education and inculcation of privilege, dictates that men and women will see intuitively in each other their respective stock, and intertwine their lives around each other until they commit in marriage. There is nothing else involved except the outward forms of stock and privilege — piety, agreeable character, success in work and career, proximity of values, family, and a future built on material wealth. Stock means that the process of meeting and dating is only punctuated by milestones — the first date, the first family function, engagement, food, food, food, wedding. Whatever else happens, the very sinews of relationships, is incidental and manageable. Where society magnifies these incidental events as the actual workings of relationships, the regime of stock gives it little attention. Have a career, don’t work too hard, work hard to make money, develop your personality, but no, not something artistic or original or unique. That puts partners off. And their families. And their stock. So, be funny. Not too funny. Be interesting. Not too interesting or opinionated. Your partner wants someone they can talk to about normal stuff. Be confident, but not too arrogant. Go to church, why are you not going, go to church, don’t go to church looking like that, there might be new stock, why aren’t you going to church! Are you lost! Are you atheist! Are you… PROTESTANT! Go to church. Spirituality? Who gives a shit about that, just go to church. As long as you’re in church, you’re spiritual and full of faith. So, stand tall, why are you tired, don’t sit down, you might miss the new stock.
Stock means you both will get automatic reprieve from each other’s screening process. Stock turns the art of meeting and committing to someone into an impersonal trade of check-lists and resumes. It becomes a lens worn and never taken off. If a person acts in contradiction to the regime, then the lens justifies abandoning that person. If a person plays the system and manages to retain the other through deceit or charm, then the lens confirms the good catch. Stock doesn’t deter people from treating other with impunity. It doesn’t stop a woman from destroying a man’s heart or a man turning a woman into tears. It could just makes it easier to justify. I had every reason to. They’re so many others out there. He or she just weren’t the right one. I can wait. The right one will come along because I deserve it. What are you doing wrong? You’re a mess, you must be a mess, stop being a mess. It’s your fault, it’s not happening because it’s your fault. Everything is going for you, it should just happen. It’s all about stock. If she’s good stock and you’re good stock, then that’s all that matters. No, their good stock is different from ours. Ours is real. Maybe I need chicken stock — don’t ever say that, your future spouse doesn’t want a sense of humour.
So, we were sold lies, that education, good stock, hygiene, presentation, style, and the right socialization will get us married in no time. They didn’t tell us about the game. Fear of commitment. That one broken engagement that turned your love into a sack of blunt blades. A string of hookups that turned your man of dreaminess into a hollow man. That in time, you yourself will turn into some ghoul that treats people like garbage because you’re privileged and you have problems, too. They didn’t tell us what to do while we’re waiting. The line of potential partners that end up passing us by like the opposite lane on the highway. We had to let go of many because you know why.
This regime of stock is doomed to fail if in time, every person standing at the wedding is single, of good stock, and still waiting for their moment, waiting for the lies to become truth.
About eight years ago, I knew this young man called *Gabriel, while living in London. He was like any of his peers — horny, irreverent, and kept the world in his pocket next to his phone. The details have faded now, but I remember that in a sudden change of course, Gabriel engrossed himself in church. He was at every service and at every meeting. Sometimes, he carried a Bible. Soon, he started wearing the highest medal of piety — “Forgive me, I have sinned.” Donning that medal was a little odd, but I wasn’t going to hate on his hustle. I had gone through my own years previous. Meetings passed and liturgies were offered. Gabriel now had monastic texts glued to his hand and tongue. He wanted to become a monk. Those who knew him pre-Scetis rolled their eyes and walked past him at church.
Last I knew of him, Gabriel was engaged or married. I have no idea now if he is still wearing that medal. It doesn’t even matter because all he wanted was to be something different than what he felt or was told or wanted to be. Gabriel’s story tempers me when I try to be perturbed by the rise of Daesh’s allure for young people. Daesh is about young people finally finding something so tantalizing that they leave everything for it. And purely on experience, those young people had little or perceived to have very little to drive them into the arms of a far-away identity.
This piece is not about Daesh, but about identities we travel to. It shouldn’t be a strange concept. Everyone has the dream of travelling to a different country, city, continent, over there where it’s better, people are better, life is better, less black people, less vagrants, fewer Muslims, fewer Christians, no homosexuals, more people of faith, money, color. When I get there — they reason — I will be more accepted, more understood, no more loneliness, no more exclusion, no more nothingness. But identities are like countries. They have gatekeepers, communities, codes, and rites. You pay taxes by trying to fit in and being ridiculed when you get something wrong. You buy property when you marry into the identity. In time, you set up shop and you would have blended in.
You. Your parents are Egyptian or Sudanese or Indian or Iraqi. You grew up away from your parents’ home city. You picked up a few phrases and in time, you can cajole with the uncles and aunts. Soon, you arrived at a crossroads. Continue down that road, embrace the country or world of your upbringing, or fuck everything and thumb through Instagram until you fall asleep. You made a choice. You continued down the first road, the road of your acquired identity.
Me. I confidently report that that road is a dead end. The taxation system is severe with no breaks. The property market is not open to non-citizens. Setting up shop is welcomed because you can never have too much taxes. You won’t be sent out on a raft if you don’t conform, but you’ll feel it with every stare, pursed smile, and stray missile, aimed at your years of hard work.
Like Daesh, far-away identities are mothers that don’t love their children.
*not his real name
I couldn’t meet her gaze. I couldn’t sleep later. I could see, later, what I had done with so much thought and fear. I did it two more times, each time engaging in the art of death. No moment to stop and consider the cost, or the damage, or the future. There are no moments available because time has ceased and been stripped of its serenity. It’s just a necklace of moments, strung together by the eventuality of more violence.
There will be no backstory or flashbacks to take you, the reader, into a psychoanalysis of the origins of violence in the violent. The violent’s world is a quiet one, where the cries from executioner and condemned is choked by nothingness. A world, fashioned by your own hands, skies expanded by arms’ lengths and soil made darker with more life shed. Visit another with violence, is on citizens’ lips. The world is solipsistic and inhabited only by the violent and his victims. Every kill makes the world thicker and more hollow.
Remember when love wasn’t returned? When your heart wasn’t respected? When your boundaries trespassed, your person used, your time wasted, your life belittled, your emotions mocked? The violent didn’t stop and choose to leave his world. He made violence his norm and ethos, his pain the ink on the declaration of war on future allies. Kills collected on a prized bedpost brought him to her tears, the bare moment where he destroyed his true love.
Violence lived is violence wrought.
Both government and private offer eight vaccines from the list of routine immunisation recommendations. How do you do start to answer the question? From the vaccinations offered and who (government and private, here) offers what.
The World Health Organization (WHO) compiles key information on routine immunisation recommendations. These recommendations are based on position papers, published in the health organisation’s Weekly Epidemiological Record. The recommendations are broken down into two types. The first is a list of 10 vaccines for all age groups and populations. The second are supplementary lists that are tailored for specific population characteristics, like risk for polio.
The vaccination schedule, published by Amayeza, an online and independent resource for medicine information, shows what the private sector and government offers. However, the schedule is based on the 2009 schedule for the Department of Health’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI). Using the Amayeza information for the private sector and looking at the 2010 (last known update) government immunisation programme, the following table summarises what’s on offer from both:
| vaccine code | vaccine for | on govt schedule? | on private schedule? |
| BCG | tuberculosis | yes | yes |
| DTP | diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus | yes | yes |
| HBV | hep B | yes | yes |
| HiB | haemophilus influenza type b (causes mennigitis, pneumonia) | yes | yes |
| HPV | papillomavirus (cause cervical cancer, genital warts) | no | no |
| IPV | Polio | yes | no |
| MMR | Measles, rubella | only offers measles | yes |
| OPV | Polio | yes | yes |
| PCV | pneumococcal | yes | yes |
| RV | rotavirus (causes severe diahorrea) | yes | yes |
Further remarks
‘We offer everything on WHO list’
Spokesman for Department of Health, Joe Maila, disagreed with the findings above and insisted,”the fact is that we actually provide 11 vaccines in this country.” When asked to see the source of this claim, no response was received. It also wasn’t possible to find a more recent version of the government immunisation schedule.
When ill-considered street semantics turn into acts of destruction and murder
The editor’s eyes were assaulted by the resolve in mine.
“What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I be considered for president if I’m a citizen and pay taxes, but not black?”
The morning production meeting had turned to Zambia and whether Dr Guy Scott should be allowed to run for president after Michael Sata’s death.
“We want your skills, but not you in a position of power.”
I have no plans to run for the Zambian presidency. But the above exchange did happen. And no one present spoke up because they agreed, or they didn’t, or they did not want to be seen as siding with “the other”. Those who did not stop Mozambican Emmanuel Sithole’s recent murder are not alone.
Look at the abject poverty of the language that we’re mired in. King Goodwill Zwelithini and Edward Zuma insist on using the term “foreigner”. No nuance or distinction, just plain, vanilla foreigner. It’s like one big clump of clay in children’s hands.
The crisis in language continues with the wrangling over what kind of phobia it is. Enough with trying to find the right ribbon for the phobia. It’s hate. It’s bigotry. These racists and bigots have eyes, flush with contempt like Sithole’s murderer, before they’re afraid of “foreigners”. Perhaps not all homophobes fear homosexuals, but all homophobes hate homosexuals.
So these bigots, on the streets and thrones, are given free rein, without recourse, to pontificate about my place in society, with the precision of a dead surgeon.
Out of this crisis emerges the foreigner/local binary. Far from being an accident, this binary pervades media reports about the violence. The country is accustomed to talking about the “other”. If you’re black or white or coloured, there’s always that “other”. The foreigner/local duality is an expression of its awareness, the idea of something called “us” and something called “them”, something called “good” and something called “dangerous”.
What is the legal status of all these “foreign nationals” in media reports? Are they naturalised? Are they all illegal immigrants? Are they all asylum-seekers? Are they permanent residents? Don’t assume anything just because they’re black and live in Jeppestown.
Some discerning outlets have attempted to develop the artificial distinction of “foreign nationals” and “locals”. But it’s still the same binary. These “foreigners” live here. They’re local and share physical space with the racists. Who’s then foreign and who’s local?
I have an ID book. I pay taxes. I have lived and worked here longer than in any other place I’ve lived. Am I then a local resident or a foreign national?
The newsroom exchange wasn’t just about a non-South African in the workplace. It was about my non-ness and my other-ness. I don’t even have the right to pick the colour of my otherness. People such as the Zulu king pick it for me.
I’m not black, so I’m white. I don’t speak like Gareth Cliff, so I’m a foreigner. That’s my otherness. And I’m not “from” here, from South Africa, so that’s my non-ness.
I refuse to believe that the only reason why I am not in the crosshairs is because I’m not black or that I look white. I think I’m just further down the kill list. Perhaps my only protection in Johannesburg is polite urban company and my willingness to contribute to the economy. What happens when these protections lapse because I move to a rural town for work? When all the Mozambicans are dead, will the Chinese in Linksfield be next? They’re “others” too, you know.
The foreigner/local distinction crumbles under the burden of reality when you find a Somali shopkeeper who has an ID book (which he obtained legally) or a Pakistani who doesn’t have a friend at the department of home affairs but, like me, has to stand in the queue for hours.
While nursing a concoction resembling a bagel at a deli-eaterie last week, waving down the waiter was yielding little result. I was faint because of a cortisone shot. So another waiter helped out. She asked her co-worker to help “Saddam Hussein”.
Saddam Hussein. Because of my beard.
Fewer Twitter campaigns and marches, please. And more engagement with the attackers and bigots about how they talk and what they think.
Originally published at mg.co.za on April 23, 2015.
