By John Ballard
Cillier is strictly an acquired taste.
But for those of us who have the time, patience and voyeuristic urge to keep reading, he's a trip.
You have now been warned...
The World Cup, My White Afrikaner Skin, My Fascist Parents, Mandela, Obama, And Forgiveness is long. Just north of seventeen thousand words. But there are pictures, cartoons actually, not by Evert but by Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro), a fellow South African.
Printed out for easier reading, it comes to fourteen or fifteen pages, depending on typeface.
It is divided into 36 numbered chapters which are something like stanzas in a poem.
Summarizing it would be like explaining fireworks to someone blind and deaf.
Here is a taste from the prologue, before Stanza 1.
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 For fifteen years, while I was poor and wrote, wrote, wrote my seven unpublished novels (and became the 90s slam poet Evert Eden), my ex-wife and I didn't communicate.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.�
She always had a way of knocking the wind out of my sails. This time the issue was galloping cancer in her stomach.
I went to hang out with her and her brother and her sister during her last days on earth, in that big, elegant apartment, now sans my large paintings, but filled with South African art, a shrine to our homeland.
�I've got no charge with you anymore,� she informed me, in the magnanimous version of her imperial Jewish Princess voice. I thought, �fuck you,� but I just nodded.
Two days before she died, throwing up her guts in a gush of blood and stuff, my ex-wife lay propped up in her bedroom with me on the side of her beautiful bed, designed to her specifications, as was everything and everyone around her. Her doctor brother had been slamming her with as many drugs as he could to keep her semi-comfortable but still lucid.
The two of us were sitting alone, the very ex-married couple. She said:
"How can this be happening to me, when I've always tried to be so good?�
"It's fate,� I said. �We can't control what happens, just how we deal with it.�
It's amazing how one pulls out the most boring cliches at the best and worst of times. My ex-wife suddenly got up and walked to the bathroom, which had always been her bathroom when we lived together; I used the bathroom one room over. As she walked, trailing a sheet behind her, she said in the commanding version of her imperial Jewish Princess voice:
"Make the bed.�
I stood there, looking at the huge mess of sheets and blankets, caught like the proverbial husband in habitual male learned helplessness.
"How?� I asked.
Without losing a beat, and without even looking at me, she snapped:
"Military style.�
The door of the bathroom closed behind her. And I made that goddamn bed that she and I had spent ten years in, that I hadn't seen in fifteen years, and General Patton himself would've approved.
This is a snip from Stanza #27.
I can't tell if Americans are subconsciously guilty or simply basted like Thanksgiving turkeys into deaf, dumb and blind self-righteousness. Why is it so easy to lie to Americans? Is dumbfuckery written into our Constitution or something? Why is it so easy to scare Americans? Our elite and our media are past masters at it. We're scared of everything -- from terrorists to heat waves to food. Our elites screw us over 24/7 -- today the bottom 80% Americans have to share a lousy 15% of the incredible shrinking American pie -- yet the Tea Party people, the latest incarnation of outraged American victimhood, are more pissed than vampires stranded on a planet of bloodless robots at that black socialist demon Obama. Talk about Stockholm Syndrome: we've got it worse than the Romans under Nero. As we regular Americans burn while our elites fiddle, what do we do? We complain about the quality of the firewood.
���
This is America as seen through the eyes of someone from South Africa. It should be noted that he's no more charitable to his motherland than the one where he now lives.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lae'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
Or as we like to say...
O would some Power, the gift to give us,
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And, foolish notion:
What airs of dress and bearing would leave us,
And even pridefullness!
Footnote: I printed this out when it was published over a week ago to have something to read during hours of waiting at the hospital. I had plenty of time to read but no time to blog about it until this morning. I was supposed to be tied up today for yet another family member's surgery but yesterday, twenty-four hours before the scheduled surgery, after three previous trips to other doctors, x-rays, sonogram and pre-op appointment.... the operation is called off because the insurance company says it is a preexisting condition so they will not pay!
In time the operation will have to happen, but getting jerked around like this is truly over-the-top unnecessary. I'm too angry to write anything rational about it so this post is the best I can do. Perhaps I like Evert Cillier because he does rage so well.
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