Nobody's Paris

I was born on the outskirts of Johannesburg, twenty years ago. The first nineteen of those years were my journey inward. I consider them unbroken years, if only because that lets me say I know a thing or two about the city. That twentieth year and the months after it have been punctured by the feeling that I know nothing about the place at all. But nineteen years is something, some time long enough for me to call the city mine.

If, for whatever reason, you choose to come to Johannesburg, arrive by day. That way, as your plane descends and you peer down, you will still be able to make it all out. The red-roofed houses, imitations of a forgotten original. The backyard swimming pools, their abundance as mystifying as their not-blue-not-green-either hue. The trees, abundant too; each rising and gathering into this urban forest that stands, awkwardly, southeast of the Kalahari. The trick will work: the unnatural beauty of it will dawn on you. For an instant, it might charm you.

In the daylight, a turn of your eyes will bring into view the many Johannesburgs that make speaking of one absurd. The tin-topped quadrilaterals piled on top of one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that don’t quite fit together — all of the pieces have been disfigured by corrosion, the boundaries non-existent, the image ruined. This on the other side of Johannesburg’s highways, which fracture the city like distorting mirrors. Remember this: from above, Johannesburg can tell none of its lies.

Arriving by day you will land and get to watch the city unfold before you. You will travel the road into Johannesburg, which is a spiral with no center. The road out, which twirls into nothingness. Within, one-way roads turn into other one-way roads, and one missed turn makes necessary three more. There are holes in those roads and cranes in the sky. And there are high-rises, all of the same off-brown or dirt-gray, that would spoil the view if there was one.

I, who arrived back in May of this year on the other side of nightfall, saw none of this. I was in the driver’s seat on the M1 Motorway with the suspicion that Forest Town was on my right, but with no way of knowing for sure. I could not see the city I had returned to. The lights had gone out in Johannesburg; they went for hours at a time, for days on end. They still go. The streetlights have become monuments; I saw only as far as my headlights extended and so long as the headlights of approaching cars did not blind me.

While in America I was never able to suppress the sensation that I was in another country; I was reminded with every turn of the minute-hand that I was someplace else. As my memory of Johannesburg receded in those months, my need for its refuge only grew. Now as I circled the streets of my upbringing, on neither the right nor left lane, I was not driving through Johannesburg but through what I remembered of it. I could see nothing — the darkness stretched out ahead of me and over any hope I could have of making new the only city I had ever really known. It was vanishing, along with the I that had once inhabited it.

For stillness, Johannesburg is the kind of place you leave. This was an invisible truth of my upbringing. I spent Decembers in my dad’s childhood village in Mpumalanga — where the sun rises earliest and the roosters crow loudest — and in my mother’s, the right side of which washes away into the Indian Ocean. We never stayed long: customarily, we departed before the break of day and returned that same night to a comatose city. I traveled but could hardly recognise either the way in or out of Johannesburg. Which is to say that for 19 years I was never so far from the city that I couldn’t, in an instant, make it back.

I grew up in two houses, attending two schools — my family made both moves between the years I turned 12 and 13. Not much changed. Growing up, what air was to me, Johannesburg seemed as well. I didn’t know it then, but leaving in August 2022 — the month I began university in the United States — and returning for the first time that December, I would have to learn again how to breathe. In those few months before leaving, I was made to see Johannesburg — the way you sit up straight and prime your eye for a season finale — but by that time it was no longer there. The city — and, without my knowledge, my world — had grown smaller and smaller, until Johannesburg stretched not much further than the interior of the van that brought my friends and I back to it.

The winter of 2022 was especially brutal, but on the 8th of August — two days before I flew — the chill relented as though to grant my friends and I pardon. Johannesburg is seldom peaceful, rarely serene, and never quiet; it is no place for a sentimental goodbye. So under South Africa’s winter sun, we drove three hours northwest to Hartbeespoort Dam. We never came face to face with the dam itself; we heard only the far-off rushing of its water. The windmill that greeted us turned gently, making only the slightest creak. We heard the voices of children in the distance; they screamed in a way that let us know they were not in danger. The park circling the dam, for all we knew, was evergreen. In the right spot, beneath the right trees, the rays of sun and the beams of shade crossed in perfect alignment. We sat on a rainbow-colored picnic blanket with enough food to last us days — days we didn’t have.

We talked about what we were watching, reading, listening to, what we had on our minds, the state of things. We stuck orange peels in front of our teeth, smiled as we closed our eyes. The taste of citrus was something strong, something to be felt wholly, something we could name. We passed around green grapes — fresh; and strawberries — past their sell-by date. We felt the sun soften on our faces. We did everything but reminisce. Neither did we project ourselves forward. We made a home of the present; copious, ornate. Each of our faces began to fade from sight. We cursed the coming of evening.

We retraced our steps: strolled back over the bridge we had paced, past the orange and yellow daisies beginning to wilt, the map declaring “YOU ARE HERE,” the now-whirling windmill, eventually into the now-deserted parking. We drove. We passed what we had approached, this time not needing directions. We were returning, though, to a Johannesburg to which we had never been. Johannesburg had come to mean this group of friends (yes, a group — that is what we experienced ourselves as. A kind of touring circus that, most of the time, stayed put). I myself was saying a silent farewell to the city as it flashed past my window. I was seeing the place as I had never seen it, imagining it now as the place to which I would be setting my clock back six hours. To all of us, just as foreign as America was the Johannesburg in which we were not together.

I remember the rest of that day like a scene out of one of those novels you can only read once. Little is needed to describe what one might have seen: seven teens, clinging to the title while they still could, pressed up against each other in a white van on the M1 highway heading back to Johannesburg. The sun setting, the city lighting up in sequence as though orchestrated. Frank Ocean’s Blonde playing start to end.

There was a score, there was a scene, but to the rest of that story there was no script. It might be enough to say that the weight of each word was too much for a moving car. Or that the music said all that needed to be said for those seven friends, or that in saying nothing they let that moment remain as anything and everything. The seconds between each song contained a vast, damp silence; the car was moving but time seemed not to. It was at once a case of having too much to say and having no idea at all where one might begin.

We got out of the van and found each others’ eyes in the dark. We hugged longer than we had time for. In that moment there was no city. There was no world. There were fears, there were hopes. There was a promise.

My flight from Johannesburg to the United States (via Frankfurt) was to take off in twenty hours, but it felt like I’d left the city then. Each hug I retreated from was a departure. There was this adventure ahead of me — I knew and was excited for this as I boarded the plane — but all of a sudden it felt small; it shrunk from my purview as the Johannesburg high-rises did the further from land I flew. The rush of the ascending plane felt somehow implausible against the feeling that I was weighing the entire thing down. Stop, I almost wanted to say, there’s been a mistake. But those aren’t the words I regret not saying.

Johannesburg was stumbled upon. Floods washed over Jerusalem and it rose again, the Roman Empire spawned and fell, Columbus watched as a continent emerged before his eyes — all this happened centuries before one prospector, sickle in hand, took the flash of the earth that lines central Johannesburg for more than the glimmer of the sun. So gold was discovered. So a city was not born, but made.

The Gold Rush quickened and patch by patch the city was seized, until it had nowhere to go but up. As its skyscrapers rose from the ground, so Johannesburg believed it did out of Africa. But none of those high-rises were high enough for the West to see. Caught between worlds, the city exiled itself.

It chose instead to imagine itself self-sufficient. The water out of the city’s taps is ever drinkable, the schools “world-class,” the weather temperate all year long. Drive down each of Johannesburg’s streets, and you will be offered the day’s newspaper, the season’s fruits, the chance to have your windscreen washed, your car parallel-parked for you — all this and more before red turns to green. The car window can be the city’s marketplace; the car itself an ecosystem in transit.

In place of the city’s dream of ascending to Washington Heights came the dream of ascending within it, of rising higher and higher until you reach the top floor. It is this that makes Johannesburg feel like a world unto itself, that, in spite of the city not being one of South Africa’s three capitals, allows it to believe itself the country’s center. A life began in Johannesburg is a life fated to end there. The city does not have borders, but edges — to leave Johannesburg is to fall off the face of it, to plummet.

For why does one need the world, when Johannesburg is “the New York of Africa.” Is “the greatest city south of Cairo.” Is “the Venice of the South.”

It is all of these places and yet it is nobody’s Paris.

Because growing up we said many things about Johannesburg, but the first was never that it was beautiful. Yes the Jacarandas fell in their velvet purple to announce summer; yes every now and then the sun set and the gold once beneath the earth now adorned the sky above. But these were momentary — the stuff of framed photographs and PC screensavers.

Every shade of brown, all colors accounted for, my friends and I were a picture of the new South Africa. But we couldn’t just pose for it, we had to live in it too. Johannesburg was birthed by gold and so built for its extraction — living and mining were kept apart, cheap Black labor moving to and fro. This was never meant to be a congruous city. My friends and I knew our suburbs, our parks. Inside my friends’ Parkview houses were framed images and paintings of city life. We were told Johannesburg (the inner city, at least) was unsafe, as though we didn’t live there. We’d put it euphemistically: “the people next door to us have lived such different lives.” The truth is that, ten years younger than our democracy, we felt the growing pains twice over — tonal metaphors could not unfragment a city, nor could they release us from the feeling that we were tourists in our own land.

Because at some point your car can’t be your ecosystem — you have to step out. For the moneyed, the distance between a parked car and, say, one’s place of work, spells dread. On the city’s roads, the eyes of the coming and the going must meet those of the staying. Each gaze lasts longer than either person is comfortable with; the cars flying by red traffic lights (or robots, as we call them) leave no time for absolution. Crossing the road — being on the road — is a high wire act in this live wire city.

For everyone who has grown up in Johannesburg, there comes a time when you can no longer delude yourself about it. It can be walking down the street. Perhaps for me it was when I drove through the darkness into which the city had plunged. Or one of those days where the winter sun shone only in ineffectual mockery and the taps ran dry with the electricity out — warm water turned as precious as a fine wine. Or when I was six or seven, and our house was broken into at gunpoint, and I was too young to know what had been stolen. Or when it happened again, at age ten, this time the list of lost possessions imprinted on my mind forever: two laptops. Or daily, when the only way to look at Johannesburg can be to curse it.

Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Johannesburg — we didn’t call it that, and I don’t when I’m home. It’s Joburg (in some cases eGoli, or Jozi). But to “where are you from?” the perennial question of my first year in university, I would answer “Johannesburg,” and to “your flight to Johannesburg departs in 24 hours,” I would become accustomed. So in spending time away from the place for the first time, Joburg became Johannesburg.

I’d left because I could — I had to my name the things America’s universities selected for — and while at the time of applying I rambled many other unreasoned reasons, that’s really all there was to it. I took the road that showed itself. Many of my friends and I had spread our wings to the West for university too; on the other side of our first semesters when we were back in Johannesburg, we agreed that we were tired of flying. Johannesburg, together, was where we wanted to be. We’d come to know that there was cleaner air elsewhere, that the high-rises were higher, the concerts grander. We rejected liberalism but its words remained with us — quality of life, standard of living, liveable cities. Most miraculously, the cities were walkable.

The infrastructure of our Johannesburg was as short as 150 cm and as tall as 190cm, concentrated in parks and living rooms, well-dressed. If we harbored illusions about Johannesburg, they were to do with what we had made of it: the palaces we had talked and laughed and drank the standing rubble into. Our Johannesburg had qualities, but no features; it had substance but no shape, blood but no bones. Out of the city’s pale gray stone we’d fashioned a colosseum.

I’d been in Cambridge, Boston, and New York; I’d glimpsed London and Paris from the airport windows; but the city I discovered across the globe was Johannesburg. Basquiat and Frida Kahlo adorned a Keith Harrington printed mural in Chelsea (Manhattan), but I was in Braamfontein, where buildings too double as canvases. In the discordant cacophony of 42nd Street I heard the dizzying hum of Juta Street, the site of many near-crashes for me. In Cambridge, in pastel-faced double-stories with no walls, no electric fences, no barbed wire and no security guards to man them, I was shown what Johannesburg was not. As with America’s pedestrian walkways, as with the train beneath them. I walked these new cities with my head turned back; what I discovered was that I did, in fact, have memories of Johannesburg, of the place itself. Not just memories — I found I had a relationship with the city: the buildings, the roads, the art. Manhattan’s intersections felt like images of Johannesburg’s Central Business District in the negative; walking from street to street I found visions of the city I did not know I had. So in December of 2022 I came back to hug my parents again, to laugh with my brother, cook elaborate meals to good music with my friends, and to discover Johannesburg. To find the city I had lived feeling like a reticent next-door neighbor to, that I had now been formally introduced to by new acquaintances.

I know I am back in Johannesburg when I drive along Central Street, turn onto West, merge into the M1. That December — my first return — I took a longer route: between Central and West I turned down 16th street to find the house I had once tutored at newly and unrecognisably renovated. The bookstore where I had bought White Teeth and The God of Small Things and Things Fall Apart — each of which was in some way the making of me — was now a tech store, or a repair company: I didn’t have the heart to keep my eyes on it. Mangrove, once the site of Johannesburg’s finest karaoke, was no more. In every conversation I found myself talking again and again about the city, how it had or hadn’t changed: it was as though I were tuning into its frequency when all that I wanted was to slip back into a rhythm undisturbed.

Johannesburg, I came to see as I returned again and again, was less the city I understood than the city where I was understood. What made returning to my friendships delightful was that nothing seemed to have changed — we laughed as we always had, sang to songs we had heard before and would hear again. As January began bleeding into February, the days slowly growing less warm, we felt the beginnings of what would become ritual: the sadness hanging over our last few hours together; the hurried, futile attempts at delaying our flights; the goodbyes that would never suffice.

We would do this again: leave and return, always deciding to do so together. And I would, too, on my own. In June of 2023, I found myself in London, the other city with which I had grown up — football games on the screen; Condition of England novels on the page — but that I had never been to. I was with one of my friends who’d been an almost permanent feature of my last decade, and who’d been studying in London. We scaled the incline of Primrose Hill to see the city from above, turned and faced it for a moment, and sat down. She rolled a cigarette with almost mechanical precision; the smoke flew into the clouds and our conversation drifted, as ever, back to our friends.

“To be honest, in some ways it’s been hard,” she said, after I’d asked about what it had been like being in London for the past few months. “A lot of missing friends, a lot of missing Joburg.” We’d bought green apples at the supermarket for £3; I’d finished mine and she now bit into hers.

She began again. “I still haven’t gotten used to being in a place where I don’t feel completely understood. Especially because I know I do feel that somewhere else.”

I smiled in agreement; we’d had the sense for a while now that on either side of the Atlantic we were living the same experience.

“But then again,” she said, “it’s tricky to tell whether we were a bunch of kids who saw the world in the same way and found each other, or if we just molded each other into these copies of one another.”

“I don’t know which I want to believe more,” I said. “It feels like maybe we’d have to be adults to know.”

She laughed. “Adults—scary word.”

We’d never experienced Johannesburg for ourselves — which is to say, not living with our parents — but we were now anticipating it impatiently, the time when we would live there together, as a group of friends, the city ours alone. Beneath that anticipation was the awkward assumption that, until now, had gone unspoken: that there was some hypothetical conversation where, after braving the timezone tetris, we would each uproot our Western lives, discard the big winter coats and the boots, double check for our passports and say, “yes, guys, now is the time, see you there in two days.” Because the alternative was coming back to a ghost town — Johannesburg without each other — which for all we knew was another country.

We took the bus back to the Whitechapel flat which belonged to my friend’s sibling and their two flatmates. We cooked dinner together; three of us South Africans, one Swedish-Brazilian who assured us despite her accent she was not American, another who’d arrived by way of Dubai. At some point I asked what coming here from Dubai was like, and at some point along her answer that flatmate said, “I had no idea what I’d find when I moved.”

The conversation went on but without me. I was stuck; I sensed my friend was, too. “When you moved?”

Blank faces. I hadn’t asked a question.

“You said, ‘when you moved to London.’ I find that interesting — I’ve never used those words.”

“Well, what do you say?”

I told her that I say ‘I study in America.’

“Oh no, I moved here. When I came to London I brought everything with me. I guess in a sense my life is here now.”

“And your home?”

“Huh?”

“You’d say this is where your home is now?”

“Well, there’s where my parents are, where I grew up. But I live in London.” There was something in her tone — perhaps in her posture — that was even more definitive than her words. It could have been the way she said ‘London’ or ‘live,’ or how she stressed the 'in,' as though this were the 16th or 15th century and she’d set sail here, waved the shore of her homeland goodbye, stopped at the Port of Dover, found her way to this corner of Whitechapel, dug up the earth beneath her, planted roots.

“Hmm.” I looked at my friend, who looked back. I ran the flatmate’s words over in my mind.

“So you see yourself going back?” she asked, bemused.

I referred back to what had become a formula: a couple of years in the world’s cities — London, New York, Paris, who’s to say where else; maybe a pit stop in Cape Town; settle down in Johannesburg again. Except this time I paused between step two and three. I couldn’t tell where the tentativeness had come from — it was a question on which I’d always had absolute certainty.

She let out air from her nose, intimating a laugh. “Well I hope that comes together,” she said. “It could be the answer you end up giving for the rest of your life.”

That was June. In August I was in Johannesburg again. They were lovely weeks. Enjoying them, though, required keeping from my mind certain questions I hadn’t the courage to face. Whenever I’d been asked Will You Go Home Again? I’d always said some variation of Yes! Yes absolutely! I would say I’m not living in America but studying there, I would fetch my knowledge from afar! That they’re different societies and this one raised me and that meant something; that I can’t care about anywhere else and nowhere else could ever be as meaningful to me, that it wouldn’t be a case of my choosing to go back but my being pulled back, that my roots are here and when you’re far enough roots pull, that my anchor is in the waters Johannesburg doesn’t have and that I’d run till the rope got too taught, till the anchor floated up, that then I would drop it again, that I would stick the landing, that I would be back to stay, that I would be home again, until finally I was asked not will you go home again but can you, Can You Go Home Again? and I had nothing to say.

I hadn’t put the words in that order yet — can you go home again? Nor had I brought the maxim to my tongue, no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. But the words are imprinted on my mind now and I haven’t been able to turn away from them.

Months later I was back in Cambridge again, sitting at a table with the group of friends I was now to live with. A man — as American as they come — came by to introduce himself. He asked where we were from, and we went in order: Lebanon, Spain, Italy, Germany, Norway, Russia, South Africa. His eyebrows shot up. He asked which city, and I said Johannesburg.

“Oh wow! It’s terrible, the news coming from there,” he said.

I let out some combination of sounds in the affirmative, maybe ended with “yeah, it’s sad,” but I had no idea what he was talking about — I’d landed an hour ago, TM Mobile had given my phone number away and I didn’t yet have a new one, and I was in the process of condensing four months of life into half an hour over lunch. I pulled out my phone, put Johannesburg in the search bar, and the first suggested search filled in “fire.”

Next came the death toll, said to be rising. The damage, said to be permanent. The messages sent to family. The time waiting for a response.

Another fire in the inner city would follow a few weeks later. The Johannesburg City Library would close, seemingly for good. All this came months after a gas explosion had broken through Bree Street, sending cars flying up into the air. That same week an editorial followed in the newspaper of record: “The Bree Street Blast and the End of Johannesburg.”

I booked my December flight home in the weeks after with my mother, over the phone, at great financial pain. Each time I insist on returning, my mother says, “honestly, I don’t understand why you want to come back here so much.” On some days neither do I, but even then, not understanding why, I know I do want to go back. I know nothing if not that. I know, inevitably, I will find myself asking: can you go home again? Perhaps because the question presupposes that there is a place to go home to, that it is still there, still standing. That there will be streets still to drive through, even stroll down; parks still to meet at, homes in which to take shelter.

Cambridge, MA

November 2023