006 · Distance

05 May, 2026

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What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass.¹

Alexandra Fuller writes that there were things she could only know about Africa once she had left. I had to leave too.

Distance altered the picture. Physical distance. Emotional distance. Things I had taken for granted sounded like sirens. It was like stepping outside a photograph. For the first time, I could see the frame.

In Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me, Bill Hayes arrives at a similar point from another angle:

I found I had to leave it in order to get a clear perspective on my life here and to write this book—most of which I did in Rome in a single five-week period less than six months after Oliver died.²

The difference I hear lies in pace. Fuller looks back slowly. Hayes writes under pressure, close to grief.

My own practice sits somewhere between the two. ‘Photo-sketching’ lets me write quickly from a photograph. It also depends on distance. Immediacy and delay. The first flash of thought, then the distortions time permits. A drift between impulse and reflection.

There were things about South Africa I could not properly see until I left. They were too close. Too ordinary. Apartheid shaped the world around me and entered daily life: relationships, assumptions, expectations. Its logic lingered in gestures, silences, mistrust and the unspoken rules that survived the official system.

The first time I used heroin was to get rid of a cocaine comedown. That was the reason for the first time, and the reason I gave myself for the next.

Late night. Lounge. Scott sat on the floor in his underwear, working on a painting with a foil funnel between his lips. Ryan leaned against the wall, his face lit by the lighter as he chased the dragon. Wisps of smoke around his fingers. Beside him, an old box of OMO washing powder held up my portable television.

The room looked ordinary to me.

Distance gave the scene another scale. I came to read the drug use around me as escape. Personal collapse. A social symptom. Those meanings overlapped without resolving into one explanation. Apartheid had officially ended years before. Its afterlife remained. The new South Africa arrived with its flag and constitution. The legal order changed faster than lived relations.

My family history made that reality harder to simplify. I carried both sides of the wound. The legacy of the oppressed and the oppressor.

In This Is Water,³ David Foster Wallace opens with two young fish who fail to recognise the water around them. That was part of what leaving South Africa revealed to me. In England, I entered different water. Different pressure. Different invisible rules.

England carried its own ideological currents. To borrow from Althusser, I moved through a new arrangement of ideological state apparatuses: education, law, media and culture.⁴ Their effects appeared in accents, manners, class codes, bureaucracies and public silences. These structures named me, placed me and taught me how I was expected to appear.

I borrow more loosely from Lukács. His account of class consciousness sharpens the relation between historical position and knowledge.⁵ My South African childhood formed the ground of thought itself: the position from which the world first became legible.

In South Africa, I had been submerged in histories and tensions so familiar that I could not fully register them. In England, other burdens emerged. A quieter estrangement. A steady awareness of being slightly out of place. The question of where I belonged did not disappear.

To move between countries was also to move between versions of myself. Writing became one way to trace that movement through memory, fracture and ancestry. A way to work through drift. A life is shaped by what is remembered and told, and by what remains silent and partial.

What remains unresolved.