Author: clairelbell

In my late teens I had a fantasy that I would get up and walk out of my life. I would open the door, turn left, turn right at the traffic lights, turn left at the dirt track that led up to the dam, and then keep on walking over the hills. I would carry nothing and never come back.

Like many young souls, in my early twenties I kind of did it. I moved to London, on a one-way plane ticket with £70 in my pocket and spent the next few years trying to build the life I wanted on my terms, but none of this really amounted to walking away without warning or a trace. I saved that until July last year.

I mostly work alone in the attic office above my kitchen. During my working day, my colleagues are friends and contacts who I interact with via a computer screen. The platform I mostly use to communicate with them is one that I am going to call the Big Blue. Like the sea, it is a place full of curious fish and a few monsters. In July last year, I climbed out of the Big Blue, and returned to dry land. I spent four weeks entirely on dry land. Four weeks drying out.

The first few days were weird as it became creepily apparent that I had got into a habit of summarising my thoughts and feelings into pithy one-liners that I would share daily with the world, and as the month rolled on, I found myself reflecting on how submerged – drowned even – I had become in Facebook.

Like many, I had first joined in 2004. Those were the days when its captain encouraged us to list our favourite movies and music next to our names, and I remembered how difficult I had found it. While others were sharing cult classics like Clockwork Orange and listed their fav musicians as Indie legend Jarvis Cocker, for me, Mary Poppins and Elton John sprang to my mind. Sure I liked Jarvis and I’d watched Clockwork Orange at a midnight showing at an arts festival, but they weren’t my favourites and I remember feeling the gap open up between what I actually liked and what I was supposed to like.  Instead I posted a quote that I had seen on a greetings card: “One day I hope to become the person by dog things I am”, and left it that.

As the years went by, the Big Blue became a kind of scrapbook for life. A place to stick holiday pics and gig tickets, a place that reflected your life back at you. Life is about becoming. It is normal to have dreams and desires and wishes, and it is especially normal about being excited when some of these dreams come true.

I went horse riding across Iceland.

I got published in a famous newspaper.

I met a sexy man and he proposed.

But of course, the Big Blue didn’t just reflect your life at you, it reflected your life at every one you were linked to, and it wasn’t long before one of the first monsters of the depths reared its head: the green monster, jealousy.

While it’s natural that people get excited by the exciting things that happen to them – and want to share that joy – it’s not always easy for people to hear about other people’s success, especially when their golden moment intercepts your day from hell. Researchers began to study the mindsets of people who spent too much time wallowing in the Big Blue, and it turned out that that sharing our highs was beginning to wreck havoc in other people’s psyches, making them feel alienated and worthless.

Society is a bit like a self-cleaning oven. When things get too murky, it starts to auto-correct to bring things back to the less murky middle, and one of its favourite tools for doing this is shame. As age old as jealousy, shame is a brilliant tool for stopping people from doing something we don’t like. And so it came to pass that those who felt hurt, and worthless and sad by the Big Blue, began to mock the other people in the Big Blue.

“Those who swim in its waters are not authentic,” they said.

“All they show us is glittering reflections of themselves.”

“The Big Blue is a place of fakery.”

“It is not real. You are not real.”

It didn’t matter that people had been brought up to dream, to have ambitions, and do their best and try to make something of their life. It didn’t matter that it was once normal – even expected – to share your joy and holiday snaps and special moments with friends. Almost overnight, you were not really happy if you were sharing your life freely with others. In fact, you were bad. A traitor to the collective wellbeing.

And so, slowly, incrementally, the rules of the Big Blue changed, and the new consensus became that if you truly cared about the wellbeing of others, if you were a kind, community-orientated good person, then you needed to censor what you shared. And when you did share, you needed to share things that really mattered to everybody – not just you. And so within a few clicks, everyone in the Big Blue became chuggers.

Do you remember them? Charity huggers? The people who would accost you in the High Street and guilt you into signing a form that took £3 every month from your bank account and gave it to a dog/child/tap in some place you have never been? All of a sudden, the Big Blue was awash with people caring about lives of people they have never met, just so their posts no longer offend the lives of the people they do know.

And by god, there was so much caring to do. There was an opportunity for outrage at every moment of the day, and being in the Big Blue started to feel like you were treading water in a turbulent sea, randomly grabbing at bits of flotsam and jetsam to stay afloat.

Sink with a Guardian article.

Surface with a piece from the New York Times.

Float for a while on the back of a refreshing blog.

Pulled under by a petition from Avaaz.

Your own life, the one you live in an actual body that requires actually feeding and washing and sleeping began to seem unreal as the Big Blue washed over you and demanded more and more of your attention, more and more of your care.

You might have once wanted to sail a yacht in the Mediterranean or ride horses across Mongolia, but now you dare not want these things. Or if you still did, you made a calculated decision not to share them with anybody. The new consensus from the Big Blue was that dreams were wrong, desire was wrong. The only thing that mattered was the anguish and suffering of people who you do not know. The only life worth living was a life of sacrifice.

When I began writing about this, I did some research into people who go missing. According to the charity Missing People, up to 80% of missing persons cases involve someone believed to suffer from mental health problems. In Japan, there is a phenomenon of johatsu, or “the evaporated people”.

Tormented by the shame of a lost job, failed marriage, or mounting debt, thousands of Japanese citizens have reportedly started leaving behind their formal identities and seeking refuge in the anonymous, off-the-grid world. The book features a collection of vignettes from people who have fled modern society in search of a more secretive, less shame-filled life. That word shame struck a chord with me.

Shame was what the Big Blue was making me feel every day. Shame that I was white.
Shame that I had a roof over my head. Shame that I dared to have big dreams. Guilt refers to what we have done to others. Shame is a feeling that we have about just being. You can get rid of guilt by doing – by making amends, fixing things. But you can’t fix shame in the same way.

No wonder I swam for the shore.

I began to realise that being immersed in the Big Blue was like being in an abusive relationship where someone else was in charge of my emotions. I started to see that I was adrift in a choppy sea of reactionary feelings, never sure when another wave would come along and sink me. In the place where I had once played Scrabble with friends, I now felt powerless and overwhelmed.

It’s been six months now since I started to rethink my relationship with Facebook. During those six months, I also stopped blogging. I needed time to rethink what I put into the world and why I put it there. Half a year later, I consciously avoid political conversations on the Facebook platform, I rarely repost articles and perhaps most crucially, I no longer feel any impetus to share my private life with the world. That’s not to say I have cut ties completely. I still enjoy connecting with friends in faraway places, but I consciously keep it as light as I would at a wedding before the wine is served.

Am I happier? Yes. Do I feel calmer and more in control of my life and my emotions? Yes. Do I feel more empowered? Yes. Does this matter? Yes.

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb

A few years ago I visited Salinas in California, where John Steinbeck grew up. At the end of a quiet street with a burger bar and a few boarded-up shops, is the Steinbeck Museum.

Steinbeck first came to prominence in 1939 with his book Grapes of Wrath which documents the exploitation of displaced and destitute mid-western farmers at the hands of the wealthy land owners of California.

These were the early days of industrialised farming, and the small-scale farmers of the mid-west had been attacked on two fronts: by a devastating drought that turned their land into dust, and by the arrival of mechanised tools that they could ill afford.

Grapes of Wrath follows a family as they cut their losses and head west, only to find that beyond the desert is not a land of milk and honey, but a place where their poverty ensures that they are despised, ill-treated and exploited.

It is a damning portrait of America and when the book was published it was met with outrage. The Associated Farmers of California dismissed the novel as a “pack of lies” and “communist propaganda”, copies of the book were burned, and the FBI put Steinbeck under surveillance.

This summer, Lost Where I Belong: Trying to Escape Apartheid’s Shadow, will be published. The book has been praised for being confronting and challenging, and rejected for not being saleable enough, and so like Virginia Woolf who stared her own press (now Bloomsbury) because the publishers of her day thought her writing too feminine, I have decided to go it alone.

Thanks to Amazon and the like, self-publishing is no longer considered the vanity press it once was, and has been repackaged as “indie” publishing, and a way to circumvent the spinelessness of traditional publishers. But without the stamp of approval of a third party, I am left alone with this thought: how will this book be received by South Africans? And what would it feel like to have your writing rejected by your nation because it is out of step with the way the nation wants to see itself?

Twenty three years after Grapes of Wrath was published, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”.

But far from celebrating his success, again America baulked. How dare this book that vilified their nation and portrayed the ruling class in such a vile light, be awarded such an important prize? How dare this book be lifted up high for the world to see?

Grapes of Wrath is a confronting book. It is a book that every South African should read as it drives home the point that land ownership matters, really matters. Drought may have pushed the mid-western farmers off their land, but in South Africa it was white immigrants who created laws that banned black people from owning land, and until that disenfranchisement is dealt with through some form of satisfactory compensation and restitution, South Africa will never find peace.

When I set out to write my book, I did not understand the land issue. My book is about an awakening to the realities of a country I ill-understood. The book is about a journey from ignorance to the beginnings of understanding, and there is no doubt that it will get South Africans hot under the collar. I know, because it already has. And those people were my friends.

The Steinbeck museum is book-ended by two poignant exhibits. The first, when you enter the museum, is a film about mechanised farming. The camera runs through jolly wheat fields, shows happy labourers picking fruit, and the clean and smooth processes of conveyor belts carrying shiny produce. It looks like a video that was produced by the Associated Farmers of California for their annual 4^th of July picnic, and feels like an attempt to sow doubt in the the twisted mind of the Grapes of Wrath reader.

The last, just before you leave, is a green camper van (pictured above). After he won the 1962 Nobel Prize and America spat at his victory, Steinbeck was concerned that he had lost touch with his country and had the camper van built so he could take to the road with his dog Charley, and write about America. Travels with Charley is a writer’s book. It’s a book more about what it is to like to desire to write about your country, and fail and doubt and lose interest, than it is about 1960s America. Steinbeck never again wrote about socio-political issues.

Steinbeck is far from being the only writer to be publicly lambasted for daring to write about that which others did not want to acknowledge.

A Woman in Berlin, published shortly after WW2, documents the Russian occupation of Berlin and how all the women were raped, how the German men were incapable of protecting them, and how the women accepted the rape in order to survive. The book is written with a light-hearted, deft touch, and after its first publication, it was met with such public anger in Germany, the author refused the book to be published again until after her death, and then only anonymously.

Contemplating these books, on the eve of publication of my own work, made me ask myself: what is it that nations expect of writers? It is easy to get a handle on what individuals expect. I just have to think of myself, as I sit down with a book.

Writing can give me succour at a time of difficulty.

It can shed light of clarity on things I do not understand.

Good writing can point me to something that I have not noticed before.

It can entertain me, creating an escape route from myself.

It can critique the way things are, and remind me that they have not always been this way, that there are other ways.

Writing can be like a hall of mirrors, that reflects me back to me, sometimes stretched, sometimes magnified, sometimes exactly the way I am (which can be the worst reflection of all).

But what do nations want? What are the forces that guide a collective consciousness to revere or deride a book at a certain point in history, and then to change their mind, or not, decades later?

I don’t have an answer to that yet. Maybe you do?

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb

I took a break from Unpopular Essays for a few months because it can be exhausting writing essays that you know will stir up bile in others. Sometimes you just need to walk away so you can breathe again.

The trigger for my break was a piece I wrote in March, in which I reflected on two Consciousness Cafés that I had recently been part of – one that I had co-facilitated, with a mixed group of 70 South Africans on Human Rights Day, and one that I had facilitated alone with a small group of white South Africans who wanted to experiment with having a whites-only conversation about the legacy of apartheid.

As a facilitator, my job is to guide the group to find the deeper wisdom that is trying to emerge (none of us know what this wisdom will be when we begin), and what had struck me was, despite the fact that the cafés were held at opposite ends of South Africa with totally different groups of people, similar wisdom emerged from both groups.

The wisdom was that privilege, in whatever way we have it or define it (and it was agreed privilege was more than just wealth), is not something that we should destroy, but something that we should become aware of and use to the advantage of others, not just ourselves. Careful use of our personal privilege was the ticket to a fairer society for all.

I thought it was a powerful and insightful reflection, and I wrote a piece about it, and then asked my Consciousness Café colleague if I could share this essay on our Facebook page. The heartache came when she said no.

I immediately understood why she refused. As she saw it, this was not a perspective that would sit well with the black radicals. The growing narrative from the black radicals was that privilege was unjust, and white people, especially, should be stripped of their privilege. The way to a more fair society was through restitution and to some extent, revenge. To post an article that was counter to the black radical narrative on the Consciousness Café page would enrage them and potentially be bad PR for Consciousness Café.

My arms became heavy. I slunk down on the couch and felt that giving-up feeling.

This wasn’t the first time in history that the wisdom of the crowd was to be ignored or silenced. It happens all the time, every day, around the world. Shifts in consciousness begin on the fringe and it takes a long time for new collective wisdom to be born. In South Africa, the voice of the black radicals was relatively new, and it was claiming centre stage. And fair enough, grab the limelight while you can, but to silence a point of view because the current populists won’t like it is a mistake.

South Africa veers from “one solution” to another. Apartheid. The Rainbow Nation. The Frantz Fanon Approach. It is a society that abhors complexity and nuance – to its detriment.

Interestingly, in the few months I took away from the page, I received some amazing teaching from the world.

I went to India on a yoga retreat, and found myself, at the ashram, surrounded by 15 people who I couldn’t get along with, and who didn’t like me. This never happens. My husband always laughs that I could make friends in a toilet, but I had travelled all the way to India, hoping to find solace in the company of like-minded yogis, and had ended up the pariah.

I then went to a global WorldWork training event in Greece, and again, found myself in a group of 15 people who labelled me “the vilifier” and “the judge”. For the whole week, until a breakthrough on the last day, they detested me because I was pushing them to confront uncomfortable truths within themselves.

When I reflected later, I realised that the two experiences were connected but different. In India, I was disliked for no obvious reason, a personality clash. In Greece, I experienced being loathed for a reason. And I can say with confidence, I prefer the latter.

So I’m back. With a bit more chutzpah and insight. I am certain that at times, Unpopular Essays will upset friends, allies and enemies, but my aim is not to make you like me, but to give you something to think about.

How liberating. 

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb

I have never been the kind of journalist who rushes to the scene of the car crash. I have always been the one to hang back, observing from a distance, more interested in what happens long after the moment of impact, than the mangled metal.

Which is probably why I haven’t put fingers to my keyboard in the past month. Right now the American presidency feels like a multi-car pile-up, and I am standing on the verge, watching while the first-responders – the lawyers, human rights activists, protestors and opposition politicians – are trying to help the victims.

Although I take heart that somebody seems to know what to do, I also find myself feeling as wary of the jaws of life, as the wreckage itself. It feels like we are veering from one knee-jerk reaction to another. No time to stop and think.

The other reason I haven’t been writing UnpopularEssays is because I am on a deadline. Together with a fellow journalist, I am writing the Secret Joburg book for Jonglez’ “local guides for local people” series, which involves hours and hours of digging around in obscure corners of the city, meeting the city’s champions and guardians, documenting the forgotten and quirky treasures.

Johannesburg has always been a contested place. With its near-perfect climate, its fertile soil and its dense underbelly of gold, it’s a city that has lured every kind of fortune hunter, from every religion, nation and race group, and it’s all of their treasures that I am attempting to capture.

Not wanting to leave anyone out, today I headed out far west, or rather, far right, to the towns of Roodepoort and Krugersdorp – the old bastions of the Boers. My guide was a lovely old amateur historian who showed me the first shop ever built on the Witwatersrand – it sold liquor – and took me, in the pouring rain, to a cemetery where women and children who died in a British concentration camp of the second Anglo Boer war lie in unmarked graves.

As our morning progressed, it became clear that my guide was a man with right-leaning politics, and we gently and politely disagreed with each other until he said: “I was going to say something, but I probably shouldn’t”.

“Go on, please say it,” I said.

“I was going to say you probably wouldn’t have voted for Trump,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “Would you have?”

“Definitely. Something has got to be done,” he said.

“About what?”

“Well for a start, America is a Christian country, and they can’t even teach God in their schools anymore,” he said.

I looked at him baffled out of the corner of my eye. This is a country where some schools teach Creationism. Since when has there been a blanket ban on religious education in America? I didn’t choose to debate the facts with him though, instead I asked him why this mattered. If you want your child to learn about the Lord, can you not teach them at home? Why is it up to the school and not the parents? And if you want it to be up to the school, then should you not opt to send them to a religious school?

He conceded that it was a point worth considering, but continued to say that teaching about Jesus in schools is what teaches morality and discipline. And the problem with the Muslims is that their religion doesn’t teach morality. In fact, it doesn’t teach them how to treat anyone but themselves.

I was trying to find the right way to ask how Trump’s Christianity was any different, but his conversation had already moved on to the Muslim refugees in Europe.

“What are they doing there?” he asked.

“They are running away from war,” I replied.

“Which war?” he asked.

“The war in Syria,” I replied.

“If they were running from war, there would be women and children among them. Where are the women in children?” he asked.

Eighteen months ago I wrote about the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Kos for the British newspaper, the Independent. Women and children, whole families, crowded the shoreline.

“I saw them with my own eyes,” I told him.

“But then why are we not being told the truth?” he asked.

“Maybe the more important question is why do we believe, without question, everything we are told? Why are we so keen to soak up facts that support our prejudice?” I probed.

I dropped the West Rand historian back at his house and drove away, feeling sad. He was a nice fellow. A kind fellow. A fellow who says he became an amateur historian in his retirement because he loves sorting the lies from the truth. And yet, he is also a man who openly harbours a blanket mistrust of black people and Muslims based on alternative facts.

It doesn’t add up.

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb