Issue 7 - Fall 2013
  • We built them on the quad of Virginia Tech’s drill field: makeshift tents, a crude harbinger of the world to come. We inhabited them to protest our school’s investment in apartheid South Africa. As college students in the eighties, we were looking for something to protest. We felt cheated because we’d been born a decade too late, missing out on the world of our older brothers and sisters, the baby boomers, the ones with real music, real drugs, real protests. They had the Rolling Stones, free love, and LSD. We had Duran Duran, AIDS, and smart drugs. The issues they protested were moral no-brainers: Vietnam, Women’s Rights, Black Power. Our issues were flickering shadows cast farther from home: Central America, the Cold War, apartheid. We didn’t have Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” or The Who’s “My Generation,” but we could dance in clubs to The Special’s “Free Nelson Mandela” and play REM’s “Flowers of Guatemala” on the last record player we’d ever own.

    Nipping at our heels was Generation X with their business-minded majors hell-bent on making money. They called it the Go-Go Eighties. We called them the Reagan Youth. The Reagan Youth thought our shantytowns and protest songs were pathetic relics of an overrated era. If the Reagan Youth stood for anything, it was  ............

  • the pragmatic belief that money makes the world go round, and that engagement and appeasement were the preferred approaches to reforming distasteful regimes.

    We had not quite approached the era of the burned-out ennui of Kurt Cobain but neither could we abandon our sixties nostalgia. We did not believe it ludicrous to imagine we could eradicate racism and greed in a far away country by living in tents on a campus lawn. We did not think it hypocritical to address racism in another country, even when we lived in the South.

    I believed I was doing my part by falling in love with guys who played music that was supposed to change the world. For a while, as part of my own emancipation, I quit wearing make up or shaving. As features editor of our college newspaper, I initiated a series on homosexuality on campus—the staff writer who wrote the series would be dead from complications from AIDS by the next decade. I was also a news announcer for our college radio station, WUVT (Hoda Kotb of Today Show fame was my boss for a while). Before taping I would rifle through the pages of UPI stories I’d ripped off the feed, cutting and reassembling the ones I’d chosen for my two-minute news moment. One of those stories was  ............

  • about shantytowns and apartheid in South Africa, and only later (Hours? Days? Months? Years?) did I discover I’d pronounced apartheid wrong—a-part-heed instead of ahpart-hide—because I’d never heard the word spoken before. My moment summed up my generation’s moment, our in-between generation, protesting terrible things terribly far away that had names we couldn’t pronounce because we still knew so little about the world, how terrible it had been and how terrible it would get.

    About the same time (perhaps that very moment) I was mispronouncing apartheid, my future (younger) husband (who had never seen a shantytown nor knew of their symbol of protest across universities in America) had probably just eaten a ham and cheese toasted sandwich with the crusts cut off by his family’s live-in maid Lena in the wealthy white suburbs of Johannesburg. After that sandwich, he probably went to ride his BMX bike, as he always did after coming home from his private school. He pedaled past the walled mansions with their landscaped gardens and pools the color of the cloudless sky, riding faster than he should have been, but still not fast enough, when his tire hit a hidden rock in the road. He pitched forward into the roadside gravel, landing on another jagged rock that sliced the  ............

  • soft spot above his hipbone. There he would have bled, helpless, except a neighbor, watching him through her property’s barbed wire fence, saw him crash and called an ambulance, which swiftly transported him to the whites-only clinic where he was stitched up satisfactorily. A few months later, a manhole cover fell on his pinky, almost severing it. In that case his parents took him to Baragwanath, the black hospital, where after waiting hours for treatment, his finger was reattached. Today all that remains of his cut is a pale recessed scar, a slash of memory almost forgotten. His pinky, stunted with a permanent crook, is a more visible reminder of that time.

    At the end of the semester we packed our tents, left the quad, and went on to other adventures: road trips, summer jobs, permanent relocations. Our protests did not have immediate effect, but in 1990, Virginia Tech’s board of trustees voted to divest its 2.4 million in holdings in South African companies, a result of a directive from the state governor. Later, Mandela himself said that the University of California’s 3 billion divestment starting in 1986 was significant in toppling South Africa’s apartheid government. It is still debated how much impact the student protests had on the universities’ decisions across the country to  ............

  • divest, although I think it’s safe to say they didn’t hurt.

    In 2009 my husband and I visited South Africa, a country no longer spurned and boycotted, a Rainbow Nation whose policies of legalized gay marriage and affirmative action are models of freedom and equality. And yet they were still there, the real shantytowns, tucked into townships, away from the sparkling dazzle of the new society. The poor were still black and neglected. What had changed were the nouveau rich, no longer only white. Three years later, as we drove through dying small towns in Mississippi, I thought of those desolate shantytowns in South Africa. Isolated black communities living in shacks, no water or electricity, abandoned by their country in the name of progress.

    What our generation missed about the one right before us was what they protested immediately affected their lives. Like them, we wanted to protest big things, but those big things were far away, their implications on our own lives, uncertain and unclear. Why couldn’t we have looked around at what was happening in our own world as well, why didn’t we have the foresight to see that 1984 had not been bypassed as we believed, only postponed? For back then, even in our little tents, playing  ............

  • our music that was angry at an unjust world, we thought we were safe. We could not have imagined how much students would go in debt to attend to our once “cheap” land grant university. We could not have imagined that twenty years later, Seung-Hui Cho would shoot and kill thirty-two students on our campus. We could not have imagined that another protest with tents, this one even more imaginative and daring than ours, would come and go. What I couldn’t have imagined was how much beauty and pain around the world I would witness in the next decades. All because I had the luck to be born a person who could live in a tent for a few days, pack it up, and walk away.

prev next
website by zzGassman