TY - JOUR AU - Baderoon, Gabeba PY - 2018/11/16 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - The History of Intimacy JF - WritingThreeSixty JA - W360 VL - 4 IS - 1 SE - POETRY DO - 10.14426/writing360.v1.335 UR - https://epubs.ac.za/index.php/w360/article/view/335 SP - 150 AB - <p>I.<br>You remember it because it’s a wound.<br>A cut, twenty cuts, the name<br>for the canings on the palm,<br>on the knuckles, on the buttocks,<br>a finely graded order of pain<br>that we who should not exist<br>were assigned for our failures.<br>II.<br>You keep you white, nuh,<br>Mike shouts in 1987 across the heads<br>of students sitting on Jameson Steps<br>and the sudden white silence shows<br>we are no longer in uniform in the quad<br>at Livingstone High, teasing hey, why<br>did you look through me<br>as though I don’t exist. And this slipping<br>from being we called keeping you white,<br>but saying it out loud reveals<br>how we have learned<br>to measure our existence.<br>III.<br>In the video store after I’ve ordered a film,<br>my cousin elbows me, Why you putting on?<br>Putting on. Transitive verb. Putting on what?<br>Putting on skin, putting on<br>not nothingness.<br>IV.<br>When the Group Areas Act is abolished,<br>my mother aches to go back<br>to the street she was removed from<br>and it is we, grown attached<br>to the scar we call home, who say, No,<br>we don’t want to live in a white area,<br>this time ceding it ourselves.</p><p>V.<br>In 1988 at Crawford train station, my brother and I find a blue<br>plank hand-painted in yellow letters:<br>“Non-Whites Only” on one side<br>“Whites Only” on the other<br>thrown away by the fence next to the tracks.<br>Picking it up, we see the two sides<br>of the sign lay back to back,<br>each half resting against its opposite,<br>intimate and inverse<br>but unknown to each other.<br>We knew this was history<br>someone had made by hand then hidden<br>and tried to forget. We bring it home<br>and come across it sometimes in a corner<br>when we’re looking for something else.</p><p>&nbsp;</p> ER -