Lost in Zulu Translation: between otherness, motherland and love.
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June 2006
12:00 midnight, my phone beeped excessively indicating a new text message.
Hoping the text was from my cutie Zulu man Mondli, I eagerly grabbed my cell phone and opened my mailbox, like a greedy child unwrapping a candy bar.
With a smile on my face, and a gaping mouth, I slowly read my text message.
?Listen, you American piece of shit. Why you want to come here and break up me and my man? I have seen women like you before and I have never liked them. Women like you are the cause for broken families you stupid bitch.?
Shit, the slick, graphic, Danielle Steel romantic travel writers didn?t mention this in their book. Beware of Zulu women!!! I immediately scrolled down the text and called the number. I received a tornado of explicates, followed by a dial tone. After the phone call, I became nauseated and wanted to vomit, but my body could only handle one chore at a time. My hand dialed Mondli?s number and my lips trembled, as I waited for an answer, but I only received his voice-mail (the thirty-four times I called).
Packed full of dreams, with a laptop and a suitcase in hand, I moved to Durban, South Africa to attend graduate school. For me, New York City had lost its charm. The pricey rent, mundane weekend bar scene and a lack of community had become alienating. But, everything about Durban had bred new life and possibilities.
Within two months of my studies, I was a committed relationship with Mondli, a highly successful sculpture artist from Durban. Mondli?s face oozed GQism, and his carbon copied muscular body, was fermented in irresistible conceited sexiness.
Mondli was a ?new aged? Rastafarian who preached about Pan Africanism, black love, and community empowerment, and I lovingly devoured every world of liberation that seeped through Mondli?s mouth. Our two months relationship followed every tried Hollywood movie clich? about foreign exchanges and love. Mondli and my movie was called, ?eight-weeks of African love blisters;? first week, we kissed; third week, we consummated our relationship; fifth week, we planned for kids, and a wedding; eight week, we organized a retirement fund.
I nervously chewed away at my finger nails (almost into stubble!) when I confronted Mondli, at our favorite coffee shop, about the crazy text message. With a sheepish demeanor and baritone ?I am sorry baby? voice, Mondli admitted that the text message was from his girlfriend. As he confessed, I became deadly silent, like a character (on Lifetime Television ?television for Women) who was contemplating manslaughter against her husband. After his apologies, and pleads for us to stay together, Mondli placed his palms into mines and said, ?I love you my Africa queen, I will never hurt you like that again.? Shattered, I picked up all the emotions I spilled onto the coffee table and in-between staccato sobs, I murmured, ?ne-ve-r c-a-ll m-e a-gain.?
Two weeks after our break up, I saw Mondli looking blissfully in love, with a foreign exchange (American) student. I was flabbergasted by Mondli?s actions; hostile words tried to force their way through my mouth to confront him, but it all retreated into tears. Through the student foreign exchange grapevine, I was informed that Mondli was a love plagiarizer. In his relationship with the (American) student, he sold her all the lies that he sold me, which were (we were soul-mates, the ancestors brought me to be with him, and he was single.)
After seeing Mondli and his new girlfriend, I quickly realized that he and other African men on campus were in the business of selling themselves as ?the other.? Mondli normalized the gaze of the exotic African male to foreign women and contextualized the idea by providing overseas black women the electrical socket, to feel connected to the ?motherland.? Instead of Hollywood and National Geographic profiting from the sale of his ?otherness,? Mondli removed the middle men and sold himself as the stereotypical African male, Westerns have grown to find sexually enticing.
Throughout Mondli?s life he interacted with foreigners through the myopic tube of ?otherness.? In our relationship, he only permitted me to see fragmented part of his personality, and by doing this, Mondli reciprocated the alien interactions he received from outsiders. By cheaply selling himself as the ?other,? Mondli was able to reverse the gaze of ?otherness,? take control of his own image, and allow foreign women to fulfill their sexual African male fetish.
Seven weeks after Mondli and I broke-up, I was back on the dating bandwagon, just for causal chats and cheap drinks. Many African men still sold me their ?otherness? like tacky American infomercials, but I had to reject the objectification gaze Hollywood had put forth, and African men had gracefully adopted. A part of me wanted to acquire their ?otherness,? like the majority of my black American friends, who had "purchased" African men and participated in the fairy-tail imagery, of the exotic lover abroad. But unlike Stella, I didn?t get my grove back and I had painfully learned to recognize, how ?otherness? and objectification severely altered people consciousness to think logically.
My second semester at University, African men on campus no longer sold me their ?otherness,? because my gaze became familiar and part of the ?normal? fabric of student?s life. The commodities brokers of ?otherness,? regurgitated and sold their ?strangeness? to fresh foreign meat, which returned the gaze of differences and continued the cycle of the exotic outsider.
Living between the misplace melodies of ?motherland,? ?otherness,? and ?developing nation,? has expanded my world from the narrow borders of Brooklyn, into an origami of unlimited knowledge, that dances on my palate and helps me gain a larger perspective of life, beyond Americanism.
