“Cold vintage white porch tiles sting beneath my feet, the distant Johannesburg traffic noise rings in my ears, a Sunday Nederduits Gereformeerde church newsletter rests on my knee. The chilly morning breeze before the afternoon heat rolls over my skin, but most of all I am overwhelmed by the smell of fresh rusks, rooibos tea, and my grandmother's familiar perfume hanging in the air. Her sweet voice of words translated, “What shall we talk about today, my child?”
This past year my Ouma and Oupa sold their house and with it my stoep. The Afrikaans word for porch. A stoep is one of the most formative settings when it comes to an Afrikaner kid's childhood. It is the place where birthdays are held, where you stand to ring the bell for Father Christmas, where morning tea is served and where you would braai after a rugby game. It is also the place where you mourn, fight, love, and most of all, learn. I never much appreciated the stoep. With my immigration to the United States, I took a few things with me from South Africa: my luggage, visa, dogs, and parents. I also left a few things behind, family and anything that would tie me to the Afrikaans community, which sadly included the mental snapshots of my days on the porch.
For quite some time I did not like to admit where I came from. A complicated, dark history was tied to the community, my personal beliefs contradicting it all. I often thought back to the times on the porch when the older relatives would talk about happenings in the community, the shift in the culture, and the truth of it all. At school I would hear a different story, a side I did not agree with, but younger me was confused because on Oma's stoep something different was said. In South Africa the stoep had become my place of reference, my example, and as I said earlier, my formative setting. I believe that once my struggle with my identity grew in the United States, it was due to the loss of this place. Often having nowhere to look can feel like abandonment.
It was not until I visited South Africa for the first time since the move, that my idea of this place shifted. My grandparents, now residing in a small coastal town, had found a new house and a new porch, whose tiles were just as cold as the previous. As we sat, sipping on tea and chewing on soggy morning rusks, the scene almost identical to the first, I realized that I had tied a thing that was not physical to a physical place. In the end, my struggle with my identity was not because of the loss of something or its abandonment of me, but instead because of my need to push it all away, to combat other struggles. I had let go of my grandmother's sweet voice on that porch. I had found it again, the idea of the stoep, my place of reference. It was an idea inside of me. It was my family, my memories. It was my origin.
If I could go back to that morning and answer my grandmother's question with something else besides a request for a fairy tale, I would have answered: “Acceptance and finding lost things, Ouma. That's what we will talk about”. Perhaps then she could have told me this earlier, and the struggle would have been prevented. But it was a lesson that had to be learned and now, on any porch, I could find myself, even one in America, oceans away from my start.”
