Thoughts while reading Ways of Staying

Ways of Staying made me think, it troubled me, made me wonder why I don't think about leaving, made me wonder if I have ostrich tendencies. I wanted the book to articulate my reasons for staying, but instead it troubled me more about why I hadn't really considered leaving.

I also wondered why I personally don't know as many people who have experienced the kinds of violent attacks that are described in the book. Of course, everyone, or almost everyone, I know has had things stolen from them. Or violent encounters or close encounters of a violent kind, from which they escaped physically unharmed. For example, last year my car was broken into twice, once in my driveway at home and once at Rondebosch Common when my handbag was stolen, which took months of annoying errands to get myself back to almost square one. I still don't have a car radio. So I haven't been listening to SAFM, and have been even more out of the news loop than I was before. I pick up snippets from the headline posters on lamp posts - this week I discovered that Zuma is marrying another wife and that as a taxpayer I will be involved in footing the bill. I also discovered that cricket was being played in Cape Town. (I also learnt this from Facebook and from seeing all the cars parked along the roads near Newlands.) (I do usually buy the Mail and Guardian and sometimes a Sunday newspaper.)

Of course I know terrible stories of things that have happened to people. The most appalling stories that I know of were things that happened pre 94. Like Phindiwe who cleaned our house when I lived on a farm outside Grahamstown in the late 90s. She 'fell' pregnant when she was 14 and the doctor she saw at the time gave her a hysterectomy, he told her that her blood was wrong. She is still at the age of 60 married to Zwelenzima, the man who was her boyfriend, when she was 14. They both drink 'too much'.

I liked meeting the people that Kevin Bloom introduced me, his reader to. I was especially inspired by Themba Koketi, the young man studying to become a social worker. I wondered if I would have been able to succeed at university under those circumstances. I doubt it. Timothy Maurice Webster interested me too, an African American who chose to come and live here.

I kept hoping that Bloom would give me a range of simple reasons for staying. But he doesn't. Instead he interrogates the question of leaving or staying. Although I don't think about living here as 'staying'. This is where I live. For better or for worse. For richer or for poorer. Perhaps I am too fatalistic. I can't imagine living elsewhere. Perhaps I lack imagination. I need the weird complexities, the impossible challenges, the peculiarity of here.

Ways of Staying mirrors for me the way I attempt to create something resembling a coherent understanding of my motivations and experiences by patchworking or collaging the bits and pieces together. In fact, it isn't coherent, and underneath it all is something that is not really possible to put into words, to write in a book. And yet from reading Ways of Staying I get a strong sense of who Kevin Bloom is and what matters to him and why he stays.

Book details

• Ways of Staying by Kevin Bloom
  EAN: 9781770101609
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