Holding Up the Sky by Sandy Blackburn-Wright Page A

believe the best about people and if I lost that, I would lose something intrinsic and valuable. I also knew that staying open meant I would be hurt. The choice I made then was to stay open and take each person at face value–and live with the occasional broken heart.

05 SEPTEMBER 1988
TO CANADA AND BACK AGAIN
    RETURNING TO CANADA WAS HARDER THAN I HAD IMAGINED. MANY OF MY FRIENDS FROM THE SUMMER SEMESTERS WERE NOT RETURNING IN AUTUMN. THIS TIME, I HAD TAKEN A ROOM WITH A YOUNG COUPLE WHO LIVED RIGHT NEXT TO CAMPUS—WITH HINDSIGHT, I SUSPECT LIVING ON CAMPUS AMONG OTHER SINGLE STUDENTS WOULD HAVE MADE FOR AN EASIER TIME.
    I did make one new close friend, Elaine, with whom I kept in touch for many years. When we weren’t in classes, Elaine took me to see the highlights of Toronto, had me over for meals at her parents’ house and took me out into the country, generally helping me to feel more at home.
    Other than studying and spending time with Elaine and a few of the international students, I marked my time by Msizi’s letters. In the top corner of each letter would predictably be: ‘From a place in the heart’. In one letter he wrote: ‘I have now realised how much of me was in you and how much of you was dug deep into my heart. It is painful for me to think of it’.
    What struck me from time to time was how he could open himself up so much to a white person of any nationality, given that he had spent his whole life keeping clear of them. It’s no small miracle when intimacy develops between two people, but when one represents discrimination and pain to the other it feels like a such delicate thing.
    When writing, we were careful not to talk about the future as that was still so unresolved but kept each other up to date on small events and the emotional highs and lows of our current existence. Nevertheless, the undercurrent was clear: a decision was coming that neither of us was going to be ready for. It hung around me as a mist, colouring my days in shades of grey, like the coming winter.
    I also exchanged a few letters with Steve. He had decided to go ahead with his plans for the youth organisation, to be called Sizwe Youth, and was busy fundraising with his old contacts back in the UK. He invited me to consider joining the organisation, if the appropriate visas could be arranged. My work visa would need to be processed outside South Africa so he suggested I should apply in Australia and fundraise there while I was waiting for approval. We both hoped that our time in Lawaaikamp would not prejudice the application.
    As I finished the semester, the rich colours of autumn faded and winter descended on the beautiful city of Guelph. I had never lived in a city in snow and as the days got colder, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. My Australian body was ill-prepared for even the November weather in Canada, let alone full-blown winter.
    My flight home took me via Vancouver and I spent a few days exploring the city on my way through. I also found a production of the South African play Bopha by the Earth Players Theatre Company, hosted by the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The Zulu word bopha means to hold, or in the current context, to detain. The play explored, in the powerfully emerging style of black theatre, the stories of young black people striving for a voice in South African society. The thing that, for me, most captures Africa as her true self is her music. African theatre is full of powerful singing that cascades over you in resonating harmonies, its rhythms transforming your emotions so completely that you feel the joy and sorrow as if they were your own. While in Canada, I had read many of the biographies and books that were banned in South Africa at the time. These stories increased my understanding and further galvanised my commitment–but the music and characters of the play lifted me up so that I felt, for a moment, part of the struggle itself.
    My hiatus in Vancouver also