Annie Q Syed

Disclaimer: Although there exist exceptions to all types of generalizations and stereotypes, they remain exceptions; therefore, until the exceptions stand out to the extent that they defy the rule, the majority determines the actuality. That being said, I am grateful to know some anomalies who also happen to be my friends who are exceptional beacons for their communities and countries. Moreover, this article is at best a prologue to a possible research paper in need of further substantiating research.

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South Africa, with or without the awareness required by majority of its citizens on this topic, is silently defining who is an “African”…

These two articles are befitting the age old discussion: what does it mean to be an American…

and what I discovered this time around in S.A.: what does it mean to be an African…given the xenophobia against Africans from other countries…

Africa 2009: Identity, Citizenship, and Nation Building by M. Mawere

and from the Christmas 2009 Edition of The Economist:

Going to America: The Greatest Strength About America Is That People Want To Live Here

En route from Jo’burg to LA with a two day stay in beloved NYC, so technically from NYC to LA, I picked up the Christmas Edition of The Economist. Outstanding variety of topics. This one stayed with me probably because the timing was, personally, too appropriate!

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.

The rest of the original article is no longer available for free, which is a shame. However, comments to the original article can be found here:  Being Foreign. The Others:  It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider.

I have picked up a new friend to spend time with on Sundays in Jo’burg: the newspaper,  Sunday Times.

One of my favorite columnists is a woman named Pinky Khoabane.

On Sunday, November 15th, I read her short but bold piece titled “A Pandemic of Body, Mind, and Soul” which rightfully calls people to have a deeper dialogue regarding the AIDS pandemic in Africa, specifically South Africa. You can check out the article here:   A Pandemic of Body, Mind, and Soul. “Awareness” is no longer the primary issue–then what is?

Below were my thoughts after reading the article:

Dear Ms. Khoabane,

Do you have any friends? No, I am not being facetious. Do you have any real-life friends besides the likes of me who may admire you for your boldness from afar? Individuals who actually have the courage to participate in a conversation that reveals how they are or are not responsible for the “broken social fabric”? How many, besides you, can hold the space of the audacious truths in your latest article without looking away from the fact that their own “friends” might be welding this very social fabric? A “real” conversation regarding this is decreasing at a frequency that is beyond alarming. I know that the diverse company of individuals (ethnically and of varying social stratum) where I centrifuge the fundamentals are dismissed as criticism given I am a New Yorker docked in South Africa for the moment.

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