waiting to cry

I have been waiting to cry for a long time now. And yet, the tears do not come. I want to cry for the old lady who sells The Daily Sun from a tattered cloth bag by the Wits robot for R5 (which I have yet to buy: not today, Mama, not today); the boys I run past in the morning, still sleeping under the trees in the park just beyond the chichi Moyo café, just beyond the young father with his two children feeding yesterday’s bread to the ducks. I want to cry for the deepened creases in the young mother’s face as she struggles to readjust her suckling child just as I am poised to shoot them both with my digital camera. I want to cry for toes sticking out of shoes, shoulders sticking out of sleeves, ribs sticking out of torsos, and for my own distracting fear of sticking out. I want to cry for these things, because these are the things for which you are supposed to cry. And yet, my eyes are dry. And yet, I have no tears.

The closest I came was at a bus stop at a village I failed to take the name of on the way to Mthatha. But I guess maybe it doesn’t matter that much – the name—the signs become the same. The din of broken taxis and hawkers and women muttering in the street. Dogs and cows with too-obvious bones. A grim confetti of Coke and Fanta bottles and orange peels and plastic bags and plastic wrappers in every color, all mixed in among silver condom packets dressed-up in red AIDS ribbons. The billboard ads featuring youthful couples behind the banners of If you love me, wait, or Protect. For me; just below them, at eye level, tacked on the street signs by the fruit vendors and liquor stores, the more matter-of-fact signs proclaiming Safe Abortions, Call 096 442 1196 in yellow lettering splattered across a faded blue background.

And it was only because a man was wearing two different colored shoes that this place, this particular bus stop, has stayed in my memory as a place for tears. And it is only because I had to lower my head to see around EMERGENCY EXIT and below it, ns) that my gaze encompassed his crippled stride. And it is only because the dirty tennis shoes with the heals cut out (hooked to the bottom of two skinny legs in cut-off blue sweat pants) were different colors- the left one white, the right black – that this person has existed for me as a human being, as an individual, as a man, rather than another line of texture within the dingy collage framed by my exit window.

In front and behind me, gunshots blared from a TV screen where Denzel Washington is playing a character that has just shot three men in an attempt to save a girl from being kidnapped in Mexico City. The noise caused me to jerk my attention from the man out the window to see a chubby young boy in front of me, laughing.

A place for tears, but my eyes remained dry.

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I think the first time I cried for Africa was when I saw the children fall into red dust at the end of Cry Freedom. The second in a squatter camp outside Port Elizabeth. Then, it was over the dainty pink flowers on toilet paper after finishing Hotel Rwanda. And the last time came suddenly as I walked through a stack of African literature on the sixth floor of Alden library two weeks before my flight to Jo-Burg. I had just placed a book of black and white photos of South African townships back on the now nauseatingly orange shelf when I had this sudden stab of despair for the sadness I will never understand. Head down, I stretched out my hands as far as they would go to brush the spines on both sides of the aisle in an attempt to know and ease this suffering at the same time. Whether it was because I couldn’t reach or a particular title I came across, I don’t remember, but I ended up on the tile floor, sob-gagging, for the better part of an hour.

I have not cried since.

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Where are those tears now? Where are they now that I am in the red dust?

Where are they now that I am here and want to cry for this place; for these people?

Maybe the problem is that I cannot yet cry for myself.