Home Away, by Louis Greenberg

Home Away, by Louis Greenberg.

Home Away, by Louis Greenberg.

Home Away, edited by Louis Greenberg, is an exhilarating mix of memoir, travelogue, thriller, humour and speculative fiction.

Louis Greenberg  

Foreword by Vikas Swamp

A heavy silence hangs over your bedroom. You gently lift the curtain and look across the lush, rolling hills at the city lying in repose. There is that fragile stillness that comes just before dawn. It seems like the perfect time. You crack open the spine of Home Away: 24 Hours, 24 Cities, 24 Writers and are pitched headlong into a perfect crime story - a plot to kill a politician in Nairobi. Even as you are trying to discover if the poison worked, the scene switches and you are now descending into a creepy cellar in Mauritius, your hair standing on end. Cut to Sydney, where in the dark of the middle of the night, you must learn to be an expat again. And now you are a stowaway in Europe, trying to catch a train in Mainz. Minutes later, you are romancing Havana, then dreaming vivid, psychedelic dreams in Kampala which are abruptly ended by a cold-water bucket bath in Lagos. You are intrigued by these disjointed yet connected narratives which are curiously adrift in time. Here and not here, but not there either.' Amidst the din of a Nigerian generator thundering to life, you hear your wife calling you for breakfast. She has produced a spread of Dutch cheese, Italian olives, Colombian bananas and Spanish chorizo on the kitchen table. Your thirteen-year-old son is already sitting down. 'I have decided to take Japanese at school,' he tells you earnestly. He was born in Washington DC, went to a Greek school in Addis Ababa, a British school in London, an Indian school in Delhi, an American school in Johannesburg and now a Canadian school in Kobe, where he wants to learn Japanese. You finish breakfast and get back to the book. Now you are in Maun, battling an epidemic which could end the world, eating ice cream in Ushuaia, figuring out the etiquette for a tea break in Oxford before being flung into a sci-fi nightmare in Tokyo. Once recovered, you find yourself figuring out a murder in Los Angeles and wondering 'in this city of dreams and nightmares' who belongs and who is out of place. A chapter later, hundreds of miles away in British Columbia, the same question is asked: 'Who is the outsider in Victoria? Where is the foreigner?'

And then you are in Moscow, feeling the adrenaline rush of an illegal enterprise, smelling the salt of the ocean in Dakar and finding that it smells just the same in Durban, Mumbai and Patmos. You roam through a ghost city in Peru, 'one that has met its destiny - where the last battle has long been fought, the last rite performed', and are then shunted into 'the circular cacophony of Piccadilly's brash neon'. But you have no time to dream about that Victorian home in Cape Town because you are now in Salzburg, driving along Route 66 and then through a snowstorm in Alaska, smoking hashish in Royaumont, sitting in a medieval abbey with a bunch of bohemian musicians jamming on archaic instruments before finally getting your face read in Hong Kong. You wonder what it will reveal. Will it uncover that restlessness in the blood and the rootlessness that it often entails, will it go beneath the smiling mask of the expat to expose the scars of a lonely life?

You have traversed twenty-four time zones in five hours, leapfrogged six continents. It unsettles you, this shifting of paradigms which has happened so seamlessly, so unconsciously. And it makes you think about our global village, adrift in a sea of change, where everything around us comes from somewhere else and yet where the erosion of national identity is juxtaposed with a sharpening of ethnic tensions and social cleavages. You wonder what it means to live the life of a legal alien, with the dust of one country in your nostrils and the dreams of another in your head. You wonder whether the freedom to cross borders is tempered by the loneliness of exile, or whether the anxiety of driving on the wrong side of the road is inevitably offset by the thrill of driving on the right side of opportunity. And then you look at yourself, an Indian living in Japan, a world away from home, writing a foreword for a book about the experiences of South African residents, immigrants and emigrants, but intended for everyone who is interested in the issue of identity in our wired, twenty-first-century world.

Your TV is tuned to an Indian satellite channel beaming an old black-and-white Hindi film, Shree420. A musical number is playing on the screen. Merajoota haijapani Yeh patloon Englishstani Sar pe lal topi Rusi Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani. My shoes are made in Japan. These trousers are British. That red hat on my head is Russian. Yet my heart is quintessential Indian. The familiar tune floods you with nostalgia, fills you with that strange longing which is both the joy and the torment of the itinerant traveller. In your study, your wife is Skyping with your elder son who left three weeks ago to study in Montreal, where it is 10 p.m. You marvel at technology, at the collapsing of distance. You see his face on the grainy video and wave your hand at the glowing eye of the webcam. 'Hi, Pa,' he says his accent already turning Canadian. And you realise with a smile, you are not a world away from home. You are at home in the world.

This is an excerpt from the book: Home Away, by Louis Greenberg.

Title: Home Away
Author: Louis Greenberg
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2010
ISBN 9781770220720 / ISBN 978-1-77022-072-0
Softcover, 15x23 cm, 240 pages

Greenberg, Louis im Namibiana-Buchangebot

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