Wrapping it up

I have been blogging for 15 years. Last week I spent some time going through the blog and I realised I was searching for myself. It felt akin to going back to a journal in order to make sense of a season I had gone through. While I was specifically looking for articles related to the figure of my mother and reflections related to my childhood, I realised that this blog has been a form of witnessing. I have witnsessed myself and I have let others witness me.

Sadly I have never been quite able to figure out the comments setting (hence there are these rogue messages I have never been able to delete or regulate) which means I don't have enough data to get a real sense of who 'my people' were as such. For many years I imagined I have a handful of people, mostly my friends, who read this blog. When I posted the link on Facebook I had a sense that people were reading and people would leave comments on my facebook feed or tag me when they posted anything I had written. And 15 years later, I still think I only have a handful of people. But that's not entirely true considering that this blog is the reason I was able to be part of Mail and Guardian Thought Leader (IYKYK) so in a sense, this blog is the reason I developed a writing voice for a public life. Nothing tickles me more than knowing that in maintaining a blog all these years, I was stepping into the digital form of the public square in a sense. While I also wrote articles and op-eds for newspapers and other publications, it was thanks to a long tradition of public discourse that I felt the need to continue this blog with the hope that when people google for any of the issues that I have written about, my pieces would pop up.

I have always wondered about the need to write so that others read what I have written. There's a sense of self-importance that I have never quite been able to wrap my head around. Now that all these years have passed and I have watched the knowledge economy change, I wonder what will happen to the future of the public square of discourse which has already changed thanks to social media and AI as well as the many mediums which have since replaced the long form of prose. 

Front of mind however, and the reason I am writing this piece at all, is how this blog has been central to me confronting my relationship with my mother. I counted at lease 22 articles spanning the last 15 years which are connected to the figure of my mother. She passed away last month. I doubt she knew while she was alive, that I was talking about her in public. I think she had a sense that I am a writer and if she did come across anything I wrote (other than the pieces I shared with her from the newspapers) she gave me the room to have my own thoughts. I am grateful that she was not on social media otherwise I would most likely had to censor myself or probably not be a writer at all. I gave her copies of some of the books I have written so of course she knows about my writerly life, but I doubt she ever had the full extent of my ideas.

Keeping this blog has also been the reason I have been able to pay attention to what it means living in South Africa and the world more broadly. Left to my own devices I think I would much rather ostrich and live a life that doesn't concern itself too much with the outside world. But with the experience of writing something then being invited to a radio show or news outlet has confirmed that the world of ideas matters. And people like me (whatever that means) should not only participate but have a responsibility to be part of the debates. I am reminded of the line from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity." I am reminded of this line and the poem more broadly whenever I consider whose ideas circulate and why. Pontsho Pilane's article on Africa is a Country captures this more pointedly (I also highly recommend her book Power and Faith: How Evangelical Churches Are Quietly Shaping Our Democracy which speaks to the circulation of evangelical Christianity and the threats this poses to democracy and women's rights).

This blog has been an archive of my growing up. I have contemplated deleting the blog, and sometimes I would search for it and I wouldn't be able to find it. Sometimes I would be relieved that it had disappeared into the internet's ether. Other times I would be distraught as though I had lost a part of myself. Even while this is my last article here, I won't actively delete it. It can take on a life of its own given what ChatGPT is doing to people's work on the internet. Maybe I will change my mind and return here and delete it but I doubt I will write here again. It feels okay to wrap it up as a season of my life and to start somewhat afresh elsewhere. I have dabbled with substack but I'm still quite hesitant. I had hoped I could post here and substack but it felt weird and cumbersome. 

This idea of witnessing has been front of mind and needs more space but for now I am drawn to the moments of being witnessed that this blog has given me. There are pieces I have written here which have traveled further than I could imagine. Some have been so personal I knew I would have to share with my sister or close friends who were privy to the issue before sharing publicly. I have had to confront bravery and vulnerability through this need to write something and share it. If I were being more gentle with myself, I would focus on bravery and vulnerability rather than self-importance in relation to my public writing. Much like all the digital content that we have shared on the digital public square, it has been curated and biographical. There is something about being umntu that desires to be seen at some kind of scale. Some get billboards and fame, others get blogs and their status on whatsapp or even just their facebook or twitter or family whatsapp group. But we are all here trying to make sense of ourselves and each other. 

I'm trying to resist the urge of being overly sentimental. I have been in letter writing mode lately and when I came to the decision that I would no longer post on the blog I had the inkling of writing a letter to the blog, but the moment has passed and this is all for now. Here's to the next 15 years.