As promised last week, here is the looser, free-form version of A Place in the Sun. I decided to make it a couple of months ago when I realized I missed the baggy, improvisatory feel of the swoopy, gloopy, untethered first demo. I’m curious to know which version people prefer.
As I did in a previous song, this piece steals a few images from Ian Holding’s Of Beasts and Beings1 and was influenced by research I conducted writing my undergraduate thesis back in 2012-13. Monica Popescu, my advisor on that project, died much too young earlier this year, so this post is my small dedication to her memory. She was extremely sweet and generous, and I have fond memories of hanging out in her office, drinking tea, and talking about literature with her.
The song is largely an exploration of colonialism and (post)colonial identity.2 So on the one hand, we get the psychology of the frontier: tough, physical, distant. On the other, we encounter a kind of permanent, constructed nostalgia. Real, personal memories — “mother’s chicken casseroles” — take on a political valence as they mingle with memories of ‘working the land’ that are used to justify one’s presence in a foreign territory. The attempt to justify a place on the land by telling a story of working on and with the land is a typical white African trope; J.M. Coetzee calls it “pastoral writing.”3
What is both cynical and violent at the collective level — “dead Bhundu boys” — is felt and perhaps even romantic at the personal level — “teen heartthrobs.” Selous Scouts fondly remembering braiis from their youth. European history and ongoing African politics mingle to create a strange sense of belonging, entitlement, and obligation. “Hobnobs” and “gin and tonics” — little England on the savanna.
This nostalgia, Ashleigh Harris notes in an essay on white Zimbabwean memoir-autobiographies, “allows the writer to imagine a space of political and racial innocence and naiveté: a prelapsarian state of unquestioned belonging as a white child in Zimbabwe or Rhodesia” (108). The long, slow, hazy days of sleepy jobs, perhaps guaranteed by a government operating under international boycott. A longing for the myths to have been true?4 “White writing is white only insofar as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African”.5
These tropes still exist in various forms today. In Of Beasts and Beings, while the schoolteacher Ian considers whether to leave Africa (sometime in the mid-noughties), he writes in his diary: “I can’t see myself arriving in Toronto to see Alex & the Canadian wife I’ve never met, the woman from a foreign icy place he’s coupled with & produced two offspring…who’ll both grow up in a welfare state & speak with a twang & not have an inkling that pumping through their veins is the sun & heat & dust of Africa” (125).
There it is: the toughness of life on African land, especially vis-a-vis the Global North, is what seems to legitimise Ian’s belonging to Africa even as the racial fact of those “veins” remains unstated.
And the song again, without vocals, just like last week:
A place in the sun, that works. A gymkhana’s fun never hurts. A city and some guns, of course. Only the finest for Victoria's workforce. A seat under acacias, life’s a trip. Over on the plantations, chapped lips. What a pity to have to strip And break these backs with whips. French cricket and mealie cobs, Evening sundowners and sleepy jobs, Mother’s chicken casseroles, Nourishing a much-deserved control. Gardens and cricket, Never with it, or time. Shaded lawns, British Kings And the British Queen, seem fine. He remembers all the colours, The shades of the savannah, All the beauty in it, And the men who learned to beat him at cricket. It's not unfair, it's just economics, Emptied gins and emptied tonics, Bellyfulls of braii and nothing to discuss, This place knows us, this place owes us. Warm lager and old hobnobs, Dead Bhundu boys and teen heartthrobs, Cattle auctions, but tobacco is worth more, Pits choked up with tomorrow's workforce. Gardens and cricket, Never with it, or time, Shaded lawns, British Kings, And the British Queen, seemed fine. He remembers all the colours, The shades of the savannah, All the beauty in it, And the men who learned to beat him at cricket. But now they know that they're running out of homes, His mind can't rest, so it roams. Out of our control, would we love it like we do? To be us but be the others, would we love it like we do? To be us but be the others, would we love it like we do? Yesterday’s future rubs the land, Straight-line fences cut and brand, More than simply land, But hey, someone had to take this stand. The early bird gets the worm, The fishing eagle catches fish, It’s what you do, not what you ought, that counts.
In Holding’s novel, the protagonist Ian writes that his brother, now in Canada, “has unbidden memories – this I know to be true – of playing French cricket with his brothers on the big back lawn of this his boyhood home, of roasting mealie cobs with Tobias over bricks and the back of the garage, or Mother’s chicken casseroles” (125). Though I stole the words from Holding, I have remarkably similar memories.
I still feel a bit weird writing exegeses of my own work like this. I think it’s worth it to add context for the listener, but when I’m writing the songs I still want to leave space for interpretation, and I never think definitively about capital-M Meaning. No song is ever entirely what I write about — the posts are potential doorways into the work, but there are always other entrances.
Coetzee, White Writing (3).
Check out this bizarre but fascinating website, for example.
Coetzee, White Writing (11).