HUGO KA CANHAM

You do not care about this news. But I write it anyway in order to record the moment and to think it through in writing. So, no, you do not have to read it. Watch a film instead. Scroll past.

I have left the department of psychology and the University of the Witwatersrand. To leave is to lean into something else. It is also to refuse. To move towards opacity. My sideways move away from discipline and academic tradition, is driven by my desire to stand aside. To stand aside is to be on the margin. Outside of the centre in order to cast a critical and sceptic’s eye. To glance quizzically. To sit with grey, ambiguities, confusion and nuance. Never committing fully. It is to be older. Perhaps to be jaded and burned. To recover and to claim a limited and liminal wisdom after the years of being on the inside. Taken for granted but supported by a small band too. To stand aside is maybe to be quieter, more deliberate and thoughtful. Less frazzled even.

For my scholarship, leaving Wits psychology is to adopt a critical eye that looks askance. It frees me to be suspicious of fads and single issue politics and scholarship. It frees me of the limitations of the psychological register.

I want to use my freedom to pay homage to the black mother against the wishes of the patriarch.

To tend to. To care for the dying and the dead. To applaud the death-defying dance at the centre of black life. To sit with the filicidal mother while steadfastly refusing pathology. To look askance is to love the queer adolescent and to see their doting father. It is to look for shades and complexity in despair. To apprehend life off stage.

Unmoored from psychology as discipline, I move towards something new and less defined in order to learn anew. To read and to be in community with those similarly adrift. To sometimes study literature and cadence instead of models. To be lost in poetry and adrift from frameworks. To love my rural folk and to learn about my township kin. To imagine kin as estranged from blood. As care. As community.

To move from a department of psychology is to own my jadedness and to learn how to care again. To learn from those who’ve been burned too many times but continue to care anyway. Where does your strength come from and how do you nurture it? Where do you get the audacity to be so steadfast in your solidarity with Palestine? With Abahlali BaseMnjondolo and the Amadiba Crisis Committee? With Khulumani Support Group?

I want to learn how you take care of yourself.

My move is motion towards forsaking borders, boundaries and rankings. It is to be in search of ideas and to trace their winding pathways beyond the nation state. For me, to move is to tarry on the Indian Ocean shoreline. To think from Zanzibar, Kenya, Mozambique, and the long Cape shoals. To imagine continuities where lines have been drawn. To be moved by Zimbabwe and Malawi and not to limit my care to Lusikisiki and Soweto.

To forsake colonial standards and university rankings is to heed Grace Khunou’s advice that black standards are always in doubt and that we carry our value with us. Deep inside.

To know your value beyond your employer. It is to imagine a universe bigger than Braamfontein.

To move away from Wits is to admit that I am a teacher in need of repair. To move is to refuse shame for not being a teacher in the traditional way. It is to relieve students of my wilting eye. It is to move away from curricula determined by professional boards and teaching and learning committees for whom well trodden pathways trump curiosity, discovery and the lessons of waywardness. To move this way is to be wayward. It is to embrace a truth I’ve known since I first learned to read in 1984. I am a writer. I need to give the writer a chance. My thoughts form in words. They emerge from my fingers. Haltingly. But with silence they form something.

To confess that teaching is too noisy for me at the moment, is to claim my writerly self.

Even though I am moving to another university, the move is a kind of refusal. To move to the side and to look askance means that I must refuse the things that institutions require. My refusals and protestations are not loud. I avert my eyes instead. But this too is a way of speaking. I look away and skulk waywardly from the directorship and deanery. Managers do important work but writers need silence. Writing requires the lonely road away from the corner office. My home is filled with silence because I do not have children. Friends are few. Silence helps me to think and to form sentences undisturbed. For me, writing is to be in a posture of refusal. Eyes turned to the screen. Buried in books. Averted. Looking at life askance.

To move requires honesty. This is to say, I arrive at this position of choice after years in the trenches. I arrive here by entering the full professoriate. My risk is calculated and not totally naive or financially risky. Honesty needs me to recognise the vulnerability of leaving a comfort zone. A comfort zone with no interest in my ideas. Where my dreams were at risk of being weighed down by the egos of others. Am I bitter? Some. But I’m not sorry for the fifteen years in Braamfontein. Walking away is also a decision not to linger in the place from which I walk. Honesty requires me to pause on the tender place of uncertainty. To admit to the fear that I may not be moving towards the quietude I imagine. To walk tentatively but with shoulders square.

Even with feelings of trepidation, the movement towards something else is a walk of hope. Towards a different kind of community. It invites reimagining oneself. Casting off bad habits and being open to newness. It is to hold back the self-protective shutters we learn to hide behind. It is to hope that I will attract doctoral students that do not want to solve problems and heal pathology but want to imagine expansive horizons of black freedom and radical love. To tend to self-love and rage. It is to imagine collaborative projects that teach me humility and pause. To move away from discipline is to hope I can finally write about the black waters of the boundless ocean. How they make and unmake us. To move towards newness is to hope for space to imagine ancestors that walked here hundreds of years before us. To divine their words and desires carried in the wind. In the stone walkways of cities and water springs in the folds of village valleys. In the ebb and flow of the tide at ILha de Mocambique and the Wild Coast.  

To strike a new path is to allow myself to dream anew. 
To write stories and to refuse entrapment. 
To rely on my sense of survival and fortitude. 
But it is also to nurture the courage to walk away whenever my freedom is at stake. 
To value the freedom of errantry and to refuse stasis. 
To wander the pathways of freedom.

first published on blog boundless freedoms here: hugokacanham

Re-published in herri with kind permission of the author.