Leisure

Leisure is the title of my undergraduate thesis. The images you see here comprise the book. The text below accompanied the book. Presented in a mock-lounge set up to resemble that of my grandparents, I am inviting the viewer to engage with these images with me, discovering them for the first time. Finding a history of lives lived as much as was permitted.

“The images in this book are slide film photographs. I found them during the month of June (2021) in my paternal grandparent’s basement. I hadn’t known that they existed until my uncle mentioned them off hand. We proceeded to dig them out of the back of the garage, setting up the carousel projector at the dining room table. As we clicked through the slides, I listened to my grandfather and uncle recount each image’s story. The importance of their existence slowly growing in my mind as we went. I had stumbled upon a visual history of my family. Documents that ensured the longevity of stories that might have otherwise been overlooked or forgotten. My grandfather made these images.

In spending time with them, I realised that my grandfather was photographing my family during events of significance: birthdays, holidays, trips to the beach. These were moments in which they were looking to enjoy themselves, despite the colonial violences they had faced; in which they were trying to find leisure as diasporic (read: forcibly displaced) people living under an overtly oppressive regime.

My grandfather worked at what was then known as The University of Natal and King Edward VIII hospital, both in Durban, South Africa. He was the clinical photographer at the hospital and medical school for forty-six years. As such, he photographed bone grafts, kidney transplants, and coronary bypasses. His day-to-day was to document that which most people experience in the unconscious state caused by anaesthesia. From these images, he would create slides for the professors to use as teaching aids. Through his proximity to a darkroom, he was given access to the photographic medium. He did not need to photograph the family fishing trip or the children playing in the garden. But he chose to. There was clearly something compelling to him about these moments. The existence of these images is proof of his awareness of the value of documenting them.

Whilst these images depict the lives of my family living in Apartheid South Africa, they are also the continuation of a much longer history. My family was brought to South Africa in the mid-19th century by the Dutch East India Company. They were brought as indentured labourers to work in the sugar cane fields.

– I want to take a moment here to explain what I mean when I say that my family was “brought” to South Africa. Dutch settlers had endorsed South Africa as a land of opportunity to the Indian people. They needed cheap labour to work in the sugar cane fields. There was a widespread need for employment in India at the time (due to the ongoing exploitative extractive colonial project of the British in the region), thus, people were in need of economic opportunities. They were offered passage to South Africa by the Dutch East India Company. However, once they arrived, they did not find the opportunities which the Dutch had promised. Instead, they were forced, by their marginal status in this new country (and subjugation under colonial rule), to work in poor conditions for little-to-no-pay, transforming these jobs from economic opportunities into indentured labour. They continued to live and work in South Africa, trying to survive. So, they weren’t really brought, nor were they taken. Maybe lured is more accurate. Or deceived. By forces of exploitation, stemming from the (at that point already) hundreds of years of the extractive colonial projects of the British and Dutch in both India and South Africa.

My choice of words is a means of accommodating the feelings of discomfort that arise when I don’t euphemise the story. These feelings of discomfort are felt by everyone (constantly by those that have been marginalised by the systems of oppression that govern society), but the deflection and avoidance that my words produce is a means of catering to the feelings of white people. A product of the internalisation of the white gaze. This realisation has been difficult to process. How had I done this for so long without realising the implications of my words? How do I acknowledge and address other instances of this internalisation? How do I protect myself moving forward?

To start, I will tell this story, in as much historical detail as I can. This book, thus, becomes a means of refusal. It is not a dismantling or refusal altogether, but a refusal of the allowance, rather, for white fragility. Ultimately, and foremost, it is a celebration of the moments of leisure, pleasure, and joy that my family managed to find in and amongst the systems of oppression. It is an homage to their resistance. A documentation and presentation of defiance through my family’s history.”