How we inhabit space (Intellectually)

"...that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse…" ~ Walt Whitman Uvela ngaphi? Uhlala ngaphi? Uya ngaphi?

How we inhabit space itself is an act of intellect. Intellect is simply understood here using the Merriam Webster dictionary, as the power of the mind to think, understand and reason clearly. 

This blog started as an idea. If you stayed in Nkulumane 12 and we blind folded you, drugged you and took you to Pumula South, and woke you up. Would you actually feel that you are in another township? Probably not, because being in a different place is not just a matter of feeling, feelings are secondary. In this example, one’s conceptualisation of place, the knowledge of where one is, which then influences feelings and emotions, is not instantaneous because the brain has to process and realise where it is first. This usage of intellect is then followed by the brain doing one of two things, rallying up memories and feelings associated with the place, or learning the place anew, generating new memories. 

What is the point? Places are not just roads, but a sum of these actions of the brain to familiarise ourselves with  the emptiness of this thing called “space.” When I say I am going “home”, home is not just a place or space, it is not just the familiar scents, faces and buildings - but it is how inhabiting this place called home makes me feel, how it triggers my brain to work!

Places and spaces are not just buildings, roads and rivers, but epistemological spaces - this in simple terms, means that knowledge is constantly being produced and reproduced whenever and wherever people occupy space and convert them into places. In Bulawayo there are places like koChigumira where people chill, break, grab drinks, have fun and party, just to name a few things. What I am stressing here is that how we understand and think of Chigumira has less to do with the place in its physicality, but instead it is a function of how the space is constructed and contested epistemologically. I say contested because if people inhabit space intellectually as I said at the beginning of the blog, no two people can inhabit the same place in a precisely identical way. Some may relate to or associate a particular place with specific things or specific people or specific feelings - and in so doing they create knowledge, upon layers of knowledge. By inhabiting space they tap into existing forms of knowledge, interact with them, reshape and reorganise them, in an endless loop of knowledge exchange. 

I think this is what Walt Whitman says when he says “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse…” 

This realization came as I was sleeping in the King’s College student accommodation on Great Dover Street in London. I was sleeping comfortably without a care in the world in a strange city, in a strange room, in strange linens, in a strange country and in a strange continent. But what was making it all strange, I was still processing the space intellectually, trying to make sense of it, engaging the knowledge that floods the internet about London, while reshaping it to suit me to be more comprehensible to me. Humans are more self centered than we care to admit and it's natural, even when we experience things as a group or as a couple, ultimately it boils down to the uniqueness of the individual and how it affects how she relates to what she encounters. 

I have been to London before, I have pictures. But having been in a group my experience was lost in memories that seemed irretrievable even though I looked at the pictures as evidence. I feel like groups have a tendency to nucleate around a particular person or idea or something centralising and yet exclusionary. I would not dare blame the people I travelled with, but it is worth saying that I was different from them, I was coming from a different background epistemologically and interacting with England was not as easy. Let me explain. (I have such a terrible tendency to expose myself to the entire world these days.)

It was in 2020, just before the COVID 19 Pandemic. It was my first time on a plane, it was my first time travelling out of the country and my first time in Europe. I was born and raised in the ghetto my entire life and trust me, this was an unbelievable experience, no one in my entire genealogy had ever done this, and I was only 16. The very preparation for the trip was full of timidity and the fear that I would not be enough. My english was not as polished and I did not have an accent, and to be fair I was somewhat a terrible debater myself aided by my debate partner who’s a debater extraordinaire. My entire experience in England was filled with too much awe that I forgot to experience the trip for myself - I did not like how I looked in cheap (and yet warm) clothes, I always felt that my group could somehow perceive the very humble background from which I came.

Ergo I simply followed. What they ate,I ate. What they wanted to see, I saw. What the group felt it should experience, I experienced. I was so damn shy to even ask for pictures of me to be taken. This was in 2020. I genuinely, barely experienced any part of England that we went to. I never even posted the pictures, until sometime later on (only on Facebook.)

I was in England quite recently and boy was I not prepared. I vowed to myself I would try to make this experience about and for myself. Not that the economic situation at home was any different or that I had ceased to be that boy from the ghetto. However, I was a different person epistemologically. How I understood and made sense of England was fundamentally different from how I did in 2020. I am a completely different human being, the knowledge I possess, the way I have engaged with different forms and sources of knowledge is fundamentally different. Therefore even as I interacted with the streets of London, as I inhabited the space, it felt like a virgin tour, like something I had never done before - I saw the places differently, I related to them differently and connected with them differently.  My intellect, the power of my brain to think and understand was of course different, and the verse I contributed to the songs of London, Gillingham and Oxford, was unique, new and fresh. 

The spaces we inhabit are imbued with knowledge systems, which many a times predate us, try to influence how we think and experience them. For example, for someone the London experience is incomplete without the Red Bus Tour, or the London Eye or being at Trafalgar Square - experiences I was not searching for. The people who tell us that “you did not visit place X if you did not see something Y” often do not realise that it is their own epistemology they try to impose on us, their own understanding about what matters about a place and what does not. The same way there is no universal experience, as surprising as it may sound, there is not a single experience of the place that you and those that are close to you so affectionately call home. Because intellectually you are all different, how you inhabit space and place is always going to have different outcomes and feelings it generates.  Your mom has a different appreciation of your home than you do, so do your siblings. It's crazy because that one “home” means so many different things at the same time. 

Surely this is not unique or strange, you have thought about this and even felt it. However, this blog wants you to think like this in every space you are yet to inhabit. That wherever you set foot and bond to place you may never take your worldview to be definitive and universal, that you may always be intellectually humble because the flipside of the coin of humility is fierce curiosity. That you may recognise places for what they are, not just buildings (houses, schools, clinics, hospitals) and landforms or natural things like rivers, mountains, streams or even the people who occupy the spaces, but they are systems of knowledge constantly being constructed and deconstructed, being shaped and reshaped. That you may never be shy to contribute your own verse to the stream of knowledge that never runs dry or becomes too full. 

Dare to occupy space and actually live and reshape it. Do not be like your couch or gate, inanimate, incapable of thinking and producing knowledge. Dare to think.