"Humble yourself to the earth and acknowledge the roots beneath you."
I came from a sleepy beach town, earlier memories highlight a chubby kid with a fountain-ponytail buried neck-deep in the warm, beach sand. I was surrounded by young fit lifeguards in red shorts, tasked with babysitting me as my mother worked her shifts at the Hard Rock Cafe. There is a photograph of this memory, yellowed around the edges but my toothless grin is still very visible. This was the face of the innocent little girl I was before my introduction to the 'big bad world'. These were the good days. The days when I would run around shirtless with my cousins, my long obviously-feminine hair blowing wildly in the coastal air. Often pleading my case until I was deemed 'one of the boys'. It was important to me to be able to play with the boys and be accepted as equal, sometimes having to perform tasks that a girl definitely could not do. I always passed with flying colours, proving my boyhood. In the privacy of our home, I would go on missions naked and play in mud puddles after a heavy rain, painting myself up like a warrior and searching for feathers to put in my hair. I'd think up elaborate stories based on what little my mother had told me about my biological father. Dark and handsome, a Native-American man who had been living in Mauritius and had holidayed in our sleepy town.
So picture this; a young girl smothered in mud with an amused grin on her face, she knew she'd have to be scrubbed clean later that evening. She didn't let this annoying reality bother her as she squished the mud between her toes, looking down curiously at the little pockets of air escaping from beneath her feet. A warmth filled her chest as a laugh began to rise almost as if from the air pockets bursting off the top of the mud. This small, simple thing was so magical to her. She had finger marks on her arms where she'd smeared the dark sludge on to her skin, it was cool and wet at first, and then it dried into a peculiar second skin which flaked off when she touched it. This whole process had become a ritual after the fresh Spring rain. She would go outside in nothing but a dark towel, because a lighter towel would stain, and stand with her head to the sky waiting for the first drops of rain to fall. Once she deems a puddle worthy, she steps into it and treads the water and soil to create her war paint. She then applies her war paint slowly, methodically. She breaks out of this daze when she hears her mom's voice call out to her. How lucky she was, to have one of those, a mom.
The setting for this exaggerated story about a little mud warrior is Kwa-Zulu Natal. There's a cool story behind the name of the province I was born in. One day the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama was sailing by and spotted a coastline. It was Christmas day in 1497 and I was born in 1997, 500 years later. Vasco named the new-found 'country' Terra Natalis after the Portuguese word "Natal" which means 'Christmas'. It's a strange piece of information I know but I reflect on the history of my home province often. Anyway, this is the beginning of my roots as they do spread quite far.