Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
I HAD a great holiday season, I really did and it is great to be happy, I discovered. This was a holiday season when I decided to go mainstream. Instead of getting depressing videos to watch until January 2, I went out and joined the throngs of shoppers in town going all gooey over toys in the department stores.
I also stopped throwing the cards that people had sent me into the garbage bin, as I used to. I too went out to buy some cards to hand-deliver to the five people who still talk to me after I had told them that greeting cards are corny and made derisive remarks about the ones that they had specifically chosen to buy for me.
That was when my eyes were opened to a new world, a world in which ready emotion is on tap for an amount ranging from R5 to about R30. If, for instance, you are down the street after a night out on the town and the significant fool in your life decides to prove to you that the movie moguls in Hollywood had him in mind when they created the character Dirty Harry and succeeds in getting his head pounded on the tarmac by a six foot gorilla bouncer, you can spend a few rand on a card to tell him:”This brings the best of wishes that it won’t be very long before you are back home again and feeling well and strong, but in the meantime don’t forget that every single day the warmest thoughts go out to you in a special way.” This becomes especially useful when what you feel is that it serves him right because walking up to a Mike Tyson homicidal look-alike and telling him to “make my day” is not an intelligent thing to do. The card saves you the pain of trying to lie with a straight face.
If, on the other hand, a friend has given birth to a mass of late-night screams and dirty diapers, you can do the politic thing and send her a card that says: “The happiest of wishes, as warm as they can be, for you and that sweet addition to your happy family. Congratulations.” You might not mean a single one of any of these words, but it’s certainly less sociopathic than telling your friend the truth: that for the next five years she is going to have a permanently corked bomb in her hands constantly ready to explode at the slightest irritation.
These sentiments on tap are not limited to happy events. If your sister-in-law’s third cousin removed twice finally succumbs to the hand of Angel Gabriel and ups and dies on your family, you can, without feeling any guilt about lying about your feelings, spend R10 and the grieving family will receive this assembly-line masterpiece: “When our hearts are saddened by the loss of one we love, the courage that we truly need comes only from above. But you may find some comfort at this time you’re going through in just knowing many thoughts and prayers are always there with you.” This way you get to send a message of sympathy without having to disclose that you don’t actually know who the heck cousin-Joe-who-got-drunk-at-brother-in-law-John’s- wedding- and-tried-to-grope-the-priest-thinking-that-he- was-one-of-the-bridesmaids is.
But the greeting-card market is missing one of the most lucrative niches in the seedy world of human emotions: everyone gets dumped or dumps somebody else at some point in their lives. For the dumped niche market, I think a line of greeting cards would be useful. The sentiments expressed should be less than polite, I think. After all, if you had somebody come into your life who made you throw away all your Gary Larson cartoons, saying that they are clutter, there should be a card that can articulate your feelings. There should be a card saying in no uncertain terms that you are glad that the floozy is out of your life and you now can enjoy laughing out loud in response to good old Gary.
What about the man who thought that your Janis Ian tapes were sentimental garbage? Well, there should be a card saying in no uncertain terms that you love her song “You’re so vain” and that you have been playing it non- stop since he, in a melodramatic self-righteous rage, took his suitcases and walked out of your two-room flat and did not pay his share of last month’s rent.
There are also those occasions when you are competing for a promotion with a colleague and the son of a female dog (that means his mother is ugly, and is not some misogynistic statement) goes and takes the boss out to lunch and sucks his way up to the comfortable office in the corner, leaving you in the communal space with all the sweaty, diet-plan- comparing masses.
This calls for a special card, one which states all your feelings and still comes across as a good-natured joke (you’ll probably be reporting to him and therefore you don’t want to alienate him too much). The card could say something like: “Congratulations on your promotion. I hope you get offered an affirmative action position somewhere else, some place where there is a 30cm-thick glass ceiling.”