was only apartheid legislation that made it accessible to our family. It sprawls lazily, the garden is large and lush, and it was paradise for we five children.
At the time, we were unaware that the spacious surroundings meant that other families lived in cramped shacks. At the time, we saw it as ‘ours’, when it was a hyperobject in its own right – its history was unknown to us, as were the many human hands that assembled it, and the creatures that used the overgrown stream at the border as a passageway. When my father died two years ago, it was obvious that our mother would have to move somewhere safer and more convenient. It was only when a timeline for this move began to emerge that family members took into account the effect this object had over the years, and what its loss would mean.
There would no longer be ‘home’ – nowhere for the now extended clan to meet simultaneously. The pencil marks on the wall in the dining room, measuring heights over the years – some getting taller, some getting shorter – suddenly held the problematic materiality of a Banksy on an outer wall in Bethlehem. Every nook and cranny held memories, like the spot where our father successfully cultivated a dot of Irish moss in a sub-tropical climate. Or the decades worth of numberplates that functioned as borders to a flower bed. And what about the pet cemetery, where well-loved creatures ranging from snakes to parrots to pigs were buried?
Number Five might be an amalgamation of brick, glass and wood assembled by human hands according to a human plan, but over the years it has taken on ‘a life of it’s own’ – considering that it might have done that despite its inhabitants is fascinating. As Harman says “The metaphors of concealment, veiling, sheltering, harbouring, and protecting are all relevant here. The real cats continue to do their work even as I sleep. These cats are not equivalent to my conception of them, and not even equivalent to their own self-conceptions; nor are they exhausted by their various modifications and perturbations of the objects they handle or damage during the night. The cats themselves exist at a level deeper than their effects on anything,” (Harman, 2009:195).
If I consider the 40 years our family lived there, I see that despite people moving in and out, family dramas and feuds, births and deaths, this hyperobject remained ostensibly the same. Yet we had our effect, too. The effect was not so much physical – a new kitchen, or extending the garage – as metaphysical. It is my belief that we affect our environment subtly. We have gut reactions to certain places – which are objects, according to Harman – based on an emotional reflex we cannot quantify empirically. It is said that there are no birds in Auschwitz. Whether this is urban myth is irrelevant, it shows two things: the human bias based on human understanding of the object’s history, and an anthropocentric thought that object (bird) interacts with object (Auschwitz) without human intervention. At one stage my mother was approached by a representative of burger chain MacDonalds, which was moving into the road (the area becoming rapidly light industrial). She was informed that the house would be demolished, mature trees uprooted and the plot paved over for parking. Joking about Joni Mitchell did not alleviate the pain this notion caused. Fortunately this did not happen. My mother moved into a smaller, more manageable duplex where she feels safe. Lloyd and Lindiwe Sithole have moved in with their four children and extended family.
If it’s true that the home does not exist except in our minds, for example as in the Hindu concept of Shiva’s dream, there are seven original homes, as experienced by me, the siblings, and the parental units. Add to that our children, and the hundreds of visitors who each had their own experiences over the course of 40 years. It’s getting quantum! And the people who came before us, and the Sitholes, who come after us, all have unique experiences.
On the other hand, this object could exist independently, as Aristotle would have it. This coheres to the modern concept of logic and ‘being sensible’, a philosophy of realism. Yet the experience of the object varies according to the needs and intentions of the person interacting with it, which is an indication of the main difficulty with Object-Oriented Ontology: it is near impossible not to assume an anthropocentric stance. As novelist and art critic Tom Robbins wrote in his semi-serious novel Skinny Legs and All, “The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, dead to humans only because of our neuromuscular chauvinism,” (1990:61).
Harman, G. (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics Melbourne: re.press
Robbins, T. (1990) Skinny Legs and All New York: Bantam Books
