The Theory of Flight Quotes

He felt that the name that he had been born with, Bafana Ndlelaphi—which literally meant, ‘boys, which is the way’—was not fit for an explorer such as himself and so he changed it to Baines Tikiti. Tikiti—a ticket, something one purchased in order to go on a journey. Something that gave one purpose.

Golide knew that building airplanes was a costly business—that being capable of flight would come at a price. Parts either had to be bought or manufactured, people had to be educated and trained and the state’s monopoly on manufacturing had to be destroyed and decentralized. These obstacles made Golide spend most of his time thinking of ways to make the people understand that they were still capable of flight, and at no cost to themselves.

Well, Marcus Malcolm Martin Masuku, you can be friends with my Genie here if you promise me one thing. Can you promise me one thing? […] Promise me that you will not become a politician . . . promise me you will become a real revolutionary instead.

“Do I have a father?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On the future.”

So engrossed were they in their travels that it took them a while to notice that shoots were beginning to rise out of the reddish-brown earth. The sunflowers were being reborn. This was how they learned their most valuable lesson about death—that after it there is life again, that things that perish will rise again, that after every ending there is another beginning.

“We are your family now,” his new grandmother said, still not smiling. They all looked beautiful, the members of his family, but Marcus felt that their beauty was not to be trusted. It was a dangerous beauty. He was suddenly more terrified than he had ever been before. He let go of his bladder then, well aware that his urine would soil both his shorts and his mother’s shiny dress.

The Man Himself told Bhekithemba that because the country was still young and working out its differences, and because civil wars often had repercussions, conflict was inevitable. However, the country had an image to portray and protect, and Western countries were waiting for it to fail. It was Bhekithemba’s job to ensure that the West did not receive any ammunition with which to destroy the country’s image.

Bhekithemba did not believe in love, at least not in romantic love. He understood the love one had for one’s parents and one’s country—but that sort of love was born of respect and gratitude. It was a sort of giving back. There was a reason for that kind of love. It was only natural to love the things that had given you life, a sense of place, a feeling of belonging, a connection to things beyond yourself. You could not exist without those things and so of course you loved them. It was a selfish love: a love of self-preservation. Selfish love was understandable . . . reasonable. But romantic love had no reason.

The man told Bhekithemba how he had come up with his theory of flight on September 3, 1978, as he watched elephants swim across the Zambezi River. What had made the first elephant cross was that it could see the other bank of the river—the elephant would not have swum into the ocean, of this the man was certain. What made the other elephants follow was the successful passage of the first. The man wanted people to know that they were capable of flight, and at first he had erroneously thought that they would realize this if he taught them how to build airplanes. After watching the elephants, he understood that what was needed was merely his own belief in flight. If people saw him build a giant pair of silver wings, then they too would believe that they could fly.

“There was a time, not so long ago, that we thought only white people capable of such hatred and anger, such evil. We know better now. Evil does not discriminate. It visits all of us with equal opportunity.”

The past ten years have had her talking about “them” more and more. Kuki does not want to be misunderstood. She is not a racist. She does not have a racist bone in her body. She is a liberal; has been ever since she married Todd Whitehead Carmichael in 1981. So no, she is not a racist. She is just a frustrated liberal.

[…]

They always seem so nice and friendly, but they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing . . . and if you give them an inch they will run the country into the ground and let it go to the dogs.

The burning of that photograph was the only thing she did after the death of her beautiful, golden-haired boy that did not feel like a betrayal.

“You understand that in the grander scheme of things you are but a speck . . . a tiny speck , , , and that that is enough. There is freedom, beauty even, in that kind of knowledge . . . and it is the kind of knowledge that finally quiets you. It is the kind of knowledge that allows you to fly.”

It was only when he saw Genie looking at the things he had created with awe and wonder, only when he saw one hand traveling to her mouth to cover an “O” that had already escaped, only when he saw the other hand reaching out to touch him gently on the shoulder, only when she looked at the things he had created as things of utter beauty, only when she whispered, “I knew it. I knew you were special. I knew it,” her brilliant eyes never leaving the sculptures, it was only then that he realized that the things he created could actually have lives of their own—beyond him.

He heard his father’s voice say: “There are many ways to be a man. Always remember that.” He knew that in uttering these words his father had prepared him for precisely a moment such as this. His father had spoken the words at a time when Vida had needed absolute understanding and acceptance. And this was a time in Genie’s life when she needed absolute understanding and acceptance.

In a house filled with the proud collections and clutter of Jakob de Villiers’s life, Blue’s absence seems like a haunting.

“Promise me you will never speak to me of love,” she said. She looked at him and ran the back of her hand idly over his chest. “To not have to speak of love is such a freeing thing.”

Funny that during her final moments her thoughts and concerns should be so domestic.

After a lifetime of believing she was in flight, of believing that she was something spectacular in the sky, had she rather been a hybrid thing—something rooted but free to fly? Could such a hybrid thing even exist?

“We live in a time of HIV and AIDS,” Bhekithemba continues. “Everyone knows someone in [the] hospital who is fighting to survive. That fact alone—that we all know someone who is struggling to be alive—should be the headline every day, but it is not. It is our reality, the way we live now, our truth. So of course we cannot acknowledge it, let alone print it.”

Krystle looks at the telltale line left behind by the adhesive tape. She gets down on her knees and traces the grimy demarcation with her index finger. Tracing the evidence that Genie’s life with them had not been as easy as they all liked to remember. They had loved her in their own way, the only way they knew how . . . jealously . . . possessively . . . imperfectly.

“You cannot break me. You see, I know for certain that my parents were capable of flight.”

“It is too intimate, this interference, this role the state plays in our lives,” Minenhle says, looking him in the eye. “Too intimate.”

As they gang-raped, shot and pillaged their way through the compound, they had also, unbeknownst to themselves, found another way to decimate the compound. It did not have to be all of them who carried the disease. Just one—the result would have been the same.

And now to find out that Genie too . . .

Genie chooses this particular moment, with the survivors as her witnesses, to fly away on a giant pair of silver wings . . . and leave her heart behind to calcify into the most precious and beautiful something that the world has ever seen.

As the survivors watch her ascend she experiences love as the release of a promise long held.

This is where he belongs.