At 25, I purchased a one-way ticket to Johannesburg within the months after Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town was revealed. My hazy objective was to re-create his overland journey throughout Africa, besides I’d do it from Cape City to Cairo. My need was to crisscross Southern and East Africa and head north with only a backpack and a tent. I didn’t have a map or a particular plan. There have been solely flip telephones at the moment, so there could be no solution to inform if I used to be misplaced or off monitor. My solely need was to wander with no sense of once I’d arrive or what route I’d take to get there.
Again then, a lot of my idols had been wanderers. However the one factor all of them had in frequent was that they had been white males. Bruce Chatwin. Jack Kerouac. Ernest Hemingway. And naturally Theroux. They by no means needed to clarify their resolution to go on the highway or off the map. They simply did it. They didn’t fear about being judged, persecuted, or, worse, raped or killed.
The message I used to be bombarded with in my 20s was that wandering was for males; locations had been for girls. Locations have expectations written throughout them. They’re about timelines. When will I arrive? What’s going to I need once I get there? However I needed to go to a spot the place I didn’t know who or what I’d be on the opposite facet. I needed to go to a spot the place I wasn’t time certain. What I didn’t perceive again then, though I felt its darkish tentacles, is {that a} lady is all the time on the clock.
Capitalism is not less than partly guilty. We’ve all realized to see ourselves as cogs in a a lot bigger machine, bowing all the way down to the dual beliefs of busyness and optimization. But a girl’s clock and a person’s clock are totally different animals. A person’s clock is exterior. A lady’s clock, we’re advised, is inside. And like her supposed distinctive capacity to nurture the younger and sick, our clocks are thought-about an intuition: primal, organic, pure. In 1978, The Washington Publish declared on its entrance web page: “The Clock Is Ticking for the Profession Lady,” instilling an existential dread in generations of girls to come back. Ladies who wandered had all the time been seen as suspect. If girls’s nature was all about fireside and residential, these girls, like me, who needed none of it, had been seen as misfits, outcasts, irregular.
Which, in my early-to-mid-20s, was nice by me. I relished the concept I used to be totally different, particular. I assumed I’d figured one thing out that nobody else had realized but: that the one solution to win on the recreation of life was to choose out altogether. The conventional milestones of a mortgage, marriage, and motherhood had been rigged in my thoughts. They had been for the unimaginative. The straight-and-narrows. The ladies with polished manicures and the lads in boat sneakers with sweaters draped over their shoulders. I’ll by no means be like them, I advised myself. I’ll maintain shifting, spending one week in Nairobi and the following in Kampala.
