Bridget McNulty reflects on how leaving South Africa revealed the deep, joyful threads of home woven into everyday life – reminding us that heritage lives in the smallest, most meaningful glimmers.
“Glimmers are micro-moments of connection and ease.”
“I never knew how South African I was until I left the country. I was just 19, and with all the confidence of youth, I jetted halfway across the world to Lancaster, Pennsylvania – to a country and culture I had never experienced – to study towards my goal of becoming a movie star. (I later decided to be a writer instead).
It was only when I was lifted out of the culture that we breathe like air every sunny, friendly, slightly chaotic day here in SA that I realised how much that culture was baked into my cells. I missed everything: the small, daily rituals, like a morning cup of tea with a rusk to dunk into it, or a warm morning greeting, delivered in an accent that made sense to me, peppered with familiar slang (‘Howzit!’). And the broader, more sweeping South Africanisms – limitless horizons and wide-open skies, the warm crush of other cultures and languages and types of people every way you look, the casual disregard for rules we all seem to agree is fine.
I left for America thinking I might make it my home. I returned fiercely proud to be South African, and never wanting to live anywhere else. What I didn’t realise at the time was that these small moments of connection with my country were actually glimmers.
Glimmers are micro-moments of connection and ease: tiny three-second slices of joy that calm your nervous system and lift your spirits.
These glimmers can be the tiniest things. Sometimes they’re rooted in the physical: the smell of your mom’s bobotie, the songs your family sings under their breath as they go about their day, the way you always sit in the same seats at the table to eat a meal together.
But they can also be more intangible … Being able to laugh at yourself when your loved ones tease you, walking down memory lane together, the way one bite of a specific food acts as a time capsule but also, somehow, a culture capsule. You may explore the world and think yourself quite debonair (I certainly did!) but give me a piece of lightly charred boerie, a blackened braai potato and some boring watery salad and I am a teenager again, wrapped in the endless teasing of my three older brothers, laughing at some terrible story my dad has told us roughly two hundred times.
Heritage and cultural memory can seem like such lofty concepts – woven from memory and lived experience and family and geographical history. What they boil down to, though, is that feeling of connection when you’re with your people. The way you feel when you see a familiar face after a long absence, when you share a secret smile that has years of history built into it, when you can use your own version of linguistic shorthand because you are so known to these people that you don’t have to explain yourself.
I was the only South African in my American college – the only South African most of my peers had ever encountered. I was met both with a kind curiosity and an incredulous fascination as our many cultural differences came to light. It wasn’t just the words I used, or the way I said them, but the expectation I held (and still do) that anything, really, is possible.
When I think of my South African heritage, that’s the thing that shines most brightly for me: the biggest glimmer. We are a people of possibility, fuelled by all the micro-moments of joy our beautiful country offers us.”
Bridget’s book, Daily Glimmers is out now.
This article was originally published in The Penguin Post, a magazine about books for book lovers from Penguin Random House South Africa.
