In my better dreams, Môtier

I was born in South Africa, but I don’t feel that I belong there. The tendrils of apartheid still linger, shaping the society I was born into and the place where I feel I can belong.

This is a photograph of a street in Môtier, Switzerland, that I have walked down many times. In the collage, it becomes dreamlike: a familiar place transformed by the desire to be there.

The clock was made by my wife’s late grandfather (Pépère). It is not part of my own family history, yet it has become deeply important to me. It represents a desire to feel connected to a place and to the references that give it meaning, even when those references are not technically mine. It also represents lost time: the time I am not there.

Maybe the desire to belong somewhere is universal. Maybe sometimes that place is not where we were born. Maybe we should think more carefully before denying belonging to other human beings—not immigrants, not undesirables or freeloaders, but humans trying to find their place in the world.