I'm at a small, borrowed writing desk, located in a corner of my son's room, working on a piece I wrote a while ago. I usually write my first and second drafts in WordPad, a rudimentary word processor that comes packaged in Windows machines. I like using it because it doesn't markup spelling or grammar errors, which I find distracting.
I have been rewriting this 500-word piece, off and on, for a couple of weeks, but it keeps eluding me. I can't get it to flow from one paragraph to the next. I take a sip of cold coffee, minimise WordPad, and look out the window at the building across from our apartment here in Stockholm, Sweden.
The balconies of the pink-painted building are empty, as is the garden below. A postman walks up to the building's entrance, punches in the door code, and walks inside. The door closes behind him.
I look away from the window and stare at my laptop's desktop instead – through the crowded icons I see a JPEG called “bunny_painting”. It sits near a folder called “2019”. I double-click on it and a second later artist Riason Naidoo's painting “Beans Bunny” fills the screen.
I have had this photo of the painting on my desktop for many years – after downloading it from an art website. I click on it every now and then, especially if I’m stuck or want to be reminded of home – Naidoo, like me, is from Chatsworth, a working-class Indian township in Durban, South Africa.
The painting, which has large dimensions and which is on a pegboard, is a pop art inspired depiction of a bunny chow – a cult Durban street food consisting of white bread filled with curry. It was painted in 1997, which was a fertile time in the city for art, music, and writing. It’s now in the permanent collection of the Durban Art Gallery – at the time a rare incursion of a subversive voice in a mainstream space.
The painting, dominated by artificial but pleasing blues, yellows and whites depicts a bunny chow, as yet uneaten. The bread plug, resting on top of the bunny, is moved to one side to reveal a filling of what looks like beans curry – almost as if inviting examination.
It's a depiction of a culinary and cultural icon, but, because the bunny is painted without context you are forced to think about what this icon represents, and what is embedded in it.
The abstract bunny in the painting is then not only a vessel for a curry, but also a vessel, given the Apartheid origins of the dish, for stories of Indian indenture, segregation, culinary hybridity, the cosmopolitan, and survival. It is both a painful and triumphant work of art.
The painting forces you to confront the fact that it is the bizarreness of indenture and Apartheid that has created the physical and conceptual bizarreness of this collage-like food.
But in the midst of this particularity there is a reach for the universal, to say that this food is art and that it is valid. That it is ultimately for everyone.
After about a minute of staring at the painting, I close it, maximise WordPad, and I return to writing. It goes better now.