Portrait with Keys Quotes

“Yet all the fun we had riding bicycles and kicking soccer balls counted for nothing because they were in here working, wearing paper hats and striped aprons as if they were in an Archie comic. They were already kids and we were still children.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on our skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“The term "tomason" was coined by Genpei Akasegawa to describe a purposeless object found on a city street/ He has tracked and tagged hundreds of them in Japan and other parts of the world. A tomason is a thing that has become detached from its original purpose. Sometimes this detachment may be so complete that the object is turned into an enigmatic puzzle; alternatively, the original purpose of the object may be quite apparent and its current uselessness touching or amusing. It may be a remnant of a larger fixture that has been taken away, or it may be a thing complete in itself, whose purpose has been forgotten. Perhaps the people who put it there, who used it and needed it, have moved away or died. Perhaps the trade it was meant to serve is no longer practiced. The natural habitat of the tomason is the city street. Thisis not to say that the tomasons cannot be found in the countryside, but they are so scare there that hunting for them would be tedious. Tomasons thrive in the man-made world, in spaces that are constantly being remade and redesigned for other purposes, where the function of a thing that was useful and necessary may be swept away in a tide of change or washed off like a label. They are creatures of the boundary, they gravitate to walls and fences, to entrances and exits. You will find them attached to facades or jutting out of pavements.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked

“For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albermarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we'd been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history 9but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by his unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11. One of Gandhi's descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall.
Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albermarle Streets approach the impostor rather Kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albermarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker.
No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an orante wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge of the light from the doorway, made them look like whores.
Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet.”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked