An Artist's Archeology of the Mind

From Joshua Rothman's "An Artists Archeology of the Mind" published in The New Yorker:

When Sacks was young, his family moved to Durban, a port city on the Indian Ocean. He walked to school wearing a safari suit and sandals. In the street, he passed Zulu men carrying shields and walking sticks; bare-chested African women with loads on their heads; Europeans in Western dress; Indian women in saris; black men in prison garb, laboring at the roadside with pickaxes. Sacks was on the “white” side of the color line; his ancestors, Lithuanian Jews, had come to South Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century. Still, the government included Nazi sympathizers, and, at his segregated school, bullies called him “Jew boy,” while his own lapses were met with strokes of a cane. The human world was inhuman. Meanwhile, a vast landscape surrounded him: long, deserted beaches echoing with rolling surf; grassy hills creased by ancient mountain shadows. At Durban’s port, he watched ships arrive from India, France, Japan—emissaries from an unfathomable world.

Sacks’s parents sought to resist apartheid: his father, an obstetrician, taught at a black medical school. Still, there was no escaping a sense of complicity. “I was waking up always too late in a ravishingly beautiful garden mostly run by thugs, and guess what, I was one of them,” Sacks has said. It was a relief for him, as a teen-ager, to become a competitive swimmer. His four daily hours in the pool were a ritual of solitude, discipline, exertion. Sacks went for training runs or daylong walks on the edges of towns. He was running along one of Durban’s beaches when a line unfurled in his head: “If they capture me, I have not learned to speak.” Decades later, he incorporated it into a prose poem. The line was a plea: don’t make me account for a life I don’t wish to have.

When Sacks was sixteen, he enrolled in an exchange program that would take him to America. He dreamed of California—by then he’d become a surfer—but the program placed him with a family on the west side of Detroit. It was 1967. Smoke from the race riots hung over the city; armored cars idled in the streets. Sacks read James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael—writers who had been censored at home—and, when he returned, he transferred from medical school to the political-science program at the University of Natal, a center of anti-apartheid activism. He became friends with Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and studied with Richard Turner, an intellectual leader of the South African left. At nineteen, Sacks gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations.