Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This message comes from HomeTap. A HomeTap home equity investment gives you access to your home equity and cash. No monthly payments, loans, or stress. Receive funds in just a few weeks to pay off debt, make renovations, and more. Get your estimate at HomeTap.com. By the end of 2021, I felt stuck. The pandemic had taken its toll on me.
As pandemic lotteries go, I was lucky. I moved to my hometown, Buffalo, New York, found a nice sunny apartment to hide in by myself. Though it was far from all my friends, it was close to family and it felt safer than the big cities I was used to. I made voice diaries narrating my new normal. Here on Kia Island. It's population one, but it's also population fun.
I learned how to install braids in my hair, how to make duck confit. I've been wearing out of this little pan. It's holding on for dear life. I bought roller skates and began to slowly roll up and down the hallway of my third floor apartment in knee pads, elbow pads, wrist pads. Stiff as a board, heavy as a rock, waving my arms around like an inflatable at a car dealership. Nope.
I'm in the house skating because personally, I find it really embarrassing and overwhelming to be so bad in public. I mean, I'm really not trying to bust my ass at the Rainbow Rink. But after months and months of being in the house, the couch had a permanent divot for my butt.
My voice diaries got more and more mundane, narrating the petty drama outside my window. Looks like some sort of pit mix. It's adorable, beautiful dog, big body, not trained at all. Most evenings, I end up stretched out on my couch, propped on a pillow in my PJs, scrolling Instagram and crushing candies on my phone.
I was sequestered in this little apartment island to feel safe, but that came at a cost. I felt disconnected, not only from other people, but also myself. Who are dogs without humans? You know, once again, I want liberation. I'm tired of watching the world behind the glass, alone. I'm damn near collecting dust. Woof, woof, woof. Woof, woof.
I'm Kia Miyakunatis, and this is Invisibilia from NPR. Hi. I just got nervous. It's been a while. Also, I haven't talked to you in this new location. I arrive in Cape Town, South Africa, with two suitcases and my emotional support roller skates. It's been weird. It's been weird.
I feel like an egg yolk. I'm here to visit some friends. Plus, February in this part of the world is summertime, which means no seasonal depression. Thank God. Cape Town has beaches, lots of them. I usually head to the beach when I feel disconnected or overwhelmed, even if it's just in my mind. My favorite beaches are those calm, sandy, lazy ones with gentle waves, you know?
Cape Town beaches aren't like that. The waves are very aggressive. The water is very cold, even in the summer. One time I thought I could be cute in the water and I almost lost my top. It was a struggle. There were rocks. It was not comfortable.
But there is a certain thrill of being near the ocean. Am I going to get swallowed by a wave? Will I get swept out to sea? Will something weird brush up against me and, you know, bite me, sting me, kill me? But also, the feeling of being in water is just so...
When I found the ocean in 2016 and just that deep feeling of belonging, that deep, deep place where that life was okay and everything was okay. Zandili Ndlovu was the first name to pop up when I googled Black Diving Instructor South Africa. I figured that if I wanted to get into the ocean, I'd need some help. It sure remains the one place where
I can be true, I can be free, and I can unburden my shoulders because she's big enough to hold all of me. She's big enough to hold my past, my present, my future. She's big enough to hold every single one of my struggles. Zandi's claim to fame is being South Africa's very first Black female freediving instructor. She even calls herself the Black Mermaid and kind of looks like one with long electric blue hair.
I am a black woman with the biggest smile you could ever imagine in your life, like you could wrap it behind your ears. And if you had to know me as a human, wild joy, wild happiness, lover of life, lover of humans, lover of the human existence. When Zandi found freediving, she found more than just the ocean. What changed for you? I inherited the universe.
That's a massive change. Oh, go on, go on, Zondi. How did you know? So I decided to sign up for Zondi's freediving course. I'm going to learn how to freedive. Pray for me, y'all. We're coming back after this break.
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We start outside at a picnic table near a vegan cafe. The sun is scorching, a typical Cape Town summer's day. I'm huddled under a bucket hat with a towel because, oops, I forgot my sunscreen. Freediving requires a level of mental preparation. Everything is a question of your ability to handle the situation if anything goes wrong.
Freediving is like scuba diving, but... Your body is the tank. It's just you and your lungs in the water. It feels like you are going into this light every single time you dive. With Zandi, the goal I'm pushing towards is depth diving. I'm trying to learn to swim deep into the ocean while holding my breath.
There's this thing that happens to you as you're descending in the water called the free fall. It feels like you are flying and you are everything and everything is you. That's how the free fall feels. When you're free diving, the first 30 feet of your dive requires so much work for you. You have to swim really forcefully to get your air-filled body down into the sea. The free fall starts and all you hear...
is the rope. You'd be attached to a rope, attached to a buoy at the surface, and you could use that rope to pull yourself down into the water. But once you reach about 30 feet, you can relax your body as the Earth's gravity begins to catch you. And you just hear your hand. You've stopped spinning. You've stopped everything else. It's almost like you transcend. You leave Earth. ♪
And so as we go into depth work, I think there's so much there for us to figure out what is in our own heads. For me, it was clearing out all the stories that I grew up with. Zandi grew up far from the ocean, in Soweto, over 350 miles from the coast. She was born under apartheid, South Africa's legalized system of racial segregation, and
They divided everything by race. At one point, even the beaches. You know, many people always ask me, weren't you afraid and aren't you afraid of water today? And I'm always like, there were many things that could kill you then. Like, this was just one of the things by which you could go. On top of that, the local pool costs money that her mom didn't have.
The few times Zondi did get a chance to play in the water. Of course, you know, when the water's at your ankle, you're doing great. When the water's at your knees, why are you trying to kill yourself? How did you learn how to swim? This is a good question. It starts by me drowning. Apartheid ended in 1994. And not long after, Zondi went to her first multiracial school. She was in sixth grade.
She hesitated and a friend noticed.
offered Zandi a ride on her back through the water. At some point, her friend turned in the water and Zandi fell off. I don't think she meant to, like, leave me there. And so when she got to the other side, it was like, where the hell is Zandi? And, yeah. She was at the bottom of the deep end and had to be pulled out. It's just one of the things that could happen on a black body on any other day. But I'll never forget Miss Berkley because she was the one who was over my body just like, Zandile, Zandile! And I was just like...
And this is how we die. Somehow, that didn't scare her off. We never went for, like, formal swimming lessons, ever. But my sister and I, at a point, we felt so confident because we could, we could, like, not drown in the water. And so we joined the swimming team. Needless to say, we were always the ones who were last to come in. And everyone would always be like, why are you doing white people things? My water story is a lot like Zandi's.
I grew up far from the ocean, had people in my family who couldn't swim because of racism, and a near-death water experience when I was a kid. But just like Zondie, I also have a love for water. Watching videos of Zondie freely gliding across the ocean floor made it easier to imagine myself in the water. Plus, I wasn't scared to ask all the silly and specific questions about what might happen to my body in the water.
What about my hair? What if I'm on my period? You are never, ever like gallons of blood out. So you can always dive when you are on your period. Back in the class, we transitioned from the picnic table to an outdoor pool where we're going to practice for the ocean. I stand in the shallow end wearing a full body wetsuit with a mask and a snorkel. Zandi sits at the edge of the pool, presiding over the water.
She's guiding us on the number one skill we need for freediving, controlling your breath. Here I want you to focus on a big breath as you go in. I want you to focus on the breath going into your belly and into your chest. Nice big breath. I'm holding on to the edge of the pool, breathing deeply, waiting for my excited and nervous heart rate to slow down a bit.
And then when you get ready to take your last breath, it's a big exhale, not a hyperventilating exhale, just a gentle exhale. I slowly stretch out, face down into the water. From above, I can hear Zandi gently coaching me while I watch the sunlight dance on the bottom of the pool. Nice, beautiful. You're doing absolutely incredible. Incredible.
I let my fingers go from the edge and float. Right by the wall. Lose myself a little bit. Feel the water moving around me. The tiny air bubbles escaping the gaps in my wetsuit. My own weightlessness. The emptiness of it all. Beautiful. Beautiful. Okay. Yes.
One minute, 38 seconds.
Zondie seems really proud of me, and I am too, to be honest. I didn't know I could hold my breath that long. I never tried. I feel like a little kid getting a gold star from her favorite teacher. Once it's time to let go of the wall and actually swim in fins, it's not good. You know, them fins, I was kind of panicking. Ugh, it was bad. At one point, I think I kicked her in her head because I couldn't get down deep enough, so...
I feel like I'm in way over my head. She made it look so easy and beautiful. Hold your breath. We'll be right back after the break. Dive class, day two. The next morning, I wake up to a message from Zandi. I was thinking about it. Well, I was thinking about it today and that's not actually. It's absolutely incredible to see how you're able to go to this meditative place.
And I hope you trust that feeling and that place when you go into depth today. See you later. Morning. We meet up at a dive shop for gear. When I walk in, I look for Zondie, and though it's busy and full of people, she's easy to spot. The only other Black person in the building. As soon as I find her, a white lady at the front desk yells her name. Zondie!
Tell Zondie and me to sit down. We rent our gear and make a plan for the day. Zondie offers to give me a ride to the pool. She walks barefoot through the parking lot to her car.
It's a white Volvo truck and the nicest car I've been in since arriving to Cape Town. You know, I was a city girl. I was working in corporate, earning big money. You know, so cool going to corporate presentations. You know, I was that girl. As we drive to the pool, Zandi tells me about who she was before freediving. And it sounds so different. She had a husband. She was a pro mountain biker. And she had this really intense corporate job that she was also really good at.
To have been able to find myself in a place where I'm working a really good job, getting good money, owning a house, being able to provide for not only my current family, but my entire family. It was incredible. Zandi was working 18-hour days. The more corporate got intense in my body when I was really battling the subtle, not so subtle racism that is.
That anxiety just grew because my heart was saying, I want out. I don't want this. And that was intense because there was a point where I thought the world could hear my heart. It was beating so loud all the time. Yes, I've been the strong black independent woman my whole life. I've done what everyone wants me to do. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, in the ocean. And I moved to Cape Town. And I'm still figuring it out, but no one's died. So we're all okay. Yeah.
Zandi got out of the corporate world, but some of those problems followed her. Like what happened at the dive shop earlier. Zandi!
I walked in and almost immediately we were singled out. Why did that woman call us out like that? She didn't tell anyone else to sit down. There were white people walking all over the place. What's my one little black body going to do to this space? You know, extend my leg and trip somebody? On purpose?
Like, come on. Zondi seemed okay with it, so maybe it's not a big deal. I know a racism when I see one, and that felt like a racism. The lady had bad vibes. I'm in a completely foreign country, and I know nothing of the racial politics in South Africa are very good. Maybe that lady was having a bad day. Some people are sad. I don't want to identify that thing as racism. I want to be in the ocean right now. I don't want to be thinking about this. Don't rock the boat. We wore the brownest stuff in there, and we stuck out. I was getting in my head about it, but then Zondi brought it up in the car.
Turns out she was stuck on it, too. We all go because that's where you can hire gear, but it can be in between for me. But it's just because maybe I'm just, you know. I mean, why do you think? I don't know. I feel like the customer service could be better. Like maybe since they have a monopoly, it's like we're going to treat you however we want. Because where else are you going to go?
Listening to it now, it's like we're talking in code, trying to protect each other or something. I think it's just always realizing that this has got nothing to do with me, but sometimes my skin holds the weight of it all, right? And then I get home and my skin is tired because it walks in everywhere and it is told that it doesn't belong. And so you have to speak up for it to be able to exist in that space.
And so there are days of fatigue where I actually just message my friends and I'm like, my skin is tired. She told me she's had problems with that dive shot before. Zani remembers a particularly bad day when she had four Black students. We just had like a series of things that morning. And I just remember as the course finished, I just got into my car and I cried. I must have cried for an hour. It was horrible.
And so it's somehow like a cry of all the violence that your body has taken. And you say, oh, it's okay. Oh, just keep it moving. And then one day your body's like, not today. And you fall apart because it's actually exhausting to continuously have to say that I'm human too and I'm equal too and I deserve to be here too. And you don't speak to me like that. And why are you pointing out my hair? And why are you pointing out my body? And why...
It can be exhausting. It's not can be exhausting. It is exhausting. It's my first time talking. Good morning. It's 6.40 a.m. here. The sun is rising. I'm supposed to go free diving in the ocean today. The day we finally get to dive into the ocean came after many days of bad weather, plus a wetsuit mix-up, which meant the German couple in our class couldn't come. So it was just me and Zondie.
I took an Uber to the ocean, but of course it dropped me off in the wrong place, so I had to walk along a stretch of highway that wraps around Table Mountain. That was an 11 minute walk. That's not bad to me. Stop them honking at me though. That sounds creepy. A fancy white Volvo rolls up next to me. Is he Sunday? Oh look, I've got a ride.
I'm good. How are you? As I came down, I'm like, I think that's where she would have gone. So this dive spot is called Justin's. There's lots of anxieties, but mostly, I know that's just like all fear-based stuff that's probably not fact-based. And I definitely trust you. That was one of my meditations of like, I know Zani's not going to put me in danger. Absolutely.
So it's more so just like overcoming the inner narratives about where I do and do not belong, you know, and where I can and cannot be welcomed. Zandi and I stand on the edge of the water on a rocky beach. Some bathers watch us as we suit up in our full body wetsuits, masks, snorkels and those really, really long fins.
To get into the ocean, Zandi says we have to crawl over the rocks on our bellies because you can't just walk in with three-foot-long fins. She's swimming in front of me, pushing a rubber tire buoy. I trail behind, struggling over the rocks. Oh, heaven, I need a hug. The ocean starts to receive us. There's a kelp forest, these really long golden brown stalks of kelp that grow up out of the ocean floor. They kind of tangle around me,
I'm pushing them away, but also holding onto them when the ocean rocks me too hard. Zondi sees a blue plastic bag tangled in the kelp. She fishes it out, throws it in the buoy to throw away later. We reach an open patch of ocean, the water nearly 15 feet deep. Bobbing in the water, Zondi challenges me to dive. I pull on a kelp stalk to help me. My body's swimming deeper and deeper.
The water is cloudy. It's hard to see. It feels like a confrontation. What's at the bottom of the ocean? Where does this end? But finally, I get there. I see the ocean floor. It's just water, rippling on the sand. I look over and see a bird. It's diving too, paddling around under the water, maybe looking for food. Not finding anything either.
I'm going to be processing that dive for a moment. Yeah. And your body in the water. And then just another left at the end of this. Forest lodge. This next one right here with you. Perfect. All righty. Thank you so much, Landi. Only a pleasure. Take care. Have a beautiful day and I hope you travel with the water today. Yes, absolutely. Same to you. All righty. Thanks a lot. See you later.
Later, when I'm at the Airbnb on my couch, I text Zondie. I can still feel the ocean. I send her the emoji with swirly eyes. She texts me back. A big, beautiful feeling. Two heart emojis. Eventually, me and my roller skates return home to that butt divot in my couch. I'm glad I tried freediving, but I didn't inherit the universe like Zondie did.
And that's okay. Her words stuck with me anyway. Here in South Africa, we've got this thing that's called a room divider. And inside the room divider is like...
the best cutlery that no one gets to eat out of right but it's known in all black communities that you don't touch anything that's in the room divided and so you will always live off the chipped plates and i think ultimately that's what we've done with life we've said this is the most precious thing but also understandably and rightfully so because black lives for a very long time did not matter and so the idea of our preservation and the
keeping of our lives and our bodies is an important thing. So we don't actively go seeking out places that feel like they might take our lives. But the hard part of that is that all our lives are these seen things through the glass that just gather dust and no one ever touches them. And so they fall...
Their full existence is not explored. The beauty and the touch of the glass, the crystal glass, the beauty of drinking out of that glass, the health of drinking out of a really beautiful glass. We don't really get to fully experience our lives. We just get to observe it from afar and every so often shine the glass. So it's the work that I think we have to do. All right, I'm here in Rainbow Rink. I already saw that there is a cop at the door checking bags because...
That's the world we live in. Since coming home, I've committed myself to roller skating. I like the people. I like learning new things with my body. This one night at the rink, adult night, black people night.
It felt like the place was on fire. I mean, folks were just locked in, moving with an energy. I happily swam in it, floating in when I could. He's really playing all the jams for me tonight.
Of course. My butt is going to be hurt. But you can't float unless you're willing to fall. You too. Boy, you could cut it with a knife. Yeah, you could. It's hard to tell. It's a beautiful night, though. You too.
This episode was written and reported by me, Kia Myakonitis, produced and sound designed by Phoebe Wang. Additional production by Ariana Garably. Invisibilia is also produced by Yo-Wei Shaw, Abby Wendell, and Andrew Mambo, with additional support this season from Lauren Beard, David Goodhertz, Claire Marie Schneider, Lee Hale, and Nick M. Nevis. Sarah Long was our intern for this season. Our supervising editor is Nina Patuk. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Factors.
Fact-checking by Katie Dogger and Aida Porosad. Mastering by James Willits. Additional thanks to Brianna Scott, Bethel Habte, and Gabriella Bolgarelli. And a very special thanks to Haven, Winnie, and Kyle Polk. Love y'all from Detroit to South Africa and back again.
Legal and standards support from Micah Ratner and Tony Cabin. Our technical director is Andy Huther. Our deputy managing editor is Shirley Henry. Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. Theme and original music by Infinity Knives.
Additional music in this episode by Ramteen Arablui, Physical Fitness, Elizabeth DeLise, William Cashin, Peels, and Bank Robber Music. For behind-the-scenes photos from my time in the water, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash invisibilianewsletter. Swimmy later. You like that? Planet Money is there. From California's most expensive fires ever... That was my home home. Yeah. Grew up there.
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