When I was 12 years old, my grandmother gave me an unusual gift: a deep plastic tub filled with individually wrapped teacups. My brother received an identical tub – his was filled with model airplanes.
At the time, I was somewhat perplexed by this offering. Although I had experienced an early initiation into the world of tea-drinking, my interest in crockery would not develop for another 10 years, so it felt like a strangely mature and slightly excessive gift for a child.
Admittedly, my grandmother (referred to by all simply as ‘Mama’) did not do things in half-measures.
She grew up in Rodrigues, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, and spent most of her teenage and early adult years working as a seamstress there. When my dad was six years old, they moved to the mainland of Mauritius. She had hoped this would make life easier, but after 10 years of fruitless labour, it became clear they would need to make one final journey – this time to Australia, where several of her brothers had already resettled.
My grandmother found work at a fabric store in Dandenong and, over the years, began to squirrel away leftover bolts of cloth in her closet at home. Silky satin, leopard-print fleece, white lace that she would one day use for my mum’s wedding dress. Eventually she moved to a different suburb and found a new job as an upholsterer for a caravan manufacturer. But by this time, the bolts of cloth had already taken over, filling up the desk, the cupboards, the space under her bed. She saved and saved, and worked from her bedroom churning out tracksuit pants, bags, and enormous boxes of hand-sewn frocks that would arrive on my birthday every year.
Mama’s aesthetic preferences were as eccentric as her gifting. She had a penchant for strange hats, including a striped one in the shape of an umbrella that sat perkily atop her head, and a large, wide-brimmed number that featured a busy flower print and a long flap to protect her neck from the sun. Even her text messages had a certain flamboyance, laden with pink hearts, pictures of roses (always yellow) and her favourite emoji of all: the smoochy red lips.
She loved to go the extra mile, especially when it came to homemade goods. When she journeyed up to our house in the country a few times a year, she would always bring a 40-kilo suitcase, filled not with clothes but with the fruits of her kitchen and garden: lemons, chapatis, cakes and jars of pickles. The spicier of these would be labelled accordingly: IS HOT.
Having grown up as the eldest of 11 children, this woman was something of an expert when it came to being resourceful and taking care of others. She cooked, sewed, and divvied up the daily catch to provide for her family in Rodrigues, and continued to do so when she migrated to Australia in the late 80s. A visit to her place for lunch always involved generous leftovers or an additional take-home dinner for that night, as well as several containers of fish vindaye, bred malbar and hearty chicken curry for the freezer.
It was her mission to ensure that no one was left wanting. No grandchild of hers would go hungry or suffer the same hardship that she had suffered as a child. Instead, we would be coddled in comfort, wrapped in the warmth of fluffy socks from the $2 dollar store, in the embrace of cheap Christmas cards covered in sparkles, and the financial security promised by tubs of collectable items.
For a long time, I did not understand her obsession with stuff. The digital picture frames, the glass cabinet packed with random paraphernalia, the piles of bargain shoes and bags that filled her house. These all seemed meaningless to me. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I was watching Ramy (the brilliant, self-titled series created by Ramy Youssef), that things began to make sense.
There is one particular episode in which the young Egyptian-American decides to make a trip to Egypt, the motherland, in search of deep wisdom and spiritual insights. He packs one small suitcase, intending to travel simply and without excess baggage. What he fails to consider, however, are the emotional wants and needs of his migrant family in America, who wish to connect with the other half of the family through the exchange of (supposedly practical) gifts. To his dismay, they eagerly load him up with a second suitcase, filled with cosmetics, handy kitchen implements and even an iPad for his uncle.
Watching this scene unfold, I could immediately understand Ramy’s resistance to being the designated bearer of what was – to him – a pile of useless crap, but at the same time I could also empathise with his parents and cousins, who chided him for being selfish and not taking a more active role in upholding the family’s emotional ties.
In his quest for enlightenment and cultural understanding, Ramy had essentially missed the point: failing to realise that culture is as much comprised of ‘stuff’ as it is comprised of tradition, religious teachings and the wisdom of old folk. But sometimes culture is like this – it is the very opposite of what we expect. It’s awkward, it doesn’t fit quite right, it clashes with other parts of our lives and doesn’t work in the ways we had hoped or imagined.
This explains, perhaps, why I always felt an odd sense of discord when thinking about Mama’s materialistic tendencies in the context of my own life environment.
Having lived in Naarm’s leftie northern suburbs for the past five years, I have very much absorbed the ethical and aesthetic values of minimalism and sustainability. Reduce, reuse, recycle (or go to hell!).
But what I have also noticed is that the cafés in surrounding neighbourhoods are increasingly designed to look like simple white boxes; retail stores often hold only a few stylish items (with exorbitant price tags attached), and ‘gourmet’ food products such as chilli oil are selling for upwards of $20 a piece.
Inflation has an obvious role to play here, but it would be remiss of me not to suggest that these changes also have something to do with class – with the idea of value, and who gets to decide what is and isn’t valuable.
Our stuff – whether we have a little or a lot – serves as a reflection of who we are, and although I am averse to hoarding and needless consumerism, I do think that material things have a role to play in our relationships. Gifting and exchange, for example, have long existed as vital facets of social cohesion, and in Mama’s case, this was one of the most important ways in which she expressed love and kinship. Having grown up in poverty, with no room for extravagance or luxury of any kind, material objects held a certain emotional weight for her. Frivolous or not, they served as markers of her hard work, of her ability to provide something beyond the bare necessities.
Yet she was not materialistic in any negative sense of the word. On the contrary, her attachment to the physical world was most often one of resourcefulness and practicality. She could barter with great tenacity over a bag of rice or a pair of sandals, and with confidence and a little bit of know-how, she successfully raised fruit trees, chillies and juicy garlic bulbs from the arid concrete landscape of Naarm’s southeastern suburbs.
Over time, however, the physicality of her work began to cost her. Her eagle-eyed focus on fiddly sewing projects led to a slow deterioration of her eyesight. Her hip ached constantly from pumping the machine at work, piecing together dull caravan upholstery on a crappy wage for years. No wonder she wanted frills and sequins and a million bottles of perfume and nail polish. She deserved all that and more.
My family and I now recall her extravagant tastes with fond amusement. While many of the gifts that she gave us had no practical use, all we could do was accept them with grace. It was the act of giving, not the stuff itself, that brought her great joy, and I realised later in life that it was her innate desire to provide that motivated the gifting of the teacups when I was 12. She didn’t give them to me in the belief that I loved cutez flowery crockery; she gave them to me because she believed they would become valuable collector’s items. She was thinking ahead, offering me a small opportunity to own something of worth down the track.
This is why I respect and honour the material world in which she lived. Mama worked hard and her life was never easy, but she navigated it with humour and kindness, softening the rough bits by giving and sharing with the people she loved. While she is no longer here in physical form, I have still hung on to a few talismans that are undoubtedly imbued with her presence. One elaborate, shell-pink dress is still tucked away in a back cupboard at home, and the last of those glittery birthday cards is still perched on a shelf (inscribed with the same words every year – to my princess).
And as for that tub of teacups? Well, it still lies dormant in the attic at my parent’s house, collecting dust – or maybe value. Either way, something tells me I can’t get rid of it just yet.