In between Christmas and New Years, I got busy with moving, family functions, more moving, more family functions... Also, after the first post, something weird happened, and all of the things I had been bursting to say all seemed to have been said. All the anger and pain and everything that had to come out (on the internet, where else) disappeared. Or so I thought. New year, same questions, and (for today, anyway) some of the old anger. At breakfast with my friend (let's call her Siphokazi - she has a Xhosa name, but is white), I mused out loud about what I would write about: the white people in the pretentious cafe where we had breakfast who seemed unable to serve me or to stop staring (simultaneuosly), or my partner's mother's white middle-aged friends (mostly female) who all appear to love me so much that I sometimes wonder if it isn't part 'we love you' and part 'you're black and/but we're totally fine with it'. All of it relevant and current, all of it tearing down my writer's block.
But when the universe gives, she sure does giveth. When I got back to my flat for my scheduled visit with my family, one of my new neighbours - she is old and white, as most of my new neighbours are (I suspect this shall ward off any future writer's block) - mistook my brother for...well, I guess a burgler. Let me explain: the intercom button one has to press to let me know they're at my gate is not accessible to someone sitting in a car seat. One has to get out, ring the bell, get in and drive in before the old automatic gate closes prematurely and leaves a mark on your car (as it did last week, when Siphokazi visited). So my brother just didn't get back in the car after he rung the bell, and instead chose to walk in after my dad's car. Which is how he came to run into Old White Neughbour Lady who kindly asked his parents if 'they [knew] this gentleman'. She was very polite; in fact, she stopped and chatted and laughed with my parents whilst I watched on, appalled. Anyway. My parents - and my brother - laughed it off. They are glad I live in a building with such security-conscious neighbours. The visit was fun and short. After they left, I thought more and more about what had just happened, I got angrier and angrier.
And just when I was at my angriest I - you guessed it, people in interracial relationships - called my partner. This is something I do often, when I am in this kind - or any other kind - of distress. He is my best friend, you see, I call him about everything, good, bad, unflattering. So I called him and told him about it. We had a standard phone conversation, which I read as 'he was offish'. This may have just been my own relationship stuff (and that is a whole other blog, believe me). But part of it is this: I started thinking about how he has no idea (through no fault of his own) what it is like to have his sibling mistaken for a criminal, how that kind of thing, even when your family laughs it off and subjects are duly changed, seeps into the air so that your family can't even stay for one cup of tea in your new flat that you're so excited to show them. He doesn't know. He can't know. I also started thinking about all the other things he and other white people don't and can't know: walking into a cafe and having the entire place watch you (not exaggerating), never being able to trust the outward kindness of people of another race because they could be overcompensating, never seeing faces like yours at the front of lecture theatres (or names like yours on office doors in university corridors), having to go by a shortened version of your name because the people in your world who are all white (how in the hell did I let that happen) cannot - for love or money - say your full, given name... The list goes on. As I listed, I got madder and madder.
And I just spewed out some of my anger to and on my partner. I am not proud of it. He is not the genesis of whiteness and its attendant hysteria. But if I am in a space where - and I am hovering there right now - I hate white people, what does that mean for the person whom I love who is white? How can I say to him (which I just did) 'I hate white people', and expect my relationship to remain whole and affirming and loving? But on the other hand, how can I swallow this anger that bubbles up from deep within me, corroding my insides? It needs to come up, I need to let it out. So, my question is this, where do I put my anger and my pain? Where will my brother put his when he goes home? Where does my partner put it when I let it out at him?
Firstly, not because it is the most important point, but rather to get the comment out of the way: 'Gorgeous writing, especially the last paragraph!'
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I have been mistaken as part of the liberal white 'us', as an imperialist, as a capitalist, as an anarchist. I am coopted as a brother-in-solidarity to the corrupt, as a son of the 'New SA', as a groom to change and friend to the 'progress' of others. I am assumed to be trustworthy and treated as if I do not even comprehend my tainted dishonesty. I am greeted with open arms full of sharp claws and poisons. All this is always to fit the whims of insignificant others.
I cannot say I suffer this all in silence. I am blank to it. It is part of the natural ground that I as a distanced figure merely traverse, as quietly as possible doing my own good.
In reading your blog I wonder if your position of anger is not the braver.
Thank you for writing this. The dilemma is so very real. As the white half of an inter-racial couple, my partner has also felt the legitimate bubbling over of anger at white people, of hatred even. And used those words, and needed to tell me, to spew it out, to hate white people. And yet, undoubtedly, she loves me entirely. It's a difficult negotiation, but, I think, naming it - naming the anger, the hurt, the hatred - is the only way to not let it poison the love. Because it must be named. And it must be felt. There is this experience of the world that my partner has that I can never experience/access, but to be fully her she needs to be able to name it and not let it censor her beingness with me. I'm not sure how we all navigate love through the molasses of race, class, anger, hatred, privilege; but I think that naming it is one step to maintaining the love above all else. THank you for writing this; it resonates, deeply.
ReplyDeleteThank you, again. This resonates so deeply for me right now. Ergh.
ReplyDelete