I recently got my driver's license. This is a Big Deal, dear reader. It has been 7 years, litres of rescue remedy and thousands of rands in the making, this particular milestone. I started giving it a shot (as you do) when I was 18, and legally allowed behind the wheel. It went...well, not fantastic. I failed the first test I ever took within the first five minutes (not exaggerating at all). Up until that point, I had lived a basically failure-free life. I was an academic achiever, used to excelling at every test I'd ever taken, and to fail this life-changing one (that most of my peers were passing) was a bitter pill to swallow. I remember a conversation I had with my little brother (who got his license before me, by the way - huge confidence boost for big sister) in which he asked me how the test went. I paused before answering carefully, "It didn't go well". To which my brother earnestly replied, "Don't you either fail or pass? How can it not 'go well'?"
I can laugh about this now, but driving has always felt like this elite club that I needed to get into (I have been told many a time, by many a lift-giver that it will change my life) but that was closed to me. First it was because my paralysing fear of failure. I didn't attempt to get behind the wheel again for another six years. And when I finally did, I was out of my parent's house, and the expensive lessons and test booking processes were no longer their bill to foot. So the second barrier was money. This year, after a failed first attempt, I got a good job, that pays enough to give me access to the instructor I needed to get over my fears, and learn how to drive. And so it was that I came to be standing in the office of a traffic department employee, bawling my eyes out in disbelief at my good fortune. I passed. I could join the life-changing club!
Well, sort of. I forgot one minor detail. You can take the license-ness out of the girl, but good luck with the carless-ness. Still, not as huge a problem as the damn driver's test, I thought. So, armed with enthusiasm and my giant (in comparison to everyone else's snazzy, credit-card format) piece of paper that proclaims me legal on the roads, I set out to hunt down a car. And I found one too. Reader, I have never understood 'car people': I don't understand how you can enthuse about a mere metal machine and its various parts as much as they do. I'm not a believer. But I believe in this car. I drove her around for a bit, got to know the different parts, got a feel for how I could negotiate my test-fresh skills into something more solid and concrete. I love this car. I want this car. (Don't need it, though. I need a car, not this one.) I was smitten. Filled out the paperwork, attached all supporting documents, dotted I's, crossed T's and fingers.
I had been told and knew that my lack of a credit rating would maybe count against me; I was prepared for this. What I was not prepared for was for the banks (including my own, who I have been with for 11 years) to tell me that I was considered a 'high risk' client, because I am not a citizen of this country and do not own property. So, let me get this straight: I have lived here for collectively 15 years, I've had a bank account for 11 of those, I have been a permanent resident for 7 years, I have paid rent in this country (in one city) for 5 years, I have worked and paid taxes for 3 years, I have a South African identity document, and I am a 'high risk' client. Not only that, but three of the other banks wouldn't touch me. Really?
I swung from extreme frustration and helplessness to deep sadness. Aside from all of those feelings, I once again reflected on all of the relative privileges I enjoy as a non-South African permanent resident of this country, and what my obvious privilege says about the sytematic barriers those who don't enjoy the privilege I do must face. I have an ID document, which (although it clearly, categorically states where I was born, and that I am not a citizen of this country) which opens doors that are resolutely closed to many immigrants (to say nothing of the many South Africans who don't have IDs). This is arguably the first instance, since I obtained my ID at age 18, that I have ever encountered a closed door. I cannot imagine what it must be like to encounter this kind of frustration, as a matter of course. I can't imagine what it must be like to be an African immigrant trying to create a life away from your life, and face this institutionalised, systemic xenoracism (in addition to the constant threat of blatant, often violent xenoracism).
I am incredibly privileged: I will probably be able to write off this and future encounters with institutionalised xenoracism as administrative nuisances. I'll escape unscathed, and will probably gain entry into the elite club I so long for. It will feel like a hollow (albeit life-changing etc.) victory. I can't unknow the taste of what it must be like to try to make a life in a place that officially considers you a non-person, unworthy of the life you're fighting to build. It seems useless and futile to, when faced with brutal, violent xenoracism, appeal to people's human decency in a society where xenoracism runs like a poison through the structural and institutional lifeblood.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Single Black Foreigner
Two things happened to me recently. A little over a week ago, I started a new job (thankfully, it is going well, there is nothing blogworthy to report - I go to work, I do worky stuff, I come home and do not sob/talk about work constantly - it's the dream). You'll know that as part of the new job routine, you have to get set up with an e-mail account, and have your name put on the company website. The woman who does all this at this new place is from the country of my birth, she speaks my first language, and she knows what the full version of my name is. This might not seem too significant, but it is: I have been living in South Africa for about 18 years altogether (give or take a 4 year return to the birth country). As a South African resident, I use the shortened version of my first name. It's punchy (2 syllables down from 4), and pronounceable (as I said, 2 syllables down from 4), and I use it because it helps to avoid the racial-xenophobic-etc awkward conversation the full version elicits. Anyhow, this woman knows my full name, as people from my country do. So when it came time to set up my e-mail address, she naturally assumed that I would be using this full name. I didn't correct her, probably because I was in awe at the fact that for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I didn't have to carefully and awkwardly spell my name ("D - for dog, M - for mother..."). So for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I am using my full name on an e-mail account.
The second thing that happened was that I read The New York Times's magazine this morning. I do so love the Times, and I especially enjoy the essays that I find in the Sunday magazine. They are invariably thoughtful, intelligent pieces that make me want to be a better writer (one day, New York Times, one day...) so I can be a better person. Their cover story this week is about mob violence in South Africa. Before you go to that link, I have to warn you: it is not an easy read. It tells in excruciating detail (I believe there is also accompanying video footage - I'm not willing to go there, frankly) the story of a Zimbabwean man brutally beaten to death by a mob that was out to catch criminals who had done something (stolen? killed? raped? what is the scale used to determine which transgression deserves what punishment?!). He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his cell phone, probably speaking the wrong African language. The story goes that the mob assumed he was a thief because that's one of the discourses out there about foreign black Africans in South Africa (we steal - jobs, women, cell phones, whatever you got, we want it!). I think it could just as easily have been about him being a black foreigner. You don't need to have actually physically taken anything, the fact that you're here makes you a thief. Anyway, they meted out the punishment they had decided on, and he is dead.
These two things seem worlds apart. I have recently started a job that affords me financial security, and an e-mail account. I'm on the company website. This man was working as a painter for a (by the Times piece's account) racist man, and was living far away from his home and from his wife and child, in a South African township. I am alive, he is dead. And although I am a black foreigner, like he is, I have never considered myself as that. Because I moved here when I was so young, much of my life, and my story is tied up with this country. I often refer to myself as a South African, not because I am posturing but because I feel South African, often. I grew up here, I studied here, I work here, I love here and I live here. Nothing about my relationship with this country and its people feels temporary. But as I say, I often feel South African; I don't always feel South African. There will always be a part of me that will never belong here. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that, well - I'm not from here. My birth country (which the observant reader will note I do not call my home country) is my birth country, and as complicated as my relationship with it is, there is still a relationship I cannot easily disavow (or make sense of). It's pretty visceral and unexplainable, and I can't put it cleverly except to say that I will probably never say that I am from Cape Town when I am asked. I am just not from here. When I read a story like the one I read this morning, what will jump out at me and bring me to frustrated tears is not the appalling levels of crime and poverty that are robbing people of their humanity (though there is that), but the xenophobia that can push human beings to kill another human being with their bare hands. When I meet someone who can pronounce and spell my name without skipping a beat, I will always feel a tiny frisson of...I'm not sure - excitement? recognition? comfort?
I read that story this morning and I cried. Because it is just so godawfully beyond-words terrible. But also because it brought up the fear that comes from living in a place where you don't belong (not fully, anyway). It's a fear that I meticulously bury and deny because I am kind-of South African, and because I live far away from the 'danger zones' where xenophobic attacks are rampant. But when my new co-worker instantly recognised my name, and I felt that rush of inexplicable emotion, I realised in that moment, as I did this morning that The Fear is never far from the surface. It sits in all of us, whether we are here because we need to keep the people we left behind in our home fed and clothed, or because we consider South Africa our home.
The second thing that happened was that I read The New York Times's magazine this morning. I do so love the Times, and I especially enjoy the essays that I find in the Sunday magazine. They are invariably thoughtful, intelligent pieces that make me want to be a better writer (one day, New York Times, one day...) so I can be a better person. Their cover story this week is about mob violence in South Africa. Before you go to that link, I have to warn you: it is not an easy read. It tells in excruciating detail (I believe there is also accompanying video footage - I'm not willing to go there, frankly) the story of a Zimbabwean man brutally beaten to death by a mob that was out to catch criminals who had done something (stolen? killed? raped? what is the scale used to determine which transgression deserves what punishment?!). He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his cell phone, probably speaking the wrong African language. The story goes that the mob assumed he was a thief because that's one of the discourses out there about foreign black Africans in South Africa (we steal - jobs, women, cell phones, whatever you got, we want it!). I think it could just as easily have been about him being a black foreigner. You don't need to have actually physically taken anything, the fact that you're here makes you a thief. Anyway, they meted out the punishment they had decided on, and he is dead.
These two things seem worlds apart. I have recently started a job that affords me financial security, and an e-mail account. I'm on the company website. This man was working as a painter for a (by the Times piece's account) racist man, and was living far away from his home and from his wife and child, in a South African township. I am alive, he is dead. And although I am a black foreigner, like he is, I have never considered myself as that. Because I moved here when I was so young, much of my life, and my story is tied up with this country. I often refer to myself as a South African, not because I am posturing but because I feel South African, often. I grew up here, I studied here, I work here, I love here and I live here. Nothing about my relationship with this country and its people feels temporary. But as I say, I often feel South African; I don't always feel South African. There will always be a part of me that will never belong here. There are many reasons for this, one of them being that, well - I'm not from here. My birth country (which the observant reader will note I do not call my home country) is my birth country, and as complicated as my relationship with it is, there is still a relationship I cannot easily disavow (or make sense of). It's pretty visceral and unexplainable, and I can't put it cleverly except to say that I will probably never say that I am from Cape Town when I am asked. I am just not from here. When I read a story like the one I read this morning, what will jump out at me and bring me to frustrated tears is not the appalling levels of crime and poverty that are robbing people of their humanity (though there is that), but the xenophobia that can push human beings to kill another human being with their bare hands. When I meet someone who can pronounce and spell my name without skipping a beat, I will always feel a tiny frisson of...I'm not sure - excitement? recognition? comfort?
I read that story this morning and I cried. Because it is just so godawfully beyond-words terrible. But also because it brought up the fear that comes from living in a place where you don't belong (not fully, anyway). It's a fear that I meticulously bury and deny because I am kind-of South African, and because I live far away from the 'danger zones' where xenophobic attacks are rampant. But when my new co-worker instantly recognised my name, and I felt that rush of inexplicable emotion, I realised in that moment, as I did this morning that The Fear is never far from the surface. It sits in all of us, whether we are here because we need to keep the people we left behind in our home fed and clothed, or because we consider South Africa our home.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Dear Sir/Madam
It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that I am resigning, after only five months of service. I must begin by telling you that I don't want to want to leave. I don't want to want to because I believe the world is unjust and cruel to young black South Africans, and that the beleaguered education system is one of the things that needs to change in order for any of this to change. I don't want to want to go because I believe that the impetus for change lies not in big government, but in groups of individuals who form communities who form movements. Oh, how I wish I didn't want to go. But I do, and so here we are.
Why do I want to go, though? Well, where to start. Maybe it is because, in my heart of hearts, I am a romantic idealist. I believe in social change and justice, and I believed that I could make a career and save the world all at once. When you offered me the job, you unwittingly offered me a chance to do research and make a difference: you told me, with one acceptance letter sent on a sunny Saturday morning, that I could become a save-the-worldologist! Such glorious news! And so I gladly believed you; I took the weight of all my hopes and dreams that this fucked up racist, classist, sexist world can change and placed them in this job, my first forray into the realm of the real (read 'my first real job outside of university', or 'my first job that I wasn't doing just to make quick change'). It's possible that that's the heart of the matter. I put too much at stake when I arrived at your doorstep five months ago, pencils sharpened, save-the-world senses tingling. You had me at "It gives us great pleasure to inform you", but you never quite stood a chance against my blind idealism.
No matter, my eyes were quickly opened. I remember thinking in my first few weeks here how, as a group, the people I worked with were not entirely welcoming. At first I put it down to my self-consciousness and my incredible neediness. But I started to realise that maybe the reason I perceived this place as unfriendly was because it rejected me as a black woman. I am black, but I complicate your closely-held and defended assumptions about what that means. I can write eloquently, I can speak for myself, I can decide for myself how best to address racism when I encounter it. I allow you into my life, but on entirely different terms than you are used to: I see you as a fellow save-the-worldologist, not as my personal saviour. Therefore you have trouble recognising my blackness. You also seem unable to recognise my identity as a woman. I am a feminist, which means I subscribe to the idea that I am no less a human being than a man (in fact, I may be more so, but that's womanism), and I will not try to approximate masculinity in order to get ahead in life. So, when the only women who are able to 'get ahead' or have their views heard are those who approximate masculinity (and its attendant patriarchy) that sends a clear message about what you think of me as a feminist woman. This place that you created didn't like the things that make me, from the word go. I don't foresee a future in which it will.
On a related note, my save-the-worldology aspirations, idealistic as they may be, are fully informed by all of those things about me. I am black, I am a woman, and I want to see social change. This means (for me) that I want to empower people, in the same way that I have been empowered, to create their own sustainable change. I know to impose my own ideas would be tantamount to reinscribing oppression that I have experienced in my own life. For me, sustainable change means financial independence, job security (though, so much for that for now), freedom from racial and sexual harassment, and a world in which I can engage with fellow citizens and state structures alike about the best way forward for this world. I have the good sense to know that my sustainable change is another woman's privilege, and that I cannot impose my definition on another human being. I realise - and I know you do as well - that the power to define sustainable change is in itself a function of my privilege. Unlike you, I choose to grapple with the complexities of promoting social change by empowering people with the tools to define their own change. You see the complexities and the grey, and you choose to ignore it in favour of simple black and white solutions. I understand you do it not because it is the easier option but because it is the popular option: one quick survey of news stories and you'll see just how black and white (literally and figuratively) the global political discourse can be. But that's just the thing: you don't claim to be just another voice in the current discourse, you claim to be the voice. Of an entire generation? Really, guys? Isn't it dangerous to claim omnipotence when you are only representing a particular viewpoint? Especially when that representation doesn't carry any of the nuance or complexities you know it should?
Ultimately, that's why I am leaving. I have been party to a dangerous game that has veered me off my righteous save-the-worldology path. In all seriousness, I know I have been using that as a joke, but I am dead serious about changing this world. It is not nearly what it should and could be, and it is a cruel and unjust place for too many of its citizens. I need to devote my life to changing that. But in the last five months, I have been a part of something that looks like that's what it is, but that will ultimately do more harm than good. You can't save the world if you are in the business of black and white, and if you cannot see it for the complex, mutli-narrative place it is.
And, so, as much as I deeply regret it, as much as I wish I weren't too chicken-shit to tell you the truth about what I see in you, I will leave without much of a fuss. As sad as I am about this experience, I will take from it a deeper knowledge of just how deep the damage to our world runs, and a renewed commitment to save-the-worldology. I wish you every success in your endeavours, as I am sure you wish me in mine.
Do your worst.
Steve Biko, white guilt and me
*As much as I would love to write about Buffy some more, I have had this post in the works for a while and I have to get it off my chest.
In response to the post, On white maleness, one commentor contemplated whether social change is "an only black thing". She confesses to having struggled with this particular part of Bantu Stephen Biko's ideas; the idea that in order for there to be real change (which in Biko's time meant the end of Apartheid), black people need to define their struggle and engage with that struggle seperately from the efforts of well-meaning white liberals.
A few weeks ago, when I was really starting to understand who I was working for, and what was expected of my identity as a black woman at the place where I work, I revisited I Write What I Like, at the suggestion of my white male partner. My relationship with this book, and with Biko is a complicated one. I first encountered I Write What I Like four years ago, as part of a course I took on race and social identity. We were assigned Biko, along with Frantz Fanon as part of our course work. Funnily enough, I didn't struggle too much with Fanon. It was Biko I had a problem with. I was especially bothered by the second chapter in I Write What I Like on white liberals. Titled 'Black Souls in White Skins?' the chapter explores the role of white liberals in the fight against Apartheid. Biko characterises liberal white South Africa thus:
...that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names -liberals, leftists etc. These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s “inhumanity to the black man”. These are the people who claim that they too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun. In short, these are the people who say that they have black souls wrapped up in white skins.
That palpable irony you detect is quite intentional. Biko goes on to declare:
Nowhere is the arrogance of the liberal ideology demonstrated so well as in their insistence that the problems of the country can only be solved by a bilateral approach involving both black and white. This has, by and large, come to be taken in all seriousness as the modus operandi in South Africa by all those who claim they would like a change in the status quo.Biko insists that these champions of change are not what they seem: in continuing to interfere and, in many cases, define and run 'the struggle' these so-called liberals are recreating Apartheid hierarchies within the heart of the struggle against Apartheid. He suggests that the place for white people truly committed to social change, and to the end of Apartheid lies not in the black struggle but in their own community. It's basically a case of "white person, heal thyself":
Rather, all true liberals should realise that the place for their fight for justice is within their white society. The liberals must realise that they themselves are oppressed if they are true liberals and therefore they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous “they” with whom they can hardly claim identification. The liberal must apply himself with absolute dedication to the idea of educating his white brothers that the history of the country may have to be rewritten at some stage and that we may live in “a country where colour will not serve to put a man in a box”. The.blacks have heard enough of this. In other words, the Liberal must serve as a lubricating material so that as we change gears in trying to find a better direction for South Africa, there should be no grinding noises of metal against metal but a free and easy flowing movement which will be characteristic of a well-looked -after vehicle.
When I read this, I was volunteering for a large student-run civil society organisations, and many of my fellow volunteers (who were also my best friends - nothing quite like spending all your time volunteering together to bond you to people) were white. I believed them to be genuinely committed to addressing the injustices Apartheid and colonialism had wrought on their country. I also struggled with Biko because I struggle, in general, with black men who I feel make pronouncements about blackness that do not take the particular struggles of black women into account. I remember a classmate telling me the story of how Biko used to dictate passages of I Write What I Like for some woman in his life (mother, sister, lover?) to record. What about her ideas and what she liked? What did blackness mean for her?
I also struggled with Biko because, for all intents and purposes, he could have been speaking about me. I am not South African, I do not speak Xhosa, Zulu or any other African South African language, I am middle class. I do not belong in 'the struggle' by Biko's accounts, but did that mean that I was not black? Did the fact that I worked side by side with white people mean that I was an accessory to the perpetuation of white privilege? I never quite answered any of my questions. I subsequently left the student-volunteering world, due to unrelated burn out. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't confront any of my race and identity issues until I entered into my current relationship. I'm equally ashamed to admit that I didn't think about or revisit Steve Biko until I started my current job.
Over the last few weeks, Biko has been on my mind a great deal more. I find that he no longer makes me uneasy. In sharp contrast to the confusion and anger he called up in me four years ago, Biko and his writing now serve as a source of sanity and as a way for me topull together the chaos of my workplace into a coherent narrative. In other words, I Write What I Like, which I read all those moons ago, shortly before my first encounter with burnout and depression, has helped keep a fast-approaching second episode of burnout at bay.
Reading my experiences at work - and my white colleagues - through Biko lens has helped me make some sense of the hot emotional mess that is currently my career. Though Biko was writing about the anti-apartheid struggle, much of what he said applies to civil society in South Africa, with one key difference. Apartheid (and its evil stepfather, colonialism) were - excuse the pun - black and white issues. I am fortunate enough to not have lived through any of those, but I know enough to imagine that you could see the evil during those periods. It manifested itself in every aspect of one's life, and in every interaction one had with fellow South Africans. It was easier back then to reject the evil, purge it from one's identity and choose a new identity that was based on opposing the evil. I believe that is what created white liberals: they saw apartheid and the particular segment of white society it was associated with, and decided to remake whiteness that was based on resistance to that which they saw as evil.
In post-apartheid South Africa, it is less clear where the lines are, and who the enemy is. Where apartheid allowed clear lines to be drawn between white whites and whites, post-apartheid South Africa has pulled back the curtains that the apartheid regime so violently policed to reveal what was done in the name of all whites. Note that it is not about what was done by all whites, it is what was done in the name of all whites, on the basis that they occupied the same place in some imaginary (biological? metaphysical?) hierarchy, no matter what their politics were. Where there once were white liberals, who drew lines in the sand to separate themselves from evil, there are now white liberals who, having seen what was done in the name of whiteness (theirs included) draw lines in the sand to cope with their guilt. It is no longer easy to separate whiteness from apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa. The result of this is white guilt, which is what I believe spurs some of the white liberals I have encountered to the work they do. Instead of the development of black agency and black solutions for black problems, as Biko advocated way back when, there has been a rush of white liberals to the spots that stand as indictments on their whiteness - spots that could have been the sites of the development of black agency, but are now into sites on which white liberals work out their existential angst and guilt.
I know how harsh that sounds, I do. But I am not saying that the same 'evil' as during apartheid is at play here. I am not saying there is anything evil about guilt (though, I was raised Catholic and could write a book debating that). Of course any thinking white South African experiences guilt. Of course the natural inclination is to do something to make right what went so wrong on (effectively) your watch. But the mistake those of us who carry our (white or middle class, private school black) guilt into our work in civil society make is to assume that the responsibility to 'make things right' is ours. Yes, it is the social responsibility of those of us who are privileged to do what we can to change this country, but it is not our responsibility to define change for those who are less privileged. Going into this kind of work from a place of guilt is both admirable and dangerous. It is admirable because it signals a willingness to face the demons in one's self. It is dangerous because guilt is all-consuming: you can never do enough to be rid of it, and the more you do, the more you do (did Imention I was raised Catholic?). And so you do and do and do, until all you are is a flurry of activity, and you forget to reflect on the impact of your guilt and your privilege on the work you are currently doing.
So, Biko was right, I am sorry to say. His work has given me some sense of comfort, and a frame with which to analyse what has been a difficult emotional journey (into unemployment, amongst other things). However, my overwhelming emotion as I write this is one of sadness. I am depressed at the thought that 34 years after I Write What I Like was published, Biko's work is still this frighyteningly on the nose. What does this mean for men and women like Biko who died in the hopes that their children's children would be born into an enitirely different world? And what does this mean for my children's children?
I also struggled with Biko because, for all intents and purposes, he could have been speaking about me. I am not South African, I do not speak Xhosa, Zulu or any other African South African language, I am middle class. I do not belong in 'the struggle' by Biko's accounts, but did that mean that I was not black? Did the fact that I worked side by side with white people mean that I was an accessory to the perpetuation of white privilege? I never quite answered any of my questions. I subsequently left the student-volunteering world, due to unrelated burn out. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't confront any of my race and identity issues until I entered into my current relationship. I'm equally ashamed to admit that I didn't think about or revisit Steve Biko until I started my current job.
Over the last few weeks, Biko has been on my mind a great deal more. I find that he no longer makes me uneasy. In sharp contrast to the confusion and anger he called up in me four years ago, Biko and his writing now serve as a source of sanity and as a way for me topull together the chaos of my workplace into a coherent narrative. In other words, I Write What I Like, which I read all those moons ago, shortly before my first encounter with burnout and depression, has helped keep a fast-approaching second episode of burnout at bay.
Reading my experiences at work - and my white colleagues - through Biko lens has helped me make some sense of the hot emotional mess that is currently my career. Though Biko was writing about the anti-apartheid struggle, much of what he said applies to civil society in South Africa, with one key difference. Apartheid (and its evil stepfather, colonialism) were - excuse the pun - black and white issues. I am fortunate enough to not have lived through any of those, but I know enough to imagine that you could see the evil during those periods. It manifested itself in every aspect of one's life, and in every interaction one had with fellow South Africans. It was easier back then to reject the evil, purge it from one's identity and choose a new identity that was based on opposing the evil. I believe that is what created white liberals: they saw apartheid and the particular segment of white society it was associated with, and decided to remake whiteness that was based on resistance to that which they saw as evil.
In post-apartheid South Africa, it is less clear where the lines are, and who the enemy is. Where apartheid allowed clear lines to be drawn between white whites and whites, post-apartheid South Africa has pulled back the curtains that the apartheid regime so violently policed to reveal what was done in the name of all whites. Note that it is not about what was done by all whites, it is what was done in the name of all whites, on the basis that they occupied the same place in some imaginary (biological? metaphysical?) hierarchy, no matter what their politics were. Where there once were white liberals, who drew lines in the sand to separate themselves from evil, there are now white liberals who, having seen what was done in the name of whiteness (theirs included) draw lines in the sand to cope with their guilt. It is no longer easy to separate whiteness from apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa. The result of this is white guilt, which is what I believe spurs some of the white liberals I have encountered to the work they do. Instead of the development of black agency and black solutions for black problems, as Biko advocated way back when, there has been a rush of white liberals to the spots that stand as indictments on their whiteness - spots that could have been the sites of the development of black agency, but are now into sites on which white liberals work out their existential angst and guilt.
I know how harsh that sounds, I do. But I am not saying that the same 'evil' as during apartheid is at play here. I am not saying there is anything evil about guilt (though, I was raised Catholic and could write a book debating that). Of course any thinking white South African experiences guilt. Of course the natural inclination is to do something to make right what went so wrong on (effectively) your watch. But the mistake those of us who carry our (white or middle class, private school black) guilt into our work in civil society make is to assume that the responsibility to 'make things right' is ours. Yes, it is the social responsibility of those of us who are privileged to do what we can to change this country, but it is not our responsibility to define change for those who are less privileged. Going into this kind of work from a place of guilt is both admirable and dangerous. It is admirable because it signals a willingness to face the demons in one's self. It is dangerous because guilt is all-consuming: you can never do enough to be rid of it, and the more you do, the more you do (did Imention I was raised Catholic?). And so you do and do and do, until all you are is a flurry of activity, and you forget to reflect on the impact of your guilt and your privilege on the work you are currently doing.
So, Biko was right, I am sorry to say. His work has given me some sense of comfort, and a frame with which to analyse what has been a difficult emotional journey (into unemployment, amongst other things). However, my overwhelming emotion as I write this is one of sadness. I am depressed at the thought that 34 years after I Write What I Like was published, Biko's work is still this frighyteningly on the nose. What does this mean for men and women like Biko who died in the hopes that their children's children would be born into an enitirely different world? And what does this mean for my children's children?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Donald Trump vs. Joss Whedon
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| The Donald...and his hair |
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| Joss Whedon, entertainer and feminist extraordinaire |
So, it's been a busy two or three weeks on the world stage. The royals put on a show that will rival all shows to come for a while. Whilst I admit to having 'accidentally' watched the vows section of the ceremony, I am very glad that's done with. And after all that, we still don't really know what it is the royal family actually does.
In other news, The (extremely loud, unbelievably obnoxious) Donald has been Shut Up! For now anyway. Donald Trump, of Trump Towers and The Apprentice, has decided to officially 'flirt' with a 2012 Republican run for President of the United States. This has involved many a rerun of episodes in the media circus that is The Donald's life, including a new episode centering on current US president Barack Obama's American citizenship. For weeks now, The Donald has guffawed, hollered, whispered loudly, insinuated that Obama has perpetrated the ultimate fraudulent act against the American people (and bla bla bla) and concealed that he was born in Mombasa, Kenya and not Honolulu, Hawaii (which he would need to be in order to be eligible for the presidency job). Finally, Obama had enough, and on Wednesday, he released a longer version of a document he already released three years ago proving that he is, in fact, an Amrikan. So, The Donald has official proof and can now, hopefully, knock it off.
This whole Trump kerfuffle, along with a few episodes of one of Joss Whedon's genius creations, Dollhouse, has led me to the conclusion that there are two kinds of privilege in the world: Donald Trump privilege and Joss Whedon privilege. Joss is the creator of, amongst many, many other works of feminist genius, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For years of my life, I tuned in to week after week of Buffy, watching her and her misfit gang (the Scoobies) defeating evils that ranged from insane gods intent on bleeding teenage girls to the death of a parent and depression. Joss - and his all of his colleagues and all of the heroines they created - helped hold me together, and assured me that being a girl meant awesomeness and power, and was something to be celebrated. Buffy and Joss also taught me that no matter how bad things were, things were never so bad that I felt the need to retreat into an alternate universe in which I was in a mental asylum, and all my friends were figments of my schizophrenic imagination. The appeal of Buffy was that it was (as Whedon himself puts it)
"the story of a young woman's journey that involve[d] a great deal of horror, and some heroics". And really isn't that every woman's story?
"the story of a young woman's journey that involve[d] a great deal of horror, and some heroics". And really isn't that every woman's story?
If I have to live with privilege (especially that of the white male Western variety), and I think I might have to for a while to come, I choose Joss over The Donald anyday.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Hearing Voices
Years ago, I loved a boy. As with all stories that begin thusly, it is a very long tale. The long and short of it was he didn't love me. And I went through a few months of deep, bottomless despair during which I would often find myself lying prostrate on the floor of my room, wondering what the hell was happening to me. He's gone now, thank the universe.
But lately I have found myself stuck on the same emotional Mobius Strip I was on back when he was around. I lie awake in the moments before I fall asleep asking myself why my life is where it is, and if there is anything I could have done differently. The focus of my angst is not some guy, but my job, and its implications for my activist identity, and the person I am trying to be in the world. I tell my friends and my partner that one day out of the five days a week I am at work, I have a hoot laughing at some of the truly ridiculous things that happen when a group of people decide that they know how to best define activist conversation on a particular issue. The other four days, I just want to cry. I want to cry because I am actively participating in something that I feel will end up doing more harm than good. I am spending my days, 9 to 5, aiding and abetting acts of 'social change' I don't believe in. I am actively helping people who I believe are perpetuating the racist, sexist assumptions that got this country to where it is in the first place.
I want to cry because I am afraid of what this job is doing to my voice. One of my colleagues wrote a moving essay about how she has had her voice taken from her during the time she has spent at this place. I told her that I believed that even in our measured, carefully regulated silences (that are broken only on anonymous blogs and in private conversations) there is voice. Silence is resistance. I absolutely believed that when I said it to her a few days ago. But there are days like today, where I'm not so sure anymore. It took every ounce of strength I have to muster the courage to make a point (not a controversial or original one, mind you) in a staff seminar the other day. The minute I opened my mouth, I started shaking, and I was sure I would not be able to finish a single sentence, let alone a thought. But I did it. And, man, was it liberating! It hit me this morning that surely I should be able to speak without shaking, surely I should take for granted my freedom to interpret data and report it without fear that I am not towing a particular line? If I do not exercise my voice, in spite of the restrictions placed on it, where will it go? If you are in an environment where your voice is subsumed, and you can only ever use it on anonymous blogs, and in private conversations with your friends, or yourself, does it disappear? Are you guilty of not using it?
The only immediate answer available is to be silent in loud ways. I have decided that, no matter what it looks like on my CV, no matter how scary it is going to be to literally halve my salary as I am on the cusp of starting a life with my partner, I am going to leave my job at the end of next month. It's not the loudest of protest; in fact, it is tantamount to silence. But I expect that it is silence that will be loud enough to restore my voice.
But lately I have found myself stuck on the same emotional Mobius Strip I was on back when he was around. I lie awake in the moments before I fall asleep asking myself why my life is where it is, and if there is anything I could have done differently. The focus of my angst is not some guy, but my job, and its implications for my activist identity, and the person I am trying to be in the world. I tell my friends and my partner that one day out of the five days a week I am at work, I have a hoot laughing at some of the truly ridiculous things that happen when a group of people decide that they know how to best define activist conversation on a particular issue. The other four days, I just want to cry. I want to cry because I am actively participating in something that I feel will end up doing more harm than good. I am spending my days, 9 to 5, aiding and abetting acts of 'social change' I don't believe in. I am actively helping people who I believe are perpetuating the racist, sexist assumptions that got this country to where it is in the first place.
I want to cry because I am afraid of what this job is doing to my voice. One of my colleagues wrote a moving essay about how she has had her voice taken from her during the time she has spent at this place. I told her that I believed that even in our measured, carefully regulated silences (that are broken only on anonymous blogs and in private conversations) there is voice. Silence is resistance. I absolutely believed that when I said it to her a few days ago. But there are days like today, where I'm not so sure anymore. It took every ounce of strength I have to muster the courage to make a point (not a controversial or original one, mind you) in a staff seminar the other day. The minute I opened my mouth, I started shaking, and I was sure I would not be able to finish a single sentence, let alone a thought. But I did it. And, man, was it liberating! It hit me this morning that surely I should be able to speak without shaking, surely I should take for granted my freedom to interpret data and report it without fear that I am not towing a particular line? If I do not exercise my voice, in spite of the restrictions placed on it, where will it go? If you are in an environment where your voice is subsumed, and you can only ever use it on anonymous blogs, and in private conversations with your friends, or yourself, does it disappear? Are you guilty of not using it?
The only immediate answer available is to be silent in loud ways. I have decided that, no matter what it looks like on my CV, no matter how scary it is going to be to literally halve my salary as I am on the cusp of starting a life with my partner, I am going to leave my job at the end of next month. It's not the loudest of protest; in fact, it is tantamount to silence. But I expect that it is silence that will be loud enough to restore my voice.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
A little writing, a little healing
Ok, so I know this blog is supposed to be about topical race-place-gender-space-related stuff, and this is a major transgression. But I am coming out of the back end of a truly awful week. Just horrible. And when I feel awful, I need to write it out, expel the words from my body, put them somewhere where someone else (my six followers! yay!) can see them so I don't feel so terribly alone with my angst.
Here's what happened to me this week. My body finally succumbed to the stress of my job (not that the work itself is stressful - I arrive at work, and immediately begin to ooze stress), and the regrettable emotional eating that is a direct result of said stress, and I developed a raging tooth infection. I think it is absolutely perfect that the pain in my body is coming, at this present moment, from my head. It's as if my head wants a break. From all the thinking. Why am I spending all this intellectual energy - that I ought to be spending applying my fairly well-educated mind to some professional pursuit - analysing my workplace? My mind is sick and tired of working at a place where half of all I do is think about all the very good, very clever reasons why I need to leave. And so my head sent me a message via an infected tooth: Get the Hell Outta Dodge.
Aside from the tooth, and all the very expensive family drama that came with it, my partner was also sick this week. First he had a persistent cough and then developed a more worrying, aggressive UTI. Which meant a lot of nervous tension on my side. Which is where it gets vaguely confusing for me. If you're other people - other, saner, normal, well-adjusted people - you express your worry for your partner by making soup, or a get well card...or something. (I don't the frack know what well-adjusted people get up to.) If you're me, you develop a full-blown nervous obsession. Last year, this meant I would call him every five minutes, to make sure he was still feeling as well as he was five minutes before. This year, my thing seems to be to develop relationship-related queries that I simply have to bring up this very moment, even though he has a fever. What the frack is wrong with me, you ask? I am working on it. Anyway, I realise his being sick is not exactly something that "happened to me" and it is an ugly thing to behold in myself, this selfishness. The only way I can make sense of my reactions to his bouts of ill health (other than that I am a selfish monster) is that they indicate bigger Things, Things that need to be thought over, and then, written about (maybe not in that order). My partner is a quadriplegic, which means many things, one of which is that his body is not as strong as any of us would like it to be. He had a huge health scare 6 months into our relationship and ended up in hospital for a week. I get scared when he is sick. So scared that I make every illness an Event, crowding out whatever he is feeling with my own drama. So, there are Things. I will think, I will write.
Finally, yesterday, I left work a bit later than usual (for a Friday, anyway), and my bus buddy colleague and I were stuck waiting for the bus. No big deal, we do this every day almost. Only yesterday, on a Friday, the bus never showed up. I panicked quite a bit. No, no, I was positively hyperventilating. For all my hyper-awareness about how "crime can happen anywhere" and "townships are as safe as suburbs in South Africa", I could not think anything else other than "I am stranded in a township on a Friday evening, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod". Luckily, I was not alone (shoutout to my level-headed, extremely patient colleague and friend here) otherwise I would have never made it home for all my carrying on and fussing. So, another ugly revelation about myself. Not only am I a selfish jag, I am also slightly racist and classist. I kept saying to my colleague (as we walked briskly to the taxi rank) that this right here - the woes of having to transport my body in and out of the townships everyday when I do not have car and only have a learner's license - is one of the reasons I will leave this job soon; I do not love the work, I care very little for most of the people who work there (in fact, some I find odious - there, I said it), so what is the point of the cost and the high drama of taking public transport so far out? If it was a job I loved, it would be worth it, right? Which is all very well, except what I was saying that it is only worth going into townships for something I love. Otherwise, big fracking nuisance. So could part of the fact that I hate my job (it needed to be said) be that I cannot deal with the reality that confronts day in and day out in the area where I work? My privilege, and the violence it wreaks on people's everyday existences is writ large, for all to see, in the townships. Maybe that is where my discomfort comes from. The bus travels steadily from the cushy suburbs, where I live, past the mostly coloured areas, out of town into the the mostly black areas. And as we travel along this path, you literally see the poverty levels rising before your very eyes. It is a complete mind-fuck. And yet, still, when I take the bus home, I feel relieved as I begin to approach the cushy 'burbs. What does this say about me? How can I sit here and write and think about racism, structural inequality, neoliberal this-that, and still breathe a sigh of relief the moment I see lush middle classness? Can I honestly be both this wide awake socially conscious being I have always thought myself to be, and this raving loon who can't be around poor people past 6pm on a Friday night?
I don't have many answers today. But I can honestly say that I am glad this week is over, and (as fey and middle class as it may be) I am glad I can return to the relatively safety of my head to Think About Things.
Here's what happened to me this week. My body finally succumbed to the stress of my job (not that the work itself is stressful - I arrive at work, and immediately begin to ooze stress), and the regrettable emotional eating that is a direct result of said stress, and I developed a raging tooth infection. I think it is absolutely perfect that the pain in my body is coming, at this present moment, from my head. It's as if my head wants a break. From all the thinking. Why am I spending all this intellectual energy - that I ought to be spending applying my fairly well-educated mind to some professional pursuit - analysing my workplace? My mind is sick and tired of working at a place where half of all I do is think about all the very good, very clever reasons why I need to leave. And so my head sent me a message via an infected tooth: Get the Hell Outta Dodge.
Aside from the tooth, and all the very expensive family drama that came with it, my partner was also sick this week. First he had a persistent cough and then developed a more worrying, aggressive UTI. Which meant a lot of nervous tension on my side. Which is where it gets vaguely confusing for me. If you're other people - other, saner, normal, well-adjusted people - you express your worry for your partner by making soup, or a get well card...or something. (I don't the frack know what well-adjusted people get up to.) If you're me, you develop a full-blown nervous obsession. Last year, this meant I would call him every five minutes, to make sure he was still feeling as well as he was five minutes before. This year, my thing seems to be to develop relationship-related queries that I simply have to bring up this very moment, even though he has a fever. What the frack is wrong with me, you ask? I am working on it. Anyway, I realise his being sick is not exactly something that "happened to me" and it is an ugly thing to behold in myself, this selfishness. The only way I can make sense of my reactions to his bouts of ill health (other than that I am a selfish monster) is that they indicate bigger Things, Things that need to be thought over, and then, written about (maybe not in that order). My partner is a quadriplegic, which means many things, one of which is that his body is not as strong as any of us would like it to be. He had a huge health scare 6 months into our relationship and ended up in hospital for a week. I get scared when he is sick. So scared that I make every illness an Event, crowding out whatever he is feeling with my own drama. So, there are Things. I will think, I will write.
Finally, yesterday, I left work a bit later than usual (for a Friday, anyway), and my bus buddy colleague and I were stuck waiting for the bus. No big deal, we do this every day almost. Only yesterday, on a Friday, the bus never showed up. I panicked quite a bit. No, no, I was positively hyperventilating. For all my hyper-awareness about how "crime can happen anywhere" and "townships are as safe as suburbs in South Africa", I could not think anything else other than "I am stranded in a township on a Friday evening, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod". Luckily, I was not alone (shoutout to my level-headed, extremely patient colleague and friend here) otherwise I would have never made it home for all my carrying on and fussing. So, another ugly revelation about myself. Not only am I a selfish jag, I am also slightly racist and classist. I kept saying to my colleague (as we walked briskly to the taxi rank) that this right here - the woes of having to transport my body in and out of the townships everyday when I do not have car and only have a learner's license - is one of the reasons I will leave this job soon; I do not love the work, I care very little for most of the people who work there (in fact, some I find odious - there, I said it), so what is the point of the cost and the high drama of taking public transport so far out? If it was a job I loved, it would be worth it, right? Which is all very well, except what I was saying that it is only worth going into townships for something I love. Otherwise, big fracking nuisance. So could part of the fact that I hate my job (it needed to be said) be that I cannot deal with the reality that confronts day in and day out in the area where I work? My privilege, and the violence it wreaks on people's everyday existences is writ large, for all to see, in the townships. Maybe that is where my discomfort comes from. The bus travels steadily from the cushy suburbs, where I live, past the mostly coloured areas, out of town into the the mostly black areas. And as we travel along this path, you literally see the poverty levels rising before your very eyes. It is a complete mind-fuck. And yet, still, when I take the bus home, I feel relieved as I begin to approach the cushy 'burbs. What does this say about me? How can I sit here and write and think about racism, structural inequality, neoliberal this-that, and still breathe a sigh of relief the moment I see lush middle classness? Can I honestly be both this wide awake socially conscious being I have always thought myself to be, and this raving loon who can't be around poor people past 6pm on a Friday night?
I don't have many answers today. But I can honestly say that I am glad this week is over, and (as fey and middle class as it may be) I am glad I can return to the relatively safety of my head to Think About Things.
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