Black Victorian

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the religious set

“So much time has gone by, and still there is no sweetness here.”

 

“Reduced to an obliging shell, you look with awe at the white power structure and accepts what you regard as the ‘inevitable position.’…In the privacy of your toilet your face twists in silent condemnation of white society but brightens up in sheepish obedience as you come out hurrying in response to your master’s impatient call…All in all you have become a shell, a shadow of a woman, completely defeated, drowning in your own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”

 

“I saw men tear down veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have the power in heir hands begin to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover, as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all blackness in the big old slave castle?…That is all anyone here ever struggles for: to be nearer the white man. All the shouting against the white man was not hate. It was love. Twisted but love all the same.” (92)

 

“No difference at all between the white men and their apes…Bungalows, white with a wounding whiteness. Cars, long and heavy, with drivers in white men’s uniforms waiting ages in the sun. Women, so horribly young, fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags and wigs of human hair scraped from which decayed white woman’s corpse?”(89)

 

 

 

The religious set

Being you is not a dead end. It’s not lies that lived on the tongue when the veil was torn; speaking a dead thing when it was un-dead. The curtain that happened to cut the  meaning, allowing two sides to meet but not in the corner before the shadow where the shades brewed. You hover instead, over the no-man’s land of emsamu, a place below a place but never behind it. Being you is not the dead end story of you not allowed to be the daughter of some-god sitting on his yellow some-throne who didn’t allow you some swallow of his special, potent redemption. Rather, you are a dead end of being last, never the last, just last.  Your mouth finished opening itself in front of his hand last and your reflection in his gold watch saw the round, white wafer melt on your tongue after his fingers pushed it on. “Dear Jesus, the man with the gold watch just told me that you were going to use me to bring his word to many across the nations. He also told me that you told him that I would hate religion and be a strong wind blowing through the lives of young people like me. Jesus, will this happen when I no longer have goat’s hide around my wrist because that’s what he also said after he’d sniffed his nose at it and told me that my ancestors were just that ancestors, dead and at the very bottom of the pile. “They walked around naked with a rag of hide covering their underneath bits that were behind, you see.” You remember how your father told you, after he’d slapped across your face that the ancestors wanted you to cut yourself up with a razor and bleed from your wrists, between your breasts, on your head and from your elbows so black-ash coal can soak. Your dead only understand the way you feel when the old man touched your chest, past your breasts in order to fulfil his holy work. They demand it, your no saying, he’d told you as he’d slapped you again, getting a blood due trickling from your lip, is that you think your Christian books are better. Sisi we were doing this long before they came, why should I stop just because you can speak English like they do and think reading from that black book is not the same as having this man on your breast so they can be touched by blood the ancestors will recognize? You think only it is that you are better. Black-red drops stained your thighs .You sat in a glass church where the light hits the window’s panes and beats through to all the pale hands that turn their bibles and their skulls whose eyes are blind and your hands started themselves shaking. He’s arrived you told yourself, you’ve waited for him every time you sucked air in but especially the many times you sucked air during Sundays, during worship. “…in a country where all black people are made to feel the unwanted stepchildren of a God whose presence they cannot feel; in a country where father and son, mother and daughter alike develop daily into neurotics through sheer inability to relate the present to the future because of a completely engulfing sense of destitution, the church further adds to their insecurity by its inward-directed definition of the concept of sin and its encouragement of the mea culpa attitude.”(61) In a country on  this page, only you seem to make the time to close the catch-up distance with that jesus who never arrives here in this church where supplication is meted by hands attached to blue eyes like the ones they show you are attached to his face. You thought he watched your raised hands, your glycerine tears soaking to your cheeks during worship when what happened, to be true , was the holy judgment of the brethen thrumming through you. You thought the veil, it was being torn. They cut you a cage labeled ‘religious’ and made you one of their own. You prayed using the tongues and had eyes that were capable of seeing the words they bound to the fog in their hearts like a dog with his chain. They adopted you because you never yanked the runt’s chain, disrupted the fog and shamed their words. Even though sometimes the hides your ancestors wore never covered their wide bits that were on either side and they never did wash. “Hhm, we have the St Mary’s girls here today, church. Aren’t we blessed today? Please stand up girls we’d like to welcome you.” They turn and stare, not least because we’re wearing the sacred prison uniform of blue and white stripes, but also because you know with the whispered “Why are they all black?” that you are in a zoo. That you were in a zoo where the patrons wrapped you in words quoted from Psalms, Deutonoromy and Revelation. They stuffed God’s love down your throat  but still, no matter how hard they insisted that jesus loved you and that they loved you like he loved you could never shake off the feeling that the problem was the way you were loved. Yet still, you wanted to be called forth like white dry bones and put to good use in a service you believed in. Still, even now you wanted to drink his body and blood, wanted to be swaddled in tales of jesus’ love for you. You wanted to be a part of this, even though you knew that the only way you could do this was from inside the cage your unbelief that god’s faithful had helped you contain in a cage of scripture. The light coming sometimes onto the windows blinds your face. Later, the pastor asks “Where are you from? Alex?” You suddenly think, in your head, that he asked you if you were an unbeliever. It is easier to answer this question. You stand feeling the acid from what your uniform is meaning seeping/what the meaning of your uniform is/ into the time your Head of Chapel told you to be “grateful that you came to St Mary’s.” You must forget hard the full fee that you’re paying which she herself doesn’t and like the true unbeliever you are, remember always, that you are being chosen special’ by the converted so they can tell you that their god, who is now your god, will not want to see you with a navy scarf and jersey in the chapel they built for him. Be grateful that they invite your parents to Boarder’s dinner and tell them no food from the same-same kitchen their money keeps running and allow them instead to have salads. Forget as well the same way you expected your parents to get angry and demand to see what their money brought them but they were denied proper food. They ate cous cous and three bean salad, forced a hug on you and the black phone in your pocket never rang. For an entire term. Her lady, Her lover, Her lord, the blue new testament and Knowing God Intimately sit next to you by your desk and the rain bleeds down the window from your bed. Surely these books had answers? You are certain they can clear a fog that seems to drown in you. The one you forget until you bow your head of bone strait hair on a pew and the only experience you encounter is one happening with jesus‘s hands between your legs. Surely the books did answer the hole that was being eaten away into you? You felt your blasphemy whenever you closed your eyes to receive his blood and body, the wafer melting slowly in your mouth. Jesus man jammed between your legs, his dirty blonde hair hanging down your chest and you belt out in penitence we confess that I have sinned against you both in thought, word and deed and in what we have left undone. You bucked against his body and watched his hand move down down down. It stayed and wriggled a bit, you smell exactly like all the other girls I’ve been with. For the sake of your son christ our Lord, forgive us all that is past. You pray exactly like all the other faithful who filled the rows before you; your unbelief is not as prominent now you think. Jesus sat in the corner whenever you took off your clothes for the Christian brunette boys who wanted to explain just how possible it was your hips were this wide and they still wanted their meat inside you. The ones who lived in gated houses and loved watching the papas flirt with you under the dinner table while the mamas watched. The pew grinds your knees. This god demanding always that you must be black-sorry that you sin, black-sorry for the all times you’d sat in a charismatic church and knew, amidst all the talk of love and marriage that poured from the Alex- man’s mouth that love and marriage were the stillborn children you’d cradle long on after their skin ran from their bodies and their veins stopped peeling blue. All the white woman and man faces that loved you like a sister and a brother, kissing softly your palms with some damp lingering, inviting you to dinner parties or to help them move or to keep them company. They prayed with you and when you thought to yourself that maybe the stage was ripe with a live baby, a love baby, they’d tell you, with tears in their eyes that made you a stranger that they weren’t looking for something right now, jesus had told them to wait, everything has a season under the sun, their mummies had loved you but, stroking your hand, they told you they can’t. They just can’t. You’d forever be a totem of their progress of how embracing and open-minded they were, you usually the only (black)worship leader( but we didn’t see colour) playing the drums, hanging around with white friends whose biggest sin wasn’t that they were white rather that they just thought that the first and only thing you were was black and their natural expectation and reliance that until the very end you would crucify yourself and your equality, dignity with them for the sake of their friendship and prayer, of course.

 

Sex before marriage for Jesus was taking someone because you knew you had no right to them in the first place, the same knowing Gatsby pulled on top of Daisy. A sexing, an act occurring always, one that can’t be stopped, stuck in the action of bodies’ verbing each other in present tense. K had sexed your cherry, imbibing it with a penance that lay in your bed like a third body in your bed when he’d smiled, his eyes closed half-moon crescents looking at you on his face and said as you slowly slid down on him that this act of knowing, wet and messy over both your thighs was more natural to him, made him feel like he wasn’t breaking God’s law. For him this act oiled the maxim my intellect may be civilized but my body is not. You proved his point that he was not unloveable because he was black and with a single stroke of his chest you helped him get his own back at the endless line of girls with fly away blonde hair who had told him how loved he was but how they knew they would never be ready for this. Your black bodies weren’t sorry then that you were committing acts you both thought should be proved rather with the white skin set. You resented how he thought you didn’t have issues about the weakness of your body like he did. He always assumed (while you watched and mocked him) that he was always the only one suffering at the cross roads of theology and the psychosis inflicted by being a token black in church. He thought you needed him like he needed you. He was an experiment you’d taken on to prove a long out-dated truth to yourself; that you actually didn’t hate the religious set, especially the black Christian boys who acted like you weren’t as valuable as your white Christian sorority sisters.

 The veil was torn and two sides meshed their loins, spurting truth-lies. Jesus man loved you, in a way similar to them, as long as you knew that they never saw you ghost-woman, dumb poor and sorry in the corner. It tore so you could be patted on the back for a prophecy delivered in the nick of time and the wagging tongues speaking to you with their words we didn’t know you were so close to the lord, well done. It tore so they were still first in line, unconscious and blind Better than you, self-loathing and bitter. It’s all the same-your bile mouth taste dripped from your behind in sludge of thick green pushed in deep by umama obonayo. Her fat fingers roamed over your buttocks and she bound a white hide about your wrist and told you your ancestors loved you; because you both knew that this ritual of ripping your body that belonged to itself open to her finger’s gaze was salvation from the worship songs you sang every Sunday, salvation from the SPCA van your neighbours called onto you like a dog called on a suspicious figure walking past a gate with trimmed hedges when the blood you slaughtered for the ancestors ran from the sheep and into the front garden. Somehow, your blackness screamed that the intimacy of this salvation was what you wanted, what would save you from thinking you know better. It was meant to humble you in shame, you couldn’t argue against your savageness with bile burned to your arms, you could only insist upon. Re-iterate it and prove that you were  not and never wanted to be like them and if you didn’t want to be like them your religion that made your freedom a mice trap that you ran into pattering over the black and white camps and leaving your black shit-droppings of anger, disdain and unbelief wherever you went painted your message of being different. This veil was black and it was torn but still you only existed to be told that you are an unbeliever. That you kaffir, are last.

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The Politics of the One Night Stand Part 1-The Black Part (1st draft)

The Politics of the One Night Stand

Part 1-The Black Part

 

“Yes Busi, you have all the power. You’ve proved your point, now please come join us?’ Black legs tangled in white sheets turn to my corner of the room with hands that reach out, peering at my body. He knows he’s transgressing. He knows he asking for what he didn’t pay for. If someone had told me 10 years ago when I watched late SABC dramas that the very same man who played the typical older-generation coconut would be begging me to fuck him sometime later in my life, I would’ve grimaced. I’m sitting at exclusive Books at the Waterfront, nauseated by the 40 year old Lucozade Lolita’s with blonde hair, orange skin and short denim miniskirts in the middle of winter. Their ability to speak English in stompie word order makes me want to give my smug, private-school, educated black shoulder a pat. This is the ‘new’ South Africa. I eye them for a bit while I revel in how much I hate how fucking white and yuppie the V&A is and remind myself that I’m here to watch a some clichéd, we-are-black-and-we-suffered-therefore-we-should-be-able-to-run-this-country-however-we-want documentary. The only reason I came was to see him, again. To see if I really could take a man who I’d seen naked, seriously. A man who was old enough to be my father and who constantly kept whispering that this was a safe space, as though the  hotel room with plush feather curtains was a meeting room for breast cancer survivors. I had seen the underbelly of the beast. Experienced how the personal is political, how fucking in South Africa is never a simple matter of flesh but that somewhere class, and in some cases, race, always snarled up at me from between my legs. That night was seedy. It involved too many Hunter’s Dry’s at The Kimberly Hotel and endless replays of Weekend Special on that damn jukebox. An hour later, after my friend had accosted Mr X, we found ourselves at the hotel on orange. I only realized I couldn’t walk straight when I fell out of the rental car and shouted at the security at the desk for being ugly. I was drunk. Not cast-my-name-to-the-dust drunk but at a the stage where my feminist bitchiness was blunted. I watched them fuck, wet, black bodies filling the room with the earthy, raw sex. She was moaning slowly at first. This was strange. All I could think was this is the guy from ******!!!. When he took her from behind, I looked away just before he caught my eye. Mr X was old and black and had some celebrity. My friend was horny and wanted to get laid, and so did Mr X.  So, like all other b.e.e men he told us about his ruby red Merc, hoping we were impressed and led us up the stairs. Throughout the night he kept going on about how he doesn’t hook up with kasi girls and only likes them posh and educated. I laughed my ass off-because he was born and raised in Sandton and attended a posh white university-no? Wow. He had the typical b.e.e salmon pink coloured shirts in his closet and the typical kickbhoboza shoes those bastards loved. He was a typical b.e.e man. He told me how he didn’t struggle to be poor while constantly refusing to see the subtle point I was making about rapaciousness. The crowning jewel was when he started telling me how I was a sell-out, copy cat, an unoriginal because my ideas were the product of Western ideology all because of my expensive white education. A Blade Ndzimande disciple driven by intense self-loathing envy. Is this what they were all like? Would they all insult me for being intelligent, tell me how pretty I was until I opened my mouth and became a complete black bitch? And what idiots are we to celebrate this man as one of our foremost black writers? I Picked up one of his books, his ideas are progressive, he went to school, university even. What I loved most were his ideas on women, they should be respected, loved and not abused. I was shocked that the very same man who had written this was the same man who had been stuck between begging and insulting me for me for sex. Yes, Mr X, you may hate the fact that a friend of your calls women sluts but at least he doesn’t treat them like sluts like you do.

 

This instance of black middle class fucking didn’t upset me because I felt exploited and coerced, even though that did happen, the reason was that it got to the heart of my own personal neurosis. He was the first black man to touch me and that freaked me out. Yes. I fully exercise my Post Apartheid right to fuck whomever I like and so far it has included only white men. This hasn’t been intentional but I’m not denying that the sheer narrow mindedness and the ‘baby, you’re so beautiful’ remarks black men tend to throw in my direction make any semblance of desire evaporate. Yes, all the outies I know would call me a sell-out, an uppity black bitch and the white men would call me an exotic experiment but I have never looked in a black man’s direction with raging lust. I am a Post Apartheid fuck up. 

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Thesis skeleton(1st draft)

You need a scalpel to dissect this anger, cut through it. Slowly slit up its length, divide it, break it and when the ooze finally thicks over your reason; understand it. You‘ve had this thing, this thing that you know but can’t explain. It has lived with you, inside you, and you’ve known it but never named it. This thing, this vein, pumps its thrum thrum through you, insistent. It catches, a click in your throat that lets listeners know you jammed words down there years ago, words that had meaning then; words of the flesh that explained the shame, the dry, half-moon mouth plastered to your face when they never understood; quashed, flesh-words that dribbled down your chin into glasses of whisky. Words of the flesh are weak words, they barely last the night in the space between you and them. Yet the vein still throbs, it’s throbbed for so long, at its dull, black-hum pace, that that you’ve forgotten; forgotten this anger’s meaning, this anger’s ache.

 

“What makes the black man fail to tick? Is he convinced of his own accord of his inabilities? Does he lack in his genetic make-up that rare quality that makes a man willing to die for his aspirations? Or is he simply a defeated person?” (30) A defeated person. This statement was written in an essay trying to explain and understand the fractured interior of blacks under Apartheid rule. Thirty years on, sixteen years into freedom and this statement is still true. Sixteen years in, sixteen years since blacks were told they had suffered their last. Sixteen years and still you haven’t experienced the freedom that only equality and dignity bring. Sixteen years in and you label the black St Mary’s Girl, sitting in the back of a crowded Jammie, asking her blonde-haired friends in a conspiratorial whisper, if they really  have to talk so loudly? a tangible token of racial progress and enlightenment. Undone by the meanings that order our conversations, visible only from certain angles at certain times like a blob of oil sitting over a puddle in a busy intersection. Threating to undo all the hard work that’s told us that we’re equal now because blacks can send their children to posh private schools and live in the same rooms as whites. “We are quite certain, now at least, that these children will not harm us, will behave themselves.” They come over, a gaggle of blonde hair and red skin lining the pavement squares of the quadrangle at St Mary’s. They chat among themselves. ‘My son, no he’s at Bishop’s in Cape Town, thanks for asking Sue. He’s staying down there with his father, even though I really wanted him to just come to Michael House really. I mean, it has a quadrangle modelled on the one at Corpus Christi, Oxford…’ You’re a black blob squished into a second hand white dress. You represent the ideal St Mary’s girl and yet, your blazer feels too big and you’re convinced you have a ladder in the back of your stockings. Your ears dart through the conversations around you. Listening to the welcome speech of the headmaster one middle aged woman turns to a black woman and says, where is your daughter? Oh, no she’s not being here right now Medem, she’s in the boarding house, Medem. The first looks at the second and walks away, to join another tight click. These women do not know each other but one has made an assumption at another’s expense. Your white belt seems too tight and a drop of sweat slowly licks it way down your back. A person defeated because they never realized that they were not being treated as equals. You entered St Mary’s because your parents believed that you would receive the best education. You received an education, one that many would call good but the price you paid for your IEB distinctions was too high. It was the alienation that gnawed through all your academic achievements, leaving a fat, round hole on the other side. Sitting down to be told how you spoke English really well, even for a black girl. Being asked if you had cheated on an essay that received a mark that was a clear impossibility for you. Told that all the blacks had to take extra classes after school because your marks were so bad. A science teacher explains that sometimes she forgets that ‘things are different now’ and the headmistress who replied that she couldn’t change much because the only black person she knew was her maid. Yes, you were the true equal, the one who only realized after five years of your life had been sold that you had allowed yourself to be misused and your parents had paid thousands in order for this trauma to take place. If your education only makes up one part of this thing that has mowed a place in your chest, this thing that you have to dissect, what about all the other things squatting in wait? Do you even know what these things are? Your mistreatment at the hands of your education fits the coconut narrative very well, too well. Perfectly, to the point of obscuring the serious issues at its heart. Being a coconut is strange. You’re equal but not. You never exist (for a white person and to a lesser degree non-white men) until you have a role to play somewhere in their lives. Whiteness can never see blackness or talk about blackness without using it’s own hegemonic categories as referent points. Which is why ALL your white friends love telling you that You’re not really black-immediately they assimilate you into their fold of whiteness instead of letting you recast the meaning of blackness. Moreover, you constantly feel as if whites use you as atonement. Middle-aged Constania house-wives stop with their young, impressionable teenage daughters in tow and let you watch them tell their daughters how beautiful you are. “You’re really gorgeous, your clothes are amazing. Are you really from Durban? All the while their fingers tangle in your hair, their compliments snag at your hips. A bit wide, but they’ll do. They’d understand, and maybe in a lust fuelled by gin encourage it, if their husband wanted to ‘experiment’ with you. His face shifts from amusement to seriousness. You’re sitting at an empty table in an empty common room telling an English don about the stubbornness inherent in Zulu people. His hand strokes the table gently, damp and heavy as his voice, steadily says You know B, the greatest love of my life was Zulu and she was really timid and fragile. Your face hardens. What was she your maid? He looks away. Pentameter is scribbled in yellow chalk on the board. His fat fingers criss-cross on his lap. Experiment. The flit of betrayal that crosses across a white boy’s face when he knows you’ve seen him shocked and slightly fearful that he finds you witty and attractive. ‘I mean I went to schools with blacks and played sport with them and stuff but I’ve never really been friends with them. The night rushes past you in a blur of neon and his thick fingers grip the black wheel. So I’m your first? The tips of his fingers turn white as his grip tightens. You know he won’t look you in the eye. The red glint of your shoes peeks out from the dark and you cross your legs. He’d stood next to you, silent and scared as the music blared over your bodies and now you are here, in a small black space with the lights low and neither of you move. “My parents would kill me if I brought a black home” he chokes and you remember, the memory fills you like air inside a balloon, how he’d squeezed the small of your back earlier and let you pull him close. Loved inspite of yourself evn though you loved him because of himself. Your ribs crack over the dashboard, the ache a dull thrum thrum.(Pride and Prejudice)

You’re there helping whites give themselves a big pat on the shoulder for not being racist or for over coming their racism. At no point are they ever interested in black identity as a solitary, independent category for its own sake. And yes, you understand that blackness is inextricably tied up with whiteness but somehow you’d still insist that this context demands more, that it takes far more humility for a white person to delve into blackness than the other, usual way. For example it demands way more humility for whites to go chill with your extended family in Northern KZN,learn Zulu and live as they do (something you don’t even do) than it is for you to go chill with their families in Constantia, sip tea and rise to sing for you supper by telling them palatable tidbits about blacks. (My Traitor’s Heart)Clearly in this situation, you and you alone understand and have undone the inherent evils of your race?

 

“Often now I turn away from things/From jubilance save that/From which a quiet/May grant my moments wealth/a home town’s olive orchard/that shivers in the dusklight, the pit-pat/as fruit fall free to the ground;/or the homeless manic’s rage at grace/when a shop owner hands him coffee./Most of all I walk/so I may reach home and try to know/myself, so I may turn to work.// And turn more from the racial rage/I need still in myself, as I turn/from the stone’s articulate act/and seek the sentence long enough/to house my tribe, even as I know/ of neither’s existence. These are/ rages which won’t still, which need/thought. But thought fans flames/And action in killing them/kills the word. Yet/in my silence there is/this rage, still this rage.// So I turn away from things/and read and slip into books;/wait thus for reports/from my r and race,choose not/speech. But sit in my silence even/which broods to myself/myself. A self at least.And wait./more thinking not of exile from-/whether inside or out-/but exile through; how inside/the very head the tongue/is exiled through itself:/the tongue its own exile.// And I turn more away from things,/preferring solitude and work/to tongue at stories/from their silent insides: like an orphan/who in a new house senses an old taste/and quietly mulls thus a morsel/that brings darting/like a wasp in the head,/then withdraws his tongue/from probing .Back to the mute bed,/the civilizing cradle of the jaw. (Jerusalem, Rustum Kozain)

 

This anger is a vein that pumps the pain and shame from your middle and pushes it through the complete body of your lived experience. The three pictures, of him, Khayelisthsha, the boy and the you. You’d told him that people worshipped his white skin and his blue eyes. He’d dared you to prove it. So you kicked stray dogs out of the way and took him for a walk on a street matchbox houses long and willed a man, woman, child, black anyone to help you prove yourself. The boy’s small hand curled around both your hands and your heart fisted a ball in your throat. His clothes were dirty, he had snot leaking from his nose and his grandmother encouraged him to walk along with us. The fist in your throat got bigger and tighter and you shook your hand out from his small hand and looked accusingly at him. See, I told you, they all love you, for no reason, no reason besides your white skin. You don’t have to prove your worth, legitimacy and authority to anyone here, not like I do. He’s slightly tipsy and so are you, another sign of your disrespect that almost trivializes your project. The small, dirty boy and the drunk big man lean against a wall and its finished. You take their pictures, your hands tremble slightly as you press the shutter-this could’ve easily been you eighteen years before. You hate yourself for thinking this but feel like this guilt is the price you pay for being able to take this picture, this guilt buys you authority while it shows what an arrogant, selfish coconut you’ve become, assuming power in the same way whites assumed power over you.  What will it take for you to ever get out of this tangle of power?

 

“I don’t really expect a response to this-but another thing, your response made me uncomfortable because it made me realize that I had been deluding myself by thinking that whites see me as truly am(not as their personification of the aspirations of the new south africa) and that all along i had never investigated the fact that I was complicit in some sense to their very covert, and sophisticated negation and inferiorisation of my blackness. I have since deleted said picture- it made me feel like I was taking liberties my skin colour didn’t allow me-my commodification of your slightly drunken white guilt and embarrassment to learn more about my blackness.” Busi-Josh via facebook.

 

In two of the three pictures this small boy looks at Josh looking at the camera. In all three pictures the little boy clutches onto Josh’s hand and Josh just let’s his hand stay there, he doesn’t hold the boy’s hand back. I took all three pictures, bent over my camera like those stupid white tourists I loathe. The only difference, that seemed to make what I did okay was the fact that I was black, aware that I was stepping outside the boundaries of power that had been demarcated for me because I immediately felt that I was taking liberties my skin colour did not allow. Why was I still judging myself by standards not determined by me? But even if my blackness didn’t allow me to do this, it was still wrong. Who am I to exploit some black kids snotty nose and his amour of white people in order to prove my own personal (and very trivial point?) _Malan and the visit and the chopping of the sofa. Why is so easy for me to agree with and try to meet the terms of the conversation when its not actually in my favor. Josh and I both know that we both have implicity agreed that whiteness is hegemonic precisely because that’s what I’m trying to show him as a means of resisting this very logic. These pictures get to some of the issues at hand-‘

If white guilt is misread for atonement when its not. White guilt actually is atonement and complicity at the same time. Where does this leave me? There’s this misreading that is both true and false that means that I’ll lose every time. It white guilt is atonement and complicity, then as a position, how can it ever consider me?  It’s victim? And why does this relationship mean that I have to constantly have to prove myself ora white person has prove that they do not enjoy their privileged position hen they actually do?

 

 

Rough sketch

 

ANGER

The anger and how it doesn’t make sense. How you searched for answers-Tony Harding email, Find a way to describe the cancer of the rage in a way that explains the problem clearly…  Power

It’s there but it may just be a cover up for something else.

The pictures-

Hey question how we interact, how we deermine power.

(The creative edge you can thread through is how you teetered on the edge of an uncertain romance ow this creates an ache but is different to the one created by anger of being treated like a second class citizen? Or is it the same)

 

Coconut-

a life of race and class

St Mary’s

Religion and its effect

 

what this means-snippets from the cocnut life. The contradictiosn. The incident you had with that boy when you were talking to Poppy. The contradictions. How the bade cuts you two ways

Black: they wan to be like you and they hate you but secretly adore you/you can’t tell anyone your pain because they are unable to understand what exactly it was that fucked you up so much. And neither can you, really. Your parents can’t help because they’re the cause to a large degree(they didn’t give you any suppot and you actually needed way more support than a white kid gets because you were bing throwin into a den of lions. But obviously you didn’t know that t was a lions den until you got there.

Also you had stay there because of thedevt system, you thought the education you received would outweight the psychic cost but it didin’t. You seem to be paying, ven now, even at university, you keep giving to apy a debt that can never be discharged really.

Friends: black friends are either cocnuts who like you or don’t like you. Non-coconut friends usually don’t like you when they first meet you but after You’ve PROVED that you’re not a snob the grudgingly like you because they know that they don’t have a reason not to like you.

 

White: The burden of having to prove yourself

 

The minute they hear your posh accent they take you more seriously. They either treat you as an equal or the ones who think they’re better,  more sensitive than the rest, treat you and speak to you with a sort of sorry in their face. They know that you saw the fact that they undermined you before your mouth opened and they feel guilty/ashamed and they try to make up for but we both know that they can’t and so they’ll keep trying. Note that both views still assume that you have fit their standards and definitions.

They don’t like you if you ever insuniuate that you are better at meeting their own standards of ealth/intelleigence ect than they are. They resent you, saying that you don’t deserve to be better me to such a degree because I am white. Wtf? Ceire story here

 

White people who didn’t go toprivate schools fall in the above acatgory or they think they’re doing you a big favour by even talking to you, even though, by their own definitiosn you are a step ahead of them. Or they resent you like the blacks do, especially if they are poor and struggling.

 

Why these thinsg make you angry but the anger hides  another emotion.

SEX

Misegenation or sticking to your won kind? Both alternatives fuck you over

White

The way you are a trophy-how your value increases depending on your conquests, e.g Marcel

The politics of the one night stand in South

What does misegnation prove? Does it prove anything?

The black girls who think white boys are more valuable, no matter who they are.

The women who tell me I’m so impressive I could be good enough for a white man to date, fuck and marry. The fucked upness in this

The white men who think they’re doing me a BIG favour by hitting on me and hate it when I point that even according to their own defienitions, I realy am out of their league. They don’t lke me being uppity? When they taught me and schooled me in a sytem that did that to me?

The stories are endless- and they each prove something

White boys who turn black

 

 

Black

The b.e.e men who use me as trophies

The ones who are really fucked up

ERIC!!!!!!!!

The categories, the problems

Kambani-

How it was more revolutionary for me to sleep with a black man that a white man. What does this say about me and my socialization?

 

 

All these issues have thing in common, going back to the guilt/atonement thing. Agency and subjectivity and power, who decides exactly and how. What would resistance to these rigid concepts look like? Why is this a blindpsot in white epistemology? And why is there no ‘legitimate’ balck epistemology?

 

Deconstruction

Spivak

Rustim Kozain

My Traitor’s heart

Country of My skull

The schooner flight Derek Walcott

Wole Soyinka’s poems

Interview with James Baldwin

Ingrid jonker

Agency and Mudimbe

Films that document miscegenation as an act of atonement

 

 

At this first this project was about trying to understand why reading rian Malan’s my Traitor’s heart made me so angry and also selfloathing. I identified with him in certain situtaions and hated him intensely in other. I judged myself according to hose standards?

I want it to be creative non-fiction and I need to show in addition to explain.

I am someone whose subject position has been altered

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The religious set (1st draft)

“So much time has gone by, and still there is no sweetness here.”

 

“Reduced to an obliging shell, you look with awe at the white power structure and accepts what you regard as the ‘inevitable position.’…In the privacy of your toilet your face twists in silent condemnation of white society but brightens up in sheepish obedience as you come out hurrying in response to your master’s impatient call…All in all you have become a shell, a shadow of a woman, completely defeated, drowning in your own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”

 

“I saw men tear down veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have the power in heir hands begin to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover, as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all blackness in the big old slave castle?…That is all anyone here ever struggles for: to be nearer the white man. All the shouting against the white man was not hate. It was love. Twisted but love all the same.” (92)

 

“No difference at all between the white men and their apes…Bungalows, white with a wounding whiteness. Cars, long and heavy, with drivers in white men’s uniforms waiting ages in the sun. Women, so horribly young, fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags and wigs of human hair scraped from which decayed white woman’s corpse?”(89)

 

 

 

Being you is not a dead end. It’s not lies that lived on the tongue when the veil was torn; speaking a dead thing when it was un-dead. The curtain that happened to cut the  meaning, allowing two sides to meet but not in the corner before the lit shadow where the shades brewed. You hover instead, over the no-man’s land of emsamu, a place below a place but never behind it. Being you is not the dead end story of you not allowed to be the daughter of some-god sitting on his yellow some-throne who didn’t allow you some swallow of his special, potent redemption. Rather, you are a dead end of being last, never the last, just last.  Your mouth finished opening itself in front of his hand last and you saw your reflection in his gold watch see the round, white wafer melt on your tongue after his fingers pushed it on. “Dear Jesus, the man with the gold watch just told me that you were going to use me to bring his word to many across the nations. He also told me that you told him that I would hate religion and be a strong wind blowing through the lives of young people like me. Jesus, will this happen when I no longer have goat’s hide around my wrist because that’s what he also said after he’d sniffed his nose at it and told me that my ancestors were just that ancestors, dead and at the very bottom of the pile. “They walked around naked with a rag of hide covering their underneath bits that were behind, you see.”” 

 

You sat in a glass church where the light hits the window’s panes and beats through to all the pale hands that turn their bibles and their skulls whose eyes are blind and your hands started themselves shaking. He’s arrived you told yourself, you’ve waited for him every time you sucked air in but especially the many times you sucked air during Sundays, during worship. “…in a country where all black people are made to feel the unwanted stepchildren of a God whose presence they cannot feel; in a country where father and son, mother and daughter alike develop daily into neurotics through sheer inability to relate the present to the future because of a completely engulfing sense of destitution, the church further adds to their insecurity by its inward-directed definition of the concept of sin and its encouragement of the mea culpa attitude.”(61)

Jesus,