| I write and unwrite this article. Different
versions of it lie on my floor with variously-coloured handwritten
notes in the margins. They are all fragments of how I think I want
to talk about "my body", and, after writing and completing another
piece, I realise that my resistance to writing this essay is linked
to my desire to make it seamless, whole and smooth, to enable it to
veil my anxieties about re-examining cuts and bruises. I want to mask
the meeting points of purple and blue on skin that could be either
tattooing or some other mark. It strikes me that embodied memories
of pleasure and pain are as far apart or as close together as we allow
them to be. And that distance determines how we live in the moments
of in between. So I offer no polished, stockinged or tweezed body
of knowledge here. Rather, I wander through slides which offer fragments
through which I read the landmarks of life's maze.
slide one: body language
To remember something is an experience.
Marita Sturken1
I am seven years old, sitting in a class in what has come to be
called a typical black school. I don't know what's typical about
anything really. There are seventy-six of us little people in desks
that stand in rows from the front to the back, or from the door
side to the window side, depending on how you choose to look at
it. We sit restlessly. It is Religious Instruction period. Our teacher
is a Blackman2 who told
us last week, and the week before, and will tell us several times
more, about how God likes fair-skinned people. This teacher will
tell us about how fair-skinned is better, smarter, morally more
developed.
I look back on this as an adult and I wonder what exactly it is
that this teacher is telling us. Is he telling us that he
is all these things? Is he exposing us to a world in which he is
at the top of the hierarchy? In this world, is he God? Is
he recreating in front of his audience a world in which he is validated,
not deviant, inferior, less than? Is this man, perhaps, also telling
us about a planet on which we are stamped by white supremacy in
ways that make us hate those who mirror us?
I am seven years old; it is 1980. I live in what I am later to
learn is something that can be called a remote part of the country
in a small town with much history. This history has pretty much
chosen not to show itself as I sit at my desk. My teacher is not
talking about a world in which white people are superior to black
people. This man is talking about gradations within black society,
within blackness, between black people, between who counts and who
cannot. At this school I am to learn that the fair-skinned girls
are prettier. Always. I am to learn that black boys and girls are
pretty or unpretty depending on their skin tones. I am to learn
that sometimes it occurs that darker-skinned boys and girls are
beautiful too. These are called names like "coffee-coloured" or
"dark beauties". I look around my class when my teacher tells us
this for the umpteenth time and recognise that we, the children
in my class, represent every shade of Black2
complexion that I am ever to know.
As an adult, I am struck by the frequency with which my mind conjures
up this and other similar scenes. I know that my identity as a Blackwoman
is not somatically determined, and that I am not a certain kind
of Black person owing to the specific concentration of melanin in
my skin. Yet the lingering memory suggests that this moment, and
others like it, continues to play some role in my present, in my
awareness of the competing, conflicting or connected ways in which
my body can be read. It continues to haunt me, because I wonder
what effects this brainwashing has on little psyches that are not
exposed to alternative ways of viewing the world. I know that this
teacher walked up and down rows of desks for close to four decades.
I wonder when it became so possible for us to teach ourselves, and
our children, such intricate ways to hatred.
slide two: body image
A few years later I overhear an adult conversation. Many children
know you are not supposed to eavesdrop. I had not mastered the art
of disguising this exercise as described in Chris van Wyk's exquisite
memoir. In his Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (2004: 160)3
he suggests:
- Don't sit quiet as a mouse. If you can hear them out there in
the lounge, they can hear you here in the kitchen. And if you're
quiet they know you're listening. Make busy noises like drinking
a glass of water, sing bits from pop songs, calling to the dog
outside. But don't overdo it.
- Do something while you're listening. Read a book or some homework.
If they come into the kitchen to switch on the kettle or something,
they'll see a boy struggling with maths and not just staring at
a wall.
- Be wary of jokes coming from the lounge. If someone in the lounge
tells a joke, try not to laugh. They'll know you've been listening
all along.
- If Ma calls you, don't answer immediately. If you do it's a
dead giveaway and means that you've had your ears tuned on them
all the time.
Although my strategies for listening in on adult conversation are
not as well thought out, I catch snippets of dialogue not intended
for my little-girl ears, and I am somewhat careful not to be detected.
One day I overhear the way in which a certain Blackman has had to
cut off his dreadlocks in order to be able to assume a post he has
been offered by the institution he wants to teach in, an institution
in my proximity. I wonder about what this means about hair; I wonder
why this man's hairstyle gets to be so unacceptable. Why a certain
manner of wearing hair should be so important, so undesirable. I
know my school has the same fascination with changing what is permitted:
pretty plaits one year, and hair cut close to the scalp the next.
I wonder why there are so many rules about what you can and cannot
do with your own hair. I decide this is just bizarre adult behaviour.
Years later, as I grapple with different narratives, styles and
hair-mories, I realise that this is troubled terrain. In a class
I teach, a debate ensues about whether appearance can ever be a
valid criterion for deciding on people's traits. This hurtles me
further along the path of whether evaluations of bodies and appearance
can ever be separated from discussions on race, gender and sexuality.
These are questions which shape our thinking on aesthetics. Beauty,
we are told repeatedly, is skin deep. And yet we know that certain
sizes and shapes, along with specific forms of body ornamentation,
preening and pruning, count as beautiful. In contemporary South
Africa we seem to be publicly experimenting, reinventing what counts
as aesthetically pleasing, and beyond that, beautiful. This is an
exciting process that we can, perhaps, participate in, because we
have had to question so much about ourselves continuously.
slide three: body layering
I am thirteen years old, away at an all-girls boarding school in
another part of the country. During communal ablutions (this is
what the bathing is officially called here) we watch one another's
movements and note differences in the way puberty affects our bodies.
There are the intricacies of curvature simultaneously desired and
feared: breasts grow fuller, hips assert themselves audaciously.
Sometimes the routines of body care betray awkwardness with the
unsuccessful concealment of the evidence of menstrual blood. There
are discussions of the merits and demerits of sanitary towels versus
tampons. Which pads are cooler and more comfortable: the clip-on,
hook-on or stick-on ones? Do tampons really interfere with the hymen?
And on it goes.
As teenagers are wont to be, we are acutely aware of similarities
and differences within our midst. Regardless of our varied regions
of origin we all take certain things for granted about the processes
and art of hygiene. Everybody has two washing-cloths. One,
preferably white, is to be used only on the face; the second, which
is usually a deeper, richer colour, is allocated to washing "the
body". The colours ensure that there is never confusion, never accidental
contamination of the face by the dirty body. The dirtiness of the
female body is "clear". We not only buy into this ideology of the
dirty girl's body, we imagine that keeping the face, and sometimes
torso, safe from the dirt of bum, vagina and soiled feet is quite
clever. (We never wonder about how soiled our socked and shoed feet
are.) We are quite clever, by extension, for absorbing this discipline
which we know somehow requires mastering as part of our entry
into ladyhood. Cleverness and hygiene seem to merge into some uncanny
union, even for those labelled as "tomboys".
Later we were to ask questions about the pervasiveness of notions
of purity and contamination in our relationships with ourselves.
When I ask friends and relatives about the washing-cloths midway
through writing this piece, it emerges that the tyranny of the two
washing-cloths is not central to adult femininities. This is not
to say that by adulthood we have all mystically freed ourselves
from notions of purity and impurity. The pages of many women's magazines
world-wide continue to extol the virtues of products necessary to
conceal, disguise and rein in unruly female body smells, shapes
and protrusions.
Patricia McFadden has argued that this obsessive narration of women's
bodies in terms of their assumed impurity and being-out-of-control
is linked to the fear of thinking about women's bodies in relation
to pleasure 4 and/or power.
These notions of containment of the girl-and-later-woman's body
are linked to other ways of living in and through our bodies. It
cannot be detached from other messages communicated to us as we
are socialised into thinking of our bodies as burdens and our minds
or souls as the only chance we have of transcending the mire of
the bodies we drag with us. Again, I wonder why it is so important
to teach hatred of self as a primary emotion through which to negotiate
our existence on this planet.
embracing alternatives
I never believed my teacher, even as a child. I knew that the intelligent
people in my family, the devout ones, the ones I relished in observing,
were not uniform in skin tone. I recognised that the boy who was
my friend, with whom I competed for first position, was not stupid,
no matter what this teacher said. I was struck by too many obvious
contradictions in my family, in my friendships, in my world. There
were also teachers at the same school who taught explicitly and
through example that life was full of possibilities, that a questioning
mind was always an asset and that you could still enjoy your body.
It helped that my parents were invested in the same project as these
perceptive teachers.
The previous body recollections strike me as linked to efforts
to make us distance our spiritual or mental selves from the ways
in which we are embodied. Of course, these saturate the world beyond
specific spaces within the black society that I grew up in in the
seventies and eighties. We have all been irritated by the barrage
of chain blond jokes at parties, in our email inboxes, and elsewhere.
From different angles we are bombarded by such ideologies: in institutionalised
religion, various philosophical and other intellectual traditions,
the assorted popular cultural forms in which we participate in moulding.
These messages safeguard the separation of body from the more abstract
entity that it holds together: mind and/or spirit. In the binary
oppositional way we have been programmed to think, and often continue
to be complicit with, this means one is good and the other bad.
They cannot just be different. And so generation after generation
we are told we have to choose: either efface our bodies when in
pursuit of cerebral interests or highlight the aesthetically approved
body.
dancing between the masks5
In your sure-footed stride
across troubles and joys
do your steps ever falter?
Abena P A Busia 6
I no longer choose. The metaphor and visual representation of dancing
between masks speaks to me. In the Goniwe print of the same name
I am intrigued by the joy on the faces of those dancing. It has
become important to realise that the activity between these two
masked positions, body and intellect, is not just struggle. You
can dance there. And, yes, there are "troubles and joys".
It is crucial to begin to make new memories of embodiment: forms
that encourage pleasure and power. Running with the dancing and
sure-footed metaphors, we touch the space where body and mind/spirit
perform not as competitors, but as playmates. And it should be possible
to continue to think critically and insurgently about what
that play means sexually, politically, spiritually, and any-other-ly.
Enjoying the play, and making it our home, cannot be trapped in
conventional beauty and acceptability when these are designed to
make us disappear: nip, tuck, tweeze, wax, cover, starve, bleach.
Today, I am an adult woman. My agency exists even in the face of
powerful institutionalised systems of violence. To assert this insurrectionary
agency as a teacher, as an older Blackwoman, it is my responsibility,
and I imagine one we all should share. Today my spirit-mind-body-self
delights, frightens, pleasures, shocks and is. My body is the home
of my spirit - not its temple - and I like the scratch here, the
adventurous strand of hair there, and even the protruding bone somewhere
else. My spirit is the oil and incense in my body and I relish its
textures, its slipperiness, and its fire, even as I am aware of
its explosions. It excites me to think that in some small way I
contribute daily to the uncovering of possibilities for children
and younger people. I see signs that there are people engaged in
this every day, especially today at the bottom of this amazing continent
I was made from. As I walk the streets of the cities and small towns
of this southern region, I am delighted by the creative ways in
which people are engaging with their bodies more and more. There
is a tickle in my spirit-place when I see young Blackwomen, especially,
communicating comfort and love of themselves to themselves. It is
a wonderful energy, because it confirms to me the chain reaction
we set off when we allow ourselves to become an expression of who
we really are, and can be.
1. Marita Sturken, "The remembering
of forgetting: recovered memory and the question of experience",
Social Text. 16.4, 1998, p. 106.
2. I use the capitalised Black here to incorporate
"black", "coloured" and Indian.
3. Chris van Wyk. 2004. Shirley, Goodness
and Mercy: A Childhood Memoir. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.
4. Patricia McFadden. 2003. "Sexual Pleasure
as Feminist Choice", Feminist Africa. 2, www.feministafrica.org/2level.html.
5. This section is named after, and for, a
print by the artist Thembinkosi Goniwe, which I read to explore
the layered ways in which identity processes and negotiations are
about making sense of the masks and crafting complexity in the activity-space
in between.
6. Abena P A Busia. 1995. "Fissures in old
friendships" in Moving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions
in Black Women's Writing (Volume 1), ed by Carole Boyce Davies
& 'Molara Ogundipe-Leslie. London: Pluto. |
Pumla Dineo Gqola is a feminist writer whose short
stories have been published in anthologies of (South) African
writing, and most recently in Tyhume, Gowanus
and Postcolonial Text. Her creative non-fiction has
appeared in Fito, Chimurenga and the UK-based
Drum. She has published academic articles on African
and Caribbean literature, feminism, womanist and postcolonial
studies, and is co-editor of Discourses on Difference,
Discourses on Oppression (2002). A graduate of the Universities
of Cape Town, Warwick (England) and Münich (Germany), she
is employed as a senior lecturer in the Humanities at the
University of the Free State.
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix!