I fucked the underground

Stacy Hardy

A small, insignificant white chick’s journey from bad-assed boyfriends, capital complicity and oral obscurantism to subaltern sex, popular promiscuity and play

I get an email from Fred. This is one month ago – or two months, whatever. He’s organising a conference and he wants me to speak. The topic is the underground. He wants me to talk about women, women in the underground, underground women.

I stare at the screen. My first thought is that I should say no. I’m not qualified. What do I know about women? Sure I am one. I have tits and an arse but that’s where it ends. I’ve never studied the theory. Feminism pisses me off. Any sentence containing the word gender is at the top of my list. I mean, why me? I think that maybe there’s been some confusion. Sure I tend to write about sex. But when I say sex, I mean sex. Sex as in, well, fucking. Sex as in you and me. Not all this gender stuff – male, female, bi, straight, trans, politics, whatever, you know the story.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m not too sure about this idea of an underground. I’m not too sure I was ever a part of it. Sure there were parts, scenes I participated in – and I use participated loosely. For me the scene was more about seeing and being seen. For me it was about the boyfriends, you know, the sex – as in the fucking.

I flash back.

Jo’burg. Post-1994 underground fallout. A couple of us in the back of a car parked outside a club in Melville. I'm not really hearing the things that are being said, just words, fleeting pieces of subjects I'm usually interested in – drugs, black market body parts, Doc Martens, virtual reality, electronic relationships – because right now I'm busy sucking off some hot young underground writer. His work is white-trash-ultra-hip. His cock is cold and hard. He pushes me down. He tells me not to stop.

Another scene. Another time. Another guy. Another town. Grahamstown. A band that sounds something like Sonic Youth – but not quite; rhythm/noise/bass, feedback from a post-political train of thought.

The next scene. The next guy. Cape Town. A soundtrack of wordcore, dub poetry, rap and rock steady, whatever.

The list goes on.

I phone Fred up and tell him I can’t do the paper. I say I have nothing to say. I say you’ve got the wrong girl. I’m not really part of this story. I’m just a bit part, you know, an extra. I say sorry baby, but I’m just the girlfriend. Fred obviously isn’t listening, or else he has other ideas … maybe he’s trying to chat me up? He’s silent for a while then he says, well why not talk about not being in the underground? I’m not following. He says, you know about how few women are in the underground? About how it’s a man’s game, a way to wage war without lethal weapons?

Jesus! I hang up and light a cigarette. War without lethal weapons? What does he want me to say? That X fucked me so hard that I cried? I’ve heard this all before. That was the 90s or whatever. Afterwards X took me to an exhibition opening. His head was shaved to number one. Under the glare of the gallery lights it shone like the sun. He poured me a glass of wine and told me his art works were deadly bombs, cultural weapons strategically placed to blow up in the heart of the Capitalist beast.

Another underground player, Y, talks about his texts as word bombs. The violence is all on the page. The punctuation. The slashes and the dashes. The speed and fury of the full stop. He gets a glint in his eyes. He says take that, fuckers! He pushes me down and fucks me on the floor. My elbows and knees are raw from carpet burn. He walks me to the door. He’s not into any of this post-coital romance shit. For him sex is just sex, biological … as in fucking.

I walk home alone. I sit in front of the TV. I’m waiting to see if X or Y’s bombs make the news. The screen flickers. Istanbul blast. Bombs in Iraq. 1 000 suicide bombers “ready” in Iran. Who is kidding who? I mean even if X or Y’s bombs did make the news I probably wouldn’t notice. The footage is all the same. A roof convulses. Windows smash half a block down. Bodies on the pavement. Instant horror and fear. The enthralled spectator. How can we hope to compete with that?

I phone up a friend and organise to meet for coffee. Let’s call her J. J is more than ten years older than me but you’d never tell. J is gorgeous. She’s small and lithe. Pale blue eyes set in tanned face. I tell her my theory about being a girlfriend. J nods her head. I wasn’t the only one. She has her own story to tell. She’s been making underground documentary films for years. She used to work with her ex-husband. They worked together. She says his name. And I say, of course, wow, he’s like famous. J nods. This is her point. They made documentaries together but it’s his name that sticks. Biological inheritance, economic forces, cultural biases, media hype conspired to cast her as the pretty little girlfriend.

I order another skinny latte. I sit there stirring it so the white foam mixes with the espresso below. I’m starting to piece things together. It’s not that there were so few women in the underground, it’s just that they weren’t given the same status. Women were seen as girlfriends. Like it or not, I wasn’t alone, we were all just there to fuck the underground.

I take a sip of the latte. I’m thinking about power. Like if you cut all the crap, turn down the soundtrack, forget all the theory, fancy language tricks and dances. If you cut to the essence, the system of power, the structures underpinning it all, it’s the same old story. The same HIStory. White male dominance. Capital. Command. Control. Containment. C for yourself.

I’m starting to wonder: if the enactments of power are exactly the same, then how underground is this underground really? I’m starting to wonder if what we’ve been calling the underground isn’t something more like a cocoon or a bunker system. A structure which covertly mirrors the white security village, where there is no discomfort around things like poverty or sexism or racism because only well-educated, white men are allowed. And if that is the case, then don’t we need some other kind of underground? A different underground? One that is different from that which it seeks to oppose and destroy?

J must be able to tell I’m feeling kind of bummed because she tells me a joke to cheer me up. She says, “What did the female suicide bomber say?” I shake my head. She stands to deliver the punch line. She says, “Does my bomb look beeg in this?” We both piss ourselves laughing. We laugh so loudly that the people in the café all turn and stare.

And maybe laughing is the only – the best – thing left to do. One can take this even further. A few days later I come across a piece in an old Chimurenga by South African writer Ashraf Jamal. Like me, Jamal is sceptical about the strategies employed by white male bombers like X. Jamal writes, “What is profoundly absent in South Africa’s creation of itself is modesty. Its contemptuous disregard for mystery, its maniacal belief in closure, its festering recourse to pain, its hatred of embarrassment, its toxic pride, has left it standing like the proverbial emperor enfolded in its naked pomp. A soap opera, South Africa is a country that chooses to serialise itself into oblivion …”¹

As an alternative to this soap-opera-gore-fest Jamal looks to the idea of play. What he calls “a kind of blindness, a whim”. Jamal uses the art of Tracey Rose as an example of how this play can work. To understand this you’ve got to first understand that Tracey Rose is a coloured chick. She’s already outside South Africa’s racial register. She can be everything and nothing. Her work pushes this everything and nothing even further. It pushes it to the brink. The centre cannot hold. The tidy polarities we set us between black and white, man and woman, hi-art and lo-art can never stop the flux.

I like that. I like the idea of breaking down barriers instead of erecting them. I’m talking about crawling out of our safe white sanitised bunkers and actually getting down and dirty for a bit. I’m talking about confusing the boundaries – between, yes, the political and the personal, inside/outside, male/female, white/black, one/many, but also between the underground and the over-ground, the centre and the periphery.

Like in the work of young South African poet Nadine Botha². Nadine’s poetry is more like sweets than bombs. You want to gobble it up. You eat the whole packet, confections that dissolve into sensations on the tongue. But there’s also something else happening. Her poems are dangerous too. They get stuck in your teeth. You’re left gagging, tonguing them for days.

What these examples point to is the need for new strategies. What I’m saying is we need to move beyond the myth of the hero, that single lone assassin, the solitary white male bomber, and start to work in other spaces: in the in-between, on the borders, in the holes, the silences. In the slippages. I’m talking about fucking with the underground instead of just fucking it. This requires that we become double agents. And this isn’t just some stupid white chick’s fantasy either. This is history. Or maybe HERstory. See, whether we realise it or not, the greatest double agent the South African underground has ever had was a chick. I’m talking about Brenda Fassie.

Brenda understood what it meant to be a chick in South Africa. Her first hit was called "Weekend Special". That was 1984. Since then, she floated into our personal and public lives as sound, as rhythm, as icon. The thing about Brenda was she always worked in the in-between: straight/lesbian, mother/sex kitten, feminist heroine/lost little girl, drug addict/role model, lo-life/hi-art. But perhaps most significantly for the underground, Brenda refused the distinction between public and private. She did it all and she told about it too. And it’s this rupture that’s at the heart of Brenda’s challenge to the mainstream, to the status quo. It’s this that makes her ungovernable³. See, Brenda wasn’t just a symbol of freedom. She was freedom. She made personal the cold, abstract political and metaphorical quest for freedom. She brought the experience of freedom – of living in a world that is open and limitless – intimately, dangerously close.

Notes

1. Jamal, Ashraf. The bearable lightness of Tracey Rose’s The Kiss in Chimurenga, June 2004.
2. See Botha, Nadine. ants moving the house millimetres, Deep South Publishing, 2005.
3. Ndebele, Njabulo. Thinking of Brenda, www.music.org.za. 2004



LitNet: 30 May 2006

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