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The generation that falls between the 1980s and the 21st century appears to be a mystery to some. In certain lights we are obsessed with the politics of the past, in others, apathetic and apolitical. A further perception is that we're atomised and dissociated from tradition, self-regarding and materialistic.
Partly, these varied and contradictory visions of South Africans under 35 are due to the fiction that age alone imbues us with oneness. The truth of geography, religion, "race" (I place the word in inverted commas because its meaning is made, not given), gender, education, sexuality, class and illness in the age of HIV/Aids make a mockery of easy unities. However, there is a genuine claim to commonality in the fact that we have entered post-apartheid life together and perhaps this constitutes a mutual focus, if not a singular identity.
Who are we? What is our world? What do we desire? Delicate, profound, intrusive
- these questions send a questing gaze into the interiority of other
people. It is a fantasy to seek to banish the inevitable distance
between someone else's irrevocable ownness and seeing directly into
their being. The famed Freudian version of this obsessed probing,
that reflects more on the questioners than their object, "What does
woman want?", was rewritten in the colonial setting by Franz Fanon
to become "What does a Black man want?"1
Today, we can substitute our own terms. I will return to this question
of distance and desire later. For now, let me address the hungry
questions at the opening of this paragraph, and examine the case
of this generation.
There is a great temptation to defend and make matters of identity explicable, whether of youth, of Blackness or of Islam. Others' desire to understand me, a Black Muslim woman in South Africa, and people like me, makes it easy to occupy an explanatory mode. But I am not going to speak for Muslims, or for Blacks, or even for my generation. To give answers would require me to narrow my view, discard awkward deviations, and collate typicalities. Rather, I am going to take a more oblique approach. Instead of answers, it is through questions that have preoccupied me recently that I am going to explore my view of my generation.
What is our past? A review of the South African art exhibition The Body and the Archive, featuring, among others, Kay Hassan and Zwelethu Mtetwa, noted the unexpected feature that young South African artists were preoccupied by history. I am not surprised - and, in fact, I would be disconcerted if we were not reflecting on it. Our past is only now erupting from its coffins. With the tenth anniversary of the 1994 elections we are marking not only our democracy but a new configuration of humanness. Everyone has noticed the question that repeated itself in different agonised mouths in the halls of the TRC: Where is the body? That recurring question articulated the official recognition of Black people's humanity. Apartheid withheld such recognition, and therefore Black people's deaths did not register as worthy of mourning. For ten years, everybody has been worthy of mourning. The recognition of grief draws a line of the human.
Contemplating the TRC as a gigantic act of documenting evidence of Black presence, the scholar Bhekisiswe Peterson argues that only human beings have a past. When you are excluded from history, your humanity is undermined. By engaging with the past, touching it, aching about it, we are running our hands over the delicate new skin of our humanness. This line of the human connects us to a longer past, where Black bodies were once so non-human that they were displayed and dissected and made available for utter transparency. The return and burial of Sarah Baartman laid to rest and closure not only the woman, but also the validity of such access and dehumanisation. Today, in the empire of visibility that is the international media, the question of whose deaths are visible alerts us to who is regarded as human, argues the theorist Judith Butler. In the concerted visibility of the wars of the 21st century, whose suffering do we empathise with, and whose deaths do not count? Tracking the shifting criteria of humanness in the TRC and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we find the past not so much banished as mirrored in aspects of the present.
What is culture? The term is often used these days as an erasing act - as though culture is fixed and explains everything about people to whom the term is affixed. I delight in and also wrestle with the culture I come from, the culture I contribute to, the culture I make. What is my culture? Nothing that is easy, unchanging and final. Anyone who looks at the arts may learn how alive and alert culture is, how it simultaneously sustains continuity through a relationship with the past (what is often lazily labelled tradition), and is also malleable and makeable, because we make our cultures, and our futures. We live most creatively in cultures that make us human and normal, but also accommodate our shifts and contradictions.
A scholar and historian of Islam in South Africa, Abdulkader Tayob, has noted that in discussions of Muslim communities, religion is often assumed to trump every other category. In such perspectives the experience of Islam in South Africa is unaffected by "race", history, region and class. In fact, the same factors that make simplistic discussions of other vectors of identity inadvisable also apply to Islam. Islam was brought to South Africa 300 years ago through slavery by the Dutch. The anti-apartheid activist and scholar of religion Farid Esack points out that the Muslim community is itself a complex entity, with both progressive and conservative elements. The beginning of a nuanced approach lies in abandoning the assumption that one already knows everything about Islam. Such an assumption shuts off agility and new possibilities. Out of fear or arrogance, we may miss the very thing we are looking for.
Where is home? The notion of home is a great national compulsion. During the years of exile and war our country breathed out its children. Under apartheid we contemplated the theft of a sense of home (crucially related to, but not solely about, land). Today, the questions are even more complex. Who has a home? Who can leave one? Who makes one?
Among the students I have met during the two years of my studies in the US and England I have noted about some Nigerians, Indians and Chinese a far more flexible notion of home, an ability to contemplate leaving their countries in a way that would be extremely difficult for me. My notion of home is still firmly located in one place. South Africans in exile whom I have met outside the country still appear to have their compasses set on the south. Yet a new ability to enter and leave and remake home is noticeable among South Africans younger than me, for whom leaving is a more elliptical act, elastic and supple, and less imbued with a sense of one-way movement.
As travellers have confirmed from the earliest recorded accounts, small illuminations come in transitions between places. My traversals of international airports have made me the momentary equal of the powerful and distant. One day, in a corridor of Heathrow, I greeted the director of the World Bank because she was a South African, and because we were both away from home. She stopped and returned my greeting and shook my hand. Then we both continued to walk in opposite directions.
What is our world? Post-apartheid South Africa entered a
world in frenetic motion. At our birth into a globalised economic,
political and cultural reality we needed a running start. The careless
erasures brought by capital and media attention make the specificities
of South Africa ever more precious. Yet nation is no distinction
for my peers when it comes to friendships, criticisms and creativity.
The world is our intellectual territory. In magazines like Fito
(www.fito.co.za)
and Chimurenga (www.chimurenga.co.za), that promiscuously combine essays, fiction,
opinion, art, poetry and discussion, my generation shows itself
to be confident, curious, grounded, open, opinionated, flexible,
and broadly interested in the world.
What do we struggle with? In a recent lecture on Sarah Baartman, the feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola cautioned, in the desire to recover lives that have been suppressed and erased by colonialism, against becoming trapped in the same terms of erasure. If, in our sincere efforts, we recover the presence of Sarah Baartman only as a body, do we not run the risk of replicating the processes that objectified her? Our desires should be equal to the supple challenges of representation and reflection that our history requires.
A second area of tenderness and delicacy is about "race", which, as I've said before, I place in inverted commas because its meaning is made, not given. Yet, despite this argument that the meaning of race is constructed, I have lived the reality in which my body was a set of markers of racial meanings. At eleven I watched the James Bond film Live and Let Die and I gaped when I saw a white man have sex with a Black woman. Everything in apartheid South Africa had conspired to make that seem impossible. Therefore I am not able to believe that "race" does not matter. We are still learning to make a space in which to be critical of one another as Black people, and one in which Blacks can be critical of whites, and whites of Blacks. Whether publicly or in private fora, we speak of this urgently and often. Recently, I have found myself immensely moved by discussions among my friends, Black women and white women, Black men and white men, about their experiences of attempting an honest space for discussions of "race" in South Africa. My friends have recounted how, after ten years, they still find it necessary to point out the assumptions that keep certain areas exempt from reflectiveness and integration. Other friends have conveyed that, despite hesitance, painful prior experience and suspicion, they have found their complexity and full humanness acknowledged across "racial" barriers. Such encounters of reciprocity and recognition that do not foreclose the interiority of someone else and, instead, respect and recognise it, generate genuine friendship and empathy. They are the basis for being able to address the real difficulties that remain.
I explore such a moment of recognition below:
Father Receives News His Son Died in the Intifada
When he heard the news, Mr Karim became silent.
He did not look at the cameras,
nor at the people who brought their grief.
He felt a hand slip from his hand,
a small unclasping,
and for that he declined the solace of glory.
I was moved to write this poem by a newspaper article on the reaction of a Palestinian father to the death of his son. The grieving man who is the subject of this poem experiences a moment of loss so utterly his own, so impossible to categorise in the terms which, as readers of mainstream media, we have become used to attaching to Palestinian lives and deaths, that his silence, his implacable grief, and his refusal in this moment to make himself easily available to others, testify to his humanness.
After this contemplation of difficulties, I return to my oblique questions. What is precious to us? What do we love? As close as pain is to the surface of our lives - whether of illness, or of loss, or of injustice - my peers and I make beauty its equal and opposite force. We value beauty excessively. We recognise the subtle ways in which people sustain their humanity, through intangible qualities such as creativity, spirituality, friendship and family, or in concrete forms such as making a garden, decorating one's home with art, and maintaining traditions of cooking and sociality such as attending weddings and funerals.
What is success? Nelson Mandela's call for an "RDP of the soul" at the 2004 Annual Steve Biko Foundation Lecture pointed to a path of attainment that diverges from materialism. This vision speaks crucially to the direction that South Africa is forging at the level of philosophy and values. In the things we find important, and the way we live our lives, each of us helps to invent the present. Through our choices we can redefine success to nurture creativity, reciprocity and beauty. Nelson Mandela's exhortation also connects directly to my own beliefs. I practise such a vision through valuing low technology activities one can conduct with intense attention - single-tasking in an era of multitasking - to read, to write, to cook, to converse, to learn, to be silent. My orientation is toward balance, mutuality and stillness. To me, a still point is a position of internal balance, not isolated from others, but not solely consisting of reactions to others. Guided by an internal sense of direction, through such still points I return to the energy and challenges of the world.
My oblique journey through my experience of generation started with contradiction, wound its way through questions about home, difficulty and success, and ends with the search for balance. On this path I have been accompanied by the insights of my gifted, generous and wise peers, many of whom I am very fortunate to call my friends.
1 I use the term 'Black' with a capital 'B'
to allude to its meaning as a resistant political identity rather
than a racial classification. Used as such, the term refers to people
previously classified as 'African', 'coloured' and 'Indian'. |
Gabeba Baderoon is a media scholar,
writer and poet. She is completing her PhD on images of Islam in South
African media and culture at the University of Cape Town. She held
an Associateship at the African Gender Institute in 2002, and was
a delegate at the inaugural Oxford Muntada at the Oxford Centre for
Islamic Studies in 2003. Her publications have dealt with art, theatre
and the body. She has also written for ThisDay newspaper, SL
magazine and islamonline.net. Her poetry has appeared in New Contrast,
Carapace, Illuminations, Matter and Feminist
Studies. She has been nominated for the DaimlerChrysler Prize
for South African Poetry for 2005, and her first collection of poetry,
The Dream in the Next Body, will be published by Kwela Books/Snailpress
in 2005. 
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