Fidelity to me, myself and I

Fidelity to me, myself and I:

the dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured

Prologue

“The short answer is yes”.

He said it. Quite flippantly. I had asked a question: “If I’m understanding you right, are you saying the existential crisis is indefinite, that coloured people will forever be doing Derridean “double duty” to multiple identities?” …“the short answer is yes”. With that I felt the cracks deepen, pieces break away. And he moved on to the next query. And I alone, heard the crack, louder than the splintering before it, I heard the interminable sound of parts of a soul break into, in two maybe.

The prologue, in its historical relationship to text establishes setting and scene, intoning statements necessary to render the ensuing drama intelligible. Ushering the audience in to the world of the authors making, the prologues marks the first encounter, and this first encounter in turn marks all subsequent encounters within the theatrical drama. The prologue, is much like the event, the event which setting the tone for all subsequent happenings, marking the self as it is violently removed from its habitat and cast into a new cosmos. Emanating from this new cosmos, the drama begins…

Setting the scene

To question existence so profoundly that one is caged in by the existential questions that stem from a body/mind/soul in crisis is to exist in a world that is marked by event. Each scene of this event, distinct from those before it yet inextricably connected, plays its role, with the exits and entrances of multiple characters that enable you, the protagonist, to embark on this journey of the self. Akin to Big Bang Theory, in the moment of the individuals encounter with a life-altering event, the world explodes out from one point such that existence as it was before is no longer. This one point, the event, creates the world you now occupy: a world of questions, complications, complexity and most fundamentally, fidelity. Because the world of the existential is inwardly projected this fidelity asserts the utmost importance. Whilst the event definitively alters your relationship to the outward world, it could be ignored, or even lessened in significance, not altering the existential drama as you do not question the change that has been effected. But when, in fidelity to the event, you attempt to make sense of the reorganisation of everything you knew, to deal with the remnants of the explosion, everything gets complicated and life begins to take on dramatics, full of the twists and turns and plot complications that so excite, unnerve and challenge a captive audience of one. I speak of the existential effects of being that are not unique to my personal experience, but of an experience of “millions of men who have been skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement”¹. This essay represents meditations on the event that have marked my navigation of an attempt to understand a self multiplied: to exist as a coloured body, not simply coloured but at once tripled: coloured, white and black, in a motley organisation of the self. As it follows, four scenes stand in a symbiotic relationship with each other, four men amongst each other, unintentionally the dramatis personae of the following scenes, caught up in the existential drama that has come to personify a personal existential navigation. 
 

Written through the chronological line they followed, these scenes allow an understanding of a neurotic obsession with race that so underscores my encounter with the world: a world that is constantly remade and refashioned in an attempt to yield answers to the questions that emanate from my consciousness.

Scene One: For generations, and generations and…

Er no, I am not your father. No. our cultures they don't they don't ... er.. er they don't... they clash, you see. But er, don't worry about this, ne? You don't worry about this, ne? You see, this existential crisis that you are having, it is very common amongst coloured people. So you are not unique in that respect umfaansee, this existential crisis which you are having, it is very common for colored people. so you are not unique in that respect umfaan. you see. ya. so, hamba galshe ne, zong bona some time umfanyan. ne?"

(Kurt Egelhof, Four Generations: 2009)

Four generations, in forty minutes, uncovered the patrilineal story of the lives of four generations of men. Grandfather, Father, Protagonist and Son, held together by how race had so irrevocably marked their lives. Kurt Egelhof, the autobiographical protagonist, tried to make sense of his life through tracing his lineage and embodying the characters of his ancestry and offspring, as well as himself. Midway through the play, following the death of his father, Kurt tells of how he approached numerous men, spoken of only by the proper names of their races, asking “are you my father?” Upon approaching Black Man, he proceeds to say the above, most importantly, “You see, this existential crisis that you are having, it is very common amongst coloured people”. This is the event, 6 lines of text spoken in a play, held in a tiny, dusty hall as laughter bounced back and forth, off the walls. But comedy’s congenital characteristic is laughter from truth. We laughed not because it was simply funny, but because these six lines spoke of truth. I laughed and suddenly became conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. At this point, that the world exploded outwards. Reconstituted, the world now presented itself a question, wholly constituted by this question and the numerous variations of “what does it mean to be me?” This question was now the ever-thumping bass-line in the score of the personal drama, the subtext to which characters spoke to and about, and I, as protagonist and reader, actor and director, was not allowed the ignorance of being unaware of the subtext and its implications. I became fully conscious of myself in the first and third person, acting and watching my self act. Kurt Egelhof and his one-man play could exit stage left: their role had been played. The stage had been set. The drama continued.

Scene Two : Enter Alain Badiou, s’il vous plait

Suddenly, the entrance of event was heralded, as the incarnation of Alain Badiou made its ghostly entrance. Constituting Four Generations as the event, Badiou’s account of the subject and ontology named and framed the existential experience. I, the subject, had experienced an event, viewing Four Generations, which had marked a point of rupture with my present ontological understanding, as an ontology that was not previously present began to take hold. The two integral themes of event, central to this drama, waited in the wings for their cue: “fidelity” and “truth”. With their relationship marked by reciprocity, the subject seeks truth through fidelity to the event, faithful to what the meaning the event holds for their conception of being in the world. Thus, it requires the individual to be active agent and not passive receptor. Reliant on the active decision of the subject, I acquiesced and Fidelity and Truth made their melodramatic entrance. The violent disruption of the established order of things had now set its course, an order in ardent pursuit of truth, a magisterial truth: “definitively unknowable”, yet “made a matter of knowledge by the activity of the subject who acts to integrate it into the discernable and epistemological regime of the situation.”²

Simply put, to understand this truth is to understand what it means to occupy your body, to fully inhabit the phenomenon of being locked in your skin. Multiple intellectuals, like a Greek chorus, enjoy asserting intellectual superiority by uniformly chanting “race is mere “arbitrary” melanin” whenever people’s experience of race comes into question. To this I am tempted to assert Fanon’s statement: “There are too many idiots in the world”. I assert this fully aware of Fanon’s subsequent proviso, that having said that I now have the dilemma of having to prove it. 

 

Simply put, these intellectuals would have more authority if we could excise ourselves from our skin. But in a world where the skin you are in encompasses more than your material self, when it encompasses your being in the world, it seems this arbitrary melanin does not leave experience to chance. It seems melanin is experience.

The bodily experience of being coloured

What does it mean to be in a body that so fully rejects its wholeness? A body existing as a fraction: instead of wholes, we speak of halves, further split into thirds, a sectioned existence. In a body that architecturally reveals its ambiguity, to exist is to live at a strange and perfidious distance from wholeness as your body is absolutely not an absolute. To be coloured, punctuated by an ancestry on competing ends of the colour spectrum, is to be caught manifold existence, both in the way that racial miscegenation causes people to think of you as simultaneously white and black, and in the way the experience differs so profoundly for every person caught in this grey area: neither white nor black, but simultaneously white and black…and coloured. Instead of the self replicated in the standard black/white binary, there is a self multiplied by three.

In the incidence of the “event”, to arrive here is always to arrive there: each moment an evanescent step towards a shifting end point. Much of this can be attributed to encountering yourself as third person: “as I arrive here. She arrives there”. The self in perpetual process seems never destined to reach any sense of the absolute, never to fully arrive, set down ones baggage and rest. To question the self is to be a perpetual wanderer: restless at heart. Multiplied, the coloured body seems constantly attempting mastery over Derridean “double duty” in an attempt to reconcile a self that is split: having not duty to one identity but to multiple. Lamentably, it seems a world is marked by proximities: perpetually a site of nearly; close to; almost; but never completely black or white. It is the proximity to both these worlds that marks the puzzling complexity that has emerged in being simultaneously multiple races. And right on cue enters a man in a suit, red shirt and red shoes.

Scene Three: Double Duty

Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has to place himself - Fanon, 1967: 83

“the short answer is yes”, we return to the prologue, that setting of the dramatic action that often makes its reappearance after the exposition of the action. Grant Farred read his Apostrophizing Algeria: The Ghost In Derrida to a crowd expecting football and the 2010 FIFA World Cup. What they got was football and the 2010 FIFA World Cup, but read through the philosophical lens of French/Algerian Jacques Derrida. Not quite what a crowd of first year students expected. In a poignant lecture, peppered with spectres of Marx, overwhelmingly filled with Derrida, and constituted by Zinedine Zidane and other football players doing double duty to their Algerian and French identities, Farred read his lyrical text. It was football and identity but in and amongst this, I found “colouredness” and identity. For every idea, notion, suggestion, presupposition, I saw “colouredness” with remarkable clarity. Unfolding was the notion of double duty, in the most seamless relation between theory and lived realities, the idea of being a self continually at the mercy of two identities such that the self vacillated between the two. I forgot my beloved football, and thought only on the implications for my understanding of a being at once two. Knee deep in writing a dissertation on being coloured in the world, I was caught within the boundaries of constantly questioning being, constantly having to face myself in the production of this scholarship and personal existential questioning, everything related back to considering my own racial constitution. I had been able to subtly ignore the still unanswered questions that chased me, constantly pursuing my shadow, my self and its numerous projections, in the wake of Four Generations. I had been able to out-run it. But, suddenly, it took hold, I found myself forced me open, unable to continue as I had been: suturing each fragmented part together everyday to be able to be ignore the splinters – ignoring how I had been unable to pull them out before they pulled me apart. “I think I saw Jacques Derrida at the World Cup” he kept saying, and I translated it into my own questions of being and belonging– fashioning it into a framework that would enable me to understand this identity that so haunted me: the identity that had been the subject of acute and sustained enquiry.

“the short answer is yes”

I had asked the question having made the link between how French/Algerian football players do double duty to two nations and identities, and how the phenomenon of being coloured in South Africa often meant double duty between black and white racial identities.

“the short answer is yes”.

In that answer I found nothing but chaos. Violently thrown from my current state of being, I was thrust into radical crisis: the excessive of questions of the self.

Plagued by this critical state of being, I walked around with the world on my back, not Atlas but Quasimodo, crippled under the weight of this understanding. I felt a self eviscerated from itself, simply pieces. I stood at a distance from myself and pondered my self. In a zone of heightened being, I existed only to question existence at every turn: from waking to sleeping, walking down the road, on the telephone to a friend, or standing in the grocery store. Each second was occupied by the repercussions of Farred’s answer: questioning racial strictures. It is an invidious position to find yourself in.

Ryland Fisher writes “I am obsessed with race because it has always been obsessed with me”. My obsession with race is similar. I can at every moment of my life point to some instance where race has reared its ugly head: whether a baby, toddler, teenager, or young adult. Every day I am confronted with race, which only impacts so deeply as I have been so engaged in questioning it. I cannot forget, the world will not let me, but most importantly I will not let me, not until I have understood what it means, until fidelity has led to some sense of truth. In The Other Healing, Jacques Derrida writes:

I am European, I am no doubt a European intellectual, and I like to recall this, I like to recall this to myself, and why would I deny it? In the name of what? But I am not, nor do I feel, European in every part, that is, European through and through. By which I mean, by which I wish to say, or must say: I do not want to be and must not be European through and through, European in every part. Being a part, belonging as ‘fully a part’, should be incompatible with belonging ‘in every part’. My cultural identity, that in the name of which I speak, is not only European, it is not identical to itself, and I am not ‘cultural’ through and through, ‘cultural’ in every part. (OH, 82)

If you substitute “European” with coloured, you can begin to understand my neurosis, the pathological obsession with race. Experiencing a self as parts, you begin to pick apart each piece, questioning, why do I not feel completely whole? Why does each part look different from the one before, why am I not identical to myself, not coloured through and through coloured in every part. Arbitrary melanin, but not arbitrary questions.

“the short answer is yes”

The interminable nature of this double duty is what unsettled me most.

How the past would haunt both the present and the future. I stood, a person divorced from a people, apart from the crown, feeling at once foolish that I was so taunted and haunted by 5 words, but feeling the same sinking feeling return, descend upon me once more.Viscerally, I felt only rupture. Numb to other sensations. Usually you shift and the world shifts with you. But in that moment the world had suddenly shifted and I was the split-second delay: tardily chasing my shifting world, trying to keep up with it, understand it: and failing on every account. I heard the spectre of Yeats as I fell apart, and the centre did not hold³. My world was mere anarchy.

Scene Four: Fanon enters to the sound of Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini⁴

I burst apart, now the fragments have been put together again by another self⁵

Into the morass entered Fanon, first appearing in the play as the stock character of “knight in shining armour”, soon to be followed by ancestor and brother. In Fanon I found solace, a valiant ancestor who had walked the path I now trod and rendered my crisis intelligible. No longer in woeful solitude, or paralysing crisis, to find Fanon was to make a joyful discovery. Finding Fanon feels akin to an archaeologist making a great, historically significant find that suddenly unleashes a wave of possibles: most crucially the act of reconstituting the self but a self reconstituted. Fanon held the answer to the questions that had plagued, through the notion of transcendence. A notion that had never entered the realms of what had been I’d thought possible, but which holds out the hope of ending an all-consuming pathology. Deceptively simple, this notion of transcending your race is not an answer, but the only answer to a world in which race matters, often more than the content of character. The only way out is beyond.

In Fanon I see myself reflected, often identically, some times more abstractly and most acutely in Black Skin, White Masks. The Lived Experience of Blackness, the oft-quoted fifth chapter is Fanon’s personal, poetic and poignant engagement with his own existential crisis. In a world of constant liberal claims, multiple distractions and the apparent inurgency in dealing with being, there is a reassuring sense of solidarity felt in the recognition of a similar pathology. To read Fanon was to read a resounding yes that echoed with manifold truths, resounding from a dizzying height to the deepest foundations. The similarities in racial experience are uncanny, particularly given the different contexts and eras. Suddenly I began to see spectres of Fanon everywhere; he became the omnipotent god of all things race related: the first and last word in all situations. Fanon became the answer in a place where there had previously been none. Gradually, as it must, the godly status afforded waned in the realisation of Fanon’s humanness, and the knightly armour saw a costume change into a dapper suit, but the respect of a life lived with profound insight and fidelity remained intact. Fanon became not the answer, but holds glimmer of hope: the hope of transcendence.

Transcendence: unmasking façade

The coloured body has always been enigmatic, a shape-shifter of sorts: at times able to take on other races with relative ease. To possess a body able to transcend its skin has been the will of many of my ancestors, but this has been regrettably towards one side of the colour spectrum. 
 

There is a sick pleasure that washes over one in this recognition of the body’s ability to transcend itself through the proximity to whiteness that means coloured people can try for/play white. The joy is not having white skin, you know your own perjury. The delight is the achievement of neutrality. A world where your body is yes, your mind is a yes and you inhabit the world in affirmation…until your lie reveals itself and you begin again, attempting this fraudulent transcendence. As Fanon says: “out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white”, and it is this I vehemently detest. This is not “hurrah for Schoeler⁶” but a “hurrah for Verwoerd”, a shout which sticks in the throat, malignantly beginning to take on the disease of corporeal malediction. In recognition of this suspicious and deceptive victory, I strip off the ill-gotten, abhorrent coat of Mayotte Capacia and now proceed as Malcolm X, adopting his swagger and rhetoric. And it tastes like freedom.

True transcendence, it is the possibility of truly moving past and beyond race's grip, getting beyond an skin under which something perpetually crawls; leaving one constantly scratching at the stitches one has sutured in the attempt to keep it all in. It is the thought that perhaps the ground will not keep giving way, and the world will stop its relentless and tiresome reconstitution. That perhaps it is possible to imagine a world in which the body is not constantly abraded by looks, gestures, words and actions that reveal race’s malevolence; perhaps it is possible for there to be a world where to be coloured is not to occupy a neither here nor there existence, as the product of miscegenation; perhaps it is possible to be free from the chains of an existence in duality, an existence characterised by assuming a persona akin to the dilemma of French/Algerian football players.

Scene five: Je suis Zidane

Yet, it is in the last scene that I drape myself in the uniform of Zidane, taking on not the colours of Les Bleus, not the double duty implicit in the indistinct identity. Rather taking on the state of mind and technical mastery that enabled Zidane to emerge as one of the greatest footballers of all time. For if I am to play as a midfielder, caught in the racial interstices and bound by the rules of this racial game, then I hope to play with the skill of Zidane: a midfielder, controlling and receiving the ball with ease, skill and technical precision. A midfielder who was capable of launching a crippling defence as a master controller and receiver of the ball, and possessing, in his virtuosic facility, the capacity to score game-winning goals. Ultimately, not simply a player of the game, but a playmaker. In being locked in this perpetual football game where the stadium lights are always on, highlighting every manoeuvre and the rules dictate possible action, emancipation can only be achieved by our own active pursuit as “none but ourselves can free our minds”⁷.

Recognising the façade of emancipation that emanates from liberal rights discourse, the battle still wages from within the confines of the mind. In this embattled territory, it then seems apt that games are won or lost in the midfield⁸.

The final soliloquy

So we return to the self, ending where we began: questioning existence and event. We have seen the entrances and exits of the dramatis personae, the action has taken place, and there has been climax, melodrama, violence and sorrow. All that seems to remain is for the curtain to descend upon this drama…yet it does not. Rather, a voice bellows:

All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts⁹

Epilogue

The epilogue is not. In its place is the ellipsis. Without end, conclusion, dénouement, catharsis. The exhumed ghosts resist burial. The body, in its mental and physical capacity, continues its perpetual journey, “surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty”¹⁰

Notes

1 Aime Cesaire, Discours sur le Colonialisme

2 Roffe, 2006: 336

3 W.E.B Yeats, The Second Coming

4 A composition by Sergei Rachmaninov, in tribute to the virtuosic violinist Niccolo Paganini, with subtle sanguine tones building to an elated climax

5 Fanon, F., 1967: 82. Black Skin, White Masks.

6 Fanon cites a story of a black negro in bed with a blonde, at the moment of orgasm the negro is said to shout “Hurrah fro Schoeler”

7 Bob Marley, Redemption Song

8 Farred, 2000

9 Shakespeare, As You Like It

10 Fanon, 1967: 83

Thinking as the rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered

Thinking as rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered

I have had time away from considering “colouredness”, to consider considering – interrogating thinking and the act of thought in fundamental process: thought that is a continual rethinking. At the recent, Fanon Fifty Years Later Colloquium at Rhodes University, Grant Farred’s paper used Heidegger as an entry point into the notion of thinking from the beginning. Considering the depths, and positing the project of thinking as fundamental inquiry that is a necessarily iterative process, Farred’s paper has stayed with us students as a challenge and a paradigm shift.

My time away from writing has led to many alterations in the first thoughts I momentarily considered: whether the declarative statements I made about the phenomena of “colouredness” or the fairly unthought ideas put down in haste – the thoughts that are not really thoughts, since they have not been subject to rethinking and critique from within. The ideas that I am beginning to formulate for my masters keep changing, in some instances minor shifts and in others theoretical quakes that requires a complete repositioning and again asks for rethinking.

For example, the Kuli Roberts debate – that has now been put to rest along with so many other necessary debates that suffer and all too early death in the graveyard of post-apartheid enquiry –represents something distinct from the ostensible questions of representation that it poses. It is easy to get caught up in the representation questions, but beyond the surface the greatest issue is that of the silencing of these debates: no matter how necessary. The post-apartheid project booms loudly over the constant debates that quickly quiet down to mutterings and whispers and then are quickly forgotten, only to be recalled when yet again we face the failure of addressing what it means to be in South Africa now. This is not a fresh, clean country that has wiped the slate of history – but one that comes to us carrying its baggage all too evidently. Again, Grant Farred astutely argues:

The concept of colouredness and its effects, the way in which it informs the thinking, political responses, the voting tendencies, the cultural particularities, the divided, bifurcated racial consciousness, of this South African constituency can only be understood if it is publically ‘debated’, ‘extended (in the sense that it is subjected to a demanding intellectual interrogation) and ‘quarrelled’ over and over again – Grant Farred, 2000: 8 -9

This intellectual interrogation is indeed demanding, requiring treading through minefields and murky waters and fundamentally insisting on thinking, and not the first thoughts that readily present themselves, masquerading as thinking. It is a critical project that is punctuated by inconsistencies and profound paradoxes, but most importantly, it is one of the most necessary enquiries in our post-apartheid context. To return then to this project, considering colouredness, is to start a thinking that will be arduous, demanding, slippery and complex – but that can indeed only be understood through fidelity to thinking: thinking as beginning again, thinking as the rethinking of thoughts momentarily considered.

To Have Nothing to Lose

I wrote this inspired by the work of the incredible Frantz Fanon

To have nothing to lose

by Danielle Alyssa Bowler


In 2004, an article written by Zenzile Khoisan titled “Crime hits coloureds hardest-study” was published in the Cape Argus. It drew on Phil Leggett’s “research”, which claimed coloured people have a greater propensity for violent crime. The article engendered much discord, particularly over the acceptance or rejection of the term “coloured”. Gino Fransman, an academic from the University of the Western Cape, wrote a response in which he embraced the term, while questioning the homogenisation of the racial group, which triggered this response by (Chief) Joseph D. Little:

If you truly want to take this matter of your identity seriously, as some of us have, then you will stop calling yourself a coloured. You will call yourself what our first nation indigenous ancestors called themselves: Khoi-Khoi (or Khoi-San). It simply means people or humankind. In order to be a true Zulu or Xhosa, you must have a language and a land… I have not found a coloured who speaks coloured and lives in colouredland (Fransman, 2005: 25, my emphasis)

When viewed in light of Little’s response, W.E.B Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness emerges within Fransman’s attempt at self-description. It raises the problem of articulating the self in “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (du Bois, 1905: 3). Thus the self is conscious of other interpretations of their reality, other articulations of their way of being in the world – and has to articulate itself in relation to this other world, not the inverse.  It is a peculiar sensation: being at once whole and splintered. To occupy a body that has to qualify its existence, that has to measure its “soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (du Bois, 1905: 3). Not because of a lack, but though overabundance the Coloured body articulates itself through ancestral plethora, often simplified through the evocation of the black/white binaries: firmly positioned in the middle. Thus to inhabit the interstices[1] is to occupy a precarious space: a space that inhibits movement within the colour spectrum provided by rainbow nation rhetoric and apartheid’s residue, a space that is both undefined and overly defined, as if defies easy definition yet fixed borders have been delineated . It is a space in which the “basic importance” Fanon ascribes to “the phenomenon of language” operates with great difficulty. 

For Fanon, “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (Fanon 17).The lack of a speaking “coloured”, does not mean a non-existence, but rather the existence of multiple languages, converging within the mixed-race body. This in my experience, it becomes not about the pragmatics of speaking English, but about the interplay of language and culture, as Fanon would rightly claim to speak a language is to “assume a culture” (17). However, the overabundance of language (and culture) within the coloured body causes a profound complexity in dealing with this phenomenon.

There is a Zulu on my stoep

As a young child, I have memories of Zulu being spoken around me – understanding it as being used for its practicality, linking my family’s knowledge of Zulu to the fact that grandparents owned a farm and it was the language of its farm workers,. As I got older, and more existential, enquiring into my history and trying to trace my family tree revealed the silencing of Zulu ancestry – perhaps as it was unpopular to embrace black heritage during Apartheid, within the coloured community. Thus, I began to attempt learning the language, intentionally pulling at the roots, stuttering and stumbling through the familiar clicks and the unfamiliar grammar – aided by the songs of Brenda Fassie and Mafikizolo and a very patient domestic worker as my tutor. However, this language assumes a culture that I have little access to – again, I found myself on the peripheries, on one side of the racial binary that is used to measure a coloured soul. As I further enquired my bodies archive the presence of other cultures and histories asserted themselves, bringing their languages with them. But, from the lessons learned in learning Zulu, I was acutely aware that to learn Portuguese or French, or any other of the languages in the vast archive that constitutes my history, would not give me direct access to their assumed cultures. 

Poverty of Choice

A cultural poverty emerges within this rich history – a paradox, as having so much to draw on implies an agency, but this very agency is inhibited by the presence of so much. To use so much is deliberate, as what there is, what constitutes much is often unknown – tracing the family tree leaves many loose ends, many (intentionally) severed roots. This is not to deny the strong presence of ancestral roots within some coloured communities, families and individuals. This is only to speak of that which I know, a singular experience that may have resonances for some, but not be the experience of others. Grant Farred (2000: 14) remarks that to be coloured is an “uneven experience” – different for all those who are called by a singular name: a name that implies a singular culture, and a singular way of being. This singularity often draws on the Cape in its attempts to reduce the experience of coloured people and language to Afrikaans (ignoring even the difference present in the Cape). However, with a relationship with Afrikaans gained not in a home, but at school, I find myself even outside the interstices, as the way “colouredness” has been constructed rejects the experience of those who do not fit within the homogenised identity. But if to speak is to exist, then speaking English gives access to existence. However, an acute splintering occurs in light the knowledge of the presence of other ways of existing, of other languages that cry out from within an embattled body.

Conclusion

For who belongs nowhere, is to nothing/deeply attached (Arthur Nortje, in Farred, 2005: 59).

With language and identity so intrinsically linked, I long for a language to lose. Hearing the narratives of those who lament the dying of their cultures and languages in the face of Westernisation, I long to have a voice in which to assert my loss, I long to have a culture to sever ties with. However I am aware that it is not the loss that I long for, it is having something to lose – to reject or accept myself, for agency. But the loss happened long before me, and in the face of overabundance, the choice was not mine to make. Uncomfortably inhabiting the interstices is to constantly “feel the ground give way beneath one’s feet”, as one is forced to vacillate between binaries and wrestle within. 

Paradoxically, the presence of the overabundance of language, which ostensibly gives proximity to these multiple worlds, causes a profound lack: a nothingness of sorts. I find myself deeply attached to this nothingness: questioning its constitution, pulling out all the strands within the overabundance that caused it. In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Homie Bhaba asks “How can the human world live its difference? How can a human being live Other-wise?” (Bhaba, cited in Fanon,1986/1957:xvii). Thus, I find myself increasingly committed to both understanding and constructing a way of living difference, asserting this difference through articulating what it means to occupy the interstices: what it means to speak and feel the force of other languages as they silently assert their presence.

---

[1] See Farred, 2000. The Midfielders Moment

By any other name...

Cartoon: Neal Obermeyer

Increasingly, I find myself obsessed with the idea that everything comes down to thoughts, and more precisely what determines thought, particularly in relation to naming. Socially, we construct understandings through naming. This naming, is seemingly unproblematised. We need words, we use them daily in our interactions, we use them without questioning them...they seem to have always been there. We need to name something within our societies so we can understand it. We need to know "things", and therefore to know them, we name them. Thus thoughts become shared ideas, shared constructions of names, these names become categories, and we create knowledge about the categories through going through this circular process again. What am I on about?

Well, essentially it is an issue that goes back to the question: "is there a coloured identity". For me, it all starts with the name, the created category, formed because Apartheid and its architects necessitated it. But the name has currency within our post-Apartheid reality...so it is (often) unquestioningly adopted. So, we are stuck with the "abandon/embrace" debate that characterises much scholarship on coloured identity. It is a complex situation, mostly because we are a complex people - grouped together despite our heterogeneity. and this grouping is important, because within our different locations and between different people, we have formed our own understandings of what it means to BE COLOURED. We have socially constructed colouredness as well.

These constructions counter the imagined coloured community that dominates both popular thought and consciousness, some times mirroring it, some times directly opposed to it, but mostly ignored because of the process of naming, and the invisibility of the architecture behind it.But mostly, and posing a more complex problem, these understandings of what it means to "be" are often at odds with each other. Thus, I find myself in the interstices, in the interstices: caught in the traditional idea of being between black and white, and caught in between ideas of what it means to be coloured from within the community itself. Named, yet the name feels strange on my tongue, I say it daily and each time I say it I feel something stirring, a questioning of the name that gets stronger with each utterance.

I found this today and find it quite profound in light of the above argument:

Talking Heads: Give me back my name

There's a word for it
And words don't mean a thing
There's name for it
And names make all the difference in the world
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth...
Let X make a statement
Let breath pass through those cracked lips

Ryland Fisher asks the important questions

Ryland Fisher (photo credit: rylandfisher.book.co.za)  

In reading much of the current work on coloured identity (whether within formalised structures of academic, or the media and stretching to include public debate), there is much generalisation that occurs. However, occasionally, there are voices that insert themselves with much intelligent thought and consideration. One such voice is that of Ryland Fisher, who in the Mail and Guardian's ThoughtLeader blog section, has written a considered piece on whether a coloured identity can be said to exist. A fantastic piece of nuanced and detailed work that is notable in its contribution. Also, could be seen as the antithesis of Kim Smith's claims about coloured people, specifically in relation to Trevor Manuel referring to himself as "black". Here, Fisher employs the epithet in relation to its "black consciousness" roots, which Smith should have referred to, if she was to stand in opposition to its use.

I find his article extremely intelligent and interesting, especially in light of his identification that:

The issue of whether there is a coloured identity is not new, but it surfaces every now and then. It seems to surface more every time we are heading for another election (Fisher,

Additionally, he makes an important claim - that requires a lot of investigation: the fact that the category "coloured" was created by the Apartheid government to deal with those who could not fit neatly delineated boxes, yet still has currency in the post-Apartheid reality(ies). Do we employ these categories because it is easier? And if it is easier does this necessarily make it better? I always like to draw attention to the language that we use, because language makes reality, and is directly related to what we claim to know. Knowledge is power - and what does the use of the word "coloured" say about those in power?



Here is Ryland Fisher's article (available on the Mail and Guardian page; all credit to the Mail and Guardian online):

Is there a coloured identity?

 

Some media forms work better than others for different things. For instance, it is difficult to describe a song in writing because one can only appreciate its nuances when one is listening to it.
In the same way, it is probably impossible to try to have a debate about something as complex as “coloured identity” in five minutes on television. This debate is probably best suited to a documentary, a radio programme, a newspaper or magazine article, or a book.
Yet last Sunday, I tried to have this debate with two other studio guests on Weekend Live on SABC2. Apart from a host of mess-ups, like us not being able to link to the guest in Tshwane and my connection from Cape Town being lost when I was trying to make a crucial point about why I call myself black as opposed to coloured, it was also difficult to have this debate in the limited time available.
As it was, we were not treated to any of the views of the representative of a website called Bruin-ou.com and I would have loved to have debated his views. Maybe somebody involved in another media form will take up the challenge and get us together to debate this issue once again.
I have never considered myself to be a coloured and prefer to describe myself as black, in line with the definitions explained by Steve Biko in the 1970s. At the time, the apartheid regime called us non-whites and Biko questioned why “white” had to be the standard against which everything was judged. He asked why “black” could not be this standard. He argued that we should all call ourselves black (Africans, coloureds and Indians), and whites should be called non-blacks.
These definitions have, of course, been entrenched in our law and our Constitution, so I can legally call myself black.
The issue of whether there is a coloured identity is not new, but it surfaces every now and then. It seems to surface more every time we are heading for another election.
At first I used to reject the notion of coloured identity out of hand; recently I have become much more sensitive towards it, but I still cannot see myself adopting this identity. However, I understand completely why some people say they are coloured and proud of it, like I believe the singer Vicky Sampson said on the same programme on Sunday.
Now, Vicky is my home girl. We grew up together in Hanover Park on the Cape Flats and belonged to political youth organisations in the early 1980s, so she has a consciousness of non-racialism and how important this was to our struggle.
At some point she, like me, called herself “black”. But she would not be the only one who now suddenly seeks solace in being a “coloured”.
Like I said, I have no problem with people identifying themselves as “coloured”, but then they must afford me the right to assert my human identity, my South African identity or my black identity.
I think the resurgence in people identifying themselves as coloureds could be laid at the door of short-sighted politicians who failed to make people who could potentially identify themselves as coloureds feel welcome in the new South Africa.
But it also has to do with economics, where people who identify themselves as coloureds have to fight for a small piece of the economic pie along with Africans.
If you speak to Africans, especially in the Western Cape, they will tell you that coloureds are favoured. If you speak to coloureds in the Western Cape, they will tell you that Africans are being favoured. The truth is probably that neither of the two is being favoured.
I try to deal with the issue of coloured identity in my book and I ask how one identifies a coloured. There are certain markers to identity and, of all the markers that I could think of, it is difficult to find any great commonality among the group roughly called “coloureds”.
I still believe that the only definition of “coloureds” is people who could not be fitted into any of the other apartheid-era definitions.
And isn’t it amazing how our democratic government has just adopted all the apartheid-era terminology? But that is probably the subject of another blog

Ryland Fisher

The problem with coloureds? Hmmm

The Jimmy Manyi debate continues to assert its voice in local press, mostly in the Trevor Manuel style (open letters lambasting Manyi's claims). It's interesting that multiple voices are emerging, from students to politicians, each claiming to identify the cause or problem at hand.

Most recently, Mandela Rhodes scholar Kim Smith inserted her thoughts into this debate, with a post in the ThoughtLeader blog section of the Mail and Guardian, titled: "The problem with coloured people" - which immediately had me raising an eyebrow (there is much to be said about word utilisation).

Smith argues that Manuel is acting as a "coloured" individual in writing to Manyi, yet employs a non-racial stance within the letter (rejecting his coloured-ness). This is seen as a paradox.

In my view, there is a problem with coloured people. The problem perhaps with coloured people is summed up in Minister Trevor Manuel’s letter. On the one hand, he says something to the effect of the idea of “coloured” being a construct of apartheid and that he doesn’t subscribe to it, but on the other hand, and I mean let’s be honest, the reason he’s writing is because he’s coloured! That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy almost, one which translates into a contradiction protruding into the very existence of coloured ethnicity. And though most people are thinking “good on you Trevor! You told him lekker”, the reality is that his letter was a bit of an emotional outburst. How can he call the man “a racist in the mould of Verwoerd”? Coloured people don’t know who they are. Those who say “we are African” or “black” are delusional: coloured men don’t go into the bush to be circumcised. The point is, black people in South Africa have their own culture, separate to the culture of coloured people. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with that.

While I applaud Smith's original aim - to see what was behind the letter and what it was arguing for, what she actually does is essentialise Manuel's position. Smith argues that coloured people's lack of an identity is at the root cause of the "problem" (right), but also that people like Manuel exacerbate this when they employ African/black to describe themselves (wrong).

Why wrong?

Well, one should start by asking, what does Manuel mean by black? One can begin to understand his position when we look at Manuel's broader socio-historical context (which should never be ignored if one is to comment on someone's opinion). Manuel's non-racialism/rather black stance emerges out of the black consciousness vein of thought, a stance often taken by coloured exiles and comrades, where coloured and Indian people are included as "black" - all suffering similar oppression under apartheid, all grouped together under non-white. So when Smith says,

Coloured people don’t know who they are. Those who say “we are African” or “black” are delusional: coloured men don’t go into the bush to be circumcised. The point is, black people in South Africa have their own culture, separate to the culture of coloured people. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with that.

she makes giant deductive leaps (evident in the emotive language: "delusional" is a little strong, I think). Manuel is not employing African-ness vis-a-vis claims to black culture, but rather employing its black consciousness definition.

Seeking a solution, Smith says

But deeper than that, and specifically as coloureds, we need to react in a way that exalts us as a people, a culture, an ethnicity, one that we can be proud of. And when this happens, we will be able to secure our place in South Africa and Africa. And once our place is secure, we will abandon our ailing chick identity and soar above the stereotypes like eagles, not because we told them lekker but because we showed them who we really are!

I would argue, this is exactly what Manuel does in both his letter and his actions - while he did "tell Jimmy lekker", he continues to act (and react) in a manner that uplifts the image of the "coloured man". That, is more important, that is key: lived experience that exposes, contradicts and reveals stereotype for what is is.
But fundamentally, the problem is not with "coloured" people, the problem lies with all of us - especially when, like Smith, we try to stand outside an issue and judge it, rather than revealing our own prejudice, misgivings. There are many ways in which every single person, consciously or unconsciously, contributes to stereotype and essentialisation of a race or culture. It's inescapable, race is written into the tapestry of our national consciousness - and recognising this complicity is key.

Essentially: We are all complicit, we are all "the problem".

Trevor Manuel's open letter to Jimmy Manyi

The best way to silence ignorance (or in this case racism) is through intelligence and articulate response. Trevor Manuel's open letter to Jimmy Manyi - in light of his call for coloured people to be distributed throughout South Africa is possibly the best open letter I have read. Provoking much debate, and high-fives, throughout South Africa, Manual inserts his voice into the "coloured debate" with the equivalent of an intellectual backhand. An absolute gem.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Jimmy,

Let us drop titles for the purpose of a necessary exchange. So let us forget for now that I am a cabinet minister and that you are a director-general equivalent, in the same government.

I want to address you simply as a compatriot South African.

I want to draw to your attention the fact that your statements about “an over-concentration of coloureds” are against the letter and spirit of the South African Constitution, as well as being against the values espoused by the Black Management Forum (BMF) since its inception.

That you were a director-general of the Department of Labour, as well as the president of the BMF at the time when you made these statements is quite a mystery.

It is a mystery because I must assume that you were elected as president of the BMF, without any familiarity with the history and constitution of that organisation; and that you were appointed as director-general of the Department of Labour, without any familiarity with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa or the legislation administered by the department.

I observe from a Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) press release, that Mr Vusi Mona issues in his own name, that you apologise for the statement because “some people may have taken offence”. This continued negative behaviour merely serves to confirm the values that you hold, or more precisely, lack.

Firstly, why Mr Mona had to issue a statement is beyond comprehension since you distinctly did not utter those racist sentiments as an official of the GCIS.

Secondly, that you lack the moral conviction to publicly apologise says so much about your acute lack of judgement.

Thirdly, that the statement apologises only for the fact that “some people may have taken offence” says to me that you clearly fail to appreciate the extent to which your utterances are both unconstitutional and morally reprehensible.

These “things”, (as the ANC statement says, your utterances reduce people to being mere commodities) in your view, “the coloureds who are over-concentrated in the Western Cape”, are the sons and daughters of those who waged the first anti-colonial battles against the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British when they set foot on our shores.

These “things”, which so irritate you, include many who made huge sacrifices in the struggle against apartheid, at a time when people with views like Jimmy Manyi were conspicuous by their absence from the misery of exile, the battles at the barricades and from apartheid’s jails. By the way, what did YOU do in the war, Jimmy?

I want to put it to you that these statements would make you a racist in the mould of HF Verwoerd. I want to put it to you that you have the same mind that operated under apartheid, never merely satisfied with inflicting the hurt of forced removals and the group areas act, would encamp language groups so that horrible aberrations, such as Soshanguve, were created to accommodate “non-Tswanas” in their own little encampments in greater Mabopane.

Mr Manyi, you may be black, or perhaps you aren’t, because you do not accept that label and would prefer to be “only a Xhosa”. Whatever the label you choose, I want to put it to you that your behaviour is of the worst-order racist.

I refer to you in this way because those of us who found our way into the struggle through the Black Consciousness Movement have always understood the origin of the Black Management Forum, as we have understood and supported the ANC documents that speak of “blacks in general, and Africans, in particular”. Regrettably, in your understanding the term “black” has quite a different meaning. As a consequence of your behaviour, people like me – in the ANC and in government – are being asked to explain what was in the mind of the drafters of the amendments to the Employment Equity Act.

We were present at the point of the debate of the first Employment Equity Bill; we expressed a complete comfort with the assignment of “designated groups” to include “black people” which means “Africans, Coloureds and Indians” because it served as a representation of our constitutionality and as the fruits of our struggle.

When, in your capacity as chairperson of the Employment Equity Commission, you made strange utterances that sought to carve away the basic premise of the Employment Equity Act, we should have been more vigilant.

The just and constitutionally obligated provisions for redress are not and can never be an excuse to perpetuate racism.

Now, in the light of the utterances you made when you were the DG of the Department of Labour, and given the fact that the amendments to the Employment Equity Act were drafted during your tenure, I have a sense that your racism has infiltrated the highest echelons of government.

Count me among those who, in spite of my position, will ensure that parliament acts in the letter and spirit of our constitution when it adopts amendments to the act.

I have never waged any battle from the premise of an epithet that apartheid sought to attach to me but I will do battle against the harm you seek to inflict. When I do so, it is not as a coloured but as a non-racist determined to ensure that our great movement and our constitution are not diluted through the actions of racists like you.

I have been prepared to sacrifice before for the cause of the kind of society articulated in the Freedom Charter. It is not a cause that has ended. I have simply not been called upon to make the same kind of sacrifices since 1990. I must declare my willingness to make sacrifices now in deference to the opening lines of the Freedom Charter that boldly declare that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”.

I now know who Nelson Mandela was talking about when he said from the dock that he had fought against white domination and that he had fought against black domination.

Jimmy, he was talking about fighting against people like you

Trevor Manuel - Photo Credit: Tracey Adams