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