Monday, January 19, 2009

Madness or Militancy?

dear bell hooks

The first time I started writing the first sentences of this letter to you, I sat with tears in my eyes and a very heavy heart. It was not a good day to say the least. It is not the kind of sadness where you would want to hurt yourself, but the kind of hopelessness a black person feels about one’s race and gender engulfing oneself - those two amazing qualities in a human being that binds us to a specific history and which despite all education, money, status and religious evocations, we are unable to change.

So, what was the source of my despair? Just a single sentence by a young white wannabe-critic on an internet site that dissed me as an artist at a time I felt incapacitated the situation to do anything because of the wide-ranging societal on-goings. This may sound simplistic and I don’t want to ramble on about the details of what I considered nothing short of slander posing as art criticism. The statement, the forum, the manner in which my name was dealt all reeked of racism. I looked at this single sentence with complete shock, with sadness and with anger pulsating through my veins because instinctively I could feel, see, understand the latent racism dripping through every word. I wrote a quick response to her calling her out for the racist she was, intending to write a more formal response explaining why. I sent friends and colleagues the link to the site and quite quickly the argument grew, educated black people trying to explain to this young white lady why her statements were out of order, many more white people rallying to the writer’s defence. The discussion heated up with not a single white respondent able to see why her writing was racist and not even something that could be labelled ‘art criticism’. Interestingly, there were also a few black respondents who understood that something was wrong but wasn’t sure this was racism as opposed to bad, misguided ‘opinion’. The writer continued to write back to all the black respondents saying that they were all getting it wrong and simply didn’t understand her or art criticism in general, turning the racism discussion around to say that if a white critic ‘criticised’ a black artist’s work, then it was easy for the black artist to scream racism.

It took me two weeks to respond in a lengthy categorical letter to this writer. Those two weeks were an incredibly painful experience for me. I cried, I lashed out at my white boyfriend as yet again I struggled internally and externally with the vulgarity of racism in South Africa. I cried my frustrations into my pillow. I set my hopelessness on the bathroom floor and wept over it. This is the ‘me’ that nobody saw. After all, shouldn’t I have been used to this? It’s been nearly two and half years since I wrote an article on what I saw as the complete lack of racial transformation in the visual arts in South Africa, a field whose positions of power are almost completely dominated by white women. I should have been used to having become personae non-grata, having lost white friends, having only a few people pitch up for my exhibitions, having not a single review or listing for any of the shows either locally or internationally that I had participated in, of being humiliated at scholarship and job interviews and articles over the views I expressed – of having this dominant white art world pretend that I didn’t exist except when it chose to denigrate me.

Yet, somehow, it has never stopped hurting. Perhaps because it is because of the dignity with which my parents raised me to believe in a form of ‘higher good’, in my mother teaching me to help the poor, the less fortunate and my union father teaching me to fight for others – for people of colour, for the oppressed, the vulnerable, for myself and what I believed in. As I hurt deeply and felt anger well up inside me to the point of tears, I started to write the long response about why I saw the piece as racist, trying to point out that racism is not just the sheer vulgarity of physical oppression, but beyond that to attitudes, reactions, perceptions, stereotypes, jokes, etc of people of colour without any attempt to understand that another point of view exists that might be equally valid and that the dominant (in this case ‘critical’) view was not just a ‘natural’ one, but was one established with authority through various means.

In the midst of all of this, I began to think about your words. Just two months earlier I had seen an old video you had made on Cultural Criticism and Transformation. It was the first time I saw a visual of you and hearing you speak blew me away. You spoke like you wrote and I felt like I have always heard your voice in my head. As you spoke in the most clearest and simple of ways, you words appeared inside my head and before my eyes and as before, I began to see more and more. With every word, different experiences emerged in my head about my life, about life in society and life in the wider world as a woman of colour. The only way to not see was to close my eyes to the world.

A friend sent me a link to the unofficial bell hooks website that had a list of your interviews. As I began to read the Killing Rage interview, I struggled to hold back the tears that were hardly a second away in those two weeks. As you spoke of what it felt like to be hated and laughed at, I, for the first time since this particular incident happened, felt some sense of healing. I can’t remember where I read this quote (maybe it’s from the ‘Quotable Quotes’ section in the Reader’s Digest) but it said that the greatest empathy a person can feel is knowing that others have felt like they do. It gave me the greatest sense of comfort hearing you discuss how it felt to try to write about oppressions in a black woman’s life. You spoke candidly and in doing so, my spirit began to surface.... I fought back with my words, a bit loud and vulgar I have to confess. More polite, well meaning black colleagues felt that it was becoming personal and would have preferred me to be a bit more general, a bit more academic. I understood and appreciated their sentiments, but the political correctness that had blanketed South Africa for 14 years, has been slowly shred into pieces, wound into a noose and has been used to throttle black people calling for real transformation in this country. Political correctness and politeness be damned I thought! I felt to fight racism you had to take it by the neck and strangle the living daylights out of it, not sit down and have English tea with it. And others could afford for the dialogue to not be personal, after all it wasn’t their careers, their reputation and intellect that was being dismissed, time and time again, so nonchalantly.

Weeks later, after verbally lashing this young woman (by the way she did concede to removing the posting from the site with all the responses which I denied her doing, instead inviting her to a screening of your Cultural Criticism video which she in turn declined), I sat on my bed reading other interviews of yours and some of your works wondering, ‘How can someone who is born in a different place, in a different time, of a different race articulate my pain so clearly that it reduces me to tears?’ Be it about the academic environment, theoretical positions, cultural productions or just about intimate family relationships within the home space, you manage to communicate with all that is this urban black woman in South Africa in 2008, in academic discourse nogal. Your works have never read like other literature and cultural theory books that I have been exposed to. Your works speak to me and I want to talk back to you. I read your words and it is like balm to my open wounds where knives have been plunged in, where festering sores of racism, sexism and class oppression are soothed. I read your words and for a while, all is calm.

I had come across your works about eight years ago while reading about feminisms. From the first time I read ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ I was hooked (sorry about that bad pun, I am sure you must get that alot). I had never read anything before that spoke so uncompromisingly to my life experiences as a woman of colour with intersecting oppressions based on race, gender, class, education, sexuality and religion. Not only could I ‘identify’ with all you said, but more importantly I could see how these factors played out in my life on a daily basis. I read as many of your works as I could get from the library along with other authors on black, African and Afrocentric feminisms. Looking back at that time, this learning didn’t seem like anything phenomenal but just like a normal part of my development, that I had eventually come across the literature and perspectives that fitted my attitude and beliefs. When I left Durban, and attended a more ‘prestigious’ former white liberal university in Johannesburg, I found that using black or Afrocentric feminist discourse became increasingly difficult with my white South African supervisor. I had to constantly justify this body of literature as ‘legitimate’ – I even had to fight to make use of your name in small font and not in capitals! I have to confess that though I didn’t entirely abandon these theoretical perspectives, I did whittle down my usage of them to sufficiently appease the relevant parties. It didn’t take me long to understand the level of racism I was experiencing in Johannesburg was one that I had not experienced before in Durban (that may be due to the fact that I was hardly exposed to white people in my place of study or in informal settings, and then only through brief interactions in the art world). Johannesburg was an entirely different playing ground.

It is important for me to let you know that I did not come to Johannesburg with any intention of getting involved in racial politics. I meant to leave all levels of politics back in Durban and just wanted to be a successful artist, and in the beginning, as long people viewed me as the happy ‘native’, Johannesburg was very kind to me. But daily I became confronted with shameless racist attitudes and actions (especially in the aforementioned university visual arts department), which seemed to be the norm as institutional places were dominated by whites. This was a shock to me as this did not reflect the situation of an African country where over 70% of the population comprised people of colour and an overwhelming part of that being Black South Africans, nor was it in line with my former education in a university where Indian, Black and Coloured students made up the entire population. Being exposed more and more to the visual art sector in Johannesburg, the phenomenon that struck me most was that even though I was constantly reading about white male patriarchy, what I was seeing was the dominance of white women in almost all positions of power across the visual art sector - that the gender and racial transformation punted by the post-apartheid government of 1994 had stopped at white women replacing the white male patriarchy. Sentiments of ‘transformation’ and ‘affirmative action’ were regarded more like swear words (in fact, one white artist whose father was an apartheid government minister still punts ‘affirmative action’ as ‘reverse racism’ as she cries about her partner twice losing out jobs assigned to persons of ‘previously disadvantaged’ status). And even though all I wanted to do was make art works, when presented with an opportunity to write an article on the ‘avant-garde’ in South Africa, I presented my opinions on the lack of racial transformation in the visual arts, listing the vast range of structures and institutions that were headed exclusively by white women. The editor did warn me at the last minute to expect a backlash. And what a backlash it was, completely changing my status, my social networks and opportunities over the next two and a half years in Johannesburg. If I expressed my disappointment or hurt over the crucifixion I suffered, my remaining white friends would retort, ‘What did you expect?’ Indeed what did I expect from South Africa, a place where legislated racism ruled for 40 years and still goes on without having to be enforced? Where democracy only works because the economic status of white dominators has been left untouched for life to go on as usual with a few more electrified fences, gated communities and the forking over of one channel on TV to a black audience?

Out of all that has happened and the price I have had to pay for continuing to speak and write out about this, the one thing I can never get over is being hated by friends who I think should know that my call for transformation is not about personal hatred. It is the white friends who have slandered me with ‘anybody but Sharlene’ propositions that I have wept about. It is the black friends and colleagues who slap you on the back with unified whispers about how great it is that there is someone who isn’t afraid to publicly articulate what ‘we’ all know, but still leave me fighting and bleeding in the trenches alone. It is the friends who don’t want to been seen with you in public for more than a few seconds, just in case they are seen to be collaborating with the troublemaker. It is colleagues who don’t want to work with you or recommend you for any project just in case the troublemaker makes trouble.

I have cried out in my soul, ‘Lord, why? Why? Why Lord?’, which inevitably ends up as ‘Why me Lord?’ I didn’t want this burden, I didn’t ask for this challenge, I never willingly subscribed for this cause. And yet by virtue of my brown skin and hole, my formal education at school and university, of my having paid attention to the lessons of history and life, of having little to risk, but, most importantly, of trying to lift my voice under the rock that weighs on my heart when I know something is fundamentally wrong, I find myself speaking, saying, screaming, hurting and eventually being at peace. And this is the spot inside me that no-one can touch, a part of me that no-one can oppress, a part that still smiles and laughs... And laugh I did when I wrote to an SAfrican friend in the US about my recent woes, saying I often oscillated between anger and madness (the kind that makes you believe you can attempt anything) and she replied that she once read that you had said that we are sometimes left with two alternatives: madness or militancy. I asked her if she could contact you and invite you to come and talk to us, as I felt that your ability to articulate oppressions and the need for transformation was an important discourse for young black Africans to be exposed to. She did try, and having contacted you finally, found out that your elderly parents were not well and that you wouldn’t be travelling for a while. But you did give her your postal address and she left you with an open ended invitation to take up the offer to visit anytime.

So that is what I decided to do – write to you, whether you get to read these words or not. These writing sessions may be as close as I will get to sitting down to talk to you about what it is to be a black woman, to be the target of racism, of ridicule, of hatred, of condemnation; to discuss the matrix of oppressions and freedoms that govern our lives and minds. But mostly though, I would like to hug you and tell you thank you. Thank you for giving me a language in which to talk about my pain, by which to articulate and validate my experiences, academic language to vent my anger, my reality, discourse by which to create my own understanding and start to engineer my own healing. I know for sure that no matter what, that no form of oppression would have been able to silence me, but the power to understand myself, the colour of my skin and the way the world relates to me, gives me a strength which sustains my femininity, my creativity, my intellect. It is only the start of my journey and as I learn from you, not through any preaching on your part, but through your sharing of your own life experiences, I will open my heart and mind and I will write of this black woman’s experiences. I will not make you my god or saint or my saviour and your writings my bible. I have those already. I will take you along and learn from you as my sister – an older sister – who through her own trials has opened up a path of wisdom for me. I hope others will come along with us on this journey.

Yours in love and transit
The Girl who Cried Race

No comments: