In this world, is he God? Is he recreating in front of his audience a world in which he is validated, not deviant, inferior, less than? Is this man, perhaps, also telling us about a planet on which we are stamped by white supremacy in ways that make us hate those who mirror us?
I am seven years old; it is 1980 in apartheid South Africa. I live in what I am later to learn is something that can be called “a remote part of the country” in a small town with much history. The history has pretty much chosen not to show itself as I sit at my desk. My teacher is not talking about a world in which white people are superior to Black people. This man is talking about gradations within Black society, within Blackness, between Black people, between who counts and who cannot. At this school I am to learn that the fair-skinned girls are prettier. Always. I am to learn that sometimes it occurs that darker-skinned boys or girls are beautiful too. These are sometimes called names like “coffee-coloured” or “dark beauties”. I look around my class when my teacher tells us this for the umpteenth time and recognise that we, the children in my class, represent every shade of Black complexion that I am ever to know.
As an adult, I am struck by the frequency with which my mind conjures up this and other similar scenes. I know that my identity as a Blackwoman is not somatically determined, and that I am not a certain kind of Black person owing to the specific concentration of melanin in my skin. Yet the lingering memory suggests that this moment, and others like it, continue to play some role in my present, in my awareness of the competing, conflicting or connected ways in which my body can be read. It continues to haunt me, because I wonder what effects this brainwashing has on little psyches that are not exposed to alternative ways of viewing the world. I know that this teacher walked up and down rows of desks for close to four decades. I wonder when it became possible for us to teach ourselves, and our children, such intricate routes to hatred.
slide two: body image
A few years later I overhear an adult conversation. Many children know you are not supposed to eavesdrop. I had not mastered the art of disguising this exercise as described in Chris van Wyk’s exquisite memoir. In his Shirley, Goodness and Mercy he suggests:
1 Don’t sit quiet as a mouse. If you can hear them out there in the lounge, they can hear you here in the kitchen. And if you’re quiet they know you’re listening. Make busy noises like drinking a glass of water, sing bits from pop songs, calling to the dog outside. But don’t overdo it.
2 Do something while you’re listening. Read a book or some homework. If they come into the kitchen to switch on the kettle or something, they’ll see a boy struggling with maths and not just staring at a wall.
3 Be wary of jokes coming from the lounge. If someone in the lounge tells a joke, try not to laugh. They’ll know you’ve been listening all along.
4 If Ma calls you, don’t answer immediately. If you do it’s a dead giveaway and means you’ve had your ears tuned on them all the time.
Although my strategies for listening in on adult conversation are not as well thought out, I catch snippets of dialogue not intended for my little-girl ears, and I am careful not to be detected. One day I overhear the way in which a certain Blackman has had to cut off his dreadlocks in order to be able to assume a post he has been offered by the institution he wants to teach in, an institution in my proximity. I wonder what this means about hair; I wonder why this man’s hair gets to be so unacceptable. Why a certain manner of wearing hair should be so important, so undesirable. I know my school has the same fascination with changing what is permitted: pretty plaits one year, and hair cut close to the scalp the next. I wonder why there are so many rules about what you can and cannot do with your own hair. I decide this is just bizarre adult behaviour.
Years later, as I grapple with different narratives, styles and hair-mories, I realise that this is troubled terrain. In a class I teach, a debate ensues about whether appearance can ever be a valid criterion for deciding on people’s traits. This hurtles me further along the path of whether evaluations of bodies and appearance can ever be separated from discussions of race, gender and sexuality.
These are questions that shape our thinking on aesthetics. Beauty, we are told repeatedly, is skin deep. And yet we know that certain sizes and shapes, along with specific forms of body ornamentation, preening and pruning, count as beautiful. In contemporary South Africa we seem to be publicly experimenting, reinventing what counts as aesthetically pleasing, and beyond that, beautiful. This is an exciting process that we can, perhaps, participate in, because we have had to question so much about ourselves continuously.
slide three: body layering
I am thirteen years old, away at an all-girls boarding school in another part of the country. During communal ablutions (this is what the bathing is officially called here) we watch one another’s movements and note differences in the way puberty affects our bodies. There are the intricacies of curvature simultaneously desired and feared: breasts grow fuller, hips assert themselves audaciously. Sometimes the routines of body care betray awkwardness with the unsuccessful concealment of evidence of menstrual blood. There are repeated discussions of the merits and demerits of sanitary towels versus tampons. Which pads are cooler and more comfortable: the clip-on, hook-on or stick-on ones? Do tampons really interfere with the hymen? And on it goes.
As teenagers are wont to be, we are acutely aware of similarities and differences within our midst. Regardless of our varied regions of origin we all take certain things for granted about the processes and art of hygiene. Everybody has two washing-cloths. One, preferably white, is to be used only on the face; the second, which is usually a deeper, richer colour, is allocated to washing “the body”. The colours ensure that there is never confusion, never accidental contamination of the face by the dirty body. The dirtiness of the female body is “clear”. We not only buy into this ideology of the dirty girl’s body, we imagine that keeping the face, and sometimes torso, safe from the dirt of the bum, vagina and sometimes soiled feet is quite clever. We never wonder about how dirty our socked and shoed feet are. We are quite clever, by extension, for absorbing this discipline which we know somehow requires mastering as part of our entry into ladyhood. Cleverness and hygiene seem to merge into some uncanny union, even for those labelled as “tomboys”.
Later we were to ask questions about the pervasiveness of notions of purity and contamination in our relationships with ourselves. When I ask friends and relatives about the washing-cloths midway through writing this piece, it emerges that the tyranny of the two washing-cloths is not central to adult femininities. This is not to say that by adulthood we have all mystically freed ourselves from notions of purity and impurity. The pages of women’s magazines world-wide continue to extol the virtues of products necessary to conceal, disguise and rein in unruly female body smells, shapes and protrusions. Therefore, whereas the religion of Blackgirl hygiene stressed the separation of face and body washing-cloths, followed by the obligatory washing of our panties, as adult women the regimens of body cleansing include numerous products to ensure control of the body’s textures, smells and shapes.
Patricia McFadden has argued that this obsessive narration of women’s bodies in terms of their assumed impurity and being out-of-control is linked to the fear of thinking about women’s bodies in relation to pleasure and/or power. These notions of containment of the girl-and-later-woman’s body are linked to other ways of living in and through our bodies. It cannot be detached from other messages communicated to us as we are socialised into thinking of our bodies as burdens and our minds or souls as the only chance we have of transcending the mire of the bodies we drag with us. Again, I wonder why it is so important to teach hatred of self as a primary emotion through which to negotiate our existence on this planet.
embracing alternatives
I never believed my teacher, even as a child. I knew that the intelligent people in my family like my sister and father, the devout ones like my Nkgono, the ones I relished in observing like Mam’Nambi, were not uniform in skin tone. I recognised that the boy who was my friend, Fika, with whom I competed for first position, was not stupid, no matter what this teacher said. I was struck by too many obvious contradictions in my family, in my friendships, in my world. There were also teachers in the same school who taught explicitly and through example