The previous body recollections strike me as linked to efforts to make us distance our spiritual and mental selves from the ways in which we are embodied. Of course, these saturate the world beyond the specific spaces within the Black society that I grew up in in the seventies and eighties. We have all been irritated by the barrage of chain blond jokes at parties, in our email inboxes, and elsewhere. From different angles we are bombarded by such ideologies: in institutionalised religion, various philosophical and other intellectual traditions, and through the assorted popular cultural forms we participate in molding. These messages safeguard the separation of the body from the more abstract entity altogether: mind and/or spirit. In the binary oppositional way we have been programmed to think, and often continue to be complicit with, this means one is good and the other bad. They cannot just be different. And so generation after generation we are told we have to choose: either efface our bodies when in pursuit of cerebral interest or highlight the aesthetically approved body.
dancing between the masks
In your sure-footed stride
across troubles and joys
do your steps ever falter?
– ABENA PA BUSIA
I no longer choose. The metaphor and visual representation of dancing between masks speaks to me. In the Thembinkosi Goniwe print of the same name, I am intrigued by the joy on the faces of those dancing. It has become important to realise that the activity between these two masked positions, body and intellect, is not just struggle. You can dance there. And, yes, there are “troubles and joys”.
It is crucial to begin to make new memories of embodiment: forms that encourage pleasure and power. Running with the dancing and sure-footed metaphors, we touch the space where body and mind/spirit perform not as competitors but as playmates. And it should be possible to continue to think critically and insurgently about what play means sexually, politically, spiritually and any-other-ly. Enjoying the play, and making it our home, cannot be trapped in conventional beauty and acceptability when these are designed to make us disappear: nip, tuck, tweeze, wax, cover, starve, bleach.
Today, I am an adult woman. My agency exists even in the face of powerful institutionalised forms of violence. To assert this insurrectionary agency, to speak as a feminist rogue, disloyal and disrespectful of the rules of patriarchy, as a teacher, as an older Blackwoman, is my responsibility and, I imagine, one we all should share. Today my spirit-mind-body-self delights, frightens, pleasures, shocks and is. My body is the home of my spirit – not its temple – and I like the shiny dip on one shin from when my leg caught on a rusty nail as I rushed back to my seat before the teacher returned to her classroom, the scratches here and there from losing balance as I climbed a wall or tree, the adventurous strand of hair there, and even the protruding bone on my foot that makes it hard for me to wear certain shoes. My spirit is the oil and incense in my body and I relish its textures, its slipperiness and its fire, even as I am aware of its explosions. It excites me to think that in some small way I contribute daily to the uncovering of possibilities for children and younger people. I see signs that there are people engaged in this every day, especially today at the bottom of this amazing continent I was made from. As I walk the streets of the cities and small towns of this southern region, I am delighted by the creative ways in which people are engaging with their bodies more and more. There is a tickle in my spirit-place when I see young Blackwomen, especially, communicating comfort and love of themselves to themselves. It is a wonderful energy, because it confirms to me the chain reaction we set off when we allow ourselves to become an expression of who we really are, and can be.
CHAPTER 2
Battling to normalise freedom
I was born in December 1972, and so that makes me a child deeply shaped by the cultures of the 1970s and ’80s, as I moved through childhood. It also means that I was 21 when I voted for the first time in 1994.
When I speak to my students, and to some young people, whose childhood was in the 1990s and the 2000s, I recognise the incomprehension of how hopeful 1994 was, what a relief to have an opportunity to think of ourselves differently than we had under apartheid. It may be a gap that is simply impossible to bridge in comprehension. And that gap makes post-apartheid failures so devastating, not because nothing has changed – for this is simply not true – but because too little has changed in ways that expand the vision of what is possible, and too much has changed in directions that should have remained unrealisable. Everywhere, and increasingly, there are reminders of missed opportunities to create the country we dreamt of as I entered adulthood.
I borrow the phrase of normalising freedom from Njabulo Ndebele, writer, cultural theorist and leading academic, who uses it to express the move away from simply gaining freedom to being able to fully experience the range of what freedom means. Ndebele coins the phrase “the difficult task of normalising freedom” for the new South Africa: political freedom was achieved and yet this achievement continues to be contaminated by – and intertwined with – various continuing forms of unfreedom: economic marginalisation, gender-based violence (within which I include homophobic violence), as well as the ascendance of newer forms of policing and surveillance.
In the lead up to 27 April 1994, the African National Congress election campaign material included a poster of smiling Nelson Mandela in a black, brown and gold shirt surrounded by children of different skin and hair colours, themselves clothed in vibrant colours. The shirt was in the style of what would later be known as the Madiba shirt. The children around him look relaxed and some have the recognisably strained “photo smile” that many young children often adopt. A green banner with white writing at the top promises “A better life for all”. Running horizontally across the bottom are four squares, one each for the letters ANC, the ANC flag, a passport photograph of a smiling Mandela in dark jacket, white shirt and grey tie, and a giant X. The bottom is a strip from an election ballot.
Each time we saw it in 1994, we knew it was a poster selling a dream we had waited too long to see materialised. However, it was also a poster that spoke without irony in the specific race language we were invited to vote ourselves away from. It looked like one of those billboards, posters and magazine adverts for United Colours of Benetton: a range of people with different skin tones and other signifiers of race clad in colourful clothing, arranged so that their bodies touched slightly, against a white backdrop. The most important message in those ubiquitous Benetton print advertisements, as in the “A better life for all” advert, appeared uncluttered in white font on crisp green background. The poster represented “all” through visual markers of difference that suggested embodied race classification. Yet, at the time, the promise in the poster made little sense when materiality was considered. How could the lives of white beneficiaries of apartheid be (further) improved, rendered “better” under a post-apartheid ANC-led government?
The slogan seemed partly informed by the tensions and fears of Black retribution, the spectre of swartgevaar had been one of the cornerstones of apartheid narrative. Such a slogan could allay white voters’ fear of Black people; assure them that Black people would not kill them in their sleep and confiscate their property once in power.
The poster connected voting for the ANC to creating a better life for all South Africans. The banners visually frame the smiling, reconciliatory Mandela – eliding the terrorist Mandela around whom swaartgevaar coalesced and absenting Mandela the beloved revolutionary on the island. Yet, for most Black voters, it was the revolutionary Mandela we placed our faith in, and wanted to see as President. Remembering a past not too long ago when he was deemed the most dangerous man to apartheid South Africa, so dangerous that just saying his name was criminalised, and his photograph unpublishable, we relished the idea of voting for our terrorist president in the bright light of day. As his pictures were suddenly everywhere from 1990 onwards, I remembered the excitement I had felt with a few schoolmates in 1986 on our way to our boarding school, Inanda Seminary, when a Durban newspaper had flouted legal restriction and published his image on the front page. The excitement resided in knowing how dangerous having access to that shared copy was, before the Special Branch had managed to confiscate and ban