Читать книгу Race Otherwise - Zimitri Erasmus - Страница 12

Living inside apartheid was necessarily double-edged. People defied the boundaries imposed by apartheid logics as much as they used these logics to ‘pass’ for White or Coloured (Wicomb 2000), and to ‘expel blackness’ from family histories (Stone 2007; Thomas 1977). These acts, fraught with emotion, were intricately interwoven with everyday struggles for access to various degrees of rights, opportunities, respectability and leeway conferred by the higher tiers of apartheid’s legalised racial classification system. For much of my teenage life I, like many other people so classified, came to see myself as Coloured, making apartheid’s race category subjectively real. This self-making was limited by apartheid’s constrictions regarding who I could become as a person, and with and amongst whom my personhood could be made. It was restrained by the power configurations produced by apartheid logics. Apartheid prescribed where one could live, learn, play and pray; what one could learn; where one could shop; on which public bench one could sit; through which public doors one could enter; where and whether one could eat in public; from which speck of land one could see and feel the sea; and whom one could love. Its nebulous logics seemed amplified in the constantly shifting, often discrepant visual and non-visual coordinates and intersections of class, racial markers, heterosexuality, gender and social status that shaped my father’s judgement of who might qualify as a male suitor for his youngest daughter. These moving complexities rendered unsuitable almost any young man in our and surrounding neighbourhoods. Their racialised gendered logics made me – ‘curly-haired’ and ‘round-nosed’ – an ‘unsuitable girl’ for young men from families with social status. My father’s gendered judgements came with a terrifying dictum: if I were to fall pregnant while at school, the damage incurred to the respectability of my family would demand that he disown me. This would leave me to a life akin to that of my uncle: intoxicated by methylated spirits, homeless, alone, wandering and rejected. To fall pregnant while at school was considered shameful.

My father’s judgements were no different from those that had been inflicted on him – as my mother’s suitor – by her parents. Her father’s concern had been that my mother was involved with a man whom he regarded as beneath her social status. Among her parents’ concerns was the apparently coarse texture of my father’s hair. These were matters sufficiently significant to keep my maternal grandparents from visiting my parents’ marital home. With the birth of their first child – a son – these dynamics in my immediate family eased. But they were alive in the communities of which I was a part. I was a recipient of shaming stares and commentary on my hair at school and at home when certain family members visited or passed through. Having suffered the pain of her parents’ racialised looking regime, my mother was able to mediate my experience of it.

In her writing on Coloured identity formations in South Africa, Zoe Wicomb demonstrates the ways in which these formations – commonly assumed to be products of ‘miscegenation’ – are intricately bound up with shame. She posits that this shame was ‘exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race’ and that it recurs in attempts since 1994 ‘to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame’ (1998: 92). This shame is commonly understood to be a consequence of the racial degeneracy that supposedly results from ‘race mixing’, which is assumed to cause moral and sexual degeneracy. ‘The look’ as a normative way of knowing race projects these imagined forms of degeneration onto black bodies that ‘bear the marked pigmentation of miscegenation’ (1998: 93) and invest black female bodies so marked with the shame of having ‘mated with the coloniser’ (1998: 92).

At seventeen I stumbled upon a defiance of these racialised logics in the story of Steven Bantu Biko written by Donald Woods (1978). Steve Biko was the leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement that refused the racial category Black as a technique of domination, and redefined it in emancipatory political terms to refer to all people oppressed in contexts of white supremacy. I read about Biko’s story when I stayed in a village in the south-east of Holland (close to its border with Germany) as the first black Rotary Exchange student from South Africa to visit this part of the Netherlands. My journey to Holland and my time there brimmed with contradictions and possibility.

It was the first time I had left home unaccompanied by close friends or family; the first time I had left the Eastern Cape; my first journey by air; and the first time I had had my hair cut short. The wash-straighten-curl-and-swirl routine for my long hair and its accoutrements – a hooded hairdryer and no fewer than thirty-five extra-large curlers (see Z. Erasmus 2000) – could not go to Europe with me. These items would not fit into my limited luggage. More importantly, these local hairstyling practices would not fit into what my family and I imagined Europe to be: a place of sophistication where such practices represented its opposite. Dressed in a green Springbok blazer, I joined Rotary students from Australia and New Zealand (all of them white) at what was then Jan Smuts Airport, for my twelve-month-long sojourn in Europe. Soon after my first presentation at the Rotary Club in my region I discarded my blazer. During frank discussions about South African politics, everyday life and the injustices of apartheid, I voiced my discomfort at wearing this symbol of white South Africa. I was the ‘safe black’ young woman for Port Elizabeth’s Rotarians – black enough, and yet, not too black.

Amsterdam was the place where, for the first time, I saw people considered black and Indische (Indonesian) walk the streets of a city centre, by day and by night, with what struck me as a sense of ownership and belonging. Their postures flipped the posture of deference – albeit a posture held for white people – with which I was familiar. This experience left a lasting impression on me. It was 1982. Donald Woods’s book, because of its liberal outlook and along with many others, was banned in South Africa. It was not on the meagre shelves of Korsten Library. For a while after reading about Steve Biko, I saw myself as Black, in the Black Consciousness sense of the word.

Over time, I knitted together the feelings, glances, gestures, postures and tasks of my world in Korsten and my world at school, Paterson High, in the brown brick-clad township of Schauderville. Woven into these worlds were the worlds of my classmates, the worlds of some of my mother’s family and that of my music teacher, Mr Oersen, who lived in the wealthier suburbs of Gelvan Park and Parkside. Woven into them were the worlds of the people I encountered in Gelvandale, where my mother taught and my father policed, and the world of a house in Kabega Park, in a neighbourhood reserved for wealthy people who were classified White. I was eleven years old when I was ushered into a room in this house. Graced with nothing but a grand piano, it was several times the size of our home on Stanford Road. Paralysed by its opulence, I stood in its acres of lush garden after I had failed my Trinity College piano examination. This was the first time I entered the home of wealthy white people who radiated a whiteness imbued with power and aloofness. With the exception of Aunty Dolly and Colleen, who did not live their whiteness in this way, I knew of white people at a distance, even though whiteness as a construct of superiority seemed close and everywhere. I encountered white people walking in the city centre, shouting orders to road construction workers, and sitting in police vehicles. I knew of poorer people, classified White, who lived in far less grand railway houses. None of this knowledge offered balm for either my shock or my failure.

The intersection, in this psycho-social encounter, of an aloof whiteness, material wealth and a negative judgement of my performance (whether justified or not), rendered inferior much of my being – from the home in which I grew up to my capacity to play the piano (see Fanon 1986: 149–50). For Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2013: 103), a scholar of decolonial thought, colonisation and its vital source, namely, changing conceptions of race and changing forms of racism, are the ‘naturalisation of the non-ethics of war’. Apartheid, the epitome of a colonial state, made death literally and metaphorically a constitutive feature of everyday life. Each daily and repeated humiliation that characterises black life in an anti-black world sounds multiple moments of death for a black person. Steve Biko’s tortured, ‘naked, manacled and lonely body lying in a Land Rover’ (Ndebele 2007: 129) is a particularly searing example of a moment of ‘incomplete death’ (Fanon 1967: 128) from which Biko was driven to his ‘actual’ death. My humiliation at my piano examination is one example among considerably milder moments of ‘incomplete death’.