Читать книгу Race Otherwise - Zimitri Erasmus - Страница 19

This autobiographical sketch of the texture of the everyday and of living on multiple thresholds shapes my thought, my becoming and my humaning. My parents lived on both sides of 1948, the year the National Party came to power to further entrench racial segregation, exclusion and discrimination. I came into the world at a time when my parents had just graduated from municipal housing to home ownership. The financial responsibility tagged to their new status instilled a sense of precariousness that extended into my childhood. This is evident in the ways my mother spoke of our lives as never far from the breadline. My mother’s anxiety about losing me, as she had lost two of her sons who died during their teenage years, was palpable. It made me acutely aware of the threshold between life and death. The threshold between a somewhat diverse neighbourhood, only some of whose residents had basic comforts such as running water, and a neighbourhood declared exclusively Coloured, was ever present. So was the threshold between apartheid’s meta-narrative of racialised destiny and the counter-narrative of my parents and teachers about a future with possibilities that defied this destiny. For them, these possibilities depended on dedication to education, keeping out of ‘politics’ and avoiding (not preventing) teenage pregnancy.

The lived reality of my youth was shaped by a precarious fusion of selective privilege and oppression under apartheid. As a young woman I hung delicately between heterosexual (South African) young men’s conception of me as on the one hand ‘not quite eligible’ as a bride and, on the other, a woman unreachable under the patriarchal reign of my father. In the politics of the time, I was neither for apartheid nor actively involved in organised resistance against it. To paraphrase Zoe Wicomb (1998), my blackness draws its meaning from multiple, overlapping and contradictory belongings and not-belongings. I repeatedly renegotiate these as I move from one place to another inside and outside of South Africa. This Blackness defies attempts to give Blackness a general, monologic and definitive meaning.

My thought is infected with these thresholds. This states the obvious. More obfuscated is my definitive experience of having lived, as the educationist Jonathan Jansen puts it, ‘on both sides of the 1990s, the decade in which everything changed’ in South Africa. He reminds: ‘It will never happen again’ (Jansen 2009: 1). I am a child of apartheid and a beneficiary of the outcome of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. From this place I use ideas about humanism as critique to question – without losing sight of their effects – the continued use of apartheid’s race categories which rely on normative ways of knowing race.

My point of departure, the premise that South Africa’s apartheid regime is an extension of its colonial history, conjoined with my conception of its land- and mindscape as a threshold between various oceanic cross-currents, begins to place its history as well as its contemporary reality within the modern colonial world system – an economic, political and knowledge system whereby Europe, through its domination, made its world the destination for all worlds, including worlds of Africa; a system by means of which Europe assumed ownership of history and of knowledge (Mignolo 2012: x). Worlds outside of Europe thus come to constitute the ‘underside’ of this world system; the ‘underside’ of modernity. The socio-political manifestations of the multiplicities I have sketched in this chapter are fragments of one expression of the heterogeneity of social formations on the ‘underside’ of modernity. They are a fraction of the fecund unsettledness, produced by a particular constellation of power for a particular historical and lived experience in South Africa. This experience is a small part of the ‘underside’ of modernity.

Without searching, I find my thought, affect and lived experience inside Walter Mignolo’s (2012: xvi) notion of ‘border thinking’, an idea which he borrows from the Latin American feminist Gloria Anzaldua: thinking from the border as opposed to about or within borders, whether spatial, cultural, disciplinary or psychological. Mignolo is among several scholars who form part of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/ Decoloniality Research Collective.¹¹ Border thinking is an act of epistemic and disciplinary disobedience which includes disobedience against any form of policing thought and practice, irrespective of its intention. It entails a conscious bending and breaking of hegemonic knowledge to the purpose of living and thinking on thresholds, while continuing the struggle to mould one’s own coming to know and one’s own principles for living.

A border implies a boundary between places – spatial, temporal, mind/ body places – one crossed by choice, whether circumscribed or free. Borders are, by virtue of being borders, always policed, with or without success. Borders are lines of domination, lines of occupation that divide people, restrict their movement and disrupt their lives (Ingold 2007: 81-84). It feels more accurate to describe my thinking as ‘from multiple thresholds’. Thresholds are lines of relation which can enmesh people, facilitate their movement and widen their lives. Thresholds are more difficult to police. A threshold implies the very necessity mindfully to step in and out of places, in and out of worlds – both within and athwart borders – for purposes of survival and sanity. This movement produces new places, new worlds and new ways of seeing. It emerges from the very necessity for a ‘pluritopic hermeneutics ... [since no] one side of the epistemological divide [will do]’ (Mignolo 2012: 17). Significantly, the implication of such a hermeneutics is that there are no original origins – be these epistemic, cultural, political or biological – to revive or to which to return.

There is no past waiting intact to be retrieved for preservation; no immaculate past waiting for our return; no past waiting for blame. There is only our interrogation of what we have come to know about history, and what we can make of and with this coming to know in our attempts to human the future. This freedom from hegemonic demands for the declaration of origins and from hegemonic impositions of origins loosens the hold of both Eurocentric developmentalist logics, on the one hand, and of ‘the trial’ embedded in nativist logics, so prevalent in contemporary South Africa, on the other. Thought, becoming, humaning and relation are freed to think, to become, to human and to relate not just differently but in an other way – otherwisely. This freedom enables possibilities – foreclosed by both Eurocentrism and nativism – for imagining something other than a logic of domination, and something other than a logic of victimisation: a logic of relation.

For me, thinking from multiple thresholds means engaging with racialised difference and its politics as a catalyst for – not a hindrance to – what Ingold (2015) calls humaning. For Arturo Escobar, a scholar of decolonial thought, this means ‘thinking from difference and towards the constitution of alternative local and regional worlds’ (2013: 37-38, my emphasis) without losing either locatedness or enmeshment. This perspective means thinking and living alongside the categories of Europe, America and colonialism and, by implication, defying the desire to deploy these very categories in reaction to Europe, America and colonialism. It implies defying the reductionism, the violence and the reliance on a foundational Otherness of both Eurocentrism and nativism as modes of knowing and being. It implies ‘not just ... changing the contents but the very terms of the conversation’ (Escobar 2013: 41), in so doing shifting the terrain for argumentation. These are among the countless beginnings on my journey to the personal, political and intellectual place articulated in this work.