What’s in a name?

Tonight, I am in beautiful surroundings but I have lost the right to use my name. So have others in my party whose names are just a little well, shall we call it uneasy for some. The person who has refused us our names went to great lengths to ensure that hers was known to us. The vowels drawn out long and slowly, lovingly, forcefully and the connection with festivity brought to our attention. Just in case we needed a reminder of who she is.

Our names, however must be hard on the tongue or rather hard on the mind that speaks to us slowly and with great attentiveness to our possible slowness. For a few moments, well truth be told it was just under an hour, I stewed and then realized that this experience unsettles precisely because it is no longer one I am accustomed to. Once perhaps, in the time before I claimed and demanded my name.

Once upon a time, in the time before, within the foreign country where I was born and raised, I shortened my name to make it easy on those whose tongues and minds are not as fluent in entering into mutual recognition. And then, the world changed, I changed and the traditions of imposing names and hiding the names given to us with love and careful thought, those traditions changed. It is rarely necessary now in this country to ask people what names they live with when they are with those who see them as beloved, familiar, undangerous, comfortable. It is no longer unusual to expect wisdom and knowledge from someone with a beautiful melodic name, weighted with meaning and history. It has become ordinary to know that those beautiful names with their intricate consonants, long and loving vowels attached to beautiful dusky bodies are not emblems of shame or ignorance. So many of us have changed the traditions of forsaking our names and so many have struggled and won in the learning of them.

Not all have shirked the tradition of stealing the name of the other as the experience of this night has shown. But then too, had the quietening of the names that beat at our core been ordinary and everyday, I would not have stewed nor known to.

The anti-racism love manifesto: Or, maybe, how to laugh at the racist, stand proud, correct false images, feel the resistance, liberate the psyche, and so forth

Hello Future.

This is your Past talking. Your Not Too Distant Past. Today is 12 Jan 2006. Time is 10.28am. I am at home, Pinelands, a few kilometres outside of Cape Town.

I have mind to write about last night, or love, or something. But racism keeps interfering with my thoughts, because racism, and sometimes racialism, can take a lot of space in the papers, over the web, across the dinner table, over drinks, and, what do you know, even during sex. In this place, at this time, at this early hour, even though one would rather be thinking nothing thoughts, the sticky perversions of racist ideology can be very successful in spoiling one’s quiet.

What to do? Why, there is nothing to do but to interfere right back with whoever is making it difficult to enjoy a quiet morning. Or free some space. Think new thoughts. Analyse a racist. Or maybe do all four if you want to for love’s sake, but just get unstuck.

Well, Future, here is what I will do. I will write say something about racism and love, or new anti-racism and love. I will write down 5 things I now believe about racism. That may help to un-stick things. And in the process hopefully free me, and you,

5 things thoughts about racism, which aren’t the same thoughts I used to have about racism before today, and which may change when I meet you:

1. Racism is far from the most important obstacle in black people’s development today – only one of many. (Nor is race an obstacle, but that is for another day).

2. To allow oneself to be hurt by a racist remark, say being called a kaffir, or hotnot, or coollie, is to put oneself at the mercy of racists. Mercy on you if you put yourself at the mercy of racists.

3. The best response to racism today, in 2006, in South Africa, to being racially insulted is laughter, authentic laughter. This is laughter that can only grow when one learns to believe in one’s purpose; to revolt against whomever want to make himself your baas or herself madam; when you open yourself to dream a different world. From then on anyone who calls you racist names cannot do much to hurt you, for you will have learned not to believe anything from a racist, including their insults. Hard stuff, but doable, since the racist, in South Africa, today, is unbelievable; for the word of a racist must reveal nothing if not impotence, defeat.

4. From now on we need to learn that the most difficult form of racism – the new barrier to our progress is not that posed by a beggar or blue collar worker who shouts, ‘Kaffir!’. Our humanity is most jeopardised by the white collar worker, the university student, the middle class individual and the company boss who slices you with his indirect, subtle tactics whose ultimate aim is to keep you subservient and in fear of their undeserved historical advantages, their unspoken traditions, their accents, their money. What needs revolting against, then, is where race meets employment, money flirts with race, any kind of discrimination that undergirds institutional authority – that’s where the real action is, where extra-legal disadvantage and privilege and unjust power lies. 

5. When you have done and shown how racism depends on tacit societal support and the rest of it, and having gone a-ways to dismantling racist traditions and its structures, is it not time to say (if there was ever a time when it was not time to say), there is something called Psyche. Character. Personality. So pump some pride back into your Self, kid. Love your face dammit.