Ethiopian feminist Netsanet Gebremichael, then director of Addis Ababa University’s Gender Office, after giving a talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, Ethiopia 28-30 November 2011

Here is a short video clip of Ethiopian feminist Netsanet Gebremichael, then director of Addis Ababa University’s Gender Office, after giving her talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. She is being interviewed on her impression of the conference and the debates that took place by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Video edited by Mandisa Malinga.  

Being looked at by others, along with looking at others, is an important source of pleasure and pain around which a self and culture is built

The idea of how individuals feel when looked at or looking at others is one that I have been troubling myself with. The first piece was on branded clothes and identification. While that piece was the first in the order of writing, it will only be published by HSCR Press later this year, in a edited collection by Moletsane, Mitchell and Smith under the title Was It Something I Wore?

Agenda published the second piece I have done on the subject in its latest issue. I received a hard copy of the issue this past week. The issue is guest edited by the black feminists Desiree Lewis and Mary Hames under the theme Gender, sexuality and commodity culture. 

The piece I did, which was severely edited and shortened, argues that seeing or being seen by a sexual object – we are always objects of the sexual order aren't we? – is an important source of libidinal pleasure and pain around which a self and culture is built. Consequently, in late racialised capitalist culture looks (and inevitably subjectivities), cannot but become commodities. The possibilities that have opened up in focusing on dressed and undressed looks are terribly exciting. The abstract/paper can be found here. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10130950.2011.630518. I expect that I will do another, more readily useful, piece in this year on the matter, bringing into sharper focus generative masculinities.

Feminist literature scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola, after giving a talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, Ethiopia 28-30 November 2011

  

Feminist literature scholar and cultural critic Pumla Dineo Gqola

Here is a short video clip of feminist literature scholar and cultural critic Pumla Dineo Gqola, after giving her keynote address at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. Her talk was titled "Feminist masculinities or suicidal men". She is being inteviewed by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Shahnaaz Suffla asks her to imagine a title and other aspects of a novel she would write on African men, if she were to think of writing a novel, for Pumla Dineo Gqola writes short-stories. 



Trapped in Fantasy

Whitney Houston has died, sympathy floods in. When Michael Jackson died, strangers shouted out of their cars, stopped me while I was on Broadway Avenue in Chicago, I received multiple texts. Clearly something momentous had happened. Top twenty people or I am not sure what they are that are followed on Twitter: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Shakira, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Ashton Kutcher, Ellen Degeneres, Nicki Minaj, Youtube Twitter stats, Oprah Winfrey, Marshall Mathers, Kaka, Justin Timberlake, Twitter en Espanol Twitter Stats, Chris Brown Twitter Stats.

Celebrity culture rules. I find it peculiar how much people who pretend for a living are valued. That is fundamentally what an actor and what singer is, isn't it, well they interpret stories and embody them for us, sort of projections of our imaginations and desires or something like that? If we value the story, then scriptwriters and songwriters should have the largest followings. But they are not, it is the blank canvas who is valued, empty until the story emerges through them. And if they do it well enough, we will assert that their interior life (and physical of course, I mean how will we know what the latest hairstyle is) is one worth following and watching and caring about. We consume what they consume, hoping that our acne scars and existential angsts will not be noticed if we wear a yellow jumpsuit like Peony Superstar. Yea, so its not always the story cos no-one is dressing like J.K. Rowling and having Rowling parties.

Instead it is mostly the fantasy figure we obsess about, feel for and try to emulate. So what is it we are doing when the reality of daily life loses its value and the most important people are unattainable parodies of themselves? And lets not forget celebrities are invariably larger than their own realities, so they are unattainable even to themselves. To clarify: they have been airbrushed and photoshopped and plucked and dressed out of their own schizophrenic existence. Julia Roberts cannot be Julia Roberts the star to herself, I am sure.

These people become spokespeople and examples for causes (like Houston for drug addiction and also an example of the black woman who becomes a crack momma cos of her violent black baby daddy)  and provide expert soundbites that often they are not equipped to discuss (like valuable nutrition advice such as the cayenne pepper diet). Don't get me wrong, there are worthy causes brought to light because of celebrities, after all it was through the interventions of musicians and singers that apartheid became anathema globally. Though Band-Aid should also be thanked for the idea of a perpetually starving, ignorant Africa as a village. Because celebrities (or the teams that manage and corporations or causes that use them) own the affect of the people and thus are influential.

What does it say about society though that we consistently value the fantasy over the real? And lets not be mistaken, daily life and reality does not have much value. If it did we would spend less money consuming the latest dress worn by Superstar Victoria pretending to be Posh whilst looking hungry and grumpy because of her low blood sugar and teetering on painful uncomfortable shoes to great acclaim and spend more time on wondering how the hell we care for the actual people around us.

Is it that reality is untenable? That reality is incomprehensible? I mean hell even the City Press asks you to send an entertaining article and most of the serious political news I got in the US was from Comedy Central. Is it that no-one has the attention span to engage with the world unless they are stroked in some way, made to laugh, made to love, manipulated into caring? I don't know.

I also know we love to hate them, love to see them fall, love to see them in pain. In some ways it is about our collective self-hate, our nihilistic, defeatist beliefs that no matter how powerful, beautiful or wealthy, life can still be crappy and one can only be on top for so long before failing. And we watch those falls, the humiliations, disgraces over and over again, no wonder we believe we can't change the life of the person around the corner. Cos, after all even if someone has everything, they will be a mess.  Except I always wonder why we are surprised that the people who pretend for a living fall apart when they have no privacy and everyone can see them, watch them. Its a contradiction, yes, of actors who strive for fame.

I wonder what would happen for instance if we were to tell people that there will be no more news about Richard Gere cos he touts for the Dalai Lama after the Secrecy Bill is passed, if there will be more outrage. I wonder if we were to say, you know, killing people in Iraq is bad because Superstar with Anglicised name would never have been born if they were bombing there x years ago or some such. We know that in the US, a really good way to get into politics is to be an actor first, cowboys and terminators are welcome.

Isn't it awful that people need movies and novels to entertain them into caring. Its as if collectively there is no imagination, no suffering until someone writes it for someone to pretend it. And then the most marvellous thing happens, we eventually after its fifteeen minutes forget the message pretended and focus on the pretender until the next pretense of celebrating a celebrity cause.

Well, you can tell I'm muddled. But hey, put it down to the grief of Houston's death.

Anger management: Mandela or Biko?

I've been having conversations about anger a fair amount recently. Anger gets a bad rap you know. Sometimes rightly so. However, if we take our affective states seriously and assume that our emotional responses sometimes are better indications of our relationship to the world and our responses to it than our thinking is, then all anger cannot be bad. Acting on anger without reflection is not so good. Being driven solely by anger is not so good. But so is ignoring anger.

There are different ideas about anger: anger being fear turned inside out; anger being a pathological response or a primitive response. Cultivating anger is to not follow the laudable Ghandi; not be a Nelson Mandela - the later version, the post-prison version. To be angry is to undermine the demonstrations of the natives' capacities for tolerance and to fail at the civilising mission.

If one thinks Mandela's and Ghandi's movements through the anger of a denied justice to the people they both served, with continuing poverty as an indicator of success or failure (depending on what you think blacks and Indian's deserve), then, well, the question is exactly what is so persuasive about what they did? Even Archbishop Tutu has been roused to glorious anger (by Mandela's movement's legacy).

Both these legendary icons, Mandela and Ghandi, transcended the idea of the native: vile, primitive, angry, destroyer and disrespecter of white civilization, misunderstander of the marvelous education at the hands of the refined whites who are genteel, and tolerant and loving. White racism is especially loving when they whip you for your edification. Or infantilise you to remind you of their advanced sensibilities and thus assert the injunction to learn at their soft unlaboring hands. Or when they ever so delicately shudder to think that the shitty hovels the majority of blacks live in is not good enough for their cousins/sisters/random white-faced person. Yet the civilised well-meaning white will declare with certitude that blacks could better themselves or, worse, that they are used to and like those living conditions. Or, well, my favorite evidence of loving, kind whiteliness are those presumptions that the mansions their struggling white selves are living in has nothing to do with the corrugated-frequently-burnt-down-scraps-of-nothing the majority of 'citizens' in this country live in; nothing to do with being maintained by normalised traditions of black hands and sweat at such great cost to the baas and madam; nothing to do with the fact that it would be impossible to have such a life without the cheap black labour. That's why comrade Malema's joke about white maids so tickles us. Now some of us living this fantastic whitely life bequeathed to us by Mandela, we know that our lives are maintained by the self-same cheap black maids, nannies and gardeners whom we pay just enough to move back and forth betwen their hovels and our magnificent residences. 

Why, we - and yes it is we blacks, hell yea - we especially really need the reflection of genteelness and steel to correct that unlove we learnt at the white breast the Mandelas and Ghandis bring to our natural tendency to be caterwauling carnival clowns jumping around maniacally popped up on our primitive rages while tsotsing for basic dignity. Aren't Mandela and Ghandi just so comforting for whites and the new black madams and masters, mostly in their ability to be better than the context that produced them expected, to become the modern-day secular Jesus with cheeks just waiting to be slapped by the non-angry crazy white people who created the conditions in the first place?

Even our new black governement hates that the enraged are not being Mandelaesque and are continuing traditions of protest that allowed him to be Mandela. And really why should they dare to do that, seeing as how the tolerant freedoms didn't turn their families into royalty with treauries to boot or forget that: the genteel un-angry negotiations of freedom didn't even turn them into citizens, except for election years, that is, and that should be enough, a nice cross like all literate people do is a wonderful gift.

Suppressing anger willy nilly without allowing its productive capacities to engender new possibilities to rouse oneself to those moments when your boundaries are transgressed, is to live without a meter of your self-worth. This anger isn't indiscriminate. I met an angry young man in December, one I haven't been able to shake. His anger was ugly. It was unreflective, as if he had forgotten the most basic premise for living, that wherever events occur in his life, he is part of the event, not outside of it. I recall that all he saw was the offence, his abused rights, his trampled dignity. Not once did he pause to accord that same right to dignity to the people room. Not once did his anger and so-called humiliations open the potentials of empathy to ask of his others: "what can I learn from you, even if it is to destroy an ugliness about me that you dare to say"? The funny thing is, he had more than he could ever experience, but his anger had blinded him to the reality of his privilege. He was more powerful than he could imagine, yet his anger rendered him powerless. He was beautiful to look at and compelling to hear if not for what his charisma was directed at. And what his anger produced was an epistemic kind of violence that built progressively and contaminated the room. So that is not the kind of anger I mean: unchanneled, misdirected and self-serving.

Biko seemed angry to me: it was a productive anger. It might have gotten him dead anger, but then he would rather have been dead and proud and klapping policemen back so that oppression would not be an easy task for the oppressor. We don't know how the years might have softened his anger or swelled it, we just don't. But he did get to leave us a legacy of dead and proud.

Anger wasn't about fear for Biko. Nor was it about the threat of humiliation.

Anger was about right and expectation and the certainty that to be human meant not accepting the klap and turning the cheek. About the fact that to be human meant to understand the right to dignity, the right to recognition and mostly and, so reductively, that anger was about marvellous, wondrous and a deep, deep self-love, self-respect and an affirming kindness to the self.

For Biko anger was, and for me anger is about giving kindness where it was, is, due; anger is about making alliances across boundaries of injustice to practice self-love and love for an other that too has been trained in traditions of self-hate and disparagement. Anger is in service of love without forsaking the fury and rage in the places it belongs: with those who are hateful, with those who are unwilling to love and care based on dermal evidence, with those who need to make a superior/inferior self through hateful Apartheid ideologies.

It seems an awful choice for us mere humans, if our anger only enables us to be martyrs or secular prophets. No, I think we need to learn that middle-ground. We need to learn to both value and control our anger so as to marshal its productive capacities. There really is more than enough room for raging against the machine. Why aren't more of us angry? I love Mandela still, but I can't understand how he brought us here.