As a visiting Fulbright scholar to the US, a group of international students and I, were given a series of workshops on living in America. There were the practical things, you know, how to deal with your landlord, open a bank account, purchase a cellphone and so forth. In an effort to account for and reduce the stresses of cultural diversity, we were also advised on how best to build relationships with Americans. ‘Most Americans are like peaches’, the workshop facilitator advised, ‘they are soft and very friendly on the outside. But don’t be mistaken, Americans have a hard inner core that is difficult to breach and take a long time to become friends. Most people from the rest of the world’, she went on, ‘are like coconuts. They are hard to get to know initially, but once you get through the hard, unfriendly, outer shell, they are soft on the inside.’ My eyebrows raised to my hairline, I looked around the room filled with all the different shades of humanity from all the different places in the world, and saw my surprise at being called a coconut reflected on others’ faces. The surprised murmurs quickly became amusement as the multicoloured coconuts started teasing each other. Well, I won’t go into what that spelled for my first year in the US, wondering just how peachy people were being and how much of a coconut I was being. As you may know, being called a coconut is a racial slur in other contexts and frankly, I might not have liked the conclusions I drew about Americans but I did not mind the metaphor of a coconut to explain cultural differences. I do mind the way coconuts are tossed around to impugn others and dis-authenticate post-apartheid blacknesses.
Not so long ago, a colleague and I were discussing the possible inclusion of a critical race scholar in an event we were planning. This particular scholar, at a seminar when someone cited my colleague to question this scholar, replied that the refutation was insubstantial because my colleague was a coconut. And just like that, an alternate viewpoint was silenced and this critical race scholar was the only authentic black voice in the room, never mind the dinner party. Any disagreement, disjuncture in perspective, was invalidated as there could only be one way of thinking blackness, remedying it and voicing it. Is there not room at the dinner party for many black voices, and tolerance for different kinds of blackness? In order to liberate ourselves from white racist capitalism, does it require a cookie-cutter black liberation narrative? Does trying to think ourselves out of the poverty of imagination enforced by Apartheid’s grand, totalising narrative mean its replacement is no tower of Babel, are we all to speak in one tongue, authenticated by the self-identified non-coconuts amongst us?
The speculation around Lindiwe Mazibuko has returned me to the question of the coconut. The sadness of the coconut if truth be told, in the same way dialogue about the black diamond makes me sad. I don’t think we get it. This woman, who knows what she stands for, we will find out in due course. Whatever her politics are will be tainted by a black body that sounds wrong, lives wrong, dresses wrong, affiliates wrong. In the same way those strange apparitions, those black diamonds who dare to have black bodies and live prosperous white lives are so darn wrong. Wrong wrong wrong black body doing wrong wrong wrong white things. And just like that, there we are caged by the narratives of race and Verwoerd and his disciples have won again, they win in academic seminars, in the media, in literature, in our living rooms. Once we were kaffirs, Boesmans, Hottentots, Slamse, Coolies, Boere, Kaffir-boeties and on and on we were trapped by the behaviour expected to come from a specific body. We are still trapped by race, expected to behave in accordance with the bodies we bear or else be coconuts: race traitors.
What is a coconut? Really, what is a coconut? It is a fruit, with a hard, dark, hairy outer shell, layers of white on the inside, surrounding a milky white liquid. What strikes one with a coconut is the visible distinction of layers. Humans, unlike fruit, don’t have these starkly differentiated layers. We are made up of complex experiences that intertwine, the beginnings and ends of which we are rarely aware of. We are required to navigate in the world, following a host of divergent traditions. The critical race scholar for instance did not consider himself a coconut for being at an academic seminar, using academic language, imbibing academic formats that were imported from elsewhere, and yea mostly from white centres, some imported traditions are just unmarked and presumably do not form part of the milky white stuff in some black centres. And what about the ad hominem argument, pointing to the character defects of the person making the argument rather than debating the merits of the point, let’s be honest, entire groups of people were subjected to ad hominem arguments to silence their humanity. Does this not sound a lot like apartheid, they cannot rule for they are not yet developed. A general hush ensues while the developed speaks for the undeveloped.
But let’s make an ad fructus argument and accept that a human is not a coconut and the world we inherited and live in, is much more complex than to imagine easily distinguished white and black layers within an individual. In other words, let’s shake off the classificatory regimes imposed by totalising institutions like apartheid and begin to read what a black person should not be, using the coconut as our guide. Unlike white people, a black person, a real black person would not circulate a public opinion that disputes another critical black person’s vision of the ideal course of liberating black people. Only real black people care and know what other blacks need and are allowed to speak for them. A real black person may only speak with a particular accent, never mind that it denotes poverty or exclusion from educational opportunities and will not have a good command of English or be educated. An authentic black person will not associate with whites and be in political office alongside whites as only genuine blacks care about black interests.
Let’s not be mistaken, corrupt blacks are not real blacks either, they are the mis-formed results of white oppression and alienated in a different way to the coconut. Just think about the black diamond, that scandalous lot who dares to be wealthy and prosperous. As we all know, being upwardly mobile and decadently rich is the provenance of white people and the real blacks are mired in desperate poverty. The real black is that mythical all knowing, wise, good and poor black person filled with righteous anger (unless they do not husk their coconuts like real black people do). To return to the coconut: the coconut is that rare creature whose inside does not match the god-given place they should inhabit with pride. Therefore real black people are all the same, are not allowed to change, and should not show solidarity with anyone who is not a real black person.
Yes, it is true that black people become seduced by the power of whiteness and mobilise white tactics of engagement, whether social, economic, intellectual or political to negotiate a world that stigmatises black ways of living in the world. It is true that some black people view themselves through judgemental white eyes and shift their political positions and identities ever so slightly and gradually until they are complicit with oppressions that favour white interests. It is also true that most black people are disconnected, and alienated and fearful and desirous of a white life. It is true that sometimes black faces speak white lies, that black faces mouth white revenges, white fears, and white cruelties and of course, white loves. It is true in this transforming society that black children will come home sounding like the former oppressors whilst unable to speak their grandparents’ languages. It is true that some black people become as uncaring of the suffering of others with the same wilful ignorance and blindness as their white counterparts. All these are true.
What is also true is that whiteness and blackness are both lies, that they do not have a real basis in physiology but are socially and culturally constituted. What is also true, is that every one of us is not a real anything but have been forced to act in ways that allow us to be recognised as real. Make no mistake, the white man, during Apartheid, wielding power and using his sjambok and teargas to fatal effect whilst stilling his compassion and empathy or the white woman treating her black maid like an object, is no less wounded than the black body in the crowd and the objectified black woman separated from her family so they may live another day. What is real are the effects of racism and inhumanity. What is real is that we have the agency to become. What is real is that the anti-apartheid struggle was not intended to allow us to become trapped by an opposing racial classification. We live in a world where we are able to transcend racial classifications and not be expected to have our bodies determine our pleasures, dislikes, moralities or even the way we relate to our cultural others, be they coconuts or peaches.
The right to freedoms entitle us to take some Beethoven, mix it with Mandoza and Jack Parow to make a melody all our own. It is not always where the inspiration comes from that determines the magnificence of the symphony but how it is put together to produce a new roar in the world. In our haste to silence these new blends, to authenticate our own blacknesses and shush our fears of complicity with the very system we have to navigate to change it, we should be careful of stifling new becomings that we as yet cannot imagine. We have to transform the very bedrock of our belief system that certain bodies belong to certain actions and that we are comfortably entitled to racially recognise each other.
The coconut-centred conversation, is a symptom of a deep discomfort with change, of a failure of our imaginations to imagine a deracialised world, of our inabilities to transcend the very system that we abhor in the same breath as we condemn another through a racist tactical lens. The coconut disrupts the certainties of race. We are all going to have to be comfortable with seeing coconuts everywhere, lest we be hypocrites seeking to assert racial difference. But really, how about foregoing the racist talk and recognise that what we are witnessing is humanity’s ingenuity and the reality of how people mix and match cultural inspirations, behaviours and patterns. But mostly, lets learn to be comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing how a particular body will speak, act, think, feel and just maybe we may give ourselves or some fruit of one kind or another a chance to imagine and inhabit a future where bodies do not determine possibilities of becoming.
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