Saturday night in the Mother City, lining Somerset Road, a city out together, coming together in its disparate wholeness: people of all hues, shapes, classes, nationalities. The street was crowded, people were pushing against the barricades, rubbing up against each other, formally intimate, there was laughter, hisses and complaints of irritation, a palpable air of excitement, the restless stirring of a crowd awaiting promised entertainment and then ... the lights went out.
In a city where violence is rampant, albeit not in the cosmopolitan (read: largely white, affluent, the poor, usually black welcome to perform domestic labour, cook and clean up sumptous meals) streets of Green Point, this sent a murmur up the street. What is happening, people wanted to know as their eyes darted around to suddenly suspicious bystanders who were regarding them with reciprocal suspicion. The (sometimes forced) jollity of the evening was interrupted by whispers of 'its dangerous, things can happen, watch your bag, get closer.' In a city where electricity is the focus of riots by the poor, erudite complaints in national mouthpieces by the rich for power-cuts have become a normal interruption in everyday life, the-quiet-the-fear jokes started to flow: 'has the city not paid its electric, has Carnival in Cape Town tripped the electricity, is there a black out, how embarassing'.
And suddenly out of the dark, appeared a carnival act, clad only in miniscule knickers and body paint. I think the paint was spectacular, I couldn't see much, it was ... blacked out. It appears the city had paid its electricity for a short while later the lights came back on. It seemed like a most carnivalesque act of censorship and has had me puzzled for days. If this was deliberate (and it seems it might not be as the lights were on in other parts of the street), it unveiled something interesting about censorship though. My apologies to those who did not get to experience and play with the paradoxes.
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It seemed like a clever compromise, between performing the risque and boundary-pushing, and a clumsy effort to protect the sensibilities of the public, to appease the conservative and yet ... kind of erotic too. After all sex that is hinted at, often is more alluring for tantalising the imagination, those painted people (mostly women I think) have been enhanced by the cloaking mystique of the dark. I saw them and yet feel like I missed something.
The most clever acts of censorship are those that aren't brutish, where the lights have gone out and yet the parade goes on, the kind that gives a tantalising glimpse of the forbidden and yet circumvents a feasting of the eye and the act of censorship becomes part of the spectacle. And the tantalising glimpse of boundary-pushing is what we feasted on, whilst deregistering the surrounding darkness. We barely noticed when the lights went back on or noticed that we had been censored.
Most succesful acts of censorship do that, are contained in the event and become somewhat seamless, as if they weren't there in the first place. They play with already existing conditions or create them utilising the possibilities at hand. These miniscule acts of change, enacted within the confines of an unchanged disciplinary regime are meant to be the light in the dark, to hold one's attention while forgetting that your gaze has been trained and hemmed in by the dark. Some traditions do this too, where there is just enough room to do something different but not enough to fully claim the different space taken up and so the newness is respectably and conservatively cloaked in the darkness whilst we are allowed to applaud ourselves for being progressive.
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