Living While Feminist: Our bodies, our truths

By Jen Thorpe

‘The power of structural violence is that it tries to silence us. The power of feminism is that it gives us a voice.’ So much of our life experience is filtered through our bodies – norms, myths, and cultural standards continue to shape the way that we and the world feel about our bodies and how we see ourselves. Feminism says these rules are bullshit. Our bodies can be tools for conformity or resistance. Feminism helps us learn and unlearn things about ourselves and the world we live in. Feminism is for all of us, for every single body. This collection takes us from an examination of skin and hair, to an exploration of pleasure, sex, and safety. It considers the way our bodies change, our health, and how we become who we are. It questions the way that institutions can trap us, how we can trap ourselves, and the importance of our hearts in all of this. Bold and honest, these writings ask questions more than they try to force answers. This book reminds us that feminism is dynamic, open, and ever relevant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Mar 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780795709425

Book preview

Skin

Me

Emelia Govender

Brown girl,

Brown woman,

When will they see me?

Past the brown and

Look at the woman,

See the human

That’s all I desire

To Be (a being)

*

Emelia Govender is a feminist, mother, psychology graduate, entrepreneur, and bookfairy. She believes in pouring her musings through words, dreaming of creating magic along the way. Twitter: @bookfairies_ct

Human

Zangose Tembo

Black femininity is a curious thing that the world criticises and fetishises all the time. I am female, I have dark skin, I come from a developing country, and for years I lived in the West as an economic migrant. Everyone’s experience is different, but I know that many can relate to being ‘othered’ on a daily basis, based on biological attributes. Through comments and actions that call attention to our skin, body, hair and more, the world reminds us of our race and gender, while questioning our ability to get work done.

For my brother, my sisters and I are too ‘sharp-tongued for ladies’. Similarly, my female relatives often say that ‘a woman my age should be married’. To the homeless man who says hello to me as I leave the train station each morning, I am ‘a lovely black girl’. ‘Race politics are very complicated,’ says my colleague, who had an African boyfriend in university, the same colleague writing a PhD on the experiences of Muslim women. My English is excellent for someone from Zambia, according to some of my British peers at work. Strangers have asked to touch my hair on too many occasions. Some have gone ahead and done so, without my permission.

In response to this attention, many black women alter their appearance, in a bid to look more Western. We bleach our skin and chemically straighten our hair to fit in. It doesn’t have to be this way. To my mother, siblings and partner, I am me: a human being who is simply trying to figure life out with all the joys and challenges it brings. Raised in a home with four sisters, my father (different from your stereotypical African man) never expected us to kneel when he called. We did not have to jump through hoops to serve him, or to mould ourselves to behave appropriately for our future husbands. Instead, he taught us to be kind and respectful to everyone we met, that we were just as strong and capable as the next person, and he encouraged us to stand up for ourselves when we were dealt an injustice.

My father’s approach armed us with resistance to the expectations that come with being a woman moving within various African cultures and traditions. It made us question preconceived notions about our behaviour, as well as global biases attached to our bodies and choices. At nearly 30, we are not married. We were lucky enough to pick careers that matched our childhood interests and obsessions. We wear our hair natural but also embrace braids and extensions. As the world evolves to celebrate individuality, it’s slowly becoming alright to be yourself. We can wear our hair the way it grows out of our heads. We can celebrate our curves.

My hope is that my children, their children and those that come after them, know that it’s okay to be themselves. I want them to know that their curves, coils and curls; their country of birth; and their choices are all authentic and valid. Our beauty and strengths lie in our ability to be who we truly are – to be human.

*

Zangose Tembo is a writer, gender/social inclusion expert, and founder of The Best of Africa. Her writing covers social justice issues, gender and development. Twitter: @bestofafricahq

Scab

Carla (Petersen) Watson

I only just managed to read the first chapter of Haji Mohamed Dawjee’s Sorry Not Sorry, cheekily titled: ‘We don’t really write what we like’. As I read, the word flashing through my head was ‘S-C-A-B’, or rather a voice screaming: ‘YOU ARE A SCAB!’. Though I was wrapped up in my duvet I was suddenly cold and confused by this noise in my head. I needed to stare into nothing for about fifteen minutes while Jacqui, my wife, read beside me. After some time, I realised I needed to get up and write.

I was apprehensive about reading this book. Actually, I was shit-scared. I was afraid I would find parts of myself on the page, parts I’d worked so hard to bury in order to survive. Perhaps what I was more afraid of was marinating in my anger. I was scared of learning how the validation of my deep anger made me a bystander to the premeditated robbery of my race.

Even now, I am afraid of carrying the struggle which Dawjee points out: the struggle to either heal my pain or let it blind any glimpse of restorative justice in my country. I am afraid the very healing I work so hard for, will mutate into justified anger, pain and revenge. How do I untangle all that I feel and experience every fucking day in South Africa, while remaining shackled to the responsibility of not flipping-the-fuck-out and trending on Twitter? How do I instead restore, heal and work towards mending our broken society? Also, why is this my responsibility?

Reading Dawjee’s first chapter made all of me feel like a scab. And it’s screaming again. It’s pulsating now. I feel that I have lived all of my life – not just adult years – all of my life working at (barely) concealing my daily wounds. Some wounds are self-inflicted, while others are inflicted by my world. Every now and again, my wounds rupture, only to be patched up with a joke or some internal justification housed by South African generational context. My body absorbs their pain, rupturing momentarily, simultaneously patching itself up into a new scab. Sometimes I explode, seemingly unprovoked. But I am not unprovoked. The scabbing is the result of too many light, painful strokes accumulated from years of terror. I have been pushed into this state of constant terror, working to heal myself constantly to be accepted as I am.

There are many questions raised in Dawjee’s first chapter. Its concluding question is the culprit behind the sudden chill I experienced. In the chapter’s last moments, Dawjee asks: ‘why does it piss white people off so much when brown people are happy?’ This question left me shook. It irritated my scabs, shaking up feelings I’d covered up as often as I could. I speak about it at times to Jacqui (I believe that she’s the only person who truly listens to me, she doesn’t try to understand, she just listens).

Three things come to mind when I think about what brown people should not speak about with white people, even if it brings a sense of peace in expression. First: do not talk about anything financial. Do not talk about how or why you would or wouldn’t spend money on something. Merely bringing up the topic downgrades you into an inferior money-driven, wealth-focused wannabe. Secondly: never be confident in what you say, unless it’s your own history. In fact, if you are confident about a matter, expect someone of a different colour to speak over your misguided contribution. Thirdly: NEVER TALK LOUDLY. This is uncivilised. Also, never complain loudly – this is laughed at. Also, never complain loudly in Afrikaans – this is a sign of being uneducated and juvenile. Also, never complain in English because this proves that you are showing off how educated you are.

This is probably Peggy McIntosh’s work coming out here.¹ I’m unpacking my own backpack and seeing just how empty it is, compared to what I thought it was. I am more on the backfoot than I am comfortable to admit. After reading Dawjee’s chapter, I am a mess. One chapter (and one whiskey) in, Dawjee’s question confirms my deepest and darkest desire: the desire to be validated. In the eyes of whiteness, I am not enough to be happy.

This may sound confusing but I am liberated by this realisation. In uncovering my desire to be validated, I am finally freed from an internal rat race: the rat race to prove to white people that I am enough. I let go of asking them to let me be smarter, to let me be equal, and let me be heard. In fact, they would look at me and see my unhappiness and be comforted about the validity of their position in our social relationship. I don’t think I need that anymore.

All of my years have been spent concealing, performing and hoping to be free. Now I am closer to my freedom, and I don’t like it. Knowing I am free feels like a lonely responsibility to carry. Since I know it now, I am charged to behave freely at every dinner party, in every response to why I am as comfortable to talk about finance, or to complain, or to be confident. Jacqui would call it ‘growing pains.’ I’d say I’ve seen myself and I’m getting used to the view. This book is changing my being. And I deserve to take up every space there is.

*

Carla (Petersen) Watson was recognised by the Mail & Guardian as one of the Top 200 South Africans in Education. She founded foryouandyours to increase visibility of LGBTIQ+ community through celebratory South African greeting cards. Find her at @sayscarla (LinkedIn).

Word

Khutjisho Phahladira

She asked me ‘why don’t you like to get your picture taken?’

She called me handsome, snapping my face with her

camera phone

Smiling, her eyes on my soul in her hands

White magic

I asked her, ‘why is it that our names are always underlined

red on Microsoft Word?’

The thick silence of her black lips left the walls deaf

I tell her that’s the blood underneath our heads

*

Khutjisho Phahladira is a South African creative writer, musician (under the alias Don Koolr), and blogger at HeitaZA.WordPress.com. In 2017, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation published his essay on racism, and his poems have appeared in PraxisMagOnline.

Undoing Hypervisibility

Desiree Lewis

In one of my best-loved novels, Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the central character, Janie Crawford, encounters a photograph of herself next to white children and confesses:

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz’s s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark child as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’²

The granddaughter of a domestic worker, Janie grows up in a white household playing with the children of her grandmother’s employers. She has been taught to accept – as the white children do – her ‘neutrality’, her right to live freely in the world and to anticipate limitless possibilities for growth. It is when she gazes at the photograph and confronts the fact of her embodied and ascribed subjectivity that she realises how out of sync the figure coded as ‘dat dark child’ is, with an innate sense of her freedoms.

I’ve thought about the implications of this in many ways, especially in making sense of my embodied subjectivity vis-à-vis my desire to live freely in the world. Recent feminist politics seem to me to focus too emphatically on invisibility. For example, #MeToo campaigns and naked protests insist again and again that the experiences of certain groups must be made visible in the public sphere, that the standpoint knowledge linked to these experiences must be heard, and that some essence should be made legible. I don’t believe, however, that hypervisibility (as the complementary condition of invisibility) is always as confronted as thoughtfully as it could be. The condition of certain people’s hypervisibility results from their being stereotyped by others (often in racialised and gendered ways) to the extent of being made invisible in human terms: in other words, being stripped of personhood. Being made hypervisible is to be denied that right to ‘full’ humanity that is the automatic entitlement of those in positions of supremacy.

Of the various political challenges that I’ve faced, I think it is the burden of hypervisibility that has plagued me most. But, this burden has also motivated me to do some hard political and emotional work. (And this is work that those who occupy dominant racial and gendered positions rarely do: inhabiting a world where one’s privileged body is normatively ‘human’ does not prompt one to reflect much on how that ‘humanity’ is measured!)

Like Hurston’s Janie, and of course like many other black women, my ‘I’ has held onto the core belief of not being equivalent to myths linked to having a particular raced and gendered body. Instead, it has clung to the belief that who I am, what I can experience, and what I can imagine are not only much more than my ascribed identity (and the dehumanising subjectivity that this posits), but also more vast than any fixed identity adopted to resist domination.

At the same time, the barrage of micro-aggressions, daily put-downs and frequent insults take their toll. I am unable to declare, as some braver members of subordinate groups may, that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.’ I have not remained impervious to, or emerged unscathed by hurt, confusion or anguish resulting from being stereotyped – whether this has been through hegemonic ‘knowledge’ and ideas that misrepresent black women nationally and globally or through personal experience.

An autobiographical anecdote here: as a teenager, my mother would send me to the butcher up the road. This had been a treat for me as a child: the men who worked at the butcher would give me slices of cured ham, which for some inexplicable reason always tasted better while walking home. By the time I reached thirteen, however, I began to be subjected to the kind of commentary from the men that, they believed, I should regard as ‘tributes.’

The friendly (black) men who’d handed me treats when I was nine years old, now smirked conspiratorially among one another when I appeared. Ensuring that I could hear, they amused themselves with puns about meat in relation to my body. Phrases such as ‘lekker stukkie vleis hier nê?’ were muttered, while they pretended to refer to the meat being cut or packaged. What I recall from these anguished moments are feelings of both humiliation and utter confusion. I could not understand how, in confronting me as a teenager, the same men who had seemed so sensitive to my childhood restlessness, somehow ‘re-read’ my body and abruptly re-construed me as an object of their lurid fantasies and sexualised attacks.

I never told my mother about this persecution or explained why I complained so much about going to the butcher. At some level, of course, I must have believed that their shameful behaviour was connected to my shameful body. Meat. Butcherable meat. To be pounded and eaten.

The harassment was vicious, yet perversely cloaked as communal or familial conviviality: a matter of the ‘uncles’ paying ‘flattering attention.’ Coercive invitations and appeals to inhabit the worlds of black men on their abusive terms have recurred (and no doubt will continue to do so) – in relation to family, political organisations, work situations, and circles of friends. These exhortations are pernicious because they are conveyed as heartfelt calls for solidarity in the face of racism. But they have also been deeply abusive, viewing me only as the enabler of others’ more important recovery: a body meant to serve egoistical and masculinist sexual, psychic and emotional needs.

Young adulthood involved my searching for ways to respond to hypervisibility through political explanations. In the 1980s, I immersed myself in the fiction and didactic work of white feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly. Retrospectively, I saw the limits of their white-centric views about ‘women’, but at the time, I drew tremendous strength from their explanations of why and how it is that, for example, perceptions about the female body are used to validate such intransigent and corrosive gendered stereotypes – evident in sources ranging from Greek philosophy, to psychiatry and medicine. By poring over extracts from The Second Sex, I began to understand how gendered myths about human bodies are connected to stereotypes that function in extremely powerful ways. Legacies of authoritative and hegemonic religious, philosophical, scientific thought have effectively built on specious myths about bodies.

Reading critical race theory and Frantz Fanon led me to understand similar myths in relation to race. As was the case with many other young, politically restless, black South African women in the 1980s, there was little to draw on to make sense of how race and gender meshed. However, experiences that were simultaneously racialised and gendered were central to our vantage points. This was evident in another of my important sources for acquiring political knowledge: intimate exchanges with other young black women. Once, when comparing notes with a friend who complained about the habitually over-effusive greetings of a white woman student we both knew, we realised that her frenzied, exuberant responses to us spoke volumes about her.

I’m convinced that one of the inevitable effects of being made hypervisible as a socially subordinate person is a form of paranoia: a hyper-alertness to the world around you. There’s a suspicion that responses and attitudes are never neutral, but come from places that reveal much more about the viewer or what may be called ‘reality.’ Reading black and postcolonial feminist work from the 1990s led me to deepen this conviction. I recall my sense of visceral relief when, after reading her devastating critique of Western feminism in Under Western Eyes, I focused on Chandra Mohanty’s penetrating diagnosis of what the hypervisibilisation of black women by white women is for:

Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world. Without the ‘third world woman,’ the particular self-presentation of Western women mentioned above would be problematical. I am suggesting then that the one enables and sustains the other. … the definition of ‘the third world woman’ as a monolith might well tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis of ‘disinterested’ scientific inquiry and pluralism which are the surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the ‘non-Western’ world. It is time to move beyond the Marx who found it possible to say: They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.³

In the face of relentlessly being made hypervisible by white women and white feminists, I could use black and postcolonial feminist tools to reverse their gaze and interrogate the source of my subordination. ‘Interrogate’ may in fact be too clinical a term here, since the process was tremendously politically and psychologically invigorating for me. The discovery – through fiction, essays and scholarship – of black and postcolonial thought also encouraged me to understand the particularity of tyrannical whiteness in certain South African articulations of feminist sisterhood. Like other black women, I’ve frequently experienced white women’s arrogance, condescension and entitlement towards me. The sense of righteousness about ‘knowing best’, ‘acting efficiently’, and ‘orchestrating everything’ results from living in a world where the white body has been coded as knowledgeable and authoritative.

In a context like South Africa, where white bodies have been protected by centuries of material privilege, by entrenched symbolic and discursive endorsements of ascendancy, and by enormous opportunities to lead and dominate, white women learn a sense of entitlement that is obviously very difficult to unlearn or surrender. In post-apartheid post-millennial South Africa, black female bodies continue to be construed as being ‘trapped in culture’, as disempowered and ill-equipped knowers, as those that must be led or healed.

I have often in recent years been dismayed by white university colleagues who claim sensitivity to the ‘unique educational challenges’, among black women students. They ultimately reinforce both their own and the students’ sense of black women’s inevitable defects. The patronising and damaging response is not easily identifiable as racialist because it often does emanate from some students’ articulation of their distinctive fragility as black women in a still-racist post-apartheid South Africa.

Probably a predictable response to a world that constantly reinforces one’s pathological ‘otherness’ is to turn inwards, to shore up shame, pain or confusion as some essential aspect of one’s very being. Paradoxically then, ‘selfhood’ becomes one’s ascribed identity. And there seems to be nothing beyond this. I believe that this is one effect of the way in which identity politics is evolving in and beyond South Africa. It is as though current articulations of identity politics, with their fixation on recognising victimisation, paralyse any quest for other possibilities of being. Recent identity politics therefore seems to stop at the point of recognising that much in the world is toxic and oppressive, and turns that recognition into some ultimate form of political position or solution. Consequently, the pain of being hypervisibilised becomes a reclaimed identity.

This response, I suspect, is also often linked to the expectation that any trauma and distress created by the intersection of racialised and gendered injustices can and must somehow be ‘taken away’ by some external force; the wounds, damage and humiliation caused by insults, threats, or attacks must be healed by someone or something. It is probably this expectation of ‘salvation’ that can lead to profound disappointment and frustration with solidarity groups. Feminists know that responding to a world that relegates women to silence, absence or general ‘otherness’ must come through collective resistance to this.

But like many others, I have been badly burnt by and within sisterhoods, including (and maybe, especially because of my expectations) black sisterhoods. This is not unique. The hunger for solidarity inevitably drives us to idealise collectives that we equate with our political dreams. I have no doubt that I will continue to search for collective ideals despite having learned through experience how messy and fragile they can be. But I am, I think, far more aware of the fact that to assume that we will – on the basis of the politics we profess and the bodies we inhabit – be determined black feminists who consistently resist patriarchal, authoritarian and exploitative standards, do things alternatively, or take care of and agree with one other, is ludicrous. I don’t believe this realisation comes from cynicism; instead, I hope, it comes from a deepened understanding of what it means to struggle against and within unjust worlds (that often lure us with dazzling rewards or threaten us with punishment for disobedience) without looking for quick-fix answers that actually prevent us from fully engaging our own complex complicities.

Assuming that one will somehow be ‘safe’ or ‘fulfilled’ in a political world peopled only by the bodies of other black women who use the same political language that one does, is a shortsighted hope. In her analysis of the complexities of ‘sisterhood’ in North American feminism, the American writer Phyllis Chesler indirectly explains this:

As feminist women, we knew that we were doomed without sisterhood so we proclaimed it, even its absence. We wanted to will it into existence without wrestling it into being. We didn’t understand that the sisterhood we so eagerly proclaimed was, like brotherhood, only an ideal. We’d have to create sisterhood, daily, against considerable odds, and we’d also have to acknowledge our own sexism as well as our racism,