Fidelity
to me, myself and I:
the
dramatics of a self split and continually reconfigured
Prologue
“The short answer is yes”.
He said it. Quite flippantly. I
had asked a question: “If I’m understanding you right, are you
saying the existential crisis is indefinite, that coloured people
will forever be doing Derridean “double duty” to multiple
identities?” …“the short answer is yes”. With that I felt the
cracks deepen, pieces break away. And he moved on to the next query.
And I alone, heard the crack, louder than the splintering before it,
I heard the interminable sound of parts of a soul break into, in two
maybe.
The
prologue, in its historical relationship to text establishes setting
and scene, intoning statements necessary to render the ensuing drama
intelligible. Ushering the audience in to the world of the authors
making, the prologues marks the first encounter, and this first
encounter in turn marks all subsequent encounters within the
theatrical drama. The prologue, is much like the event, the event
which setting the tone for all subsequent happenings, marking the
self as it is violently removed from its habitat and cast into a new
cosmos. Emanating from this new cosmos, the drama begins…
Setting
the scene
To
question existence so profoundly that one is caged in by the
existential questions that stem from a body/mind/soul in crisis is to
exist in a world that is marked by event. Each scene of this event,
distinct from those before it yet inextricably connected, plays its
role, with the exits and entrances of multiple characters that enable
you, the protagonist, to embark on this journey of the self. Akin to
Big Bang Theory, in the moment of the individuals encounter with a
life-altering event, the world explodes out from one point such that
existence as it was before is no longer. This one point, the event,
creates the world you now occupy: a world of questions,
complications, complexity and most fundamentally, fidelity. Because
the world of the existential is inwardly projected this fidelity
asserts the utmost importance. Whilst the event definitively alters
your relationship to the outward world, it could be ignored, or even
lessened in significance, not altering the existential drama as you
do not question the change that has been effected. But when, in
fidelity to the event, you attempt to make sense of the
reorganisation of everything you knew, to deal with the remnants of
the explosion, everything gets complicated and life begins to take on
dramatics, full of the twists and turns and plot complications that
so excite, unnerve and challenge a captive audience of one. I speak
of the existential effects of being that are not unique to my
personal experience, but of an experience of “millions of men who
have been skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes,
trepidation, servility, despair, abasement”1.
This essay represents meditations on the event that have marked my
navigation of an attempt to understand a self multiplied: to exist as
a coloured body, not simply coloured but at once tripled: coloured,
white and black, in a motley organisation of the self. As it follows,
four scenes stand in a symbiotic relationship with each other, four
men amongst each other, unintentionally the dramatis personae of the
following scenes, caught up in the existential drama that has come to
personify a personal existential navigation.
Written
through the chronological line they followed, these scenes allow an
understanding of a neurotic obsession with race that so underscores
my encounter with the world: a world that is constantly remade and
refashioned in an attempt to yield answers to the questions that
emanate from my consciousness.
Scene
One: For generations, and generations and…
Er no, I am not
your father. No. our cultures they don't they don't ... er.. er they
don't... they clash, you see. But er, don't worry about this, ne? You
don't worry about this, ne? You see, this existential crisis that you
are having, it is very common amongst coloured
people. So you are not unique in that respect umfaansee,
this existential crisis which you are having, it is very common for
colored people. so you are not unique in that respect umfaan. you
see. ya. so, hamba galshe ne, zong bona some time umfanyan. ne?"
(Kurt Egelhof, Four
Generations: 2009)
Four
generations, in forty minutes, uncovered the patrilineal story of the
lives of four generations of men. Grandfather, Father, Protagonist
and Son, held together by how race had so irrevocably marked their
lives. Kurt Egelhof, the autobiographical protagonist, tried to make
sense of his life through tracing his lineage and embodying the
characters of his ancestry and offspring, as well as himself. Midway
through the play, following the death of his father, Kurt tells of
how he approached numerous men, spoken of only by the proper names of
their races, asking “are you my father?” Upon approaching Black
Man, he proceeds to say the above, most importantly, “You
see, this existential crisis that you are having, it is very common
amongst coloured people”. This
is the event,
6 lines of text spoken in a play, held in a tiny, dusty hall as
laughter bounced back and forth, off the walls. But comedy’s
congenital characteristic is laughter from truth. We laughed not
because it was simply funny, but because these six lines spoke of
truth. I laughed and suddenly became conscious of a sinking feeling
in the pit of my stomach. At this point, that the world exploded
outwards. Reconstituted, the world now presented itself a question,
wholly constituted by this question and the numerous variations of
“what does it mean to be me?” This question was now the
ever-thumping bass-line in the score of the personal drama, the
subtext to which characters spoke to and about, and I, as protagonist
and reader, actor and director, was not allowed the ignorance of
being unaware of the subtext and its implications. I became fully
conscious of myself in the first and third person, acting and
watching my self act. Kurt Egelhof and his one-man play could exit
stage left: their role had been played. The stage had been set. The
drama continued.
Scene Two : Enter Alain
Badiou, s’il vous plait
Suddenly,
the entrance of event was heralded, as the incarnation of Alain
Badiou made its ghostly entrance. Constituting Four
Generations
as the event, Badiou’s account of the subject and ontology named
and framed the existential experience. I, the subject, had
experienced an event, viewing Four
Generations,
which had marked a point of rupture with my present
ontological understanding, as an ontology that was not previously
present began to take hold. The two integral themes of event, central
to this drama, waited in the wings for their cue: “fidelity” and
“truth”. With their relationship marked by reciprocity, the
subject seeks truth through fidelity to the event, faithful to what
the meaning the event holds for their conception of being in the
world. Thus, it requires the individual to be active agent and not
passive receptor. Reliant on the active decision of the subject, I
acquiesced and Fidelity and Truth made their melodramatic entrance.
The violent disruption of the established order of things had now set
its course, an order in ardent pursuit of truth, a magisterial truth:
“definitively unknowable”, yet “made a matter of knowledge by
the activity of the subject who acts to integrate it into the
discernable and epistemological regime of the situation.”2
Simply
put, to understand this truth is to understand what it means to
occupy your body, to fully inhabit the phenomenon of being locked in
your skin. Multiple intellectuals, like a Greek chorus, enjoy
asserting intellectual superiority by uniformly chanting “race is
mere “arbitrary” melanin” whenever people’s experience of
race comes into question. To this I am tempted to assert Fanon’s
statement: “There are too many idiots in the world”. I assert
this fully aware of Fanon’s subsequent proviso, that having said
that I now have the dilemma of having to prove it.
Simply
put, these intellectuals would have more authority if we could excise
ourselves from our skin. But in a world where the skin you are in
encompasses more than your material self, when it encompasses your
being in the world, it seems this arbitrary melanin does not leave
experience to chance. It seems melanin is experience.
The
bodily experience of being coloured
What
does it mean to be in a body that so fully rejects its wholeness? A
body existing as a fraction: instead of wholes, we speak of halves,
further split into thirds, a sectioned existence. In a body that
architecturally reveals its ambiguity, to exist is to live at a
strange and perfidious distance from wholeness as your body is
absolutely not an absolute. To be coloured, punctuated by an ancestry
on competing ends of the colour spectrum, is to be caught manifold
existence, both in the way that racial miscegenation causes people to
think of you as simultaneously white and black, and in the way the
experience differs so profoundly for every person caught in this grey
area: neither white nor black, but simultaneously white and black…and
coloured. Instead of the self replicated in the standard black/white
binary, there is a self multiplied by three.
In
the incidence of the “event”, to arrive here is always to arrive
there: each moment an evanescent step towards a shifting end point.
Much of this can be attributed to encountering yourself as third
person: “as I arrive here. She arrives there”. The self in
perpetual process seems never destined to reach any sense of the
absolute, never to fully arrive, set down ones baggage and rest. To
question the self is to be a perpetual wanderer: restless at heart.
Multiplied, the coloured body seems constantly attempting mastery
over Derridean “double duty” in an attempt to reconcile a self
that is split: having not duty to one identity but to multiple.
Lamentably, it seems a world is marked by proximities: perpetually a
site of nearly; close to; almost; but never completely black or
white. It is the proximity to both these worlds that marks the
puzzling complexity that has emerged in being simultaneously multiple
races. And right on cue enters a man in a suit, red shirt and red
shoes.
Scene
Three: Double Duty
Overnight the Negro has been
given two frames of reference within which he has to place himself -
Fanon, 1967: 83
“the
short answer is yes”,
we return to the prologue, that setting of the dramatic action that
often makes its reappearance after the exposition of the action.
Grant Farred read his Apostrophizing
Algeria: The Ghost In Derrida to
a crowd expecting football and the 2010 FIFA World Cup. What they got
was football and the 2010 FIFA World Cup, but read through the
philosophical lens of French/Algerian Jacques Derrida. Not quite what
a crowd of first year students expected. In a poignant lecture,
peppered with spectres of Marx, overwhelmingly filled with Derrida,
and constituted by Zinedine Zidane and other football players doing
double duty to their Algerian and French identities, Farred read his
lyrical text. It was football and identity but in and amongst this, I
found “colouredness” and identity. For every idea, notion,
suggestion, presupposition, I saw “colouredness” with remarkable
clarity. Unfolding was the notion of double duty, in the most
seamless relation between theory and lived realities, the idea of
being a self continually at the mercy of two identities such that the
self vacillated between the two. I forgot my beloved football, and
thought only on the implications for my understanding of a being at
once two. Knee deep in writing a dissertation on being coloured in
the world, I was caught within the boundaries of constantly
questioning being, constantly having to face myself in the production
of this scholarship and personal existential questioning, everything
related back to considering my own racial constitution. I had been
able to subtly ignore the still unanswered questions that chased me,
constantly pursuing my shadow, my self and its numerous projections,
in the wake of Four Generations. I had been able to out-run it. But,
suddenly, it took hold, I found myself forced me open, unable to
continue as I had been: suturing each fragmented part together
everyday to be able to be ignore the splinters – ignoring how I had
been unable to pull them out before they pulled me apart. “I think
I saw Jacques Derrida at the World Cup” he kept saying, and I
translated it into my own questions of being and belonging–
fashioning it into a framework that would enable me to understand
this identity that so haunted me: the identity that had been the
subject of acute and sustained enquiry.
“the
short answer is yes”
I
had asked the question having made the link between how
French/Algerian football players do double duty to two nations and
identities, and how the phenomenon of being coloured in South Africa
often meant double duty between black and white racial identities.
“the
short answer is yes”.
In
that answer I found nothing but chaos. Violently thrown from my
current state of being, I was thrust into radical crisis: the
excessive of questions of the self.
Plagued
by this critical state of being, I walked around with the world on my
back, not Atlas but Quasimodo, crippled under the weight of this
understanding. I felt a self eviscerated from itself, simply pieces.
I stood at a distance from myself and pondered my self. In a zone of
heightened being, I existed only to question existence at every turn:
from waking to sleeping, walking down the road, on the telephone to a
friend, or standing in the grocery store. Each second was occupied by
the repercussions of Farred’s answer: questioning racial
strictures. It is an invidious position to find yourself in.
Ryland
Fisher writes “I am obsessed with race because it has always been
obsessed with me”. My obsession with race is similar. I can at
every moment of my life point to some instance where race has reared
its ugly head: whether a baby, toddler, teenager, or young adult.
Every day I am confronted with race, which only impacts so deeply as
I have been so engaged in questioning it. I cannot forget, the world
will not let me, but most importantly I will not let me, not until I
have understood what it means, until fidelity has led to some sense
of truth.
In The Other Healing, Jacques Derrida writes:
I am European, I am no doubt a
European intellectual, and I like to recall this, I like to recall
this to myself, and why would I deny it? In the name of what? But I
am not, nor do I feel, European in
every part, that is,
European through and through. By which I mean, by which I wish to
say, or must say:
I do not want to be and must not be European through and through,
European in every
part. Being a part,
belonging as ‘fully a part’, should be incompatible with
belonging ‘in every part’. My cultural identity, that in the name
of which I speak, is not only European, it is not identical to
itself, and I am not ‘cultural’ through and through, ‘cultural’
in every part. (OH,
82)
If
you substitute “European” with coloured, you can begin to
understand my neurosis, the pathological obsession with race.
Experiencing a self as parts, you begin to pick apart each piece,
questioning, why do I not feel completely whole? Why does each part
look different from the one before, why am I not identical to myself,
not coloured through and through coloured in every part. Arbitrary
melanin, but not arbitrary questions.
“the
short answer is yes”
The
interminable nature of this double duty is what unsettled me most.
How
the past would haunt both the present and the future. I stood, a
person divorced from a people, apart from the crown, feeling at once
foolish that I was so taunted and haunted by 5 words, but feeling the
same sinking feeling return, descend upon me once more.Viscerally, I
felt only rupture. Numb to other sensations. Usually you shift and
the world shifts with you. But in that moment the world had suddenly
shifted and I was the split-second delay: tardily chasing my shifting
world, trying to keep up with it, understand it: and failing on every
account. I heard the spectre of Yeats as I fell apart, and the centre
did not hold3.
My world was mere anarchy.
Scene
Four: Fanon enters to the sound of Rhapsody
on a theme of Paganini4
I
burst apart, now the fragments have been put together again by
another self5
Into
the morass entered Fanon, first appearing in the play as the stock
character of “knight in shining armour”, soon to be followed by
ancestor and brother. In Fanon I found solace, a valiant ancestor who
had walked the path I now trod and rendered my crisis intelligible.
No longer in woeful solitude, or paralysing crisis, to find Fanon was
to make a joyful discovery. Finding Fanon feels akin to an
archaeologist making a great, historically significant find that
suddenly unleashes a wave of possibles: most crucially the act of
reconstituting the self but a self reconstituted. Fanon held the
answer to the questions that had plagued, through the notion of
transcendence. A notion that had never entered the realms of what had
been I’d thought possible, but which holds out the hope of ending
an all-consuming pathology. Deceptively simple, this notion of
transcending your race is not
an answer, but the
only answer to a
world in which race matters, often more than the content of
character. The only way out is beyond.
In
Fanon I see myself reflected, often identically, some times more
abstractly and most acutely in Black
Skin, White Masks.
The Lived Experience
of Blackness, the
oft-quoted fifth chapter is Fanon’s personal, poetic and poignant
engagement with his own existential crisis. In a world of constant
liberal claims, multiple distractions and the apparent inurgency in
dealing with being, there is a reassuring sense of solidarity felt in
the recognition of a similar pathology. To read Fanon was to read a
resounding yes that echoed with manifold truths, resounding from a
dizzying height to the deepest foundations. The similarities in
racial experience are uncanny, particularly given the different
contexts and eras. Suddenly I began to see spectres of Fanon
everywhere; he became the omnipotent god of all things race related:
the first and last word in all situations. Fanon became the answer in
a place where there had previously been none. Gradually, as it must,
the godly status afforded waned in the realisation of Fanon’s
humanness, and the knightly armour saw a costume change into a dapper
suit, but the respect of a life lived with profound insight and
fidelity remained intact. Fanon became not the answer, but holds
glimmer of hope: the hope of transcendence.
Transcendence:
unmasking façade
The
coloured body has always been enigmatic, a shape-shifter of sorts: at
times able to take on other races with relative ease. To possess a
body able to transcend its skin has been the will of many of my
ancestors, but this has been regrettably towards one side of the
colour spectrum.
There
is a sick pleasure that washes over one in this recognition of the
body’s ability to transcend itself through the proximity to
whiteness that means coloured people can try for/play white. The joy
is not having white skin, you know your own perjury. The delight is
the achievement of neutrality. A world where your body is yes, your
mind is a yes and you inhabit the world in affirmation…until your
lie reveals itself and you begin again, attempting this fraudulent
transcendence. As Fanon says: “out of the blackest part of my soul,
across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be
suddenly white”, and it is this I vehemently detest. This is not
“hurrah for Schoeler6”
but a “hurrah for Verwoerd”, a shout which sticks in the throat,
malignantly beginning to take on the disease of corporeal
malediction. In recognition of this suspicious and deceptive victory,
I strip off the ill-gotten, abhorrent coat of Mayotte Capacia and now
proceed as Malcolm X, adopting his swagger and rhetoric. And it
tastes like freedom.
True
transcendence, it is the possibility of truly moving past and beyond
race's grip, getting beyond an skin under which something perpetually
crawls; leaving one constantly scratching at the stitches one has
sutured in the attempt to keep it all in. It is the thought that
perhaps the ground will not keep giving way, and the world will stop
its relentless and tiresome reconstitution. That perhaps it is
possible to imagine a world in which the body is not constantly
abraded by looks, gestures, words and actions that reveal race’s
malevolence; perhaps it is possible for there to be a world where to
be coloured is not to occupy a neither here nor there existence, as
the product of miscegenation; perhaps it is possible to be free from
the chains of an existence in duality, an existence characterised by
assuming a persona akin to the dilemma of French/Algerian football
players.
Scene five: Je suis Zidane
Yet,
it is in the last scene that I drape myself in the uniform of Zidane,
taking on not the colours of Les
Bleus, not the double
duty implicit in the indistinct identity. Rather taking on the state
of mind and technical mastery that enabled Zidane to emerge as one of
the greatest footballers of all time. For if I am to play as a
midfielder, caught in the racial interstices and bound by the rules
of this racial game, then I hope to play with the skill of Zidane: a
midfielder, controlling and receiving the ball with ease, skill and
technical precision. A midfielder who was capable of launching a
crippling defence as a master controller and receiver of the ball,
and possessing, in his virtuosic facility, the capacity to score
game-winning goals. Ultimately, not simply a player of the game, but
a playmaker. In being locked in this perpetual football game where
the stadium lights are always on, highlighting every manoeuvre and
the rules dictate possible action, emancipation can only be achieved
by our own active pursuit as “none but ourselves can free our
minds”7.
Recognising
the façade of emancipation that emanates from liberal rights
discourse, the battle still wages from within the confines of the
mind. In this embattled territory, it then seems apt that games are
won or lost in the midfield8.
The
final soliloquy
So
we return to the self, ending where we began: questioning existence
and event. We have seen the entrances and exits of the dramatis
personae, the action has taken place, and there has been climax,
melodrama, violence and sorrow. All that seems to remain is for the
curtain to descend upon this drama…yet it does not. Rather, a voice
bellows:
All the world is a stage and all
the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their
entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts9
Epilogue
The
epilogue is not. In its place is the ellipsis. Without end,
conclusion, dénouement, catharsis. The exhumed ghosts resist burial.
The body, in its mental and physical capacity, continues its
perpetual journey, “surrounded by an atmosphere of certain
uncertainty”10
Notes
2
Roffe, 2006: 336
3
W.E.B Yeats, The Second Coming
4
A composition by Sergei Rachmaninov, in tribute
to the virtuosic violinist Niccolo Paganini, with subtle sanguine
tones building to an elated climax
5
Fanon, F., 1967: 82. Black Skin, White Masks.
6
Fanon cites a story of a black negro in bed with
a blonde, at the moment of orgasm the negro is said to shout “Hurrah
fro Schoeler”
7
Bob Marley, Redemption Song
8
Farred, 2000
10
Fanon, 1967: 83
