Mansplanations

Mansplain. v. To explain in a patronizing manner, assuming total ignorance on the part of those listening. The mansplainer is often shocked and hurt when their mansplanation is not taken as absolute fact, criticized or even rejected altogether.

A friend of mine fell victim to a hip-intellectual's mansplanation tonight. The scene of the crime - a house party in my favourite brownstone in gentrified Brooklyn. I had encountered the manalyst myself a few moments earlier - he seemed to enjoy saying obvious things using unnecessary words and hand-gestures - many of them. I had wanted to excuse myself for another drink, but my cup was full. Also, I had premium real estate right by the food table - it was too scrumptious. I resigned to a few minutes of his mansplaining the importance of clean drinking water while stuffing my mouth - making sure to always have just enough food in it to make it impossible to respond to anything.

I wasn't too bothered really; after all, a few moments earlier a well-intentioned lady had asked me which South African Tribal Languages I speak, and which Tribe I belong to. She asked me not really to know what languages (because that’s what I call them) I speak, she had already prepared to forget the answer. It was to confirm her knowledge of Tribal Africa. This kind of thing bothers me sometimes - on another day I might have said something snarky about her blouse or started a shouting match. But today I wasn’t moved. I was drinking something sweet and surprisingly potent out of a red plastic cup. Now, my friend was angry about her mansplaining situation - so three of us pulled off to the side to say to each other some very unkind things about the manalyst. (We rubbished everything from his poor posture to his occupation). It was therapeutic.

When I first arrived here in New York, and at my school, it took me a while to get used to how people speak sometimes. Self-assured, assertive, and confrontational on a really thin knowledge base about the topic at hand. I remember one conversation with a school mate in which he impressed upon me that The Economist is really not a good publication to read. It is so UK-centric. Unless I feel beholden to my former colonizer, I should really switch to the New York Times or something like that. I was not ready for that, I was floored.

I almost duelled with a lawyer the other day who proclaimed that he had never discovered culture as patriarchal as African culture. People know more about us than we know about each other, it seems. Africa has over 2000 languages and just over 50 countries. Who can talk about African culture? Certainly not me.

When I first arrived, conversation seemed at times like mental arm-wrestling - it was suddenly possible to win or lose them. I tend(ed) to lose them. Manalysts and their mansplanations really crept under my skin. They don't so much anymore. I don't know why. I think I have given up, or turned into one. Ok, I don't really think I have turned into one. I hope not. 

But if you think I have, feel free to pull two friends to the side and say unkind things about me to each other. 

Applications (again)

Its time to apply for things again. Of course, the plans I had made before are before-plans, and now I need to make now-plans.

I attended a career fair the other day. It was slightly depressing because nothing there grabbed me. There was only the possibility of good money or prestige and the safety of a resume that can be warped into the right lie for just about any of the employers there.

I almost applied to a consulting company. (I had already bled out a disingenuous letter of motivation). Their online app system kept on rejecting my transcript from UCT (the pdf file was probably too big or corrupt or something). So I just ditched the application because I probably didn't want it enough, and they would probably sniff that out down the line.

I should probably just keep on lurching from one interesting project to another until it all comes together.  On the upside, I (cross fingers) have my next interesting project at a really exciting agency which does really amazing work but they are not going to pay me.

But you can't eat passion - not forever anyways.

silence

I have tried a few times to write about my last love(r). I have not yet found a mouth with which to tell. Two years have not created enough distance, maybe years alone don't. 

I only have suspicions and impulses - they refuse to birth words, not yet anyways. I want to blame it on race or class or my strange passage through the Cape Colony, or the time I frightened him because I was too black and too fast and I tapped him on the shoulder from behind outside my residence in Mowbray.  And his habit of locking the car doors upon sight of those men who have been selling flowers and beaded things on the corner of Paradise and Edinburgh for as long as I have known the corner of Paradise and Edinburgh. (They were brown and therefore dangerous, those men).

I think we never learned to understand together that I am Black and he is White and we have histories we didn’t create and they are written all over our bodies and read out loud every time a waiter puts the bill folder on his side of the table.

instead, we layered silence upon silence upon silence. until we Exploded. 

Tutu

"African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence."
--Wangari Maathai.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote this letter to the Constitutional Assembly in response to the National coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality's campaign to support the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Equality Clause in the Bill of Rights [in the South African Constitution of 1996].

Dear Members of the Constitutional Assembly

Re: The Retention of the Sexual Orientation Clause in the Bill of Rights

Within the Church of Christ, and indeed amongst adherents of other faiths, there is much debate and difference of opinion on the question of homosexuality. The theological and ethical issues are complex and far from resolved.  It is indisputable, however, that people's sexual nature is fundamental to their humanity.

The apartheid regime enacted laws upon the religious convictions of a minority of the country's population, laws which denied gay and lesbian people their basic human rights and reduced them to social outcastes and criminals in their land of birth. These laws are still on the Statute Books awaiting your decision whether or not to include gay and lesbian people in the "Rainbow People" of South Africa. It would be a sad day for South Africa if any individual or group of law-abiding citizens in South Africa were to find that the Final Constitution did not guarantee their fundamental human right to sexual life, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

I would strongly urge you to include the sexual orientation clause in the Final Constitution.

God Bless You

Yours sincerely

(signed) Desmond Tutu

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God - if there is this love among you, then we will know that you are my disciples."

*from Sex & Politics in South Africa edited by Hoad, N., Martin, K., Reid, G.

Maurice

I found E.M. Forster's Maurice in our garage when I was about 14. I don't remember how I came to read it before even noticing A Passage to India or A Room with a View. They were all in the same box that my uncle (who had been taking night classes in English) left at our house. It must have been during the hot, idle and depressive summer holidays after my first year of high school.

I was sure that I am gay, but knew that I would never tell anyone. We had read Othello that year and I cast myself as Iago - "look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under't". I hated myself, and knew I would one day find my thrills without ever telling anyone. I would live in the dark, and differently in the light. I was very dramatic (some things don’t change!).

Then I discovered this English novel completed in 1914 but published posthumously in the 1970s. The more I re-read it now (I do it at least once a year), the more absurd it seems. Anyways, at my first reading, I came across this passage. My fingers still know where it is in the musty book. Two friends find each other at college without ever having to speak out their affliction. They find a complicated and transient love.

Love was suddenly possible for me.

For a long while, this passage was all the hope I had.

 *****

Durham sat upon the floor beyond [Maurice's] reach. It was late afternoon… . Maurice stretched out a hand and felt the head nestle against it. He forgot what he was going to say. The sounds and scents whispered, 'You are we, we are youth.' Very gently he stroked the hair and ran his fingers down into it as if to caress the brain.

'I say, Durham, have you been all right?'

'Have you?'

'No.'

'You wrote you were.'

'I wasn't.'

The truth in his own voice made him tremble. 'A rotten vac and I never knew it,' and wondered how long he should know it. The mist would lower again, he felt sure, and with an unhappy sigh [Maurice] pulled Durham's head against his knee, as though it was a talisman for clear living. It lay there, and he had accomplished a new tenderness - stroked it steadily from temple to throat. Then, removing both hands, he dropped them on either side of him and sat sighing.

'Hall.'

Maurice looked.

'Is there some trouble?'

He caressed and again withdrew. It seemed as certain that he hadn't as that he had a friend.

'Anything to do with that girl?'

'No.'

'You wrote you liked her.'

'I didn't - don't.'

Deeper sighs broke from him. They rattled in his throat, turning to groans. His head fell back, and he forgot the pressure of Durham on his knee, forgot that Durham was watching his turbid agony.  He stared at the ceiling with wrinkled mouth and eye, understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven.

Now Durham stretched up to him, stroked his hair. They clasped one another. They were lying breast against breast soon, head was on shoulder, but just as their cheeks met someone called 'Hall' from the court, and [Maurice] answered: he always had answered when people called. Both started violently, and Durham sprang to the mantelpiece where he leant his head on his arm. Absurd people came thundering up the stairs. They wanted tea. Maurice pointed to it, then was drawn into their conversation, and scarcely noticed his friend's departure.  It had been an ordinary talk, he told himself, but too sentimental, and he cultivated a breeziness at their next meeting.

This took place soon enough. With half a dozen others he was starting for the theatre after hall when Durham called him.

'I knew you read the Symposium in the vac,' he said in a low voice.

Maurice felt uneasy.

'Then you understand - without me saying more -'

'How do you mean?'

Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, 'I love you.'

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, 'Oh, rot!'. The words, the manner, were out of him before he could recall them.

those three letters

Today someone told me that they're HIV positive.  We were talking about something else, about our Public Health interests. He mentioned that the region he is interested in working in would not admit him. (Like I would mention my ex-boyfriend to indicate my gayness without asking permission for it). I had a split-second of panic, but I think my face did not give me away. I hope it didn't.

I remembered a similar occasion a few months ago.  I was walking from a house party to a bar with some new friends and older friends. One of the new friends (I had just met him at his house party) noticed the shirt that I was wearing. My black Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) t-shirt with white "HIV Postive" emblazoned in huge block letters. I love that shirt, it reminds me of home, and it reminds me of the power of community organizing. I wear it often and deliberately. He noticed the shirt and I started talking a bit about TAC and how I came to work with its members.

He shared with me: "you know it took me a very long time before I could say those three letters to myself." At first I wasn't sure what he was saying. When I became sure, I froze. Again, the panic. What is the right thing to say back?

"It's Ok" ?

"Well done" ?

"I understand" ?

I don't think I understand, and I don't want to patronize. I am afraid, though, that my panic was read as something else - revulsion, judgement, pity. My new friend crossed the street and entered the bar - we didn't talk again that night, and it is unlikely that we will meet again. I wanted to apologize, or have a do-over, but what good would that have done then? I failed.

Maybe I have been on the other side.  Being in, and then out of the closet taught me to be vigilant, and to be quick. We have always had to be watchers. I remember mentioning my boyfriend to an ex-supervisor who considered himself my mentor. I didn't stop for feedback of course - I was not asking for permission. I did see the flash of panic in his eyes.  Our conversation struggled back on its feet clumsily, and limped on for a few more minutes before falling back to the ground. It was our last. I read his reaction as homophobia; clear and simple. I excised him from my life as I have excised others.

I wonder if it wasn't something else though. A brief failure - one worth forgiving. I wonder how many such failures I have failed to forgive.