Conan the Barbarian: The Musical (Arnold Schwarzenegger)

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you.
Hear the lamentation of the women!

For more ridicumusicals: http://jonandal.tumblr.com/

Prelude to Skiing

I am well on course in my mission to accumulate American experiences before Immigration Services (in concert with some administrators at my school) ask me to leave the country. Yesterday I went skiing on Hunter Mountain. To be more accurate, I went skiing down a smallish mound of snow next to the mountain. It was hard work trying not to ski right over the dozen or so deliriously happy little children sharing the slope with us. Our ski-teacher had done a better job of teaching us how to go than he had of teaching us how to stop. Anyways, I like to think of the situation as a dynamic obstacle course.

A seasoned veteran of symphony concerts and other high-culture events in Bloemfontein, I was expecting to be the only black person at the resort. To my surprise, there were 6 or 7 of us. I think all of us met at the equipment hire queue. Within a few minutes we were all standing next to each other. Each silently wondering what the other was doing here.

Talking about the queue, the devil is in the details! No one told us that equipment hire is like trying to board an international flight (or going to the Department of Home Affairs). Except, as Janet put it, at every station you are given more things to carry. We queued to get to the computer terminals at which we entered our details and received a print-out that then permitted us to go to the second queue. At the second queue we waited to get to the lady who took our printout and equipment hire ticket and stapled them together, and allowed us to the third queue. At the third queue we were given the ski boots (like a straight-jacket for your ankle), that made it difficult to walk to the fourth queue. The fourth queue was for checking-in our personal stuff and the fifth to get the helmet that is (according to the last of 3 waivers we signed) "protective at slow speeds".

For the 6th challenge, they changed things up a bit and instead had us stand in a 10-people-deep huddle across about twenty meters where about 5 employees shouted numbers out over each other and over the hubbub of the scrum. (We had been given a piece of paper with a number on it at one of the 5 previous stations). After 15-20 minutes when my number was called out and I triumphantly tried to collect the ski's, it was pointed out that I needed the paper from station 1 and my rental ticket which had been stapled together by the lady at station 2. My heart sank. I had lost it. I had lost my boarding pass. I had to return to station 5 and look for it. Fortunately, it was on the floor behind the counter.

By the time we finished getting the ski's, finding the place where the ski-lessons were given (an odyssey in its own right) and taking the lesson, Janet and I agreed that it was time for us to have lunch and a beer as a reward for the hard work, and so we did.

Questions and 3am thoughts

1. Snow is ugly. And it is unpleasant. Why are you dreaming of a white christmas?

2. Go-go boys are cute. Why do they always leave an unexplained oily residue on the fingers?

3. You will never meet a nice boy at the club. Go home and watch a rom-com.

4. Grey sweatpants are always ugly. Bhuti, why are you trying to sit next to me in the subway? And why are your thighs all up in my grill? Can you not press your knees together and look straight ahead like everyone else?

5. Facebook is addictive. But at least I'm not on crack.

A poem I cant get out of my head

A Song for Many Movements
by Audre Lorde

Nobody wanted to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence.

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

The South African LGBT Flag

Late last year, at South Africa's biggest annual queer party, a brand-new "South African Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered flag" was launched. The setting was the annual Mother City Queer Project (around 10,000 attendees) whose theme this year was "Gay and South African Pride". The designer of the flag, Hugh Brockman, says "I truly believe we (the GLBT community) put the dazzle into our Rainbow nation and this flag is a symbol of just that…look at all these costumes, this event, even Cape Town at large. It is a testimony that we as the Gay community have a lot to offer in skills, talent, inspiration, business (millions in PINK MONEY) and life".

I was reminded of this flag when I watched Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk entitled "The Danger of the Single Story". Ms Adichie warns us about the power of stories in framing our understanding of the world, particularly about peoples. She warns us to be wary of the single story - the single, neat narrative that claims to tell the story of all of a people, a culture, a country. There are many stories, and understanding comes from hearing many of those.

This flag represents to me, a single story of gayness. Gayness is white, affluent, young, male, attractive, fun, liberated (or in the process), talented, worldly, classy. Gayness is "dazzling" with "skills, talent, inspiration, business". As pointed out by the website of Cape Town Pride, "It is an international fact that the LGBTI market is both affluent and influential… On the whole, South African LGBTI individuals are high-yield, trend-setting, brand-conscious, loyal and have ample disposable income." This is not possible with our high poverty and unemployment rates. Obviously CTPride is not talking about all of us.

The flag was designed by few, is owned by few, but it claims to represent many. In doing so, this flag does not unite us, it obscures our own brown, fat, skinny, old, female or poor faces and voices. It places us behind the white, affluent, male, young… It tells only one of our many stories.


Click the link for my friend Jake's essay on the same theme, but more substantive.

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Last wednesday my research supervisor told me that he had just received terrible news about the murder of David Kato. Today was the first time I felt really sad about it - just because my first instinct is always to do, and so I have occupied myself trying to organize a candlelight vigil with members of the student organization I am in.

I wanted to write something about what David's murder means to me. But my dim anger and helpless (and unhelpful) sadness are stuck in my throat, just behind my mouth. I am mute. So it is sad Barbra Streisand songs, thick ice-cream with bits of chocolate cookies in it and my black stilleto's which still have not made their debut on the sidewalk. My head is full.

Gay is unAfrican (?)

It becomes increasingly difficult for me to shrug off the accusation that my gayness is not African. In fact it is not. I am a product of all the American and British media I consume. This is because all of us learn how to be from other people, and because there have been no people to learn gayness from other than those I found on the internet and on T.V. and in gay magazines. This is where I found the assumptions through which I make sense of my sexual political world.

I know it is not smart right now for a gay African man to be calling himself unAfrican (here is my legitimacy on a silver platter Bob/Kibaki/Museveni/Zuma). The point I want to try and make is that in battling the order of heteronormativity, a new order has been created and that order has diffused (incompletely) from the "west" across the world. There is a normative way of being homosexual, and there is a rubric of sexual identity that purports to describe everyone everywhere. You are either straight, L, G, B, T or I. Each of those letters comes with an identity. You have to chose one.

When Graeme Reid**, an anthropologist, studied "homosexual men and lesbians" in Ermelo, Mpumalanga in 2006, he found that being gay there was "almost synonymous with being effeminate or, in local parlance, a 'lady', or sis-Buti." He found that the separation of gender identity and sexual identity implied by the rubric did not play out in Ermelo. Instead, gay participants in the study saw themselves as members of a "third gender category, separate from men and women". One of the participants said: "In my family it is my mother and we [children] are six . I would say that at home there were three boys and two girls. Then there is me, who is gay." This is just one example in one context where the rubric fails.

So what?

This idea that our discourse around sexuality does not accurately reflect the lives of people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex has two implications. One is obvious but important - we risk excluding and alienating people when we advocate for sexual freedom and when we study sexuality. The other is a strategic implication. Well, a question really. By using a language of sexuality which is divorced from the culture of a place, from the experiences of people that live there, do we not perpetuate the myth that same-sex attraction is a foreign thing? There is no word to describe my identity in seSotho that I am comfortable using. I resort to english words and I use a language of queerness which has been received from scholarship and activism and pop culture in the west. I wonder if it would not be easier to dismiss the claim that gay is unAfrican if gay was something that we expressed in our languages and was true to the lives of all kinds of South Africans.

In a time when (hetero)sexual identity is a rallying point in a war against cultural imperialism, shouldn’t we be more deliberate in crafting a discourse which is true to our lives, and which is seen to be authentically African, South African, Sotho?


**The study was quoted in a conference paper:
Homosexual and bisexual labels: The need for clear conceptualisations, operationalisations and appropriate methodological designs
by Sandfort T., and Dodge, B.
in From Social Silence to Social Science.... it has a long subtitle and many editors.