Today, I came across a critical review in an esteemed journal, wherein the author emoted that whereas Alexandra Fuller pleads that she and her parents don't go to the dogs tonight, it would be better if they did. Even today, it is considered the height of good taste and a well-rounded political constitution to emit a tone that suggests "simple destruction would be too good for you!" I'm aware of the difficulties of conveying the realities of my own lived experiences -- the main one being that a wall of hatred quickly obscures the perspective I am trying to convey.
I understand it -- that is, most of it. Evil has often been done in the world, and somebody must therefore pay. That is how we reason, all of us. For each historical era there have been a group of people whom it is considered politically fashionable to hate. It's a resounding cry of "leave the others alone, and hate only these ones!" In the mid 20th Century is was okay to hate the Jews, if you were alive in Europe at that time. Blacks have often been hated -- especially in the American 20th Century. Women are still regarded as sub-human in a myriad of contexts where you wouldn't fathom it. In Rhodesia (and more so the Republic of South Africa) one wouldn't have wished to be born black in the 20th Century. (The contemporary state of Zimbabwe is not much kinder, economically or politically to the average person who has been born black.)
It seems to me that the emotional constitution of someone who is determined to express their right to hate has a message to the ones who are hated: It concerns the very dynamics of power, which put those in a position of structural advantage over others into a position whereby they are conceded their right to express hate. To be hated by one whose position is secure as a maker of popular sentiments is to see the crude underbelly of a very rarely observed political beast. Needless to say, such a vision is always an education.
I'm being a bit glib: had I developed the proper conservative mentality suited to my status as a no-good white trash ex-Rhodesian female, I would certainly be working as a teller in some bank by now. Perhaps I could have gingerly tested the economic waters as a primary school teacher -- or, more humbly, as a teacher's assistant. "As me no questions and I will tell you absolutely nothing at all," would have been my motto. By holding such a razorblade of nullity to heart, I would have survived (if only barely). More likely, I could have darted away sideways, out of the economic loop and into the cool lap of domesticity. There I could have expressed my opinions from a position of being a step or two above the status of being occupied with practical and economic matters. Many would have been the children I would need to produce. However, I would have been able to justify myself quite readily by remaining behind the veil. I would only have to intone "my husband [this]" or "[that]" in order to assure that build upon my own defensive wall against the world. Thus my existence would be guaranteed as a conservative flinging out new generations of conservatives: behind the veil.
That was how it was supposed to be. It didn't work out that way. Somehow, in some way, I couldn't make much sense of conservatism. What I thirsted after, day and night, was Knowledge.
I didn't know where to begin, so I tried various things. Experiments. One of these was to embrace fundamentalist Christianity. That didn't work out. It made me increasingly sick. Sick to the heart. Sick to the bone. I tried to recapture the possibility for adventure I had earlier enjoyed in my life. That seemed to work up to a point, but something was still wrong. The innocence of adventure was no longer there. Even the three hours journey on my bike to do the horse-riding meant crossing dirty highways, industrial milieu and the perspective of the earth as having become an open wound earmarked for housing construction.
I had to get out. Where there were horses. Then I could think a bit. Only not too much. It would be like just enough fresh air to last me through the week -- a week which would be guaranteed to make no sense at all.
It is hard to be hated. It is even harder when others are hated, too, and take out their fear of the hatred by making life harder for you. My father -- he said he wouldn't take me out to the place where there were horses. I was full of a selfish vibe, he said. He would drop me off in the middle of a Highway, so that I could make my own way on in life, from this point on. I had no right to expect anything more.
The key was to repress my personality, in order to survive.
Still, there was the other project running parallel to the project that entailed survival. This came under the description of the need to "find out what things mean". So the two projects of survival by repression of what I am actually thinking, and the project of "find out what things mean" by trial and error, ran side by side. It was quite a balancing act to keep both of them going at once, and in one particularly disastrous instance, I overbalanced and everything I had been working very hard to keep in order came undone. My mind is stronger than my body, however, and after ten years I was able to rebuild.
Being hated for an identity that people associated with white supremacy no doubt has its beneficial attributes, however. It encouraged a certain necessary independence of spirit. It drives one, out of oneself-preservation, to understand the real political dynamics that govern any situation. It can lead one into the isolation of a hermit. Thus, I became my own teacher, and taught myself to think.
I write from the position of one who expects to be hated -- for whom being hated has become a normal fact of life, like the buzz of the cicadas in the summer afternoon. Sometimes I suddenly leap up from my chair, with a sudden surge of feeling that something new might have developed upon the horizons of hate. These days such anxiety is rarely justified, although I am not fool enough to give up the suspicion that any onslought of hatred could hit me in the near future, from almost any direction whatsoever. The training of the past 20 years has not been in vain.
I understand enough now to know that the hatred isn't personal. It's situational. And ideological. One hates because one must have somebody to hate. The Westerner's hatred of me for being a white Rhodesian would just as easily pass on to become the hatred of somebody else.
Robert Mugabe, for instance.
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