my basic arrogance / calling society's bluffs

It is necessary to honour my bloody-mindedness for without it I would certainly have no life at all. It is how I came to survive this long, by thinking, “It is very likely that the people who are bringing all sorts of accusations against me are merely mistaken.” My father’s cause against me was that I was not the perfect daughter and Rhodesian woman. These were true, because I’d had my own matters to contend with – how to make sense of an environment and a culture which had almost no meaning at the moment when I first arrived in it, aged 16. I was not the perfect Rhodesian woman because I didn’t know what that was, and all my father’s blustering and reprimanding were not going to turn me into that. My society had me as it had wanted me – the perfect Rhodesian child.

So when people turned their backs on me and shuddered when I tried to tell them of how much I’d lost, I learned to just accept that as their way. These people of this new terrain were as unknowable as the Kantian “thing in itself”. They seemed to know what they were doing but I couldn’t find their soul. Talking with them was like a game of roulette, placing your bet as to what kind of responses would come out. Sometimes it was a condemnatory response for my seeming to glorify the past (in fact, I was merely mourning it). At other times it was indignation that I was asking questions that I should already know the answers to, and that I was up on my high horse, wasting everybody’s time and effort. I got a tightness around my throat after a while, when I learned not to speak my feelings or ideas.

But somehow my bloody-mindedness – “maybe these people are wrong?” – pulled me through all of it, until finally I learned that it is not as terrible a thing as one could imagine to be considered evil, because of where you’re from. People are naturally afraid of evil, even when they grant unwitting concessions to it by crediting it to be where it isn’t, where it wasn’t previously, before they saw it there.

So I became “evil” and tried to figure out what a fascist looked like, and behaved like, so that I could turn into one. At least that way, I would be getting something back for all that people had considered me to be. “Might as well be hung as a wolf, rather than as a sheep,” I said, gaining renewed confidence in myself through this idea.

Now, everybody could know that I was evil. And when I introduced myself, it would be as good as saying, “Hi, I’m evil. How do you feel about that? Can you deal with that, then?” That way, I’d avoid being ambushed by people who pretended to be friends, but were merely waiting for a moment to condemn me for my nefarious colonial characteristics, the moment I did something unexpected or stepped even slightly out of line.

This solution worked for quite some time, and bought me rare intensive moments of great peace of mind. Meanwhile, I would hit the books – any books: Sartre, in the initial stages, and then Nietzsche – to try to work out what things meant.  Also the Frankfurt School.  Finally, Bataille, Marechera, shamanism. By means of these, I reached myself.