One of those things....

I wasn't brought up in a society of bourgeois values, as I've noted before, most of all in my memoir. I believe that there may have been Rhodesians who were, but that doesn't seem to have pertained to me. The narrow individualism and the attribution of well defined characteristics to gender roles was not part of my childhood experience, at school, or towards my mid teenage years. Maybe I simply didn't pay enough attention. I'd internalised a few ideas that women were different from men, by the age of emigration.

Yet no matter to what degree I tried to externally conform, inwardly my spirit was rough and wild and wanted to climb trees, race across fields on horseback, and touch the sun. I had little inwards compliance towards the strictures of femininity, although externally I did roughly what I thought was expected of me. The problem, I guess, if there really was one, was that I didn't feel particularly defined by any social role. I hadn't cottoned onto the idea of putting myself into a category. My responses to life and to others were based upon crude calculations of what was expected from me, rather than from any feelings from the inside. I saw social authority as inevitable, but lacking in insight. So I didn't relate to it from the heart.

That was very different from how my Western peers behaved. I saw them as those who had lost their spirit -- the remains at the bottom of the teapot; something wasted and used. Their competitive individualism seemed to be in contention for things that didn't really matter, since all were in this same resigned pasta-boat of placid conformity. You were supposed to aim to win approval when the stakes were very low indeed, when those who could give you such approval had no fire of their own to impart. Due to my sense that life had evaporated from my peers and those around, I didn't have very much of a social life in high school, after immigration. I didn't miss it, either. Rather, I desperately missed a sense of wildness, or social and political unpredictability in my experiences.

Because of my stoical upbringing, I tend to presume that when others do not communicate, they are experiencing the world in a way that is ruggedly thick-skinned. Since I don't necessarily experience the emotional world of Westerners, in the absence of other signs, I tend to posit something about their emotional states from my own background experience. For instance, if I express a concern about my life and its situation, and that is ignored, then I am inclined to conclude that we are, all together, upping the ante in terms of thick-skinnedness and indifference to our material surroundings. Yet that is rarely the case -- or the correct interpretation.

Rather, in accordance with Western cultural logic, I am supposed to accept that my concerns are being overlooked because of the femininity that has been attributed to me, whilst I have been unaware. The overlooking of things that matter to me is not to be taken as a sign that we are all entering a zone of transcending the things that seem to matter -- rather I am supposed to take it as a sign that my gender causes me to raise issues that are of no relevance. (I understand how that works intellectually nowadays, but when I am comfortable with a relationship, I often revert to relating not in the Western way, but in my childhood African way, which leads to confusion, as thick-skinnedness was one thing that we sought to socially demonstrate.)

Miscommunication ensues, and those imbued with Western cultural logic take offence. I seem to be emotionally blunt and insenstive -- or perhaps too emotional (take your pick). Either way, I'm not responding to unspoken assumptions about gender roles in the conventional Western way -- and some conclude that I am persecuting them.