Common Sense

If I were to name the reality that changed for me when I moved from Zimbabwe to become part of Western culture, it was the facet of common sense. When what I did out of common sense was not considered meaningful, or was questioned, I learned that what I had previously taken to be "common sense" was not actually so. It was turning out to be something else entirely. It was becoming its opposite. Anything that I assumed to be "common sense" was most likely to get me into trouble in the new cultural situation. So long as I wasn't relying on my prior cultural conditioning, I could probably say something that was deemed to 'fit in'.

This left me in a peculiar position with regard to "common sense", since this was no longer what it ought to have been for me -- a facilitator of social cohesion and interaction. Rather, every time I relied on "common sense" to get me through a situation, I learned anew, like a canine undergoing classical conditioning with electrical shocks, that any kind of natural thinking wasn't going to be of use to me. On the basis of direct, personal experience, natural (unquestioned, unexamined) thinking had became my nemesis.

It was this situational driven inability to rely on modes of thinking I had previously trusted that finally drove me towards intellectual life. For, an intellectual is, above all, someone who reacts in a highly suspicious way towards whatever others take to be the common sense of the times. Rather, she sees something entirely different going on, underneath, around it, and perhaps even above.

A loss of common sense perspectives on things therefore constituted my "shamanistic" transformation. I began to read social behaviour not in terms of what it was meant to signify, but rather as a complex "meta-text", which had only internally coherent meanings. When other people spoke to me in a way that jarred with my earlier understandings of "common sense", I began to analyse the ways in which their alternative version of "common sense" was constructed. I noticed a certain logic in these ways of representing the world. It was as if the logic was asserting, "This is how a normal Western subject looks at the world." At the same time, since I had not been brought up as a Western subject, I found this internal logic to be far from compelling.

The change from one culture to another, if these cultures are different enough, can produce the effect of shamanic wounding. The person experiencing such wounding feels as if she has lost something that cannot be redeemed. At the same time, this loss is somehow bound up with the capacity to see the world in a richer, more complex way. To lose one's "common sense" about reality is not simply a loss, then. Indeed, what stands to be gained through the loss of "common sense" may be of greater proportion.