It's time to celebrate the past, to look back on it with gratitude, a sense of transcendence and relief.
I'm very, deliriously happy. All my life I'd been seeking a level of self-understanding that I finally have. I realized how definitively I'd achieved it yesterday, as I moved among my relatives and family with their newly sprouted children. I could relate to nothing that was happening and yet I didn't feel like going mad.
Now I have achieved the monumental task of self-understanding. I realize how from an extremely early age -- around the age of three -- I had developed the ability both to wholly embrace aspects of reality and to shut aspects of it out that would have hindered my development. For instance, I erased from the realm of meaningfulness my father's wartime temperament. I shut out emotional complexity in relationships, demanding that all relationships should be simple. My relationship with my father was very distant.
This strategy gave me an excellent childhood: I was one with nature.
This continued. As a teen, I went to all all girls' school. At this stage, life was also relatively tranquil and unhindered by any sort of incident apart from my mother increasingly worrying that I was isolating myself by spending too much time with horses. I suspect her fears had more to do with sexuality than sociability. She did not explain them to me at all.
I didn't lack for anything, as a young adult in Zimbabwe. Even when my father became increasingly hostile to me as a developing young woman, this didn't phase me as deeply at it might have -- rather, it heavily underlined the distant nature of our relationship. It felt like grave injustice to be treated in a harsh and arbitrary fashion. I can't say I was personally hurt by his erratic and alarming attitudes.
This all changed when my family migrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. After this, there was less scope to roam and more uncertainty. I became much more dependent on my father and his car, to get me to those kinds of places that potentially held interest to me -- the rural areas, where horses and the space to roam were. I eventually got a bike and road the two and a half hours out to see the horses. These trips helped me to reduce my level of distress in a setting where very little of either the Australian culture, environment or people made any sense.
The suburban setting was truly hideous. It didn't appeal to my sense of aesthetics, which were adjusted to appreciation of the African bush. I found the fashion to be garish, like a clown and counter to my appreciation for a cool, military aesthetic. I began to idealize what I'd lost. Mostly it was in terms of the aesthetic, but also I had the feeling that life as a whole had been on a firmer foundation before. Now, it was far more fragile, frivolous and cheap. (This was the mid-eighties, so commercial values ruled the 'culture'.) I did what I had always done -- I attempted to weather the storm, whilst waiting for change.
Change of the sort I felt I needed simply didn't arrive and I began to feel alienated. I had internalized just enough of this culture of individualism to reach for such a term. I couldn't understand it. I tried Christianity and reading the Bible -- but that only made everything so much worse. The more it didn't resolve my problems, the worse I felt. After three or four years of Christianity not working, I gave it up.
I couldn't fit into the culture, but I didn't feel any pain in this. The distress I felt was in not being able to roam freely through the environment, perhaps on a horse.
It gradually dawned on me that I lacked all sorts of normal competencies in terms of Australian society. I conceived that I had to develop my knowledge-base, or I would never be able to resolve my sense of being lost.
Once the pursuit of knowledge became my project, I worked on it tirelessly. Everything I did or experienced had to serve the purpose of enhancing my knowledge. I simply had to know what had been denied to me. Gaining knowledge was the project of my salvation and in its service, just about anything would be justified.
Conservative norms were as far as could be from me, in my hot pursuit of knowledge. I didn't find much companionship among liberals or leftists, however, since they had been trained to view me with a cynical eye, as I was a colonial type, who was deemed to have "fled" Africa. They occasionally upbraided me for what they considered my "expectations" that I should be given any understanding or respect, after having escaped the punishment that was awaiting me "back home".
It was leftists and liberals, above all, who made it impossible to culturally adjust.
My father's attitude didn't help either. My mother and father were always on the lookout for sexual impropriety -- which I was not capable of, because nothing in my environment really turned me on.
I lived many years in extreme "alienation".
I'm very happy now, all the same. I've managed to achieve a few "rites of passage", I know who I am and I approve.
I'm very, deliriously happy. All my life I'd been seeking a level of self-understanding that I finally have. I realized how definitively I'd achieved it yesterday, as I moved among my relatives and family with their newly sprouted children. I could relate to nothing that was happening and yet I didn't feel like going mad.
Now I have achieved the monumental task of self-understanding. I realize how from an extremely early age -- around the age of three -- I had developed the ability both to wholly embrace aspects of reality and to shut aspects of it out that would have hindered my development. For instance, I erased from the realm of meaningfulness my father's wartime temperament. I shut out emotional complexity in relationships, demanding that all relationships should be simple. My relationship with my father was very distant.
This strategy gave me an excellent childhood: I was one with nature.
This continued. As a teen, I went to all all girls' school. At this stage, life was also relatively tranquil and unhindered by any sort of incident apart from my mother increasingly worrying that I was isolating myself by spending too much time with horses. I suspect her fears had more to do with sexuality than sociability. She did not explain them to me at all.
I didn't lack for anything, as a young adult in Zimbabwe. Even when my father became increasingly hostile to me as a developing young woman, this didn't phase me as deeply at it might have -- rather, it heavily underlined the distant nature of our relationship. It felt like grave injustice to be treated in a harsh and arbitrary fashion. I can't say I was personally hurt by his erratic and alarming attitudes.
This all changed when my family migrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. After this, there was less scope to roam and more uncertainty. I became much more dependent on my father and his car, to get me to those kinds of places that potentially held interest to me -- the rural areas, where horses and the space to roam were. I eventually got a bike and road the two and a half hours out to see the horses. These trips helped me to reduce my level of distress in a setting where very little of either the Australian culture, environment or people made any sense.
The suburban setting was truly hideous. It didn't appeal to my sense of aesthetics, which were adjusted to appreciation of the African bush. I found the fashion to be garish, like a clown and counter to my appreciation for a cool, military aesthetic. I began to idealize what I'd lost. Mostly it was in terms of the aesthetic, but also I had the feeling that life as a whole had been on a firmer foundation before. Now, it was far more fragile, frivolous and cheap. (This was the mid-eighties, so commercial values ruled the 'culture'.) I did what I had always done -- I attempted to weather the storm, whilst waiting for change.
Change of the sort I felt I needed simply didn't arrive and I began to feel alienated. I had internalized just enough of this culture of individualism to reach for such a term. I couldn't understand it. I tried Christianity and reading the Bible -- but that only made everything so much worse. The more it didn't resolve my problems, the worse I felt. After three or four years of Christianity not working, I gave it up.
I couldn't fit into the culture, but I didn't feel any pain in this. The distress I felt was in not being able to roam freely through the environment, perhaps on a horse.
It gradually dawned on me that I lacked all sorts of normal competencies in terms of Australian society. I conceived that I had to develop my knowledge-base, or I would never be able to resolve my sense of being lost.
Once the pursuit of knowledge became my project, I worked on it tirelessly. Everything I did or experienced had to serve the purpose of enhancing my knowledge. I simply had to know what had been denied to me. Gaining knowledge was the project of my salvation and in its service, just about anything would be justified.
Conservative norms were as far as could be from me, in my hot pursuit of knowledge. I didn't find much companionship among liberals or leftists, however, since they had been trained to view me with a cynical eye, as I was a colonial type, who was deemed to have "fled" Africa. They occasionally upbraided me for what they considered my "expectations" that I should be given any understanding or respect, after having escaped the punishment that was awaiting me "back home".
It was leftists and liberals, above all, who made it impossible to culturally adjust.
My father's attitude didn't help either. My mother and father were always on the lookout for sexual impropriety -- which I was not capable of, because nothing in my environment really turned me on.
I lived many years in extreme "alienation".
I'm very happy now, all the same. I've managed to achieve a few "rites of passage", I know who I am and I approve.
4 comments:
Your journey towards happiness on the surface seems very different from mine. On a profound level, though, it's remarkably similar.
Great post! I will add it to my link encyclopedia.
Hey Jennifer, each time I read your stories I am amazed by your honesty and bravey to cross and trend the cultural, religious, social and even racial divides/boundaries without fear nor apology. What inspires me about your writtings mostly is the fact that you are one of the few who acknowledges that thsese boundaries that were set before us are not perfect. I will say this, and I think I said it before on my earlier comments that most of us that grew up in the colonized Africa idolized the ground that the white walked. We were trained to be "white" except that we could not change our skin. I am pretty sure that If there was away to do that, we surely would have done that.
When I started going to school, I noticed that black people of a lighter complexion were prefered. They would be put in places of authority and trust. Like class monitors and prefects. This is a environment where there were no white people at all, but the colonial influence was great. There are many ways in which as African people , we failed to love and appreaciate ourselves, and to this day we still suffer from that mentality. I know for certain that most black African people I know back home would prefer being lead by an ignorant white man even if you gave them an option of the competant person of thei own skin colour.
One other thing that I have noticed over time especially being in the US is that most Zmbabweans (black) speak great english as compared to other nationalities or immigrants, even locals. This is a double sword in the fact that in Zimbabwe if you do are not fluent in English, not mtter what you can accomplish you will never amount to anything. I know lot of people in Zim, who could not go to college or do apprenticeship jobs, because they could not pass English. This is regaredless of their high disitictions in other languages like math and science. I know this for a fact if a black Zimbabwean stood up to address other folks of is or her own tribe in English langauage and if he makes a grammatic mistake. He or she will be a laughing stock for a long time. Those who cannot master Engish langauge that well, we tend to judge them very harshly. I do not think this happens in some other African countries.
In my langauage no curse is worse than saying, you are black. 'Umnyama"Its like telling an American that he or she is fat! You cannot be forgiven for that. Back to the point, most of the things that burdened you both as young white person growing up in Rhodesia,Zimbabwe some of us expirienced double that dose or even tripple.
We had to discard our cultural values to be accepted and we still do. In most western cultures, it is a proper and acceptable thing to matain eye contact when talking to somebody. If you do not matain that eye contact you are automatically labelled as a lier. This is contrary to my Ndebele culture, in my culture you can never looked at directly at an adult or superior. Its a no no in Ndebele except if you are talking to your peers or spouse.
Something called "freedom" is not there in my culture. Only exist as a political slogan! Women are bound by culture from birth to death. Its a little bit better for men. The white man's culture which we inherited through education, colonialism and religion, which as much as it is a bondage, it also sets us free from the later.
I do not really think we can ever be free, but at least we must know and identify where we are bound.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Thanks for your honest thoughts, Justice. To make myself even clearer, this was never intended to be a post about suffering, nor was it intended to claim anything about my righteousness on the basis of suffering. Unfortunately, these are extremely common assumptions, but the ideology is Christian and Western.
I enjoyed your last paragraph, because I think you are right. African women are often not free. African men are only slightly more so. This is the traditional way. In 19th Century Europe, few whites were free, either. They had to fulfill their destinies on the basis of gender and social class.
Now we are entering an age of modernity. This transition from traditional culture to modernity has been taking place in the West for a while. The end of the 19th Century marked one lurch forwards. The cultural revolution of the 1960s was also extremely significant. Africa has lagged behind, with many of its spokesmen wanting to revert to older ways of traditional culture prior to colonialism.
It would be futile to argue that being colonised did not change everything for those who experienced it. But, there was almost never a pristine condition for any culture where one cultural group was not infringing upon or influencing another. The ideology that insists African people should throw off their oppression by restoring a pristine state that existed prior to colonialism is in error. This philosophical idealism will not lead to happiness, but will reinforce traditionalism and home grown oppression.
In my thesis, I write that it is important to depart from tradition and find one's own individual sense of meaning. That is frightening -- but I have followed this principle with great success.
We all have much to lament about the past, but we cannot change it. Trying to build any sort of identity on what one has suffered is self-defeating, as is trying to make others feel guilty for your suffering. You can't stop or reverse history that way. Life will just pour out further amounts of suffering, because the life force is not bound by your notions of social justice (or by mine!)
The only option is to work with what you've got -- like I have done.
Really, it's worth a try. My life is very exciting.
Post a Comment