My war of liberation

To achieve my liberation,  I had to deal with the habits of right wing thinking -- not mine, but those of my parents, particularly of my father.

The dynamics of this are extremely hard to understand.  This accounts for the fact that I didn't understand them for many years.  I always have the feeling that I've only just reached the precipice of understanding and that I've arrived breathlessly.

In short, it has to do with projective identification.   I come from a non-individualistic, layered society, where everybody had their place in the hierarchy.   What I couldn't have fathomed in my wildest dreams was that a lot of the solid feel of this society had to do with the capacity of those who wished to maintain a sense of a uniformity of characteristics to project their unwanted characteristics onto others.  A direct analogy is when somebody farts and blames it on the dog.   That was how my father's mind worked, anyway.   I'm not sure how far the phenomenon extended into the rest of society.

This was a country at civil war, where those who had black skin were given second class status.   The denial of their full humanity wasn't just formal, but had a psychological dimension.   There was a sado-masochistic dynamic, whereby the incapacity to demonstrate qualities of "civilization" was held over these black people as a reason to deny them liberation from inequality.   For instance, the authorities would act triumphantly if a word was used incorrectly because English was a second language.   This meant that a civilized mentality hadn't been attained yet and that a second class status was still necessary.

This describes the background to my own struggle -- for when we transferred to Australia from Zimbabwe, my father's mentality remained hierarchical and he looked around for a dog to blame his farts on.   He concluded that this person ought to be me -- and so began my battle for liberation where I demanded my full human status and he fought me all the way.

The aspects of his character that he tried to pass off onto me were defined in his mind as "feminine" characteristics.   He particularly tried to relate to his own emotions through me, by claiming I was experiencing very negative emotions and that I should speak to him about them.   By externalizing his confusion and distress and attributing them to another, he expected to be able to come to terms with them.

He used a lot of patriarchal reasoning to justify to himself and others why it was I who was experiencing these emotions and not he.  Many fell for his lies.  Even I wasn't sure, half the time, which of my problems were legitimately my own and which were his. Thus, my liberation as a human being has involved liberating myself from my father.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism