The Patriarchal Trap

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I found myself in the feminine side of a patriarchal trap, but not by will or choice.   At its core, patriarchy is a system that treats women as if they belong to their fathers.   What a father wills for his daughter is publicly what she "is" and what it is necessary for her to continue to be.   Other men will tacitly reinforce what they divine to be her father's will for her.   From personal experience:  you can't go around saying, "My father wants this for me, but I want the other arrangement."   Well, you can say it, but its a way of garnering popular support for your father and making your own choices look extremely dubious to the public eye.

I'm sure that there are many women who were not born into this patriarchal trap to begin with, but I spent the first fifteen years of life in the womb of right-wing Rhodesia.  To be made uncertain of what you  know and what you don't, because people keep blasting you with suggestions that you don't know what you surely do, is a recipe for crazy-making.  There are few people who will not take the father's view.   It seems authoritative.

Because of this patriarchal dynamic that affected my psychology, I developed a persistent sense that I wasn't really there when I spoke.   My sense of my own experiences was revoked by others who assured me I couldn't really mean what I said; that I meant something else when expressing my perspectives.   This ideological denial of my opinions, ideas and observations was crazy-making, since it created a smokescreen around my consciousness.   I was never quite sure what kind of opinion or idea had any social validity.   I felt like I was in a sense unreal, myself, and had to bring myself into the world by some tireless gesture, which involved sticking to my guns until the smoke clouds  around me started to subside.

The fact that my father's view of me wasn't valid --- either in terms of who I really was or more broadly in terms of ethics --- has taken a long time to become clear.   In the mean time, I had given up expecting any consolation from others.   My father's view of me was based not on his experience of me, but on his experience of his mother.   That much is now clear;  he felt tormented and abandoned by her.   I didn't torment and abandon my father, but his mother did when she sent him to boarding school at an early age, and did not protect him from the world's violence, including his stepfather's verbal violence and rage.

Because it was my father who entertained some pretty immature conceptions and notions about me, these conceptions and notions were considered to be true by the authorities I went to for help.   I couldn't make sense of the fact that my own views were not taken as the true ones.   This made me feel uncertain and unborn.

Marechera's writing helped me, finally, to understand reality on my own terms. You have to abandon your fear of death and your need for social approval, and then other people's agendas in wanting to control you become plainer to see. That's because you're no longer wrapped up in the circumstances emotionally and in particular you're no longer crossing your fingers for a good outcome -- that life should turn out to be full of roses and benevolence. Once you lose hope, you gain reality. And, it turns out that the deeper reality isn't ideological; it's not patriarchal. It's robust, and complex and pulsating. But, you may first have to move very far from from polite society and live under a hibiscus bush like Marechera, to find that alternative sense of existence.

I managed to finally move from patriarchal unreality into the realm of experience.  Here, I understand everything on my own terms at last.



I’ve never sought normality or social grounding so much as an initiatory experience — something that would move me from fuzzy experience into palpable reality. I think I’ve always sought that. At least, from my early twenties, I always sensed that this was missing. I no longer do, however, since I’ve pushed myself to my limits psychologically and perhaps physically. I definitely felt the crushing force psychologically, so I am satisfied with that — that I am completely brave and worthy of my approval. This is what matters, in the end. If you haven’t tested yourself, you are still inclined to ask others for their views on you, to try to ground yourself in that way. That’s a horrible thing to do to oneself. Having gained this emotional self-knowledge, I have completed the most significant task required from an individual, in their lifetime.