Who and the Beast?

  My (briliant and raucous) cousin Sizakele intimates on 'beauty' and its  meaning in her life*

  I am 21 years old and grappling with issues of identity. Grappling with whether I can affirm myself as beautiful or not – and if this is a designation of any real significance. I have wiped the tears off the cheeks of many friends who have fallen too close to the less than favourable extreme of the beauty continuum. Or so they have been told. And I have sympathised with them because I have been called fat, self-important, boisterous, arrogant and much too intelligent to earn the affections of any man – but I have never been called ugly. You might be too smart, but you are really pretty and your complexion isn’t too bad either, they (men, women, everyone, really) would say. For some reason that has always been a comfort. Permission of sorts to pity the poor girls who are considered too dark, fat, thin, odd to be beautiful. I would tell my friends that worn old lie, of which I wasn’t even convinced, about everyone being beautiful; while my self-confidence was secretly nourished by the compliments of men who thought I met their standards of bed-worthiness.

After a conversation with a close friend of mine who has also struggled to consider herself beautiful enough to love, I sat in a taxi and thought about beauty as a concept and what it meant to me. Inexplicable, tear-inducing rage filled me and I had to write. What about, I did not know.

I started to write about how arduous the bumpy road to self-affirmation and self-love is when you’re black. How beauty is equated with these things and how one cannot consider oneself the inverse of beautiful, but still feel confident and worthy of love – and enough. Enough for parents and friends and extended family and the drilling mundaneness of everyday life. Inexorably, self-assurance and confidence to conquer anything as well the belief that what you have slain was indeed a giant – relies on where you fall on the beauty scale. It is not intellect, resilience, compassion or artistic brilliance that decide whether a woman is worth even her own love, but the amount of approval her sight invokes in the male gaze. And unobtrusively, she will make it her job to be called beautiful.

So I spit on this reasoning. I spit on the fact that my generation were given yellow dolls with piercing blue eyes and inundated with images of pink cheeked princesses and fairies that made us believe we had to be lighter and daintier and more poised, with smaller noses and thinner lips and hips that protruded just enough, to be worth celebrating. I spit on all the everyone-is-beautifuls and the black-is-beautifuls, the beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholders and the all-sizes-are-sexys that have ever been said. I will not settle for these hackneyed one-line consolations fed to every little black girl, desperate for approval, any longer! 

  

"I spit on the fact that my generation were given           yellow dolls with piercing blue eyes"

You see, I grew up in a rat-infested township that was a land of milk and honey for all forgotten ones and those who had seemingly not done anything that paid them to get out of the slums. I watched my single mother teach my brother to be a man and wrestled with the idea of being strong and self-sufficient and smart, but still womanly – bearing in mind the possibility of having to teach my own son about manhood one day. Of what help is beauty to me? It is not an accomplishment or fete of any sorts. It is mainly a perfectly abstract concept manufactured in the minds of white supremacists and refined in the gateless prisons of colonialism and its son, apartheid. I spit on your beauty! It does nothing for me. If I will be called anything, it ought to be wildly passionate, a formidable and enduring woman, who is undoubtedly intelligent, and maybe one day, wise. Beautiful is far too limiting and obscure a description to assign my being.

   I penned my response to her thoughts 

Those closest to me will know that every so often I am given to mouthing off in subversion of some or other ‘social norm’. So when my 21 year old, very intelligent cousin launches a similar missive in denial and/or defiance of ‘beauty’ (I think she’s still deciding herself), one would expect me to read it and nod in vigorous agreement as I do so.

I did.

But my intuitive response wasn’t as straight-forward as one would expect. To be sure, I think she’s right on the money about the black female’s struggle towards- and the right to- self-assertion, particularly in a context wherein outright sexism is sometimes sanctioned under the guise of ‘African tradition’. Of course, I cannot and do not and say this from a woman’s perspective, but from a male’s. I also stand with her fully in dismissing the blanket ‘all girls are beautiful’ and ‘power-in-the-afro’ schools, both of which I find to be lazy (and quite frankly, nauseating) attempts to deal with the difficulties of ingrained notions of the ideal feminine form. In my opinion, they’re both just another instance of legitimizing the societal flow by swimming against it while denying its existence altogether. If there’s no flow, what are you swimming against?

All that being said, I’ve always held that beauty, however amorphous a concept, has some kind of universality to it. What I mean is that there are instances in which a certain person, place, or event elicits a general consensus on how ‘beautiful’ it is. I’m thinking the Aurora lights, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, or Megan Fox’s eyes, Rihanna etc. And of course there is no such thing as perfect agreement across the board on any single issue, but there are certainly instances whereby there is discernibly more consensus than others.

Often, people who hold the same view get challenged with the question, “what exactly is beauty?” or “What exactly is beautiful about her/it?” The poor victim then usually falls into the trap of attempting to answer that question, isolating specific features of the subject to justify why he/she thinks it’s beautiful.

I tend to reject that logic because it seems to imply that one cannot fully appreciate what one cannot fully comprehend. That is nonsensical. We cannot, for example, quantify or predict love and its effects, but boy do we celebrate it. Equally, I have a right to say Nomzamo Mbatha is absolutely beautiful without being obliged to write a dissertation on the characteristics of (her) beauty, or the places it manifests itself on her person.

So ultimately, beauty- which I by the way loosely define as that which elicits awe- is indeed too limited and obscure a description to assign to any being, but taken in isolation, what ‘description’ isn’t limited and obscure? ‘Smart’ and ‘funny’ come to mind, right alongside ‘tall’ and ‘handsome’. Even ‘intelligent’ and ‘talented’ can be pie in the sky, generic go-to phrases we learn from chick-flicks and deploy in innocent celebratory flutters of appreciation.

Human beings are dynamic, and the fairer of the sexes have been known to be in some ways more ‘complex’ (there’s another one) than their male counterparts. To reduce them to being mere vestiges of ‘beauty’ would be tragic, but to fail to appreciate it as part of their dynamic allure is, in my books, equally deplorable.

 *The collaborative piece first appeared on Sizakele's new blog 'The Girl      Unbound' ---> https://thegirlunbound.wordpress.com/

I Know What Hope Smells Like

Corruption has a smell.

It is the potent stench of urine and human waste that oozes off the pavement on a cool night in central Johannesburg. Parked next to the bus stop, the unassuming white van carries not just bread and warm soup, but hope and temporary relief from the lifeless glare of the city’s countless concrete giants. Paballo Ya Batho, it reads on the side panels, which loosely translated from Tswana means ‘Preserving the People’. Sheepishly I begin to hand out bread to these men, making my way slowly down the line and preluding each 5-sly handover with a trite unjani?-‘ how are you?’

They mostly stick to the scripted norm, nodding in acknowledgement before muttering that they are okay in some colloquial variation or another. Isn’t it amazing how, even in extraordinary circumstances like homelessness, we adhere so thoughtlessly to business-as-usual patterns?

As I continue down the line I find it harder and harder to look up and face the human being I am handing out charity to. It seems my soul wants to duck under the weight of their burdens, the plight of abject poverty in the city of gold which confronts me head-on. I go back to the van for another loaf. Now I can only bring myself to look at their hands, which tell a story- their story. These aren’t a plumber’s hands- calloused by splinters and mishits with the hammer. These are a struggler’s hands, darkened by the kind of dirt that makes clean spots conspicuous, or perhaps darkened by an untold act of desperation in an unlit alley- the only witness to a bout of misdirected rage.

In the moment, I don’t think these thoughts, I feel them. They course through my brain, down my spine, and across to my shoulders which probably arch under the tension. I can only write these words in hindsight because in medias res, I’m processing everything as and when it happens; poverty does not wait for reflective blog posts.

With my cognitive faculties so congested, my legs carry me on autopilot back up the sidewalk once I’ve reached the end of the line and run out of bread. My eyes begin scanning the pavement for someone I can talk to, you know, “minister to” as we say in Christianese. I really want to know their stories but, at the same time, the idea of forcing an inauthentic conversation/ in the name of altruistic religion nauseates me. While weighing this dilemma, I catch a glimpse of one middle-aged guy in particular, who unlike the many small groups that have formed seems uninterested in communal dialogue.

I’m drawn to him.

I ask him how he is, and of course he says he’s okay. “My name is Zama,” I say in isiZulu after sussing out from his name and accent that it’s safe to switch over to the vernacular. After finding out that he’s from Zimbabwe, I work out within milliseconds that going down Small Talk Avenue isn’t desirable for either one of us, so I decide to go straight to the heart of darkness: “how did you wind up on the streets?”

**********

What followed was fascinating but stays between myself and him. The real story here is that he, and all those people- mostly men, but also the many women and children on whose behalf they stood in the line- the real story is that they are there to begin with.

From the moment that smell hit my nose as I sat listening to this man’s story, I wondered, as an aspiring policymaker, about the extent to which underhanded monetary exchanges at the very highest levels of government were to blame for joblessness. I wondered about that clichéd term ‘corrupt officials’- how it makes the headlines so often it seems a given at times, a necessary irritation if you will. Common sense says it is not, but it is senseless how common these headlines are.

In my academic pursuits I’ve come across the term “illicit financial flows” and have been shocked at the numbers, the sheer volume of resources lost to my continent because someone wants it all to him/herself. Yet on that particular night in the middle of Johannesburg, it was not a numbers game. Corruption was looking me in the face, dressed in tattered robes. There she was in front of me, giving birth to a dim-faced young man who squatted beside me and told me his story of uncertainty and perseverance in a foreign land.

Nonetheless, another birth was happening in the back of a white van parked unassumingly besides a bus stop. The sound of it was alive in the friendly chatter between strangers rich and poor. I saw it on his face when the wall disintegrated and he smiled at me for the first time in our conversation. All is not lost for our continent and its leaders.

On Wednesday nights at the centre of Johannesburg, hope for a corruption-free Africa smells much like warm vegetable soup.

What Do We Mean By "Value"?

 In 1942, American ethicist and philosopher Paul Weiss wrote, quite unequivocally mind you, “we are lacking in clear thought”. As I sit here pondering the loaded concept of ‘values’ in South Africa 73 years later, his words seem to have been remarkably proleptic.

The author claims no intellectual ownership of the image. 

The word value seems to be readily used interchangeably with the related ideas of principles, ethics, price, and worth. To an extent, this is understandable because these are all so closely related to each other that the need to distinguish between them in everyday discursive acts- speech, writing and so on- becomes obsolete. Yet conceptual clarity demands that we go beyond the grey lines that don’t matter in daily casual conversation. The kind of clear thought Weiss is alluding to does not happen accidentally, arising from the cracks of life’s mundanity. It requires deliberate contemplation, a kind of intellectual chiselling that does away with the excess fragments in order to arrive at a vivid and coherent whole.

 However our collective idea of what ‘value’ constitutes is not at all uniform, and is far from being vivid or coherent. Simply, it is unclear. My attempt at thinking this theme through brought me to three Cs­ – broad reasons why the term seems at times to be a floating signifier.

Context

 I suppose it goes without saying that little if anything makes any sense outside of a particular set of circumstances that give it meaning. If I just hang the word ‘it’ in the middle of the line with no words before or after, it is nonsensical. There needs to be some kind of context that gives the word some sort of meaning. Of course, any meaningful discussion of the concept ‘value’ needs to be placed against a particular background, even if we are framing it ‘in the broadest possible sense’.

Thus, I would argue that the first problem has been the cowardly divorce of values from morality- the “concern with the distinction between good and evil”[1]. Indeed, morality is troubling: it requires one not only to take a stance but also to defend it, even when it means offending other people. In a sense it demands what is simply intuited to be explained with reason (another tricky term). The 17^th and 18^th century Enlightenment saw a shift away from absolutism, but it cannot and should not take with it essence. In avoiding inflexible dogma, in other words, we should not roll down the slippery slope of decontextualized relativism.
The context of the concept ‘value’, then, is our individual and collective conviction on what is right and wrong. Reconciling the two isn’t always easy but, in the end, necessary if we are to think clearly about what ‘value’ is, why we value what we do, and how we assign and measure that value.

         Continuum

What often emanates from decontextualization is fragmentation. Let’s call it the Jenga effect: remove one part from the whole and the integrity of the entire thing comes undone, resulting in collapse. Once we conceptually root value within the intangible but powerful context of morals, it becomes a more unified, fluid idea. Instead of it being a term that can be used for several things- price, quality, importance and so on, it becomes more coherent as a construct.  Values are a continuum, beginning from an internal conviction about right and wrong, evidencing themselves in what we think is good and bad, and then translating into how much we are willing to spend on something. This begins to make clearer when and how we commodify the activites, people, and objects that we do.  Simply, my values will be manifest in what I value , materially and otherwise. Of course, we don’t always act in ways that show what we value due to the curious human tendency toward self-destruction. But human nature is a topic for another article entirely.
This way of thinking about value(s), it seems to me, approaches a level of clarity that is otherwise elusive when we try to understand what value is outside of the context of morality.

Capitalism

 In the above I touched on our tendency in modern life to put a monetary value on everything. A few decades ago, for instance, it would have been almost absurd to imagine any marriage between altruistic philanthropy and for-profit investment. Yet since 2006 the buzzword ‘philanthrocapitalism’ does just that, attempting to combine the moral imperative of helping the needy with donors’ concerns about ‘social returns’- ostensibly a term for making a difference in society. The jury is out on the merits of this idea. In any case, the point is that almost anything can be thought of in terms of profit or a price tag.

We can scarce talk of this tendency towards commodification without talking about capitalism—that economic system in which means of production and wealth are largely controlled by individuals and corporations, both of which seek profit. There are of course no limits to the potential maximization of these profits in a free market economy. As such, when the opportunity to gain wealth arises, humans have been known to exercise their right to profit even to the detriment of the own wellbeing.

What is undeniable is that the (admittedly over-cited) logic of capitalism cannot be ignored in the aforementioned tendency to divorce morality from practise; the exploitative economic system needs to justify its creation and abuse of the have-nots, and we need to justify our otherwise perplexing bent towards selfishness when teamwork is clearly a winning formula.
Still, capitalism also has a right-and-wrong compass. A common misconception is that capitalism is itself devoid of any moral framework, but this is untrue. Capitalism too, as a system of organizing society, is based on moral convictions. As Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand once put it: “The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature…and that its ruling principle is: justice”. The problem arises in the continuum effect outlined in the previous section: if indeed the moral foundation of capitalism is the ‘rationality’ of humans, and that it is right to have a system that accommodates this, then it is indeed ‘right’ when inequality bows to profit, for it is rational to maximise it. Yet where is the justice in this?

All this makes it all the more compelling to leave the morality factor out of it so that it is not at odds with the profit imperative. Subsequently, it is easy to see how property can be assigned more value than, say, the right of a community to have access to fertile land. It does not have to be this way, neither is it always the case. I am merely illustrating the role of the way we organise our economy in adding to the dilution of what we may understand value to be.

Context, Continuum, and Capitalism are therefore three lenses that help us think more clearly, and even more creatively, about the concept of value. But, for crying out loud, what is the value of dedicating an entire article to understanding the term? Well, in the words of preeminent historian  David McCullough,

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly.

---

[1] Advanced English Dictionary

Resolutions and Resolve

I’m very quick to roll my eyes. Being a skeptic- I don’t know how much of it is due to nature and how much to nurture- I tend to dismiss much quicker than I accept. With this in mind, I thought it fitting to formulate a clear outline explaining something I've become fond of saying every year in January. It’s always my answer to that inevitable festive season question: “So, any new year’s resolutions?” To this I reply, almost as a reflex: I don’t believe in resolutions. I believe in resolve.

I thought it fitting to write about it because it’s something I’d probably roll my eyes at before genuinely considering, and I wouldn't blame any of you for doing the same. Facebook and Twitter have after all turned us all into pseudo-philosophers.  We've become experts at filling status updates with paragraphs of wind, constructing 140 characters of illogical drivel, and posting countless edited images we’d like to portray as our reality- filtered pictures and unfiltered thoughts. The point is this: you wouldn't be blamed for thinking my little motto is just another attempt at meaningless ‘wisdom’.

But humour me.

The Thrill of the New

There’s nothing like the thrill of newness. Novelty is what sells Hollywood movies, drives us to theme parks, and motivates thousands to camp outside i-Store outlets in a bid to be the first possessors of the latest iPhones.  It seems that, from time immemorial, we have always had an innate thirst for discovery, that is, new experiences. Just ask Vasco Da Gama. Furthermore, and perhaps more interestingly, I read somewhere that consumerism is such a successful economic model because buying something new makes us feel new. I don’t know how to feel about that-  about the fact that my new phone is not only an indicator of economic status but potentially also an attempt to (re)create my identity.

Anyway, what does newness have to do with my little motto? Simply, New Year’s resolutions seem to become obsolete when the year is not so new anymore. In other words, when the novelty of having made the resolution itself fades, there’s no longer motivation to pursue it. The very name is a dead giveaway- we think of these (often abstract) goals as functions of the new season, and as the season wears on, the motivation does too.

Your Season Ain’t Mine

This new-season-new-resolution thinking brings me to my second reason for dismissing the ‘New Year’s Resolution’ concept: it implies that we are all more or less at the same stage in our life cycles. Of course, this is not the case. I may be facing a ‘season’ in which I need to channel all my energy into completing or achieving a certain thing- say, for example, studying for a board exam. In this case, it makes absolutely no sense for me add onto my plate the psychological (and sometimes physical) demand of a resolution I expect myself to realize. For me, in this particular season, there is no space for other goals and/or objectives. In fact the realization of other long term goals may be subject to my ability to successfully complete the board exam.

The trajectory of our lives does not follow a January to December progression. I’m dealing with things now that I did not have to think about in August simply because they were unforeseen at that stage. And up until that stage, I would not have foreseen them either, especially not as far back as January last year. Blanket resolutions that cover a whole year as if life is even relatively predictable over 12 months are a fallacy and, for me, a waste of time. Often if circumstances don’t change in that time, you do. Or vice versa.

Resolve

The idea of resolution is, for me, a lot more concrete, a lot more person-specific. My dictionary says that ‘resolve’ as a verb speaks to coming to a definite decision, and as a noun is “the trait of being resolute”. Notice that it is not preceded by ‘New’ this or ‘New’ that’, and therefore isn't subject to the flimsy ecstasy of newness, of fleeting novelty. Additionally, resolve doesn't have to be a year’s thing- it can be a 2 month thing, a 6 week thing, a 2 day thing, heck, a one-minute-at-a-time thing if that’s what it takes.

The results of my resolve, my determination and application in working towards a certain goal, will be evident even if I don’t splash it all over social networks. What’s more, the goals I quietly decide on are more likely to be relevant to my stage of life and personal convictions than the shared resolutions which may be heavily influenced by or simply mimetic of popular (yet depersonalized) clichés that many others purport to be pursuing- not necessarily because they see the importance thereof, but because it gives them a subtle degree of social (media) capital.

Off I go, then, to share my thoughts with you by means of a post, share, and tweet. I've resigned myself to the likelihood that I will encounter some ostensibly profound musing about 2015 being the year of greater things and what have you. How quickly we've forgotten the supposedly rosy ‘Twenty-For-Me’.

*Rolls eyes*