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/