ok so there’s been a lot of excitement and general feverishness over die antwoord. we all know who they are, what they do… if not where the hell have you been? maybe not attached to your macbook like most of the hip middle classes. anyway i’ve been observing the up and down swings on the debates raging about their authenticity, their popularity, their cultural revolutionary significance blah blah. whatever it is, all this activity suggests that there’s something there. so what is it?

as mungo adonis (http://www.mahala.co.za/culture/die-vraag-questions-for-die-antwoord/) points out this is not a band you average coloured person in cape town is going to be into and in fact that the trashy gangbanging version of colouredness that they appropriate is downright insulting. and as rustum kozain (http://africasacountry.com/2010/02/19/is-die-antwoord-blackface/) points out they in fact resort to little more than blackface with “anthropological bent”, that it’s unlikely that waddyeverhisname is has “discovered his inner coloured”, and that in fact, that even the afrikaans white trash persona in inflected through a similar anthropological lens in that waddyit’isface lives in higgovale and is actually english speaking.

on the flipside someone called andy has it that “in the post apartheid dispensation, people are actually free to choose whatever racial group they’d like to belong to. these definitions are fluid and shifting. there are no hard edges between black and white” ( http://mhambi.com/2010/02/die-antwoord-is-it-blackface/). sigh that’s a nice thought, people are free to belong to any racial group they belong to (cue johnny clegg tunes and images of madiba wearing the springbok jersey)…. yeah well, tell that to my parents who are about to disinherit me for loving a black man. here, what la la part of postapartheid South Africa do you reside in my friend? higgovale? having said that, you have a point. there are no hard edges between black and white. there never have been. they have always been constructed. which doesn’t make them not real, just constructed.

and so because i am not one to dismiss the revolutionary potential of something just because it’s contradictory and problematic (i mean jesus, look at our liberation movement!), and because i really did have a very real response to them (despite my nagging discomforts about anthropological bents and the two hundred steps back for feminism in the form of yolandi visser and new mainstream legitimacy of the word “poes” – which is a whole other story) i remain intrigued by die antwoord.

and this is why. there is also something very liberating about the flagrant exhibition and embrace of white poorness, and its inevitable bleeding into coloured poorness. at the (socio-economic) edges of any racialised community lie the opportunities for encounter with the “other”. encounters which usually attempt to harden the edges of those racial communities through overt and often violent racism. thing is, this policing is hard fucking work. let your guard down for a minute and you might end up with a coloured accent or falling for the coloured boy next door… cultural and racial slippages/spillages are inevitable. usually they are hidden. what i like about die antwoord is that they (albeit problematically) expose, intensify and exploit them. to the max.

there is something very liberating in the bleeding of colouredness into whiteness in this way. which is of course is why it appeals to white kids and not coloured kids… it’s about the fluidity and permeability of whiteness, not colouredness (which might also account for why the colouredness inhabited is sensationalised caricature – no nice church or mosque going aunties in this version of coloured). and that embraced and enacted fluidity instead of being threatening, packaged in this strangely apealling, at once familiar and excitingly new, aesthetic, is deeply liberating for us white kids. the aesthetic renders it legitimate, cool even, to play with those edges. even if the way in which they are being played with is deeply problematic.

but why liberating? you know like being a man, being white is hard ideological work. masculinity constantly has to be proved. it’s no accident that men are most frenzied at rugby matches, that they experience being overtaken on the N1 as a personal affront and spend their lives calling each other fags, just so they can prove that they’re not! i mean whew, no wonder it’s lights out after one orgasm. but i digress. being white requires similar (if not as obvious) legwork. from with not having sex with (or heaven forbid!) falling in love with black people, to making sure you live in the right “safe” neighbourhoods (ja ja call it property prices if you want to, we all know what it’s really about), to constant bitching about crime and the government (yes i know black people do this too, but us white’s take it to another level)… etceteraah…. add to that that to be at the centre of white society and i’m talking specifically in cape town here, means being in upper middle class, and preferably with a clipped UCT english accent means that those of us who do not fit that ideal white mould have to work even fucking harder to make the grade.

so when all of a sudden there are these loud badly behaved foul-mouthed white trash tripping over the colour line with narcissistic abandon, and they’re actually cool (even Fred Durst thinks so.. ha ha), it’s like “whew!”, the fucking relief man. maybe now I can stop monitoring my kwazulu-natal afrikaanse accent so heavily. maybe now the fact that I grew up in an eskom village may actually be cool. maybe now I can stop trying so hard to fit into these culturally barb-wired southern suburbs. because clearly the northern suburbs is where it’s actually at and my accent and small dorp working class roots, may actually be, not just ok, but cool!

but more than that, maybe i have more room to move in my white skin. if my afrikaans comes out inflected with a coloured accent, so what? if i live in a neighbourhood that has mostly brown people in it, so what? if the man i love is brown? if my children are brown? so fucking what? you can take your UCT accents, lily white neighbourhoods and racially pure children and shove them (altho i like all children, even racially pure ones – i’m just making a point). there’s something else available, a different place for my white skin to occupy, and fuck, it may not be perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than what you got to offer!

that is the power of die antwoord for me. they are very problematic, yes, but they, whether they intend to or not, open up a new discursive space, a racially impure, class irreverent and all round badly behaved discursive space, which invite us, white kids, to play. i think many white kids are as kak tired of being told who they can hang out with, who they can have sex with, who they can love, where they can live, what they are supposed to do with their lives and so on as I am. whether die antwoord are authentic or genius or foul-mouthed or whatever man, is beside the point. they’re giving us a new place to stand, and license to misbehave. and what is revolution if not radical misbehaviour?

Why We Find It So Hard to Act Against Climate Change by George Marshall

Thanks, David, for the link.

Cx

two things in particular have struck me about all of this.

the first, is the extent to which a story can push different emotional buttons in different people, and how much that can tell us about who we are. and second, that i often forget how much i rely on a common understanding of how the world works in communicating with friends and colleagues, and how that is not necessarily shared by  all people.

point one emerges around how very little notice i’ve taken of the main character, wikus. there is in fact, a very powerful narrative unfolding in wikus. he is the sweet, almost bumbling, guy that by virtue of his social position ends up with a task that his community considers very prestigious and important, righteous even. he has no idea what is waiting for him though, or how he is being manipulated and used by the powers that be. powers that happen to be his own community, and powers that will reject him, when he returns damaged by the work they set him to do.

familiar? well not to me. but to many white men in SA, possibly. i imagine for the white men who served in the SADF in the townships in the 80s and early 90s, the violence, the fear, the trauma, the confusion depicted in the film,  were not unfamiliar at all.  i would not have made this connection if it wasn’t for  a friend who told me that district 9 captured very strongly his experience of  the living under the militarised conditions of the apartheid regime, an experience that was not pleasant for him to revisit. my experience of apartheid was different. the extent of my exposure to the militarised violence of  my society, was the odd “terrorist” attack drill at kilbarchan primary (involving climbing under ones desk), that red poster with the different kinds of bombs (i knew knew what a limpet mine was an looked like at age 10),  a friend’s brother who returned from the border with PTSD (although we all just thought he was nuts) and the images being streamed to me through the SABC. and although my friend was not in the townships, he did serve in the SADF, and he has certainly seen more than me. i was too young, but i was also a girl, and girls were protected from these things.

wikus is a man sent to do a filthy job. he is damaged, changed, rejected and yet a good guy. a guy who in the end is the hero, not a conventional hollywood one, but a thoroughly human one, complex, contradictory, half dead, who finds it in his wracked body and psyche to turn on his own people and help those he was tasked to persecute. he is literally and figuratively “turning into one of them”. although the literal probably had a lot to do with the figurative. but he’s a wonderful character. a very real character and certainly one in which some people can see parts of themselves reflected. i think i could have done this, i might’ve been able to salvage the film for myself. but  i couldn’t. i didn’t see myself in wikus and so his story failed to carry the film for me. i saw and responded emotionally to other things, things closer to my experience and my heart, things which were more real to me. i find it fascinating to explore how different things can more real to different people, and how things like films can make that apparent.

and that brings me to the second point – that i do engage these issues from a particular place and from within a particular theoretical and ideological frame. absolutely. i think it is one i share with most of my extended community, which of course has been forged through common pursuits, interests and politics, but i forget that it’s not shared with everyone. being reminded of this presents a useful opportunity to reflect on how it is that i make sense of things in general, and how i made sense of district 9, in particular.

so i have been accused of not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, inserting morality into art which is amoral and that this is no different to what christian (or I image any kind of) fundamentalists do.

the technical term is “social-constructionism”. i believe that that our worlds are socially constructed. that our actions are informed by who be experience ourselves to be i.e. our identities. and that identities don’t come from nowhere but are rendered from social resources, mostly in the form of cultural narratives i.e large overarching stories about who we are and what we do as members of particular groups, be they racial, gendered, ethnic, subcultural etc. and therefore relational, of “us” and ‘them”. and that these narratives circulate through social interactions which can take the form of a conversation over coffee, a multimillion dollar hollywood film or a sexual encounter. and so it’s an iterative process, we draw on social cultural narratives, we enact them or we challenge them, and in doing so we circulate them further, in more sedimented or through challenging them, modified forms.

and so fantasy and reality for me, are part of the same continuum. fantasy cannot exist outside of the social resources we have. we can be creative with the resources, for sure, we must be in order to evolve, but we are always coming from somewhere, we are always inside the text. i do not believe in transcendence. i believe that our worlds, our fantasies, our art, our gods, we create oursleves – with what we have at our disposal.

and that brings me to most important assumption in all of this that none of it is neutral. art, god, fantasy, sex are all the product of human interaction, that occurs inside of social, cultural narratives that are inherently relational and therefore inherently political i.e. no human relationship occurs along an equal power differential. not one. power is afforded to us by our group membership (male/female, black/white, gay/straight, old/young,  christian/muslim) and the context in which these group memberships are being enacted. and art can say many many different things, but none of these things are amoral or apolitical. in fact the very claim for amorality, is a moral one.

what do i mean? i mean it is a political choice to acknowledge that human interaction and productions are political, in that it enables analysis and action which might challenge narratives which have us act in ways that are damaging to certain groups of people. to claim amorality, is to obscure this, and disable any meaningful challenge.

importantly, and i will get back to district 9 here, the claim is not that the film portrayed nigerians as cannabalistic warlords so every south african if going to beat the next nigerian they see over the head with a bat. that’s just dumb (although given our very recent, not necessarily unlikely). but it’s about understanding how particular narratives can create enabling conditions for certain actions and certain inactions. all studies on large scale hate crimes (like the holocaust, the rwandan genocide, the serbian war) identify similar patterns in language use (in contexts ranging from dinner tables, to newspapers, to films), language of animalism, threat, crime etc. that eventually, given the right sets of circumstances, enabled  ordinary people to butcher their neighbours and even members of their own families, to cut unborn babies out of their mothers’ wombs and replace them with dogs, to ignore the stench rising and ash rising out of the concentration camps, to say allow the apartheid authorities to act on their behalf, even though they claim not to have known. i’m getting a bit carried away here, but it’s simply to illustrate that this shit powerful, and that we are not immune. we are in fact, very deeply in it. and our job, in trying to make this shitehole of a planet a better place, is first and foremostly to see that.

so that’s my truth. not THE truth, but the truth as i choose to see it. it is a choice informed by what it allows me to do  - to analyse and act on my world in ways i think are helpful, and that i believe will make it better, even if only in the most miniscule, incremental way. we all exercise our own fundamentalisms, wether they be fundamental amoralism or apoliticism, human-rightsism, or christianity. if i am any kind of fundamentalist, it is a social-constructionist one.  but what i like about this particular fundamentalism, is that it allows me to see that.

i have not responded to all the comments i’ve received here, and i have not acknowledged the range of responses i got (some, quite surprisingly, were in agreement with me!). but i have responded to what i felt were the biggest challenges posed.

now we wait for invictus… and may the bunfight resume with vigour!

i had my second real psychological breakdown in the wake of the xenophobic attacks of may 2008. one day after having been spent some time at soetwater, having seen the extent of the dislocation, fear and desperation and having experienced first hand the apathy  of the south african authorities in general, the arrogance and incompetence of the human rights commission in the western cape, the political bickering between the province and the city, this marshmallow middle class consciousness could not get itself out of bed, it pulled up the duvet and stayed there for 3 months.

so i probably feel questions of xenophobia more deeply than issues i work with, in that i in some oblique way understand my own vulnerability in relation to the events of may 2008. well who knows, it’s a theory … point is, when there is an opportunity to say something, to do something meaningful to somehow make it better, then best it be grabbed with both hands desperately and be worked, hard and deep so that the opportunity is not squandered. district 9 was a squandered opportunity at best, and  fucking vulturism (that’s my word for brutal opportunism, i like it) at worst.

i’ve said somewhere before that if racial stereotypes didn’t exist peter jackson would not be able to make a film. i’ve learnt since he didn’t actually make the film it was someone called niel blomkamp. well, screw him too.

because i don’t want to seem biased, i’ll start with what i consider to be the film’s redeeming qualities.

one  - visually spectacular. the image of the mothership over johannesburg is wonderful, etched into my consciousness. the ha ha it landed over johannesburg is kinda obvious, but nice.  the grittiness of the kind of post-apocalyptic-but-not-quite feel, very joburg, very raw. loved it. (although i might want to ask why we can’t have nice settings, like the drakensberg, or the karoo etc. for south african films… but i won’t.)

two – there was a definite sense of the “humanising” of the aliens as the film progressed. all the usual tricks, a cute baby, appeal to the universal (!) experience of parenthood, a common fate, a toxic brown liquid that turns you into the Other, you know walking in the Other’s shoes etc. all very good. well done. bravo.

now if only mr blomkamp had been so enlightened in his handling of the nigerians….

ok, so here  i must interject. vic says, that the handling of the nigerians must be ironic. that by depicting the nigerians as cannibalistic, bloodthirsty warlords who pimp “their women” out to the aliens, and the aliens becoming systematically more sympathetic, the director is saying something along the lines of: “look how we can become sympathetic towards aliens, that look like cockroaches, and yet not towards actual human beings, with whom we share our neighbourhoods, our schools and churches. shame on us”. vic is a much better person than me. he sees the best in people and their intentions. but vic has not seen the film and he just  can’t believe that anyone would make a film so genuinely lacking in irony. i wouldn’t believe it either. but, my darling, having endured it myself, there is about as much irony in district nine as a there would be at a DA conference on racism. and IF there is, it’s so deeply hidden there’d be no point.

first of all, (and i’ll get to the nigerians in a minute) the aliens are actually very fucking scary, even near the end, when they rip the bad guy to pieces. i can accept that to many people human “aliens”, are in fact this scary, and that the depiction of aliens in this way, somehow reflects that. but for me, this depiction did more to reinforce those ideas than challenge them. part of challenging the stereotype would be depicting them as not scary at all. i mean, obvious? no? what that last scene did for me was, after all the cute baby, and “aw they just wanna get home”, remind me that they’re fucking violent and scary, and it’s probably a good thing that they’re in district 9 and even better that the nice one (the mandela one) in the space ship is coming to take them all away in the sequel.

now let’s get to the nigerians. if i was nigerian, i’d have a fatwa out on blomkamp’s ass. whereas the aliens become progressively less scary the nigerians become more and more terrifying. where the alien character has redeeming qualities (he’s just trying to be a good father etc.) the nigerian men are cannibalistic, power-hungry, warring savages (now where have we seen that particular characterisation before?). the nigerian women are whores. and in the lack of any serious deconstruction of the “animalism” of the aliens, the fact that they have sex with the aliens, their sexuality is reduced to the bestial, not unlike early european tales of african women having sex with apes.

gender is a whole other conversation. all i will say is: whore, wife, sociologist. the extent of women’s contribution to society. oops, sorry, and news reader.

finally, this brings me to the main character. who’s name i forget. the white guy. dudes, why a white guy?  i mean i know, it was a commentary on apartheid, but xenophobia is apartheid which transcends an easy black/white binary. and once again the white guy gets to have the complex psychological narrative, the very human condition, that we all related to. and the black guys get to be sidekicks or very fucking scary nigerians. and dudes, why an afrikaans guy? ditto the it was supposed to be a comment on apartheid, but i am so fucking over the stereotype of the afrikaans idiot apartheid official/ arms dealer/ crazy soldier. english men were also there, they also did this, they were and are also the bad guys. fuck!

anyway in the chaos of these racial and ethnic stereotypes clamouring for reproduction, an opportunity was lost. i would hate to think that the film makers used south africa’s bloody past and present as simple backdrop to make an ass-kicking alien flick. that would be vulturism. so i will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they wanted to say something. but they fucked up. they said all the things we already know: that “aliens” are scary and dangerous even when you get to know them, that afrikaners are arms dealers and idiots, and that nigerians are bloodthirsty savages and whores.

and that, given the realities of our south african situation is not just racist and xenophobic, it’s downright dangerous.

Nothing of who I am is tied up in New York City. Nothing. The millions of images from the television and film screen generate  a level of fantasy, that is so removed from my life that I might as well have gone to Minis Tirith! It was so strange, on my way from JFK to Manhattan Island… I knew all the names on the roadsigns. ALL of them. Isn’t that crazy! I’ve never ever been to this place, and yet, I know all the road names, signs, places. It made me angry actually. Angry at the level of intrusion of this culture and this place, into other cultures and places. The amount of head and heart space it occupies around the world. And, and as I discovered, not because it’s so amazing, mostly just because it’s so loud. Like one of those annoying people (usually coked up or male, likely both) at parties who hold the floor for hours with their egotistical jabbering, silencing all others.

And I realised that airtime, does not equal awesomeness (we need only watch MTV to figure that one out). It can in fact equal bullying and silencing. Even more insidious is like any dominant discourse (i.e. loud annoying person at a party) we believe it. I believed it. We feed it. I fed it. That may be the source of my irritation. I feel like I was duped. I hate being duped. But to my credit, I also realised that exposure and familiarity, do not equal identitfication. Identification: having something give you part of who you are. At some point that loud person will stop being interesting, and you’ll see him for what he is, a bully, and you do not have to like, believe or want to fuck him, just because he’s the centre of attention. The loudest person at the party, maybe. The greatest, unlikely. The loudest city in the world, maybe. The greatest, uh, no. Probably no such thing.

So let’s get back to business of New York City’s “energy”. I am a great fan of energy, but for me, unless that energy is being channelled into something meaningful, it reduces to so many frenetic hamsters. Hamsters have loads of energy. So what? For me meaning is a function of how much of myself is tied up in it i.e. how much I identify with the ways in which it is being channelled. The “why “of it is always present to me. Energy for the sake of energy, is not only pointless but potentially destructive. So as someone stepping into this place with which I do not identify, this energy seems a little “so what?” I’m sure that if I had a community and purpose in NYC, I would feel differently. But I don’t. I also don’t believe in or  like the loudness which leaves me with only my cynical outsider’s eye. (Mmm… I detect a trend in the kinds of positions I take up in my life here, but that is for another day.)

It is with this eye that I want to make another point where the hamster analogy is appropriate. (And in case you were wondering, I did have a hamster once, so I feel confident in my observations.) Cage bound hamsters spend alot of time running around in those wheels of theirs. Round and round and round, going nowhere, inward bound. I have not been all over this place called the USA, but I have developed a real sense of their “inward-lookingness”. Not in a critical reflexive way, but in a “we’re so fascinated with ourselves way” and also not in a kind of” by-the-by” way. It’s like for that hamster, a serious business, that takes a lot of time and energy. The analyses of the political system most recently amplified around health care reform are a case in point. Like Vic said, all this internal reformist stuff is like putting a plaster on an amputated leg. The problem is bigger, than a public health option or not but the analyses, even the good ones, don’t seem to go there. They’re too busy ferreting around with what this Democrat did, what that Republican said and this House needs this many votes blah blah… there are 24 hours news channels doing this everyday. And whether it’s MSNBC or Fox News, they’re all swimming in the same political fishbowl. A fishbowl bobbing in an ocean of political alternatives to Democrat or Republican. Ok so now I’m mixing metaphors but the hamster keeps runing in his wheel, the goldfish keeps swimiming around in circles, and nobody thinks to suggest, flopping out of the bowl or escaping the cage. I heard/read somewhere this last weekend that Manhattan was built to look inward i.e. towards the centre of the island not outwards to the water. How very very appropriate.

Have any of you seen that Berocca ad where the hamster running on his wheel generates electricity ? That is New York city, that is the USA, for me. People running in their wheels, generating their own meaning, their own culture and therefore their own energy. I have the benefit of not being of this culture which means I don’t take it for granted, simply as “the way things are”, and because I’ve had the benefit of years of American TV I am familiar with some of the cultural artifacts. Based on this, Americans spend alot of time generating their culture. That hamster is on speed, that neon light is blinging it like Times Square. I’m sure all cultures do this, but I think the USA does it large.

Where do I start? Yellow school buses. Do you know that new school busses in the USA are sleeker modern versions of the old yellow school busses we all see in movies.  They have the same shape, and the same colouring. Trucks. The same thing, the same shape as old trucks, not the flat fronts of  modern trucks, but modern versions of the old shape. Fire engines. The font on the fire stations and the trucks themselves, the same font you see on steak ranch menus. University campuses. EVERYONE wears a school sweatshirt or T or something, and all the logos all the same, except for the actual letters, you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And don’t get me started on football… I mean I know we take sport seriously in SA but here they have a whole channel dedicated to university football. Just university football. And when people go to the matches, they ALL dress in team colours. In fact, for a culture that values individualism so much, there’s a whole lot of conformity.  But I digress. Yellow cabs. H.O.L.L.Y.W.O.O.D. etc. etc. The USA loves its own hype, and there is a particular aesthetic that feeds the hype. It’s part of the work of the hype, it’s part of what running on the wheel involves. Producing, reproducing the aesthetic, rendering something coherent and meaningful. I don’t know what that something is, but many Americans believe in it, they and very successfully get other people to believe in it, and of all the sites in the USA where the hype machine works, New York is of the busiest and most successful, almost more so than Hollywood.

Now that I have all of that out of my system, I don’t dislike New York. I like it. Some of my best friends are New Yorkers and I like them too. Very much, in fact. I just don’t think it’s better than any other city, and I think the hype does it a disservice. Like any dominant discourse it subsumes all those other stories which make it a complex and fascinating place, full of complex and fascinating people. Just another place, just people, living. Very much like anywhere. It’s like I want to sit it down, smooth its ruffled hair, mop its sweaty brow and say ” Sweetheart, you don’t have to be better than everyone else. You just fine the way you are”,  and give it a big big hug.

i think the geometrically shaped hedges of OC suburbia are part of an unconsciously agreed effort to manage/control/subdue this landscape, this fantasy we have created for ourselves. a leaf out of place speaks of messier existences, that we are not interested in, that do not exist.

why are all the gardeners mexican?

i’ve never felt so capetonian in my life!

it’s one thing to not know how to feel about reality, it’s another thing to not know what reality is anymore.

am i the sum of my senses? is the sum of my senses, my culture?  culture is not about intellect. it is about human connection at a visceral level. the smell of cooking and woodfire on dry winter nights on the highveld. of the ironing. the smell of freshly cut grass. the sound of the test match in the background, or soccer on the radio on a saturday afternoon. the quality of the late autumn light. etc. the gentle aesthetic of KZN’s green hills, the crunch of burnt veld under my shoes. the comfort of  a rusk and a cup of coffee in front of a fire on a bright cold winter afternoon. etc. the smell of vicks and camphor cream. etc. the sound of a saxophone. the racket and euphoria of carnival. the general dishevelledness of obz. the line of the tower blocks in a polish housing estate. the parachutes. the oppressive hulking line of the mountain. the openness of the veld. the smell of the atlantic. the electric green of the hummingbirds of orange county. etc.

all of this channelled to and through me, given memory and meaning, by the people around me. each informing the next. building…

add them all up and there is me. that which moves me to tears, to rage, to laughter, to action. that which consoles me, comforts me. that which binds me.

it comes from my gut, not from my head.