A new masculinity

For a moment during an otherwise seamless performance of poetry and music, Modise Sekgothe seemed so overcome by his own words that his balled fists and arms jutted at his sides were the only form of expression that he could muster. At the all-consuming crescendo of one of his poems, the audience looked on enraptured as Sekgothe found his place again, line by line, stanza by stanza until the poem’s completion.

Sekgothe performed at the first of a six-part poetry series, titled Ah Men, being held at visual artist Roger Ballen’s Inside Out Centre for the Arts (IOCA) in Johannesburg. The Ah Men Poetry Series and Ballen’s semi-permanent exhibition, End of the Game, offer a historical and current critique of manhood, and create room for what masculinity might mean in the future.

“Masculinity is central to End of the Game, as it underpins the mythology and spectacle of the so-called golden age of African hunting,” Ballen said. “This era was defined by a constructed ideal of masculinity during the Industrial Revolution. These ideals of Victorian machismo equated dominance over nature with power, control, and prestige. The exhibition highlights how these expeditions were an expression of these ideals of male prowess — symbolised through the trophies of taxidermy and photography.”

End of the Game goes beyond the “Ballenesque” style of creating a third medium where photography and drawing merge. Beneath the provocative shock, repulsion, fear and other emotions that the artist is famous for eliciting, the exhibition is a subversion of the masculinity that prevailed during the era of unregulated, ecologically catastrophic African hunting. It does this by exposing how vulnerable this masculinity was.

 “Through the imagery, we expose the absurdity and contradictions within this masculine ideal,” Ballen said. “These hunters, posing with their kills, sought to prove their strength, yet the very act of killing was often detached from real survival. There is a performative quality to their masculinity — an attempt to impose order upon the wild, to frame themselves as heroic conquerors. But what we see, when we step back, is the instability of this identity.”

The Ah Men Poetry Series brings an essential complexity to the exhibition’s subject matter. Poet Afurakan, responded to the IOCA’s desire to add layers to End of the Game with a curation of poets whose work deals with masculinity. The thematic thread in his own poetry can be traced back to the 2017 release of his Broken Men Chapbook collection of poems. The series’ title borrows from the final poem in the collection, *Molahlehi 6: 9-13.

“It’s the continuous prayer,” Afurakan says about the poem whose title is styled after a biblical verse. “As much as it’s at the end of the book, it’s also the beginning of everything. It’s also the giving in to say that I am vulnerable and I am willing to get into the issues no matter how uncomfortable they are. If some of them come with shame, embarrassment or discomfort, that is the process.”

Ah Men seems to propose an alternative masculinity, one opposed to what is depicted in the exhibition of its host organisation, and different still to the prevailing ideas of masculinity in the black communities that the series’ poets come from. Though their biographical and artistic backgrounds vary, there is a set of agreements that make up this counterpoint of masculinity that the poets propose. Traditional in its values but not conservative in application, liberal in identity politics yet stoical in its ethics, the type of masculinity being proposed here comes at a turning point for the black man’s global identity.

“We as men now do not necessarily have softer conditions,” Afurakan said. “We have different conditions. We have a different kind of agency, we have a different kind of empowerment. Some of the stereotypes we’ve inherited, for example, ‘black men don’t raise their babies or black men are absent’, we are challenging those by living our lives, being present and wanting better for ourselves and for our children.”

For Ballen, End of the Game demanded a response from the men whose forebears’ roles in the universe of the exhibition might have been as men dispossessed of currency and agency, whose lands had been invaded, livelihoods and ways of life destroyed, who earned their living from the activities of white men, as trackers or perhaps bakhaphi (escorts). But for Afurakan, making the platform available for black men is a “revolutionary act on its own”. Not without cognisance of the prevailing capitalist power dynamics, however.

“Black men as artists are sitting in spaces that we do not own and control,” Afurakan said. “To a large extent, we are still fodder for capital that wants to achieve certain things with those spaces. But I think it is part of challenging where our voices can exist.”

Ah Men injects a cautious optimism into an art historical reflection of man’s place in degrading the planet and dispossessing generations of people. Because something in the making, uncertain of its perimeters but deep in its conviction, is just the new type of masculinity that might convince us to start afresh.