On responding to a spectacle

On Saturday morning I woke up in a hotel in the city of Philadelphia, US. I was in town for a screening of my film and a workshop at a place called The Scribe Video Centre. It’s a community film and media centre that was established in 1982 and is the kind of space I wish I would have had as a child, where film isn’t just bound to home entertainment or blockbusters served at the local mall.

Scribe has a library of DVDs and tapes, computers where children meet to play games, learn different filmmaking skills and interact with cinephiles from all walks of life. There was a humility in the space, whose mostly grey and white interior had no self-important sheen. There was humility in the people, who when I asked where I could get a matcha, walked me to what a young man called the “siddity” coffee shop. 

Most of all, I was relieved to be in a place that felt ordinary, against the spectacle of the US election. Against the spectacle of being in Harlem sometimes, where the statement “I don’t give a f*ck” is becoming the most ordinary aural feature of my new day-to-day life. And the spectacle of being on social media right now. 

I’d just woken up in this hotel room when I opened Instagram and saw a story by a woman I know but haven’t met in real life, and another similar story from a model I follow. Both of these women — East African but born and raised in the US — as well as thousands of black women in the US received text messages on November 6, calling them by their names and telling them to “report to the nearest plantation to pick cotton”, among other harrowing instructions recalling slavery.

There isn’t a premeditated response to something like this. I felt the sky close. The cynic in me, a part of my personality I don’t often engage, came out and in a series of back-and-forth messages between me and one of the women; I found myself frothing at the seams and rehearsing a response should one of these messages come to me. I was sorry for her. For all of us. I wanted to retaliate. Purple with rage. Burning to burn back. To say something that would open the veiled annals of shame that white boy race fantasies are built on. I wanted to go as far as my flaming fingers would allow me to type.

I had accepted the invitation into this historic brawl. 

The one where an enemy says something 

provocative, cruel. 

And you, perpetually nursing or suppressing the open 

wounds they impressed on you,

are triggered into the role of the victim.

The actor in the charade of your inferiority,

Taking on the role cast by your provocateur

Who will bond himself with violence 

When what he yearns for is the milk of your 

Essence. 

This was the much-rehearsed call and response, 

A dance as old as time. 

A fisherman and his bait. 

I lay back on the bed in silence, and remembered a story I was once told by the wisest and most emotionally intelligent person I have ever had the privilege to meet when it comes to navigating these kinds of situations with integrity and power.

Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela had given a talk at a university in the Western Cape and was on her way to the parking lot when out of the bushes she heard a man say “Hey K*ffir”. Shocked, but with her faculties in place, she ignored the bush call and continued to walk, perhaps dazed from this random assault on her person. When she was a few metres away, the bush call persisted, this time a little louder, “Ek het gesê hey k*affir”. 

Her feet did not betray her. She was perhaps too angry to stop. Too bewildered to pause and think of the right way to respond, so she continued walking. As she approached her car, she was greeted by the young man who often watches her car, with whom she has a warm and respectful relationship. He beamed when he saw her and at the exact same moment he greeted her with “Hey Mamzo”, the bush caller repeated his taunting call with irritation, “Can you not hear I’m saying hey K*ffir?” 

It was at that moment, a tiny splinter of time in which the world became quiet enough for her to ask a profoundly liberating question. Which word is describing me? Which word do I identify with? Which one is me? 

She did not engage the bush caller. Her feet delivered her to her car where she marvelled at this tricky ticket from God. 

As I try to find my place in this new country — at this most trying time for a nation whose moral compasses are aching in the earth’s belly, drowned by the noise of red and blue vessels — I am glad that I have not come empty-handed.  

I wonder what it means that the unmasked faces of corruption, the bricklayers of a kakistocracy are being vitalised by a Musky white South African man,  who has come out from the bushes. To reveal himself. To show us who he is. 

We have no choice but to ask: who are we going to be in the spectacle, which calls will we respond to? I do not know the “we” I am addressing, yet.

But I find solace in T.S Eliot, “To be restored, our sickness must grow worse”.

*Gobodo-Madikizela presented findings on this incident in her seminar at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study