feminine furniture

I remember the curved carved wood, shiny with polish. Shaped like a kidney, it would envelope my mother as she sat on the cushioned stool and did magic woman stuff.

My mother’s dressing table was a source of great excitement and pleasure for me when I was little. The deep drawers held all sorts of lady things – clips and brushes; jewellery and the occasional lost button; letters and pictures my brothers and I had presented to my mom; makeup old and new; nail varnish and sharply smelling acetone; balls of cotton wool and tissues with lipstick streaks.

To a little girl this was lady heaven.

I remember kneeling on the cushioned stool, leaning in towards the three mirrors, twisting and turning the articulated side mirrors the better to see the back of my head.

I remember applying powder to my small face with a sponge, and blue eye shadow with my finger. I’d smudge and blend and think I was beautiful; that I looked like a lady. In reality I probably looked like a nine year old whore – but reality had no place at the dressing table.

 This was where my mom sat and turned from Mommy into a Lady. It was the secret place that boys didn’t share.  It was what I aspired to own one day – when I was all growed up.

 So few people have dressing tables anymore. We keep out ‘lady’ supplies in bathroom cupboards and apply makeup using the mirror above the sink, often competing for space with a shaving man. The process of turning from our home selves into our dressed up party selves is so much less of a ritual now; no slow luxurious time at the dressing table. Rather it’s a quick shower and then a shared bathroom.

I wonder what we as women have lost by relinquishing this most feminine of spaces?

16 days of activism – emotional abuse

Emotional abuse is insidious; it creeps into a relationship with no fanfare, no announcement and seldom any realisation. It is hard to identify and even harder to point out. It is accompanied by such incredible charm that its existence is hard to articulate.

The emotionally abusive partner seems to love and cherish and care.

The emotionally abusive partner is the perfect partner in public.

The emotionally abusive partner seldom insists of shouts; rather suggestions are made in such a way as to make not adhering to them impossible.

The emotionally abusive partner makes suggestions which are ‘for your own good’.

It is so hard to tell your friends that the gifts the emotionally abusive partner buys are chains and shackles. It is impossible to explain that you are not allowed to wear hats when the reason the emotionally abusive partner gives is that you have such beautiful hair.

It is so hard to even realise that the cage you are in may be gilded, but is still a cage; that gold held up to the light reflects painfully in your eyes; that huge diamonds weigh you down and expensive clothing twists and traps you.

Insults coated in sugar hurt and tear and reduce.

Insults hurled with violence are easier to recognise and dodge.

People sympathise with black eyes and torn lips but not with being told to wear longer skirts. People acknowledge the damage of broken lips and cracked teeth but not of being told you are worthless. When ribs are cracked they can repair themselves. When self esteem is cracked the crack grows into a fissure and a crevice and finally splits you in two.

Emotional abuse kills from inside.

And no one sees

people who get on my wick

Here is my list of things that piss me off on today of all days – world aids day

1. The beetroot brigade

Now, we all know that eating well is good for you, all round. If you are sick, with anything, and eat well, you will get better faster. If you eat poorly, disease lurks and punishes your body big time. However, eating well does not cure diseases, least of all ones caused by viruses. HIV + people who eat well do have a better prognosis, but they are still HIV +.

 

2. The pharmaceutical bashers

These are often also members of the beetroot brigade. Of course the drug companies are making money from the ARV drugs they make. They are businesses who make money out of drugs production and sales. It’s called economics! To suggest that these companies created the HI – virus and are now selling unnecessary medicines to treat the disease is ridiculous. If they were going to, do you not think that maybe they would have made the epicentre of the disease fat rich American and not poverty struck Africa? Again – it’s economics!

 

3. The judges

These are usually middle class white people who get exasperated by having to replace their maid and/or gardener much too often than is convenient because they keep dying. ‘Don’t these people know about condoms?’ is their war cry. For many people, women mostly, in this country, sexual equality and any sexual power whatsoever are as alien a concept as compassion is to many of the judges. These women do not choose to have unprotected sex, or, often, any sex at all. They have no negotiating power when it comes to this aspect of their lives. That is the privilege of the middle classes!

 

4. The unaware

It is from this group that the questions are raised about why kids begging are not at school. ‘After all, it is 15 years since the birth of our new land and all kids have the same opportunities.’ Yeah right! The 12 year old AIDS orphans who are working the streets, begging and hooking, to feed their younger siblings have exactly the same opportunities as the rich kids off to their schools in air conditioned 4×4s.

 

5. The preachers of abstinence.

In an ideal world we would all rock up at our weddings pure and virginal and ride into the sunset with our soul mate. Only we are an infinity from that world. So saying that if the teenagers and young people didn’t have sex they would be safe and therefore it is a personal decision they make, and therefore infection is just deserts, is just beyond archaic. No condoms to school kids does not stop them from having sex – it just stops them from being safe. No condoms to prisoners does not stop them having sex – it just stops them from being safe. No condoms to underage girls does not stop them from having sex – it just stops them from being safe.

 

6. The punishment advocates

Anyone who has a god that they truly believes punishes people for sexual activity or drug use by giving them aids deserves an eternity with that god. What we all need to do to get this disease under control is to stop judging.

We need to admit that the sexual aspect of the transmission of this disease makes us uncomfortable, and get the hell over it.

570 000 people died last year in South Africa from AIDS related disease! More than half a million people! Our people, the people of our land!

can’t believe – treatment of prisoners

At the start of 2008 7% of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were people captured by US and collation forces. The other 93% were handed over by warlords, usually in exchange for money, often thousands of dollars!

85 000 people in total spent time as prisoners at Guantanamo.

 

The former chief of staff to Colin Power estimated that maybe 1% were terrorists. Many were not terrorists, at worst insurgent when arrested.

Torture was a regular and violent part of life for almost all of those held at the detention facility. American soldiers who worked there have been charged with a range of offenses, including torture, assault, maiming and committing lewd acts.

You can be sure the innocents held there were terrorists after release! And you can be sure there will be future attacks on America.

How can there not be when they have treated innocent people like animals!

i love you

Why do we say these three little words to people?

Really why?

Deeply, in our most honest of places – why?

 

We tell our children because we want them to feel safe and valued and important. We want them to know they matter to us. But why do we tell lovers we love them? What do we expect it to mean? Does ‘I love you’ ever really just mean that I am telling you how I feel? Or does it always come with a …… after it?

 

I think we tell people we love them so that they will treat our hearts carefully, so they will care back for us. I think someone loving you is a huge responsibility. As soon as you know someone loves you, you have to treat them better; you hold their hearts in your hands.

Too often ‘I love you’ is a power thing.

Too often ‘I love you’ is a demand.

Too often ‘I love you’ is an excuse.

Love, as Oprah said, is not an emotion, it is a series of events. It is a verb, not a noun. It is an action, many little actions, not a statement.

And much too often, ‘I love you’ is about me, and what I feel, and not you.

 

I prefer ‘You are loved.’

betrayal

Why does it feel like betrayal is the worse personal crime against us?

 

 We expect certain behaviours from people who fill certain roles in our lives. We have a set idea of what a mother, a lover, a friend does. And when someone does something contrary to these ‘rules’ of behaviour, we feel betrayed.

 

Is that really fair? Who says a mother has to choose their child over another option? Social convention? History? Personal expectation?

 

Who says a friend has to always be honest? Again – is this the reflection of desire rather than reasonable expectation?

 

People betray each other, their country, their families, their gods, all the time. And yet every time it happens the affected people are shocked.

 

Mothers leave their babies to die so they can go out and party, friends sleep with their friend’s spouses, people lie, cheat and steal all the time, every single day. And yet we gnash our teeth and pull our hair every time we are the victim.

 

We need to grow up as a species and realise, finally, that we cannot impose our expectations of others onto them. Just cos I want you to always love and respect me does not mean you will. And I can’t make you.

 

We pathetically hang onto the fact that ‘he promised!’ as though that means anything in the greater scheme of things.  People are essentially selfish – each one of us is designed to make sure we get ourselves as far as possible in life. We only stop alongside another person to make sure we have offspring to pass the baton of genes too, not cos we want to improve that person’s life. Not really. Altruism does not exist – everyone gets something out of everything they do. And they will do that which gives them the most reward.

 

That we expect anything different from anyone is a reflection of our own naivety rather than their flaws as a human.

god and morality

I am very anti religious schools as a rule. I think it is fine to have religion specific schools parents can chose to send their kids to, but generally available schools, government schools, should, in my opinion, be secular.

Praying to the god of one religion should not be imposed upon all kids, regardless of their religion. It is invariably the Christian god who is communicated with at in government schools across the Western world. And the Christians say it should be so. But how would they feel if their kids were forced to kneel on a mat and prayer to Allah, or don suits and knock on doors trying to find converts to Jehovah – all during school hours?

The children of all religions have equal rights to worship their god, so who gets to decide which one the school supports? ‘

 

But what of the morals of the kids?’ I hear many people say.

I would hope that the morality our kids have is aside from their belief in god. A faith system inherited from your parents seems a tenuous hook upon which to hang your morality. What if you lose your god? Or meet and connect with people with a different one? Does morality fly out the window then?

I believe it is the thinking that god is what determines right from wrong that allows fanatics (of all religions) to kill in the name of their god. If your god says non believers deserve to die, then your morality will allow you to kill. And it’s not just the Muslims doing this – many a person has died at the hands of Christian fanatics etc.

As the grownups is it not our job to teach kids to respect each other, to respect themselves, to respect the world simply because other people/ourselves/the world deserves respect. And not cos some god in heaven is watching.

 

God should be an addition, an optional extra if you like, to the moral fibre of a person, not the reason for it.

nature

Living in the developed world, the structures of the landscape causes humankind to feel as though it exists around us, as a backdrop to the dramas of our life. For so long have those structures been inhabited, they appear to exist for humankind. The hills, fields, moors and seas have been domesticated. Trained and pruned. Populated.

 

In Africa, they have not. In Africa the natural structures stand separate and beyond humankind. They do not bend to our desires but rather often resist and refuse us. The land seems harsh, as though it minds us here. The distances are vast; the skies high. There is little sense of co-operation, but rather a sense of tolerance. It feels always as though a good season, a cool summer, rain but not floods, heat but not drought are something akin to a gift; certainly not a right. Nature keeps us on our toes in Africa.

 

In Africa we know we are not the centre of the Universe, we see our fragility in the disregard nature has for us.

Afrikaans

I heard a most interesting conversation on safm yesterday.

It was all about Afrikaans as a language of oppression and reconciliation. This is my summary and comment on what I understood yesterday.

 

Afrikaans is considered the language of the oppressors in this country. It is the language the Dutch of the original colonialists has morphed into. And as such, seems to be forever associated with the raping of the land. The Nationalist Party from 1948 onwards continued to display that the language was one of oppression.

 

But why and how?

In the early 1900s there was an interest in a translation of the Bible into Afrikaans. It was at this stage that it came to be realised that the language needed to be standardised. To translate the Bible meant simply that there had to be agreement regarding what every word meant. A dictionary had to be created.

When this was done, the Afrikaans as spoken by ‘civilised’ people (read white) was used. This despite the fact that thousands of non-whites spoke Afrikaans as their first language. Words of Dutch, Flemish etc origin were given more power than ones of Cape Malay origins. An example of this apparently is ‘Dankie’ and ‘Tramakassie’. Both words mean the same thing, but Dankie, as a word with Germanic (read white) origins has more semantic value in the language.

Doing this to the language split it into the ‘proper’ (read white) Afrikaans, and the kitchen Afrikaans (read non-white). And so proper Afrikaans as the language of the oppressors was created.

 

What I find so interesting about this is the huge numbers of non-whites who speak Afrikaans as a first language or as a very competent second language. If you use volume to decide what average is, the average Afrikaans speaker is not the Blue Bulls supporting ex Nat voting dude with a beer belly and holding a braai fork. It is probably a Coloured farm working in the Western Cape with coffee coloured skin and a metal roofed house.

What needs to happen is the restandardisation of Afrikaans so as to include the aspects of the language as used by all of its speakers.

Maybe this is the only way to ensure that Afrikaans survives in this multi-linguistic nation of ours. It would be a pity to lose so original and vibrant a language because only some of the people who use it are allowed to contribute to its development.

 

Afrikaans does not live only in Tshwane

racist

I am sure it was Pieter Dirk Uys who said that every day he admits that he is a racist, and then spend the day trying not to be

If it wasn’t him, it could’ve been

 

In this shiny new South Africa of ours many of us try very hard not to behave in a racist fashion. All of us, all colours and cultures, grew up with a sense of our separateness because of race. For us oldies, we grew up in different areas, went to different schools and were taught not to trust each other.

 

We all were, not just the whites.

 

 

So how do we think that in 15 short years all of that prejudice will have vanished? What hopefully naivety is that? All we can do is try. And recognise that others are trying too.

 

And I try. I do. I have friends who are not white and I have friends from different cultures. When watching someone eat with their hands in public I try to remember it’s a cultural thing and my way is not right, it’s just my way. When my space is invaded in the post office queue I try to remember that a personal space bubble is a luxury of middle class, of having my own bedroom as a child, of growing up being driven around in a car and not a packed taxi.

 

I do try.

 

But when that taxi driver cuts in front of me in the rain and then just looks at me, mean little racist words and phrases leap to mind, unbidden. At best I think ‘those people!!!!’, and at worst, much worse words and thoughts.

 

That I ever think ‘those people’ means I consider myself separate from them because of my race. And let’s be honest, I think at least that ‘my people’ are better drivers! That’s racist!

 

When I see a hot white woman with a black man I wonder why. I do, I am sorry, but I do! I don’t have a problem with it but for just a second I wonder why. The word ‘why’ is just there, in my head, before I can bat it away and think ‘because they like each other’. But it is there. And that’s racist.

 

I see a black man playing with his child in a park and I think ‘wow.’ I have this horrible idea that black men impregnate and vanish.  I know too many black single mom’s not to think this. This is sexist, I know. And it’s racist.

 

 

And it is very hard to admit these things cos I don’t want to think them or feel them. And cognitively I don’t; I really don’t think I am better than anyone else cos of my colour, race or culture. I do not lump people into categories based on their skin colour; I think there are both nice people and shits in every group everywhere.

 

But my knee-jerk reactions often let my higher being down

 

I am not proud of these thoughts.

I try very hard not to allow them to exist

 

But I am a racist

And every day I work hard at not being one.