Nancy Chodorow posits that women identify rather readily with their mothers. Therefore their ego formation is less strong, their boundaries of self more permeable. I am not that way, and I think perhaps it might be explained by the unusual formation of my Oedipus complex (to use the term in a broad generic sense, to mean one's relationships with one's parents in general).

I may have had a pretty diffused identity (and therefore seemingly feminine) up to a particular point. Most people brought up in Rhodesia had something of a tribalistic cultural influence, and were neo-Romantics rather than bourgeois individuals. (The lack of development of the industrial complex made this so.)

There are certain traditions of misogny in many traditionalist cultures, and in my family (especially and particularly on my father's side) this appears to have been quite the case. There is an almost fundamentalist Islamicist notion, that I have seen applied to each of my female cousins (on my father's side of the family) that when girls are in danger of becoming women and thus developing into sexual beings, they develop the devil inside of them. So, even before this process of puberty begins, they must be beaten down emotionally (if not always physically) into extreme submission. This was the policy that was applied that seems to have resulted in both of my female cousins (from different families) running away from home. In my case, my father would suddenly lose his temper for no apparent reason, and chase me up and down the supermarket isles. Thus, I grew up to realise that I was hated by my father, for who I was, and that I would have to develop extremely strong ego boundaries, separating him and me, if I was to survive.

I couldn't identity with my mother, because she representing the predicament I would be in (of inability to help me or herself) if I had much weaker ego boundaries (which the onslought of animosity from my father was presumably supposed to bring about.) Thus I did not grow up with a nurturing and pacifying relationship with my mother, but rather with the pre-established psychic principle that I would have to struggle to the death against my father in order to win my own survival.

The outcome of my success in this endeavour made me, in turn, rather thickskinned and in terror and incomprehension of those who are able to go through life with rather thin ego boundaries. Don't such people realise that they are on the verge of psychic suffocation, as well as physical and emotional violence, up to and including death?

I cannot understand Nancy Chodorow's formula, suggesting that as a woman I shouldn't be feeling this way.

It is probably worth mentioning, more than once or twice, that I feel that I have been very lucky in my misfortunes. Nietzsche proclaims this phenemenon in terms of people who are strong enough for everything to work out well for them.

Let me count the blessings:

1. I had a great and robust early education in a kind of neo-romantic geographic and social environment.

2. Although I was thoroughly rejected by my parents for the social role that I was destined to play, as someone's housewife or "woman" (see the Masaai culture and the way that girls are cast out from the village to become wives of a different tribe), I became very thick-skinned and self-reliant on the basis of this rejection.

3. I turned my cultural alienation and a workplace bullying situation into a desperate intellectual hunger, which I then fed. This has now borne fruit, as I am writing a very important (which is to say, culturally and politically relevant thesis regarding Zimbabwe) thesis.

4. I turned my necessity to defend myself against hostile opposition into a capacity to spar. I can do so quite well.

5. Due to the negative experiences I've had I've clarified my thinking and determination to the point where I am now doing exactly what I would have wanted to do, rather than something I would settle for.

6. I was turned out of my African home, but live in Perth where there is a beach, and the weather is generally not shit.

7. Due to my unnatural hardships (in terms of first world standards and expectations) I have developed insight into all sorts of things I would otherwise have not had insight into. Had I remained in a situation that was tame and safe, I would probably not have the psychological background to write my thesis, or take the risks that led to my meeting Mike.

8. I've learned to rise above what other people think of me, and to see the fallacies of reason hidden in their value judgments.

9. I've learned to distinguish between good-value friendships and those that are merely mutually exploitative.

10. Consequently, I am not neurotic, and fight well.

Heyho, Heyho, it's off to train I go
No time to say hello goodbye heyho heyho!

Well I've had a strange week -- much of it without the Internet or a phone. The phone went dead on Friday night or so and still hasn't been reconnected. On my wander up towards the train station during the week, I saw a Telstra man deep in a ditch attaching or investigating wires. Apparently something is mal in the state of Cannington.

So......my phonecalls all had to be diverted via my parents' place, given their kindly offer to host my ESL sessions. That was last weekend, when I woke up during the night and then again at 6 pm to find the system was still dead. This eventuality ended up provoking a tenuous reconciliation with the parent folk, given that I am destined to be in their good books lately since nothing succeeds like success.

I've put off giving ESL sessions this week, which makes things seem odd indeed, since thee devil does make work for idle minds - or rather, does make idle minds work, given that there are no other means to achieve temporary distraction.

Right now Mr Internet is popping up with signs that tell me of a limited local connection. Thee telephone is still not working. Reportely 600 other people are in this same boat.

Due to all my hard work, getting things done, I've abandoned my libidinous impulses, and only tend them sullenly, through moments of sporadic sparring, not even temporary reflections. That feels odd as well. A symptom of an uncluttered mind.

Ah! I long for adventure!! Not the adventure that you have to plan step by step of the way, but the one that happens naturally, freeflowingly, in open space. (I long for open space and feel so cramped in what appears increasingly to be an overpopulated planet. Give me air.

An having distance myself quite a bit from Western culture by immersing myself in Zimbabwe and its strange affairs, I now feel really alienated from all the little, baby sparring matches occuring on the ideological sites, staking their grounds for their own particular brand of identity politics. Such approaches seem all too disatisfying and remarkably limited, like the possibility of sex that never really gets off the ground.

So I must wait, and last out the winter, and try somehow to thrive against the odds. I'm SO bored; have conquered all my intellectual goals of late. Resent the possibility of spending long boring hours filling out footnotes, or detailing in endless amounts of forms. Life is too short for that.

I must pick up the little strings of other goals. I have abandoned skydiving, and temporarily my next martial arts belt. The reason is that intellectual projects have cropped up, and so I have abandoned this, that and the other -- all important stuff, put to one side for too long.

I find my martial arts fuels my intellectual training, but not the other way around. This implies an order of priorities, which I have been casually abandoning. I mustn't.

I wish someone would say something intriguing.

(a) was where I went to high school in Harare, Zimbabwe.

And the big vlei, just north of the racetrack, is the one I galloped across (uncontrolled, bareback, terrifying, nearly smashing into ant-hills and in danger of rabbit holes in unknown terrain) on Thika.

Perhaps it is a Utopian vision of how life could be that inspires and produces Jung's "emergent self"? Then it has something in common with a thread in Marechera's writing and with Hegel's Idealism.