The current gender-based bifurcation of reality boils down to a state of deep personal and psychological laziness -- permitted by social consensus.

The state of personal lassitude that strongly embraces the importance of gender identity was perhaps less an invitation to sink into stupidity in the past, when economic and social options were limited. One had to do what one had to do, without mechanical leverage to lift you up, and without the liberating measures of chemical birth control.

These days, however, when diversity is made allowable by the increase in general social knowledge and by greater scientific advancement (including social scientific), it is laughable that some people demand to be treated according to a particular categorical definition.

A male demands to be viewed  as 'masculine' because "I say so."

This is the logic of a two-year-old, slamming its foot down, whilst fearing any adversity from  its mother.

Even this assertion of his independence is deceptive, for it is not really the need to be treated as a member of a separate and distinct category that drives the one who claims "his rights" as a member of this category or the other.

Rather, he is intent on assuring his sense of safety and security in the world, though his demand to be treated always in the same way, both before and subsequent to any actions that he might perform. For, if his actions were truly attractive and desirable, he would have not have made them dependent on others according to him the self-definition he prefers. After all, masculinity used to be about facing hardships, including not being acknowledged as having the identity you thought of as yours. Swimming in the glamour of self-image, conversely, was once considered pejoratively feminine (the fantasy of femininity, with its fluid qualities of self-creation, as per the movie screen.)

Underlying his demand to be treated as "masculine", come hell or high water, appears to be a desire never to move or change anything about oneself, not even his perceptions. Is the desire at hand to become a woman? Does such a desire mean returning to become again a passive, suckling infant? Or stranger still, requiring to be treated always in one particular way, no matter what -- doesn't it involve the strong determination to be treated like an already dead person, a corpse?

Apish dwelling in the Shadowlands of ambiguity, between linguistic literalness and linguistic metaphor, was for making life easier. Whilst claiming his cultural rights as worker-boss and enjoyer of art, the evolutionary psychologist could always suppose to himself that "ape" is just a metaphor for human life.

However, convenience is preferred for its ability to buy a sense of superiority cheaply for its adherents.

"Ape" can be a term appropriated more literally, too -- as within domestic relations, in such instances as when the urge to rape and decimate appears from anywhere, and the adherent feels the need to give in to his lower impulses, without cultural mediation.

Exploiting the ambiguity between literal conceptualization of humanity as ape, and figurative conceptualization (as, for example, when he means to make use of civilisation's apparatus of legal, social or financial power) suits our social Darwinist adherent very much. This approach justifies the ape in whatever he feels like doing, and makes him very comfortable with himself.

The possibility that others may view his antics in a rather more perspicacious way, as being revelatory of the aesthetics and thought processes of an ape, passes way above his devolved consciousness.

Identity politics is primeval -- rooted in the pre-Oedipal*. It always evokes a "metaphysics of presence" (term from Derrida); the "good breast versus the bad breast" (terms from Melanie Klein).

Those who say that they are postmodern, and yet invoke identity politics at every turn are engaging in primeval sorcery, because they believe that they see more at hand than is actually capable of presenting itself to them.

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an erroneous or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, rather than passively observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "appear" to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a kind of magician.

Ultimately, what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such(as with a postmodernist interpretation of the world), but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

In Marechera's writing,  the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also that whicht redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity as a human core only after experiencing an overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral encounter with opposing and contradictory identities. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds".  Intellectual shamanism thus takes us way beyond postmodernism and its fascination with identities.

The postmodernist, who retreats periodically to his or her island of skepticism, cannot lay claim to the same sort of shamanistic experience of reading.

NOTE: *Jungians see this early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm.  It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  We all have components of that  in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great "oneness".