It relates to the false religion of postmodernism, whereby we can all achieve inner sanctity by embracing ‘the Other” in all of his petty differences. Of course, we still get to project our horribleness onto those who are genuinely other — like the white Africans. That is the benefit of belonging to this religion.
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My engagement with feminism was based on very personal necessity — to bring myself out of a traditional mindset and into the 20th Century. My culture had a very limited pool of knowledge about sexuality and gender relations. We hadn’t even entered the arena of any sort of gender politics. That is to say modernity had not yet arrived in my culture.
This led to a state of affairs where I didn’t understand the sub-texts of any of the social situations I was in. In retrospect, I see a lot was implied about identity, including gender but I didn’t really catch on at the time.
My inability to respond appropriately and to defend what others perceived as my “identity” made me extremely vulnerable to such onslaughts as workplace bullying. I really had no idea what people wanted from me or how to behave normally. To make matters worse, I had internalized attitudes that were socially quite passive. A female in an extremely right-wing, militaristic culture has no need to assert herself. Men are expected to do that for her.
For me, feminism was a way of solving this set of problems, in order to bring myself into modernity.
Feminism gave me the philosophical justification for what I needed to do, which was to engage in a prolonged and difficult battle with my original character structure in order to transform it into something more effective for the modern world.
What surprised me was how few people were able to understand this need and how many — good liberals included — worked actively to sabotage my project. Since I wasn’t able to articulate the nature of my project at the time, the lack of active support can be explained away. The attempts to sabotage my freedom by affirming my father’s perspectives over and against mine really needs a lot more explanation, though. It wasn't just my inability to articulate the deeper nature of the problem at the time I was experiencing it. Rather, it seems that even those who are otherwise impartial in their dealings with others do in fact have a deep emotional attachment to the concept or sensation of patriarchal authority.
So it was that I finally won my battle, but all my own effort, and against the forces of all sorts of attempts to make me feel guilty and repent of my fight for freedom.
Like most aspects of life, unless you’ve been through the experience — in my case, the experience of giving birth to oneself — you have little idea of what it means. You will misconstrue everything.
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I was extremely impressed by my horse on safari. She turned out to be both sure of foot and mild of temperament -- not features I would normally have considered selecting for, but exactly what was required for the type of terrain we covered for eight days. The ground was incredibly rocky, unpredictable and uneven, but she never put a foot wrong.
She was, however, a follower and not a leader.
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On the issue of whether "Zimbabwe" is a made up community: It is and it isn't. Right now, we have a movement whereby one of the traditional ethnic groups wishes to secede:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mthwakazi-Nation/162801343740250
Originally, colonial politics defined the boundaries of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). The group that now wishes to secede was violently subdued after the anti-colonial war. It is said that 20, 000 were killed in what might be described as a genocidal act on the part of the guerrilla faction that came to power.
Even though the nature of identity is being disputed within Zimbabwe itself, it is undeniable that there is a common history shared by the peoples of Zimbabwe, based on the historical fact that boundaries were defined. Whatever people in Zimbabwe have experienced -- and whatever they now think and feel, based on what they have experienced -- is different from what those in the Republic of South Africa will think and feel. National boundaries have a psychological meaning simply because they are a historical fact.
Some of the ways that national boundaries define and help to shape and form community is in terms of what kinds of media are permitted within those boundaries. During the years of Rhodesian rule, those within the national boundaries were time-locked, in that ideologies that were not right wing and Christian were not permitted to permeate the borders. There was strong media censorship and this affected the cultures developing within the national boundaries. I would say, in general, Rhodesians were stuck in the time of about 1949*. Then suddenly the national boundaries were open to the media and other influences. "Modern" ideas began permeating. Many white Rhodesians panicked and became converts to extreme forms of evangelical Christianity, as the American missionaries began filtering in, past the old boundaries. When I left Zimbabwe in 1894, I would have to say I could not have been less prepared for the 1980s. Our media censorship had made us unaware of how much the rest of the world had moved on.
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* When I went back to Zimbabwe last year, I found elements of the society still hadn't moved on from 1949. For example, a pantomime I attended had as one of its jokes that Germans were very funny because they did the Hitler salute.0Add a comment
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December 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm | #33| Quote- December 26, 2011 at 7:33 pm | #34| Quote“Of course, we still get to project our horribleness onto those who are genuinely other — like the white Africans. That is the benefit of belonging to this religion.”-Exactly. And that’s extremely convenient, isn’t it? The Other becomes nothing but a space where one can enact one’s own dramas and conflicts. And when that Other fails to comply, the sense of outrage is huge.
- December 26, 2011 at 7:40 pm | #35QuoteYes-and unsurprisingly, it is a form of imperialism –only now enacted on a psychological level, rather than in broader physical terms.It’s interesting that the black Zimbabweans, whom white (but not black) Westerners require to hate me, rarely do anything of the sort. Most of the time, we are quite chummy. This shows they are not fulfilling the postmodernist, Western agenda for me.
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Lack of knowledge about other countries is very common in the West. Distorted perspectives often serve domestic political purposes — also psychological purposes. The portrayal of white Zimbabweans as self-indulgent racists who lived high on the hog has a powerful psychological benefit for most Westerners, in that it makes them, as other beneficiaries of Western imperialism, seem more tolerant and less racist in their own eyes. After all, they never left the shores of Western countries to exploit any blacks. The lie entailed in this sentence should already be evident. However, projective identification is an extremely intense psychological mechanism that overrides empirical fact and reason. If one has the need to believe that others are more evil than you are, so you can diffuse your guilt, you will believe this no matter what.
Evidence is not so important. The need to get rid of an intolerable psychological burden is what counts. Hence, most Westerners have illusions about their identities — and about their morality.
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