No,
this is not the opening title of a feminist manifesto, but rather a critique on
the one blanket approach we’ve taken with regards to nudity as opposed to a
culture-specific perspective. A comparison between oral and literary societies reveal
how cultures inform the different lenses through which things like nudity are
to be viewed. Marshall McLuhan in his book, Understanding
Media, writes immensely on the differences between oral and literary
societies; mainly that literary societies are limited in their perception and
there is an over reliance on sight as a sensory input. Whereas with an oral
society, hearing does not just involve the ears. McLuhan writes ‘The act of hearing is a group effort for
the human body’s organs, involving the ears, the eyes and the skin.’ McLuhan
expounds on the McGurk effect which describes how hearing involves the eyes as
well. There has to be regularity between the auditory and the visual. For
example, if someone mouths ‘ga’ but
the auditory input is ‘ba’ then they
will report to hearing ‘da’. This is
one of the primary reasons I can’t watch anything that has been dubbed; my mind
cannot reconcile the movements of the actors’ lips with the words emanating
from the screen. Part of the fascination with Chinese films when we were
younger lies in the fact that we found the auditory and visual inconsistencies
hilarious; not to be taken seriously. Milli Vanilli learnt the hard way that if
you are going to lip sync, then remember the operative word ‘synchronization’.
McLuhan
also mentions a phenomenon that illustrates how hearing involves the skin. There
are certain letters such as ‘p’,‘t’,
and ‘k’ which in saying them release
a puff of air which is picked up by the skin. This puff of air differentiates
those particular letters from ‘b’,‘d’
and ‘g’ respectively. ‘We listen with the entire epidermis’
writes McLuhan. The advent of literacy in modern societies has reduced the
sensorium to just sight; and it is through that rather limited lens modern
societies have perceived and understood things.
African
people have for the most part been oral people; we are the griot people, the
people of the ears, the eyes and the skin. It is this particular frame through
which we view nudity; in its entirety as a natural part of the environment. When
people from literary societies encounter nudity; they do so having been
betrayed by their eyes. Their eyes make benign all other sensory input,
heightening themselves and creating as a result a sort of fetishistic quality
to that which is beholden. The unsurprising reaction to nudity (a bare breast)
then would be a gasp from the modern man and he would then be compelled to look
away in embarrassment. When an African man encounters a bare breast, he is able
to absorb this information in its appropriate context. It is subsumed as a part
of the environment because he makes sense of this information holistically;
which is why nudity outside of a sexual context is not sexualized. ‘To a person using the whole sensorium,
nudity is the richest possible expression of structural form. But to the highly
visual and lopsided sensibility of industrial societies, the sudden
confrontation with tactile flesh is heady music indeed’ writes McLuhan.
While
modern societies have ridiculed African societies to no end on being scantily
clad; because the assumption has been that the civilized wear clothes and the
barbaric choose to go without them; things like climate or diet not even
factoring into these assumptions. While the move to literary media has a lot of
positive implications for the cultures in which this media is imbedded, it also
has its drawbacks. We then to need to be careful of hiding the drawbacks of
certain media under the auspices of the word ‘civilization’. In the words of Mark Manson ‘Everything has trade-offs’. Africans, therefore, have no need to be
ashamed when it comes to their sartorial preferences (e.g. ibheshu of the Zulu or the loincloth of the San people) and they
also need not be ashamed of that which is natural and intuitive to them like
the breastfeeding of infants at any time or place when an infant expresses
hunger. The moderns eat in full view of other people in restaurants and yet a
hungry infant must take his meals in private because there are people who find
his mother’s bare breast indecent. In fact, it is the sexualisation of a child
receiving nourishment that is deviant and indecent. An African mother on
African soil should never have to cower beneath the contempt of people who
themselves haven’t interrogated where this contempt stems from and if they
indeed even have a right to be contemptuous in the first place.
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