A
few years ago, there was an upsurge of learners physically attacking teachers
in South African schools. The teachers could not retaliate because the law
forbade it. There seemed to be an asymmetry (beyond the minor-adult axis)
regarding the meting out of justice in these situations; a teacher would be in
more trouble if he retaliated then the learner would be for assaulting the
teacher in the first place. This asymmetry left teachers at the mercy of
learners and learners took advantage of this. It became a rather contentious
topic on 702 and I recall quite a considerable number of its listenership advocating
for the reinstitution of corporal punishment. At the time I thought it was the
worst idea; living in one of the most violent countries, the last thing we
needed was another tributary through which more violence could flow. I felt
that in order for violence to be curbed; it should be eradicated from society
entirely. For me it seemed disingenuous and lazy for us to discuss ‘gender based’
violence without discussing the number of men who kill other men in South
Africa, or the number of women who inflict violence on men knowing that society
would not even bat an eyelid because of an unfortunate masculinity construct.
There is a toxicity in femininity that relies on this and will goad, taunt and
provoke men to no end knowing that he cannot in any way respond physically
because the law will come down, ton of bricks, hard on him. Because, as is
often the case in society, men are not really seen beyond their utility; parts
of their humanity is thwarted or ignored altogether. Men are complicit in this
as well. Men are not meant to have feelings, they are not meant to react in any
way to provocation and when an armed burglar breaks into a man’s home at 3am,
he (as a man) is meant to leave his wife in bed and confront the burglar by
himself and risk his life. His life seems by virtue of being a man disposable
i.e. how in The Titanic, women and
children were first on the lifeboats. There are men who will read the few
sentences above and see zero conflicts regarding what I’ve articulated. They
internally and impulsively assent to ideas that men are supposed to protect
their families, cannot show emotional displays (interpreted as weakness), and irrespective
of what women do, the men can never lay hands on women. If this blog had
appeared on any mainstream media, this is the part of the blog where folks stop
reading, put on their virtue signalling T-shirts and cancel me. But before roll
your eyes and label me as anti-women or pro-GBV, bear with me for a second. I
am not in any way arguing for GBV, as a woman myself it should be obvious why
this cannot be the case. What I have been arguing for is a violence-free
society (think Scandinavian). As a caveat, I’d like to draw attention to the
observation that South Africa’s violence is a symptom of inequality and there
is no way that the violence conversation can take place before the inequality one
has. Inequality aside, I saw a society where men wouldn’t raise their hands to
women; women wouldn’t raise their hands to men; men wouldn’t raise their hands
to women; learners wouldn’t raise their hands to teachers, vice versa and so
forth. Importantly and indispensably, it is a society of mutual respect and
understanding that our ability to inflict violence on one another is ever
present; that we should treat each other in a way that doesn’t wittingly poke
and trigger those parts. It would not be a society where violence becomes
impossible but where violence becomes unnecessary. It would be a society where
a man does not have to bear the yoke of protecting his family, existentially
and financially, because there would be nothing potentially-violent he would
need to protect his family from. While I’m lost in fantasies of this utopic
non-violent society, Tyson Yunkaporta comes and drops his book Sand Talk on to my society. Like a house
of cards, my society flattens at the impact. I had to begin ideating afresh on
violence. The great thing is that I already had a cornerstone to begin with:
the acknowledgment that the ability to respond violently is very much a part of
the makeup of being human. I guess I have been Ariscratle from Ice Age 4 imploring Scrat and the rest
of society, ‘No! Stop! Brother [and
sister], rise above this base desire to be more than a [primate- of the
chimpanzee variety].’ With this capstone and Sand Talk, I started rebuilding.
In
Season 5 of The Real Housewives of
Potomac, Monique Samuels assaulted another cast member, Candiace Dillard
and most of the other cast members reproached Samuels and she was ostracised
and Dillard herself was spared rebuke even though her actions were instigative.
Consequently, Samuels is no longer a part of the show. Samuels heightened already
high tensions by tweeting ‘ask and you
shall receive’ post altercation. Her co-stars condemned her behaviour as
morally reprehensible as the tweet showed that she lacked remorse for her actions.
She subsequently kowtowed to the pressures that be. I thought her behaviour was
a natural consequence of the provocation. You push people hard enough and they
will push back. You go around daring people, one day someone will call your
bluff. In Seriously Funny, Kevin Hart
has a bid about precisely this. And of course, the hackneyed ‘a lady doesn’t behave like that’
reprimand from all other cast members. This brings me to the domestication of
people.
Yunkaporta has a rather interesting hypothesis
regarding the mass scale domestication of people. He posits that the Prussians
invented adolescence to extend the developmental period of children into
adulthood. This adolescence allowed the Prussians to retard the populations’
social, emotional and intellectual maturation so that they would be easier to
control; creating a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults. This
domestication was exported to Nazi Germany and then to America. His hypothesis
does coincide with menarche but it conflicts with the neurobiological finding
that the human brain only fully develops at the age of 25 unless this finding
is correlated to the retardation. I think his hypothesis is compelling and if
that was the only thing I had found insightful in Sand Talk, it would have been completely worth the read. It is
still something I need to mull over; the jury is still out on whether his
hypothesis is poppycock or pure genius. I do however want to spend time a bit
of energy on the domestication of human beings because our current human
conditioning would have made us easy prey to the sabre-tooth if we were placed
in those settings, that’s if we didn’t die of starvation because persistence
hunting is no joke. Yunkaporta points his finger to public education but I would
like to point to more nuanced techniques that I myself have fallen for,
repeatedly. This particular technique is courtesy to the English and the
residual culture they left in their wake when South Africa became a Republic in
1961. When I was in primary school we were often referred to as young ladies.
Obviously this was the Pygmalion Effect in full force and my nine-year old self
had zero fighting chance against such psychological weaponry. Whenever a
teacher referred to us as ‘young ladies’,
we would beam with all the pride we could muster without putting our ladyship
in question with vainglory. That referral, however, was not just an
acknowledgment of the self but an invitation to step further and firmer into
our ladyship. The principal of the school at the time was the epitome of a
lady: never raised her voice even in anger, always composed, poised,
immaculate, articulate, unhurried and the entire student body adored her. To
emulate her was an ambition harboured by many female learners. So there we
were: tempering our loud natures, walking across the quad instead of running,
having our hair tied back at all times and blunting our sharp tongues. Later,
it dawned on me that this whole turn ‘girls
into ladies’ thing was a restraining, a domestication. I had inadvertently
zipped up my own lips; placed fetters and handcuffs on my own feet and hands. I
am wild now, untamed, let loosed; resembling an older Sandy Crood, or at least attempting
to.
Chuck
Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, in
conversation with Tom Bilyeu says that the number one preoccupation people have
is ‘looking good’ and showing the
world that you ‘have it all together’.
Woe to him who gets flustered in public. Being taught to be a lady was being
trained to look good in thought, word and deed. The same thing has been done to
men; a gentleman shows the outmost restraint, suffers silently under heavy
constraints and is chivalrous. In societies where violence is equated with
savagery; unsophistication and the efforts of desperate people who have not
cultivated any other alternatives as a response to life’s provocations. This
perception has also led to the damsel in distress trope. In the face of danger,
a lady doesn’t raise her hands but must rely on a man facing the danger on her
behalf, putting his own life in harms away. A woman must act like a lady by sitting
and waiting on a man to act like a gentleman. This is some co-dependent toxic
shit. Just imagine with me if you will, a lady dropping her ladyship, picking
up a weapon of self-defence and pulling a Jenko & Schmidt from 22 Jump Street or a Mike and Marcus from
Bad Boys, standing back to back
facing the threat from all sides with the camera panning in slow motion.
Impossible? No. Implausible? No! Improbable? Most definitely. Not because women
can’t learn to fight but because have been weakened more and more through
domestication. Women don’t fight. Most women have no agency in the face of
danger. They freeze. While men have been given options in the face of danger:
fight, flight or appease. Just as a lion at the lion park approaches the fence
of an enclosure when it spots a human child (easy prey) on the other side of
the fence. There are men who see women in the same light. They see easy prey.
They are predatory because they know they’ll mostly get away with anything they
do to women. In Vagabond by Lerato
Mogoatlhe she shares an account of a man attempting to force himself on her and
she fights back. I remember picking up her book, reading the blurb and being
both excited and afraid at the same time. Here was a woman, very much like
myself demographically, who travelled the continent on very little money and
alone. My domestication reflex kicked in right on cue: What? No male chaperone?
And my neo-cortex shows up on the scene (late as always) and I have to remind
myself that she’s an adult. She should be able to go wherever she wants and do
whatever she wants to do without being afraid. The domestication of women has
not only been accomplished through their physical weakening but like the
domestication of dogs, there has been an invisible leash placed around them
that keeps them in their very well air-conditioned and artificially lit
kennels. Not a lot of women would do what Mogoatlhe did. A lot of women die
having not heeded the inner call to adventure or not trying new things they
really want to because of safety or looking good or the other tamings of
society. Lebo Mashile writes in her poem There
is a me that I could be:
‘There is a me that I could be/ If I could
just let her breathe outside/ A thundering song that I could sing/ If I just
let her breathe outside/ There is a me who lives unseen/ She paces the
corridors inside.’
Yunkaporta
sums up the domestication of women in this way. ‘Everywhere civilisation goes, most women are excluded from active
participation in violence and then domesticated into a twisted, soft, flouncing
version of femininity… In Asia, the Middle East and Europe, in every
civilization, women are forced to adopt a passive role, their bodies confined
and weakened until they are at the mercy of the men around them… the
subjugation of women is perpetuated by multiple means. The myth of romance is
political. It is a myth about male-dominated hetero couples, where an
incomplete woman is completed by her relationship with her partner. Patriarchy
naturalises this sexual identity, masking the cultural construction of the
feminine, thereby continually reproducing women in a subordinate position… when
it was found that Neanderthal women carried much the same suite of bone
injuries as men, there was a brief silence before ‘men were hunters and women
gatherers’ narrative continued unchallenged… When I think of the worst public
beating I ever received from a woman, resulting in three busted ribs, a knife
through my hand and half my hair pulled out, I recall that the non- Aboriginal
observers of that fight ignored the power of that magnificent woman and focused
on my weakness as an individual who had somehow let my sex down. The onlookers,
both male and female were so disgusted with my poor performance that they
didn’t even bother calling an ambulance, leaving me to crawl my bloody way home.’
So again I ask: Improbable? Yes, but it doesn’t have to be.
Palahniuk
says that his work scratches away at the gossamer of looking good; allowing
people to confront their shadow selves (including people’s propensity for
violence), to integrate it into themselves, and lastly celebrate it because it
is a part of being human. Yunkaporta, ‘Creation
started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern. The
damage of violence is minimised when it is distributed throughout a system
rather than centralised into the hands of a few powerful people and their
minions [or one gender of the population]. If you live a life without violence,
you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and
detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the Southern
hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the
clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into
the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the
economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of
your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace-
medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in
your phone from devastated African lands communities. Your notions of peaceful
settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears.
Violence exists and it must be carefully structured within rituals governed by
the patterns of creation and the laws of sustainable cultures derived from
those patterns. Violence employed in these highly interdependent and controlled
frameworks serves to bring spirit into balance and hold in check
I-am-greater-than deception… Every organism in existence does violence, and
benefits from it in reciprocal relationships. Domesticated beings are stripped
of this reality, and become passive recipients of violence- either its benefits
or its cruel impacts. They devolve as a result.’ This shares the same
sentiment with what Jordan B. Peterson once said in his Maps of Meaning series. He said that the reason why we don’t resort
to our primal reptilian brain is because everything is working as it should be.
If there were serious food shortages for example, we would shrug off our
civility to survive. It would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. We saw a hint of this in our avaricious
hording behaviour with the impact of the Corona virus. All of a sudden, shops
had to interfere and restrict the amount of non-perishable food people were
buying because at that point, it didn’t matter if other people got food or not.
And
also, with the Scandinavian example; as ‘peaceful’
as it is, now and then violence bubbles to the surface. A few days ago, a man
went on a shooting (bow and arrow) spree killing five people. We can repress
violence but we run the risk of having no say in how it will erupt and how
extensive the damage will be; uncontrolled violence is also gratuitous. Yunkaporta
writes, ‘There is controlled violence
versus uncontrolled violence, hidden violence and public violence, violence
born from colonisation and dispossession. There is also an argument to be made
for white systems perpetrating non-traditional violence so that members of
marginalised groups remain cornered about these things and not with the
decisions that are being ‘made for us’ in a wider socio-political sense.’
Violence is not just physical; violence is poverty, carnism, erasure of
cultures, arbitrary hierarchies, incarceration without rehabilitation, the
commodification of people and the environment etc. Erick Godsey in conversation
with Michael Phillip of the Third Eye
Drop podcast, says that we should take our cues from nature. Yunkaporta
supports this view as well, ‘Violence is
part of creation and it is distributed evenly among all agents in sustainable
systems to minimise the damage it can do. We follow creation, so we must all
have high levels of competence when it comes to conflict.’ Godsey takes it
further and says one of the problems with modern day society is that ‘we are
heads cut off from our bodies’ which is why Ian Tattersall says that ‘The only ironclad rule of human experience
has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.’ While we lived in smaller
tribes, unintended consequences could be rectified and equilibrium in the system
re-established. Unfortunately global village consequences are exponentially
catastrophic which is how we have found ourselves in the climate change
predicament, amongst other things. And because we are disembodied; we have lost
the ability to recalibrate to nature’s patterns. We have lost the patience to
wait and see how the changes we make on the earth affect the rest of the system
before changing something else. Before we ourselves have assimilated a change
into ourselves, a new one is thrust upon us by occupying powers and on each other.
We have literally lost touch of reality. We have all this information and
technology and our heads are spinning at the speed of 260 Mbps but our bodies
are still at the beginning of the race; asking like that infamous South African
ghost: ‘Waar is my kop?’ The Law of
Unintended Consequences remains and the consequences will naturally follow;
whether we like it or not. Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World had his house flooded in 2019 because a dyke had
broken. Despite the stress of having most of his and his family’s possessions
destroyed, he asked a sensible question: Where is the water supposed to go? In
Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, she
describes how all the people who die as a result of an earthquake are killed by
the manmade structures around them. The earth is have said to have gone through
5 mass extinctions and I’m pretty sure they were violent affairs. Nature, will
always auto-correct. With our big brains, we could have let nature set the
rhythm so we could exist in tandem with it; moving along the grain; advancing
with its patterns; able to anticipate and dance with it. But we’ve chosen to
strong arm it as we have done with one another
and the violence of nature’s autocorrect (homeostasis) of our unintended
consequences may lead to our demise which will likely be a protracted painful
death; as the planet becomes even more inhospitable for and hostile to us.
Yunkaporta says that violence has to be distributed among all agents to
mitigate the damage, similarly Jamie Wheal’s recapturing of the rapture has to
be distributed among all agents. Elon Musk is not going to save us.
One
of the most violent occurrences that take place daily and should then reinforce
the indispensability of nature’s timing in the activities of human beings; and
that is childbirth. Childbirth is violent for the mother and the child. Maybe
it’s modern day medical advancements (epidurals, caesareans, inductions, germ
theory etc.) have made it less harrowing. Even with the hormones that flood the
system of the mother to dilute the violence so that she heals well and that
allows her to remember childbirth in sepia tones so that she would still want
to procreate in the future; the violence still exists. There was a time in our
not so distant past when childbirth was truly touch-and-go. Maternal and/or
neonatal death was common and likely. Creation started with a big scream, and
the hug came only after. Human beings have fully wrapped their heads and bodies
around the gestation period of a human foetus. They know that they run all
sorts of risks by either shortening or lengthening that period. A cautionary
tale, perhaps, on not dilly-dallying with regards to climate change and all the
other percolating elements that came as a result of our heads floating around
without bodies. Another lesson childbirth extends to us is that violence
doesn’t have to lead to trauma. I think trauma is one of the biggest threats to
the survival of human beings. Systemic violence has produced trauma that has
lasted generationally and psychologically crippled large populations which is
really counterproductive to our existence. In summary, a good childbirth is not
one without violence; it is one where violence is integrated, is shared,
timely, where both mother and infant survive without trauma. Therefore, a good
society is not one without violence, it is one where violence is integrated, is
shared, timely, where human beings and the earth survive without trauma.
