R. Kelly: The man, the artist and the art

 

In an interview with Aubrey Marcus, Jamie Wheal says ‘My default setting is hopeless romantic’. I could completely sympathize as that is my default setting as well. I have a tough exterior but my insides are goo therefore it should then come as no surprise that I have a favourite love song (The Scientist by Coldplay), book (Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez), favourite love film (Wicker Park) and favourite celebrity couple (Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu). Although Coldplay holds the number 1 spot, there is an entire top ten of love songs one of which being ‘I’ll never leave’ by R. Kelly. The year was 2013 when The Chocolate Factory graced our hearts and our speakers. If you know anything about me, I play my music forte much to the chagrin of my neighbours who probably think I’ll outgrow it but what they don’t grasp is that this listening-to-music-loudly thing is genetic and all I can say by way of explanation is that I am my mother’s daughter.

So one Sunday morning I stream it through my car speakers and recall a conversation I had with a friend earlier this year in Sunninghill. The topic of conversation was Ravi Zacharias, MLK and R. Kelly and he emphatically expressed how he would never buy R. Kelly’s music again because he and I quote ‘won’t support a child abuser’. This knee-jerk reaction is very popular in today’s cancel culture. When someone transgresses worse than we have done then we take a self-appointed seat on our high moral pedestals and cast judgment. This judgment is like that unforgiving monopoly card that says ‘go straight to jail, do not pass begin’ which plays out in modern day culture as being ‘cancelled’. At least in Monopoly you are able to re-participate in the game as opposed to our cancel culture that wants to pretend you never existed to begin with. No atonement. No ‘go back to start’. Nothing. You are torn out of all the history pages and there is a black ink blot wherever your name use to be. I hope this essay, more than anything, allows us to pause and reflect before detonating people and their life’s work with our thumbs.

In Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, he establishes how social interactions amongst human beings culminate in sacrifice, time and time again; which is why sacrifice is an element of many different tribes around the world. Girard is often referred to as the accidental Christian because what his theory leads to ultimately is Jesus Christ who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Many gods have walked the corridors of Hades to bring someone back to life: Isis brought Osiris back to life, Semele brought Dionysus back to life and other gods who were brought back to life include Inanna, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Ba’al and Melqart. Even Jesus brought Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter back to life. The distinguishing factor between Jesus and the other gods is that Jesus Christ went to the worst place (Hades) and gave his life but in doing so, just as Samson brought down the pillars in the temple of Dagon, Jesus brought down the pillars of Hades thereby conquering death. So what does that have to do with R. Kelly? That basic pattern appears with events circumscribing R. Kelly’s downfall. R. Kelly became our scapegoat which Jesus was and which is the step that precedes sacrifice in Girard’s work. R. Kelly was ultimately sacrificed by being ostracized. R. Kelly’s presence in our society and the very acts he committed are those that happened in the societies that we live in, his transgressions are an indictment on the societies we have built. He mirrored our complicity to us in the ‘monsters’ we produce in society. And because a whole bunch of us are in denial of our shadow sides; whenever someone shows us this part of ourselves, we react with rancour and make attempts to repress these sides of ourselves by removing those who mirror them to us from our sight. We numb our guilt by engaging in a sort of collective amnesia and choose to form our identities through scapegoating.  

Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear) writes ‘One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children either with violence, neglect or humiliation (with the exception of people suffering from no-fault diseases).’ R. Kelly himself suffered at the hands of abusers when he was a child and this is precisely what we have chosen to forget in order for us to delineate between the bad man that R. Kelly is and the good society that we raise our children in. We choose to forget all about schismogenesis and that R. Kelly is a victim of said processes. He was a victim and he became a victimizer. Our reaction to his abuse has been to harden our hearts and become ever so indignant towards him. Whereas, we could have stood in a place of understanding and introspection into how we have allowed the society that he grew up to have existed in the first place. ‘Difficult childhoods excuse nothing but explain many things- just as your childhood does’ (Gavin de Becker). The healing he afforded the world through his art was sadly not afforded to him.

Speaking of healing, the word ‘pharmaceutical’ would conventionally invoke the spirit of the Hippocratic oath and has now become synonymous with the nefarious, iatrogenic, profiteering Big Pharma. The word ‘pharmaceutical’ is derived from the word ‘pharmakon’ which is Greek for drug (both poison and cure). In Plato’s Phaedrus, there are other similar words that are mentioned and I think these tie together in the deconstruction of R. Kelly’s fall. One such word is ‘pharmakos’ (sacrifice) and ‘pharmakeus’ (poisoner, sorcerer or magician). R. Kelly embodies all three of these ideas: healer (drug), sacrifice and sorcerer. I’ve elucidated on the sacrificial aspect of his persona in preceding paragraphs and will spend a bit of time on the other two.

‘I am a giant; I am an eagle, oh,

I am a lion down in the jungle

I am the people, oh, I am a helping hand

I am a hero…

I’m that star up in the sky

I’m that mountain peak up high

Hey, I made it, hmm

I’m the world’s greatest’

These are lyrics to an R. Kelly song I belted when I was a child and it was one of those songs that used to fill me to the brim with possibility. His music has been so empowering and healing. Through that song, we all tune into our inner hero and we enter the ring of life with the greats. We don our white Hero T’s and join R. Kelly in the boxing ring like in the music video. We learn to fight back despite the challenges we face. It is because of songs like his that we do not succumb but overcome. He also speaks a message of unity through that song. I am that little kid in the beginning of the music video who says to R. Kelly ‘Thanks Champ’ for allowing himself to be a conduit of such uplifting and inspiring music.

The third word mentioned is ‘pharmakeus’ which is the sorcerer which he unfortunately becomes. In Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the Egyptian god of Technology (Theuth) who is also the god of art. They discuss the positive and negative elements of technology and R Kelly himself is an illustration of both the positive and negative of technology i.e. art. R. Kelly aka The Pied Piper of RnB who in his words ‘put the R in RnB’ is a descendent of Theuth. R. Kelly becomes a sorcerer however, because he uses knowledge (gift) that he received, not to obtain more knowledge but to obtain power and yield this power inappropriately which has led to his global widespread condemnation.

W.B. Yeats describes Shakespeare as possessing a characteristic he calls ‘negative capability’, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs without suffering distress (cognitive dissonance) as a result. This is precisely the lens we should view art and artists through; we should be able to separate the art from the man the art came through. We cannot throw away the art because of the fallibility of the artist. They are not one and it takes someone with an opposable mind (Roger Martin) to wrench the two apart and keep them differentiated: To be able to buy R. Kelly’s music without it being enmeshed with ‘supporting a child abuser’ rhetoric. JF Martel and Phil Ford of The Weird Studies Podcast say in a podcast addressing this very issue, that if we are going to value or engage with art depending on the moral character of the artist then we’ll have no art left. And a life without art, I may add, would be akin to being thrusted into the wilderness-terra incognito- with no way of navigating the terrain, without cynosure to point the way and no way to make sense of reality spelling ultimate death.  

Will the real Lebogang Moeketsi please stand up... and step outside

It has been a hard day 

I slam the door 

And the books in me fall off their shelves

Blocking the door

Sealing the world out

As I do the comforting but courageous work 

Of putting the books in me back on their shelves

Clearing the doorway with a sweaty-palm reticence

You call my name as though from the other room

In the way only you can

It still has the underwater ring to it

Like how used to call me when I was safely

Ensconced in your belly floartinng in amniotic fluid

You called my name and I was born and 

Faced the glare of the world

You call my name

And even though it has no physicality 

Since you left me on this side of the veil

It is not silent

The particles of the other room vibrate

Except I know there is no other room

There is the world I need to meet

Lebogang 

Give thanks to she who faces the glare of the world

Born... yet again

With Jesus reminding me that 

He has overcome the world I'm about to step into

Take heart darling daughter

The world awaits your contribution 

African women should breastfeed wherever the need to arises

 

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.

Transformation this time, not revolution

 

A friend of mine works in the transformation office at the University of Stellenbosch. If there is an institution that is in radical need of transformation, it is Stellenbosch University. She has found the work rather challenging primarily because the very people who are quite comfortable keeping Stellenbosch as is; entrenched in Afrikaans culture, exclusive and alienating to the other races; have been tasked to carry this transformation on their shoulders. You can just imagine the dragging of feet; Resistance with a capital R. One of the things that kept coming up during workshops is the sympathetic response from white staff members. The appropriate response is one when everyone realises we (South Africans) are in this together and we have to help each other navigate the new South African terrain together, with our rather complicated history. As I echo Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki’s words: ‘[South] Africa belongs to all who live in it’ and that attests to its resources as well. The problem with the response of sympathy is that sympathy places the sympathizer at arm’s length from the victim. The action then that follows this type of response is charity as opposed to sharing. Since the word charity has fallen into disrepute (it leaves an unsavoury taste in one’s mouth), it has become replaced with the word philanthropy but both these words have been misconstrued and we have moved away from their original meanings. Dambisa Moyo has a lot to say regarding the disenchantment of philanthropy in her book Dead Aid. I’m disenchanted as well with philanthropy as we know it and advocate for the return to its original meaning.

 

The word charity etymologically referred to the love between Christians. The word philanthropy has Greek origins meaning love of man. Both these words have love as the primary response. To be charitable is to love and to be philanthropic means to love. No sign of sympathetic responses here. The ‘ag shame’ sentiment pervasive in South Africa is insufficient and is altogether rather infuriating. Not only can a sympathetic response only take place where there is distance between the parties involved but it’s also a hierarchical response. The sympathizer places themselves above the marginalised and sends sympathy down to the marginalised. They feel sorry for them but in no way identify themselves with them. They are in effect saying ‘We see you down there in the trenches and we are in no way joining you. Sucks to be you.’ The Christian charity is the Jesus type of love, the sharing of bread and fish amongst all who are present type of love. It is not decadent gala fundraisers and golf tournaments where a Davos type of setup takes place with a handful of people making decisions on behalf of those on the other side of the world. The space between is the very reason love cannot take place. No intimacy, no love. No brushing up against each other in the trenches, no love. Jay Z has a line in Sade’s remix to The Moon and The Sky where he says ‘I guess it’s in the stars for me to love you from a distance’ Great line. Sounds fantastic but in reality it doesn’t hold. Love is a product of proximity which brings us back to Stellenbosch.

 

My disheartened friend felt as though her skills could be better utilised elsewhere and could have a bigger impact than they currently have at Stellenbosch. She was saying that it seemed that the only way Stellenbosch would change is through a complete board overhaul; all twelve of those white men with vested interest keeping Stellies as is should be replaced by people who actually want transformation to take place. She is calling for a revolution; a change from the outside in. Completely understandable but revolutions are a high stakes game; because even those who win lose. They miss out on a collaboration with those who have been overthrown. So I would like to echo Jamie Wheal’s word in his book Recapture the Rapture: ‘This time the aim isn’t revolution; its transformation’. South Africa’s not so distant past is testimony that collaboration is in the best interest of everyone. Our transition to a democratic country has been far from seamless and there are still resentments and injustices that many people are still contending with regarding the transition. To say the apartheid government was reluctant to transition is an understatement. That reluctance can still be felt to this day. The main reason why F.W. de Klerk’s government capitulated is because of the external pressure that the apartheid government was receiving through sanctions. We were being watched and so we needed to act accordingly in the eyes of the world. And so the apartheid government reneged and the ANC came into power. C. S. Lewis’ quote comes to mind: ‘There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time to discover which side we really have chosen… now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.’ The apartheid government did not choose to do the right thing; they did so begrudgingly and so it beggars the imagination why their leader would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for acting with the world twisting his hand behind his back. Transformation is the right side, it is the right thing to do. History has shown us how it goes down otherwise. It would behoove Stellenbosch to cotton on to this historical lesson and climb on board before the revolution.

 

Recent global events show us that we are at the mercy of the vagaries that threaten to annihilate us as the human race; those we have brought on to ourselves and those completely out of our control. There are bigger threats looming over our heads and we have to triage those threats over anything else. And we have to be united in order to do so. One could ask what the global crises have to do with a small town in the Western Cape of South Africa? Everything. ‘We need to foster more localized solutions to global challenges’ says Jamie Wheal and then we scale up. The privileged and disenfranchised have to work together to make their small place peaceful, free and liveable for everyone before any effort can be channelled towards global challenges. This working together is the very process of transformation where there will be a sharing of space, resources and knowledge and where peace is achieved through justice. And no one knows better than those who live in those spaces daily what will be required to foster transformation there. Not the philanthrocapitalists (what an oxymoron). Us. We have the gnosis. And besides we have learnt from the infamous story of the well, the taps and the angry women; and we have learnt from Bill Gates’ mosquito nets faux pas that the solution cannot come from the outside in. It must come from within. Transformation this time, not revolution. None of the figureheads business either, it fools no one.

 

Even though my friend’s passion for working at Stellenbosch is waning, this is perhaps the time where she and her team knuckle down. They hold the liminal space. They are doing the Samsonian work of pulling the privileged and disenfranchised together. They are dissolving the distance. They are engineering the intimacy required for love of man to take place. They are the ‘men in the arena… daring greatly’. They are the hope and they are compelled to make being a hope a contagion. In Cornel West’s words: ‘The question’s not having hope, the question is being a hope. Having hope is still too detached, too spectatorial. You have got to be a participant. You gotta be an agent.’ And while they set the example, we have the even greater responsibility of being open and vulnerable enough to viscerally feel each other’s pain and to ‘metabolize that pain’ (Jamie Wheal) as fuel for love. To unite. To simply refuse to let other South Africans live in a way we (the privileged) wouldn’t.  We can no longer remain as we are. There are three essential nutrients for humans to flourish as articulated by Jamie Wheal: Beyond, Becoming and Belonging. We then need to move beyond our comforts and avarice, to becoming a people transformed and united, belonging to all of South Africa. ‘They are how we wake up, grow up and show up. Again, and again, for as long as it takes’ (Jamie Wheal).  It really is time for us to wake up, grow up and show up.

A case for Generosity

 

Dedicated to: Sannie Ncube   

Whose generosity has split over in to many different lives.

 

There is a theme that has been recurring in books I’ve been reading, from fiction to non-fiction and even in music. I think it may just be a universal law; not as in a universally known physics law but rather a law on how the universe works. I think it boils down to the fundamental concept of generosity. The law is that when you save or help others, you inadvertently or perhaps even ultimately help yourself. In Susan Newham- Blake’s As If Born to You, Ana, who is a psychologist describes how she went into the field because she was in a way attempting to help herself. Garth Japhet (Like Water is for Fish) suffers from dysthymia throughout his childhood where he had to change schools often and spent a great deal of his childhood in tears when on the surface, nothing seemed to be wrong with his life. He decides to become a doctor when all the academic signs are pointing towards his studying law. He writes that in deciding to become a doctor, he wanted to help others but in effect he was trying to help himself, especially since he was not then aware of what was wrong with him.

Lupe Fiasco runs a similar thread in his album Drogas Wave. In his song Alan Forever, he rewrites the story of Alan’s life centred on this motif. Alan Kurdi drowned during the European immigration crisis when his family was trying to leave Syria. He was three years old and a picture of his washed up body was taken by a Turkish photographer and went viral. In Lupe’s song, Alan becomes an Olympic swimmer, Michael Phelps, with the ambitions of becoming a Jacques Cousteau of sorts, someone who is very comfortable in large bodies of water. A young child falls into the water and Alan saves the child and there are happy endings as opposed to Alan’s real-life endings. In his song Lupe raps: “

‘You should really feel good that you gave your help
Might get you into heaven, might raise your health
Might get a lot of blessings, might raise your wealth
Bet you ain't even know that you saved yourself’

It is in the last line where the motif is echoed. Later in the album, another song titled Jonylah Forever, which carries the theme as well. Jonylah Watkins was a 6 month year old baby who was shot in Chicago. She was with her father in a car and she was killed when a retaliatory attack took place against her father. In Lupe’s song, Hadiya Pendleton who died when she was shot in the back while standing with friends, lives instead and grows up to be a doctor. She decides to go back to the South Side to help the communities there when she could have had her pickings with regards to a job in the medical profession. In returning to Chicago working at the free clinic, Lupe writes:

‘And that's where you (Hadiya) heard the shots and quickly ran outside
And saw a man and a van and a bleeding baby (Jonylah) in his hands
Fading fast, but you knew she could survive
Did everything you could to keep this girl alive
Stabilized until the ambulance arrived
And in that moment, where you gave your help
I bet you didn't know that you saved yourself’

 

In a way, Lupe seems to be articulating that it is only in helping others, that we truly become immortal and we live forever. Richard Powers in his book, Generosity, writes that it is not a coincidence that the word gene appears in the word generosity. To be fully human, is to be generous. I, for one, support this whole idea with élan. As much as I get Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene, I am behind the generous gene. I have seen how life is all the more better for those neurons having fired together. N.E.R.D. was on to something with their band title. No one Ever Really Dies; perhaps the ones who give of their lives are the ones who never die.

Or In Lupe’s words:

You live… FOREVER!!!

 

 

LL Moeketsi

 

 

On Jordan 1s and ornamentation

 

                                                                                   

Yesterday, I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is a kicks aficionado. The new Jordan 1s dropped (sneakerhead parlance for released) on Thursday. I began to explain to him that as I was sitting in my office; there were crowds of people gathering outside my window at Shelflife (store where the Jordan 1s were being sold). He then began to vent regarding the whole kicks industry. Shelflife uses a manual raffle ticket system so, in principle, the process makes use of random selection as opposed to the first-come-first-serve online purchasing alternative which has been manipulated by bots. His grievance was, however, that the people who got the sneakers don’t actually want the sneakers. They bought the sneakers in order to resell them immediately at 200% mark up. He was saying that the people who actually want to wear the shoes don’t get the shoes and in order to get them; they are exploited.

Exploitation is one of the negative aspects of capitalism and what is being exploited in this case is the human psychological need for ornamentation. Ornamentation is anything added to something that provides no functional value whatsoever but an aesthetic quality to something: making it stand out from its counterparts. Ornamentation is ubiquitous across all cultures; be it in facial scarification called Kolo practiced by the Yoruba in Nigeria, or the adornment of feathers by South American Amazonians or in our case tattoos or vanity license plates. The chair that Frank Underwood sits on in House of Cards is necessarily different from the chair that Jon Snow sits on in Game of Thrones. The ring of Mordor from The Lord of the Rings has an inscription that sets it apart from any other gold rings in middle earth. These are but a few examples of how pervasive ornamentation is in human societies, fictional and non-fictional.

There is a particular type of ornamentation that shows up in our times and is summarised in two words: Limited Edition. Only 20 Jordan 1s were sold last Thursday. This is a clear case of ornamentation when the exclusivity of an item makes it valuable or heightens the need to procure it. The Buy-and-Resell people play on this aspect of human nature. But ornamentation as with most things, is dualistic, has trade-offs, is a two-sided coin. On the one side, you have the prudent use of ornamentation which enhances, adds-on and reveals that which has been ornamented. On the other side of the coin is the imprudent or excessive use of ornamentation which produces the opposite effects. It detracts and hides the true essence of that which is being ornamented. An easy way to understand this is using the illustration of women and makeup. Makeup can enhance if used moderately but can hide and change the face completely if used immoderately. Which is what I think is happening with the Buy-and-Sell culture in the sneaker industry. People’s need for exclusivity; being the 1 out of 20 to own a pair of Jordan 1s, is ornamentation taken to the extreme. As a result, the fans of the shoes become hidden by their very own need for ornamentation; it drives them further away from the objects of their desire. Even if they begrudgingly succumb to the strategies of the resellers; the fact that they didn’t want to pay that much money in the first place is another way their ornamentation takes away from them; in this case monetarily. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when ornamentation ceases to be at the periphery and becomes the centre; where functionality or practicality take a back seat to it which is a recipe for regrets and resentments.   

The Black Body as an act of Resistance

 

I guess apartheid could have worked in its purest, separatist way; like how most Afrikaans nationals at the time wanted it to be and how essentially it was designed to be: complete separation of the races. I am convinced this could have worked; this could have been the easiest way for white people, in general, to pretend that black people did not exist. The English then stepped on the scene and insisted on the relegation of certain jobs to non-whites. The English needed non-whites as domestics, gardeners, miners, street sweepers, etc. In so doing, the English had inadvertently handed black people a weapon of resistance in the form of black bodies in white spaces. This was, I think, one of the ways apartheid stepped on its own tail. The Group Areas Act itself was undermined because although the Black person slept in the township, they commuted daily into white spaces and black bodies could be seen littered across the white landscape for extended periods of time in the day.

 

Carl Jung wrote of slavery in ancient Rome: ‘Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy; and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence. The potency of a resource, fundamentally, lies not in the overt (what it can be used for or what it does) but in the covert; that it’s very existence assaults the senses in such a way that it soon becomes an extension of man. Similarly, the black resource became an extension of the white man and the white man became, in the Jungian sense, a Swarte… he was also not immune.

 

And so when, as a white person, you woke up and were first met with the black back of your domestic worker feeding your children or you were sitting in your office but you could hear the miners’ singing floating from the mines; you were not immune.

And while you may try to ignore the black person, or proceed to deem him inferior to you and thereby assert your superiority in your personal narrative- placing yourself and the black person at opposite ends of the continuum- at the subconscious level this separation does not exist. The continuum is not a straight line, it is a Möbius strip. It is this dissolution that eats you from the inside; that makes you lash out in all manners of brutality and indignity; that makes you yearn to exterminate; that makes you hate. It makes you hate the other; it makes you hate the other in you; it makes you hate… well, you. And it’s damn impossible to love others when you cannot love yourself.