Bridges

Yesterday, in therapy (because am broken, as should be obvious to anyone reading this) I didn’t start with any negative things or gripes or complaints – but I did end up talking about bridges.

No, you idiot. Not the physical structure. It’s a metaphor. In this case, I am a bridge. In fact, I am many different bridges, depending on who I’m with.

You see, I have lingering worries about many many things – but one of them is that I fear that I am somehow schizophrenic when I am using different languages. That somehow Cullen is different from uKhaleni or uMabhengwane or Coolen or any of the other different ways that I am pronounced and pronounce myself.

My therapist assures me that I am not. He assures me that I am authentic, that I show up fully when speaking in indigenous languages with People of Colour. He said ‘you are the same Cullen, in case you were wondering – not that I’m stalking you or anything, but I have observed you interacting in the Centre, and you do not seem to be different in any way when you speak other languages’. And he should know, I think.

But I’m jumping ahead to the end of the session. There were 45 minutes in between me saying ‘I came here with nothing to talk about’ and his admission that he has been watching me [nothing creepy, you understand: more like a patient or research subject, which I willingly am since we are in a paying and consensual therapeutic relationship].

What we discussed is the previous weekend’s events. Particularly what I called ‘interesting identity things’ when I broached the topic. These ‘identity things’ concerned my rising irritation at the continuing tone-deafness and unconscious privilege of the majority of white people I encountered, in contrast with the welcome and interest of most of the PoCs that I encountered. I contrasted the phrases in the following way, particularly in response to my multilingual presentations [response in other languages represented in italics]:

White-folks: Wow, that was impressive: they really seemed to enjoy it, although I didn’t understand a word of it.

PoCs: yoh, Mabhengwane, you’re wonderful – where did you grow up? Would you like to come and chat with our African spirituality / culture / history group sometime?

The differing responses were statistically correlated with race (with a few outliers, of course), and I commented that even PoCs whose first language was Setswana or Sesotho or something else didn’t respond with the first way. Instead, they responded in the second way, just in a mixture of English and their own language. And this correlates with other interactions that I have had over the years that I have been interacting with other humans.

[I didn’t reflect on the where did you grow up? question in therapy, but it occurs to me now that it strikes to the very heart of the matter here, as my growing up in a rural area is taken by most people as the overriding condition for me being unable to avoid speaking an indigenous language fluently.]

So my therapist asked me how I felt about the different responses, and I responded that I started to feel angry at the white ones. And I felt angry because those same people had lived in this part of the world their ENTIRE LIVES (many of them were in their second half-century of life) and yet had not picked up even a single shred of another language. Not only that, they did not even have a small window into understanding the various dynamics of the day: issues of protocol when dealing with various types of dignitary, or respect, or simple things like PRONOUNCING SOMEONE’S NAME CORRECTLY. They didn’t even seem to have any tolerance for it, let alone understanding. In fact, their continuing intolerance of it was alarming.

[Caution: the following are statements captured in the wild. May contain traces of RACISM and INTOLERANCE

“Oh my gosh, there really are a lot of them, aren’t there?”

“Why are they being so loud?”

“Who is that person shouting?”

“Oh, look at them in their skins and things”

“I’ll just come back when the dining room is less… full.”

etc.]

So I presented these things to my therapist, and he said that I had a right to feel angry at this, because it really is amazing that people still continue to display this kind of tone-deafness and assumed privilege in 2023, after all these years. And then I told him about the dinner that evening, and how the whole thing continued.

There was storytelling in the boma. The bow-ma. And I, already suffering with a sore-throat from stifling my anger and a headache from tension, dragged myself to it. I got there and encountered more of the same, including the following question that continues to irritate me like a stone in my shoe:

“Why do they get upset when I call Mzilikazi a king? Surely the big nob should be called the king?”

…to which I replied with a Socratic question:

“In your country, and in your language, what are the different words for aristocracy?”

“Well, there’s a duke, and a lord, and a baron, and a count, and a viscount, and a marquis, and an earl”

“So there are many different kinds of leader?”

“yeah, I know, but there’s only one king.”

So I gave up. Because I did not have the energy to explain that the different cultures and nations within Southern Africa are just that: different. They do not all have ONE leader. So even thinking like that is incredibly reductive and myopic. So I drank a bit more, and left to go and sleep, and gave up on being a bridge for the day.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – there were many wonderfully positive interactions over the day. I spoke with the storyteller in isiXhosa, and interacted with one Kgosi and various other dignitaries in various different languages, all with an interest in culture and heritage and history.

But I keep coming back to that dinner. How each white person there told me their apology – how they were someone who had stayed in South Africa because they were once very nice to a PoC, or how they weren’t openly racist, or how many black friends they had, or how they had a lovely farm somewhere and had been here for such a long time. And they were telling me, after saying the responses mentioned earlier, about how ‘they didn’t understand a word of what had been said’.

So I told all this to my therapist. Shame, the poor man really has to deal with a lot from me. But he lets me come to most of my conclusions, in the end, because he’s good like that. In this case, in trying to understand why I was the recipient of the apologies, I mentioned that there were a few white people who didn’t do that. So he asked what made them different. I said that they were of two sorts – people who had taken the effort to learn one or more of the indigenous languages and cultures to a point where they understood; and those who had crossed over completely into those cultures, and created a new identity for themselves.

There were two beats, and then I said (about the second group), ‘they were people who had assimilated fully’. And he smiled and said ‘yes, that’s the word that went through my head’.

Now, I have thought of that word a lot. It has gone round and round in my head for a looooong time. At one stage, I even thought that it was the goal of my whole life. But I realise now why it is so problematic.

You see, to go back to the original metaphor here, the different identities in me are like countries separated by a river. And the different countries are fully populated, and exist in connection with other people who share those countries. I am able to converse with people in isiZulu, isiXhosa, English, Afrikaans and French. And I have access to the museums of Latin and Ancient Greek whenever I have need. And there are fully functional bridges between the different countries, and I have spent a significant portion of my life showing people the bridges and helping them to cross between them. But I have never given one of them up in favour of another. I have never forsaken one authentic identity for another.

The way I explained it to my therapist is that, even though I am completely fluent in isiZulu, I am not the sort of person to go an wear ibheshu and isinene, or to marry polygamously. Since I am an atheist, I am also not the sort of person to venerate the ancestors in any way other than to remember them, or in recognition of the important metaphorical role that they play in the cultures I inhabit.

I have not assimilated. I am multi-faceted, but I am still not going to give up one side of the bridge in favour of another.

So the end of the session involved me contemplating authenticity and identity, and what it means to assimilate. There are some PoCs who have assimilated to English and lost their foot in the land of isiNtu. And there are many White people who have only ever gawked at the land of isiNtu across the river, despite many fords and bridges existing for them, and who are content to keep that other land as an object of voyeuristic curiosity. Each of these sets of people react aggressively when challenged about this, and sometimes defensively when they perceive that someone has somehow managed to maintain their residence of many different lands, as I have.

So, you know, build bridges and maintain them. Otherwise you will only ever have a life on one side, and be excluded from the wonder on the other side of the rivers that divide us.