Apologies for lack of posts recently, I have been engaged in huge amounts of intense work and personal exploration which I will not bore you with now, but I would like to open a possible discussion to all you women: ARE MEN AND WOMEN A DIFFERENT SPECIES?
I have been having lots of interesting debates on this very subject, a friend of mine just gave a fascinating and well-fouded talk that argued that men and women are actually not the two catagories of human beings, but that all human beings are actually different, and the gender roles we play are just that - roles. Socially acceptable habits and behaviours that are INSCRIBED (my work of the month!) on us from birth...
I am myself a performance maker, and recently made a piece of performance that drew from my own experiances with men, mainly focusing on the negative its true but also conveying (I hope, an underlying level of total confusion and exasperation!) If it was widly acknowledged that women are from 'venus' and men are from 'mars' metephorically, wouldn't life be so much easier. Would we stop trying to understand one another and treating members of the opposite sex how we would expect to be treated, when our expectations could never have been so different? Would we also stop going to absurd lengths (such as waxing and plucking every hair off of our bodies and dying, straightening and crimping whats left of it from the age of NINE!) on the pretence that we are doing it all for ourselves, in the name of feminism and self-respect when in actuality it is all for the all-defining attentions of men? Would they in their turn be spared (from what I have been told) the many years of anguish and pain to look like David Beckam's thoroughly photoshopped body from head to crotch to toes and win our favour. Would we not do better to spend that time (and money) on maintaing, widening and cementing a dialogue based on communicating if not true understanding? I don't know, I am still so much in a dialogue with myself and friends. But I'd love to know your thoughts!
Ama xx
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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This blogging space is not exclusive, but it is specific. Its about saying hello, welcome, I acknowledge that you exist. I acknowledge that you do not have to specify yourself as 'black' or 'white' I acknowledge that you are you, you are something else.
I was raised by a white, English mother, my Ghanaian father not being firmly in the picture during my early youth. I was also lucky in some ways to spend the first nine years of my life in London: a positive racial sweetshop. Every shelf jam-packed with colors, shades, textures, social grouping, political grouping, religious grouping, and rainbows galore. Both my extended and non-extended family were all white save my infant cousin, yet I never saw myself as different or separate. A blessing in many ways. My liberal upbringing, imbued a strong political attitude against racism, inequality and ostracisation and from the earliest of years I remember my mother telling me that no-one had the right to treat another person differently because of the colour of their skin. However lost as I was in all of this blissful 'hippie' homogenious, it was many years before I acknowledged the anger and injustice I felt when black children at school told me I was 'soo, or even too white'. Never accepted into their group, yet as a got older I felt less and less comfortable being identified with the white children I was nevertheless always sitting with in the lunch hall. White children who never found my colouring an issue, never considered asking me about it, referring to it, or treating it with any relevance at all. Where was the middle ground? Because it is relevant. Totally relevant. A very real factor of who I am, a major piece in the every growing jigsaw that creates the experiance of me.
Not until my mid-teens did I finally meet a woman who opened my world. An academic, artistic and empowered mixed-race woman, who takes the discoveries I am still making, feeling like a baby, learning to walk, to cry, to taste, to feel for the first time again, as given. Of course being mixed-race is totally different from anything else, she says to me, of course no-one who is not mixed-race could truly understand, much as with being a feminist. A man may be a feminist sympathiser but how can they ever truly understand what it is to be feminist, to be a woman. To be a mixed race woman. It is a different experience, not harder, or more special or commendable in any way (though I have sometimes felt it is) but different. And for me to meet someone, who then introduced me to others who acknowledged this not only as a fact, but as a talking point a factor indeed for more discussions and statements and explorations. For me, this was the most empowering thing that has ever happened to me. All of a sudden a whole new dictionary had been written with which to define my own expressions, opinions and reflections. The most poignant of these that if I had never met my good friend (Madame Mulatress as I now call her!) this world may have remained a mystery for years or even a lifetime. I suddenly say with such clarity how isolated I had always felt, and I began to wonder. There must be others, I thought others, all over the world struggling, searching, chastising themselves and being chasticed for 'not quite fitting in'...
The first racial insult I remember was around the age of seven. A young black boy playing football at the time searching for an name bad-enough to get me back, for whatever he felt I had done. "Yeah well," He finally stumbled, "Your not white or black, your just, like invisible!"
I scoffed at the time, unaware of the severity of this pronouncement, and it is only now that I can reflect on how literal this seems to be. Where are the hands waving? Where are the voices calling? Where are the people acknoledging that we exist? That we deserve just as much of understanding and respect in our plight to find self-discovery, to find where we come from, our true heritage as any other race. For I am not a combination: a grey, a lesser shade of bits a bobs shoved together to make something we haven't quite got a name for. Perhaps they are there, I think, perhaps these conversation are a given in some societies. But I think that is just not good enough. It is not enough for academics and intellectuals to have acknowledged our existence, when we ourselves still flounder in the dark, unsure and uncertain. Striving to fit into some category, whatever the name that will welcome us home.
Indeed the search for what is un-taboo has become quite extensive. Terms such as 'half-caste', 'quater-caste' or 'mulato/mulatress' have been socially connotated as derogatory, though I know some people of mixed-heritage that are perfectly happy, empowered even to name themselves under these categories. Dual heritage, bi-racial or mixed-race seem at present to be relatively 'PC' but the name itself does not concern me personally. What I am interested is how you feel about the connotations associated with these 'boxes'. Your stories and your journeys so far. The histories that have weaved like un-deterring streams to finally form rivers and seas that flow ever more persistently through the oceans of our world. I cannot bear to ignore others who have felt excluded, forgotten, different and unacknowledged. So I reach out, not as any kind of authority on the subject but as an eighteen year old young-woman living in this world and searching for others like her. Others to reach out, to connect, to embrace and to begin to acknowledge our story.
I was raised by a white, English mother, my Ghanaian father not being firmly in the picture during my early youth. I was also lucky in some ways to spend the first nine years of my life in London: a positive racial sweetshop. Every shelf jam-packed with colors, shades, textures, social grouping, political grouping, religious grouping, and rainbows galore. Both my extended and non-extended family were all white save my infant cousin, yet I never saw myself as different or separate. A blessing in many ways. My liberal upbringing, imbued a strong political attitude against racism, inequality and ostracisation and from the earliest of years I remember my mother telling me that no-one had the right to treat another person differently because of the colour of their skin. However lost as I was in all of this blissful 'hippie' homogenious, it was many years before I acknowledged the anger and injustice I felt when black children at school told me I was 'soo, or even too white'. Never accepted into their group, yet as a got older I felt less and less comfortable being identified with the white children I was nevertheless always sitting with in the lunch hall. White children who never found my colouring an issue, never considered asking me about it, referring to it, or treating it with any relevance at all. Where was the middle ground? Because it is relevant. Totally relevant. A very real factor of who I am, a major piece in the every growing jigsaw that creates the experiance of me.
Not until my mid-teens did I finally meet a woman who opened my world. An academic, artistic and empowered mixed-race woman, who takes the discoveries I am still making, feeling like a baby, learning to walk, to cry, to taste, to feel for the first time again, as given. Of course being mixed-race is totally different from anything else, she says to me, of course no-one who is not mixed-race could truly understand, much as with being a feminist. A man may be a feminist sympathiser but how can they ever truly understand what it is to be feminist, to be a woman. To be a mixed race woman. It is a different experience, not harder, or more special or commendable in any way (though I have sometimes felt it is) but different. And for me to meet someone, who then introduced me to others who acknowledged this not only as a fact, but as a talking point a factor indeed for more discussions and statements and explorations. For me, this was the most empowering thing that has ever happened to me. All of a sudden a whole new dictionary had been written with which to define my own expressions, opinions and reflections. The most poignant of these that if I had never met my good friend (Madame Mulatress as I now call her!) this world may have remained a mystery for years or even a lifetime. I suddenly say with such clarity how isolated I had always felt, and I began to wonder. There must be others, I thought others, all over the world struggling, searching, chastising themselves and being chasticed for 'not quite fitting in'...
The first racial insult I remember was around the age of seven. A young black boy playing football at the time searching for an name bad-enough to get me back, for whatever he felt I had done. "Yeah well," He finally stumbled, "Your not white or black, your just, like invisible!"
I scoffed at the time, unaware of the severity of this pronouncement, and it is only now that I can reflect on how literal this seems to be. Where are the hands waving? Where are the voices calling? Where are the people acknoledging that we exist? That we deserve just as much of understanding and respect in our plight to find self-discovery, to find where we come from, our true heritage as any other race. For I am not a combination: a grey, a lesser shade of bits a bobs shoved together to make something we haven't quite got a name for. Perhaps they are there, I think, perhaps these conversation are a given in some societies. But I think that is just not good enough. It is not enough for academics and intellectuals to have acknowledged our existence, when we ourselves still flounder in the dark, unsure and uncertain. Striving to fit into some category, whatever the name that will welcome us home.
Indeed the search for what is un-taboo has become quite extensive. Terms such as 'half-caste', 'quater-caste' or 'mulato/mulatress' have been socially connotated as derogatory, though I know some people of mixed-heritage that are perfectly happy, empowered even to name themselves under these categories. Dual heritage, bi-racial or mixed-race seem at present to be relatively 'PC' but the name itself does not concern me personally. What I am interested is how you feel about the connotations associated with these 'boxes'. Your stories and your journeys so far. The histories that have weaved like un-deterring streams to finally form rivers and seas that flow ever more persistently through the oceans of our world. I cannot bear to ignore others who have felt excluded, forgotten, different and unacknowledged. So I reach out, not as any kind of authority on the subject but as an eighteen year old young-woman living in this world and searching for others like her. Others to reach out, to connect, to embrace and to begin to acknowledge our story.