Title: Desire at the end of the white line, notes on the decolonisation of white Afrikaner femininity
Author: Azille Coetzee
Publisher: UKZN Press
ISBN: 9781869145712
Thank you for giving the opportunity to engage with you about this wonderful book. I have closely watched you and your process of writing this book, and was amazed at how meticulous you were at your research, how theoretically agile you are and how you then have the ability also to juxtapose this very sophisticated research and theory with a very intense and compelling personal story. It is difficult to know where to start the questions – there is so much to ask. I hope that the conversation will give people an idea of what you have done here and will make it possible for them also to engage with us about the very important issues you raise here (desire, whiteness, decolonisation, femininity) – even if most people have not read the book.
1 Writing white
But let me begin with a quite obvious question, because I think you will be asked this again and again. Why in this day and age are you interested in white women, their femininity and their desire? Have white women not had enough attention in the South African context? White women’s tears – witmeisietrane, soos Ronelda Kamfer sê – what about it can be important? And then, it is even about boeremeisies – even worse. In the sarcastic words of Kamfer in her poem “Laat die wit meisies huil” (Chinatown, 2019; 47):
the purity of the world is in
the secret formula of
whitegirltears
my tears are heavy and soiled
white girls cry when
their tits are too small
This is such an important question and a very good starting point for this conversation. The short answer is that there are certainly more important things to think about at this moment in South Africa today than white Afrikaans women and their desires – for example, the enduring structures of racial inequality, sexual violence, etc. White women generally remain in a relative position of privilege in the context of the bigger patterns of inequality and discrimination in post-apartheid South Africa.
That said, I am convinced of the fact that we as white people and white Afrikaans people have not yet done enough introspection and self-interrogation after the ending of apartheid, that we have not yet spent enough time doing the work that is necessary to transform our identity and to open it up. This book is my attempt to contribute to such work from within my own body and life world.
There is also a third point to be made here. In the book, I show (with reference to the work of feminist historians) how, in our history, white women’s desires have been co-opted in the colonial and apartheid projects of white nationalism and settler placemaking. If you want a “pure” white nation, you need white women to have babies with white men, and you need them to raise their children in a certain way. If white women fail at these things, by choosing women or black men above white men, or if they refuse to have babies or to raise their children in the “right” ways, the project of the white volk fails; the white line is no more. That is why we see great anxiety around the sexuality of white Afrikaner women in our history. It really matters whom she decides to sleep with and live with; her body is the place from which the white line unfolds. Her subjugation to the white patriarch is where the project of Afrikaner whiteness stands or falls. The point is, if we are concerned about problems like the persisting issue of racial inequality in the post-apartheid present, the desire of the white Afrikaner woman is not irrelevant.
Importantly, I have to point out here that all of this does not mean that the white Afrikaans woman is simply an innocent victim here. Historians show that throughout our history, she was complicit in her own subjugation, willingly embracing her role of loyal Afrikaner wife/mother and disciplining other women to do the same. This is, on the one hand, because the consequences of resistance were so harsh, but on the other hand, because the rewards for complying were so big: she would get to share in the ethnic power and material privilege of the white man.
By looking at my own life and by analysing contemporary Afrikaans cultural texts, I show in the book how these gender dynamics continue to shape and condition white Afrikaner femininity in the present, and how we as white Afrikaner women continue to play a crucial role in the containment and preservation of white Afrikaner people, or, in the words of Christi van der Westhuizen, in the maintenance of the boundaries of the white enclave long after formal apartheid has ended. This can be seen from the ways in which there is still a marked absence (with very few exceptions) of mainstream cultural representations of white Afrikaans women sleeping with black men, or sleeping with women. The white Afrikaans women we see on television, in film and in popular culture more generally, are first and foremost mothers of white babies, wives of white men. In this book, I ask what would happen to the white Afrikaner identity and the enclaves we lock ourselves into, if white Afrikaans women like me stopped following these scripts, and if we were to start building broader communities of care, intimacy and sociality with people who are not the white husband and the white Afrikaans huisgesin. I, therefore, start imagining the opening up of the white Afrikaner identity through the transgressive desires of the white Afrikaans woman.
To return to your question, then: in this sense, the issue of white Afrikaner women’s desire is interwoven with the big, pressing issues of enduring racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa; it is important.
The central question that drives this book is why, 30 years after the ending of apartheid, Afrikaner whiteness remains so closed off, and why our lives remain so white and so separate even if so many of us want to change. In this book, I locate the answer in the politics of the intimate and the familial, and, more specifically, in the way in which we continue to live our lives according to the gendered and familial scripts of apartheid. I argue that if we want to open up this racial identity, we have to be willing to interrogate our personal, sexual and familial lives.
2 Feminism and decolonisation
This is unashamedly a feminist book, both in terms of how gender assumes central stage and in how it is an activist book. There is a very clear political agenda, a call for action and change.
You begin the book with talking about feminism. You tell a story of how one flippantly answers questions about feminism at a boerebraai in the northern suburbs – or is it Stellenbosch (same thing) – and then seriously interrogate such easy, flippant answers by linking feminism with race and decolonisation. You say:
We can’t talk about gender without talking about race. (2)
What is feminism then? In our context, it is the work of decolonisation, of land redistribution; it is the work of racial reparation.
You explicitly link the feminist project to the project of decolonisation.
In this book, my aim is to contribute to bringing the issue of white women’s bodies and gender emancipation to the very urgent and ongoing conversation about what decolonisation requires of us today. At the heart of this work is the very basic question I am repeatedly confronted with as a white Afrikaans person 30 years after the ending of apartheid: why haven’t we changed more yet? Why are our lives still so white and so separate? Considering the entanglement between race and gender discussed above, I go searching for answers in what is perhaps the last place we want to look: the realm of the sexual, the intimate, the erotic and the familial. (4)
Central to apartheid was the obsessive state policing of sex and of white women’s sexuality in particular: if there is to be a white volk (nation, people), we need white sex and white mothers to birth and to rear the white children. In this sense, apartheid systems of racial control and segregation were inseparable from structures of white patriarchal rule of men over women. (5)
What emerges from my readings is that apartheid is not simply a political history in our country’s past, but a way of being that is programmed into our gendered bodies, our nervous systems and our erotic imaginations and cells; a set of gender norms and sexual rules that orient us in certain ways in the world, direct our desires, and pull us towards some and away from others in ways that keep us white and apart. The point is that if we want to change how we are white, we have to change how we are men and women, how we have sex, how we love, how we make our homes. (6)
Please would you say more about the link between feminism and decolonisation?
There are different layers that one has to unpick to understand this point. I would begin by saying that colonisation and apartheid are not only about race, but are also systems that are fundamentally gendered. As I explained above, if you want to build a white nation, you need white women to have white babies with white men. This can be seen from the fact that so much of apartheid policing was about trying to stop “interracial” sex and queer sex from happening, and about controlling sexual reproduction. The apartheid legislation around population control was always applied in tandem with legislation regulating sex and marriage. This also makes sense on the level of spatial segregation: if you want to keep white and black people in separate neighbourhoods, you have to stop them from forming intimacies and families with one another.
The next layer here is that apartheid and colonialism are very specifically not simply about white rule, but about white patriarchal rule. They are about the white man’s right to rule over everyone else, and about his right to land, sexual access, privilege and posterity. This had big consequences for everyone else, in different ways. There is a lot of research on this by historians and other scholars. For white women, it meant compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory motherhood and falling in line with the plans and projects of the white man (in exchange for which, she got to share in the ethnic privilege and material comforts of white supremacy). For black people, the consequences were much harsher. Black men got construed as sexually violent, a threat to white women that conveniently (for the white man) justified both the control and surveillance of black men and the control of white women, all in the name of “protecting” white women against black men (a dynamic we still see playing out in racist neighbourhood watch practices infused with sexual anxieties about black men moving through white neighbourhoods). This is a system that rendered black women totally unprotected from sexual violence (from white and black men) and the structures of white and black patriarchies alike (read Pumla Gqola’s work for more on this). The point is that the problems of sexual violence and gender inequality that shape contemporary post-apartheid South Africa are deeply racialised and are rooted in colonial and apartheid histories. The implication is that attempts at racial transformation in the present require of us to interrogate gender inequalities and violence, and decolonising present-day South Africa is also a project of feminist and queer activism.
3 The politics of desire
The third of the four central issues is desire. You write about the prominence of desire in the project of decolonisation. You say:
What I want to get at with this introduction is that the intimacies we cultivate, the sex we have, the families we make are not simply personal; all of these decisions, acts and plots are laden with history, and through them we make ourselves and the world. (24)
[W]ho we desire and who we do not desire is a political question, one that we often find the answer to in more general patterns of domination and exclusion marked by racism, classism, ableism and heteronormativity. (25)
You thus claim that desire is always political?
Yes, I think so. This is what Foucault and many other thinkers after him (like Amia Srinivasan) teach us: just because desire tends to feel so personal, private and instinctual, does not mean that it is an authentic expression of our inner beings, unfettered by the workings of power. Rather, what we desire and what repels us are always also trained and conditioned into us by societal forces, like patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, racism, etc. For example, much has been written about how female beauty standards (thus the terms that determine how desirable women are regarded to be) are oriented towards the male gaze, and how they centre the white, able-bodied, middle-class woman, and how much profit is made by men off women (in many ways) in women’s attempt at embodying such standards. This is only one example, but the point is that what we want, what we find desirable, is not politically neutral.
This is how I work with this idea in this book: if one considers the white Afrikaner history I outlined above, it is no surprise that my sexual desire as a white Afrikaans woman was for a very long time directed only at strong, white Afrikaner men. It feels like this desire comes from deep inside of me, but it doesn’t; my culture turned me towards the strong, white Afrikaans man from the moment I was old enough to start playing with dolls, listening to stories, watching television. As a white Afrikaans woman, my desire for the white Afrikaans man serves a very particular political purpose, namely the making and preservation of the white Afrikaner people. We are taught to want what we want. This is, then, why a thinker like Amia Srinivasan asks: if we understand that what we want has been conditioned by oppressive forces like racism and patriarchy, do we not have the obligation to retrain our desires?
However, again, there is another layer. Even if desire is conditioned in this way, it has the wonderful capacity to veer off track, to take us completely by surprise. Desire can be unruly, can refuse to follow rules. And because it is such a strong, affective force, it has the ability to change us and to inspire us to change our lives. Amia Srinivasan says in this regard that desire has world-making capacity. It can turn us away from one life toward something else that we have to imagine into being. Sara Ahmed teaches us that our emotions orient us in the world; they determine whom we turn to and whom we turn away from, and which paths we take. In this book, I look for such examples of moments of transgressive, world-making desire in my own life and the Afrikaans popular culture I am exposed to. Where are the moments when what we want takes us by surprise and opens up the self to the self and others, in a way that is totally unexpected, leading to a different kind of life from the one our history has conditioned us for?
4 Femininity
The fourth central issue that you address in this book is femininity. You are saying that desire is political; whom we desire and how we desire are political and have a history. You also say that how we make ourselves desirable is political. What does it then mean to be a meisie and Afrikaans? On pages 153-154, following Jamaica Kincaid’s wonderful piece in the New Yorker, you write about this:
Meisie (Kincaid se “Girl” vanuit ’n ander kant)
’n Vrou se voete moet mooi lyk; maak seker jy lyk goed versorg, al is jy net by die huis; kleur jou hare; beskerm jou vel teen die son; koop vir jou mooi pajamas; as jy baie wil eet, moet jy oefen; niemand hoef te weet jy menstrueer nie; sit met jou knieë bymekaar; moenie te hard praat nie; hou op om so vir jou aan te sit; trek jou skouers terug; niks proe so lekker soos wat maer-wees voel nie; moenie frons nie, dit gee plooie, glimlag; moenie te styf wees nie; moenie te ernstig wees nie; van baie lag kom baie huil; moenie so dikbek lyk nie; mans hou nie van giggelrige meisies nie; moenie te preuts wees nie; ’n vrou lyk mooi in ’n bietjie kleur; ’n vrou moet baie maer wees om los klere te kan dra; daar is niks mooier as ’n spontane meisie nie; vra vir hulp wanneer jy dit nodig het; laat hom bestuur; met ’n mooi glimlag kan jy ver kom; huil wanneer niks anders werk nie; hê jou opinie maar moenie moeilik daaroor wees nie; maak vriende met sy vriende; maak vriende met sy ma, help haar om skottelgoed te was en moenie te veel praat aan tafel nie; moenie nag nie; dit is hoe om beskuit te bak; dit is hoe om winkel lasagne tuisgemaak te laat lyk; dit is hoe om te jok sonder dat iemand agterkom; dit is hoe om jou bene langer te laat lyk; dit is hoe om jou wang te draai vir ’n soengroet wat jy regtig nie wil hê nie; dit is hoe om te lag vir ’n grap wat nie snaaks is nie; dit is hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy nie baie hou nie; dis hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy niks hou nie; dis hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy regtig hou; dit is hoe om te weet of jou eerste kind eendag ’n seuntjie of ’n dogtertjie gaan wees; wees versigtig vir mans – ’n man is ’n man, ’n man is nie ’n klip nie; wees meer versigtig vir ánder mans; moenie op jou eie uitgaan in die aand nie; oppas waar jy loop; hier is die dele van die stad wat jy vermy; dis hoe dit lyk as iemand jou snaaks aankyk; dit is wat jy aantrek om ’n ekstra paar kilogramme te verbloem; dit is hoe jy iets van die hand wys terwyl jy dit laat lyk of jy dit eintlik wil hê; dit is hoe om jou vinger in jou keel te druk wanneer jy te veel geëet het; dit is hoe om te voorkom 154 dat jy te dronk word wanneer jy te min geëet het wanneer jy kuier; dit is hoe jy weet hy het geld; dit is hoe jy weet hy is nog nie oor sy eks nie; dit is hoe jy hom herinner aan jou waarde; dit is hoe jy kry wat jy verdien; dit is hoe jy die seks interessant hou; dit is hoe jy soms ’n paar rand uit sy beursie uit haal sonder dat hy agterkom; dit is hoe om aan die slaap te raak langsaan hom wanneer hy snork; dit is hoe om ’n man te boelie; dit is hoe hy jou boelie; dit is hoe om hom te kry om te praat; dit is hoe om hom te laat beter voel; dit is hoe om jou kinders in die regte laerskool in te kry. Maar wat as ek nie kinders het nie?; wil jy vir my sê na dit alles gaan jy regtig nog steeds die tipe vrou wees wat alleen is? (146)
Please could you say something about the Kincaid piece and how you think discourses of femininity work, specifically also in Afrikaner culture?
White Afrikaner femininity is a highly paradoxical endeavour, and so much has been written on it by feminist historians and scholars like you, Lou-Marié. On the one hand, it is a femininity that is strong, capable and independent. In our settler history, we had to be tough to survive; we had to play our part on the farm. We are known for our strength. On the other hand, this strength is always circumscribed by our position of subjugation in relation to the white Afrikaner man, and our role as wife-mother in the white Afrikaner huisgesin. This paradox is perfectly encapsulated in the figure of the volksmoeder, which represented the hegemonic standard for Afrikaner femininity in our history. Through her role as mother of the nation, the white Afrikaner woman exercised significant political power in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism through social work and other “caregiving” activities; but because her power was framed as an extension of the mothering role, this didn’t translate into long-term, formal political power in the ranks of white men. You must be strong, but never stronger than your man. And then: the notion that the white Afrikaner woman is so strong, was used to dismiss attempts at feminist resistance (we don’t need feminism, we are so strong already). In the book, I argue with reference to what we see in popular culture today and what I experience in my own life, that this is still the paradox that characterises white Afrikaner femininity.
Again, there is another layer that adds to the paradox here. In spite of the strength and toughness associated with white Afrikaner femininity, white nationalism also really depended on our vulnerability as an affective technology in the politics of racial segregation. Historians show how the idea that white women had to be protected against the threat of violent black men was consistently activated in our history (in the form of the narrative of the black peril) to justify spatial segregation, white people’s control over black people and white men’s control over white women. The narrative was that white men had to protect white women against the sexual threat posed by black men, and that is part of how violence against black people and patriarchal control over white women were justified. Again, in the book, I argue that these dynamics continue in the present in informal and privatised ways. White Afrikaner women’s vulnerability is weaponised for racist ends; that is, of course, what Ronelda Kamfer’s poem is about.
If I can get back to your “Meisie” rule book cited above – I have to ask you about class. It seems to me that this rule book – or, then, discourse – is perhaps dominant only in certain classes: not all Afrikaans women were exposed to these “lessons”?
In the story (“Girl”), Jamaica Kincaid thinks about the kind of education into femininity that black girls receive in a racist colonial society like the one she grew up in. In the colonial imagination, the black woman is stereotyped as sexually “primitive” and wild (in our context, a scholar like Pumla Gqola writes about this). In Kincaid’s story, she shows how much of the gendered education that she received as a black girl in her context and culture was about always working very hard to disprove the implicit racist-sexist colonial assumption that she would be sexually “easy”, thus proving continuously in all kinds of ways that she was sexually “proper” and “civilised”. Also, the education was directed at enabling her to be good at domestic labour, which is the work that racist-sexist colonial societies typically assign to black women. The story led me to ask what kind of education my culture instils in white Afrikaans girls here and now, and therefore what the conditioning is that we receive in conscious and unconscious ways – the big lessons that we are made to learn. For me, those lessons were primarily centred around learning to maintain a certain middle-class comportment, making myself desirable for the male gaze – through grooming and conforming to certain beauty standards, while performing the necessary vulnerability – but then also developing the toughness and “raakvatter” sensibility that white Afrikaans women are known for. It was an education into a certain brand of middle-class, heterosexual domesticity and compulsory motherhood.
Now, of course, white Afrikaans women are not all the same, and we are differently positioned geographically, but also in terms of things like class, education, etc. So, if you grew up very poor, or very rich, or in a very intellectual or politically progressive environment, the education into femininity that you would have received will look different from mine. I grew up as part of an upcoming, white middle class in the Afrikaans northern suburbs of Cape Town, an area established in the 1950s for white Afrikaners who couldn’t survive financially on the farm and had to come to the city for work, but who felt intimidated by the urban context. In such a context, middle-class values are stringently aspired to, because the platteland and relative poverty are not too far in our past. This is typical for many white Afrikaans people, because this is what apartheid wanted for us: accession into a “proper” middle-class, white existence. Still, it is not everyone’s story. I write from my own body, and the book is an attempt to understand the shape of my own life better.
I do find it frightening, though, that even if this kind of femininity is a femininity that you can afford only if you are from a certain class, it is still what many women are measured against – even if it is an impossible ideal. I think of women’s magazines and, of course, the reality shows that you refer to. I think of the psychological impact of the impossibility of living up to the ideal.
Yes, I feel that much of the feminist work I have to do is within my own psyche and my own body, trying to free myself from these very oppressive (and expensive) beauty standards. On most days, I fail at this because the conditioning is so strong.
5 Family and motherhood
You argue that in dominant discourses of femininity in Afrikaner culture, family and motherhood assume centre stage. You are critical of how motherhood “is activated as a crucial vector of eugenic nation-building – the white woman does her part, and proves herself indispensable in the machinery that installs and sustains the white man as ruler of all”. This, you say, is “not perfect, but, god, it has its perks”. Can you say more about this critique of the centrality of motherhood?
Feminist historians and scholars like yourself show how, in our history, white Afrikaner women activated their compulsory caregiving work of motherhood to exercise political agency in the project of white nationalism. White Afrikaner women not only did the work of raising their own children in line with the ideological rules of white nationalism, but through avenues like social work they extended their realm of influence to broader society, where they played their part in the establishment and maintenance of the white nation through, for example, disciplining working-class white women into the rules of middle-class propriety. So, in our history, the role of the mother is explicitly activated in the work of white supremacy. This means that, on the one hand, the white Afrikaner women made the best of a bad situation – empowering themselves by politically activating the seemingly apolitical domestic role of motherhood assigned to them by white patriarchy. On the other hand, we wonder, why did they not aim for more? Why be so willing to play their part in a system that required their subordination? Why not rather find solidarity with black women in resistance to the violence of racist, white Afrikaner patriarchy? The answer that feminist scholars like you, Lou-Marié, offer is that the rewards of sticking with the white man in this system are too big to pass over, and the risks of transgression too high. That is why we usually end up “sitting pretty”, as Christi van der Westhuizen writes.
And this is still what we do, and this motherhood remains the role on which the identity of white Afrikaner femininity pivots. We see this very clearly, for example, in the way in which Afrikaans powerhouse businesswoman Minki van der Westhuizen consistently insists that she is mother and wife first (and a daughter of the big patriarch, God). She did a Rooi Rose cover recently where she was quoted on the cover as saying, “Ek is nie ’n ster of ’n supermodel nie, net ’n ma.” Which is simply not true. She is a star and a supermodel. But the conventions of proper Afrikaans femininity require that you self-limit your power through a commitment to your role as wife-mother in the white huisgesin, in a proper relationship to the white patriarch – or at least pretend that you are doing so.
By continuing to play according to these very old rules of white Afrikaner identity, we are continuing to do the work of maintaining the symbolic boundaries of the white enclave and cultivating the white line. We choose our relationship with the white man above other kinds of solidarities, where we could have a wider network of women and people who are not men and who are not white. I’m not trying to say that a woman like Minki van der Westhuizen is personally responsible for anything; I’m trying to show something about how the culture continues to position white Afrikaans women fundamentally in relation to the white man and his children, and how the structures of our personal lives have long political histories and implications.
My aim is also definitely not to disparage the crucial care work of motherhood. I am asking what would happen if we as white Afrikaner women refused to play according to these old colonial/apartheid rules. What if we were to cultivate an identity beyond our work as wife-mother in the white huisgesin? What if we were to prioritise community, solidarity and intimacy with other women and queer people? If we were to open up our identity in a bigger network of relations? What would our lives look like then? What possibilities open up for Afrikaner whiteness? I have to add that I do not mean with this that we must hate white men or reject them all; I’m saying, what would happen if our relationship to white men stopped being the primary relationship in terms of which we define ourselves?
You argue that the abolishment of the family seems to be one of the solutions (187-194). This is quite a radical call for action. Can you say more about your reasons for seeing the abolishment of the family as necessary?
I activate the notion of family abolition as a kind of utopian horizon in the book. Rather than saying that this is something we must do, I offer it as a radically alternative possibility of what society could look like. What if the care you could expect from the world did not depend on who your parents are or who you are sleeping with? So, the theory of family abolition does not say we should not care for our family anymore; it says we should structure society in a way that family is not the only institution within which you can expect care. It is the idea that society should be set up in a way that we could all be okay, regardless of who your family is or whom you get married to.
The history of the white Afrikaner is structured as a family history; the story we tell about ourselves is the story of a bloodline. The story of apartheid is the idea that we should care only for our own. And this history continues in new, privatised ways in post-apartheid South Africa. The nuclear family is an individuating structure. I’m asking, what possibilities would open up for white Afrikaner identity if we started thinking of ourselves as existing in broader relations, and if we started to contribute to bigger networks of care that are not defined by family/blood?
Ironically, you dedicate the book to your parents, who, you say, have always been there. What about this contradiction?
In society, as it is structured now, the only unconditional care I can expect from the world is the care of my parents. And that is what they have given me always, and I am deeply grateful for that (also because many parents fail at this). This does not change the question I am asking: what would the world look like if my parents were not the only people I could expect unconditional care from? What if society were structured in a way where I were unconditionally cared for in a much broader community than the nuclear family?
6 Friendship as an alternative
In a beautiful piece “Living a feminist life II” (195-200), you indirectly refer to Sara Ahmed’s work on living an alternative feminist life. You seem to suggest that friendship should be prioritised and should maybe become more important or as important as family and intimate relationships. Can you say more about this?
I’m glad you like this; I know that you really prioritise friendship in your life, too. Friendship is interesting because it is so fluid and dynamic; it can take so many forms. It can change with us in ways that romantic relationships often struggle to do. Friendship is not tied to gender, and it is not dependent on blood. Also, it is plural – you do not understand your love for one friend to diminish your love for other friends, or your new friendships necessarily to take the place of old ones. In this sense, there is something inherently queer about friendship. But the more specific point I make in the book is that, as white Afrikaner women, we have always been taught to prioritise the relationship with our white husbands and children; anything else comes after that. Family orders our relationship with the world. And I argue that this is why we are stuck in our white neighbourhoods and our white schools, and are always with other white people at the braai. What would become possible in our world if we structured our lives so that friendship carried equal weight to romantic and familial relationships? It would mean that we could cultivate an identity in communities and systems of care and sociality that transcend the limits of family (blood, race, class) and transgress the rules of white patriarchy. It would mean that our lives could start to look different.
7 The personal is the political
An implicit question that runs right through the book is whether there are possibilities for a different femininity, a different kind of desire. You say:
If whom I turn to in desire, as a white woman, and whom I shrink from in fear, mark and uphold the boundaries (electrified and walled) of the white enclave, the white body, what kind of side entrances, hidden exits, irregular lines of acquaintance, alternate routes and disordered geographies start opening up in my world when I desire differently? When I, in the words of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, pursue intimacies that “bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property or to the nation”? (28-29)
You engage with this question by very bravely and boldly presenting personal vignettes, telling brief stories about how desire has functioned in your life and how you personally have addressed this question. You write beautifully and very openly about your own life. You make yourself extremely vulnerable.
A central point that surfaces repeatedly in this book is that we are carrying the past in our bodies, and that we renew old racial binaries and spatial boundaries through those everyday decisions, habits and preferences that are the most intimate. Therefore, race is also made within the realms of our lives that feel so personal and bodily that they tend to escape political and theoretical scrutiny. My decision to render my own body, sexual desires and erotic imagination present in this text is an attempt at making the personal and the sexual legible as political and theoretical in the thinking that I am doing. I, therefore, turn to the materiality of my own body, to the tactile and affective, as a way to close the distance between the theory I offer and the textures of the everyday in the lives we live. The other well-known feminist point here is, of course, that the body is always already folded into all knowledge we generate: our embodied experiences and lives inevitably inform the theory that we create (page 7).
We have, indeed, learned from our feminist foremothers that the personal is the political, but talk to me about this rather controversial decision to put yourself and your own body quite prominently into the book.
It was a difficult decision, and I considered more than once removing all the personal narrative fragments, because it is scary writing oneself into a book like this. However, a central point of this book is that apartheid rules are inscribed into our bodies, so that the personal, intimate decisions we make are laden with political meaning and relevance – meaning that if we want to decolonise this racial identity we inhabit, we need to look critically at the shape of our lives in the most intimate sense. A way to illustrate to the reader – and to work out for myself – what this would mean, is to look at my own body, desires and erotic imagination. I’m not offering my own life as an example of things done right; rather, I’m trying to show something of how the history of my country shows up in my body and my personal life. I’m hoping that this will work to invite and prompt the reader to think about their own bodies, desires and fantasies, and the scripts they follow in their sexual decisions and familial lives. Of course, the feminists will tell us that our bodies are always already part of all theory we create, in any case – we think the way we think because of how we are situated in the world – but this is something that we tend to obscure because of academic writing’s claims to objectivity and neutrality.
Importantly, I explain in the introduction of the book that all the personal stories I tell are not necessarily literally true; I’m working also with invented or possible histories and pasts – imagining at times what could have been, what could still be or what might be. This means that the reader can engage with the narrative as a text that can be interpreted and critiqued, rather than as a more rigid, biographical truth.
Another crucial point here is the relationship between the individual and the structural. Sure, the personal is political; therefore, all of our individual lives matter politically. However, at the same time, when we are talking about decolonisation, we are talking about structural change: we cannot expect to change a place like South Africa through individual acts of will. This means that this book is not about convincing individual women to want something else than what they already want. The point is to think about how we can change the structures of our society so that we can want different things, and so that we can expand ourselves and imagine new ways of being beyond the monogamous, heterosexual love plot of white genealogy and the life path of wife-mother in the white Afrikaner huisgesin.
8 Critique and complicity
What I like about the stories is that you are able to watch yourself with quite an amused and ironic eye, painfully aware of how you often catch yourself enacting the very things that irk you and that you rail about. This tension between critique and personal complicity runs through the book. For instance, in a rather erotic personal vignette (184-185) called “You ask me about my exes”, you explain to a lover why you are partial to Afrikaner Gen X men.
You ask me about my exes
When I’m connected to my feelings for you, I find it almost unbearable – to see you so seldom, the compartmentalisation I have to do, never having enough time with you. When I manage to disconnect from it all and regard things from a distance, I realise I feel encumbered by it, the profound burden of a second love. Of someone who is so attuned to me. I cannot hide from you – it takes me to task, this love. It asks so much, but it gives so much and I struggle with both.
You say you always know when I’m in bed with someone else. It doesn’t hurt, you say, but you can feel it.
You ask me again about my partiality for white Afrikaans Gen X men, the string of them I have as exes. I struggle to explain it, the vulnerability, their deep and unspoken need, the yearning to be touched; how something releases when I take off my clothes; how they so clearly want to be seen and I can do that, how good it feels.
“But the sex,” you say, “they’re just so bad at it.”
Not all of them, I shake my head. I understand what you mean, but I try to explain the pleasure I get from the shaking desire in their big hands, the urgency in their taut bodies, how their breath quickens and eyes roll when they enter me, the thrill of watching them shiver with quiet pleasure when they come, the single deep groan. How they smile afterwards and draw me closer, hold my gaze without looking away, brush a strand of hair away from my face and how I know that this is how they say that they care for me, they like being with me, I make them feel good.
“Why would that be enough?”
You state the obvious and I have no answer.
The darker side to this is how there is a part of me that still measures my self-worth with reference to how desirable I am for a specific kind of man.
“What kind of man?” you ask.
Those with status, money, access. I guess it is about proximity to power, but you wouldn’t understand because you have always lived so much more imaginatively than I have.
In this vignette, you seem to be critical of yourself, unashamedly acknowledging your own complicity. How do you understand this complicity? Why are you yourself playing along?
Ha ha, yes, my own complicity is something that I am painfully aware of, and I’m glad you can see this in the text – the fact that I’m not trying to present myself as getting things right at all. All of us live within these existing systems and histories; they have shaped us into who we are, and I don’t believe it is possible to step outside of this in a position of pure resistance. Rather, we are all complicit and resistant at the same time, in some ways going with the flow, and in other ways managing to push up against it.
I am assuming you would rather not be complicit? How do you break away from it if, in your own words, “it has its perks”?
A point that some whiteness scholars make is that critical whiteness studies are in themselves a way through which whiteness expands its reach; by “improving” whiteness through being critical about it, we are readjusting it strategically so that it continues to survive and retains its hold on power. The point is that it is impossible to escape complicity and to step completely outside of these structures within which we are made. I think a good starting point is understanding one’s own complicity and being willing to continuously interrogate how one is positioned within these structures.
9 Popular culture
Apart from using yourself as data, you also apply theory to all the holy cows of Afrikaans popular culture: Boer soek ’n vrou, Housewives of the winelands, the farm in Nêrens in the Northern Cape, Fiela se kind, Agaat, Triomf, Kompoun and even our own Minki can’t escape your cynical gaze – all of these Afrikaans cultural institutions (high culture and low culture) are rolled over and analysed from a very critical perspective.
Regarding my engagement with texts from popular culture: we live in an era where the sheer amount of content that is produced is staggering – this is also the case in the Afrikaans language. It is impossible to watch, read and listen to everything that is out there, nor could I include discussions of everything I did read and watch here. The texts I do discuss I chose because I found them rich resources to think through the questions I am asking. This book is therefore not an attempt to make an exhaustive argument about what is happening in Afrikaans popular culture and art. I am sure one could find counterexamples in the archive for everything I say here. Rather, it is a thinking through of some of the dominant narratives and patterns that repeat in our stories and our lives. (31)
Can you say more about the decision to focus on popular culture and to include everything, from serious novels to (if I may say) rather trashy reality shows?
I was interested in exploring the big stories that we tell about ourselves as white Afrikaans people today. What kinds of lives do we see represented in the culture at large? What plots are most familiar and most comfortable? What life paths are rewarded with visibility, legibility and familiarity in the collective imagination, and which ones remain unrepresented, obscure and opaque? Of course, our lives deviate from what we see on television or read in books, but when we know that a show like Boer soek ’n vrou has been running for 15 seasons and is the most watched show in Afrikaans, then surely it tells us something about who we are in a collective sense, or at least something about the kinds of lives that are most intelligible in our culture. So, in this book, I explore how the stories that we tell about ourselves today are the same old stories that we have always been telling – the farm family story so central to our history of settler placemaking and white nationalism. Therefore, it shows how we remake the past in the present, just in an updated visual register. But I also look for moments in which contemporary popular culture pushes back against these old plots, and when they open up glimpses of new ways of being through which it becomes possible to reimagine ourselves and the ways in which we are white in South Africa today.
10 Ending: the questions that you ask
I like the fact that you are clear that you are asking questions, not providing answers. These questions are implicitly and explicitly asked throughout the book. Quite aptly, the book then also ends with a paragraph of questions, and that is perhaps a good place for us also to end?
Still, at the same time, I hope that this book can serve as an invitation to the reader to reflect on the political shape of their own sexual and familial lives. I hope – especially if you are a white Afrikaner woman – you might be led to ask (not once, but over and over again, and not quickly, but slowly): what is it that I desire? What do I fear, and why? What do I want sexually, and how does this orient me in place? Whom does it turn me towards, and whom do I shrink away from? How does what I want determine where I go, who I go there with and how I move? What are real preferences, and what is it that I have been taught to want and disciplined to pursue and to work for? How do I spend my time? With whom? What do I do with my days? Where do I invest my energy, and why? Whom do I care for? Whom do I talk to? What do I care about? What are the rules? Who makes them, and what happens if I break them? What is the story I tell about myself? What are the stories I narrate to my children? What do I feel? What do I expect from the world? What else is there? (225-226)
Dankie, Azille. Soos een van jou ex-lovers gesê het (jy quote hom in jou boek): wow, as alle volksmoeders soos jy is, is ons volk nie verlore nie, of soiets.
Baie, baie dankie, Lou-Marié, jou mentorskap en ondersteuning deur hierdie projek was van onskatbare waarde vir my.
- Photographs: Azille Coetzee by Izak de Vries, Lou-Marié Kruger provided
See also:
Internasionale konferensie: Slow intimacy (Langsame intimiteit)
Die teenoorgestelde is net so waar: ’n onderhoud met Azille Coetzee
Jonathan Jansen, Protea Boekwinkel en Twitter: ’n studie in wit broosheid
Video: Cape Town launch of Of Motherhood and Melancholia by Lou-Marié Kruger
Of Motherhood and Melancholia: a bilingual interview with Lou-Marié Kruger