“i get it. we want it clean.
we want the work of dealing with history to be all bone, no blood. no sinew. no stink. no rot. no flesh.
we want clear outcomes. we want clear protocols. we want everyone to nod their heads and mean it. we want the spectres of history to rest in pieces….”
– Kopano Maroga
Something has been exciting and troubling me. They say you will spin and spin and spin until you learn what this revolution has to teach you, and I’ve been spinning and trying to learn. So I want to talk about that struggle, reading struggle through the lens of “ChiMurenga/ The Ways of God,” which is struggle whose origin and dimension are spiritual, a struggle that sees the valleys, the seasons, the birds as allies to the entire people engaged in struggle. It is meaningful and it is not clean.
Firstly, there’s been, for me, a very useful turn away from safe spaces to brave spaces – spaces that you enter knowing that everybody is going to speak their honest truth without being judged. Viciously genuine spaces. These can be very dangerous spaces to be in, spaces that require bravery to enter meaningfully. It’s been a way of trying to enter the world without a chip on my shoulder, surrendering to how largely ordinary and unremarkable I am. A way of leaving a ghetto which was obsessed with the wounds on one’s hands, and instead seeing how the bleeding is common though the wounds are not.
Secondly, I’ve come to deeply appreciate that the notion of your identity being yours (as if a slave) is a Kantean, Western import. Here, you can think of Descartes’ assertion that I think therefore I am. Or Emmanuel Kant’s existentialism – the idea that the great tragedy of life is that your life is your own. I don’t believe that it’s an evil, or immoral, idea, just that it has come to dominate how we speak about identity globally.
Identity, where I am from in Africa, is a shared experience, a single self that is distributed amongst many embodiments. You borrow identity from the people in your life because you would have no identity without them. Here, you can think of the organising and originary principle of Ubuntu – I am only because you are, I am made of you. Even further, ‘Ubu-’ is a prefix meaning “of”, as in a descendant or follower of, and “Ntu” is generally acknowledged as the primal life force of the universe. Ubuntu is being an expression of that primal life force. Even further, we might see Ubuntu as a litmus test that measures and produces humanity where a person that is at odds with community lacks Ubuntu and in that way lacks humanity.
How can we as colonial subjects in Africa negotiate these ideas of Western and African identity systems? The manoeuvre, says my friend Kamal, is to let them dance with each other - the way you have made yourself and the ways you are made by others.
“There are nonbinary people, and there are trans nonbinary people,” said the Facebook post.
“What, how? What does that mean? I thought transgender and nonbinary were different,” went the comments. “Do you mean a person that has had gender reconstructive surgery and identifies as nonbinary? But then why did they…. Or do you mean like trans nonbinary as a single thing, like they place their nonbinary identity somewhere on the other side of gender?” they asked and asked with smart words and clever analysis, all very respectful except when they weren’t. And I asked myself too - what does this mean? Am I trans nonbinary? Is that the word that will wrap the storm in its arms and coo it to sleep?
I get it. We need words. Words have saved us. Theory was our first love because it said it was possible, it was all possible. Words gave us a voice to take our place and take up space. Words gave us a language through which we love, and find ourselves, and plot, and bleed. And so words have done so much for queers, much more than this article seems to suggest.
Yet, I’ve been suspicious of identity and its words. On the one hand, we’re claiming to decolonise it - to carefully and generously create spaces where people can be safe and feel seen and recognised as part of a loving and humanising whole - to scrub the ships off, the Bibles and Torahs off, the Queen of England and the Dutch East India Company clean off the body. “And once the body is clean,” we say, “then it will be free.”
On the other hand, our approach has been to discern, articulate, counter-articulate, map and remap gender. Our approach is best described as a fixation on exactitude and specificity, on Assigned-Male, transsexual femmes and cis-het able-bodied men, as though we are able and are in fact under the moral obligation to give a word to every degree a spirit bends. Every way a person can be and has ever been. And, these words must meaningfully exude the real stakes of your internal habitat as you have exclusively determined them.
However, possessing complete knowledge over everything has always been a colonial fantasy. It is the kind of fantasy that drove the Eugenics movement, the attempt to ‘scientificate’ the human experience and source it squarely in the body. After ‘scientificating’ the human experience and basing it in the body, categories are created of geographic origin, skull shape, muscle mass, bone density, the length of teeth, and the amount of testosterone present in a person’s body. There is something eerily reminiscent here to our terms of masc v femme, assigned gender at birth, sexual proclivity, and whether one has contested the gender they were assigned.
Queers are murdered, assaulted, denigrated, and discriminated against. With these words, we’ve been creating community, we’ve been creating safety, we’ve been claiming who is inside. The words glorified us, put on the very tip of God’s pinky for them to give us a kiss. We found words to say we were, in fact, very very special. We forgot that we were also creating rules for what it means to not be inside. With these words, we have drawn our battlelines and borders and found ways of pointing at people we call the enemy. We want intersectionality to be the measure of us and give us our weight in words. Something isn’t working.
We all have very good reason to be suspicious of the capacity of identity and its words to meaningfully say anything about us at all, not really. Maybe in acknowledging the very hope that it might, we might call the great hollow missing inside of us by its name, our deep longing for belonging.
For the longest time, I believed that when men were violent, fatal, and scary, it was because they were men. That their being men was what made them this way. I grew up believing that all men have red gums and split tongues. Of course that isn’t true. And we don’t want it to be true either, not really. We all want love from the men in our lives. We want love from our fathers, our brothers, our friends, our colleagues. And the absence of that love “rends us” (bell hooks). And in the trauma of the absence of that love, we reject them back and say of course they don’t love us, they’re men. And still, we need love from the men in all of our lives.
“Non-binary” is completely inadequate and frankly insulting. Nonbinary is not a third gender, but a space created by those that refuse (or rather refused by) man-woman gender ideas. It’s a non-word, that says I am not this thing. Non-white. Noncitizen. A nonbeliever. But let’s say I found the word. Let’s say I found it in the archives, written in Sanskrit in a book kept in the custodianship of a Sanusi. a better word than man. A better word than nonbinary. a word that, in its utterance, my brilliance and hopes and deepest weaknesses were all showcased for as long as it was being said. Would I be free? Would it bring in the kind of love I need in my life? I have serious doubts about that. It would mean spending the rest of my life explaining to people the history of what I am and missing out on the moon’s marble glow and the fire’s flagrant sedition.
There is also this way that what has emerged as a queer monoculture is not safe for the working classes in the Global South who fuel the fast fashion industry that is significantly marketed at queers. Popular queer culture’s allegiances to capitalism are further evidenced in the sponsorship and involvement of commercial brands at Pride Marches. Wealthy, White, gay men had until very recently (as in 2016) typified the image of the queer community that identified the Pride march as a parade to the exclusion of Black, lesbian and transgender people. Capitalism continues to coopt the LGBTQIA+(yikes) community and there are victims to this allyship - largely communities in the Global South working poverty wages to produce the products that run this allegiance.
This identity-what-what has achieved so much, saved so many lives and created so much safety for so many queers and women and men too. But we’ve repeated the logic of oppression in doing this (the quest for omniscience and tribal formations) and created other kinds of oppression too. Let's move the blood, as so many have already started to move. I think that we can move, now, into a braver space. I think that we can move, now, into the family get-together because we are a part of the family, made by it, and we have every right to claim and direct it.
My suspicion is that we want to talk about love, and being loved. But that conversation is so political, so convoluted, so contradictory that we want identity to do the work of making us loved.
It’s like when my grandfather was calling me as a child. He would rifle through the names of all his children, the cousins, the aunts and the neighbours before finally remembering my name standing in front of him. When he spoke English, he couldn’t care less about pronouns, as much as he knew very well what they meant. These things were insignificant to him. I still felt his love, deeply so, love as deep as a machete cuts into flesh.
You get what I mean? Just because we get your pronouns right, doesn’t mean we love you. Sometimes, just because we get them wrong, doesn’t mean we don’t. And family are no angels and love ain't no heaven.
“...it is dirty. it is soaked in blood. it has our names written in shit all over.
it is not clean.
this work. is not clean.
it is blood work. it is necromancy. it is making the graves tremble. it is making the bones rattle. it is making the blood move.
DOES YOUR BLOOD NOT MOVE?
it will ask of us all our breath. it will ask of us, “what offering do you bring to dare commune with us? to dare sit at our table?”
it is not clean.
it is soaked in blood. our hands overflow with it.
it will ask all our breath. it will ask for tribute. it will ask us, “how did you pretend so long to not know?”
it is not clean
it is not clean
it is not clean”
– Kopano Maroga