Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 423

How do Senegalese talk about gay identities

A music video by Senegalese singer Ouzin Keita caused some online stir in Senegal when it debuted about a month ago on YouTube. “Beureung Barigo,” which means “rolling the barrel” in Wolof, is a mbalax style song with simple lyrics calling on listeners to ‘clap’ for the singer. Ouzin tells his audience that that he “doesn’t know anything yet, but I’m learning….” As of early February, the clip had been viewed more than 158,000 times on YouTube, discussed on local websites, Twitter and TV. But the attention to the video has more to do with denigrating Ouzin than with the popularity of the song. Here’s the video:

Many of the comments in Wolof poked fun and insulted the singer; a few called him “gordjiguène” (a Wolof word that translates literally into “man-woman”, and is often used as a slur for “homosexual”) and said that Ouzin is “going nowhere.”

I honestly couldn’t tell much of a difference between the quality of this song and many of the other mbalax tunes I’ve heard (though admittedly I’m not an mbalax expert), so I asked a few Senegalese friends and colleagues what the premise for the online backlash was. Although many of the comments attack the singer for the style and quality of the song and dancing (‘boring lyrics’ was one critique I heard), some are also aimed at the singer’s gender and sexuality (‘I don’t know if he’s a man or woman or gay because of the way he talks’ one online commenter said). Others said the singer was dancing in an effeminate way and speaking with a lisp, which is what I was told was provoking the “gordjiguène”-related comments.

The use of “gordjiguène” highlights an important issue regarding local views on homosexuality and homophobia here in Senegal. Historically there is no word in Wolof that translates literally to “gay” or “homosexual” as the words are commonly used in the West in the late 20th and early 21th centuries. And while some African countries are making headlines for various anti-gay laws, such as Nigeria’s recent passage of a law banning same-sex marriage and membership of gay rights organizations, the Raw Material Company gallery in Dakar decided to address the issue of homophobia in Senegal with an expo called, “Who said it was simple?” (named for the Audre Lorde poem of the same title).

When I spoke to the curator at the gallery about the expo, she told me the gist of the event is to explore how homosexuality, which is something that she says was traditionally accepted and integrated into society in Senegal, has become something that now often provokes vicious backlash. (According to the Associated Press, earlier this year, two men were arrested in Dakar for “engaging in homosexual acts” and sentenced to six months in prison; in January, four men were arrested for attacking and beating gay men in their neighborhood.)

The expo is made up of displays of Senegalese newspapers, illustrating how local media now treat the issue. A plaque at the entry declares that the “current radicalization” of homophobia is born from the tendency to now use “Western notions designed to define margins and minorities, while local systems of ensuring peace and social well-being remain erased.”

One of the points the expo makes is that it’s hard to discuss human rights in Africa “within an imperialist framework that imposes categories and creates identity where there were practices.” When I asked the curator for an example of what this meant, she told me that while there is no Wolof word for “lesbian,” there are multiple words for the practice of a woman having sex with a woman, or a man having sex with a man.

This way of recognizing “acts” without labeling the “actor” raises important questions: how important is it to be able to safely claim your identity in society? Is that not a fundamental human right as we are taught in the West? Does naming confer certain protections that are unavailable without the recognition of a specific identity, or does it simply create conditions for calling out difference?

To get back to Ouzin – while much of the backlash is outwardly aimed at the quality of the music, there is an underlying homophobic tinge to many of the online comments. While trying to analyze and address this issue, it could be helpful to remember the first words from Lorde’s “Who Said it Was Simple?” poem: “There are so many roots to the tree of anger.”

* HT @rcoreyb for the heads up on the “Who Said it Was Simple” expo.

Musician Umlilo pushes gender boundaries in South Africa

Artists in South Africa continue to push the boundaries of gender norms in popular media. In contemporary dance, members of the group V.I.N.T.A.G.E. Cru (who we’ve interviewed) are boldly leading the way (see their latest video) and in music, the young Cape Town-based singer Umlilo is poised to redefine common gender perceptions. Through his makeup, hair, attire and the qualities of his vocal style, Umlilo unabashedly challenges South African society to reassess their assumptions of how men and women are supposed to look, act and sound. This is especially evident is his videos for “Out of My Face” and “The Elements”.

Sonically, Umlilo is innovative as well, blending melancholic electronic beats with vocals that can be slow and ethereal or fast-paced and rhythmic. Coming off his “Shades of Kwaai” EP, Umlilo still has a relatively niche audience, but his presence is demonstrating that there can be space in urban South African youth culture for an open embrace of queer/trans aesthetics, despite the challenges that those communities face in daily life.

That Umlilo is black is significant to consider as well. The popular belief of rigid gender roles and the “un-Africaness” of homosexuality in most African societies make gender transcendance of the kind Umlilo is striving for both more challenging and higher risk in South Africa than in the social environments of North American, European or Asian countries. The penetration of creatives like Umlilo and V.I.N.T.A.G.E. Cru into mainstream media will be the catalyst for life to finally imitate art around perceptions of gender and sexuality in South Africa. Eventually, this gradual social change could influence other African countries, in particular Nigeria and Uganda, where people with nonconforming sexualities are currently being openly persecuted through political and religious agendas.

‘The Post-Imperial’

I recently shot the short interview, below, with Niyi Okuboyejo, creative director of New York City men’s accessories brand, Post-Imperial (for a short documentary graduate class at The New School). Okuboyejo, the son of Nigerian immigrants, describes what he does as a “coup against the regime of Fashion.” Post-Imperial is a men’s accessories brand focused on ties and pocket-squares. Constantly creating for now, what sets Post-Imperial apart from other menswear brands is the vision of tomorrow. “I hardly use nostalgia to bait people,” says Okuboyejo. “I feel like a lot of menswear brands in this day in age, especially the heritage brands, try to use nostalgia to bait people into living a certain, false life or standard.” Collection IV features products treated in ‘adire’–an old and rare dying technique developed by the Yorubas in the Southwest region of Nigeria. Due to the nature of the process, each piece varies in uniqueness and individuality. Here’s the video:

Are Nigerians the New Asians?

Recently, the Nigerian newspaper Punch opened an article as follows: “Nigerians … have been rated among certain races who are bound to succeed over others in America, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.” Anyone who reads book reviews or listens to middlebrow talk radio in America is likely to know that this refers to the new offering from Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld (that’s them looking self important above).

Their book, The Triple Package claims that Nigerians and a few other groups share the characteristics that are commonly supposed to have made Asian immigrants so successful in the U.S. (In a far stranger opinion piece in the Premium Times, Reno Omokri, an advisor to Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, cites Chua and Rosenfeld as support for anti-gay policies.)

One can see why the Nigerian elevation to model minority status might be welcome news in some quarters. After all, Asian-Americans have come a long way.

For much of twentieth century, Asians were the “yellow peril” that had to be kept at bay by overlapping layers of racially discriminatory policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (pretty much exactly what it sounds like) was followed by a 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan. (That arrangement spared the Emperor the embarrassment of having his citizens similarly barred, but only if he agreed never to let any try to emigrate.) Combined with an “Asiatic Barred Zone” established in 1917 and the “national origins” quotas enacted in 1924, these measures added up to repeated, official U.S. government declarations that people from East and South Asia were not citizen material. When U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were herded into internment camps during World War II, the Supreme Court doubled down on this estimation, essentially holding that blood would tell.

In the early twentieth century, there was plenty of support for these measures from U.S. social scientists. Franklin Giddings, the founder of modern sociology in the United States, published a “scientific scale” (See the chart on page 142 at this link) showing “Asian yellow” to be the seventh-least civilized racial group in the United States. “Civilized” blacks were next, followed by “uncivilized” on the bottom.

John W. Burgess, Giddings’s counterpart in political science, thought whites had a “world-duty of carrying civilization into the dark places of the earth,” but still opposed America’s imperial adventurism in the Philippines, worried that it would add “unspeakable Asiatics” to America’s list of problems (e.g. Indian, negro, labor, and Mormon). And when the U.S. did acquire an Asian colony in the Philippines, social science stood more or less united behind the proposition that “assimilationism” was doomed to fail. In the words of international relations scholar Paul Reinsch, the U.S. would “never succeed in making Americans” of its new subjects, since “deep racial differences cannot be bridged over by political institutions.”

Fast forward to 1966, just after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act deracialized U.S. immigration law (on paper, at least) and the U.S. civil rights movement won its great legislative victories. That’s the year the sociologist William Peterson coined the term “model minority,” claiming that with their strong families and stringent work ethic, Japanese-Americans had proven that discrimination was no barrier to the American dream. The media piled on, finding exemplary qualities and success in all manner of Asian-descended groups.

Suddenly, the “deep racial differences” that had meant Asians could never make it American-style were reimagined as their secret weapon for doing just that.

But it wasn’t so much what made Asians different from whites—the kinds of differences that had preoccupied people like Giddings, Burgess, and Reinsch—that made this trope so appealing. Sometimes implicitly, but often as not explicitly, the differences that mattered were with “negroes,” so tragically unfit to get on with the business of becoming middle-class Americans. Senator (and Tufts-trained sociology Ph. D.) Daniel Patrick Moynihan crystallized the liberal version of this canard in “The Negro Family: a Plan for National Action” (better known as the “Moynihan report”). For Moynihan, black poverty may have originated in slavery and discrimination, but stemmed in modern times primarily from the resulting damage to black culture. In particular, Moynihan highlighted the “deterioration of the Negro family” evidenced by the high incidence of female-headed households. By this logic, the solution wasn’t antipoverty programs but rather a federal effort to “stabilize” black family structures along patriarchal lines.

These weren’t new ideas—versions of them had long informed “uplift” schemes peddled by paternalistic liberal whites and many black elites. But this image of black Americans, paired with the new, improved version of Asian-ness, was a potent brew. That is, just at the moment that de jure racial oppression was dismantled, social science found that it was not the real problem. The real problem was black Americans themselves.

This “damage” discourse has had a curious history since. Roundly denounced by activists and social scientists for “victim-blaming,” it nonetheless lived on in various strains of “underclass,” “cycle of poverty,” and “pathology” theories of class and racial hierarchy in America. (For more on this, see Adolph Reed Jr., on “The Underclass as Myth and Symbol”.) That is, it became at once a commonplace of mainstream liberalism (“It’s not ‘race!’ It’s ‘culture!’”) and deeply suspect (“‘culture’ is the new ‘race!’”).

Chua and Rubenfeld have hit the publicity jackpot by playing at the edges of this paradox, going mainstream by locating racial superiority in culture rather than genes, and at the same time trying to finesse the controversy by endowing some black people with their “triple package” of desirable cultural traits. (Sorry – no link to the book here. It’s bad enough we’re writing about it.)

Of course, the book is nonsense. And it’s scurrilous nonsense to boot. In point of  fact, “culture” isn’t the new “race.” It’s the old “race.” Biological racism is particularly lurid (and saw particularly heinous expression in eugenics and Nazism, for example), but racial oppression has as often (or perhaps even more often) been justified on cultural, religious, or economic grounds. To disavow, as Chua and Rosenfeld do, “the whole idea…that groups succeed because of innate biological differences” and claim instead that “cultural forces are at work” does not put you on the side of the angels.

In any event, boosters should take note—being among the anointed has its hazards. As the political scientist Claire Jean Kim has pointed out, for Asians, the stamp of elite white approval has come with plenty of othering. You may be successful, the story goes, but you are really strange—not one of us, unassimilable.

And heaven forbid you’re an Asian-American family on food stamps, with children who will probably never walk the halls of MIT. What the hell is wrong with you?

And that, of course, is what the authors of The Triple Package are selling: The idea that elites are on top because they are better; everyone else simply doesn’t have what it takes.

Caveat emptor.

What it is to be Winnie Mandela

I just finished reading a fascinating appetizer to John Carlin’s new book on Nelson Mandela, Knowing Mandela, and it set me wondering what might be the place of solitude in the narration of South African history. Some of the details of the failure of Nelson’s marriage to Winnie are public knowledge while others are revealed for the first time by Carlin: she a 22-year-old social worker meets him, then 38, and “strikes him with lightning”, as he wrote in one of his many letters to her. By the time they met he was already a well-known public ANC figure and much sought after on the political circuit. That a 22-year-old would be tapped on the shoulder by history in the person of Nelson Mandela (because that is what it turned out to be) and that she would subsequently give her life both to the man and to the history that he was making came at great cost. This highly intelligent, passionate, and eloquent man was not the stay-at-home-type.

We learn from Carlin’s account that Winnie was rueful about not knowing her husband in the way that ordinary wives know theirs: “I have never lived with Mandela”, she said. “I have never known what it was to have a close family where you sat around the table with husband and children. I have no such dear memories. When I gave birth to my children he was never there, even though he was not in jail at the time.” Nine years after they first met came the 1964 Rivonia Trial, at which his uncompromising choice of death as a price he was ready to pay in the pursuit of an equitable society rang out boldly, with his unjust 27-year imprisonment sealing his place as an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle around the world.

Winnie also suffered persecution at the hands of the apartheid authorities, with imprisonment, exile, a ban from setting foot in her home in Soweto, and even a year-long solitary confinement being unleashed by the regime to silence her and break her spirit. But an innate defiance was also part of her nature, so she rejected all attempts at being muzzled and continued to display the qualities that would cement her place as a political force in her own right. Her forthrightness in speaking her mind, something she did often and that got her into various spots of trouble, especially on the coming to power of the ANC. Her forthrightness in speech and the superb capacity for providing the measure of ordinary people’s suffering became legendary.

That she also managed to paradoxically live the high life of the rich and famous was not lost upon both admirers and detractors, but this was obviated by her tirelessness in pursuit of the objectives of the struggle during her husband’s absence in jail. Then came the many indiscretions that were to damn her. A conviction for assault and accessory to the kidnapping of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, whom her driver had subsequently murdered provided a galling low point. She also entered into several hush-hush and high profile affairs, culminating in the one for which she became most notorious. Her relationship with Dali Mpofu, a lawyer 30 years her junior became headline news in South Africa, finally making public what had been an ill-concealed secret among the ANC. (Carlin’s observes from his interview with her, when she was 53 and still in the relationship with Mpofu, that Winnie has “a coquettish, eye-fluttering sensuality to her” as if to insinuate that he himself was almost seduced.)

When Winnie walked hand-in-hand with Nelson Mandela on his release from prison in 1990 the whole world watched on television and saw in this the fulfilment of a great wish that had been written about many times, turned into anti-apartheid slogans, and even memorialized in Hugh Masekela 1988 “Bring Back Nelson Mandela”. The words “I want to see him walking hand in hand with Winnie Mandela” from the song became a well-known chant across urban Africa in the late 80s and early 90s, challenged perhaps only by equally memorable lines from Fela Ransome-Kuti’s trenchant critique of the continent’s kleptocracies, and by those from Bob Marley’s many ballads and Pan-Africanist songs. However, the dream of conjugal harmony surviving unscathed through apartheid’s scorching crucible had already been unraveling long before he came out of prison and matters became progressively more painful after that. When after two years following his release Winnie refused to share a bed with him he knew that the marriage was over. They separated then and divorced in 1995. Winnie had refused to give up her affair with Mpofu, even going as far as traveling on an ANC-related trip to New York. Carlin reports that her husband had begged her not to take the young man with her and she had apparently agreed. And yet, when her husband called her hotel room in New York it is Mpofu who picked up the phone. The pain he must have felt can only be imagined, but we must not assume that she did not feel some pain too.

Even though Carlin takes great pains to draw up a sympathetic picture of Winnie, it is clear that his sentiments are on the side of Nelson Mandela. For who would not gasp in shock at what appears to be a heartless betrayal? And of a loving and beautiful man such as Nelson Mandela? And yet it is precisely at this point that to side with Mandela entirely is to completely obliterate what it is to be Winnie, not just as an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, but as flesh-and-blood woman and human being.

As many scholars of South Africa have pointed out, including most recently Jon Soske in a magnificent lecture he gave at the University of Toronto on violence in the 1980s South African liberation movement, one of the key effects of apartheid and indeed of the long genealogy of white supremacy in the country, has been the separation of families. This phenomenon precedes apartheid by at least a century. The reasons for familial separation varied over time, but often included labor migration (in which typically men had to leave their families to go and work in the mines or other industries), state violence, or simply the exigencies of the liberation struggle itself, which often led to thousands of men and women leaving their families either to study abroad or get some form of military training in countries supportive of the ANC. These countries were both near (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola) and far (Libya, Ghana, Cuba). More importantly, the fact of family breakup also became a core feature of all societies that shared proximity with South Africa. Thus the trope of the male laborer that leaves his familiar environment to go and find money in the region’s largest economy is commonplace, with a poignant recent example to be found in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.

The reverse movement of women fleeing harsh marital conditions, whether from or to South Africa and going to settle elsewhere is also common. Such familial disjunctures and the exilic conditions that are their source form the centerpiece of Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather and the truly remarkable A Question of Power. And in The Cry of Winnie Mandela Njabulo Ndebele tells the story of the intersecting lives of four different women who have suffered the loss of their husbands to labor migration and politics, with each of them lamenting the loss and embarking on imaginary conversations with Winnie Mandela, whom they all consider to be the emblematic Penelope. In this light the experience of families being torn apart by the dysfunctional violence of the sociopolitical order must then be understood as central to both black and white lives in South Africa under apartheid (if even to different material effects), such that though remarkable the Mandela’s condition of separation is also simultaneously quite mundane.

It is when we interpret the extraordinariness of Winnie’s life not just as exclusively pertaining to its political dimensions but also as the volatile combination of the historical familial fracture and the unbearable solitude that is the direct product of this same fracture that we glean something of what must have been and may still be the nature of her anguish. Since she has never really spoken about her feelings on the breakdown of her marriage except to very close friends, we are obliged to speculate. But our speculation is neither vulgar nor voyeuristic; it is a means of achieving an Aristotelian insight by seeing her and her husband’s life as the unfolding of a tragedy, but with all the attendant dramatis personae, the ebbs and flows of fortune, the large scale interplay of determinism and contingency, and the irredeemable moments of tragic (re)cognition that any tragedy entails. As Martha Nussbaum points out in her superb discussion of the Aristotelian notion of pity to be found in the Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics, it is our bearing witness to the hero or heroine’s loss of worldly goods that allows us to empathize with them and to draw cathartic insights by which to guide us on our own paths.

However, worldly goods must not to be mistaken for material goods. They do not include houses, cars, or money in the bank. Rather, worldly goods are the ineffable goods that sustain our capacity first for relating to others, and second for providing a coherent account of ourselves both to us and to others. (I am intertwining Judith Butler with my argument here, but please forgive me.) These worldly goods entail family, friends, neighbors, compatriots, and the entire aesthetic apparatus of social relations. To Aristotle the loss of any or all of these worldly goods fundamentally undermines our capacity to pursue ethical courses of action. We might gloss this view by saying that our capacity for pursuing ethical action is not merely a function of informed individualism but rather the product of our intersubjective relations with a range of others in a series of ever-widening concentric circles. And it is this loss of the capacity for undertaking ethical action and the recognition of the consequences of that loss that triggers pity and fear in those that bear witness, whether circumstantially or by choice. And in life as in the theatre, bearing witness precludes passivity. To bear witness entails a form of participation in the formally unfolding character of the tragic action. For Winnie Mandela the greatest worldly good was without a doubt her unjustly incarcerated husband. But she also lost several friends and acquaintances to jail, exile, death, and even abject despair during the long years of the struggle. And while the Soweto funeral, many of which she attended in a show of solidarity, was famously known for providing a platform for launching further songs and protests against the apartheid regime, in reality the sounds of lamentation remained echoing well beyond the funerals themselves.

Winnie experienced these losses on behalf of herself and others many times over. Of course to read Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s lives as revealing a tragic form we will have to break their mutual and interdependent biographies into relevant acts and scenes, a task that would require historical knowledge as well as a capacious creative imagination. We would also have to show how each segment entailed the exercise of multiple and contradictory choices that appeared equally valid and desirable both to them and to the other historical actors with whom they interacted. We would also have to explore how the choice of any course of action triggered consequences incommensurate to the choices themselves. We can agree with Carlin that for the Mandelas the choices seemed to have been primarily between Politics and Family, but I would add that this binary was undergirded by something much more profound yet by the same token more elusive, namely, the choice between iconicity and being human.

While Winnie’s various amorous relationships must have been joined for a variety of reasons, it is the fact that all her choices were undertaken in the face of history that must have affected her most profoundly. What response could she have given to a lover’s anxiously whispered question, “What shall we do if your husband finds out?”, when her husband was not only “the” Nelson Mandela but the entire anti-apartheid movement? And how would she have responded to the earnest demand that every lover in the entire history of humankind has felt impelled to make: “Do you really love me?”  She may indeed have truly loved some of the men she got into relationships with, but how would her simply stated “Yes, I really do love you” have been interpreted by these men? That she also demanded exclusivity in her relationships with comforting strangers must have struck them as a paradox. She was extremely jealous and vicious when scorned for another. As Carlin tells it, Mpofu was at the receiving end of hissing reprimands when she discovered he had also been seeing what she called a “white hag”. Beyond the adulation accruing to her as a legendary political icon–Mother of the nation, no less–all she wanted was for someone to still the heart that romped uncontrollably in her bosom like the mind of God. What might it be for 27 years to have viscerally felt “What thou among the leaves hast never known/The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (Keats) and yet to have had to cast around for the comforting warmth of a man’s naked embrace (true, not her husband’s, but he was not at home when she needed the embrace most urgently). And when she surrendered to the reassuring caresses of these men, gently sought or commandeered, did she ever transcend her abject solitude and manage to reach the simple delirium of being desired whole and in her entirety, with her tired and aching body, her snappy ill temper, her arrogance and pride, and all the flaws that flesh is heir to? What stray longings must have flitted tremulously across her body and soul at such moments? And so to the luminous words of T.S. Eliot’s “Marina”:

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

Even though Eliot’s poem is inspired by Pericles’s nostalgia for his daughter, the intensified perspectival sensorium that is registered by the lapping water, the plethora of details regarding the decrepit boat, the damp fog, and the woodtrush’s calling and calling all coalesce into an emblem of solitude, despair, and forlorn hope. Marina has in reality been lost long ago so that Pericles’ reflections are partly the recollections of a lost familial relationship through the maze of fading memories. That he moves seamlessly from the condition of the vessel to the vague threats of the eveloping environment and then to the elusive image of his daughter shows how ultimately fragile his mind is. It is a fragility born from longing solitude. Something of this fragility and the maze of solitude may be discerned in Winnie’s life too, for we must not suppose that in all her many affairs she ever stopped longing for her first love that may have long past faded or even been lost, and which, given the exigencies of South African family history may never have been retrievable anyway, at least not in its quotidian rhythms and banal articulations.

Scribes will no doubt wrestle mightily with the question of how to represent Winnie Mandela in the historical record. The fact that she was the wife of Nelson Mandela, the man who forgave his enemies and saved an entire nation will compound their problems. But if they remember, and we with them, that the real tragedy is ultimately in being human, perhaps we shall all agree that when it comes to our emotions it is an act of extreme hubris to rise up and say: “I am strong and thus can do no wrong.”

* This post first appeared on the digital salon, arcade. It is republished with the permission of the author.

Winnie Mandela and the narration of South African history

I just finished reading a fascinating appetizer to John Carlin’s new book on Nelson Mandela, Knowing Mandela, and it set me wondering what might be the place of solitude in the narration of South African history. Some of the details of the failure of Nelson’s marriage to Winnie are public knowledge while others are revealed for the first time by Carlin: she a 22-year-old social worker meets him, then 38, and “strikes him with lightning”, as he wrote in one of his many letters to her.  By the time they met he was already a well-known public ANC figure and much sought after on the political circuit.  That a 22-year-old would be tapped on the shoulder by history in the person of Nelson Mandela (because that is what it turned out to be) and that she would subsequently give her life both to the man and to the history that he was making came at great cost.  This highly intelligent, passionate, and eloquent man was not the stay-at-home-type.

We learn from Carlin’s account that Winnie was rueful about not knowing her husband in the way that ordinary wives know theirs: “I have never lived with Mandela”, she said “ I have never known what it was to have a close family where you sat around the table with husband and children.  I have no such dear memories.  When I gave birth to my children he was never there, even though he was not in jail at the time”.  Nine years after they first met came the 1964 Rivonia Trial, at which his uncompromising choice of death as a price he was ready to pay in the pursuit of an equitable society rang out boldly, with his unjust 27-year imprisonment sealing his place as an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle around the world.

Winnie also suffered persecution at the hands of the apartheid authorities, with imprisonment, exile, a ban from setting foot in her home in Soweto, and even a year-long solitary confinement being unleashed by the regime to silence her and break her spirit.  But an innate defiance was also part of her nature, so she rejected all attempts at being muzzled and continued to display the qualities that would cement her place as a political force in her own right.  Her forthrightness in speaking her mind, something she did often and that got her into various spots of trouble, especially on the coming to power of the ANC.  Her forthrightness in speech and the superb capacity for providing the measure of ordinary people’s suffering became legendary.

That she also managed to paradoxically live the high life of the rich and famous was not lost upon both admirers and detractors, but this was obviated by her tirelessness in pursuit of the objectives of the struggle during her husband’s absence in jail.  Then came the many indiscretions that were to damn her. A conviction for assault and accessory to the kidnapping of 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi, whom her driver had subsequently murdered provided a galling low point.  She also entered into several hush-hush and high profile affairs, culminating in the one for which she became most notorious.  Her relationship with Dali Mpofu, a lawyer 30 years her junior became headline news in South Africa, finally making public what had been an ill-concealed secret among the ANC. (Carlin’s observes from his interview with her, when she was 53 and still in the relationship with Mpofu, that Winnie has “a coquettish, eye-fluttering sensuality to her” as if to insinuate that he himself was almost seduced).

When Winnie walked hand-in-hand with Nelson Mandela on his release from prison in 1990 the whole world watched on television and saw in this the fulfilment of a great wish that had been written about many times, turned into anti-apartheid slogans, and even memorialized in Hugh Masekela 1988 “Bring Back Nelson Mandela”. The words “I want to see him walking hand in hand with Winnie Mandela” from the song became a well-known chant across urban Africa in the late 80s and early 90s, challenged perhaps only by equally memorable lines from Fela Ransome-Kuti’s trenchant critique of the continent’s  kleptocracies, and by those from Bob Marley’s many ballads and Pan-Africanist songs.  However, the dream of conjugal harmony surviving unscathed through apartheid’s scorching crucible had already been unraveling long before he came out of prison and matters became progressively more painful after that.  When after two years following his release Winnie refused to share a bed with him he knew that the marriage was over.  They separated then and divorced in 1995.  Winnie had refused to give up her affair with Mpofu, even going as far as traveling on an ANC-related trip to New York.  Carlin reports that her husband had begged her not to take the young man with her and she had apparently agreed.  And yet, when her husband called her hotel room in New York it is Mpofu who picked up the phone.  The pain he must have felt can only be imagined, but we must not assume that she did not feel some pain too.

Even though Carlin takes great pains to draw up a sympathetic picture of Winnie, it is clear that his sentiments are on the side of Nelson Mandela.  For who would not gasp in shock at what appears to be a heartless betrayal?  And of a loving and beautiful man such as Nelson Mandela?  And yet it is precisely at this point that to side with Mandela entirely is to completely obliterate what it is to be Winnie, not just as an icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, but as flesh-and-blood woman and human being.

As many scholars of South Africa have pointed out, including most recently Jon Soske in a magnificent lecture he gave at the University of Toronto on violence in the 1980s South African liberation movement, one of the key effects of apartheid and indeed of the long genealogy of white supremacy in the country, has been the separation of families.  This phenomenon precedes apartheid by at least a century.  The reasons for familial separation varied over time, but often included labor migration (in which typically men had to leave their families to go and work in the mines or other industries), state violence, or simply the exigencies of the liberation struggle itself, which often led to thousands of men and women leaving their families either to study abroad or get some form of military training in countries supportive of the ANC.  These countries were both near (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola) and far (Libya, Ghana, Cuba).  More importantly, the fact of family breakup also became a core feature of all societies that shared proximity with South Africa.  Thus the trope of the male laborer that leaves his familiar environment to go and find money in the region’s largest economy is commonplace, with a poignant recent example to be found in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.

The reverse movement of women fleeing harsh marital conditions, whether from or to South Africa and going to settle elsewhere is also common.  Such familial disjunctures and the exilic conditions that are their source form the centerpiece of Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather and the truly remarkable A Question of Power. And in The Cry of Winnie Mandela Njabulo Ndebele tells the story of the intersecting lives of four different women who have suffered the loss of their husbands to labor migration and politics, with each of them lamenting the loss and embarking on imaginary conversations with Winnie Mandela, whom they all consider to be the emblematic Penelope.  In this light the experience of families being torn apart by the dysfunctional violence of the sociopolitical order must then be understood as central to both black and white lives in South Africa under apartheid (if even to different material effects), such that though remarkable the Mandela’s condition of separation is also simultaneously quite mundane.

It is when we interpret the extraordinariness of Winnie’s life not just as exclusively pertaining to its political dimensions but also as the volatile combination of the historical familial fracture and the unbearable solitude that is the direct product of this same fracture that we glean something of what must have been and may still be the nature of her anguish.  Since she has never really spoken about her feelings on the breakdown of her marriage except to very close friends, we are obliged to speculate. But our speculation is neither vulgar nor voyeuristic; it is a means of achieving an Aristotelian insight by seeing her and her husband’s life as the unfolding of a tragedy, but with all the attendant dramatis personae, the ebbs and flows of fortune, the large scale interplay of determinism and contingency, and the irredeemable moments of tragic (re)cognition that any tragedy entails. As Martha Nussbaum points out in her superb discussion of the Aristotelian notion of pity to be found in the Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics, it is our bearing witness to the hero or heroine’s loss of worldly goods that allows us to empathize with them and to draw cathartic insights by which to guide us on our own paths.

However, worldly goods must not to be mistaken for material goods.  They do not include houses, cars, or money in the bank.  Rather, worldly goods are the ineffable goods that sustain our capacity first for relating to others, and second for providing a coherent account of ourselves both to us and to others.  (I am intertwining Judith Butler with my argument here, but please forgive me).  These worldly goods entail family, friends, neighbors, compatriots, and the entire aesthetic apparatus of social relations.  To Aristotle the loss of any or all of these worldly goods fundamentally undermines our capacity to pursue ethical courses of action. We might gloss this view by saying that our capacity for pursuing ethical action is not merely a function of informed individualism but rather the product of our intersubjective relations with a range of others in a series of ever-widening concentric circles. And it is this loss of the capacity for undertaking ethical action and the recognition of the consequences of that loss that triggers pity and fear in those that bear witness, whether circumstantially or by choice. And in life as in the theatre, bearing witness precludes passivity.  To bear witness entails a form of participation in the formally unfolding character of the tragic action.  For Winnie Mandela the greatest worldly good was without a doubt her unjustly incarcerated husband.  But she also lost several friends and acquantainces to jail, exile, death, and even abject despair during the long years of the struggle.  And while the Soweto funeral, many of which she attended in a show of solidarity, was famously known for providing a platform for launching further songs and protests against the apartheid regime, in reality the sounds of lamentation remained echoing well beyond the funerals themselves.

Winnie experienced these losses on behalf of herself and others many times over. Of course to read Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s lives as revealing a tragic form we will have to break their mutual and interdependent biographies into relevant acts and scenes, a task that would require historical knowledge as well as a capacious creative imagination.  We would also have to show how each segment entailed the exercise of multiple and contradictory choices that appeared equally valid and desirable both to them and to the other historical actors with whom they interacted. We would also have to explore how the choice of any course of action triggered consequences incommensurate to the choices themselves. We can agree with Carlin that for the Mandelas the choices seemed to have been primarily between Politics and Family, but I would add that this binary was undergirded by something much more profound yet by the same token more elusive, namely, the choice between iconicity and being human.

While Winnie’s various amorous relationships must have been joined for a variety of reasons, it is the fact that all her choices were undertaken in the face of history that must have affected her most profoundly.  What response could she have given to a lover’s anxiously whispered question, “What shall we do if your husband finds out?”, when her husband was not only “the” Nelson Mandela but the entire anti-apartheid movement? And how would she have responded to the earnest demand that every lover in the entire history of humandkind has felt impelled to make: “Do you really love me?”  She may indeed have truly loved some of the men she got into relationships with, but how would her simply stated “Yes, I really do love you” have been interpreted by these men?  That she also demanded exclusivity in her relationships with comforting strangers must have struck them as a paradox.  She was extremely jealous and vicious when scorned for another.  As Carlin tells it, Mpufo was at the receiving end of hissing reprimands when she discovered he had also been seeing what she called a “white hag”.  Beyond the adulation accruing to her as a legendary political icon–Mother of the nation, no less–all she wanted was for someone to still the heart that romped uncontrollably in her bosom like the mind of God. What might it be for 27 years to have viscerally felt “What thou among the leaves hast never known/The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (Keats) and yet to have had to cast around for the comforting warmth of a man’s naked embrace (true, not her husband’s, but he was not at home when she needed the embrace most urgently).  And when she surrendered to the reassuring caresses of these men, gently sought or commandeered, did she ever transcend her abject solitude and manage to reach the simple delirium of being desired whole and in her entirety, with her tired and aching body, her snappy ill temper, her arrogance and pride, and all the flaws that flesh is heir to?  What stray longings must have flitted tremulously across her body and soul at such moments? And so to the luminous words of T.S. Eliot’s “Marina”:

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and

hurrying feet

Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and the canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unkowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that

unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards

my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

Even though Eliot’s poem is inspired by Pericles’s nostalgia for his daughter, the intensified perspectival sensorium that is registered by the lapping water, the plethora of details regarding the decrepit boat, the damp fog, and the woodtrush’s calling and calling all coalesce into an emblem of solitude, despair, and forlorn hope.  Marina has in reality been lost long ago so that Pericles’ reflections are partly the recollections of a lost familial relationship through the maze of fading memories.  That he moves seamlessley from the condition of the vessel to the vague threats of the eveloping environment and then to the elusive image of his daughter shows how ultimately fragile his mind is. It is a fragility born from longing solitude. Something of this fragility and the maze of solitude may be discerned in Winnie’s life too, for we must not suppose that in all her many affiars she ever stopped longing for her first love that may have long past faded or even been lost, and which, given the exigencies of South African family history may never have been retrievable anyway, at least not in its quotidian rhythms and banal articulations.

Scribes will no doubt wrestle mightily with the question of how to represent Winnie Mandela in the historical record.  The fact that she was the wife of Nelson Mandela, the man who forgave his enemies and saved an entire nation will compound their problems.  But if they remember, and we with them, that the real tragedy is ultimately in being human, perhaps we shall all agree that when it comes to our emotions it is an act of extreme hubris to rise up and say: “I am strong and thus can do no wrong.”

* This post first appeared on the digital salon, arcade. It is republished with the permission of the author.

Political Theater: ‘Breakfast with Mugabe’

“Breakfast with Mugabe,” on extended run Off-Broadway in New York City, is set in Zimbabwe in 2001, on the eve of national elections. Based on newspaper reports of the time that alleged that Robert Mugabe had turned to a white Zimbabwean psychiatrist to help him cope with recurrent visitations by the ngozi, or malevolent spirit, of one of his former comrades, the play delves into the psychological motivations behind Mugabe’s highly controversial land redistribution policies.

The play may overemphasize the way politicians’ personal lives determine their public acts, thereby divesting the land redistribution policies of their deliberate and quasi-socialist underpinnings. Yet the portrait playwright Fraser Grace paints of Mugabe as a man still striving to shake off the colonial yoke twenty years after independence, refreshingly enlivens public dialogue about Zimbabwe’s most (in)famous political figure who has come to stand in the Western news media as an almost parodic symbol of evil.

Michael Rogers (in the image above) gave an astonishingly powerful performance the night I was in the audience, and he was especially convincing as a charismatic, if dangerous head of state in a scene near the end that stages a political rally. As his populist rhetoric soars in the small theater, one sees how quickly style and showmanship can sweep away an audience, even when the underlying message promotes violence and jingoistic triumphalism. It takes a convincing actor to show how powerfully persuasive acts of political theater can be.

One of the more surprising suggestions of the play is that it is through his confrontation with his own traumatic past (via psychoanalysis) that Mugabe is able to shake off his anxiety and recognize that the answer, for him, lies in a “Third Chimurenga,” in the form of a new land reform policy, that effectively renders the psychiatrist himself, bereft and haunted by his own ngozi. While psychoanalysis is not often thought of as the master’s tool used to dismantle the master’s house, the more benevolent spirit of Fanon may well approve of this reversal.

Eliot Elisofon’s Africa: Old, Updated, Worse

Eliot Elisofon did not cast “new light” or “refine Africa in a new and a complex way for American audiences,” as claimed in Susan Stamberg’s “‘Life’ Photographer Showed Africa Through a New Lens” on NPR (February 10, 2014) about an exhibit of Elisofon’s work at the Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. His subjectivity and artistic talent was of another sort. Any photograph that Elisofon took for LIFE (and also post-LIFE, 1966-1972) was the result of an array of interlaced pulls. It was informed by the contextual material that he culled from various impromptu sources, by what the LIFE editors supplied him with, and, in particular, by the normative colonial practices that related to the visualization of the ‘African’ body and the ‘African’ landscape. His ‘choice’ of what to see (and how) was embedded in a visual colonial archive of long standing. It was never a unique choice.

To un-mask the mask or the “unfamiliar world” (Africa), he re-masked it by bringing it home — at costs for Africa. “Life’s special gift,” explains Wendy Kozol (in LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism), “was to make change seem traditional by locating the tensions of an unfamiliar world within the seemingly familiar and nonthreatening orbit of the ‘happy’ nuclear family.” It is from within this political parameter of the curative ‘happy American family’ that Elisofon’s applied pedagogy became a lucrative business.

His photographs are confirmations and refinements of ‘the-already-seen’ for an audience that he/LIFE believed needed his/their guidance and clarification. This was to be his gift. Colonial travel or missionary travel, such as his famed 1947 ‘Tour of Africa,’ the trip from Cape Town to Cairo, was double-faced, as each of his eleven trips were. It privileged the return, from the outer (Africa) to the inner (the U.S.). His travels were circuits, their destination was the U.S., not Africa. His photographs are not about Africa, they are about Africa in America!

Ever since Leopold II’s time, the Bakuba Kingdom was the established destination for Western anthropologists, explorers and photographers in their pursuit of what the area could offer of decorated drums, raffia cloths, and fine pottery. But more importantly, it hosted relative exemption from colonial restrictions that gave the visitors access to the Kuba King in Mushenge, a colonial handyman who, at Eliot’s visit, was Mbop Mabiinc maKyen (see the photo in Stamberg’s review captioned as “Portrait of Kubanyim Mbopey Mabiintsh ma‐Kyeen, taken in 1947 in Mushenge, Congo”).

He was a king who knew his price. Elisofon was out for the ‘authentic’ and the ‘untouched,’ but he was always ready to compromise these ideals, when his camera caught what he thought might attract an American eye (that was male). He took hundreds of photos during the two days he stayed in the King’s village, half of them focusing on a dancing session and the leader surrounded by his “harem of 350 wives.” These are his own words about what he wanted to see:

The leader had a special gourd which had a necklace of tinkling objects around its neck. She set the rhythm for the others. The others … all kinds … fat and skinny, tall and short, young and old, smooth and wrinkled, some with breasts so pendulant that they were revolting to see, backs and stomachs tattooed in intricate beautiful patterns, a touch of tattoo near the forehead, some with clean shaven hands, other with tight black curls, and all wearing the attire of the harem [the ruler's entourage of wives], an orange wrap around skirt with a billowy edging. … I got tired of photographing old hags with horrible figures and picked out a nice young one with a fine figure, only she said she couldn’t dance.

Customarily, the king and the photographer exchanged gifts. The king offered Elisofon an old pipe with a man’s head for the bowl, a cup in the shape of a hand, and several boxes covered with intricate designs and animals in relief. He was laying the ground for his collection of African artifacts that eventually would amount to 700 pieces, now at the National Museum of African Art in Washington. Elisofon, in his turn, gave the king a “a gold-looking heavy neck-chain that cost exactly forty-nine cents” at Woolworths, a camera and 500 francs. This lopsided mode of bargaining was a colonial norm that Elisofon practiced whenever he had a chance.

The re-invented photographies of the Kuba clan (with the freakish depiction of him as “African Big Shot. A Fat Black Monarch of the Congo,” LIFE, March 31, 1947), and the denigrating one-liners that accompanied them, were returned ‘home,’ and being re-published (with them also the support from the condescending captions) and robbed of their context, were/are continuously distancing African cultural and historical conditions, in fact revisiting their racist mythologies.

A couple of months later, during the same 1947 Tour, he spent some time with two British colonial families (the Pitt-Moore family and Lord and Lady Hamilton) in British Kenya, shooting family pictures of a kind that, it seems, did not require any curative interference. These pictures have not been published (as far as I can see), for that reason. Elisofon’s idea was to “make a simple coverage of the English way of life in an African setting.” It so happened that this “life” as well as the “life” that gave him an opportunity to photograph the Kuba king was colonial, a system that he benefited from, and never problematized in visual terminology.

As a contrast, see the sober, unsentimental photo by Arnold Newman, a colleague of Elisofon, “Bope Mabinshe King Of The Bakubas Congo Africa 1958″:

Eliot Elisofon’s Africa: Old, Updated, Worse

Eliot Elisofon did not cast “new light” or “refine Africa in a new and a complex way for American audiences,” as claimed in Susan Stamberg’s “‘Life’ Photographer Showed Africa Through a New Lens” on NPR (February 10, 2014) about an exhibit of Elisofon’s work at the Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. His subjectivity and artistic talent was of another sort. Any photograph that Elisofon took for LIFE (and also post-LIFE, 1966-1972) was the result of an array of interlaced pulls. It was informed by the contextual material that he culled from various impromptu sources, by what the LIFE editors supplied him with, and, in particular, by the normative colonial practices that related to the visualization of the ‘African’ body and the ‘African’ landscape. His ‘choice’ of what to see (and how) was embedded in a visual colonial archive of long standing. It was never a unique choice.

To un-mask the mask or the “unfamiliar world” (Africa), he re-masked it by bringing it home — at costs for Africa. “Life’s special gift,” explains Wendy Kozol (in LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism), “was to make change seem traditional by locating the tensions of an unfamiliar world within the seemingly familiar and nonthreatening orbit of the ‘happy’ nuclear family.” It is from within this political parameter of the curative ‘happy American family’ that Elisofon’s applied pedagogy became a lucrative business.

His photographs are confirmations and refinements of ‘the-already-seen’ for an audience that he/LIFE believed needed his/their guidance and clarification. This was to be his gift. Colonial travel or missionary travel, such as his famed 1947 ‘Tour of Africa,’ the trip from Cape Town to Cairo, was double-faced, as each of his eleven trips were. It privileged the return, from the outer (Africa) to the inner (the U.S.). His travels were circuits, their destination was the U.S., not Africa. His photographs are not about Africa, they are about Africa in America!

Ever since Leopold II’s time, the Bakuba Kingdom was the established destination for Western anthropologists, explorers and photographers in their pursuit of what the area could offer of decorated drums, raffia cloths, and fine pottery. But more importantly, it hosted relative exemption from colonial restrictions that gave the visitors access to the Kuba King in Mushenge, a colonial handyman who, at Eliot’s visit, was Mbop Mabiinc maKyen (see the photo in Stamberg’s review captioned as “Portrait of Kubanyim Mbopey Mabiintsh ma‐Kyeen, taken in 1947 in Mushenge, Congo”).

He was a king who knew his price. Elisofon was out for the ‘authentic’ and the ‘untouched,’ but he was always ready to compromise these ideals, when his camera caught what he thought might attract an American eye (that was male). He took hundreds of photos during the two days he stayed in the King’s village, half of them focusing on a dancing session and the leader surrounded by his “harem of 350 wives.” These are his own words about what he wanted to see:

The leader had a special gourd which had a necklace of tinkling objects around its neck. She set the rhythm for the others. The others … all kinds … fat and skinny, tall and short, young and old, smooth and wrinkled, some with breasts so pendulant that they were revolting to see, backs and stomachs tattooed in intricate beautiful patterns, a touch of tattoo near the forehead, some with clean shaven hands, other with tight black curls, and all wearing the attire of the harem [the ruler's entourage of wives], an orange wrap around skirt with a billowy edging. … I got tired of photographing old hags with horrible figures and picked out a nice young one with a fine figure, only she said she couldn’t dance.

Customarily, the king and the photographer exchanged gifts. The king offered Elisofon an old pipe with a man’s head for the bowl, a cup in the shape of a hand, and several boxes covered with intricate designs and animals in relief. He was laying the ground for his collection of African artifacts that eventually would amount to 700 pieces, now at the National Museum of African Art in Washington. Elisofon, in his turn, gave the king a “a gold-looking heavy neck-chain that cost exactly forty-nine cents” at Woolworths, a camera and 500 francs. This lopsided mode of bargaining was a colonial norm that Elisofon practiced whenever he had a chance.

The re-invented photographies of the Kuba clan (with the freakish depiction of him as “African Big Shot. A Fat Black Monarch of the Congo,” LIFE, March 31, 1947), and the denigrating one-liners that accompanied them, were returned ‘home,’ and being re-published (with them also the support from the condescending captions) and robbed of their context, were/are continuously distancing African cultural and historical conditions, in fact revisiting their racist mythologies.

A couple of months later, during the same 1947 Tour, he spent some time with two British colonial families (the Pitt-Moore family and Lord and Lady Hamilton) in British Kenya, shooting family pictures of a kind that, it seems, did not require any curative interference. These pictures have not been published (as far as I can see), for that reason. Elisofon’s idea was to “make a simple coverage of the English way of life in an African setting.” It so happened that this “life” as well as the “life” that gave him an opportunity to photograph the Kuba king was colonial, a system that he benefited from, and never problematized in visual terminology.

As a contrast, see the sober, unsentimental photo by Arnold Newman, a colleague of Elisofon, “Bope Mabinshe King Of The Bakubas Congo Africa 1958″:

Going to the Mall in Brazil

Since last December, Brazilian shopping malls have become the stage for a new style of youth gathering: the rolezinho. Roughly translated as “little excursions” or outings, the rolezinhos can be characterized as planned meetings (via social network) of a large group of youth from poor neighborhoods, with the intent of seeing each other, flirting, eating and drinking at McDonald’s, taking pictures to post on Facebook, and simply having fun.

This can be considered a collective action with direct links to at least two different issues that characterize contemporary Brazilian society. First, rolezinhos cannot be understood without taking into account the almost nonexistence of public spaces for leisure and enjoyment. Coupled with the historic negligence of the Brazilian state to the population’s right to recreation, the ongoing privatization and destruction of the few existent public spaces of the kind leads to the curious situation in which a shopping mall and, particularly, its food court and parking lot, become a place for hundreds of young people to hang out. Second, the country’s economic growth in the last decade, with its emphasis on consumption, dramatically changed the social landscape, reinforcing the notion that in order to be someone, one needs to possess material goods, more specifically, branded merchandise. This last element is emphasized by the musical genre known as “ostentatious funk” and embraced by young Brazilians living in the periphery of big cities, particularly in São Paulo (many of whom take part in the rolezinhos). Commonly framed as the more acceptable version of the Brazilian funk genre, the lyrics of “ostentatious funk” as well as the video-clips produced by the MCs, cultivate a mode of life which places value on consumption. Wearing certain brands of clothing, driving certain cars, drinking certain liquors would altogether provide status, access to women and, most importantly, entrance into a differentiated social group.

In this context, there is nothing uncommon about young people from the outskirts of one of the richest (and most unequal) Brazilian cities deciding to hang out in the shopping malls. Besides associating this particular mode of consumption with social status, the teenagers taking part in the rolezinho do not want to be locked up at home in on the weekends, as pointed out by one of the organizers. Uncommon, nonetheless, is the effect such an action causes when they choose to do it collectively in large groups. The first rolezinho brought together no less than six thousands teenagers to a mall on December 7 in Itaquera, on the outskirts of São Paulo. They were met by fear and panic from both the shops’ owners and other clients, followed by violent police repression. Since this first event, the rolezinhos became a fever, drawing together hundreds (sometimes thousands) of youth to various malls on the outskirts of São Paulo and other major cities in Brazil. At the same time, they ignited a violent response from the administration of the shopping malls. These have resorted not only to private security, but also state police force – in many cases legitimated by judicial decisions – either to keep the youth literally out of these spaces by locking the doors and deciding on an individual basis (racially biased) who is allowed in, or to welcome them with tear gas, rubber bullets and, in the most extreme cases, arrest.

Different framings, from the radical left to the most extreme right, have been used to read and interpret this new social phenomenon. I would like to put forward a different way of comprehending the rolezinho as political, one that does not depend upon the intention of the participants – who clearly want to have a good time – neither aim to turn them from victims into heroes. Rather, the argument advanced here relies on the meaning of the action itself vis-à-vis established social norms.

Brazilian society has long been understood as one whose foundations led to multiple forms of segregation. Take, for example, the case of race, which plays a very important role in the rolezinhos. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. Despite some attempts of formulating the nation as a model of racial democracy due to its mixed population and the nonexistence of institutionalized segregation, the reality is that racism pervades every dimension of Brazilian society. While more than half of the population defines itself as black or brown, the average income of these, according to IPEA, is slightly less than half of whites. The majority of the population in the poorest areas of the large cities, the slums, is black. Access to a university degree only became a tangible aspiration for black and brown Brazilians after the introduction of affirmative action in public universities. Finally, the rate of homicides among the young black population is alarming and much of it constitutes summary executions by the police force.

Another clear example of segregation, which is also crucial for understanding the rolezinhos, is found in urban development. The design of the Brazilian urban landscape portrays the deep inequalities which characterize our society: while upper class neighborhoods have access to facilities, implement renovation and conservation plans and are served by a variety of public services, the poor areas exhibit precarious living conditions. On a certain level, one can claim that the our cities display, through their streets, squares, buildings and public services, the differentiated citizenship characteristic of our socio-political heritage. Formally, citizenship is universal and inclusive, but when it comes to the benefits linked to citizenship, especially social rights, only a small parcel of the population enjoys them fully. Urban space in Brazil mirrors the unequal distribution of wealth and political exclusion of the lower classes.

To a certain extent, the economic and social development of the country in the last decade intervened on those two axes of segregation, by providing, on the one hand, some social goods that allow for social ascendency, such as education, and, on the other hand, by increasing the power of consumption of the working classes. Nonetheless, the social norms already well established, along with these material forms of segregation remained in place. These norms, which are constitutive parts of la police in Rancière’s terms, organize society, arrange bodies by defining “the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task”, thereby instituting “an order of the visible and the sayable.” In Brazil, these norms are legitimated, to a great extent, by the myth of racial democracy, largely accepted by the population who most of the times abide by such rules of propriety. In this sense, the so-called “differentiated citizenship” is not only accepted, but also guides the ways in which people organize and manage their lives as well as locate themselves socially.

The rolezinhos constitute the moment when black and brown teenagers decide to collectively occupy sanitized and disciplined spaces of consumption – a consumption which in the first place was not meant for them – in order to make of it a locus of enjoyment and fun in their own terms – a form of leisure, linked to a lifestyle much celebrated by “ostentatious funk”, so far segregated and misrecognized. By doing so, they disrupt those very norms, putting into question the police order and exposing the great fallacy of the myth of racial democracy. And this disruption causes fear and hatred. They are bodies occupying spaces and reclaiming a form of citizenship which was not meant for them. And this is precisely why, independent of the initial intentions of their participants, the rolezinhos are political: they are disruption of the police order. As Rancière formulates it, not only is the police order hierarchical, it also relies on the assumption of inequality. Politics, on the contrary, is founded on the premise of equality. It challenges, it disrupts, and it interrupts the easy permanence of the police order.

One could counter-argue and say that the rolezinhos cannot be understood as a dissensus because they aim for inclusion in the one of the constitutive spaces of the contemporary police order: the space of neoliberal consumption. However, I am not claiming that politics is pure or devoid of contradictions. Rather the opposite, politics is impure and paradoxical, it blends with the police’s order without ever merging with it. The politics in the rolezinho is located precisely in its impurity: by aiming to exercise their neoliberal right of enjoying a life of consumption and fun outside the limits of the ghetto, black and brown Brazilian teenagers expose and call to question the very norms of segregation which remain intact in all other spaces of social life. If these norms have not been tamed even by the rules of the neoliberal market, with all its promises of freedom and equality as consumers, one can imagine where they stand in every other social realm. It is time to take a rolezinho into these spaces.

* This piece first appeared in Dissident Voice.