SAFELY BEHIND BARS, INTRUDING

Colonial Patterns and Territorial Rites
in white South African middle class suburbs

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2 .  BODY SPACE

“’Look, a Negro!’  It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by.  I made a tight smile.  ‘Look, a Negro!’  It was true.  It amused me.  ‘Look, a Negro!’  The circle was drawing a bit tighter.  I made no secret of my amusement.”  This is how the renowned postcolonial writer Frantz Fanon describes the moment of his self- alienation as a black man in Black Skin, White Masks.  His personal space, the ‘circle’ of his skin even, is invaded.  Suddenly, he begins to think of his blackness as something frightening or different. (quoted in Kaplan 1997:316, 326).

• "Every being-in-space is differentiated from that space by some demarcation – his skin.  It is this that makes it possible for him to relate to objects as a subject.  . . .  The barrier is not only porous but dynamic, and . . . there is a constant ebb and flow.  It is mandatory for the individual to distinguish his space from that of his neighbors’ and there is the question of his inner and outer space.  Thus the [concept of a] barrier is a spatial barrier in that it governs how much space comes in and out of the organism”  (Burton 1964 : 297 in Malmberg 1980:90).

In South Africa the body is not politically neutral territory.  Any references to the colour of some body’s skin are potentially loaded with racial connotations, and potentially painful and offensive. In armed and ready and after purity, my young white, male, suburban body is used with the full awareness of the political and historical baggage of the space it inhabits. By drawing on the visual culture of a white South African suburb (eg security fencing patterns, the content and style of the average home) and linking it to the white male body, I aim to problematise that body, drawing its supposed non-ethnicity into question.  After all, “it was white males who engineered colonialism, imperialism, and slavery” (Kaplan 1997:324).

The ‘look’ is one of the most subtle and therefore most insidious invasions of privacy.  It is literally an intrusion into personal space and the basic operating mechanism for surveillance.  It would be patronizing for me to think that one could comprehend the pain caused by centuries of systematic oppression on the basis of ethnic origins. However, in South Africa since 1994, being black is the new norm, and the importance of whiteness is shrinking as black culture asserts its hegemony. Because the majority “looking” are black, white South Africans are in a unique position globally.  In sheer numbers, for the first time, white people are subject to the ‘look’.  We realize to our surprise that, “Oh my gosh, I am a white person,” and this is done on a collective group level.

This is an entirely new realization for most, and far less prevalent in Europe or America, where the hegemonic culture has white Anglo-Saxon origins.  White people the world over unconsciously believe that that “only others are ‘colored’ and therefore ‘less’ or ‘different’ (Kaplan 1997:325)”. To white people, being white and behaving in ‘white’ ways, is entirely invisible.  White people think of themselves as ‘normal’, and therefore do not realize how they discriminate against others by labeling them abnormal by their omission.

This is also strongly related to gender.  The feminist film scholar E. Ann Kaplan writes in response to Fanon’s realization of his blackness quoted in the opening lines of this chapter that “White women, like black women . . . have grown up as objects of a male gaze (white or black) and thus are less startled to be objectified”  (Kaplan 1997:614). 

In chosing to use my own body, I was making an masculist statement as an extension of feminism: we are all oppressed by the patriarchy. I was hunting for the ‘normal guy’, the type who thinks of himself as ordinary, almost boring, and takes an almost pathological pride in his nine to five routine.  I wanted to turn the gaze onto men’s emotions, men’s repressed anxieties and obsessions.  What does a man do when he is not competing at work or earning money?  The range for socially acceptable emotions in men has until recently been very limited.  The masculist philosopher Johnson calls this the "loneliness of the male body" (Thompson, 1991:75).

In this sense after purity is essentially a parody of the shower scene in Hitchcock’s horror movie Psycho, replacing the concerns particular to the terrified, eroticized female body with those of a fearful, blunted male body. The threat here is not to Marion Crane’s female sexuality, but rather to the masculine norm of remaining strong and silent.  I wanted the main character to show his fear, instead of resorting to aggression.  The fences too, in their function as a boundary, speak of his emotional deadness.  Not only will he not let others close, he attempts not to acknowledge his own emotions.

• Although the minimum acceptable space around an individual is chiefly determined by culture, reactions to invasions of this ‘forbidden zone’ vary with the circumstances and the individuals involved.  They range from ‘cocooning’, or withdrawing into oneself, through displays of discomfort to flight, leaving the place to the intruder, the most extreme nonviolent reaction (Glassner 1996:19).

The area surrounding an individual, anywhere within which an intrusion is possible, causes him to feel encroached upon, to show displeasure and sometimes to withdraw. If the intrusion does not stop, the withdrawal continues into the deeper layers of the psyche. This can lead to a sense of psychological defilement resulting in mental illness (Malmberg 1980:318).

Most human societies have pollution taboos (polluted in this context implies literally or symbolically soiled, dirty or lacking in hygiene) which reinforce social norms of cleanliness and order. Dirt is seen as something which must be overcome. Through the fear of contamination and chaos, "Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment" (Douglas:2002, 2).  Unfortunately in the case of overcrowding and the invasion of space, the context is often so subtle that it cannot be eliminated.

In the concept sketch at the start of this chapter, the human aura becomes a cage constructed of various security fencing elements.  They are both decorative and dangerous.  Instead of keeping off the threat, they themselves become the threat, a perpetual reminder of potential terror. In armed and ready the fences serve a similar function to those in after purity. They are symbols not so much of protection but of intrusion.  The fences themselves intrude on the comfort zones of the white male suburban character.  They are fluid and inside of him, already ‘under his skin’.  This makes them pervasive, ubiquitous:  they are his culture.  They are his strength, appearing when takes pleasure in flexing his biceps in the illusion of security, or perhaps due to his insecurity.

“General figures for magnitude of population, degree of urbanization and number of the mentally diseased in Belgium show that urbanization and psychiatric disorder are inseparable allies.  The total insanity rate followed the ecological stricture of the city, highest in the central areas of social disorder and steadily declining towards the periphery”  (Malmberg 1980:316).  Psychologists and sociologists attribute this “pathology of the city” to mainly overcrowding in urban areas.

Our sanity therefore depends on our ability the mediate between the public and the private spheres.  There are some intimate actions we need to perform in order to survive in public.  These acts require a certain amount of privacy.  The photographer Santu Mofokeng writes that “Such space as there is in the cities does not adequately fulfil the needs – or is deemed inappropriate for the ritual and spiritual needs – of the majority of black people.  As for the other places of prayer, they frequently find them alienating”  (Mofokeng 2001:67).

What is not always obvious among the more ‘civilised’ themselves, is that white people too have ritual and spiritual needs, whether they be the same or different from those of other ethnicities.  Washing is a particularly strong need.  The ritual forms boundaries between past, present and future, as well as dissolving them.  The binary tensions of purity and danger create a boundary between the two, which acts as a psychological security measure.