Opting out as medicine and resistance.

 In chapter 6, titled “Reflections of a Black Clinician” of the book “Being-Black-In-The-World,” Dr Chabani Manganyi writes on the image of the black body:

“What in terms of the African experience of being-in-the-world does it mean to talk about the socialisation of the body image? It means, as was suggested earlier, that in the African experience there has over time developed a sociological schema of the black body prescribed by white standards. The prescribed attributes of this sociological schema have, as we should all know by now, been entirely negative. It should be considered natural under these circumstances for an individual black person to conceive of his body as something which is essentially undesirable (something unattractive), something which paradoxically must be kept at a distance, outside of one's self so to speak. This paradoxical feat is, of course, never achieved in reality. It expresses itself in reality in a sort of diffuse body experience, a certain inarticulateness of the experience of the physical self.

My friend laughs at me when I tell him that my face is my parents’ best collaboration. On the extensive list of breathtaking features my siblings and I inherited, is beautiful, thick, long and strong hair. I did not always see it that way though. Having gone to former model C schools in post-apartheid but relentlessly racist South Africa meant that white teachers could mete out all kinds of psychological violence on our young minds. The same grade R teacher who force fed me soup called me “fuku-fuku hair” (meaning big bushy hair) for most of the year I was in her class. She even used to gesture what she meant by creating a giant halo over her short, grey pixie. Even at that age I knew that my hair was a kind of problem in the world. It did not help that my mother, upon me telling her what the teacher had said, had begun to put considerably more effort into keeping my hairstyles as flat and controlled as she could when she would get me ready for school every morning.

That teacher would not be the last to torment me about my hair. Another, a school principal, punished me for it. I remember one particular incident where I had cut off half of my previously chemically processed hair and it stood like a halo above my head. She called me into her office and handed me two elastic rubber bands and instructed me to go tie up my hair. The hair was too short to tie-up neatly and the rubber bands tugged at my hair causing tension on both my hairline and my self-image for the rest of that day at school. When you are a child, you are helpless in these situations. But I have always been hypersensitive to injustice and told her that my hair could not do what she wanted it to. It was not like her hair.

As a people who have suffered both the insidious and overt othering and oppression we have, we need to revisit our ideas about our body image. In doing so, we will allow ourselves an opportunity to interrogate our habits and what we believe are our preferences for how we want to present ourselves in the world. Dr Manganyi writes:

“Another trick, so often played on the black body, has been the attempt to impose certain attributes of the white body (appeal characteristics like skin colour and hair texture). In spite of the costly effort expended by some individuals in this direction, it should never be expected that these external (to the black body) attributes would be integrated into the black body. Neither could the imposition of these attributes on the sociological schema of the black body be expected to drastically improve its status. These, I contend, are some of the factors responsible for the noted pathological experience of the black body. What follows is worth repeating because it is of great importance. Black people the world over have to face the challenge of improving the socialisation of the black body. It is we who have to eradicate the negative sociological schema prescribed by whites. This might mean that some cosmetic empires might find themselves in the red. This certainly should be no dear concern of ours. There appears to be sufficient evidence for those prepared to see it that the black body can stand on its own without the sort of borrowing that has been going on for years.”

This sociological schema or outline of what the black body is has been pervasive. The two personal experiences I have highlighted here, are related to hair but the schema is malignant. It not only attempts to tell us what is “wrong” with us but also what kind of treatment we deserve because of it. Black women for example, are often hypersexualised because of our anatomy. It is no wonder then that we become the single racial group of women who are most likely to experience sexual assault the world over. The schema will not disappear or change at a macro level as rapidly as we would like, if at all. But it certainly can change at a micro level. We can reject this outline by looking into ourselves and how much of it we knowingly and unknowingly endorse through our choices. It must be clear to us that it is harmful to think of our bodies in the ways prescribed to us. We need to exercise our right to opt out as both medicine to heal our relationship with our bodies but also as resistance to the prescript.