On Solitude - Part 2

“Psychoanalysis is the tool best suited to uncover, plainly discuss and understand these issues, as psychoanalysis has always rightly enjoyed a bad reputation, the hallmark of honesty which never curries favor with its audience, and shuns all attempts to modify a pungent truth with our pretty lie: good taste.” Richard Norman.

I fully agree with the need for psychoanalysis to assist in healing and searching for alternative ways of self-awareness and perception.

But I also propose that classical psychoanalysis will always fall short of the need to uncoil ‘the "under-soul" of our human height and sickness’, therefore a new psychoanalytical point of view is direly required.

The overwhelming despondency among the black male population has seen a number of suicides escalate as a consequence of popular discontent arising from the effects of capitalism on the working-class and unemployed majority.

Over and above our ill sentiments towards taking one’s own life, there has been an overt trend that has left many with that sole option.  

The demands of a changing world, evolving gender dynamics and the influence of monetary stature are but a few of the pressures assailing black communities.

It is often sad when the people who take are found in ‘relationships or married’, but coming against walls which apparently were faced in solitude.

Trauma has been a condition least associated with black people perhaps because of their purported animalistic strength of emotion, but close observation into the contemporary situation will disclose the nexus upon which black humanity has been cast.

Society has inaugurated a masochistic degradation of all healthy potential among black folk through a proliferation of ideals subaltern to their social concern.

There can never exit a collectivised human cooperative conglomeration among black folk when certain existing unconscious structures which are endemic to modern personality are still untouched.

Socio-cultural specific assumptions can become entangled in interpretations of what is a man’s responsibility to his community and familial structures.

Major decisions about who goes into the frontline of battles, occupational positions and family structures are always allocated males in society.

Capitalist morality however, has always provided examples detailing the exact way its structures are created, and how it influences, for the worse, our ethics and our intellect as black people.

Capitalism has left black folk castrated through servitude and meagre benefits of flagellation in stables of dehumanizing labour, have never honoured the amount the sweat bled.

Capitalist economic strangle hold continue to displaces black people as it only functions as warfare against the black population, a war on our family systems and means of sustaining inter-personal relationships.

The failing family and the poverty, unemployment and hopelessness that engender it cannot be prevented under capitalism.

This plagues the black mind incessantly, from those who have been integrated into the debilitating and nefarious wage machine to those who haven’t had the fortune.

Complexes and fears thereof inform these moments of introspection about my fear the act of castration perhaps through integration into the workforce and the emasculation my lack thereof will bring by the hand my partner.

We lament, with screeching wounded cries held within our breast, echoing through ruined godly souls, this redesigned construction of personality bereft with castration complexes.

What formed our masochistic cooperation in the surgery that dehumanised us?

What is a viable alternative to the ‘civilized life’, to which we are all entrained?

How do we re-establish the social and economic conditions for a new era of relations between the sexes, liberated from the pressures and constraints of archaic capitalism?

Capitalism has entered into its deepest crisis since the Great Depression, perhaps even greater, and a continual sinking into the barbarism of poverty, unemployment, and other effects of austerity are all we can expect under this system

In order to maintain competitiveness with the so-called developed countries, and to overcome the effects of capitalist overproduction, layoffs and savage wage reductions continue to mar our economy.

And given capitalism’s long history of institutionalized racism conditioned by economic imperatives, where does the situation leave the black community?

BUSINESS WEEK once admitted that "trends in labour markets have played a big role. Technology and global competition have displaced many low-wage workers and driven down the incomes of other less-skilled workers, with young black men hit harder than any other group." Further, "The rise in women's relative wages [from 73 percent in 1980 to 98 percent in 1990 for the wages of black women relative to those of black men and from 53 percent to 80 percent for those of white women relative to those of white men - an indisputably positive development - nonetheless is having some negative effects," BUSINESS WEEK wrote. "...One reason for getting married is undermined - financial support."

Written by: Khahliso Matela