But here I sit, a weary old man,
On this porch that leans into the wind,
And I wonder, as the sun sinks low,
Casting long shadows over this broken land,
If the answers will ever come,
Or if we’re destined to remain in this place,
Forever yearning for the paradise
That was promised, but never found.
I see my neighbors, faces lined with the same questions,
Hands calloused from work that never ends,
And I feel the weight of generations on my shoulders,
The dreams of those who came before,
Now buried beneath the dust of forgotten times.
Is this all there is, this endless struggle,
This fight for survival in a world so rich,
Yet so stingy with its blessings?
And what of the children, those wide-eyed souls,
Who look to us for guidance, for hope?
What do we tell them, as they lie down to sleep,
Hungry not just for food, but for a future,
That seems as distant as the stars?
Do we speak of God, of His mysterious ways,
Or do we tell them the truth,
That we are lost, as lost as they are,
In a world that’s forgotten its way?
***
There exists a variety of afflictions scaled against black masculinity that have long been perpetuated by the oppressor who deemed and deduced these prowess as menial and bestial.
This demonising doctrine that eventually emasculated black men came in various guises, from forced removals from the rootedness of familial unions to labour reservations erected to house black bodies for exploitation by colonial profiteers.
Chasing a dreamworld constructed beyond his reach the black male finally became alienated from his kin and his self-alienated soul began to feel alone in a world of that was pent on erasing his identity.
A criminal mind brewed in these self-torture chambers of the mind also creates venues for committing heinous crimes in the name of liberating oneself from internalised shackles of an inferiority complex long constructed and sustained by religion and academia.
***
Townships, locations and villages are sites of such racial and economic repression, spaces populated by alienated people, who themselves alienate others and eventually become alien to their communities as Na'im Akbar explains in his 1991 paper “Mental Disorder Among African Americans.”
Adopting this theory to a South African situation, one realises that there is a link between various psychologies of people of colour across the globe, many being entwined through ancestrally linked trauma and others incubated through adaption to cultures of violence and poverty.
Unemployment has created a promiscuous youth copulating to quench the thirst for companionship and quick wealth when their past traumas threaten to destroy their romantic unions.
A skewed education system is only producing a work-force seeking quick access to dreams of affluence through inconspicuous consumption.
Moving haphazardly through their labyrinths of childhood trauma, adolescent traumas, traumas of motherhood, traumas of exploitation for menial labour are social codes that become imprints left between the individual and societal systems.
But are coincidental reoccurrences and repetitions of behavioural patterns inherited from past trauma evidence of psychosis?
The disdain for “home” as expressed by many young men who live with their grandmothers, sister with three children from different hard-handed “lovers with benefits”, has seen substance abuse become the only reason behind toxic camaraderie of gang relations that is now sprouting in townships and villages.
Masculinity pitted against a vulnerable and traumatised femininity in squatter camp cages across the country is thus breeding illegitimate children who will have absent yet existing fathers, and enraged mothers loathing masculinity for all its transgressions.
This growing generation will of course embrace other traumas throughout life, nurturing alienated personalities and enforcing violent dispositions.
A sense of abandon will characterise their “living for the moment”, cancelling all past memory through historic amnesia, feeding a self-destructive hedonism which is near suicidal but merely an outcry for acknowledgement and empathy.
Listening to young women raised by single mothers, who learn to loathe crudely mannered and violent young men nursed by overprotective single mothers, embracing those who perform acts of misogyny reminiscent of their fathers, one sees a proportionate distribution of interracial cruelty brewing.
***
Colonialism and white supremacist policies of colonialism and the apartheid regime meant that many people of colour had to live hidden, traumatised and exploited lives, behind masks of their making and those created by systems of power.
White society constantly levels trenchant attacks on the dignities of a group of people through their community policing forums, burning bodies of women and lynching children suspected of stealing fruit.
These victims constitute the racial demographic of consensual servants keeping white households intact, farm-workers and undesirables of society.
It therefore appears that between a traumatic past and the impending future lies a constantly shifting society and fragile interpersonal connections shaped by endless painful memories, altering the way people form relationships with others in their patriarchal and racially segregated environment.
The birth, transformation, and disappearance of trauma is something near impossible, but as this generation morphs into illusive devices of violence, psychological or otherwise, new ways of hiding, of dying are also devised.
***
There are protracted ways of dying, methods of killing oneself without the purgatorial dread of suicide and its hellish consequences canonised by religion. These types of deaths constitute self-destructive ways of shortening lifespans, concerted efforts at causing ill health and disease.
Contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, excessive consumption of alcohol, drugs and cancer- causing foods, the disregard for preservation of “the body”, are all symptoms of greater self-destructive tendencies at play in many black communities.
These postponed ways of ceasing life are common among black communities where the death of the environment always precedes the death of communities and the individual.
Junk food lovers would rather discard wrappings of their burgers in the township rather than the city where they purchased those disposable, non-biodegradable packages.
They would rather litter through windows of vehicles in places of their despised residence, where they find other despondent individuals kicking filth lining streets and leaving plastic bags strung on tree branches, sewage seeping from blocked drains, as well as stray dogs defecating where children play hopscotch.
There is therefore a lack of endurance of life-affirming, contingent, intertwined and inseparable sociality under duress of colonial and post-colonial violence in communities struggling with various forms of trauma.
Of all the deaths, marriage is yet another perceived form of dying; any union that bind man to woman is viewed as shackling oneself to an uncertain future, even though uncertainty is the fabric of all time.
Living in the midst of a decaying environment, embodying the human failing ambition to conquer nature, increasingly reshaped minds towards a morbidity that is activated through this psycho-social toxic interaction.
When toddlers scavenge through garbage piles with leprous pets, when young children play in sewage ponds and learn vulgar language from mothers to solicit attention from strangers, when young boys and girls are lethargic and somnambulist through school yards and tavern hallways; there is certainly a state of stupor enshrouding black communities.
This degraded environment becomes a reflection, a mirror of the deranged lives involved in the grand spectacle of repression of people.
And one is left to ask if psychotic behaviour is an inextricable part of the history of the township as a concentration camp of demeaned and demeaning souls?
***
