Although imagined or invented, nations are nebulous creation of human ingenuity crafted from a variety of institutional imperialism and military prowess.
Heritage sites that shape national identity and imbue it with meaning are the subject of my artistic inquiry, attempting to address themes of collective loss, inherited trauma and the persistent loss of homes experienced by black people.
Engaging in archival research and the use interdisciplinary artistic practice utilising national symbols and narratives connected to South African nationhood, my work could be said to explore cross-pollinations of nationhoods within the diverse landscape of the southern tip of Africa.
On the backdrop of South Africa celebrating 30 years of democracy, it becomes essential to grapple with how a maturing state shapes its citizens and traditionalises diverse histories and cultural responses to said histories.
As the bourgeoning state adopts and adapts to colonial Eurocentric and western ideologies and structures inherited from colonial powers; there arises a need for decolonial revisions of said histories as collectivised through memory.
And considering multifaceted efforts by the Afrikaner community to carve a space for separate development, the “coloured” community retracing “their” roots to the Khoi and San people of antiquity, it has become pivotal to reevaluate cultural impacts of “spaces of collective incidents of trauma”.
To investigate how these spaces tie historical diverse perspectives and root truths which could be contested at various period of history is one of the empirical objectives of my work with archival materials, to reposition their relevance without taints of race based definitions, but hopefully a holistic view of a collective memories.
***
How can a nation of nations grappling with compartmentalised views of nationhood create a state founded on cohesive and harmonious exchange and engagement?
Can people who developed their perspectives of “the other” reconcile their vantage point with contemporary landscapes where lives are morphing and intertwined by intricate economic and social misnomers and discrepancies?
Take for instance a street where protesting activists were massacred by colonial forces; would the perpetrator and the victim recall the same space equitably?
Can the farms located on land disposed from black communities become safe havens for impoverished farm labourers, while owned and supervised by generations of colonisers?
And that small quaint town with magnificent views of pictorial natural landscapes nestled among hills adored by artists of privilege, how are they to become “home” for those who lost vast fortunes with the land of their spiritual roots?
Mothers from one-roomed shacks are cleaning immaculately large houses with glass walls and fathers from garden-less homes are tending gardens and flowers that render “white” spaces heavenly, like dream objects they yearn to possess but could never achieve.
Upon leaving these spaces, back to the sombre and mediocre environments of scanty camps on the outskirts of these towns, there seems to be an inversion from dreams of bliss to utter disdain for even the people in their lives.
The township peopled by those who resent their lives and those with whom they share their life experiences; that is a schizophrenic space of liminality occupied by black folk.
What about those intermittent days celebrated as holidays, which are said to represent commemorative efforts of appeasing sins and brutalities of the past through reconciliatory mirages?
How could a date associated with the merciless killings of black people be celebrated by another community as a moment of their historical victory to be recalled and venerated annually in clear view of descendants of the deceased victims of slaughters?
Could these sites of flawed memories be windows through which to spy on the past with clearer eyes; to reconstruct the events afresh in minds often exhausted by the flow of time?
***
Colonialism has extremely long tentacle which are clutching every sinew of the present, and cities, towns, villages and squatter camps have mushroomed on very poisoned soil, built on exploitative social contracts and sustained by a form of collective amnesia.
All blood spilled at various stages of this country’s evolution still wails from beneath the rocks, and generations who draw blood from those deceased are living lives alien to themselves while alienating themselves from their respective communities.
Alienated from the past and present, this is a generation of people of colour attempting to find individual identities fused with reconstructed historical narratives, where our noble past becomes a badge of honour to our dispossession and disenfranchisement.
Rage-filled souls roam the streets, youth with no sense of self beyond narcissistic yearning for grandeur are plotting for a future which is rendered uncertain by the unresolved past.
It seems those proverbial sites of past battles are once again be filled with screams of men dying afresh, by each other’s hand; towns assailed by disgruntled domestic workers and garden boys using shovels as weapons for racial cleansing.
Hating the face one sees in the mirror as a metaphor for “black on black” violence is not a simplification of some deep seated disorders and self-destructive tendencies among black people.
Violence against self and others seems to fuel an insurrectional reaction against personalised false hopes and sedative tales told to keep the downtrodden hopeful; masking a grotesque truths that bear witness to traumas experienced and therefore experimented on those closest to us.
But how did Africans become separated from the truth of their actual contributions to history due to it being “white-washed”, erasure and censorship of records of historical significance?
How did Africans become convinced that tribalist segregation is final and just as a solution for their poverty and social plight; will this self-alienation be another collective disorder that continues to hinder collaborative redress of historical ills and mistruths?
***
To answer these questions one is compelled to study works of numerous renowned psycho-analysts and historians, who have carved alternate lenses through which to address traumas of unresolved pasts concerning people of colour.
One must device methodologies of self-analysis, to decode wounds of “the past as a space where persons and communities were shattered”, reassembling broken bits into a coherent yet transformative identity that would best survive the scourges of contemporary inequality.
This new identity that is achieved through self-analysis should not be nebulous, formless ego that can be externally manipulated, but an identity with agency and accountability to the past as well as the present.
And how does one begin to fashion this new-self in the face of a present steeped in monuments of traumatic pasts, still glorified and revered by certain communities while being despised by others?
Should personal and social metamorphosis solely rely on destruction of such monuments and sites of massacres, in a form of collectively sanctioned erasure of unpalatable episodes of history based on sentiments of betrayal and disgust as felt by the majority of black people?
***
Many have been puzzled by the observable spiritual depravity of gangs and gruesome waves criminality experienced in the Cape and other coastal cities which historically were the entry points of vast populations of colonisers?
Why are communities in these regions prone to internalised self-loathing and inferiority complexes that are disguised as machismo, which explode in bouts of ultra-violent that sees no value in lives?
And these places are inundated with memorabilia, churches with ancient bells, monuments and museums filled with artefacts and deceptions from the colonisers’ past, exalting their “achievements” gained through usurping native lands and properties.
What about the mining towns were men were exploited and their bodies vandalised for profit; and those town along the Voortrekker route that seem never to awaken from a slumber and stupor of beauty as veneer over the wickedly affluent livelihoods of the colonisers?
The homelands are centred around self-destructive violence and revenge killings meted against vulnerable generations paying debts of the past.
Townships are labour camps for unemployed and self-deprecating beings intoxicated by failure and drink.
And all these places are in clear view of the coloniser, often built inches from their comfort zones, shanty town mushrooming near suburbs and gated estates meant for excluding the poor and their envious gaze.
***
Analysing multiple systems in operation within traumatised psyches takes significant and frequent reflection on both the past as was and the past as viewed or perceived from the present.
Relationships between past events and their recollections in the present are fraught with illusory metaphors and hints of covet subconscious concealments. These barriers need be dismantled prior to finding the chaotic persona that is the result of trauma and other experiences.
A distanced objectivity is often required, a voyeurism synonymous with scientific enquiries; therefore the decolonisation of how the past and its present manifestation affect the black mind is crucial first as a personal project followed as an undertaking for the benefit of the collective.
Confronting souls that have been through inter-generational trauma transmitted through birth and genes can in fact be described as living in catastrophe, a continuous crimson flood that threatens to swallow and drown their innocences.
But once a new-self has been fashioned, a degree of asynchronous observation of personal and collective disasters seems possible.
That blurred line between neurosis and psychosis is shifting with each engagement with the past, be it when looking an old photograph of a seemingly happy servant family on a farm once dispossessed from people of colour.
The irony of affiliating one’s deceased relatives with the same land they toil as lowly servants of colonisers, is strong even when the same descendants are forbidden to visit the graves of those who dies on those colonised farmlands.
Thoughts ignited by memory beyond the brutal treatment of the white farmer do not even deter many from associating themselves with those enclaves of white monopoly, swathes of infinite space upon which they lounge and thrive owning herds stolen on their behalf.
But can minds, specifically black minds, be viewed as sites of flawed memories, recollections of past events tainted with terrors and anguish, pretences of joy and indefinite exploitation that eventually is accepted as divine fate?
Are literal and metaphorical flows of social power between black and white communities always going to exist as bridges built on landmines of the minds of the wretched of this earth?
***
“Heredity nothing, environment everything.” Maru, Bessie Head
The statement has become canonical among by psychologists who are concerned with how the environment affects the mind, the mind as product of community and social interactions.
Imagine a scenario where nn elderly silicotic mine worker approaches his supervisor complaining of migraines; but he also alludes to the belief that the migraines are a result of witchcraft emanating from interacting with the son of another sorcerous man, who is now deployed in the same section of the mine shaft.
The supervisor is young and bemused by superstitious belief, but the adamant man is neurotically demanding the expulsion of the young descendant of his enemy, without considering that he might be suffering and organic disease.
And for those who can suffer more in their imaginations that in their reality, what could be the remedy for their unburied demons?
Of Motherhood And Melancholia, is a seminal book written by renowned Psycho-ethnographer, Lou-Marie Kruger, who traces various strains of trauma to conditions that mothers and mothers to be suffer prior to beginning.a journey of the child’s development.
The Valley, as a space for hostile social conditions and a stage for the “violence of poverty”, is a microcosm of a vast dilemma.
Genealogical traits inherited from parents also have psychological imprints on their offspring, traits which also evolve over time as the child grows and matures to adulthood.
The plausibility of such an outcome in psychological terms is undeniable to the extend that what ever traumatic experiences the mother underwent during pregnancy can be passed on the newborn’s inner mind which is yet to mature with scars inherited from the mother.
This newborn does invariably exhibit trans-generational affiliations with trauma, influenced by experiences from both his parents and those cultivated as an individual maturing with a communal setting.
Abbreviated versions of past trauma that show up in adulthood are unique in that they are personal, even though drawing from a wide array of psych-social forces.
Previously unseen sketches of internalised pain, fear, inferiority can therefore be unrolled through violent spats and burst, that both merge the old inherited traumas with the personally cultivated traumas.
Another reading of Professor Kruger’s well-researched work, highlight how violence becomes infused with behavioural make up of communities that have normalised violence as a tool for surviving the ravages of poverty and powerlessness.
Men feeling emasculated by their coloniser and employer tends to reclaim is lost power by subjugating and brutalising those nearest to his circle of influence; the wife, the child and immediate family.
The echoes of sobs from a mother slapped by a masculine voice of “the father” after she slaved under the lusty gaze of “the master” who is disgusted with his wife, which the unborn inevitably hears, will forever be recalled and normalised as part of sounds of an environment into which they will be ushered.
