True confessions of a cultural schizophrenic

ON A hauntingly beautiful track, Telling Stories, Tracy Chapman laments the science fiction that sometimes exists in the space between her and everybody else. She often fills this space with fictional narratives in which she is able to escape in a space ship. Sometimes, she melancholically concludes, a lie is the best thing. These lyrics have been on my mind lately as I plod along with a book manuscript of mine. In this book, too personal to fully live outside my headspace , I share some of my deepest, scariest confessions as a cultural schizophrenic.

Black kids who were born during the dying days of apartheid and hit puberty after Nelson Mandela’s release from jail have undergone identity journeys that, like Tracy Chapman’s existential thoughts, need to be shared with the world.

Instead, we bottle them up or restrict their discussion to cappuccino-aided trips down memory lane about school life at multicultural (read: multiracial) schools. This failure to record and grapple with our inner thoughts could result in strands of democratic SA’s social history being lost. We should not let dry academic theses and journal articles about integrated schooling be the sum total of our recorded memories. Lived experiences need to be captured in richer, rougher detail in other forms, such as works of fiction. A sprinkling of works do so, but these barely scratch the surface.

Here is why all this matters.

Some black teenagers and young adults are cultural schizophrenics. This is neither bad nor good. It is just an experiential fact about us. It is a fact to be understood and mulled over. By cultural schizophrenia I mean that we often “code switch”, as the Americans say, between township language and the language of formerly whites-only institutions into which we have been inducted as honorary members. “Language” refers broadly to the values, principles, culture and norms (linguistic ones included) of an institution or a social space.

When I wear my non-township hat, I speak English, speak corporate (or did, before moving into the political and media space), sip exotic wines, travel the world, espouse deeply liberal, individual world views, and am an agnostic who lives in a secure complex in northern Johannesburg in which my neighbours remain strangers some two years after I moved in. This is middle class escapism at its best and worst.

My township self, who only comes out during holidays spent at home in the Eastern Cape, or strained conversations with family members still stuck in the geography that now forms the landscape of my childhood memoirs, speaks Afrikaans, has a fading commitment to Catholicism, is thoroughly working class, knows all his neighbours very well, has a spirit of communalism that is stronger than the selfishness of his coconut alter ego, and has never heard of JM Coetzee nor travelled outside the Eastern Cape.

This cultural schizophrenia is, of course, just a part of the human condition. Multiple selves are present in all people. No doubt psychologists can chip in with academic footnotes that challenge the sense of uniqueness of what I am describing here by demonstrating it to be a general human trait.

But there are at least two important reasons why this South African instance of cultural schizophrenia should interest us. One reason is simply sociological. The novel that has best rehearsed the inner lives of these postdemocratic identities is K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams.

Often black families imagine their worldly sons and daughters in the corporate space live glamorous, stress-free lives . This is partly true. Often, however, the cost of multicultural education, and opportunities for personal and professional growth, is dissonance. You straddle two worlds. Only the most unaware coconut would not have a personal moment of quiet reflection when the fiction between herself and her aunties and uncles back in the township jars a cocktail-sipping night out in Sandton. Exploring and recording these narratives is therefore important. They are a source of cultural history.

Second, we will never understand, let alone dismantle, structural inequalities in social and economic spaces if we do not understand the idea of institutional language. Many young black graduates struggle in the corporate space because they are not fluent in the institutional language of the old boys who had decades to stamp their values, principles and language on those spaces before the arrival of democracy. Cultural schizophrenics — invariably black people who went to former Model C schools or private ones — negotiate these spaces better than equally qualified black people who only have a township self.

Cultural schizophrenia has become an economic imperative for blacks. Personal identity politics clearly have a more intimate connection with public space and the private sectors. We cannot afford to lack self-awareness about these social complexities.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=84178