There’s a song in this silence,
A proud melody of defiance,
When our eyes meet,
There are no words like this soundless sound.
I want to wring out the entirety of this eternal melody,
From the voice of your gaze.
To imprison this heaven in my atmosphere,
And take a deep breath.
A life without sound would be bearable,
if we stayed like this,
feasting on silence.
Featured image by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
In the staid calmness of my reality,
I notice the fabricated solitude,
The peacefulness I have gifted myself.
Stolen goods.
I admit,
It is serene.
And yet the noise shamelessly cuts through.
It is not a thing I can point out,
But it is all around me, wrapping me like the sky.
It nauseates, like an overdue pregnancy.
I feel the internal pull it creates.
Invisible cramps and convulsions.
I allow it only my foot.
A sacrifice to this unseen force.
My foot taps gently at first,
Then furiously.
It infects my wholeness like a cancer.
My body is wracked with the terrible rhythm.
I am feverish with a righteous desire.
My mind rapt with horrible images,
Images moving in uniform discontent.
Flashing widely before me,
A mental prison I can not turn away from.
My oasis of peacefulness is flattened and I am lifted.
And the desert reveals itself.
The famines of justice,
The cavernous poverty,
The plunder.
My fish-like eyes gobble the devastation,
They flick around directionless and ravenous.
A painful feast.
Determinedly, I lunge back into my reality,
Safely awakening into my dream.
I am back on the green surface.
The peace is restored,
I no longer see the desert.
The noise is no more.
Only a subtle shiver in my foot that I no longer allow.
I still myself and sigh a sigh of relief.
I exclaim cathartically, “At least it is not me”.
The pain is at its end.
Now I can finally return to my distractions.
He did not consult us when he invented sex.
Mere Christianity, C.S.Lewis.
I will start with a disclaimer that no. I do not revel or make it a habit to disagree with Lewis, who I truly think is the greatest Christian apologist that ever lived and I am not even a Christian. That should tell you something.
Just for today though, I will disagree with him.
The first phrase on this post is from his book where he discusses how we should be prepared for sex to be odd, repulsive and sometimes downright degenerate. How much of it we want, how we want to it. All of that. He advises us to welcome the oddity because rationale may be truly inadequate to explain the ins and out of the whole thing.
He says God did not consult us when he invented it so we should come prepared to deal with that.
I mean it’s true that God, the Higher Power or whatever you choose to believe didn’t consult us. I mean. he didn’t consult us about anything, but I think in that phrase Lewis was using the phrase more to mean ‘consider’ or maybe I’m just imposing my Freudian slip to his work because I really can’t stop interchanging ‘consider’ with ‘consult’ whenever I say it.
If that was the case though. I disagree.
I think God considered us particularly. So much so that he created a pocket called sexuality for us and us alone. Where our choice interacts with sex and sex interacts with our unconscious needs. Animals can’t have sexuality, in fact I think sex is the wrong word for what animals do. What they do is more or less just reproduction and what does reproduction tell us about them? That they live to die another day and further that cause.
So what does sex tell us about us? About our lives, how much we want it and why we want it at all, especially when it has nothing to do with reproduction. I mean to live to die another day is the obvious reason but that’s only part of it. What about the craving we have for it, the insatiability we have even after years of copulation. What does that tell us about our lives?
I think it tells us there is a great amount of loneliness in the world and it is as if this strange phenomenon of ‘horniness’ is the alert that we have more of it than we can handle at any one moment. By it, I mean loneliness.
In fact for me the physical desire for the act of sex is such a huge metaphor for the loneliness we feel and the true magnitude of it. The need to literally have someone hurtle into your body or you to theirs and I’m not talking about just the physical act even just kissing, it’s quite literal there too. I think in many ways sex is a comfort for the intense loneliness life has to offer us.
And I should say ‘correct sex’ that is just to mean, the kind of sex that fills the void, if only for a time. Any other kind of sex is incomplete in its goal thus more or less null and void, with the side effect of only increasing the hankering for ‘correct sex.’ The insatiability I was talking about earlier
Although, this void filling isn’t just about sex. I think sex is just a complex form of communication and more on the extreme side when you have had as much loneliness as you can take. ‘Horniness’ is not the alarm when the fire breaks out, it is the literal phone call to the firefighters when the heat is unbearable. There are plenty of remedies before we get to that level, not to say that those who do not want sex are not lonely because we all are and the physical desire has its roots in our biology too. But the desire coupled with the heightened intent to act on it usually points to the apex of loneliness.
As such this is why I think children have less inclination to want sex, usually. There is a kind of loneliness reserved only for the matured, when you no longer have your parents within that close reach.
In fact I think sex is the adult equivalent of bonding between babies and their mothers. When we are born we are truly vulnerable and saddled with our new individuality, I think we experience a profuse amount of loneliness. Enter mom. She provides the solace we need to encounter this new world we are now in away from uterine comfort.
When we want sex, we really just need to bond, badly, as the loneliness bites and thanks to our heightened awareness being adults the loneliness can be torturous. Unfortunately at that point bonding with our mothers like we used to, chest to chest, nipple to mouth is much less of an option.
I think this is why a mother dying in childbirth or a closed adoption is usually such a traumatic event. When the one person who could ease your new found loneliness is the one person you will never meet.
My idea of a relationship is one plus one equals three.
These are the words of Shan. A sex educator. I heard them on a clip on Youtube which you can find here. A conversation about monogamy versus polyamory, actually a conversation I would really suggest you watch. Anyway, I heard her words and this idea that society lives finally clicked in me.
At minute 18:40 in the video, they pose a question in the group for discussion. The question is, ‘I would feel incomplete without my partner?’ And Shan disagrees, enthusiastically, I assume that’s how she does everything.
She says she doesn’t connect with that. She imagines at the end of a relationship she would feel a number of ways, sad, disadvantaged and I might even add relieved. But what she can’t connect with is the complete loss of self.
You see, to Shan relationships are one plus one equals three. Where two complete people meet and through their interaction, a third springs up. A third complete person.
And it occurred to me. This is what happens whenever people interact, not just relationships. Whatever it is. The office, school, a date, church, every single interaction, there is always an imaginary third that lives.
I think this third is a paradox because in a sense they are at once the most powerful and fleeting person in the interaction. This is why people act so different in groups than they do when alone. It is the third, the presence of the third alone is so potent it changes the behaviour of the individuals.
But then again, when the interaction stops. It is the third that gets the axe. The first axe. So in a way the third is both the strongest and the weakest link. It is this third we are changing when we say society has indeed improved because in a sense the rest of us remain as we were.
I find this an interesting notion especially since we are always talking about changing the world and how that connotes with changing ourselves. And while I do not disagree with that. I think perhaps changing the third is just a tad bit more efficient. The whisper of the third does a lot more than the example of one of us. It’s the difference between using an elevator to lift something to a top floor of a sky scraper as opposed to having someone take the stairs with it in hand, in fact I think the difference is much more drastic than that.
The next question is, ‘So, who is the third?’ The law. Religion. The Internet. Our conscience or what. This I must admit I cannot answer but it would certainly be wonderful if this mystical third could be adequately isolated and truly utilized to ‘change the world,’ as we all so often proclaim.
Educate comes from the latin word educare or educe. It means to bring out. As if we ourselves are the libraries and the dictionaries but before education, our wonders and knowledge are sealed off. So this seems education unleashes the sleeping beast within all of us, whoever the beast may be. Which comes as such a surprise to me. This is why.
All my life I have idolized knowledge and education. When I hear the aphorism, knowledge is power, I truly do believe it. But in my head it registers as knowledge is the power to do good. A thought I have only come to criticize recently after combating the paradox of ‘evil education’ what always seemed to be quite antithetical. How can education birth evil or worse yet be the child of evil?
When I heard of the stories of the founding of Uganda and Congo. Stories encased in the Machiavellian princely mentality of how their respective erudite leaders, which counted for a lot in the days of post -independent Africa led their countries to the slaughter. I am indeed, extremely dazed. Not to say that my own Kenya and other African countries are better, in fact this is the tale of many a African nations. Putting hope and the future in the arms of the educated who in turn stab us with their corruption and malevolence. All wrapped up in glossy academic qualification and impeccable experience in leadership. But how can this be? How can education be the root of this evil because place an illiterate ignorant individual in the same position and they would not do half as much damage as that of the educated fellow.
It makes me wonder if education in its essence is rather ambivalent or possibly wholly evil in some instances?
Or worse yet is its power akin to the power of money, dragging the beast from within regardless of whether the beast is evil or beautiful.
I presumed like many others that the process of education is a self-checking mechanism. Enabling only the good to go out. Right?
I mean there must be a reason why we all believe in educating our children and why it’s a millennium development goal. If Education had the same power as money we would feed our children as much money as we do education. It would be in legislature all over that children have a right money the same way they have a right to education. But this is not the case, and I know that isn’t coincidental.
Education is a kind of cure. Education has the power akin to free will. A sword immeasurably potent but also rather dependent on the swordsman. It is the power of choice. Because education can be used to build bombs to kill innocents or to build some beneficial structure to house the very same innocents from danger.
So it seems education isn’t at all what I thought. Education isn’t the one who breaks out the good inside. It just allows you access to the world inside and hand you the requisite tools to build its entry into the world outside. So I guess education is the cure of whatever we decide we are ailing from and the irony is we can decide that we are ailing from ‘goodness’ and use education to build ourselves bad medicine.
Pain demands to be seen while it clings on to its own blindness.
This is a line I came across in my exploits with poetry. I wrote it trying to comprehend acts of transgression in its many varied formats, which in many cases create the very kind of pain that was caused to them. A rather confounding outcome I have found. It’s like a person in captivity escaping slavery only to become a slaver. How bizarre! And what is even more bizarre is just how common this is.
I am talking about things such as infidelity, rape, domestic violence, substance abuse which until very recently have always been neatly compartmentalized into the boxes of victim and perpetrator. As it turns out perpetrators are at times victims themselves.
This has certainly gone a long way in explaining why people do bad things and apportioning them some sympathy but many of the jilted parties still question why their assailants breathe life into the very same pain they themselves went through. Because in the act of violating another can’t you see their pain, you of all people especially. You who have gone through it before.
It is almost an imponderable question when the stakes are high and by that I mean when you are the recipient of the pain or can identify the recipient. I myself found it particularly challenging when I internally discussed the question of pornography and prostitution and I picked these two because sex is the master at straddling violence and redemption especially with regards to porn and prostitution.
At first when I even think about these topics I am so enraged I can’t even believe I am giving them a thought. My heart always goes out to the obvious victim. The used party. The girl who was recruited into the sex industry at a young age and as a much older woman continues to desecrate herself. It is usually even more heartbreaking when the innocence is stark, when the girls or boys at these sex parties, massage parlours or websites are clearly underage, inexperienced and young.
I wonder, can you really look into their innocence and violate them still.
Like I said, imponderable. Right? And yet many people do this, every single minute of every day, after all it’s as simple as a click of a button.
Prostitution certainly didn’t earn its reputation as being the oldest and most powerful industry if we all weren’t a part of it in many ways.So I look into the ‘perpetrators’ who do this and many have tales of woe similar to the ones they now participate in. But why? Why in the very act of signaling your need for help do you in turn hurt another? Can we not see the familiarity of pain whilst inside it ourselves? Or is it a classic case of familiarity breeds contempt.
But then again I have seen people who have risen from the ashes and did not return to the fire. What do they do so that they learn the correct lessons from their pain, so that they may not live in the endless rehashing of cycle of victimization and perpetration? They aren’t called vicious cycles for nothing.
Is it that these people absorb their pain differently or acknowledge it differently because I have heard people defending the right to violate on grounds that they too were violated. And though perplexing I do see how it can make sense, if all you know is pain and truly regard this as the best outcome and yet this is hardly ever the case.
Many people who assault their loved ones and others are disgusted by themselves afterwards. They hate it but theirs is the story of addiction. They are forced to love the very thing that they despise which I think might just be the worst kind of punishment.
But the point isn’t punishment, the point is redemption. And all this does is birth more generations of pain. What is it about pain that ensures its prolific continuity? It is after all not deranged maniacs or spawns of the devil that are tomorrow’s perpetrators but victims of today.
Jealousy is what you get when respect malfunctions.
For a long time I have wondered what the hype is about respect, these famous term that inspires every generation. What is this internal hype that everyone recognizes because it is marked with excellence.
Everyone that ever lived wanted respect and not necessarily from others but even from themselves. Disrespect had initiated divorce and even started wars, so what is this nagging emotion?
And I want to point out respect is not reverence. Reverence which is also associated with excellence. We regard God, geniuses and saints with reverence. Reverence is for the unattainable excellence, it is for those we a priori regard to be above us.
You will never match the goodness of a saint, the IQ of a genius or the potency of God so we revere them but respect is different. Respect is for our equals, we even respect people we otherwise dislike. Many at times we say, “I don’t even like so and so but I respect what they did.”
Respect is primal and automatic to another person’s good and it’s streamline even with other species. I thought of this in terms of dogs. Dogs respect us, they don’t revere us. They don’t pounce on us and kill us even though they can because they have seen something admirable in us, they’ve seen our loyalty to them, something they can aspire to themselves.
As the meaning of respect unfurled in front of me it struck just how similar it is to its malevolent counterpart, jealousy. Jealousy too is a response to another’s good a good which is perceived to be attainable by us but it goes a step further. It seeks to destroy the excellence.
Jealousy is not passive like respect. Jealousy is the woman who tries to seduce a man just to ruin his marriage. Jealousy is the rapist who recognizes purity and innocence and decides to twist it. Jealousy is the madness that can come from respect because we are only ever jealous of the things we respect.
So what contorts so that respect can morph into jealousy? Is it internal disequilibrium? Is it trauma associated with the excellence that now glides before you?
What are the ingredients that need to mix with respect to turn into virulent jealousy?
Laughably, it is also interesting to point out that dogs’ respect hardly ever shrivels into jealousy. It never succumbs to the turmoil and instead aspires to it. A rather odd outcome because the dog’s instinct like most other animals is to survive which usually means to kill. In this case however they seem to transcend their instinct something that hardly ever happens in the alpha ‘dog eat dog’ world of animals.
You would think it would be easier for humans but it is in fact humans whose respect occasionally deforms into jealousy. Even though humans don’t have to deal with the persistence of natural instincts to propel it. How is that?
Every revolution aspires to the institution it fights and the vice versa is true.
From the outset institutions and revolutions seem at odds. Enemies, set against each other to forever do battle. And yet amidst their enmity I have always found a distinct entanglement. Almost a reverence for the other, not just a simple hero/villain dichotomy but an outstanding connection such that even though one could exist without the other, they probably wouldn’t want to.
This I find very disturbing but in the ever evolving world of individualism, this conundrum is becoming more crucial.
Nowadays, life is centered on the individual as opposed to the past life that was centered on the communal. As a result, in the old world, culture and institutions were the bulwark of life, they were the templates with which life was organized. And now the opposite is true.
Now culture is a decoration, a figurehead to the real master. Me. Marriage used to be entirely about the process, how it was arranged, the role in the community taken after and the minute details of the ceremony were crucial for they were physical containers of the meanings behind it all. Now if you pay dowry it is less symbolic and more of a courtesy, a relic, in fact most do without it.
We are now living in revolutionary times where everything rests on the unique individual experience and thus everything is unique. Institutions have been thrown under the bus and all we pay credence to now is the revolution inside. The needs of the personal person within.
And many including myself have praised this shift. The age of institutions has come and gone. No more external definitions of how we must live, what we must do, who we must love even how we must love. No we are sober to our own lives. We want to write the vows to our lives not just replay those written for us by some obscure authority. It is the annihilation of institutions. The question is, is this good or even true?
Can we really ever do away with institutions? What was the problem with them to begin with and will they make a comeback?
And from that alone I understood the allure of revolutions especially in the context of the current world’s enlightenment. Revolutions are the best choice there is that is a no-brainer, because they are so simple. They are singular focused dealing with one issue at a time, generously while institutions deals with heaps of issues in a constrained manner. They are overworked but it wasn’t always like this. Institutions are revolutions, just grown up .
Think of a recent institution say, feminism that is now properly muddled with numerous opinions and yet in the beginning when it it was so focused and single-minded. It was either about women getting property rights or about the ability to vote or about legislation punishing violence against them. But the inevitable happens, the revolution caught fire and was embraced by many, many of whom saturated it with their individual selves and instead of it expanding in order to maintain its hold. It became obstinate to revision and extension in the face of new realities in an attempt to hold on to its uniqueness, viewing vagueness to accommodate everyone and changing needs a sell-out. Thus its members leave and go set up, revolutions. So now we have a bunch of duplicated institutions doing the same thing but for different persons.
It is this unwavering quality of institutions that make them obsolete and discarded, yet everlasting, in a constant labour because for every one of their disenfranchised member lies a revolution.
They live on but in dismay. As a retrogressive ideal with which to compare progress and lo and behold those revolutions that succeed in usurping it in a cruel twist of fate end up becoming it because like mother, like daugher. The kiswahili proverb sums this up perfectly, “mwana hutazama kichogo cha ninaye.”
So no, institutions are not going anywhere because revolutions need something to pull against. The romance between revolutions and institutions is an eternal one but not necessarily.
So the question is now that we are in a revolutionary space how do we guard against the faults of the institutions before?
Because it is clear that, the greatest dream of a revolution which is to spread and infect all, is in an ironic twist of fate infact its downfall. How do we sieve the obsolescence from the success?
I think the answer lies in realizing that institutions and revolutions are the same thing at different times. They are not at all interdependent or independent. They are the same. This alone removes the difficulty of having to found new institutions when all we need do is reform the old one.
It is an ideal known as generous orthodoxy i recently learnt from the brilliant Malcolm Gladwell . It is learning how to manage the paradox of a wide open sieve. Letting in some new ideas contradictory to the old ones in order to perfect the old ones. It is just as difficult a paradox to live out as it sounds.
Using our earlier example the truth is, we never needed to found feminism all we needed was to reform patriarchy because as we’ve seen in certain instances feminism can be quite patriarchal. The greatest irony of them all.
The next step is the preservation of the old institutions that have very much good in them still.
And for this the structure of institutions needs to change. Elasticity must be included so that it can at once be institutional and revolutionary because we need institutions and culture. Let no one lie to you that we have evolved beyond them.
Many have reported anxiety and even depression in the worst cases at the loss of institutions, every decision becoming one we have to agonize over and research interminably sometimes at the cost of enjoying life itself. Terms such as the ‘paradox of choice’ never even existed before this shift. Sometimes we don’t need new institutions only to find our place in them. It is much more pragmatic to fix a crack that rebuild a house.
In fact I think this is a huge reason why cults, polyamory, groups and all sorts of makeshift communities are on the rise despite the individualistic milieu we find ourselves against. We still need direction and guidelines even if only to go against them. The child within never truly grows up, neither should they. This inherent inadequacy and aspiration is I think the true anchor of the concept of God. And the main reason why we must re-integrate institutions and revolutions for our own good. We are just like ships who need to remain suspended in our own revolutionary ideals but moored nonetheless to institutional anchors.
So, a while ago I can’t remember when exactly, someone I admire quite a bit sent me a viral video. A man in the rural setting, speaking to his friends about how he could beat up his wife to a pulp in an instant and the ignominy of men who allow themselves to be as he put it ‘beaten up by their wives.’ In the midst of heavy laughter amongst them, his wife appears suddenly, very Nollywood-esque and is immediately on him the minute she spots him. Lifting him by the collar and occasionally pummeling him, as she repeatedly asks him about the children, the upkeep of the house and his lolling around with his friends instead of attending to those matters specifically. Matters which I will point out to you are ‘traditionally female roles,’ so you know there is an inherent denigration there already, especially in the African setting.
The man after thorough scrutiny and assault by her, in full view of his friends is finally escorted away, by her, by the collar might I add, which she has bunched up in fists as she drags him away. And if you’re wondering, no, she is not a giant with brute strength, she is just an average sized-woman and he is just an average-sized man, bigger than her, to further magnify the true absurdity or irony of the situation, I am not sure which. The scene closes to the resounding laughter of his friends and to my eternal shame, mine too. In fact calling what I did laughter is a gross understatement.
The Patriarchy
Now let’s begin at the beginning. Before even feminism, we have the patriarchy and I don’t even mean the obvious intricate infrastructure that over millennia has been built to just destroy women. Whether you’re talking about victim blaming in rape cases, corporate mistreatment of mothers and women alike, domestic violence, gender-roles, honour killings, disgust and objectification of the female form, I mean you name it. That’s not even the issue to me. The real issue to me is the whisper in almost everyone’s head that says, ‘men are better than women’ constantly. This to me is the real culprit and honestly the measure of the beast. Because try as we all may, this whisper still exists in all of us . This whisper that informs us subconsciously.
This is the true enemy of feminism, what feminism is fighting everyday tooth and nail to dismantle and silence. If feminism is Samurai Jack, then patriarchy is Aku, shape-shifting master of darkness, literally. The operative word being shape-shifting. You’ll see why.
This is where the fraud comes in or is it slips in. I think, in recent times there has been a profound misconstruction in the decomposition of patriarchy by feminists and let no one mistake this for a denouncement of my feminism because I am a feminist through and through.
Patriarchy is not men. In fact patriarchy exists outside of men (as ridiculous as that sounds or not actually). And the problem of feminism is that it has assumed men are tantamount to the patriarchy which is the worst possible thing it could have done. And the minute I say that, many if not all feminists will rise up in arms and tell me I’ve got it all wrong. That what I am talking about is radical feminism and not ‘feminism feminism’ and to that I say. The rabbit hole goes deeper than that but then again it always does.
My evidence is the term that many feminists use, even male ones, even the very mild ones, even me. Male privilege. And no I don’t think it doesn’t exist, male privilege is a living breathing organism. I just don’t think it exists in the way we think it exists.
Males aren’t enjoying because of the patriarchy, in fact I’d argue men are the ones suffering the most. And with the patriarchy there is male privilege and the more obscure female privilege that most people don’t want to talk about. And here is where the problem begins. The denial.
Most of us have assumed that men are in their slots of power, up there in the sky, past the corporate ladder, trampling on these poor weak women enjoying when it’s anything but that. I will quote one of my favourite modern philosophers, Alain De Botton, ‘any success must admit to the loss that it sacrificed.’ The opportunity cost is not a concept that ends in the Economics class, it is real. Patriarchy has given men more money, more power and more control and stripped them of even more.
Men can’t cry. Men are nothing without success, they are success objects. Men are barely enjoying raising their kids. Men can’t get any help if abused, hell men can barely report abuse without never hearing the end of ridicule. Men can’t dare experiment sexually. Men can’t be vulnerable. Men are conscripted automatically. Men have no say in what happens to their children if their children’s mothers decide to abort/adopt. Men’s sexual abuse is the most notoriously unreported crime, ever, I think in the history of the world. Men’s suicide which has always been historically high has now really reached maybe the highest point. Men have to man up, daily.
And this is just the tip of the ice-berg, trust me because men won’t tell you. With the patriarchy, the only person who benefits is, the patriarchy. Men are getting a shit deal too. They are victims and the biggest irony of all is that a man is the perfect victim because you can count on him to take it, silently.
So you must understand how terrible it is when feminism pillories men for being the patriarchy while in fact they are right down there with us under the patriarchy’s boot, squirming.
Now the next question is naturally. Then who set up patriarchy if not men? And to that I honestly don’t know but what I do know is, there is no way it could have been men, not in their entirety in any case. For me it’s right up there with the unsolved millennium problems and conjectures. But what I do know is that there are many people, male and female in various ways that benefits from patriarchy just like there are many who actively benefit from racism and as a result have helped maintain its structures all this time.
And hold on because the plot thickens, feminism has even gone further to spread some terrible lies about men. That men are more violent which is supported by scientific studies of how their amygdala is less developed and what not. Forgetting all the while that being violent is a behaviour and thus a choice. Men are not more violent they are just more capable of violence. There is a difference. I have seen women who are violent with a capital V and the studies show that their amygdalas are ‘just fine.’
Then there is the worst lie of them all. For me especially, that men are simple. Not in the classic way we talk about simplicity in terms of parsimony or efficiency of using less and getting more. But when most say men are simple they mean men are idiots, they are pathetic, they have no feelings and emotions, they just want sex and food like wild baboons and its’ heartbreaking to see a man actually believe this. And here’s the shape shifting thing I was talking about earlier, when men are cornered and internalize these messages guess how it come back as, exactly, the patriarchy. They become the rapists, law makers who put taxes on tampons, men who enforce gender roles and the cycle goes on and on.
Now feminism has become the ambassador of the patriarchy.
Checking yourself.
And now here comes the trickiest part. Checking yourself. For me, it began when I watched a documentary on Men’s Rights Activism called ‘The Red Pill’. In fact I encourage every feminist to watch that documentary, the metaphor is apt is all I will say.
For me it all came to a head with the story I started with that at the time I didn’t even realize was damaging. How I was laughing hysterically at a person being assaulted. I mean, I might as well watch a snuff film because clearly that’s what I enjoy if history is any indication. Now imagine it like this, if a man in that situation came to a Help Center that I say worked at what do you think someone like me would do? It is this question or rather the answer that makes it imperative for me to check myself constantly ever since.
Moreover, one other time that really forced me to check the error of my ways was recently when a great friend asked me if I would trust myself to be in an enclosed room with him or if I would be afraid of rape. And again to my eternal shame I said,’ hell no. I don’t trust anybody. I don’t trust men like that’ verbatim.
I will tell you this, at the time I was so indignant, naming all the instances I have heard of men turning on women and entirely forgot about how much I was disrespecting this good human being in front of me who by the way, I know would never do anything like that to me, and I convinced him of his vileness too which is exactly what women fight to diminish. I know he became convinced of his maleficence simply by being because with downcast eyes, wanting to tear his hair off, he answered with a feeble, ‘if that’s how you feel about me, then men have failed women.’ How tragic.
So yes, there is the fraud and its insidious nature.
Checking yourself is hard but it must be done. It is the nature of power to corrupt and now feminism has that power so it is of the utmost importance to ensure this power doesn’t corrupt.
The thing I do know now is that victims aren’t always what we think they are. For more illustration on this check out Malcolm Gladwell’s decomposition of David and Goliath. Brilliant!
Feminism 1.0
For those who do in fact believe me, the feminists most especially must now be wondering. But how did such a malignant behaviour slip into a wonderful movement such as feminism? And it is, very wonderful indeed.
Especially in the last year with the reforms done in the sector of corporate female mistreatment which still has a long way to go but wow, I’m glad I lived to see this.
So, how this cancer got in is actually very simple, it is in the evolution of feminism. I think feminism has changed and as a result these mutations have come up because I don’t think women sat down and decided men needed to be cut down to size just for fun. It is just a consequence of figuring out the path that you get lost.
We have forgotten the feminism of old. The first feminism and no I am not talking about the first wave or the second wave which is really just about white feminism. I am an African woman after all. I mean the feminism of our grandmothers or rather my grandmother. Feminism centered on uplifting women not equalizing them.
I really do believe that this is where feminism went wrong. This feminism of equality is nonsense and you know what they say, garbage in, garbage out. The feminism of old is about equity not equality.
And I sort of blame the fight for racism a little here that became I suppose too hot for feminists to handle at a point. Feminism is starting to use the incorrect model in its undertakings. To approach the patriarchy how activists for Africans (I mean anyone with black skin who is really just an African wherever they ended up via colonization, diaspora or the worst of all slavery) approach racism. You see the battle against racism is a battle of equality, to prove that we are all humans, black, white, brown or otherwise and that makes sense in that context but not for feminism.The battle for feminism is not a battle of equality, men and women are not equal, neither do they need to be. They are complements which a totally different thing.
The fight for feminism is a battle for equity and honestly it’s a much older fight than even racism which makes it hard to explain how it became subservient to the latter in the first place. Understanding this complementarity aspect is the biggest bone of contention to men and women because somehow we always end up competing which makes absolutely no sense. The point was never to usurp one another, it was always to help one another.
Feminism should not be about turning men into women which is as absurd as it sounds. It is about increasing women’s engagement with power, in careers, all areas that were previously closed to women but the key pointer is for the women to engage as women and not as women-turn-men. Women are supposed to bring their femininity into boardrooms, courtrooms, office spaces as men take their masculinity there too.
I personally believe in God so I will use that. For non-believers insert what you like but for me, I really do truly believe that God created us with deficiencies to be filled with ‘the other’ purposely. This is why I find the story of creation quite problematic where man precedes woman, in fact she almost seems an afterthought but I’ll leave that little rabbit-hole for now.
For me feminism is actually a call to humanity. Recognizing that yes, men are bigger than women physically and because might is well, might they can easily torment women forever even at their own torment but they shouldn’t. They should recognize that because of the deficit in might they should fill it up with justice. And the same is true for women, men also have such deficiencies in comparison to women. I’ll give the most obvious one.
Birth. I choose it because most people don’t understand the immense power of life and death that women possess. Women are literally vessels of life. This is a remarkable power as it is a remarkable sacrifice.
I personally always find it absolutely hilarious when I see especially men discussing the politics of abortion and birth control or babies in general. And I wonder to myself, don’t they know that whatever their clerics, judges and politicians agree on the true judges of whether this life enters this world or not has already been decided? It has always been up to women. We are the owners of that decision.
I could literally kill myself or starve myself and my baby is dead too. Isn’t that abortion? And I don’t need state-funding or special pills to do so. In fact women had been dealing with the business of maternity before government or medicine.
And I use this example because once women have babies inside them, they have all the practical power but now the humanity I was talking about earlier comes into play here. Women can either torment men with this power they have over life and death or accommodate men because the power doesn’t end after birth and we all know this. The loyalty we accord to our mothers is something perverse and this goes a long way to show us the power of matriarchy which I think is often underappreciated.
In fact I have noticed, people who are scarred by their mothers are some of the most severed abused people on the planet, right up there with POWs and hostages of Guantanamo Bay and this is just one area where women trounce men. Part of that elusive female privilege nobody ever wants to talk about.
So what!
Finally after all those tedious things I’ve said we are at the only part I really want you to remember. The so what to all of this, now that we are in this mess.
The first is to move the dial of feminism away from trying to attain equality and instead to attaining equity.
And before I mention the others, I want to mention something I would advise against which is the renunciation of feminism. The title of the article is indeed, ‘the feminist fraud,’ but I would like to think jumping ship makes no sense at this point. The vessel is good and so are the engineers, we just need to tweak the blue prints.
I am not one of those who would say oh let’s just scrape it all and go for human rights. That’s like saying the answer to racism is colour blindness which in actuality is diminishing all the pain of all the Africans who have and continue to suffer under white supremacy.
The truth is, feminism is called feminism for a reason, it is because females have suffered and still continue to suffer. We still live in the same world where the #metoo stories exist, where every other day in South Africa at least one woman is brutally murdered by a man, where Sudanese girls defending themselves from abuse by their illegal husbands are sentenced to death, where there is a teen pregnancy crisis in the Phillipines and where girls in Pakistan are still killed for honour and if they survive they are cajoled by society to forgive also known as exonerating the attempted murder.
We must be careful not to diminish the very real struggles of women because its delicate and it always is when people are in pain.
We only need to add to our repertory, the plight of men which means working hand in hand with Men’s Rights Activists because everyone needs help. And let me be very clear, this is advice is only for real feminists, radical feminists who I personally do not consider feminists who want to build women up on the pyre of men or misogynist groups who have no real issues to discuss other than whingeing about women belonging in the kitchen or their invisible emasculation are fringe groups that will always exist and hopefully will one day be extinguished because what I do know now is that we really are in this together.
Men too should be heard which is something that is regularly overlooked. In fact ignorance is one of the ways men have been abused for a long time. It’s time to embrace them because they do in fact matter. I did hear one really interesting statement from a male activist saying that, ‘In geometry the distance between A and B is the same as the distance between B and A, so if a man must listen to a woman to understand her experience the opposite must also be true.’
As good feminist males decided to listen and reassure women on their journey of feminism it is time for good feminist females to also listen and reassure men on their journey of feminism.
Feminism is for all of us, and has remarkably changed the landscape of the world for women, for the better . Why shouldn’t it do the same for men?
Men proliferate the patriarchy because feminism has abandoned them in the old world with a noose. Men too want laws to respect their reproductive rights and give them paternity leave so they too can bond with their babies, they want laws to protect them from false accusation of sexual assault. They want to be able to be vulnerable without immediately being labelled, ‘gay’ not that I have anything against homosexuality. Men want to be heard and embraced in all their complexity. They want women to love them for them not their money, their jobs or their cars. And I think the most critical one of them all, men want to be allowed to love women correctly without the crippling fear of ostracism as well as each other.
There is one of my all-time favourite lyrics of all time I think perfectly fits this moment.
I am not the only traveler, who has not repaid his debt.
Lord Huron- The place we met.
So I wanted to write a review on this book. So cliché by the way, after so much has been written already, written much better than if I had done the writing. Therefore, I will settle not for a review, rather an opinion and a half-baked one. I’ll explain later, but don’t let that stop you, do read on.
What I meant by half-baked is that I haven’t read the entire book. And that is not a subtraction to this review/ opinion. Quite the contrary, in fact it is more of an exaltation. You really do not need to finish this book to realize the potency of it. The story this woman tells is not only peculiar and unjust to all of the characters, literally with no exception. It is a masterpiece of the human story. And the way she tells it, the neutrality of it, to be able to balance the good and bad so precariously since in every moment they exist, at times confusingly melded in others horribly in contradiction. But both sides exist, it is a story with joy and happiness as well as sorrow and pain. It is a remarkable feat how she laid down this delicate story so intricately.
You know in the beginning, she sets out with a disclaimer that this is not about Mormonism. Unfortunately, the few interviews I’ve except the one with Gayle have centered on the religious aspect ignoring the story underneath, the powerful literature of her life that nearly drowned her and she eventually survived and yet even after saving herself, she faced the ultimate loss. Loss of family, the one thing she had clung to as much as she possibly could even as the separation of her own ideas’ and her family’s unfolded.
I was moved by this story because it is one of triumph. What I would otherwise refer to as true human courage and I am a 23 year old woman in Kenya so yes. Yes her aim to reach far and beyond her beloved Buck’s Peak with this story, to teach another, so different from herself some monumental ideas framed by the chapters of her life has been achieved.
She has done a fine job of bringing to the forefront ideas in a palatable and I hate to say this but edible way for public consumption. I hate to say edible as if the events of the book are so thrilling and interesting which they are and which she has represented ever so artfully. But alas this isn’t some wonderful imaginings or her life shrouded in a mirror image like say Kafka who wrote the same story over and over again. The bureaucracy, the tedium and the madness of paperwork but he covered it with the gauze of literature each time. This book is not that, this is her actual life.
If there is something that is displeasing, it isn’t a way to bring out an idea, it is an actual fact of life. Something that happened.
I can only commend her for the bravery for stripping her story and herself like this and presenting it to us in a manner that we would be both appalled and enticed by, in the hopes that we may learn something.
I feel the sacrifice because I write stories too but this was on another level. And you mustn’t forget that she is human too. Some of the things that happened, not only to her but to her family will follow her to her grave, of that I am sure. Even in her interviews, there is a controlled stiffness to her, not like the fluidity of her words in this book. The events changed her, she even spoke of how her brother the one who introduced her to the entire idea of schooling also had the same scars. And I’m not talking about the physical scars, I mean the mental ones, those bruising his psyche. Even after years of being away from that brainwashed environment he still did not trust medicine so much so that his children weren’t immunized for a long time.
The same goes for Tara. The violence both physical and mental that her brother inflicted on her. The terrible confinements of thought her father had on women and their relationship to their bodies, modesty and God I am sure haunt her to date.
This book was a rude and painful awakening. Now I can thank my parents enough for just one thing, exposure. I was floored by how the level of exposure and ideas you are allowed in your developmental years can define you for life. It taught me about the carnage of mental illness going unchecked and violence most of all. Violence and the hold it can have on a person. How it can twist and contort who you are until you are unrecognizable to yourself and the world.
I would advise everyone who can to read it and to do so. And to do it soon. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, after reading this you too will be educated. Mark my words.
NB/ Even the cover how her mountains loom before her, like her childhood did but both are encapsulated by the pencil indicative of education. That explained everything that went on there. This book is just magical.
ofsenseandsensibility 