Suren Pillay
A Second Look
On my way to work, I passed a billboard stuck on to a light pole advertising the One City, Many Cultures festival. Which “culture”, I wondered, of these “many cultures” would I be a part of in the making of this “one city”?
If you were to look at my name, for example, you might say, oh, that’s easy. But, is it?
An identity, a culture, is ascribedto me by others, based on a series of markers, like name, appearance, eating habits, and so on. If, for example, my name has it roots in Hinduism, many might be inclined to ascribe this identity to me. On the basis of this religious identity, a series of traits may also be inferred.
Yet, let’s say I come from a Roman Catholic background, but was raised agnostically. Let’s say I am a product of a diverse set of influences and I don’t find myself at home in any single cultural identity. How do I participate in this event?
This question indicates a more fundamental problem. What do the organisers mean when they talk of cultures? Has culture become a synonym for race and/or religion? If being a Jew, a Muslim or a Hindu is a cultural identity, what does that mean for those who are ascribed identities by others?
By saying Cape Town is one city with many cultures, we may be doing two negative things. Firstly, we are forcing people to become aware of their “differences” when they may not have been. Where the lines may have been grey, the actions and behaviours murky and tangled, the values and beliefs heterogeneous, mixed, contradictory, they are now purified into clear lines of where “you” are and where “I” am. Instead of relating to others as people, as someone who likes the same music I do, who reads the same books or doesn’t like the films I do, the lines of difference are demarcated along “cultural” lines.
Secondly, the idea that Cape Town is one city with many cultures reinforces a sense of difference among those people who do adhere and cling to and assert their racial and religious identities.
Why is it a problem to do this? It is a trend which has been imported from multiculturalist movements in the United States and Europe, where people “othered” by Anglo-Saxonism sought to assert their right to exist and partake in the making of the nation, to say “we are African- Americans” or “Hispanic-Americans” as equal citizens.
Is this type of multiculturalism appropriate for a South Africa in which differences are so clearly marked, almost ingrained in the psyche so as to constitute a strain of prejudice that is frightening? Do we want to further normalise these racialised differences?
The challenge is to make cultural differences unfamiliar, not to render them nostalgically soft-lit and serene, but unveil them as “constructions”, patterns of ideas, beliefs.
My objection is the same as my objection to unbridled nationalism and any other identity which furthers a notion of “us” and “them”.
This “in-group” mentality, for sure, does have its positive effects in that it can stabilise, make coherent a disparate and unconnected group of people and orient them toward shared goals, values, beliefs and actions. The flipside is that it often goes with a notion of superiority, a feeling, sometimes overt but more often subliminal, that “my” culture is better than “theirs”.
These “differences” are not manufactured in a timeless warp, but in a society in which power is everywhere. The unavoidable coupling of difference with power is where these differences reveal a latent viciousness: their capacity to draw borders in blood. To slaughter, to gas, to hack, to chop. Hutu or Tutsi, Serb or Croat, gentile or Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, South African or amakwerekwere … the list is endless.
For, we must be clear, who we are is constituted in difference, by what we are not. As a nation, a community, a religious group, a “race” and ethnic identity, when we choose to be one thing it is because we are not something else.
That is what the celebration of Cape Town as One City with Many Culturesdoes. It forces us to be one thing: a cultural identity. One cultural identity, not a mixed cultural identity, a hybrid cultural identity, a shared cultural identity, but different, separate cultural identities.
It celebrates what we don’t have in common, in a town, in a country, with 400 years of experience of this. It does not challenge us to change our prejudices, but makes us feel comfortable with them, it gives them new life, allowing them to dance in the robes of a new legitimacy.
We are not one city but many cities. Turning off the N2 on to Bhunga Avenue in Langa takes you to a different city than the ones nestled in the leafy bosom of Table Mountain.
Spatially, Capetonians find their meeting points in places of severe power hierarchies – in offices, on factory floors or the homes of madams – but we return, we go home, to different “imagined” worlds. The mental postcards we take with us and send each day from this city will show very different images.
It may be a picture of silhouetted couples against a liquid silver surf at sunset, framed by the most delicate of pink skies. It may be of a white foreman who calls me a stupid darkie when I don’t understand his English. It may be a picture of an Indian madam who prays devoutly to her gods but makes me drink from a different cup, eat outside, and not let me use the toilet -the one I clean every day.
A collection of these postcards from this city, these many cities, might be more interesting, more challenging … more rewarding.