Eish, the papers. Russia’s world-famous Bolshoi Ballet is apparently trying to get rid of a fat ballerina. A spokes-person, speaking from St Petersburg, said that the problem was that male dancers whose job was to lift the ballerina into the air while doing muscular spins and twirls and so on, risked injuring their backs. ”And a dancer without back,” the spokes-person added, in impeccably Russian English, ”has no more career.”
The heavy ballerina is fighting back, claiming that the Bolshoi management just doesn’t like the way she looks.
It seems scarcely possible that she could be admitting to fulfilling the two fatal criteria for the Westernised image of attractiveness — being both fat and ugly. But it could give rise to a whole new expression: ”The fat lady’s dancing.” It would draw the crowds — in Africa, at least.
The West, as ever, just wouldn’t know when it was on to a good thing. Which is why that well-built ballerina might be heading for the dole queue as Russia heads increasingly away from the equal opportunities of socialism and embraces the narrow-minded individualism of the West.
These days it ain’t cool to be fat. The fuller figure that was celebrated by Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and the rest of the Renaissance gang somehow crashed spectacularly out of style shortly after the end of the so-called First World War. You might say it fell through the floor under the weight of its own extravagance.
Thin was in. Gaunt was hot.
Maybe it had something to do with the way the British, the French, the Belgians, the Germans and so on were forced to adjust their diets in the age of wartime food rationing. Maybe the sheer weight of the images of millions of starving refugees wandering through the blasted post-war European landscape pricked consciences among the overfed victors. Whatever the case, curves were out, and the ironing-board figure was in — and remains so to this day.
And white ballerinas flying effortlessly through the air continue to be the ultimate expression of this supposedly desirable, Eurocentric, narcissistic condition. Which probably explains why you don’t see so many black ballerinas out there. They suffer from a culturally inspired reverse weight disadvantage — the same old story once again.
You can’t say the same about Zimbabwe. People are dying like flies, and no one is doing anything about it. Aids and starvation are collectively making sure that there are fewer and fewer potential fat ballerinas being raised in the country. If the situation were not so ghastly, it would really look like a macabre cartoon.
Consider this: last week a respectable South African news- paper reported that desperate Zimbabweans are playing dead in order to jump queues for petrol. Yes, people now have to queue for everything in that former bread- basket of a country — for food, for petrol and even to collect their pay cheques from the bank, which usually end up short because the banks simply don’t have enough actual currency to honour the cheques that people present.
But the lingering image on the television screens is of petrol queues, winding hopelessly through the streets of the country’s dying cities. Apparently people get so desperate that they resort to all sorts of subterfuges to avoid having to spend most of the week waiting to fill up the gas tank. People gang up to try to beat the system. Funeral cortèges are exempt from these ignominious queues — presumably because the quicker the dead go away, the less they will be noticed in the gathering catastrophe of Paradise. But even in death, things get unstuck.
One outfit that was trying to jump the queue got rumbled because the petrol pump attendants became suspicious when they saw no sign of mourners hanging round the gas station.
The rule is, you can jump the queue if you can show a bona fide corpse. The gas attendants, playing by Information Minister Jonathan Moyo’s rules, opened the coffin and found one of Zimbabwe’s last living citizens staring up at them from inside. The fake hearse had to go back to the back of the queue. (In true-to-form shoddy South African journalism no one reported what happened to the guy inside the coffin, or whether the guys actually got their gas in the end, but never mind.)
But setbacks like this do not deter many people caught up in this desperate situation from giving it another go, even with the president and government ministers responding to the crisis with the equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s famous comment that, if the ordinary people couldn’t find bread, they should eat cake. A crisis always breeds a new class of predators.
Undertakers in Harare are apparently doing a thriving trade renting out corpses to would-be fuel queue jumpers. There are no reports of arrests and prosecutions for this macabre practice. But then again, since everything else is so haywire in Mugabeland, maybe this is perfectly legal. The ruling regime doesn’t seem to have many ways of winning friends, anyway. It might well be relying on stiffs and undertakers for its bedrock support at this late stage of the game.
So we live in a bizarre kind of post-no-war kind of post-Cold War kind of world, with fat ballerinas fighting for their survival on one side, and the living dead being press-ganged into petrol queues on the other.
What should we make of it? Who should we blame? Who is going to come up with the answers?
Me, myself, personally, I think it’s all too out of hand for anyone to fix. Which is probably why so many of our know-it-all politicians are turning to religion or becoming witchdoctors.
Everyone for themselves and the devil take the hind legs — fat or thin.