31/12/2018

Flash, flesh




They say that when you die, life passes you by in a flash. You witness the key moments of your life. I didn't believe it, and yes, I was right. 
But death has allowed me this and assured me that every person, at least those who choose to be buried, is conscious for the first 5 minutes in the coffin, awake to taste the loneliness that inhabiting this nothing entails. Five minutes, because no one will last longer.



The Telegraph


Well, here I am. My first thoughts go to my father, whom I often thought of in the first days, weeks, months after his funeral, so alone in his grave.

How I pressed myself against him, sitting on the back of his bike. How I looked at him, on my own bike, during a trip, at a turn, a junction. Are we going left, right or straight on?


I see the penis of the boy next door, he was older than us. I feel that there were several children present, but who?  Who was there? Can I talk about it?  I remember nothing, nothing  about  how I ended up in this situation,   nothing about what happened next, no, only the image of his penis, his bent, not stiff penis, the glans is still hidden. Kinda cute. 



Those were  the years of "in the bushes" and it was written with chalk on walls that I went with that girl.  And when I passed that text, I wondered if she was really in love with me.
I see her before me now.  She had a beautiful  soft, round face, she spoke, what did she say? Her lips were moist, her eyes sparkling, she was eager  to live. 


I am thinking of the car accident on the ring road at the end of our street, in which a young girl died.  In order to save her for life, I would have liked to die.  This kind of sacrifice I have felt all my life, when reading about a tragic accident in which a woman died. Let  her live!   Most recently, the death of Bethan Roper, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, who died leaning out of the window of a moving train and being hit by a tree or a branch.








I remember my niece Marie, the first woman in my life.   I fell in love with her.  Her powdered face and pink lipstick, her dark hair in a beehive, the skirt and her legs in nylons.  Such a skirt that brought the knees together.  I longed  to wear such a skirt.   The pencil skirt feels different from looser skirts, and impacts the wearer's movements and posture. Walking needs to be done in short strides, and entering and leaving a car gracefully takes practice. When sitting, the legs need to be close together. Activities such as climbing ladders and riding bicycles can be very difficult in a pencil skirt. Due to reduced ventilation, the pencil skirt is warmer than other styles, and it is less likely to be blown up by gusts of wind.”



I remember rubbing my knees together, getting an erection and soon after that spraying my seed. I felt the little shocks behind my balls. I remember the sweet smell of sperm. It was during a mathematics class in the first class of high school.  I was terrified during those lessons.  Afraid of being asked to explain and solve a mathematical problem before class.
The stain in my pants. Seen by someone? The smell ? Did no one smell that?

To soothe myself, I have masturbated every day of all my life, say from the age of twelve. Nowadays I have to use my hand.  



I remember the first issues of Transexual Climax, a magazine of the Swedish Color Climax Corporation, which I bought in the eighties.  I recognized something of myself in the models and was moved. I sensed a deep understanding. I was envious of them.  They looked beautiful and well-accomplished.   Hybrid creatures in beautiful clothes, fucking and sucking in luxury apartments.


I searched through Google Images, using the terms camel toe and thigh gap, collecting photos on my hard drive.  The first term refers to the print of the female genitals in textile, the second to the absence of the penis.



For the first we went to England for the holidays. We have arrived in Calais. I get out of the car. It will take a while before we can board the train that will take us through the tunnel to our destination.  I look at a couple nearby, they’ve just stepped out of the car to stretch their legs. They were clearly in love with each other. If only that  young blonde woman was my companion! No, I long to be that woman!

The five minutes are almost over. Have I come to insight? No, as usual I was only looking for distraction. But I have accomplished it. 








29/12/2018

Friedrich Schlegel on philosophy and poetry




Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) – whose full name was Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel – was a leading philosopher of German Romanticism, as well as a poet and a scholar. Together with his brother August Schlegel he was at the center of early German Romanticism. Romanticism was an 18th-19th century movement that appeared in Germany, Britain, France, and other countries. Its ideal was to unify the different aspects of the human world – philosophy, poetry, the sciences, art, nature – around aesthetics, or beauty. As Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “The Romantic imperative demands that all nature and science should become art, and art should become nature and science.” This ideal took various shapes, sometimes that beauty is the basis of truth, sometimes that poetry should be the model of all fields of knowledge, or that life and philosophy should be made poetic, etc. The result was much emphasis on feelings, creative imagination, and non-rational elements of existence (although without rejecting reason and systematic thinking). 

 Friedrich Schlegel was born in Hanover, Germany. In his mid-twenties he moved to Jena and collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Fichte, and Caroline Schelling (who married his brother). Together with his brother, he founded the journal Athenaeum, and published in it fragments and essays about the principles of Romanticism. He later moved to Berlin, where he lived with the thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher and met his future wife, Dorothea Veit, daughter of the Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn. She was a married woman, nine years older than him, but they started an affair. Even after she divorced, they remained unmarried, because he despised social norms. Eventually they married and joined the Catholic Church. After some writing and publishing activity he went to Paris, where he gave philosophy lectures and studied Indian languages and wisdom. He published an influential book on the topic, in which he argued that European languages and Sanskrit have a common origin, a view that is accepted today. Throughout the years his social and political views changed: he turned away from his earlier radicalism and became conservative and opposed to civil liberties. In 1809 he went to Vienna and took up political positions and also wrote texts on philosophy, literature and history. He died at the age of 56.

On philosophizing  - Fragments and Symphilosophy

The following are some of “the Atheneum fragments” which Schlegel published in 1797-1798 in Atheneum, the journal which he and his brother founded. For the Romantics, particularly for Schlegel, the philosophical fragment was an important format of writing philosophy. Each fragment is an incomplete idea, written spontaneously, and is therefore open-ended. It inspires or suggests, but without having a finished meaning. In this sense, a collection of philosophical fragments is creatively open to the universe. It points to the unity of everything, but without trying to capture it with a theory. 

 The idea of writing in fragments is related to another Romanic notion used by Schlegel, that of symphilosophy (Symphilosophie in German) – which means philosophizing together. In this process, each philosopher contributes a few fragments, so that the collection of fragments creates a whole composed by several authors. Both of these methods, fragment-writing and symphilosophy, were used to point to an ideal harmonic whole which cannot be captured in a theory. But this does not mean that the Romantics rejected systematic philosophy. Rather, they aimed at a balance between systematic and fragmentary thinking. Indeed, Schlegel also wrote and lectured systematic texts and lectures. 

53. It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. The mind will simply have to decide to combine the two.

 54. You can only be in the process of becoming a philosopher, you cannot be one. As soon as you think that you are a philosopher, you stop becoming one.

 77. A dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments. An exchange of letters is a dialogue on a larger scale. And memoirs constitute a system of fragments. But so far, no existing genre is fragmentary both in its form and in its content: completely subjective and individual – and at the same time completely objective, and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences.

 112. Philosophers who are not opposed to each other are usually joined only by sympathy, not by symphilosophy.

 116. Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim is not just to reunite all the separate types of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to, and has to, mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, and make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetical. It should poeticize wit, and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good solid educational matter, and animate them with the pulses of humor. It embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art […] to the sigh, to the kiss that the poetizing child breathes in a natural song. […] Only Romantic poetry can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole surrounding world, an image of the period. […] 

The romantic kind of poetry is still in the process of becoming. This, in fact, is its real essence: that it is always in the process of becoming and is never perfected. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a guessing interpretation would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free, and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet cannot tolerate any law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind – it is, as it were, poetry itself. Because in a certain sense, all poetry is, or should be, romantic.

 125. Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new historical period of the sciences and arts if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartfelt that it would no longer be unusual for several complementary minds to create communal works of art. One is often struck by the idea that two minds really belong together, like divided halves that can realize their full potential only when joined. […]

206. A fragment, like miniature work of art, must be entirely isolated from the surrounding world, and be completely in itself like a porcupine.

 264. You shouldn’t try to symphilosophize with everyone, only with those who are à la hauteur. 

 297. A work is cultivated when it is everywhere sharply limited by boundaries, but within those limits it is limitless and inexhaustible; when it is completely faithful to itself, entirely homogenous, and nevertheless exalted above itself. Like the education of young Englishmen, the most important thing about it is le grand tour. It should have traveled through all the three or four continents of humanity […] in order to broaden its vision and give its spirit more freedom and inner versatility, and thus greater independence and self-sufficiency.

 344. Philosophy is a mutual search for omniscience.

 451. Universality is the gradual realization of all forms and substances. Universality can reach harmony only through the unification of poetry and philosophy; and even the greatest and most universal works of isolated poetry and philosophy seem to lack this final synthesis. They come to a stop, still imperfect but close to the goal of harmony. The life of the Universal Spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions. All individuals – that is, all original and eternal individuals – live in it. It is a genuine polytheist, and it bears within itself all Olympus.







Philosophy and the unity of life.

Throughout his philosophical career, Schlegel believed that philosophy, like poetry, should aim at the unity of life. Although the life we see around us seems to be divided, although it consists of conflict and contradictions, life in its highest form is a unity. Romantic philosophy, as he envisioned it, aims at restoring this unity. 

 The following text is adapted from Lecture 1 from his series of lectures, titled “Philosophy of Language,” which he gave in Germany during the last years of life, in 1828-29. By this time he had turned away from his radical years, and had become conservative in his political and ethical views. Yet, the theme of philosophy as unifying life remained central in his late philosophy. Schlegel argues here that if we want to truly understand life, we should explore it not in everyday moments in which it is fragmented and in conflict, but in its pure or higher state, in which it is a harmonious unity.



“If the object of philosophy is the sublime understanding of our inner life, which struggles to expose the mystery of its own being, how could it possibly want to exclude one half of humanity, or society, or of civilized life? The proper sphere of philosophy, no less than of art, is the whole of human life. […] Therefore, the field in which philosophy has to act and work is not a narrow field, limited and confined by some unjustified exclusivity. On the contrary, it must be complete and perfect, as much as humanly possible. And for this reason, too, philosophy must not, and cannot start from a consciousness that is artificially divided, and which is only half of its true self, and which, biased in its views, is divorced from real life. It can originate only from the mind’s greatest perfection and its full and most undivided totality, so that it makes this consciousness clear to itself and to others. 

 […] 

A true and living philosophy cannot choose and follow the method of higher and higher abstraction, much less can it regard it as the only right method. It starts, rather, from life itself and the feeling of life, and indeed from a feeling and consciousness of life which strives to be as complete as possible. It does not seek its success and hope of true knowledge in any artificial and elaborate division of the human mind. […] This kind of philosophy is based on an assumption which is entirely arbitrary, and which is discovered to be baseless once we examine it more carefully: It assumes that the human mind as it exists now is in a perfect state, and has always remained entire and complete, and has not changed from its original constitution. It believes that nothing is missing for the task of finding the truth, except for a careful and skillful analysis of man’s self-consciousness, and a correct and appropriate classification of its different elements. But we, in contrast, whenever we examine the experience of our inner consciousness, and try carefully to understand it simply as it is, the first thing that strikes us most strongly is conflict and opposition – not only between ourselves and the external world, but also within our own self in the inmost center of the mind. Thus, our mind seems to fall apart and to split into absolute unconsciousness and irreconcilable contrarieties. 

 […] 

The immediate and specific aim of philosophy is simply to analyze and clearly understand the psychological fact of the conflict and opposition which exists between the several faculties of the soul and spirit, and to present it just as it is. After accomplishing this, philosophy will continue to show the point from which the work of restoration must begin, or at least the way which leads to it – the path of returning to the original harmony of the soul. In other words, the ultimate object of philosophy will be to discover the way to restore a living and perfect consciousness, and to create a more harmonious cooperation of its divided powers and faculties, whether of soul or spirit. 

 Now, even in ordinary experience, under certain circumstances this inner conflict and disagreement between the understanding and the will, reason and imagination, is happily overcome. When this happens, the faculties which previously were separated and divided, or which fought against each other, are brought into profitable agreement and harmony, at least partly. These rare moments are characterized by extraordinary energy of character, unique artistic genius, or other high and rare mental gifts. These, therefore, do not only prove the possibility of restoring the conflicting and isolated elements of the inner man to completeness of unity and entirety of life, but also provide stable starting points from which we can begin with the work of restoration. Such moments, however, are only exceptions from the usual situation. They are, no doubt, fortunate and rare exceptions, but even so they prove the universal fact of the internal conflict among the faculties of the human mind. 

 […] 

To sum up, the ordinary state of the human mind, as it shows itself in its present condition to our inner perception, is in a state of four-fold conflict and disturbance. We may say that it is a consciousness divided to four, that it is the victim of the double opposition between the understanding and the will, and between reason and imagination. […] Now, the return from the divided mind into a harmonious consciousness is the very beginning of a true philosophy of life, and, indeed, of a renewed and enhanced vitality. “




Poetic energy.

Poetry was a central topic for German Romantic thinkers. It was viewed as a metaphysical force representing unity, harmony, and beauty, which were humanity’s highest goals and aspirations. Poetry was often associated with philosophy – poetry and philosophy enriching each other, uniting, and acting towards unity and harmony. 

 Friedrich Schlegel, who was the main critical thinker of the German Romantic school, spoke about poetry in many of his texts. But his most important text about the topic was Dialogue on poetry, published in 1800. It is structured, like Plato’s Symposium, as a collection of speeches and conversations between several people. The selections below are from the first two main sections, “Epochs of literature” and “Talk on mythology” (slightly adapted for ease of reading). They express Schlegel’s idea that poetry is a metaphysical energy that flows through human history.

“Epochs of literature’ 

This first main section is about the history of poetry. It describes Homer as the “fountain” of Greek poetry and Western poetry in general. From there, poetry continued to flow like a river that inspired future poets and that split into several smaller rivers. The details of this historical exposition should not interest us here, but note that Schlegel uses the metaphor of a flowing river of poetic inspiration:



“It is an essential quality of all art to follow closely what has already been formed. Therefore, history goes back from generation to generation, from phase to phase, always farther back into antiquity, to its original source. 

 For the modern generation, for Europe, this source resides in Greece, and for the Greeks and their poetry is was Homer and his followers. This was the inexhaustible source of poetry, a powerful stream of representation in which waves of life rush against each other, a peaceful ocean where the fullness of the earth and the splendor of the heavens are nicely reflected. Just as the ancient thinkers saw water as the beginning of nature, so does the oldest poetry manifest itself in fluid form.”

From ancient Greece, the flow of poetic energies continued to flow in many rivers throughout the history of Europe: “…The Romans had only a short outburst of poetry… the stream of fervent love flowed powerfully from Horace’s sincere heart… With the appearance of the Teutons, a new fountain of a new heroic poetry flowed across Europe. And then the wild energy of Gothic poetry merged… After it sprang from such sources, the stream of poetry in the fortunate Italian nation could not run dry again…”






Talk on mythology

In the next section, which is also built as a speech, Schlegel presents his vision about the essence and future of poetry. He tells us that the spirit of poetry must be given a new life. But in order to do this, it needs a new cultural source of life. Without such a common fountain, each poet would be a separate creator, an isolated little fountain that is forced to start poetry from the beginning. This common fountain of poetic inspiration, Schlegel proposes, is mythology – a non-rational, complex, “chaotic” framework about human life, nature, and reality. 

 Poetry needs individual creators, but it also needs a cultural fountain of poetic energies. To be a poet you must have certain personal gifts, but you also need to be connected to the river of poetic energies that is bigger than you. In the ancient world, this river was fed by mythology. Now, in modern times, we need a new poetic source that would unify all poetic creativity.


“You yourselves have written poetry, and you must have often felt the absence of a firm foundation for your activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere. The modern poet is forced to create all these things from within himself, and many have done it wonderfully. But until now, each poet had to do it separately, and to work on it from its very beginning, like a new creation out of nothing. 

 I will go right to the point. Our poetry, I maintain, lacks a focus, something like mythology was for the ancients. We can summarize the inferiority of modern poetry to ancient poetry in these words: We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to getting one! Or, rather, it is time that we work seriously together to create one. 

 […]
The new mythology must be created from the deepest depths of the spirit. It must be the most creative work of art, because it must include all the other arts. It must be a new vessel for the ancient eternal fountain of poetry, an infinite poem which contains the seeds of all other poems. 

 You may smile at this mystical poem, and at the disorder that might result from so many poetic creations. But the highest beauty – indeed the highest order – is that of chaos. It is a chaos which waits only for the touch of love to reveal itself as a harmonious world, a chaos like ancient mythology and poetry were. Because mythology and poetry are one and inseparable. All poems of antiquity join one another, until a whole is created from the many members. Everything inter-penetrates everything else, and everywhere there is one and the same spirit, only expressed differently. And thus, it is not an empty image to say: Ancient poetry is a single, indivisible, and perfect poem. Why shouldn’t that which once was, come to life again? – in a different way, of course. And why not in a more beautiful, in a greater way? 

 […] 

Because this is the beginning of all poetry: To cancel the laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of the imagination, into the original chaos of human nature. I don’t know a better symbol for this than the many different gods of the ancient world. 

 […] 

We must be able to press towards the goal in more than one way. Let each one of us pursue his own way in joyful confidence in the most individual manner. Because individuality has the greatest validity here, where the sublime is at issue – as long as we understand what individuality means: indivisible unity and an inner and vital coherence. From this standpoint, I would not hesitate to say that the true value – indeed the virtue of man, is his originality. 

 […] 

And so, let us, by light and life, no longer hesitate, but accelerate the great development to which we are called, each one according to his own mind. […] What an immense expansion will this power experience, and especially now! It seems to me that anybody who could understand the historical period – that is, those great principles of general renewal and of eternal revolution – would be able to grasp the poles of mankind, to recognize the activity of the first man, as well as the nature of the Golden Age which is about to come. Then the empty chatting would stop, and man would become conscious of what he is: He would understand the earth and the sun."





Philopractice  , July 18 , 2018.












27/12/2018

Power Walking




Pretty girl

I am 20. I am walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea in London. It is the 1980s. Three men are coming towards me; they are clearly together, though the foot traffic on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. They are white, dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts. The first man, as he passes, looks me in the eye and says: “You’re a pretty girl.” The second one smirks, but says nothing. The third one leans into my face and breathes: “Nigger!”

My final year at university and I had a part-time job working for an American foreign correspondent. One of my tasks was to pick up the broadsheets each morning, and in those pre-Internet days I would leaf through them and clip and file any articles on the stories he was covering. That day was a Saturday in summer. I generally came in later on the weekend and the street was already busy with people. I was on my way to his house with my haul of newspapers when I passed the three men.

You’re a pretty girl. Nigger.

The first remark did not seem designed to offend. You’re a pretty girl. It intruded on my thoughts, got my attention. Then came the complicity of the second man. Then, “Nigger!” What happened afterwards? Do you imagine that the first man berated the third man? Do you think they argued? And whose side did the second man take? None of that happened. I know it didn’t. You know it didn’t. The three men carried on walking down the road. At some point one of them likely turned to the others.

And they laughed.

Walking

A child learns to walk. The child hauls herself up on a chair or her mother’s knee, finds her balance and takes one tottering step and then another. The parents murmur sounds of encouragement, spread their arms. Come! Come! The father catches the child and swings her up in the air. My mother tells me that my approach was a little different from most infants’. I would crawl into the empty middle of the room and there I would take a breath and slowly rise. And I used my growing independence not to run towards her but to run gleefully away.


I grew up in the compounds of developing countries, in West Africa, where my father was from; and Southern Africa, the Middle and Far East, where my stepfather’s career as a diplomat took us later. The hazards of the compound were snakes mainly, and army ants. As children, my brother, my sister and I didn’t leave the compound alone much except to go and buy sweets or when we broke out in search of adventure. Around the age of five I began to borrow my brother’s clothes. Boys’ clothes afforded a greater practical freedom, were better for sliding down banisters, climbing trees, even the simple act of sitting. There was a lot of focus when I was growing up on making sure I sat properly, that is with my legs closed. My brother didn’t have to sit that way, which seemed odd to me, given that he had something far more prominent to display. I wondered why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we were the ones to wear skirts.

I went to boarding school at 6 and left at 18 for university in London. The enclosed worlds of compound life and British boarding school left me unprepared for the streets of the capital, the act of walking, specifically of walking alone and female down a street. Yet in my tomboy/cross-dresser days, which lasted until I was around 14, I had already begun to understand viscerally something I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t want to be a boy; I wanted the freedom I saw belonged to boys but not girls.


2017. I am standing on the platform of a London tube station, I’m back in the city where I lived for 30 years, before making my home in the United States. A young man is looking at me. I ignore him, but his stare is intrusive. When we board the train he stands very close to me, and at one point his hand touches mine. I am twice as old as him, which makes this situation somewhat unusual. But everything else about it is familiar, and I’m old enough now to recognize exactly what is going on. The next stop is mine and so I move to stand facing the door. He follows and stands right behind me; I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. The train is crowded, it’s unlikely anyone else has followed his behavior closely enough to think it out of line. What the young man doesn’t realize is that I am facing the wrong door. This is my old home station, and the doors behind us will be the ones to open. At the last moment I swing round and exit.

A week or so later, on the tube again, I catch the eye of a man sitting opposite me. For a few moments I hold his gaze and then I look away. In the moment of turning I see him smile and it is a smile of triumph. He has won something, he has defeated me. Like the first man he is very young, around 20. In that moment I realize something chilling. My God, I thought, he’s practicing.

Nobody tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze. My mother never told me that men may look at me but I may not look back. That if we do our look can be taken as an invitation. Men teach us that. Over the years we train our gaze to skim men’s faces, resting for only a split second, shifting fractionally sideways if our eyes happen to meet. The man on the other hand, if he so wishes, will look at your face, your breasts, your legs, your ass.

In her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey described how films are created to be seen from the point of view of the heterosexual male. Their female characters are presented to him as objects of desire. This is the “male gaze.” The gaze is power. Men own the power of the gaze. White people do, too. A white friend tells me of the time she took her adoptive daughter who is black to a small town in Maine and found her daughter the object of stares. “I guess there aren’t too many black people in that part of the country,” she suggests placatingly, because already I am visibly irritated. “And they don’t own a fucking television?” I say. “And they’ve never laid eyes on their president or his family?” (This was early 2016.) They stare because they can, by the gift of the power vested in them by their membership in the ethnic majority. They stare because her daughter’s discomfiture is nothing to them, may be the whole purpose.

When a man stares at a woman in public her sensitivities are, at the very least, immaterial to him. He owns the power of the gaze and he will, if he cares to, exercise it. The real mind-fuck is that enfolded into the action is the defense. The woman who complains may well find herself being told she should be flattered, that she is lucky men find her attractive.

“Where you going, baby?”

“Smile, little lady.”

“Sssssss!”

“Want some of this?”

“Look at the ass on that!”

“You wouldn’t be able to walk if . . .”

“’Til . . . it . . . bleeds.”


In the early 90s I shared an apartment in London’s Chelsea with a friend. One week, while repairs to the roof were being undertaken, we had scaffolding erected at the front of the house. My room was on the top floor and faced the street, and from there I could see the roofers go up and down the ladders. At certain times throughout the day they would take their breaks sitting on the scaffold deck right in front of my desk unaware that I could hear them as they took turns yelling comments at the women passing in the street below. The excitement each opportunity provoked was astonishing. “‘Here comes one, here comes one! Your turn!” One man in particular was actually jumping up and down on the scaffolding. The more evidently humiliated the woman, the greater the delight. From where I sat I noticed several things: Firstly, yes, the young and attractive women drew more aggressive attention, as if the men were intent on denigrating what they could not possess, to punish the woman for being desirable and also unobtainable to them; secondly, no woman who was walking alone was exempt; and thirdly, they especially liked to pick on women who were dressed for work, who almost certainly earned more than they did. The women were metaphorically stripped, just as women were in earlier times and still are publicly stripped in some parts of the world, for transgressing the boundaries of womanhood, for stepping out of their place. They were being shamed, stripped not of their clothing, but of their dignity.

As a child I was taught to ignore aggressive dogs, to keep walking. Once you’re out of its territory, the dog will leave you alone, so goes the conventional wisdom, and mostly it works. The same is supposed to be true of men, except it isn’t. They walk alongside you, they kerb-crawl you. If you tell them to leave you alone they will call you a bitch and ask you who the fuck you think you are. Every encounter, however seemingly benign, contains the possibility of violence. By the time it is over (you have entered a shop or a subway), your breath is coming quickly and your heart slamming against your ribcage. Why do men do this? Nobody asks the question and when I ask, I don’t get an answer. Sometimes it is said or suggested that this is simply the nature of men. What is interrogated more often is my response. Submissiveness is what is demanded. Women are taught not to answer back, for if we do we will escalate matters and then—the subtext—whatever follows will be our own fault.


Except I do, I do answer back. For, you see, it is in my nature. In London in those early years, I get into fights. In South Kensington a man threatens to punch me after I tell him to piss off. I say I am going to fetch a policeman and if he is still there I will have him arrested. He swears at me, but he goes. A man in Camden Town pulls out a knife and threatens to stab me in the stomach. A crowd, mostly white, gathers around me and watches to see what will happen. The man is black and so am I. The stand-off goes on for long seconds. “Do you want to fuck with me? Do you want to fuck with me?” Even then the ghost of a joke crosses my mind. Well, I thought I’d made it perfectly clear. Another man, also black and wearing dreads, moves through the audience. He walks up to us both, looks at the man with the knife and says: “What’s the problem, brother?” I never see that man again, not even to thank him, because the friend with whom I am walking has found a policeman and my harasser flees. But he is caught, and he goes to court and I am there, and I see him. His hair is braided and he wears a shirt and suit; he looks so different I wonder if I would have picked him out of a line-up. My statement is read to the court. He is found guilty, not of the sexual harassment which began the whole altercation, although the judge tuts at this part of my statement, but of possession of an offensive weapon. The case is over in minutes, my assailant is sent away to be sentenced at a later date. The girl I was walking with and her father attend the case. They both make it clear, though not unkindly because I have now learned my lesson, that this is my fault.


Later, when I tell the story I will discover that in the eyes of many of my white friends, the fact that I am black and both my harasser and savior are black makes this a “black thing.” Something in which they have no stake and in which the mostly white onlookers are now exempt from interfering; the courage of the dreadlocked man is suddenly not so great.


On the streets race and gender intersect, the dominance of men over women, of white over black, of white men over white women, of black men over black women, of Hispanic men over Hispanic women and so forth. Layered upon that is the relationship between men, the sometime competition and sometime complicity between men of all colors, the upholding of male power. This can play out in a variety of ways. For a woman of color, men of the same ethnicity may be ally or foe.

In London men view street harassment as an equal opportunities occupation. I’ve endured sexually aggressive behavior from men of every color and class. In New York I am rarely publicly bothered by white men. How to account for the difference? In America the edges of racial politics are sharper and more bloodied. Human motivations are often hard to fathom, but I’d give a good guess that white men in New York City are scared to be seen harassing a woman of color. To be seen. In public. There is also this—that within the codes of heterosexual masculinity, black men have ownership of and therefore power over black women. In some places this code is more strictly enforced than in others. On one of my last visits to the city I had to pass a group of workmen on a narrow sidewalk as they stood leaning with their backs against a building. In London this would be an inescapable moment. But we were in New York. All the men were white except one black man at the end. I was dragging an overnight bag and so my progress was slow. The men went silent and watched me as I passed. The unspoken rule, I sensed, was that the job of calling out to me belonged to the last man, the black man. I walked towards him and it seemed we both knew what the other was thinking. Would he betray his race or his place in the patriarchy? As I passed he leaned forward and, audible only to me, whispered: “I like your jacket.”


  Officers stand by in 1955 as religious leaders from Chicago demonstrate outside the White House in Washington over the      murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.




Emmett Till was murdered. Emmett Till did not own the power of the gaze, at least not as far as Carolyn Bryant was concerned. 50-plus years on, white women friends in New York complain of the behavior of some black guys there. They worry about being thought racist if they complain. This is the power play between men, the revenge exacted by certain black men upon white women but in reality upon white men. Payback is the pickup truck bearing a Confederate flag that cruises me twice on a long, lonely run in Western Massachusetts, the white guy with the baseball cap who turns his head and licks his lips on each pass.

#NotAllMen


At some point most women come to the silent and terrible realization that the men in their lives—fathers, brothers, uncles, boyfriends and husbands—are not especially outraged by their experience of sexual harassment.

Late one evening when I was in my mid-twenties I had a row with my then-boyfriend. I decided to go home until I remembered the time of night, that I didn’t have a car and would have to call a taxi if I hoped to execute my walk-out. I had very little money at the time and I’d have to weigh the cost of the taxi against the level of my outrage. A few months later, arguing with the same boyfriend (things didn’t last too much longer) while on holiday in Southern France, I remained walking on one side of the road while he crossed to the other. We were headed for the beach and the road was more or less empty. A man driving by, assuming I was alone, began to proposition me. I ignored him for a few moments and then I told him to get lost; finally I crossed to walk with my boyfriend and the man drove away. I remember very well my boyfriend’s reaction. He laughed at me.

Writing about South Africa, where the incidence of rape is among the highest in the world, the feminist activist, poet and academic Helen Moffett has stated: “Under apartheid, the dominant group used methods of regulating blacks and reminding them of their subordinate status that permeated not just public and political spaces, but also private and domestic spaces. Today it is gender rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated. This is largely done through sexual violence, in a national project in which it is quite possible that many men are buying into the notion that in enacting intimate violence on women, they are performing a necessary work of social stabilization.”

In other words, rapists are the shock troops of male power.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the uneasy conclusion that, whilst #notallmen are rapists or sexual harassers, equally #notallmen are too unhappy about the status quo either. The relative vulnerability of women in public spaces limits our freedom of movement and our choices. Good practice in personal safety—telling someone where we are going, allowing ourselves to be escorted home and not walking alone at night—all add up to an effective form of social control. “The necessary work of social stabilization.”

Only in the second half of the 20th century did middle-class women in many Western countries acquire some degree of freedom outside the home; before that, to walk unaccompanied was to be taken as a prostitute, a “woman of the streets,” a “streetwalker.” Walking, for a woman, can be an act of transgression against male authority. When a man walks aimlessly and for pleasure he is called a flâneur; a certain louche glamour attaches to the word. One rarely hears the term flâneuse. In her account of women walkers, itself called Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin observes that: “narratives of walking repeatedly leave out a woman’s experience.” Historically the free-ranging woman who dispensed with the domestic to claim ownership of the streets was a rare creature. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, George Sand, the flâneuses who recorded their flânerie were women who all defied male authority in other ways, too. George Sand wore male dress so that she could move more freely around Paris.


Only once has a man ever stood up for me against harassment by another man (with the exception of the dreadlocked man, though he did not know what had started the trouble) and the man who did so was gay. We were standing outside a bar in Soho in London smoking cigarettes when a young man passed me and made a remark to which I responded with a put-down. His rage was instantaneous. He was smoking too and he threatened to burn me with his cigarette, holding the lit end close to my cheek. My companion intervened and in doing so drew fire away from me, literally because now the burning cigarette tip was being held to his neck. The scene ended when a friend of the assailant pulled him away. Afterwards we talked about it. I observed that a straight man would almost certainly have reprimanded me for my comment but he, notably, had not. No, he told me, because he grew up having much the same fight on the streets: the sexual insults, the shouted provocations. As a gay man he had learned to stand up to bullies.


Yet when I have talked to straight men about what happens to me on the streets I have consistently been met with looks of blank innocence. They insist they know nothing of it. I have seen the same conversation played out extensively on social media where the men most devoted to the use of the hashtag #notallmen always claim ignorance, are “surprised,” so “surprised” they’ll go as far as to insist that what women are telling them cannot possibly be true, that invention or exaggeration on a global scale must surely be in play. Talking to a straight man about street harassment can be, as many black folk including black men have pointed out, like talking to some white people about the daily indignities of racism.

Somehow something enacted in broad daylight thousands of times in the lifetime of virtually every woman has gone entirely unnoticed by most straight men. At some point you have to ask: How can it be so?
How can it be so?


       
               A lithograph of George Sand dressed in men’s clothing by Paul Gavarni, circa 1840



On Matriarchy

I am driving down the road from my home in Freetown when a youth makes a kissing noise at me. I brake hard, bringing the car to a halt. “Did you hear that?” I ask the friend I have with me. She says she did. “I don’t believe it,” I tell her. To the young man I say: “Come here!” I expect this kind of behavior in many places, but I have not experienced it in the city where I spent many of my formative years. The youth, in his late teens or early twenties, is leaning against a wall in the company of four or so friends. One of them nudges him and points to me, telling him he is being called. He pushes off the wall and approaches the car; he saunters over but his cockiness has already lost its edge. People are watching, not just his mates but the women stallholders on the other side of the road. A couple of passersby, too, have stopped.

As I have said, I grew up in several countries in the world and as an adult I have traveled much of it. In every city and country I have ever visited I make tactical decisions before I step out of the door. Time of day, clothing, route: these things must be considered. Often this is done at a subconscious level; at other times advice might be sought or given. There is a constant tension between the desire to look one’s best, to be noticed, and the price that will exact. I want to dress for my destination, the person or people I am going to meet or the event I am headed for, but I must also dress for the men I do not know who I will encounter along the way. Anonymity is something I can only imagine, to walk unguarded an impossibility. Certain places, though, are better or worse than others.

When I start in on the young man in Freetown he apologizes almost at once. “My name is Aminatta,” I tell him. “And the next time you see me you will remember that and you will use it when you greet me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes Aminatta.”

“No!”

The youth looks startled.

“Yes, Aunty Aminatta.”

“Yes, Aunty Aminatta.”


Sierra Leone is what some anthropologists have called a “matriarchy posing as a patriarchy.” It is also a gerontocracy, and deference is expected of anyone younger towards anyone older, even if only by a few years. Over lunch I tell my stepmother what has happened and she laughs. “Oh, it’s those little dresses you wear. They think you’re younger than you are.” My mother, sitting sideways on her chair like a Victorian lady riding side-saddle, is dressed in robes arranged in swathes around her. I am wearing a cotton shift dress and sandals. Then: “Anyway the NGOs brought all that here with them.” She waves a hand as she sips her ginger beer. Freetown then was home to hundreds of Western aid workers, newly arrived in the wake of war. There’s a tendency to blame unpalatable social behavior on outsiders—and yes, everything about those young men (the sagging jeans, the backwards-turned baseball caps, the sullen expressions) spoke of an enthusiasm for American rap—but my stepmother is saying something different. She is saying that they were treating me as if I were a Western woman.

On my first visit to Ghana a couple of years later I have a series of similar encounters: In a hotel a young man in baseball clothes murmurs suggestively as I pass by. I stop and I yell at him. His companion, an older man in a business suit, turns and looks at the young man open-mouthed and orders him to apologize. As they walk away he continues to gesture angrily. The porter with my suitcase asks me what the young man said. He shakes his head: “They send them to America, you see.” A few days earlier I had taken a walk down the beach at another hotel. There were men working on the scaffolding of a building, and one of them called out to me. I stopped and shouted at him: “Is that how you talk to your mother?” A local friend who I tell later on will smile at this point in my story. “So they realized you are an African.” On my way back I had to pass the men again and I was a little concerned about how the next encounter might go, but the men were silent.

I won’t make a host of claims about the position of women in West African society and nor will I say that a man will never speak or behave insultingly to a woman in a public space. But I will say this: if he does and if she makes it her business to reply, she can expect the crowd to have her back.

Whose Space? Loos, Queues, And Other Places

When I was still at college I read in a newspaper of a study purporting to show that when a man and a woman are walking towards each other on the sidewalk, the woman invariably steps aside for the man. I told my flatmate about it, and the next time we went  out she announced gleefully: “You’re doing it! You’re doing it!” Ever since then, whenever I think about it, I try to hold my ground and have often found myself nose-to-nose with men who are evidently so used to the path clearing ahead of them they can’t figure out where I have come from. In the last year or so the discussion has resurfaced and now the behavior being described has its own portmanteau, “manslamming.”

In July of 2017 New York Times reporter Greg Howard, a black man, accused white women of doing exactly the same, writing: “When white women are in my path, they almost always continue straight, forcing me to one side without changing their course. This happens several times a day; and a couple of times a week, white women force me off the sidewalk completely.”

Earlier in the same year I was standing in line for the ladies’ in a theater in Baltimore. The theater was under renovation, some of the facilities were closed and the line was about 50 people long. Women were making way for very old women and women with disabilities, allowing them to jump the queue. The crowd that night was mostly white and by chance I found myself standing next to the only other woman of color in the line. A white woman, older (but not so old she might have skipped the queue) and evidently wealthy, walked down the line, stopped halfway and inserted herself just in front of me. I looked at her. I looked around. I caught the eye of the African American woman next to me. “Did that just happen?” I asked. She raised her eyebrows: “Don’t say anything,” she mouthed. But I did, I said: “Do you just do that then? Stand wherever in the line you want?” and eventually the white woman slipped out of the line and walked to the back. I asked the African American woman: “Was it just a coincidence that she stood in front of us?” And she replied: “I’m saying nothing,” and gave me a look like I had been born yesterday.

I return to Helen Moffett, who pointed to how, during apartheid in South Africa, the dominant group, whites, had used methods to regulate blacks in public spaces in ways which reminded them of their subordinate status. It’s all about power, people endeavoring, consciously and subconsciously and through myriad daily encounters, to establish dominance over those they consider less worthy. During the Jim Crow era in the United States, white Americans forced upon African Americans the same ignominies as white South Africans did upon their black populations, reserving certain public spaces and privileges for whites. When black people challenged this orthodoxy, it’s no coincidence they did it, just as black South Africans did, by walking, by marching, by crossing into those spaces barred to them.

Greg Howard asked an Asian friend, a man, whether he was forced off the sidewalk by white women on the streets of New York. The answer was no. It was the white men who plowed through him.

Many months ago at a friend’s book launch I was standing talking to a man I always liked to talk to whenever we met. He was tall, six foot two or three, and still broad shouldered though he was then in his eighties. We were standing close to the bar, and I was telling a story and turned at one point to find his face suffused with rage. I wondered what could possibly have happened, and I asked him if he was all right. “He would never, ever have done that 30 years ago,” he eventually said in a low voice. A man on his way to the bar had shouldered him. “As if I wasn’t there.” He’d been manslammed. I am as certain as I can possibly be that this man had never cat-called a woman, probably was even the kind of person who stepped aside for other people on the sidewalk. By the same token I am equally certain he has never endured a carload of women hurling obscenities at him, heard a woman hiss filth into his ear as he waited to cross a road, or seen a woman waggle her tongue and clutch at her crotch. I remember his face, the mix of fury and frustration, how taken aback I was that he could be so angry, because worse happened to me on any given day.

As I write this I wonder about all those guys, of every class and color, who have interrupted my thoughts in order to remind me of my place. For whom it was fun to try to unnerve or to humiliate me. To them I say, Just wait. It’s coming. Too late for me. Too late for you to learn much except a mote of what it might be like to be treated as if you don’t matter. But it’s coming.
I’d like to say I wish I were a better person than to feel that way.
I wish I could. But I can’t.

 Power Walking :  Aminatta Forna on the streets of London, Freetown and NYC. By Aminatta Forna. LitHub , September 19, 2018. 






This fall Freeman’s published Aminatta Forna’s essay “Power Walking,” a meditation on what it means to occupy and move through public space as a woman of color. It is a practical art form, Forna describes, that she had to learn. “Nobody tells young girls that men own the power of the gaze,” she writes. “My mother never told me that men may look at me but I may not look back.” This fall, Ms. Forna exchanged emails with another walker and writer, Taiye Selasi, a novelist who, like her, has had a home on three continents and notices the ways that power dynamics shift in each place, depending on whom she encounters. Who regards her and whether she can look back. Here is their conversation.


Taiye Selasi: Your entire essay is—like everything you write—beautiful, honest, insightful. Of the many, many things that strike me as deeply familiar and heartbreakingly true, there is this line just at the end: “I wonder about all those guys, of every class and color, who have interrupted my thoughts in order to remind me of my place.” Those words made me gasp. Somehow, I’d never organized my thoughts around those two sets words: “interrupting my thoughts” and “reminding me of my place.” And yet they are the crucial words. They contain all the violation, the violence.

First: the interruption of thought. What I most cherish about walking is its relationship to thinking. From the earliest age I’ve been admonished to “look where I’m going” and yet I can never quite manage it. I look up, at cloud formations; around, at passing strangers; down, at my own moving feet. That steady stream of visual information has a hypnotic effect; invariably I find myself lost in thought: about the clouds, the strangers, some lover, some plot. I’ve never walked for more than ten minutes without starting to write in my head. Those who interrupt me while I’m walking, just as you say, interrupt my thinking—and they do so because they cannot imagine that my thoughts have any value. They cannot imagine that I am attempting to perfect a paragraph in my head. They cannot imagine—they most certainly do not imagine—that I am a writer. A thinker.

Of course, I am aware that I live in a body. I am aware that this body is received by the world as brown and female. But to write, to be a writer, I think, is to depart from the body. To drift away from it. To move within so many bodies that one can so easily forget one’s own. To be harassed while walking—accosted while thinking—is a violent reminder of male disregard for the thoughts of women, the contemplative lives of brown people, interiority.

And then: my place. To be reminded of my place. First to be interrupted while thinking, then to be reminded of my place. Violence to greater violence. What is my place? I have spent most of my life walking through spaces in which, on the face of things, I have no place. A black girl moving, un-placed, through lily white Brookline, Massachusetts; a West African immigrant moving, un-placed, through African-American Harlem; a brown writer moving, un-placed, through Rome, Berlin, Lisbon; a soi-disant Afropolitan moving, un-placed, through Lagos, Accra. I have come to terms with not having a place. Perhaps that is why I feel so exceptionally galled at being reminded that others have a place for me.

The white woman in Berlin who does not think that I belong in her building (where I own a flat) has a place for me. That place is: NOT FROM HERE. The aunties in Accra who click their tongues at my unprocessed hair: NOT FROM HERE. My black high school friends who thought it absurd that I didn’t know what Kool-Aid was: NOT FROM HERE. I can accept NOT FROM HERE. Everywhere I walk I am NOT FROM HERE. What I cannot accept is: NOT HERE at all. The men who push past me on the sidewalk, just as you say; the white women who do the same. For them I am not here at all. Nothing in my upbringing prepares me to accept that place, and yet nothing in my nature equips me to resist it, as you do. It is horribly difficult for me to shout out, to shout back—and why is that?

Did I make my peace with “NOT FROM HERE” by making the locals like me? Isn’t so much of the African immigrant upbringing about being polite, being accepted, being acceptable? How appalling, really, my hesitation to object to my own erasure.


Aminatta Forna: I think they do imagine you are a writer, a thinker, that is to say a woman with more on her mind than knowing her place with regard to men, a brown person with places to go, people to see and things to do. That is precisely what antagonizes them so. I have had discussions with my friends male and/or white about the extent to which people are cognizant of their responses and reactions. I’m talking about the men who call out, your neighbor in Berlin, the aunties in Accra. Many would have us believe their behavior is reactive, unthinking and, in the case of men, biologically driven. I don’t buy it, I believe their actions are calculated and deliberate. How else to explain the differences in the places you and I have traveled? In some street harassment is endemic, in others rare.

In the era of South African apartheid white citizens knew it was their job to keep black and brown citizens in their place, for without their active cooperation and if left entirely in the hands of, say, the police, apartheid would have failed. It required the white citizens of South Africa to engage in the daily enforcement of the minutiae of the system, the restrooms and drinking fountains. Same goes for the United States, where we still see the legacy of citizen enforcement in the white women who call the police when they spot a black woman asleep in the university common room. Some actions may be less or more harmful, consequences less or more grave, but the impetus is the same. It is the desire to assert their power through control, which in turn is effected through humiliation. For otherwise and without the self-appointed guardians of the status quo, Taiye, women like our younger selves, might begin to believe we could own the world.

I like to walk and dream. I like to take a knotty problem of plot or character out and unravel it on a stroll. For many years I walked alone around a ruined, Gothic cemetery in South East London. Some women, when I told them I walked there, were concerned. But the danger posed by the remote possibility of attack when weighed against the impossibility of uninterrupted thought, became a risk worth taking. I had a dog, which helped, I have found dogs to be a great deterrent to would be harassers. To a writer a lost thought is a violation. Sometimes I know I will never get that thought back, it’s gone, like a book stolen from a library. Tens of thousands of lost thoughts over a lifetime.

I shout back and in so doing I have doubtless lost even more thoughts. Still more disappear into the smoke of outrage that persists long after the encounter. Partly my response is a matter of temperament, I’m not quick to anger but when anger comes it is instantaneous and huge. Also I was raised to believe injustice must always be confronted. For the most part young women are taught submissiveness—silence, at the very least—is the price of walking. And who among us can insist that the woman alone faced by the one, two, three men should antagonize them with her anger. Yet I have always had a feeling that women, especially in the West, missed a moment. What if, in one unpremeditated voice we had all shouted back from the start? What then?

You say “isn’t so much of the African immigrant upbringing about being polite?” Do you think that perhaps therein lies a difference. I have never been an immigrant. Here in the US, according to my tax status, I am a resident nonimmigrant, a visitor. In America I am “not from here,” but I couldn’t care less. I was born of two nations, the Britain of my mother and my father’s country of Sierra Leone. I have never felt that I did not belong, despite the assumption that I should feel that way and the efforts of those who might like it to be so. I begin from a different footing to you: these are my streets, this is my country. How dare they?!

TS: What you say is so interesting—and so true. So painfully true. “These are my streets, this is my country” is something I’ve never felt while walking. Anywhere. Your essay articulates an (admirable) intolerance of harassment on the streets of “the Britain of your mother” and your father’s Sierra Leone. I love the continuity of it: those countries belonged first to each parent and now belong, both, to you. A question that comes to mind is whether you feel the same anger, instantaneous and huge, on streets that feel less your own? Cape Cod? Cape Town? Or is it perhaps the case, as I’ve long since suspected, that a fully formed sense of belonging in just one context makes possible a deep, unshakeable sense of belonging in any context?

An image emerges: of you walking with your head held high, confident of your right to be wherever your foot falls. And of myself, walking, watching my feet fall, careful not to provoke the locals. It occurs to me that what I’d most wish to transmit to a daughter, if ever I have one, is your certainty. Not merely of where you belong, but of your right to confront injustice wherever you are. Reading your words I became aware (and again I must say painfully so) that I’d internalized the lesson you reference: submissiveness is the price of walking. Avoiding confrontation—rather than courageously rising to it—the trick to belonging.

In this, I must thank you for your essay and for these reflections, Aminatta. These last days I’ve tried walking as if I were you. I’ve had the chance to exercise this new stride—these new eyes—in Lisbon and Algiers. Palpable the difference. To maintain the manners with which I was raised without defaulting to submissiveness. Not to give way on the sidewalk perforce. Not to avert my objecting gaze from a man’s objectifying one. Not to receive the where-did-she-come-from stare by smiling, demurring, but rather to return it with something like a wink. I became aware, conducting this experiment, of the body’s ability to perceive actual threat. As you say, we do not insist that the lone woman agitate the pack of three men. But it’s become clearer to me that the performance of threat is what I most often encounter: the adolescent boy playing at menace, the airport official playing at power. Real power lies elsewhere, I’ve always known. What I’ve learned from “walking like Aminatta” is how, moment to moment, to summon it.

Power.

Perhaps it is easier to believe that those who attempt to exert power over us do so clumsily, blindly. That they are, essentially, ignorant. It is more difficult—and more enraging—to understand that however narrow-minded they may be, my neighbors in Berlin and my aunts in Accra are not fools. They intend that I feel discomfort. Their goal—with their gazes, their sighs, their asides—is my reaction: that I feel out of place. My weakness has always been that I agree: I am out of place, yes, they’re right. Your reflections have encouraged me to rethink the matter. If their goal is my disempowerment, what is mine? And by what means do I intend to reach this goal? Then, I understand why you may have chosen the title you did. “Power Walking.” A woman who has ceased to consent in any way whatsoever to her own disempowerment, is precisely that. She is power. See her on the streets of Freetown, Georgetown, Glasgow, Gost—and you’re seeing power walking.

AF: “Walking like Aminatta!” That tickles me. “You’re right, I do feel if not that I belong everywhere, then perfectly at ease in most places. I’m not uncomfortable with difference, including my own. And so I am probably all the more outraged by the need on the part of so many to continually remind me that a difference exists.

Let’s talk about female anger. In my view Western women have been taught to swallow their anger and to turn it inward in a way that is unparalleled in Sierra Leone say or Nigeria. I’m reminded of Nigerian neighbors I had in London, a couple with two kids who lived above a really obnoxious fellow, an Australian as it happened, who was frequently drunk. One day the Australian swore at the man and his children. Words were exchanged. The Nigerian told the Australian he was rude and then added: “I’m going to tell my wife on you.” The Australian scoffed at that, as you can imagine. I said to my husband, because we could hear the whole altercation though our wall: “Oh my, he has no idea.” Half an hour or so later madam drove up. We heard her go upstairs and then we counted, one, two, three, four. Bam! A door slammed. She stormed downstairs, hauled that Australian out of his apartment and yelled at him with such fury that he ran back inside and hid. She won us all months of peace, I was sad to see them move. When I told an English couple, they were confused. Why had the man left it to his wife to deal with the neighbor? They thought the Nigerian man was lacking in manliness. But I know that in Sierra Leone this would be an entirely probable scenario. Female anger carries great weight, particularly coming from a mother. The home is her domain and her authority within it counts. But not just the home, I have become visibly angry three times in public in Sierra Leone that I can recall and each time it has changed the situation for the better, for me anyhow.

Yet in the West from the youngest age girls are taught otherwise, to turn it in upon themselves, to weep and not to rage, to seek sympathy, rather than demand respect. Somebody asked me recently why female anger in Sierra Leone is more evident and seemingly more effective, and I think back to the words of a psychiatrist I know there, who described Western culture as one that “internalizes” and West African culture as an “externalizing” culture. This is a very general observation, of course. The impact on anger, on female anger, is that a woman from Nigeria or Sierra Leone is far more likely to take it out on the object of her displeasure than on herself.

In the West women have swallowed their rage for so long one wonders what would happen if it were put on display. And I mean full bodied, red blooded rage with no evidence of tears. Here’s a story might amuse you:

Once I was out with my dog when a man on the other side of the road yelled a crass remark at me. I shouted at him to “fuck off!” He was astonished. His jaw simply dropped open. He told me to watch my mouth and I retorted he was the one who should watch his. I told him he could come cross the road and repeat what he just said to me if he dared. This wasn’t how he expected the exchange to go and he was confused, he hesitated and then decided he wasn’t going to let me get away with this. So he began to cross the road, but after a few paces faltered. My dog had recently defecated and I was holding a steaming bag of dog shit. Suddenly the power was not his, but mine. I can feel it now like a warm wash, the sensation of justified rage let rip. How many women and how many bags of dog shit would it take, I wonder, for men like him to finally stop.

I wish I could say I walked through the world with quite the authority that you ascribe to me, but battles must be picked and I’ll just as often walk into a shop to avoid a man or pretend I haven’t heard what he has said. And the vigilance required of simply walking is so tiring. Yet unbelievable as it seems, if we want the right to walk and dream while doing so, women are going to have to fight for it.

Next time I see you, Taiye, we must take a stroll.



 Whose Streets? A Conversation About Walking.  Aminatta Forna talks to Taiye Selasi. LitHub, December 20 , 2018