Hoekom is 'n boek soos dié nodig?

In haar nuutste boek, Desire at the end of the white line: Notes on the decolonisation of white Afrikaner femininity (2024, UKZN Press), vra Azille Coetzee hoekom Wit Afrikaanssprekende mense ná 30 jaar van demokrasie nog so min verander het, en steeds so Wit en apart is.

“What emerges from my readings is that apartheid is not simply a political history in our country’s past, but a way of being that is programmed into our gendered bodies, our nervous systems, erotic imaginations and cells, a set of gender norms and sexual rules that orient us in certain ways in the world, direct our desires, pull us towards some and away from others in ways that keep us white and apart,” skryf sy. “The point is that if we want to change how we are white, we have to change how we are men and women, how we have sex, how we love, how we make our homes” (bl.6).

In dié boek ondersoek Coetzee die familiestruktuur van Afrikanerwitheid en dink na oor die moontlikhede wat bestaan wanneer daar verbý die grense daarvan gedink en geleef word. Ter illustrasie van haar argumente analiseer sy ’n aantal films, TV-reekse en romans: Nêrens, Noord-Kaap, Fiela se kind, Triomf, Die stropers, Troukoors, Mating birds, DAM, Disgrace, bientang: ’n !nau gedig, Agaat, Kompoun en Flatland, onder meer. Die besprekings word afgewissel met persoonlike vertellings uit die skrywer se lewe om teorie daar te stel wat vanuit en deur geleefde ervaringe bedink is.

Lees ’n paar uittreksels uit Desire at the end of the white line hier onder, en in geval jy wonder hoekom ’n boek soos dié een nodig is, sien die kommentaar wat onderaan ’n Netwerk24-artikel, Hoekom lyk my wit lewe nog nie anders nie, verskyn het.

Coetzee is ook die skrywer van In my vel: ’n reis (2019) en Die teenoorgestelde is net so waar (2021).

What is feminism?

I sometimes get asked what feminism is. I am white and Afrikaans and in my culture the term is regarded with great suspicion. When it is said out loud at a braai, in a bar or at a family lunch, one can often see how people’s posture changes slightly, a shoulder pulled back or a head cocked; a glance might flit between two friends. “Could you just quickly explain what that word actually means?” someone might ask. (Maar wat beteken dit nou eintlik?) and in the inflection of the voice, or the slow “nou eintlik” at the end, every white Afrikaans feminist knows what they are up against. You know that if you want to make this conversation as painless as possible, and maybe win over a friend or two, your job is to conclusively dispel the image of the angry, bra-burning woman. I try really hard to avoid these conversations, but when I find myself in one, my answer has been the same for a long time: Feminism is when you believe that men and women should be equal (not the same, one must quickly explain, because people really hate that, but equivalent in their difference). This answer elicits relief – almost no one thinks consciously of themselves as being a person that disagrees with such an idea – and you can see how everyone relaxes around you again. Someone tells a story about the oppressed women in Afghanistan who are not allowed to drive, or about a Black woman colleague who gets hit by her man; everyone nods gravely that feminism is necessary, elsewhere, for others, then a friend pours you another drink and the conversation moves on.

I am some years into the study of feminism now and my answer has changed. Equality between the sexes is an easy explanation you can give – only if you have not yet started reading the work of Black South African thinkers. Equality between the sexes is the comforting answer at the bar or the braai because it is the one reached by middle-class white feminists from Europe and America; it is an answer that we can stretch a bit to comfortably integrate into white Afrikaans life as it is. It does not scare us too much because we think we have achieved it already – at least some workable version thereof: “Kyk, ’n Afrikaanse vrou is nie op haar bek geval nie,” we would say. (Look, an Afrikaans woman is not afraid to speak her mind.) No one has to be angry, or burn anything; no one is pointing any fingers. We are fine.

What I know now is that in a place like South Africa we cannot talk about gender without talking about race, which is the wrong answer to give at the braai if you are out for a good time because if there is one topic that white Afrikaans people dislike more than gender, it is race.

(bl.1–2)

“What I know now is that in a place like South Africa we cannot talk about gender without talking about race, which is the wrong answer to give at the braai if you are out for a good time because if there is one topic that white Afrikaans people dislike more than gender, it is race.”

— Azille Coetzee

Historians show how Afrikaner whiteness understands itself as something that extends in a patriarchal family line, one reaching deep into the past and far into the future, through which land is passed on from father to son. This positions the white Afrikaner woman in a critical way: It is she who births the white babies; it is she through whom the line unfolds. “Without female subjects obedient to the proposed ideal femininity, there is no nation,” writes Christi van der Westhuizen. Central to apartheid was the obsessive state policing of sex and of white women’s sexuality in particular: If there is to be a white volk (nation, people), we need white sex and white mothers to birth and to rear the white children. In this sense, apartheid systems of racial control and segregation were inseparable from structures of white patriarchal rule of men over women.

Importantly, the white Afrikaner woman is not simply a victim here. In our past and present, she is strikingly willing to comply, proves herself repeatedly complicit in her own subjugation to the white man and in the subjugation of others. The insidious and depressing trade we make with white patriarchy (then and now, I argue) is relinquishing our feminist agency (and along with it the possibility of intersectional feminist and queer community, sociality and solidarity) in exchange for access to white ethnic belonging, power and privilege.

(bl.4–5)

For the Afrikaners, whiteness was therefore always something that they (we) had to prove, that one had to learn to perform, to conform to, something that one can slide out of if you are not vigilant about the kind of life you live and with whom you are living it. Our whiteness is work that we are trained to do among ourselves, unremittingly.

(bl.11)

What would it take for us as white Afrikaners in the post-apartheid present to unfold in the presence of others, rather than drawing back into our enclaves, pushing the world away? As white Afrikaner women our job has always been, and still is, to tend to the racial house of Afrikaner whiteness, to make a home for our children there, to keep its order. If the white Afrikaner woman cannot be counted on to choose the white Afrikaner man above all else, to make him a home and to raise his children, it not only undermines the “natural” order of things that structures settler society and justifies the colonial enterprise (where the white man is at the top of the “natural” hierarchy), it also divests the project of the white line of its symbolic infrastructure. In other words: If the white woman is pivotal in the project of enclosing the white race, of erecting barriers, if her body represents the boundary through which the white Afrikaner subject closes itself off from the Black subject, spatially and ontologically, could she not be instrumental in lifting closures, raising barriers to enable the advent of something new, a different belonging in the world, a surging up, a blossoming? If the white Afrikaner woman’s role is so central in symbolically and materially maintaining the closures of Afrikaner whiteness, in locking us in the extraordinary sterile and arid region of race, what can she do to send us forward to meet the world?

(bl.42)

Intelligibility

“Is dit mejuffrou of mevrou?” (Is it Miss or Mrs?) the receptionist at the doctor’s rooms asks me. I have a shoulder injury and I am there for a cortisone injection. The receptionists are white Afrikaans tannies. The doctor’s rooms are in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, where I grew up, where Me (Ms) has not yet filtered into the collective psyche. I brace myself, make my back straight and say, “It’s ‘Doctor’ actually”. I have to force myself to do so – it is much easier not to, but I worked hard for this title and, even if it is nothing else, it is my ticket out of the pitied dead end of lifelong Miss. “Oh,” the receptionist says, looking at the other one with raised eyebrows. “Doktor, nogal,” she replies (Doctor, would you believe). The rest of the time I am there it is a little joke between them, not in an unkind way, but a joke nonetheless. “Would the doctor mind to sit a while – the doctor will be with you now,” as they gesture towards the closed door of the surgeon’s room. “That’s your title, use it,” says C when I tell him about it afterwards; he is not quite getting the point. How would he feel if his options were Meneertjie or Meneer (Little Mister or Mister), I ask him; if how people addressed him were determined by his marital status; if he was still Meneertjie by the age of 40 and would remain stuck in that diminutive forever because of his decision not to get married? He laughs, understanding now.

[…]

After I have received my injection from the orthopaedic surgeon, I hand my bank card to the receptionist to pay. She says she knows many Coetzees and asks me whether I got the surname from my husband (“jou man”) or whether it is mine. She is assuming that I am married, to a man. I am not wearing a ring – it is simply that heterosexual marriage is the grammar through which we read one another in my culture. Especially as a woman, you are either not-yet-married, or married and, if you are older than 30, people give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it is the latter. Or, they hope so, for your sake. Femininity is a timeline stretching from a pre- to a post- and there is nothing else.

[…]

My problem here is not marriage in itself (it is a highly questionable institution, but this is not what I’m on about here). I am trying to say something about how being intelligible as a subject in white Afrikaner culture is always through the language of heterosexual marriage, nuclearity and genealogy. How the ways in which we are read by others and placed in relation to others is through the vocabulary of marriage and procreation. The obvious example here is how in the Afrikaans language the words for man and woman (man en vrou) double as the words for husband and wife (man en vrou). To be a man is to be a husband; to be a woman is to be a wife.

(bl.72–3)

“Very complicated”; “heel ongekompliseerd”

Meisie (Kincaid se 'Girl' vanuit 'n ander hoek)

’n Vrou se voete moet mooi lyk; maak seker jy lyk goed versorg, al is jy net by die huis; kleur jou hare; beskerm jou vel teen die son; koop vir jou mooi pajamas; as jy baie wil eet, moet jy oefen; niemand hoef te weet jy menstrueer nie; sit met jou knieë bymekaar; moenie te hard praat nie; hou op om so vir jou aan te sit; trek jou skouers terug; niks proe so lekker soos wat maerwees voel nie; moenie frons nie, dit gee plooie, glimlag; moenie te styf wees nie; moenie te ernstig wees nie; van baie lag kom baie huil; moenie so dikbek lyk nie; mans hou nie van giggelrige meisies nie; moenie te preuts wees nie; ’n vrou lyk mooi in ’n bietjie kleur; ’n vrou moet baie maer wees om los klere te kan dra; daar is niks mooier as ’n spontane meisie nie; vra vir hulp wanneer jy dit nodig het; laat hom bestuur; met ’n mooi glimlag kan jy ver kom; huil wanneer niks anders werk nie; hê jou opinie maar moenie moeilik daaroor wees nie; maak vriende met sy vriende; maak vriende met sy ma, help haar om skottelgoed te was en moenie te veel praat aan tafel nie; moenie nag nie; dit is hoe om beskuit te bak; dit is hoe om winkel-lasagne tuisgemaak te laat lyk; dit is hoe om te jok sonder dat iemand agterkom; dit is hoe om jou bene langer te laat lyk; dit is hoe om jou wang te draai vir ’n soengroet wat jy regtig nie wil hê nie; dit is hoe om te lag vir ’n grap wat nie snaaks is nie; dit is hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy nie baie hou nie; dis hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy niks hou nie; dis hoe jy glimlag vir iemand van wie jy regtig hou; dit is hoe om te weet of jou eerste kind eendag ’n seuntjie of ’n dogtertjie gaan wees; wees versigtig vir mans – ’n man is ’n man, ’n man is nie ’n klip nie; wees meer versigtig vir ánder mans; moenie op jou eie uitgaan in die aand nie; oppas waar jy loop; hier is die dele van die stad wat jy vermy; dis hoe dit lyk as iemand jou snaaks aankyk; dit is wat jy aantrek om ’n ekstra paar kilogramme te verbloem; dit is hoe jy iets van die hand wys terwyl jy dit laat lyk of jy dit eintlik wil hê; dit is hoe om jou vinger in jou keel te druk wanneer jy te veel geëet het; dit is hoe om te voorkom dat jy te dronk word wanneer jy te min geëet het wanneer jy kuier; dit is hoe jy weet hy het geld; dit is hoe jy weet hy is nog nie oor sy eks nie; dit is hoe jy hom herinner aan jou waarde; dit is hoe jy kry wat jy verdien; dit is hoe jy die seks interessant hou; dit is hoe jy soms ’n paar rand uit sy beursie uithaal sonder dat hy agterkom; dit is hoe om aan die slaap te raak langsaan hom wanneer hy snork; dit is hoe om ’n man te boelie; dit is hoe hy jou boelie; dit is hoe om hom te kry om te praat; dit is hoe om hom te laat beter voel; dit is hoe om jou kinders in die regte laerskool in te kry. Maar wat as ek nie kinders het nie?; wil jy vir my sê na dit alles gaan jy regtig nog steeds die tipe vrou wees wat alleen is?

(bl.153–4)