Many madrassas only teach students how to recite the Quran in Arabic, without teaching them the language itself. So while these learners may know how to repeat an extract – or the entire scripture – from memory, they often don’t know what they’re saying. Pair this with a teacher who is probably brainwashing students into believing that Islam is monolithic, and what you’ve got is a cult. Or at least that’s how I think of it. So by the time I got to university, that’s exactly what I faced in the other Muslim students: a cult who believed their own distorted truths about Islam and kept to themselves. I possessed no key to this community.
Laudium was once a whites-only area known as Claudius, after Claudius Marais de Vries, a former mayor of Pretoria. In 1961, the apartheid government declared the small suburb an Indian township. It aimed to house people specific to this ethnic group so that they could be evacuated from Marabastad and central Pretoria and be segregated from other ethnic groups. At the same time, Marabastad and Central Pretoria were, of course, zoned as white areas following the implementation of the Group Areas act.
I don’t know why Laudium is called Laudium or who named it that. What I do know is that it’s derived from the Latin word laus, which means ‘to praise’. Laudium (or laudanum) was also a drug in the Victorian era, popularly consumed by the working class. On the streets, it was known as ‘blue troll ass dust’ and ‘evening delight’. Doctors prescribed it for anything from pain to tuberculosis, and Victorian nursemaids even used it to calm cranky infants (often leading to their untimely deaths).
Fun urban legend: my grandfather used to say that Laudium was called ‘Ghost Town’ because it was built on a massive gravesite. There is no research to support this, but it’s a cool story and I spent a lot of my childhood digging for human remains.
Fun fact from Wikipedia: in 1981, Umkhonto we Sizwe launched a rocket attack on the Voortrekkerhoogte military base from Laudium, and the homes of local politicians in Laudium who supported apartheid were bombed.
Anyway, that’s where our parents and our grandparents went, away from the city and into the township, along with their friends – Christian, Muslim, Hindu, all of them, as long as the government could classify them as ‘Indian’. Then came us. And then, in about 1990, came the proposals to develop private schools. Hotshots in the Muslim community clubbed together to start a private Islamic school. (Well, that’s how it started in my head. I don’t know the economic details; I was six.) The school would incorporate all the strictest teachings of the Dïn (religion) into its syllabus. Obviously this included stuff like wearing hijab and having no co-ed classes, ever. It was a private school, so it was expensive. Forget that the Quran literally says that education is the right of all individuals and the moral duty of every capable individual. No, only economically capable individuals could go to this school. I did not attend.
It was only at Tuks that I encountered this bunch of bourgeois snobs who drove their daddies’ BMWs, wore only Guess or Diesel, and walked the moral high ground just because they went to a private Muslim school. This basically meant that any young woman who was sort of semi-athletic, smoked, wore jeans and hoodies all the time, kept her hair relatively short and never bothered to straighten it, and dared to study music of all things, was basically the devil. If eyes could stone, I would have been under Table Mountain. It did not help my cause that I mostly hung out with male friends who were either black, white, coloured or Hindu; none of them Muslim. I was never going to date – or marry – a good Muslim boy. Not from this community, what with all our differences in beliefs and me being such a rebel.
Their exclusive, judgemental version of Islam and outlook on life also made me hate being Muslim. I never could understand why I needed to believe in a god who hated me. Who was just waiting to judge me. Who gave other people the right to think they were better than me and could judge me too? How did any of that make someone good? Wasn’t the point of any religion to make you a respectful, humble human being with good morals and principles? To treat people fairly and equally? This was not the impression I got from the Cardbox Clan, as I called them, because they were soft, shifty and loved their mental boxes.
The Clan hung out on the corner of the piazza in front of the First National Bank ATM. The piazza housed the main cafeteria on campus, along with some eateries and, of course, the ‘coffee shop’. This is where they held court. You needed ovaries of steel to walk in there and order a subpar caffeine drink. Every time I queued at that till to pay the lovely Portuguese lady, I felt the eyes on my back. Caesar had it easy.
One day I made my way up and a tall woman who always intrigued me stopped me before the ATM. She was part of the Cardbox Clan, but I always thought she stood out. She didn’t seem to be made of cardboard, and she definitely did not seem like she fit into any of their preconceived boxes. Her name was Rasheda Titus. And I was 100 per cent right in all my assumptions about her. Rasheda is now my best friend and the oracle of my life.
Rasheda will deny this story, but it is absolutely true. She stopped me that day to hover over me (she is very tall) and ask me whether my eyes were my own. I do have a stunning pair of eyes, if I may say. A pool of chocolate, I tell you. Or the eyes of a swamp rat with brown cataracts. I said, ‘Yes, they are real.’ She was completely entranced and became my BFF. And that’s that, only it isn’t. We spent the rest of our tertiary education days together, socialising more and more. Hanging out. It wasn’t long before the Cardbox Clan had had enough and decided Rasheda needed an intervention. In their eyes, she was naive and had no idea how evil I was. She needed to be warned of the terrible Muslim who was crap at convention.
Rasheda told me this, but only years later because that’s the type of person she is. If she did not believe in something, there was no reason to speak it. I noticed that she hung out with the Cardbox Clan less, but I never enquired. Our friendship grew; no warning was needed. In spite of hanging out with people who I thought were indoctrinated and spent their days judging everything that wasn’t like them, she stuck around and they accepted her. Rasheda is a tall, coloured woman with alopecia. She has a single mom who remarried, so she has five additional siblings. She checked none of the Clan’s boxes. But her Islam is a religion of love, and her choice to love rather than judge made her accepting and easy to accept.
We’ve spent the last fifteen years challenging each other, learning, growing, cleaning up each other’s mistakes and crying. Rasheda ended up marrying a guy I sort of dated when I was in tenth grade. I always joke that I love her so much that I had to make sure she was in good hands. She is. They have the most beautiful relationship and together we have the most beautiful extended family. I have seen her exit the orthodox, Islamic-school way of thinking and gravitate into Sufism. She has seen me become less and less of a practising Muslim, with all its rules and rigour, and watched me find peace.
I have never had a relationship more spiritual than this one, and if this is her Islamic state of mind, then it is mine too.
My mother, the true radical
My mom is a tough woman. She’s independent, she’s feisty and she doesn’t suffer fools. She can pack more into one day than I could accomplish in a week: run a household, manage my dad’s office, throw in a yoga class and still have time to bake biscuits – if she feels like it.
Call her a feminist, though, and she might just have a heart attack. Yet to me, she embodies a type of feminism we don’t hear much about. She’s strong. She’s creative. But she is also a product of patriarchy and prejudice. She has not been subjected to the physical abuse a lot of women suffer, but because of the place that society carved out for her, she chose, in many ways, to be timid while I was growing up. In order to survive, she maintained a degree of invisibility and a reluctance to challenge authority.
That’s not considered politically progressive by our modern feminist standards.
In science, there’s a particle called the free radical. These are atoms or groups of atoms that are highly chemically reactive, even
towards each other – not unlike a particular type of militant feminist I’ve come across in my generation. Like those mercurial particles, these feminists are often reactive instead of introspective, whether the context is a university lecture, social media or a chat with friends.
I have seen these ‘free radicals’ criticise other women for not being feminist enough, not being powerful enough, not exerting their agency enough. The ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ statement often uttered by the allegedly more enlightened and liberated woman in reference to the domestically abused one is a mild example. For some feminists, women should just do better.
There is a place for the spontaneous combustion of feminism’s free radicals. They play an important regulatory role in many social circumstances. If all women turned the other cheek and condoned the notion that ‘daddy beats me because he loves me’, well, we might still be normalising things like physical abuse and rape.
Free radicals help all kinds of women rage against the thinking that we should sympathise with men as their power is challenged and try to understand their pain before we criticise them for abusing women. In many instances, they make space for the voices of the silent.
But, while their volatile nature is necessary, it lacks empathy and respect when it comes to all women. The feminists I’m talking about would probably look at a woman like my mother with pity. If they heard that she still lays out my father’s clothes for him every morning, they’d get busy planning a hostage rescue. That’s patronising bullshit.
As a Muslim woman of colour in South Africa, my mother has had to face a multitude of stratums and facets that define her as a woman in her society. As a result of this, she has had to find her own type of feminism. She has had to navigate the roles of women in terms of racism, tradition, religion, and cultural and societal norms. Women of colour are not just facing sexism; they’re battling all these other things at the same time. Their activism requires them to jump many hurdles before even engaging with the feminism we know today. Their version of feminism may seem lost and unrecognisable to our politically advanced eye, but the role they play in the fight for feminism is real and requires acknowledgement, even if it may seem passive or silent.
I often think about these issues when I watch The Color Purple (1985), the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name. The Color Purple is my go-to movie when I need catharsis. I own the DVD and pop it in often. In the most stressful moments of my life, when I feel burdened with the challenges of being a woman, I succumb to the comfort of watching it. I love to relive that story over and over again. It makes my problems as a woman seem small, and it gives me perspective on the forgotten burdens that other women still face.
My opinion of The Color Purple is unconventional. I don’t think Alice Walker wrote the book for people like me to use as some sort of therapy, but the culmination of events in the life of the lead character is a significant and important message when it comes to women in the home. Women who have no time to think about the politics of feminism (the waves, the movement, the meaning). Feminism doesn’t exist in theory in these women’s lives. It lives in practice.
The main character is Celie, a young black woman whose life lacks the freedom of choice. We are witness to this from the beginning. She gives birth to two children because her father rapes her. She cannot choose whether to keep her kids or give them up for adoption – he decides for her and they are taken away. To her father, Celie is a burden. To rid himself of this burden he decides that she is to marry a widower and take care of his house and children. The widower is warned that Celie is ‘spoiled’. She also does not check any of the standard boxes of beauty: she has ‘bad’ hair and very dark skin, for example. Constant societal castigation leaves her with only one option: shut up, never smile, do all of this to survive, practise strength by submitting to physical abuse.
In the first half of the movie, it becomes clear that women like Celie cannot simply abandon their situations in search of a better life. It’s not easy to accept this. When I watched the film with Rebecca, who had never seen it before, she voiced her frustration with Celie: ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ Rebecca is an outspoken feminist, and I understand this take on things. I was really young the first time I watched it, and as an angst-ridden teen whose upbringing made me aware of the power of women and what we should not put up with, I shared the same anger towards Celie.
Why did Celie choose to stay? Why did she actively subject herself to isolation and degradation? I admit, a big part of me ignorantly thought, Well fine. If she won’t do anything about it, she deserves it. This belief lacks understanding and stems from the idea that women who will not do anything about their situations deserve what they get. This is an anti-feminist stance that many people believe to be feminist. It condones the abuse and disrespect of women who are not as fortunate as we are. Women who do not get to protest the abuse that befalls them because their path to liberation looks very different.
To be a feminist on the ground, to publicly voice dissent against norms, advocate for women’s rights and fight for the equality of the sexes is unfortunately not an option for all women. One woman’s practice of feminism is not necessarily another’s. Without considering the important role of intersectionality, the feminist fight is driven by ignorance instead of support.
The first wave of feminism, which focused on the fight for suffrage, produced a homogeneous view of feminism and women’s experiences. When this wave ended, the second wave of feminism took off in the early 1960s in the United States. Twenty years later, it started to gain traction in Europe and Asia. But it ignored the significant role of intersectionality, which remains an important social theory that acknowledges the fact that not all women or feminists are white, from the same economic or religious background or able-bodied, for example.
First- and second-wave feminism ignored the fact that, for people like Celie, the path to feminism and the experience of it were very different to a white woman’s at the time. While Celie was a slave of patriarchy, the white woman had progressed. She had the right to drive, vote and have a say in the household, to an extent. Over and above the fact that white women in the film did not have to pander to the expectations of patriarchy in the home by doing the cooking and cleaning (because people of colour did it for them), they absolutely did not have to pander to the needs of other races. We see this in the mayor’s wife, whose disposition is starkly different to Celie’s. She’s relatively more independent, she’s verbose and bossy, and she is not threatened by a predominantly male society. In the middle of town she demands that Sophia (a woman of colour) come and work for her. She does not consider Sophia’s own strength and independence when she refuses. It is not allowed. Sophia is out of line. Her attitude is out of line.
Today, we still ignore intersectionality and the layered, dynamic struggle of some women compared to others.
The Color Purple asks us to consider the actions of women who are more vulnerable than others. It argues that the choice of directing their own lives is not the same as for someone who falls in a less vulnerable category. Who maybe comes from a place where culture, tradition, religion and race are not prominent identifiers when it comes to their roles. For less privileged women, the rights of sexuality, family, work, how they should be treated in the workplace, reproductive choice and the option of joining the military, to name a few, do not belong to them. Not yet. The film’s emphasis is on the fight for a woman’s choice, and how that might look different from our own.
In simple terms, there is no singular, cookie-cutter feminism.
We did not suddenly emerge as ‘woke’ feminists. We are the products of previous generations’ prolonged and fragmented conversations. We are the stuff of painful challenges that live silently in the minds of these struggling women. We have been harvested from their internal rage. We have witnessed them try to break free of insufferable prisons defined by chores – the ironing of the clothes, the washing of the dishes, the being at the beck
and call of their husbands. These are not superfluous conflicts. These are not shallow stereotypes to overcome even though it’s easy to categorise them as such today.
These women are our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers. They are even our sisters, existing in our same generation.
They live out their lives in stillness, while we ‘progressive’ women flick our middle fingers at their confines. Their soundless struggle has become our noisy protest. They darn the socks and raise the kids. They cook, clean, play the disciplinarian. Their fight is for the peace to get by. We spew poison at their expense because we think we are so different, so much … better. And while we have progressed, I have to ask: is it feminist to disregard and degrade the experiences of one generation of women over another’s? Or have we become the female versions of our patriarchal counterparts? Unable to empathise and quick to judge?
It seems to me that we regard theirs as a cumbersome life too uncool for us to acknowledge. We forget that women like this still exist. They keep things peaceful so that the patriarchy remains comfortable and calm, maybe because they fear it, but also to make things easier on themselves. For these women, staying safe within the status quo is winning the fight.
My upbringing was comparatively feminist. My grandfather and father raised me, my sister and brother with a strong sense of admiration for womanhood and the important role women play in society. My mother had no such luck. And even though the current fight for feminism is as important as ever, to me it still seems so small when I compare it, generationally, to the fight of those before, who still suffer the consequences now.
Despite Beyonce’s 2014 announcement that girls ‘Run the World’, girls and women don’t. Pop-culture references to women’s social roles may influence a select few, but broader patterns of power remain unchanged. Girls can run the world, but we don’t. Glib proclamations of female power should be challenged, yet because they fit a certain trendy model of what ‘women slaying’ looks like, they are celebrated.
Sorry, Not Sorry Page 10
