THE EROTIC AND THE DOMESTIC

Im being tested, by men who want to taste that, lick that, squeeze that, stick tongues, fingers and u know what into that. Coming looking for action soldiers with pump guns all cockd up. Sure i can hump that, ride that bump and grind that, flex that, squeeze that til it pops...But did u ever think that i might be looking 4sum one to stroke that, cuddle that, get down on both knees and kiss that, dive deep in and build a home in that? This isnt about war and man hate, its about getting that forever mate to give me my one and last Ooh oh my....

by Thuthu Ndlela on Facebook

The idea and image in this poem that strikes me most is that of home. The poet mentions her need for someone to build a home in "that" after performing tender ministrations to "that", demonstrating adoration to "that" by getting "down on both knees [to] kiss “that”, showing total commitment in [diving in] "deep..and [building ] a home in that".

This poem by Thuthu is particularly striking for a number of reasons. One of them is its relationship to the development suggested by some of her earlier status updates on Facebook by Thuthu. Status updates suggest something of the thinking of the writer since they are the writer’s attempt to sum up in one line what they are thinking of or doing at any a particular point in time. In comparison with Thuthu’s status updates before this poem, this poem suggests a deeper sensitivity to the paradoxes involved in the erotic than the status updates had shown before now.

Another reason why the poem is striking is its vivid evocation of the various permutations of sex, expressed in terms of the language of a person who is very familiar with those possibilities. Beyond the evocation of the lascivious and its delights is the understanding that when all is said and done, when the fires have been lit and sated, something more lasting, more fulfilling, is needed. That something is expressed in terms of the idea of home. The depiction of "that", the much desired destination represented by a particular capacity of the poet, in terms of a possible abode, and not just a temporary one but one that gives all the comfort and security and satisfactions of home properly understood, is very powerful. It evokes an ageless desire of the human being as it emerges from amorous relationships.

The evocation of a desire for homemaking also, incidentally and ironically, without intending to do so, evokes the difficult compatibility between the erotic and the domestic. The erotic, as in this instance, often inspires the desire for permanence of relationship, for security of affiliation, for mutuality of comfort and security in sharing. These very values, however, are often problematic home fellows with the erotic. Sustaining the erotic in the midst of the familiarity that comes with the security embodied by domesticity is one of the great challenges of domesticity, a challenge compounded by the fact that domesticity is vital for the physical and psychological sustenance of the children who come to life through the expression of the erotic. The erotic often competes with the energy and time required to sustain the material structure of the home and the inhabitants of that home.

The paradoxical relationship between the erotic and the domestic underlies conceptions of various kinds of binding relationship, from monogamy to polygamy and cuncubinage, to the culture of mistresses. This paradox might also be responsible for the fact that most stories of amour and eros,as far as I know, are not set in the bonds of matrimony, but in the activity leading up to it, in the illicit drama existing alongside it, and in the vicissitudes that do not succeed in achieving consummation through the blessing and sanction of the altar or the registry. The amorous and the erotic do exist plentifully within the framework of the agreements that constitute the marital bond, but they seem to be different in tone, in intensity, in the effort required to keep ablaze what was once more a matter of the unfettered animal spirits evoked by Wordsworth. The greater subtlety that comes with deepening mutual psychological integration, the spatial, social and interpersonal navigation involved in building a hearth where the amorous and the erotic can thrive in the midst of a house with children, in the face of the expectations of society, in response to the unflattering light shown on the loved other by the disillusionment of proximity, make the domestic setting an unfavourable context for most amorous and erotic literature.

This poem, in relation to some of the poet’s earlier comments on similar subjects as suggested by her status updates on Facebook, also suggests the paradoxical relationship between the erotic and time as represented by the development of the human being. Erotic energy does not necessarily indicate erotic knowledge and skill, erotic knowledge and skill do not necessarily represent an appreciation of the larger emotional and interpersonal contexts of the erotic; the presence of all these factors do not necessarily suggest the presence of opportunity, the presence of opportunity does not necessarily imply the availability of adequate, much less ideal prospects for the exercise of the erotic and its amorous possibilities.

South African Poet Mazisi Kunene on Classical Zulu Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and its Relationships to Metaphysics (Theory of Being)

Mazisi Kunene’s characterisation of Classical Zulu epistemology and its correlation with metaphysics is related to the subject of achieving a synthesis of knowledge. His focus is on the conception he attributes to Zulu thought on the human mind as operating in terms of two contrastive but ultimately correlative forms of knowing, the precision mind (ubuchopo) and the cosmic mind (ingqondo). “While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesises fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge”. The precision mind represents the ability to arrive at discrete forms of knowledge while the cosmic mind consists in the capacity of integrating these discrete forms in a manner that demonstrates their universal significance. “At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts...” At its most penetrative, this synthesis enables an initiation into the convergence of past, present and future, of life and death, in a unified awareness. “When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which ...erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s all-round vision, the power to conceptualise the totality of life at once.”

This synoptic scope is symbolised by the circularity and amplitude of a calabash. The circularity of the calabash could be understood as evocative of cognitive range as developed in terms of the cognitive integration of different aspects of existence into a unity that is expressive of unity of being. The amplitude of the calabash may be understood in relation to a cognitive depth that represents a penetrative grasp of particular aspects of being in terms of their central aspects as well as their constituents, and the relationships between these two units.

This goal is arrived at through a process akin to the combustion of flame:

"At its highest point, the faculty of knowing (ingqondo) corresponds in quality to the thick, mature, sour-sweet, butter-rich milk (izangqondo) whose water ( whey-umzala) has been totally drained from it. Indeed, the two words share a common root. The similarity in the nature of the mind and the matured milk is more than superficial. It illustrates an intra-material principle in which the maturation of phenomena is an outcome of a slow burning process. Thus the mind and [ the ] milk are similar for both reach their desired potential through fire. The fire is essential for the changing of things from their raw inaccessible qualities to a ripe state of richness and healing. Fire in this sense is not heat but a process capable of positively affecting other phenomena and triggering in them their inner powers of inter-phenomenal nourishment. Thus a state of ripeness is a state of ultimate maturation both in the mind and in the milk yet it is not a state of burning. Ripeness (ukuvuthwa) is an outcome of slow burning characteristic of the cosmic process.

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A fruit is ripened by the sun-fire. The body is ripened by the blood-fire. The mind is ripened by the life-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than themselves. This process demonstrates the highest cosmic ideal, that is, an interdependence within all living phenomena."

The image above is Kuntunkantan,one of the corpus of Adinkra symbols first developed by the Gyaman of Cote d'Ivoire and the Akan of Ghana.I use it in in representing the harmonious integration of various elements in a system,as suggested by the balance between the five circles that make up the symbol.

THE GAZE:A STRIKING STATEMENT

Excerpt from

"Politics by Other Means:Two Egyptian Artists, Gazbia Sirry and Ghada Amer
by Chika Okeke-Agulu
in
Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 6:2 (2006), pp. 117-149

In her study of Nawal el Saadawi’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of a
Woman Doctor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas discusses the significance of the glance
in the Middle Eastern context, including Egypt, the homeland of the novel’s
female physician protagonist, and she points to the unending debate
among religious scholars on the power of intergender gaze. She notes—referring
to the problem created by the female doctor’s act of looking at a
male patient on whom she performed a surgical operation—how within the
social economy of exclusively male gaze her glance assumes the penetrative
potency of the hypodermic needle. Citing Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist
who has argued that the eye is “an erogenous zone in the Muslim
structure of reality, as able to give pleasure as the penis,” Malti-Douglas
concludes that the “scopic power of the physician (from which the erotic is
never fully absent) becomes a form of penetration that is virtually a violation”
(1995, 27).

Related to this is the connection between the potentially
violent (male) gaze and the culturally inscribed notion of the nakedness of
the female that the provocative idea of ’awra encapsulates. ’Awra denotes
the female genitalia, but it signifies an incomplete and reprehensible thing
that the woman dares not expose.14 Significantly, Malti-Douglas argues that
for el Saadawi’s protagonist, the “‘awra of the private parts is made to expand
and apply to the female hero’s body in its entirety,” but she notes that
‘awra is central to the predicament of the narrator, the key cultural reality
against which she rebels, embodying the sense of physical shame and
inadequacy and the restrictions that society places upon her as a female.
Her entire body takes on the notions of shame and imperfection. (Malti-
Douglas 1995, 27, 28)

This female body, when confronted by the male gaze with its potential for
scopic violence, can unleash fitna (chaos), and therefore it must be veiled.
And it is within this discursive and social context that the veil serves to
control the female body, for the sake of the woman who risks scopic/sexual
violation, and the man must deal with the resulting disorder that his gaze
unleashes.

NOTES [ ORDER MODIFIED]
1.The public sphere is primarily a discursive space controlled and peopled by the
political and cultural elite who in all societies constitute the demographic minority.
Thus discussions here about Egyptian women’s access to this space refer
primarily to women who belong to this elite society.

2.The idea of the female genitalia as something that must be covered and not
beheld (by men) has resonance with its conceptualization among, say, the Igbo,
who traditionally believe that the adult female genitalia, when exposed in protest,
can cause fatal harm to the menfolk who elicited such action.

3.[MY NOTE] This section of the essay is even more interesting when compared with the section on the gaze in Aworan:Represeting the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art by Babatunde Lawal in The College Art Bulletin
For more on the journal see http://www.smith.edu/meridians/index.htm

For more on the writer see http://www.princeton.edu/artandarchaeology/faculty/okeke-agulu/

A CHOIR OF EGRETS

As the day draws to a close, some lines written by the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka while he was in prison,most of it in solitary confinement, come to mind:

A choir of egrets
servers at the day's recessional
on aisles fading to the infinite

I like these lines so much because of the image-the mental picture-they evoke and the manner in which they go about it.From his cell,the line of egrets flying in formation,in an ordered group, looks to him like a procession of choristers arranged in rows singing in church.The egrets,who have now become choristers in his eyes,are taking part in a holy ritual represented by the solemnity and beauty evoked,brought to mind, by the setting of the sun at the end of the day.The wondrous power of light and shadow released by the setting sun is like the majestic motions that take place when the priest is conducting mass in church.As the sun sinks into the horizon,the lines of egrets that seem to be flying close to the sun seem to be poised,positioned on rows of seats that stretch beyond the distance that the eye can see;perhaps they terminate at the sun which seems to be at the horizon,but since the sun is actually at an unreachable distance away perhaps they terminate nowhere and continue forever,into infinity.

From a little cell of only a few feet wide,the poet has allowed the sight of the birds to lift him out of that narrow space and into the sky.From he sky he he has allowed his mind to take him beyond the physical world into the infinite.In all these movements the poet has not left his cell.His body remains there.He is physically confined within the concrete walls,enduring the proximity of the toilet nearby perhaps,the absence of any human contact except perhaps those of the jailers,but through his mind he has allowed himself to leave the concrete walls,the smell of sweat perhaps,possibly the sense of despair and wondering when he will leave that place,and enjoy the freedom of the mind which cannot be denied him,even if his body is imprisoned.

Of what value is such imagination when the body is not free?

When the body is not free,the only free space possible is the mind.