This video presents some essential facts in the Jena Six case. Since many people do not seem to remember or understand the chronology, I present it to you as a review session.
I also note that if you read any unmoderated comments thread about the Jena Six, you will find a great deal of naked bigotry, violently expressed. This is of course why even my Anglo self is uncomfortable with white people unless I know them as individuals and am sure they are not part of the madding herd.
White Americans, have you the faintest idea what it would be like to walk around in this country without the protection of looking as you do? Donald Washington, do you hold your position out of cynicism and expediency? If not, what is the tangled road which has led you to sell out?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Another thing about Marechera (I’m sorry I still can’t see any videos because of in ISP handicap) is that he apparently didn’t realise he was black until he was beaten up a few times for going to the wrong bar in London, and even then…..
There is surely a certain amount of protection in skin colour, but the hierarchy of western values (as westerners themselves understand it) is complicated by the need, in various quarters, to attribute wholesome goodness unto themselves, whilst attributing more turpitude unto others. So it is that having a certain accent can, for example, be attibuted as the mark of an oppressor. Likewise “elitism” (athough only in Australian society).
In any case, the everlasting western motif is the portrayal of oneself in the light of moral perfectionism, whilst projecting one’s less positive aspects on to unfortunate others (including those that one considers to be inappropriately “elite”).
“he apparently didn’t realise he was black until he was beaten up a few times for going to the wrong bar in London”
Avoided hearing about race … or just didn’t realize which one he was seen as belonging to in England?
I have to phone a Japaneee in a second. I’ll get back to it. Primeval (in the neutral sense) innocence about race I suspect. Both Marechera and I had our primary relationship with the natural environment rather than (contra Freud) with our parents.
Yes but if one has access to American tv/news, or lives in London, how does one avoid finding out … ?
Quote:
I never particularly noticed that I was black — and it was something of a shock suddenly to realise that my skin for the English was a natural label that read Mugger, Rapist, Amin, Inferior. That kind of thing.
So then, one would not have heard in Zimbabwe that this was what Blackness might well mean in England? … or that hearing about it is one thing, and experiencing it, another … ?
Let me quote some more… I’ve just returned from the session.
“But when I read bout blacks being beaten up by the National Front and by the police who were also attacking black business premises, I could not believe that the same thing would happen to me. I was too bound up in my books. I had just handed in my thesis and decided to go out for a drink to unwind. I knew a nice pub which was very difficult to find: you had to go through a series of alleys. There I drank and smoked and drank.
‘At closing time I was the last to leave. There was a full moon. It made everything stark and clear-cut. One of those lucid thoughtful nights when it’s easu to imagine things. But I had not imagined a man who blocked the alley and had a knife in his hand. ”
Anyway, bear in mind that this novel is semi-fiction, semi intellectual thesis.
I begin to see…
Note that in a colonial context, education was considered almost enough (or in some situations perhaps more than enough) to make one white.
Yes, I get that Marechera thought that because of education he had been whitened (or something along these lines). On ‘whitening’ and the impact of becoming lettered, however, see for example Jose’ Piedra, “Literary Whiteness and the Afr0-Hispanic Difference,” NLH 18:2 (1987). It’s in JSTOR.
The other thing I cannot figure out about the “Marechera did not know he was Black” idea is that this was *Rhodesia* of all places – that country founded by Cecil Rhodes. Does one not find out there who this person was and what was done there, what the justifications were, and so on?
The time line is important. The mainstream press scrambles the chronology to make it sound as if the Black kids beat up the white kid before the nooses were hung on the tree. Or at least that was my impression. Also this is the first mention I’ve heard of the minor nature of the white kid’s wounds, or the sentencing of Mychal Bell of the Jena six to max 22 years in prison by an all-white Jury and an all white judge. And the convenience store incident is new to me. The good white folks of Jena are using terror against young Black men, with threats, intimidation, incarceration, even death threats, as they no doubt always have done.
I’m still furious about the Duke case. I’m sure they raped that woman. Sooner or later, the truth will come out on that one.
Just another reason to hate the dear old Southland, from whence so many of our social injustices stem.
The other thing I cannot figure out about the “Marechera did not know he was Black” idea is that this was *Rhodesia* of all places – that country founded by Cecil Rhodes. Does one not find out there who this person was and what was done there, what the justifications were, and so on?
You must have come across the phenomenon before? Women who do not know how patriarchal society views them until they are raped, banished from the job, or whatever? A lot of feminists have commented on the phenomenon of right wing women who view themselves as exceptions to patriarchal rule — Michelle malkin, anne coulter, etc?
YES – I actually hadn’t seen this comment until after I’d written my other one below, but yes. Although the right wing examples are extreme ones … In my case, I didn’t come up against really serious sexism until I hit about 30. This was why it was hard to figure out – I had been a sort of exception, to a degree, up until then. Perhaps this is how things hit Marechera…. crossing my mind are also certain Latin American writers who did not find out they could ever be seen as non white until they got to Europe … which of course is the opposite experience of people like James Baldwin, who first experienced not being seen first as Black when he got to France. My question about the whole thing – not realizing, then discovering that one is female, Black, etc., and that these are the ‘marked’ categories and that one *will* be classified into them and seen as such – is that this experience, this positioning is also a product of the hierarchical situation. –Z
Also there is the aspect of pride. In certain really powerful senses, I do not know that I am proletarian. This mostly comes to light when somebody assumes control over me and I see that I am not willing to give them that control. So, I have to learn, again and again, that I am proletarian. But the lesson never seems to stick. I still resist the idea that this is what I am.
[..cont.]
“His breath reeked ow whisky. And he was grinning. The hairs stood on end at the back of my head. I had never fought anybody. At the same time I had never been stuck up with a knife. The thing was ludicrous enough to be real. He made a move and in that instant I could feel the blade dig into my side. It exploded in my head that this was a ridiculous way to go. That’s what saved me. I went beserk. The next thing I knew policemen were dragging em from the wretehed man who was unconscious in my hands. They had started to beat me up when I passed out. I woke up in hospital to find myselfunder guard and charged with grievous bodily harm and intent to commit robbery. There were alternative charges of being drunk and disorderly.
‘I could think nothing but wild thoughts of what was happening to me. The first time I realized I was in the hands of whitemen and thier kind of law. I could not even begin to admit to myself that I would not receive any kind of justice. I had visions of a statement being issued that i had thrown myself from a window or strung myself up in a toilet or somehow killed myself. I did not know any lawyers. It suddenly struck me that everyone I knew was white. My own colleagues, right down to the nurses in the hospital. It paralysed a art of me, realizing that I was on an island that contained millions of whites who were all suddenly personally against me. I could only think of trying to escape. It was so unreal it had to be real.
[……..]
We are a continent of refugees; one day here, another day there; so much fodder for the boundary markers. There is no sense of home any more, no feeling of being at one with any specific portion of the earth. As you said we have to seek unborn routes and these, like the evidence of ourselves, are yet to come. We live as though we were rehearsing our roles in a misty womb whre we cannot see the text clearly but as it were remember vabuely the general theme of it. Which is everything to do with the history of this continent. A continent of wounds which no longer knows what it is to be whole and healthy. A country difigured by scars and broken teeth and smashed testicles can only writhe in nightmare over and over, reliving the horrors that started it all. […]
The thing I remember most about it is that i always tried to reduce everything into a sort of autobiographical record. As though I needed to stamp myself with the evidence of my own existence: as if every single thing I did and said was pregnant with significance.
Scratchy – He’s a *great* writer. And – what I am not used to, or do not fully see / expect / accept / believe can be real, is sexism. It gets wielded upon me and I do not understand it.
Hattie – *wow* so the mainstream press really does distort. But re the South: as Keith Ellison (D-MN) said as he was lecturing Donald Washington (U.S. Attorney for the area in which Jena lies), “We all have our Jena Sixes.”