I woke up this morning thinking of a friend I made in college. We were friendly in classes but became friends one day when we coincided at the pool and fell into conversation about other things.
That was so long ago. It was when university gyms still issued their faded swimsuits. Really skilful women could pin their caps in such a way as to remain legal, yet still show most of their hair.
Raised in atmospheres that harbored dreams for middle class white girls elaborated from about 1945-1960 we had been taught to limit ourselves and we were struggling with many forms of self mutilation. I am not talking about cutting and piercing, things people do now, or anything visible.
We knew we were capable of turning anything, no matter how positive or pleasurable, into torture and we were learning not to do this. We became quite good at catching it, and turning it around.
Everything I remember from the early days is so different from what things became, everything was getting decolonized then and people were not post-feminist yet.
I woke up this morning thinking that the problem is, the wicked managed to catch me, to turn work into an instrument of self mutilation; that is the explanation.
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I have noted before that when we were students our professors from the South and East, although particularly the East since you could not get to our university directly from the South, told us we looked too healthy to be intelligent and were not sure we could be suited for the hard life of intellectuals.
Dame Eleanor Hull speaks of the Puritan hangover and it seems a lot stronger East of the Mississippi. I think that is one of the reasons academics suffer. If you add to it the self mutilation we had been taught earlier on, which school had actually trained me out of to a large degree, you get the conundrum I have. These things, though, are why you have to rise up singing, stay your mind on freedom, all those things we learned from our SNCC teacher in the first grade.
It always seemed to me that the negativity of certain academics was an allegedly fashionable pose they could afford to strike because they did have time and money to waste, and more freedom than they knew what to do with. It always seemed to me that if you knew what you would do in freedom then you would not fritter it away.
♦
It also seemed to me that my identification with all the decolonizing peoples and the marching sharecroppers was problematically romantic and vicarious. Perhaps it was actually not. Perhaps for someone whose original education was about learning how to put on one’s own straitjacket and enjoy it, these people were an ideal model.
And they were working on freedom for everyone. That point is key, especially on the King weekend, which this is.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 