I was watching Isibaya a few weeks ago before I left South Africa. One of the characters had organized for his wife to be away watching movies with her friend while he stayed home and decorated certain rooms with all manner of rose petals, delicate candles placed strategically around the room to create the right ambiance, and even a chef-cum-butler who would wait on the couple as they dined the night away.
Grand gestures occupy an interesting place in the mind of a man, even his existence in general. Common sensibly, they must not be overdone (i.e. with excessive frequency) else they cease to be ‘grand’. That is good and well. Yet if we look a little further we will see the irony that every man must tackle in the morass of his conscious: these gestures, these spontaneous acts of lavish spending of money and energy and time indeed cannot be always ‘grand’- the cost, in all senses, would be astronomical. But at the same time it seems to be a man’s psychological, almost instinctive reflex to want to do just that; to lavish upon the subject of his enchantment all manner of unnecessary gifts, all manner of indulgent luxury and accessory in order to symbolize his appreciation (and to woo her).
This conflict cannot be overstated. The grand gesture has a double function, in that it is ostensibly for and about the lady; but secondly, underneath this layer, is a sense in which it is also about being the man. The latter is constituted, firstly, by his own drive to demonstrate, besides his affections, that he can pull off the grand gesture- not just any old gesture, but one that requires financial, imaginative, and (though less often) physical muscle. But here is the interesting part. Who is he demonstrating this to? Precisely to the second aspect that ‘determines’ manhood, namely the culture and/or tradition of which he is a product, which while he laments, he nonetheless struggles to become the very prototype of, the poster-boy of whatever manhood-imperatives the tradition confers upon him.
Why in the world would he want to become that which he feels authentic acrimony towards and wants to be free of?
The answer is counter-intuitively simple: to be free of the burden of this prescribed masculinity, he resolves to become more than what it says of him. But therein lies the root of his trauma: to be ‘more’ than something, he must first, in some sense or another, be equal to it. He does not calculate this with any degree of consciousness- it is already built into the internal logic of his thinking. And this is a simple step we, with the advantage of the observer’s distance, can see very easily: to be ‘two’ you have to, at some point or in some quantitative term, be equal to ‘one’ and then some. Of course, it’s nonsensical to say 2=1, but it is common sense that ‘2’ is composed of a ‘1’ and another ‘1’; in this sense, it is equal to 1 at two points of its being. Or to use another example, a bag of potatoes is obviously not the same thing as a bag of mixed vegetables, but to the extent that there are somepotatoes in the latter, it is at some points equal to the bag of potatoes and then some.
What results, then, from him wanting to be ‘more’ than what his uncles and aunts and neighbour say it is to be a man, is that he gets to the point where he is precisely equal to these prescriptions, but can scarcely reach the ‘and then some’. For all he knows are these prescriptions; that is, all he’s ever wanted to do is to be ‘more’ than these prescriptions, but in his project to do so he has seldom taken the time out to define exactly what the ‘more’ is or what it looks like. Thus we have the man that loathes the imperatives of manhood that have been thrust upon him but is at the same time the quintessential embodiment thereof.
His trauma, however, starts here (that is, if he was aware of this he would have avoided the whole mess of the above): the man’s initial mistake was to define his project of identity formation in terms of the logic of ‘being more’ to begin with. Why is this a mistake, besides the dynamic we have seen above? Again the answer is deceptively simple. In the very moment he defined his ambition to ‘be more’ as such, at the very nanosecond he thought this, he accepted the very logic he is at pains to defy. The ‘be more’ (competitive) principle is a classic hallmark of many false narratives of masculinity, and in its logical deficiency (or is the deficiency ours for not asking?) it fails to mention exactly who or what he must be ‘more’ than. For ‘more’ indicates that there is some kind of comparison going on. Be more competitive than who? What?
Not having interrogated this tradition, he in fact misses this inherent incompletion, completing it in innocence (‘I want to be more than they say I should be’) but ingesting its logical implication in the process.
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But as to the grand gesture itself, how thoughtful of Sbu!
16-01-2016
Zama Moyo lives in Johannesburg. He completed his honours in international relations at Wits University. While busy with his honours, Zama was selected as an intern at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). He completed his MA in ideology and discourse analysis at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Zama has always loved words and penned a number of reflective essays on his personal blog Thought Box. He has also written on a broad range of issues related to current affairs. In 2013 he was selected as a finalist in the Global Human Rights Essay Contest which focused on ‘Human Rights Cities’. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis – On the intersection of ethics and public policy – at the University of Pretoria.
