Pensativities: Selected Essays

Half a Future

I remember an experience I had as a journalist in 1974, during what we then called “the period of transition.” We didn’t know that it was only the first of an endless series of transition periods, and I sincerely hope that many more transitions will occur as we continue the process of discovery to which we have dedicated ourselves.

It was 7 April, 1975, the first time all Mozambique had commemorated the Day of the Mozambican Woman. I was working for the Tribuna newspaper, and was sent to cover the celebrations in the port of Maputo. The person in charge of the rally was our late and fondly remembered general, Sebastião Mabote.

Right at the beginning of the meeting, there were songs and the obligatory slogans were shouted, as was the custom in those days. The enthusiasm of the dockworkers was unrestricted, and their support for the speaker total. Mabote shouted “Long Live Women!” And hundreds of manly arms and harsh voices were raised in vigorous and unanimous accompaniment.

Suddenly the general paused, and from his improvised podium, contemplated the crowd, which consisted solely of men, hardened and muscular by the nature of their work. His look was one of a commander of souls, used to leadership. It was then that he issued his order: “Everyone shout with me. I want your voices to be heard far beyond Maputo.” And the men answered as one that yes, they would join their leader in chorus. Then Sebastião Marcos Mabote raised his arms to encourage the masses, and launched forth with the following rallying cry: “We are all women! We are all women!” And he urged them, vigorously, to repeat his words. There was a shocked silence, and a wave of unease swept over the dockworkers. Some, just a few, timidly began to repeat the strange slogan. Mabote knew the art of communicating with the masses. And he persisted patiently until after some painful minutes, more and more masculine voices proclaimed their feminine identity. But no one did so wholeheartedly. And those who timidly raised their voices were never more than a tiny minority. This time, the general wasn’t fully successful.

I share this memory with you because it confirms what we all know: it is easy (although it is becoming less common) to show one’s solidarity with others. It’s difficult to be the others. Not even if it’s only for a fleeting moment, not even if it’s just a brief visit. The dockworkers were disposed to declare their solidarity with women. But they weren’t willing to travel over to their feminine side. And they refused to think of themselves as reborn beneath a different skin, within another gender. We say we are tolerant towards differences. But being tolerant is still not enough. We need to accept that most differences are invented and that the Other (the other gender, the other race, the other ethnic group) always exists within us.

It’s obvious that I’m not talking literally about being the Other, I’m not proposing that we men become transvestites, parroting women’s traits, painting our lips and nails, wearing bras and high heels. For men use this kind of disguise far more often than they would willingly admit. Let us not forget that during Carnival, the most common costume involves a man dressing up as a woman. It’s almost an obsession. Even the most hardened males feel a strange compulsion to parade as women, on those days when it is socially accepted. It would be worth asking ourselves — even from a psychiatric point of view — why there is this desire to take on an identity that men otherwise repudiate so vehemently.

I’m not talking about this type of mimetic conversion. I’m talking about our willingness to travel over to what we understand as the soul of others: our capacity to visit, as ourselves, that which we might call the female soul, even if we don’t quite know what that is, even if we do not know where the frontier between masculinity and femininity begins or ends.

I remember that at a conference on literature in Durban, a South African writer criticized one of his country’s young poets. He said: “You wrote a verse about an African woman riding a bike in the country. But a Bantu woman would never do that.” I had just come from a journey through Sofala and Zambezia and happened to have with me various photographs of women riding around on bicycles. I showed this proof of the crime, and the critic muttered bitterly: “Yes, but these aren’t Zulu women.” The world of the Bantus had suddenly and drastically been reduced to that of the Zulus. And it’s quite likely that there were many Zulu women pedalling along the roads of South Africa without our friend being aware of it. But that’s not the point. Even if no women from a given community use bicycles, literature is free to invent whatever it wants, and to place a female body — or that of a gender yet to be invented — in the saddle.

I think that the South African writer’s reaction, born out of insecurity, reflects a male position that invokes supposed interdictions in the name of a hypothetical “female essence.” It is the product of fear. We men do not know the women with whom we share our lives and the world. We fear what they are thinking, we feel threatened by what they feel. We view the future as if it were a bicycle being ridden by a woman. And so it was this profound, primal fear that came to the surface when the dockers had to shout the slogan proposed by Sebastião Mabote. Women may suffer the same challenge when being the Other and travelling through the souls of men, but something tells me they don’t have the same fer of a male-dominated future: in fact they experience this now. The present is a pirate bus and a man is at the wheel.

It is against the deep-seated fear of otherness that Ibsen and all great writers worked. They were ahead of their times, constructing worlds beyond reality, and they enabled others to imagine because they had imagined themselves beyond the limits of their bodies and of what were generally accepted as their identities.

A hundred years later, we are celebrating the work of a man who represents a country, a language and a culture that are apparently so far removed from us. But we all become closer to each other in the struggle for humanity. Ibsen was a writer and a fighter. In the notes to his play, The Doll’s House, he wrote: “A woman cannot be herself in this society that has been constructed as masculine, with laws drawn up by men and male judges who evaluate society on the basis of masculine criteria.” And we Mozambicans view Mozambique as a male entity.

Our society is in a state of permanent and generalized violence towards women. This violence is silent (I would prefer to think of it as silenced) because of an extensive network of male kinship. Levels of domestic violence are huge, cases of rape are unacceptable, violence against widows has already been reported on in a book, and there is violence against elderly women who are accused of being witches and who are therefore punished and stigmatized. And there’s more if we wish to illustrate the silent and systematic aggression against women: over 21 percent of women marry before they reach the age of fifteen (in some provinces, this number rises to nearly 60 percent). There are young girls who never get to be women. The cycle reproduces in such a way that a young girl who should still be a daughter is already the mother of a girl who, in turn will be impeded from exercising her femininity. Fifty-five percent of births by these young girls occur without the support of a qualified midwife. For all these reasons and many others, women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are twice as likely to be contaminated by AIDS as boys of the same age. These statistics suggest a process of silent mutilation in the country, a permanent state of war against ourselves.

This is the only conclusion we can draw: a country in which women can only be half themselves is condemned to live only half of its future.

Speech delivered at the commemoration

for the writer Henrik Ibsen, Maputo, 2007.