“When
we wear the clothes that are demanded of us, do we stuff our unhappy skins in a
trash can or turn them into drums beaten to unfamiliar rhythms?”
Do we wear the clothes we like to wear, the colours we
prefer? In a superficial sense, yes, we
do. Of course some of us are never
really happy with that which we can get given limitations of purchasing power,
but we do get to pick and choose and it makes us feel good that we are able
to. We like to think that we have
picking power, but the truth is that the picking process is more often than not
something that operates within fairly well defined limits. Income, wealth, social location, propriety of
place, status etc. and other things determine what we can and what we cannot
and/or should not wear, how we should or shout not be.
So yes, we get to choose, but only after we’ve been told
you’ve got to choose from this, this, this and this only. Sometimes we can’t help it; sometimes we
can. If you really think, we are for the
most part a conforming species. We adapt
to circumstances and rarely adapt circumstances to suit ourselves.
Maybe all this is too abstract. Let’s get concrete. Isn’t it true that we often find ourselves in
situations where we really cannot say what we really want to say, when we hold
ourselves back because pointing out the obvious is embarrassing or
inappropriate given the specifics of power relations?
I think we all find ourselves in situations where we have
reason to burst out laughing but would stifle all that because it might annoy
or embarrass someone, usually someone who could if he/she wanted to make things
uncomfortable for us at a later point. This
is what I mean when I say we wear clothes that are demanded of us. We have to have the ‘correct’ make-up,
manufacture on our faces the appropriate countenance, adopt the correct
posture, say the right words, keep our silence and steer clear of certain
subjects. If we do all that we are
‘nice’, ‘courteous’, ‘proper’; if we don’t, we are ‘uncouth’, ‘irreverent’,
‘rude’, ‘crude’ etc.
A lot of times we don’t have a choice. We just ‘grin and bear’ as it were. Until of course some kid comes and tells us
and the world that the emperor is naked.
In those rare and remarkable moment we are liberated and can ourselves
be naked, i.e. be who we are, who we want to be; but for the most part we were
the clothes someone else demand we wear and perforce are rendered naked and
vulnerable and open to all manner of humiliation.
Take democracy, for example. On election day we are
gods. We are worshipped. Well, not just
on election day, for we are worshipped by all kinds of ‘devotees’ throughout
the several weeks that constitute campaign-time as well. And then on election-day us gods go to a
polling booth, thrust a piece of paper inside a small box and thus do we
willingly relinquish our divinity. Thus
are we robbed of our divinity, to put it another way. The point is, we can be gods, but only for a
limited time. After the Elections
Commissioner announces the results, there is a quick reversal of role: the
elected, formerly devotee, is conferred with divinity, and the elector,
formerly god, is now devotee. Democracy
allows us to wear a dress called ‘participation’ but we are stripped naked
immediately after we ‘participate’ and revert to our ‘natural’ skin; that of
‘marginal’ and ‘inconsequential’. Add
‘to be exploited and humiliated’ to that.
There are other dimensions to this dress-code trap. It is a serious epidemic among those who
engage in politics. I noticed this first
in my first year at Peradeniya where the JVP, avowedly a Marxist-Leninist
party, consistently took up positions that were quite antithetical to the
ideology that claimed to be inspired by.
There was a single-word justification: ‘strategy’. When survival and relevancy are more
important than anything else, I suppose anything and everything can be
justified with that dismissive and misleading term, ‘strategy’.
I wonder, though, about the degree of comfort experienced or
missed by those who have to wear clothes that are not necessary of their
choosing. When Anura Kumara Dissanayake
gets an elephant badge and has to wear it, what happens to the hammer and
sickle of his sensibilities, the bell that has rung for him for half his life
or more?
How about those who cross over from one party to another and
sometimes back to the original political residence? No sweat, no guilt, no embarrassment?
It is true that life makes us wear garments that we are not
keen on wearing but we have to for reasons beyond our control, although it is
also true that sometimes we can be ourselves in other people’s skins or in
garments we are required to wear. We
just have to be smart, creative, enterprising and quick footed. It’s rare though.
More typically, we drop ‘self’ when we put on the face we
are supposed to wear. We can and do
collect our unhappy skins so that we can get back into it and recover who we
are after our drudgery of imposed self-deception is done.
The issue is this:
when we leave our skins behind, sometimes they are stolen. Sometimes we don’t remember where we left
them. And we can never become ourselves
again. That’s the ultimate condition of slavery.
We all face this situation in numerous ways at numerous
times of our lives; we are often slaves, sometimes consciously and sometimes
not, sometimes happily and sometimes unhappily.
Through it all, there is I think one thing that we must all keep in mind
and I am not sure if we do: it is possible, quite possible, that there comes a
moment when your mask could replace your face forever. We do not know if it is preordained, sacred
or tragic, but it is a moment we need to watch out for, simply because the way
we respond to this moment can make our skins relevant or irrelevant. As per our
choice.
Read also 'Let's de-code the dress code'
First published on December 24, 2009 in the Daily News
malindawords@gmail.com.
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