Times Of Swaziland: USABLE TRADITIONS: QUEERING  OF XHOSA MEN’S INITIATION

USABLE TRADITIONS: QUEERING  OF XHOSA MEN’S INITIATION
================================================================================
SOURCE: Mail & Guardian on 01/11/2017 00:04:00


THE film Inxeba: The Wound, South Africa’s official entry for next year’s
Oscar awards, has captured the imaginations of South African and international
audiences. In a July 2017 edition of the Mail & Guardian, Niza Jay wrote of the
necessity of the film in confronting what it means to be a Xhosa man. Niza
argued that markers of Xhosa manhood ‘do the violent work of endowing the
Xhosa male body with an erroneously heightened sense of significance’ that
perpetuates patriarchal, heterosexist ideals. In this way, according to Jay,
Xhosa initiation renders some bodies ‘placeless’. These bodies, Jay argues,
include those of ‘feminine’; presenting men who engage ‘physically and
emotionally with other men on a romantic level’, thus defying all that the
Xhosa culture dictates.
I would like to complicate prevailing discourses, such as Jay’s, about the
experiences of queer and non-heterosexual-identifying Xhosa men with initiation.
My aim is not to downplay the violent experiences ‘feminine’ bodies have had
with Xhosa cultural practices. Rather, I want to draw specifically on Xavier
Livermon’s concept of ‘usable traditions’ to call for a more complicated
discussion of the experiences of queer black Xhosa men with tradition,
especially initiation.
In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at how gay Xhosa men
experience aspects of cultural and religious life.
Sociologist Thoko Sipungu examines the experiences of gay Xhosa men in the
Methodist Church. Anathi Ntozini and Hlonelwa Ngqangweni look at how gay Xhosa
men experience traditional initiation. Ntozini and Ngqangweni argue that
initiation does not accommodate gay men. In their work, gay men share negative
experiences of having to downplay their sexual identity and having to deal with
expectations that initiation will ‘fix’ them.
Indeed, this affirms Jay in that it would appear that gay initiates could be
considered ‘as vulnerable men who take up the subjugated position of
masculinity’. Yet Livermon’s work complicates Jay, Ntozini and
Ngqangweni’s experiences as symbolic of all gay men’s experiences with
tradition. Livermon shows that in various ways black South African gays do use
‘tradition’, despite prevailing heteropatriarchy, to make ‘claims to
sexual autonomy’ by ‘redefining what constitutes African culture’.
In so doing, black gays show tradition as ‘constantly in process’ and
accommodating of difference. Yet the main discourses on Xhosa male initiation
have presented a homogenised narrative that erases how black Xhosa gays
variously choose to use tradition and customs. Seeing black gays as being
without agency in how they engage cultural practices ignores the ways in which
they might find belonging through customs and tradition.
Livermon uses the case of now late gospel megastar Lundi Tyamara, who shocked
South Africa when he came back from initiation and said the experience gave him
the courage to come out, to show the different ways in which black gays use
‘tradition’ to assert being gay.
Although this did not sit well with traditionalists, Livermon argues that ‘the
insertion of individuals such as Tyamara into traditional practices such as
circumcision requires a rethinking of gendered binaries and exclusions based on
sexuality’.
Thus Tyamara, despite occupying a position of gay subjectivity, undergoing and
using tradition to claim a gay sexuality forces a rethinking of the conferring
of manhood on bodies despite a gay sexual identity. Livermon’s analysis notes
various instances when his interlocutors talked of the need to do things ‘the
right way’ in accordance with tradition. In doing so black gays revisit
customary practices to ‘suit their needs’ by melding being gay and tradition
to gain acceptance and visibility in their cultural contexts.
By creating ‘usable traditions’, black gays combine African cultural
traditions with being gay and show, according to Livermon, ‘how customary
cultural practices can retain their importance and salience through
reconceptualisation and the importance of black gay bodies in testing and
pushing the limits of black cultural subjectivity’.
Narrow portrayals of Xhosa cultural practices erase the ways in which Xhosa gays
engage tradition in a gential ways that reflect the complexities of working with
traditions and customs in a gay body. Initiation can thus be a ‘space of
reconstitution’ and reinvention, in the words of Livermon, where black gays
can experience ‘custom and culture to be in a state of being rather than an
already accomplished fact’.
Black feminist scholars, such as bell hooks, have argued that often black men
only come into consciousness in prison, where they are able to think largely
unbothered. Certainly we know that this was the case for many black leaders such
as Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.
Initiation can offer a space for young men to reflect and repair across sexual
identity. As Livermon argues, it is important to move away from ‘oppressive
normative discourse[s] of exclusion’ and look at how black Xhosa gays might
find beauty and redemption in their traditions and customs.