Me and My Mate

M has given us a lift home and, as we get out of his car, my mother pulls paper money out of her purse and thrusts it at him. We go through the usual rigmarole of

Ah no, Peg. Put it away.

No, gowaon, take it.

It will end with someone either pressing the money back into her purse or folding it into his top pocket. The essential thing is that someone will finally feel able to acquiesce in what they had to say they didn't want. My mother wants to draw a line under the fact that her husband, and therefore she, does not own a car, cannot drive and does not have access to mobility without being dependent on others. I know this feeling. Probably the kid who keenly observed this interchange already knew it. It precludes gratitude and generosity. Generosity is something that moves in two directions – to the giver and to the taker. It is not a quality of the giver, the quality is only there if it is in the interchange. I can’t really do generosity, it’s too scary. If you rely on yourself, however incompetent you are, you at least know what you’re dealing with. When you have to ask others for what you need, you have to accept the humiliation of that need. And you must accept the position that, one day, they may come back for payment and you will owe them. What experiences does this dilemma expose? I don’t know. I just inherited it, learnt it by observation and by osmosis.

Acquiesce, access, mobility, interchange, precludes, incompetent, dilemma, osmosis. All words from the above paragraph. None are words that would have been used in the conversations I would have heard or would have had with my parents. Most of the words would have been unknown to them and to me at the time. They come from language I have borrowed from others and the act of speaking them makes the distance between who I am and who I have been. When I began to read “difiicult” books in my late teens, I learnt to read “big words” with my pocket Oxford Dictionary. When I think to use a word now, I consult my good friend the Oxford Dictionary on my phone. He always helps me not to make a fool of myself by confirming, or not, the appropriateness of the word I am about to use.

And then there are the idioms (just checked that). I am supposed to say, my friend and I because, my friend must be seen to come first and I must pretend that I am only an afterthought. The rationale I have heard is that you should not thrust yourself forward. It was the Victorians who insisted on this. They even went as far as to refer to themselves as ‘one’, as if it was shameful to get more personal. Ironic that they thrust themselves on most parts of the world at the time! But now I have to conform if I do not want to drop the Me and my mate bomb into a conversation. Every group has its rules, without exception and these are the rules of the group I now find myself in. The people in my group are reasonable people and, if you speak reasonably, they will be understanding and sympathetic. But do not break the rules. The rules are how we identify who is us and who is them.

So where can I stand in relation to my own work? It is very personal. Direct and in your face some would say. Should I have a bit of confidence in my own work? Stand behind it with a bit of muscle? Sometimes I do stand behind it but there’s always the shadow of a ‘fuck you’ in that.

Maybe you’ve never had to feel fuck you. You say that to someone who assumes right to such an extent that they are impervious. There are such people. They just know, in their bones, that the world belongs to them. I once saw film from apartheid South Africa. Some black people were demonstrating. A young white man strode over and starting punching people hard. Apart from the morality of this act, it would have been extremely stupid in another context. The black men he was punching were just as strong as he was. But here, under the apartheid system, the man ‘knew’ he had this right and that the blacks were recalcitrant children and any black man who retaliated must first overcome the fear that he might be right. I am reminded of something I read once about the Mau Mau and the experience of actually killing a white man. It was transformative because, up to then, they didn’t know that these people were not gods. I am not making a point about black and white because these mechanisms exist in any class society. It is uncomfortable to talk about because it exposes all the accommodations we have made in order to just get on with our everyday lives.