Who am I

Who am I

It is an instinct of human nature to label others who are different from oneself. A socialist brands all those who do not subscribe to socialism as capitalists, a theist finds it repugnant to be in the company of those whom he describes as atheists or agnostics. The neo-critics sarcastically refer to the older school of critics as canonists and ridicule them as fossilized scholars holding to a body of established and axiomatic rules and principles.  The earliest endorsement of this trait among men and women started with the Bible. The Book of Matthew (12.30) reads: “Whoever is not with me is against me” and later  the Book of Luke  (9.50) quotes  Jesus saying : “Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you”.

Ever since I started putting down my thoughts on society, politics, art and literature and spiritual matters, I have been ist- labelled as a socialist, communist, elitist, atheist, canonist etc, though honestly speaking, I do not subscribe to anyone of the- ists without some degree of reservation. I have also been pigeonholed in other contrary labels as conservative and post-modern, radical and progressive depending on my views that appear chameleonic to an uninitiated and prejudiced mind. Married for more than half a century I have been an advocate of lasting heterosexual marriages in the interest of family and society. At the same time, I do not find anything odd or objectionable in gay or lesbian marriages. This is not to be seen as pro-actively modern by casting off conservatism that becomes a senior citizen of my age,  but because I subscribe to and endorse individual make-up, what is sometimes referred to as the genotype, that has a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex. This group may not be as large as the heterosexuals and therefore in no way will it conflict with progeny that is central to the perpetuation of humanity. For me homo- or hetero-, the mutual attraction between two human beings is an exalting experience and to frown upon same sex fascination as an aberration because it is a departure from what has been traditionally prescribed and followed is an infringement on the right to love. If we recall Milan Kundera’s line “love…entered the room like a miracle”, we will understand that proscribing love between two human beings irrespective of their genders is going against instinctual human nature.

The immediate provocation for writing this piece is an article on female sex tourism by a dear friend of mine from Spain. She is a European by descent, liberal and left of Centre whose political beliefs lean towards socialist ideas though not of the extreme. She has a soft spot for people in the third World and in the colonized but now liberated countries and her empathy with them is not to be mixed with ‘pity’ that carries overtones of condescension and patronage. Her article on Female Sex Tourism highlights the colonial mentality of the white women towards the blacks as portrayed in two plays, Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummiesand Debbie Tucker Green’s Trade. As a reviewer of the two plays, she has examined “the interactions between white female tourists and local black men from the context of post-colonialism, asking whether these encounters can be considered a “fair trade” or whether it is the neo-colonizing of people in this ex-slave society.(Hilda Klein)

The plays present Northern European women, independent and professional, travelling to Africa or the West Indies in search of sexual satisfaction. In other words, these plays deal with male prostitution and the new trend among economically independent women to go on sex tourism. The statistics are staggering- some 600,000 European women, among them 80,000 single British women are engaged in sex tourism. These affluent women seek the virile physique of a small number of black men for trifling sums. The earlier dominance of the white colonizer over the dark-skinned colonized continue today through sexual relationship between the black male prostitutes and white female clients. Tanik Gupta says: “You can […] see it as white people colonising and objectifying black sexuality. It’s almost like a return to the slave days, with white women checking out the men’s teeth, limbs and dicks before they buy”.   Prostitution is the new trade except that the client is a white woman and the prostitute is a black man. The new trade balance is one of eco-sexual transaction and white women with their economic independence and hunger for sex that is not satisfied by their white spouses in their native lands, are presented as degraded and perverted females.

I find the plays a pointer to the debasement of humanity. It is one thing to justify female sex tourism on grounds of failed marriages and failed sexual satisfaction. When one does not succeed in man-woman relationships, can't women raise themselves up to seek satisfaction in things other than sex? Somehow degrading oneself in this way shows women lowering their femininity whose distinguishing characteristics are delicacy, gentleness, demureness, grace, love and compassion.(classical views) Can’t the women adopt children, do social service or indulge in forms of creativity to heal their hurt physical deprivation? Isn’t seeking sexual satisfaction an easy form  (though debased) of escapism? I do not know if I am right in expressing my feelings that border on disgust and revulsion that sound antithetical to present day feminists’ no holds barred orchestration towards  freedom and gender equality.

As stated at the beginning, though labeled a conservative because of my family upbringing, I appreciate romantic love which is based on two identities becoming one. If A is in love with B, A identifies himself with B and so does B with A. Shakespeare’s Desdemona, a white woman is deeply in love with Othello, a black Moor. She tells him “I see my visage in thee”- it is a total identification of the two lovers.  The romanticist in me is of the view  that sexual union between two beings, irrespective of gender, authenticates the exalted love felt deeply in the heart. Unfortunately in today’s fast moving world, there is no time for men and women to read and enjoy great works that distil the essence of human bonding in exalted terms. They seek coarse sexual pleasures without the experience of exalted joy. For example, here is a lovely poem by John Donne who speaks about the lover and the beloved bitten by a flea:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame nor loss of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

…    …     …    …     …

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;

Here are a few lines from another poem of Donne: The Ecstasy

Where like a pillow on a bed

A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The violet's reclining head

Sat we two one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented

By a fast balm which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands as yet

Was all the means to make us one;

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

This ecstasy doth unperplex,

We said, and tell us what we love;

We see by this it was not sex,

We see we saw not what did move;

These poems reveal the working of the senses in transmitting love between two souls- it does not matter whether it is between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. The eyes and the hands complete the fullness of love, the bliss of togetherness. Void of such ecstatic bonding, sexual union is animalistic in character. Reading such a poem of pure and unalloyed love is one way of transferring the experience of the poet to oneself. The modern men and women have no time to absorb such exciting experience.

Thus I grew to be I a romantic at heart ( which endorses unrestrained freedom), but I continued to be a classicist in spirit in my unrelenting search for  elegance, grace, beauty. I am a liberalist favouring tolerance and open-mindedness and yet a conservatist who believes in law and order. I am a theist  and that too a polytheist, but I am also an agnostic who does not worship God  as a benign Power ever willing to bestow His benevolent boon giving hands  on us, but only as an unknown, unknowable and inscrutable Power endowed with authority and capability to create as well as to destroy. I am a feminist inherently proud of the capability potential of women and its realization for which they need total freedom, but at the same time, I am an anti -feminist who refuses to labour under a fallacious delusion of persecution and victimization.

Am I the only one to be a bundle of contraries in my make-up? No, I am one among many thousands who does not seek an –ist label unless the –ist is prefixed with ‘human’. A very large majority of people all over the world are humanists who believe in humanistic values and devotion to human welfare. There is no point in being rigid and dogmatic and be labeled an –ist. The cause of all clashes today begins with this act of labeling.  Since till today Man has found no answer to the question “Who am I” nor will he ever arrive at a comprehensive answer,  let us drop that question and instead explore what we can do with the given’I’ without attempting to coerce all other ‘I’s to be like our ‘I’.