The Body & The City

The Body & The City

The city is more than a purely physical fact; its buildings are inhabited, its streets navigated and its spaces occupied by people who encode and interpret its physical infrastructure. Different groups settle or avoid various spaces according to a seemingly shared and unspoken understanding around orientations of the city. The city can then also be understood as a social institution in which hopes, dreams, desires and fantasies of ownership, representation and identity are conflated, contended and mediated between different groups.

In thinking about space & the city, I have decided to focus my presentation on a discussion of the body and physicality, as I have personally experienced moving through and between different spaces in the city. 

Here are a number of poems through which I personally tried to navigate the space of the city. They are in free verse...

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(About openness & the unfamiliar)

I walk into the house for the first time

The yard looks like that of a typical house in Sudan

An elusive sense of familiarity & novelty conflate in a dance to which I chose to surrender; suspending all judgment

I walked around the neighbourhood

I look up at a stunning sunset view of what I would later come to know as lions head

Obs felt welcoming

But the sense of a void in understanding, calling attention to itself so starkly made me realize thats its been a while since Ive been in a completely new place.

The thought filled me with a sense of contentment in what it entailed - a suspension of judgement and a humbling need to reconsider obnoxious assumptions of “common sense” or “human nature”

As pico Iyer put it ever so poetically,

Like falling in love, travel throws us into a state of delight, uncertainty and self-discovery. Like lovers, travelers both give and receive. Travelers, like lovers, go naked into the world.

I was ready to clothe myself with complexity

Filling the gaps in tomorrow's headlines & learning of distant places more than the newspaper can ever accommodate…

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Liminality

(Kind of about service; & about physical spaces of the city)

Its strange the way in which your feelings and attitudes manifest themselves into physicality …

Occupying the space inside and around walls of constraint;  or ones of possibility

Almost palpable, but ever elusive…

Like an unfinished thought or a forgotten name, waiting for the brain on the tip of the tongue ..

The flow is reversed

The space now controls your feelings and thoughts

Your body helpless

In the face of what now seems like an authoritarian rule of infrastructure.

But there is a clear disconnect.

A disconnect between what is and what could be...what is and what should be

It is within that space grey that I found hope through activism

Through developing a comfort that comes with occupying a space riddled with the confusion of ethics, and eternal ambiguity…

A space with which fairness has little acquaintance

& sense decided to walk out years ago

BUT in that negative space between what is and what could be resides an emptiness

Waiting to be filled with dances of our imagination…

Over time, it finds its inspiration and begins to distill with its energy the dense stillness in the air which once suffocated any terrain of possibility

Its not about increased comfort or bringing solutions

Its about learning to live in the space between despair & possibility, between a complete lack of rationality yet the meaning that is somehow produced out of it all…

And its about waking up, and doing it again tomorrow.

                                         **********

Growing Pains

(About the apartheid museum as a constructed space)

Tears that carry with them decades of pain stream down my face

In a sense of utter confinement; I could not breathe

A burden so deep, it finds its temporality in the past, present & the future

As a human, I felt the weight of the world we have created as a species, that can render people’s life experiences so drastically different and unfair. As a black person, I felt angered at white supremacy and the very concrete, very real, sickening effects it has had on people that were somehow decided to be lesser humans. As a Sudanese-American globetrotter, I felt confused and repulsed at the access I had to the world, and to different forms of imagining my existence. As an activist I felt the pressing urge to do something to acknowledge and fight against different forms of oppression that exist in the world today.

Concerns confused in their temporality, forever implicating me in a global narrative of domination and exploitation …

No clear answer, but I’m left with the heartbroken desire to see the world whole again…

Moving through the Apartheid museum has made me realize the importance of creating spaces like it; and like the district 6 museum which validate historically marginalized identities. As Soudien has argued, embracing a subjective view of history is so important; how we tell what happened is as important as telling what happened. I think really using the body as a starting point for pedagogy brings things outside the realm of the past, forcing us to deal not only with the legacies of history, but also with our place within it.

******

Continuing to think of the ‘concept city’ as a utopian and urbanistic discourse that is dependent upon the creation of a universal / anonymous subject (De Certeau) 

But through walking the migrational or metaphorical city slips into the clear text of the readable city. Here, the city is brought under the control of the individual.

To Wonder

A strange element of freedom is created within rigid or hypothetically overpowering structures of control

We enact a personal way of being in the world through walking on, along, across and between the streets of the city.  

But I have concluded that I can only write so many lines of this poem….

Bounded by whatever relative space I occupy depending on how I am read..

Woman, Black, Non-South African…

I cannot access the way that people in different parts of the city move through its spaces...

I will forever be outside of some people’s social reality

While they sometimes seem to be out of their country’s

Pushed to margins of self governance; a new sense is made out of the city

Laanga and Kirstenbosch are around the same distance away from the center of the city

Yet in metrics beyond distance, Laanga feels so far away

A world many, never even have to enter as they lay comfortably at the foot of the mountain

I feel the bizarenss of it all on my physical being as I move more freely around a city as a foreigner than most of its inhabitants do.

But I like the concept nonetheless

Hopeful yet elusive

Almost like a rebellion around the streets of the city, refusing to conform to formal analysis