THE MONOCHROMATIC ABERRATION
By: Mystique Rheordan
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Discrimination, Black And White, Humanity

Martin Luther King Jr. once stood on the pedestal of abominable ignominy and echoed with reproach the cries of a thousand children, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Juxtaposing the ideologies of torrid discrimination and abhorrible gegenpressing, the world has eventually metamorphosed into a unique blend of cultures, civilizations and conflicting geo-political ideologies hurled under the wheels of time. Grabbing a cue from the aeons of desperation and shambolic virulence of the ancient divisive ideology of “Divide and Conquer”, the leaders of yesterday and the torchbearers of today embarked on a heuristic expedition to discern the eclectic connection between the colour black and Satan. It is merely degrative to the concrete foundation of our society that the pillars of yesterday are crumbling and the walls of today are being shattered by our miscommunicated ideals of racism.

Imagine for a second, strolling on the streets, hand-in-hand with your son or daughter. Would you for a second imagine what would happen if your skin betrays you? Out of the million things in the world, a million evils in our society today, you would trust your own skin to save your back, wouldn’t you? Ironic! I repeat; Ironic! We hear the sages of yesterday preach us to trust ourselves. And yet, degluting the philosophies of equality and equity, we are hurtling towards an era of the innate death of our morals: the clarion call we must heed to realise Martin Luther King’s dream. Stemming from the blood following through our veins, hypocrisy is but a misjudged notion. Rising to the sunshine, one may claim to be an advocator of racial equality, may even go out of his way to help a few “black” kids out there and yet at night, he will be the first to mock and abuse that dark-skinned servant in his home. The irony presents itself even when I use the term “black”. This word in itself has the ability to trigger more than half the world’s population, yet ironically black is but another word in the dictionary. When your child is shown a black ball in an interview and he answers correctly, your heart swells with pride and you pat him on the back. Binging for its roots in the treasure house of the obliterated tales of yore, the tracts of apostolic spiritualism finds solace in the dungeons of darkness, wherein thrives our hatred, jealousy and racist mindset. Be it the Herrero-Nama genocide, the Armenian genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Guinea or Sudan or the apartheid movement in South Africa, history is but another excuse for menacing solidarity. Stoically, our lives are but an interlude to absence. Yet, we associate black as the absence of purity, wherein it is merely the absence of light. That wafer-thin ice gives way to the heuristic claim by the “Whites” as the “Burden of the Whites” metamorphosed into the “Salvation of the Whites”. From Nelson Mandela to FW de Klerk, from Abraham Lincoln to Hilary Clinton, the prophets of yore intertwined their preaching with the tales of their forefathers, of digress at the colour black, of hatred of the darkness, of their fight to achieve recognition of a colour they found themselves struggling in.

They say, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Come the 21st century, the world struggles to find its place in the enervated dungeons of racism. Hate crimes against the Afro-Americans in the USA, utter disregard for gun laws and a blatherskite approach to eclectic nationalism has metamorphosed the world into a potboiler for Tudor-like stringiness. Struggling to find room for breathing in a world of treacherous nought, racism has confined ourselves to the prisons within and beyond ourselves. The Doll Test was an exercise conducted by the government of the USA to demonstrate the effects of racism on the mindset of Afro-American kids in the USA back in the 1970s. The exercise yielded horrendous results as each and every Afro-American child associated himself with black, and hence with impurity. And yet, as they say, to every lock lies a key. Indeed, the key to our Utopian concept of equality seems lost in the ocean of meandering complexes. As Fabrice Muamba had lamented, “Sadly racism is inbuilt in our children since their birth. And it will continue to exist until we stop associating black with impurity, unless we stop wearing black to funerals, until we stop using black to refer to Satan.”

The path, they say, is treacherous and thorny. The roses are prickly and yet enthralling. Our struggle against racism is but an interlude to the monotonic interparty of life. As the leaders and flagbearers of Gen Y, our duty lies in the demolition of these “narrow domestic walls” to build better and brighter futures for our children and for theirs as well. To shatter the misconceived ideals will be a Herculean effort and yet I believe in every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. Coping with an unreal struggle for existence, our battle in arms against ourselves must begin now. To defeat oneself needs greater courage than your enemies. Yet, it is a battle that we must fight today for the benefit of society. Ironically, the Bible, the shepherd of the masses has been quoted by naysayers to promote racism. A year ago, a religiously devout farmer in Accra, having discovered that the Bible supports racism, came to hate his own skin. In frustration, he wrote a note which surfaced online. I quote some excerpts from the same:

“ To the lilting melodies of the Caribbean folklore, to the canorous and sensuous serenades of the absquatulate love of the sanctifying spray of Adam’s ale, John Hopkins pays his tributes:

“ In epochs of desperation, frustration and adscititious apprehension, we as humans are fine-tuned to turn to the solitary entity, whom we believe to be superior to us- our Creator- the Maker of Heavens- God and by self-extended definition- religion”

In an astrobleme of ideologies, in a Barmecidal mirage of dogmas, the Law of the Jungle stands to be modified: “Revolution before evolution.” Trespassing on the tepid borders of insecurity, mistrust and benthos of disparaging benignity, my horizons have metamorphosed from apostolic spiritualism to an enervated bergschrund of despondency, wherein I flounder with bilboes constraining my vocation. During my juvenescence, I was dictated by my blatherskite father in the sacred treatises of pietism- erudition that would hold me in good stead for thirty-three protracted years of morbid suppression of my self-despotism and cruel reticence of my talents. Gazing up at the teeming multitude of the glistening stars in the cosmic obscure blanket of the nocturnal heavens, I would habitually whistle aloud, amidst my bruxism, and promise, “Die dood wag op diegene wat dit waag om my Vader te ontmoedig.” [Death awaits those who dare to disrespect my Father] Brought up in an ether of vicious reverence for Him, I was never a stranger to the cantillation under the deep cerulean.

At the tender age of three, the Gods of monochromatic bigotry peeked in through the translucent cavities of religious armours, as the clepsydra of demurring comminatory commensalism rained through chiliads. Indeed, the mere notion of transformations in perception owing to diverse hues and colours of His Creation seemed incredulous to me. With concinnity and conniption I have never experienced before, I was thrust into a neo-discriminatory world of bias, where skin colour forms the bedrock of prejudice against one’s own brethren; where religious beliefs and orthoxodism is fueled by racial intolerances.

And then incarnated the outrageous revelation of degluting ethics of human discrimination. Envisioning my beliefs thwarted in a realm of deracinated ideals, embodiments of my generic frustrations disembogued in a basin of disenthralled tears. The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. Be it or be it not, I find solace in the little words of freedom; the little grains of joy:

“We talk of how the pen is mightier than the sword.

So why does the ink in my skin continue to be cut by the whit-hot blade of racism?

My hair is black as vanilla bean.

My skin and eyes are dark brown like old African trees.

My soul is black with the ink I use to write my story.

So my pen may be mightier than the sword,

But if I wrote in the blood of my people, they might finally be able to read the words on the page.”

I failed to fathom, in my remotest senses, the root of the peculiar sense of discrimination between the hues of day and night. At the juvenile age of four, my mother illuminated my brain with the idea of symmetry: day exists in harmony with night; Sun exists in co-operation with the Moon; white exists in bondage with black. At the back of my head, there is a faint voice, which orates and muddles and ensorcells on its own: “If He creates us, why doesn’t he paint us uniformly?” This lack of symmetry troubled me as much as the ingenuous whims and fancies, existing through eviternity.