Who is a woman?
What or who is a woman? We in Africa hear this question and we laugh. We wonder why anyone would ask such a question with a straight face … and in the name of science. A woman can only be described by poetry.
As a sower sows a seed and a plant grows from that seed, so does a man sow his seed so that a child may grow from that seed. Herein is rudimentary agriculture transposed into basic biology that can be understood by any simpleton. No need for formal schooling in order to assimilate such primordial knowledge… knowledge as primordial as the one required to know what or who a woman is.
What or who is a woman? We in Africa hear this question and we laugh. We wonder why anyone would ask such a question with a straight face … and in the name of science. We look around us and point at the nearest village woman passing by – one of those lovely microcosms of creation – gracefully balancing a clay pot on her head as she makes her way to the well to fetch water. Why, we ask ourselves, would we need science when we can point out the obvious? But our interlocutors are too sophisticated to rely on the obvious; they ask us to elaborate – to give a more “scientific” and “nuanced” description worthy of their civilized ears. Unfortunately, we are mere rustics, “Noble Savages” as Rousseau would have preferred to call us; so we stammer as we look for scholarly analogies that will make us sound erudite and learned. “The woman”, we stutter, “is the ground of growth, the soil without which nothing can flourish. She is the rich soil in which, through which and on which the seed is planted, nurtured, and grown.” Satisfied with our modest attempt at describing the obvious, we look back at our interlocutors for a nod of approval, a smile … some form of recognition to indicate that we have hit the target or approached it at the very least. Nothing. They are not convinced.
The basic language of creation is lost on an overly technological world. A world that has dug deep into its own soil and extracted all its riches, leaving it barren, forgetting the womb that bore it and the breasts that nourished it. Such a world, we as Africans are convinced, cannot understand a woman, precisely because it has drained her of her meaning … her interior richness. A woman cannot be understood by the cold instruments of science. Scanners and stethoscopes that can only scratch the surface of reality. Neither can her depths be plumbed by those insolent and intrusive instruments of modern medicine. She is as vast as the ocean and as the ocean deep. Biology can no more comprehend a woman than a fisherman can drink an ocean. Like the created world that she embodies and expresses, she cannot be analyzed and dissected without doing damage to her integrity. To say in Biology that a woman is “the one with two X chromosomes” is only to underline the fact that she is doubly unknowable. X being the letter used to denote “uncharted territory” or “the unknown”, as in SpaceX and X Files.
A woman can only be described by poetry. She can only be understood by the heart. Is this not the wisdom of Exupéry’s Little Prince who reminded us that “it is only with the heart that we can truly see”? But these exploiters and plunderers do not listen to children, just as they do not listen to women and that is why they cannot understand them. The one they slaughter in their mothers’ wombs and call it liberation; the other they plunder and purloin and call it conquest.
Creation does not speak with words… but she has a lot to say, if only we would listen. Creation is very like a woman and very like a child. Have you ever wondered why women and children are so often bundled together under that marginal category of “women and children”? One explanation could be that they are equally expressive; i.e., they both don’t rely primarily on words to express themselves because what they have to say often goes beyond words. And again, it is for this reason that these cold-hearted, deaf conquistadores, do not listen to the language of creation. It is because creation reminds them of women and children.
And why don’t they listen? I would like to suggest that the main reason why these blind technocrats see neither creation for what it is worth nor her personification – the woman, – is because they chose to kill her Creator. They willingly chose to deny the existence of the One who draped her with His beauty and bestowed on her His capacity to speak with signs and symbols. One of the most poetic representatives of this godless age – a self-declared madman – said it eloquently; “God is dead. We have killed him. You and I”. When the Creator fades the creature vanishes. When God is forgotten, the creature becomes unintelligible. When the sun is eclipsed, the earth is enveloped in darkness. The lower is only evident “in (the) light” of the higher.
No one described the “death of God” as poetically and as powerfully as Friedrich Nietzsche. And I call him a “madman” to his credit, for how can anyone help but be mad if he has truly understood what this madman understood? His was the fiery fervor and frustration of a latter-day prophet who couldn’t help but be both angry and excited … angry because his message was not received and excited because he bore a truth too great for words. Too great for the cold language of science and facts, but not too great for the language of poetry and mystery – which is why he wrote with such pithy expressions and lively turns of phrase.
Nietzsche wrote the Joyful Wisdom (also known as the Gay Science) in 1882 and he died in 1900. In it he narrates the tale of the “madman” who is frantically searching for a God who is lost. As the narration goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that this God he is seeking, is not really lost … it would be more accurate to say that he has been “killed”. “We have killed him – you and I”, the madman says excitedly. He waxes poetical in describing how unbelievable it would be to kill a God – an act akin to drinking an ocean, detaching the sun from the earth and straying into infinite nothingness. He goes on to describe the utter meaninglessness that would necessarily ensue from such an act and the impossibility of cleansing the self from the guilt of such a heinous crime. At one point in his exposé, when he senses the incredulity of the crowd, the madman stares intently into their faces and dashes the lantern he had been holding in his hand onto the ground and walks away in protest. He realizes that the people in the market place are still too dull and slow to come to terms with the full impact of what he has been struggling to explain. That very day, he goes to announce the same message in various churches which for him had now become nothing more (and nothing less) than monuments and tombs of this God whom they had killed.
How is it that even after two centuries, we have not yet digested what Friedrich “the Madman” Nietzsche was talking about? Are we still so retarded that we cannot see what even a crazy person can see? When Nietzsche’s madman says, “I come too early … I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling—it has not yet reached men's ears,” … can we not see that this “right time” about which he spoke is the time we are living in now? Should we not now allow the madman to rest in peace in his grave, knowing that his predictions have come true?
The Cartesian desire to doubt everything except what can be ascertained as “clear and distinct” is not only equivalent to bracketing out divinity, i.e., mystery in actuality; it is also tantamount to bracketing out femininity, i.e., mystery in potentiality. Potentiality does not mean lack of definition or amorphousness or fluidity, and even less does it refer to a chaotic or formless type of energy. Potentiality means limitless possibility, continuous creation and concrete mystery – all at once. Potentiality only means “chaotic” or destructive when the ultimate source of actuality and mystery is killed; i.e. when possibility is suffocated and energy is exhausted. Potentiality stops being mysterious when we make an ultimate end – a heaven out of it … the earth then becomes a hell because we frustrate her by asking of her more than she can give.
A woman is the quintessential icon of the created world. She is fresh pasture and the Sahara Desert; the Amazon jungle and the Pacific Ocean; all rolled into one. She is the earth and all its glory. She is mystery with a hint of order; time with an echo of eternity; darkness with a ray of light; the caterpillar bearing the promise of a butterfly; the embryo before it fully develops into a child and the child before it becomes an adult. She is already something before she morphs into something else. She is never nothing. She can never die – just like the Creator who breathed life into her in the days when she was young. Even when she is plundered, she is never a complete wasteland. Like the Sahara Desert, she is still full of potential energy hidden both beneath her bowels as fossil fuel and on her surface as the innumerable grains of sand that men can harvest to make silicon chips for their electronic devices and their electric cars.
Whenever she exposes or manifests that which is hidden in her, the masculine is born. The masculine is a crystallization of the feminine. The masculine is the realized feminine just like the feminine is the potential masculine. The masculine is mystery as unveiled in time but the feminine is mystery as concealed in perpetuity - and this is her strength. Each mirrors the other just as creation is both plant and seed – to go back to our imagery of the seed and the soil. Her unique strength lies in the fact that we never get bored of seeing the same things over and over again because she always hides a new dimension of things inside herself – in her words and in her deeds, as well as in her heart and in her womb. When she is allowed to flourish the world can never congeal into boredom or reach saturation-point because boredom comes from the illusion of “seeing it all” and saturation comes about when the possibility of increment is exhausted. Menopause is precisely a “pause” not an end to life. She may stop giving birth but she does not stop nurturing it.
The strength of the masculine, on the other hand, lies in cultivating. Every farmer understands the necessity of ploughing the gross clods of earth in order for the light to penetrate to the seeds. He stirs into tremulous motion the potent seeds so that they can unleash their hidden powers. Without the sower, the two “prehistoric” worlds stand in firm opposition – the instinctive world of primordial waters against The Spirit hovering over the waters. Without the man – the pontifex (the bridge-maker), – the potential abyss fails to speak to the actual Abyss and vice versa. Woe unto that farmer who willfully blocks the rays of the sun from the earth below. Woe unto him who spreads darkness in the name of “Enlightenment”. Creation rebels against such men. The sun covers its face in shame and the waters rise up in protest.
Masculine and feminine categories are second nature, self-evident categories, to anyone who is still rooted to the earth. They strike a chord with anyone whose umbilical cord with nature has not been severed. They are categories that can be described but not defined. They are not deduced by analysis; they are intuited via synthesis. They are known through empathy, not experimentation. Every Noble Savage innately knows that their pronouns are both “he” and “she”. How can we not be both, seeing as it is that we are all born of both a father and a mother? Every “I” becomes “a he” when it gives and “a she” when it receives.
Pronouns exist “for the sake of” (i.e., “pro”) nouns. They cannot exist on their own. This is so simple it hardly needs to be said. “He” and “She”, “Him” and “Her” are categories of relationship; they are not categories of being. Men and women, on the other hand, are concrete beings. They/we are concrete individuals, enfleshed existents, substantive nouns. Relationships subsist in concrete beings not in empty spaces or vacuous metaverses. We are not all women but we all have feminine features. We are not all men, but we all have masculine characteristics.
The ultimate “He-She” relationship is of course that between the Creator and the creature. When we wipe out that relationship, we are not left with nothing; – relationships are inevitable in a world of multiplicity. We are left instead with Hegel’s “master-slave” relationship.
Historically, perhaps it is we, Africans, more than any other people, who have borne the brunt of the master-slave relationship. How is it then, that we have not crumbled under the weight of such oppression? How come we have not chosen to swap the Creator-Creature relationship with the Master-Slave paradigm? Could it be that we are still standing because we have not lost sight of our “givenness”? Givenness being a vivid awareness that creation is always a gift and that we can therefore give only in so far as we are given. Could our existential resilience be the result of our reverence towards creation and our sense of gratitude towards the Creator? Could it be that womanhood is self-evident to us because it still is our very existence?