Sunday, February 10, 2008

Internalizing the Pain of Being Tyra Banks

Thabang. Tha bang. Thabang is the name of our South African artist…the man we speak to when we want to go do some sort of artistic thing.. Today Thabang invited our group into the New Brighton township to go to an arts festival of some nature.

A few of the more outgoing girls organized the group and we stood around outside our hotel, waiting for Thabang to send a cab to come and pick us up. I was hoping he would send the cab called ‘Seduction’ because I love driving around in a car that reminds me of Snoopy Doggy or whatever his name is.

Something that irritates me: whenever my group is talking with Africans I feel like we’re boring ass neurotic people with nothing of substance to contribute. When Thabang arrived in his taxi, we all stood around with him, and complained to him about how hungry we felt. He just smiled. None of us told him how beautiful we thought it was outside, or how excited we were to come and see the arts festival he had created. We just told him we were tired and hungry…something boring white people talk about constantly.

But really, I was excited to go do something artistic. I’d come to South Africa to experience the arts, and my favorite thing about being here was leading a drama class.

The kids in my class were so uninhibited, so natural at acting. They didn’t think first about how the class would respond, or how I would respond, they just committed themselves to an action and followed through with it.

One time, on a drive back from class, I sat next to a young African guy in the cab and talked to him about the arts in South Africa.

“In America, you have Hollywood. You have money to harness the talent. Here we do not have the money, but we have so much talent,” he said to me.

“I know. There are all these amazing stories to tell about township life, about Apartheid, and racism, and you’re stuck watching Oprah and Jerry Springer on TV; American media personalities who have no relevance to your lives.”

“Yes. The Americans have a cultural monopoly over our airwaves, and thus our brains.”

Through teaching drama class all day with 7th graders, I’d learned a lot about how American mythologies are re-interpreted and internalized by South African youth. The children liked to perform cowboy and Indian skits for me, they liked re-enacting America’s Next Top Model, and Days of Our Lives.

It was bizarre to see the children internalizing and espousing the narratives of American personalities they had no relation to, like Tyra Banks and John Wayne. Tyra, while she may be viewed by a select minority of gay men and unemployed housewives as a strong African American woman, is a fucking freakshow, and not someone I would encourage a child to emulate. John Wayne is the prototypical gun-slinging cowboy; the conqeurer and colonist. For obvious reasons, it is completely bizarre to see African children emulating John Wayne.

South African youth do not internalize the narratives of Oprah and Tyra Banks and Jerry Springer because any of these television personalities have anything profound to tell them. Hell, these people don’t have anything profound to say to Americans either.

So why are they on television here? My guess is that the South African Broadcasting Company pays for American reruns because it is cheaper than producing original shows. There isn’t enough funding to create original South African shows 24 hours a day.

“What’s the solution to the American mass-mediated monopoly?” I asked the boy in the car.

“We have to create our own shows. We need investors,” he responded.

1 comment:

josh said...

thank you for that hilarious yet nightmarish vision of the youth of south africa emulating tyra banks and re-enacting top model. horrifying.