our grandparents and the politics of respectability
One of the most elegant things I own is a black faux fur stole that I inherited from my grandmother. Reminiscent of a time and people gone by, this stole archives part her history and therefore mine. Its elegance is out of step with the very inelegant and rugged surroundings of the dusty streets of New Brighton in Gqeberha where my grandmother lived. But that was the point, at a time where we were confined to the most unimaginative and uninspiring locations, through their clothing my grandparents could assert some kind of freedom, choice, expression and dignity.
‘Practices of dress / performance / display have the capacity to either contest or reinforce existing arrangements of power and flesh out the meaning of citizenship.’ I came across this quote as I was researching for a panel discussion and I immediately thought of my grandparents. Looking back at the archive of clothing they left for us of tailored suits, dresses, dainty handkerchiefs and scarves I see a beautiful but painful story of resistance, transcendence and pursuit of self-definition. We, the grandchildren, were also shaped in the image of their style as an extension of our grandparents. We showed up to church coiffed, buffed and upright in our Sunday dresses and bobby socks.
My grandfather went to work in a well-tailored suit even though he was the delivery man at a law firm. His appearance can be seen as a contestation of power. A reclamation of the little power to assert himself as a man when the power he really wanted was to be a lawyer. He could not be a lawyer but had the power to defiantly dress like one. My grandmother was a maid but defiantly dressed like a madam or like the singer that I suspect she dreamt of being. My grandparents never verbally articulated the dreams they had for themselves but their clothes spoke of a hungry imagination unfed by a limited reality.
However, some may argue that that generation’s affinity for ‘respectable ‘clothing was not a contestation of power but a marker of colonised minds. assimilation and conformity. A dressing up put on for the gaze of the white man. What colonialism has robbed us of is our ability to tell the difference between our own choice and indoctrination.
There are those who look at our grandparent’s generation as tap dancing, submissive, obsequious and pacified people. That they dressed to maintain the status quo, to aspire to whiteness and to counter the image that white people held of us as lazy and dirty. The choices they made are viewed through the lense of our politics today, more specifically our understanding of respectability politics.
Prof Harwood McClerking, defined the politics of respectability as the idea that [blacks] need to improve their behavior so white people will see it and reward us. Tara Donaldson writes that the aesthetics of the 1960s spoke to being non-threatening at a time when Black people could, more easily than now, be beaten or jailed for their mere existence. I cannot say for certain that my grandparents dressed up for white approval. They could have dressed up for their own self-preservation. When your life is under constant threat you will do everything to mitigate that threat even if it means weaponising your clothes.
Or they could have been dressing up not out of fear but for freedom. Dressing in defiance of the notion that they were underserving of nice things. When I wrap myself up in my grandmother’s stole, its softness and beauty belies the horrors of that time. Her affinity for beautiful things was not to merely play dress up. It was her dress rehearsal for freedom.
