The Mobility of our Identity
The example I want to bring to your attention here is a re-working of that admirable book by Amin Maalouf, entitled In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. I experienced an episode which is very close to the one recounted in that excellent work. During the 1980s, I was a journalist. Let us imagine the following possible scenario: at that time, I might have met a journalist who, upon introducing himself, proudly proclaimed, “I am Yugoslavian.” The journalist (who is mirrored almost exactly in Maalouf’s essay) was on the board of directors of the newspaper of the party in power. Later, during the same conversation, he let it be understood that he was Islamic in origin, born in the Federated Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
We kept in touch and, during the nineties, at the height of the war in the Balkans, the same man told me with the same fervour: “Don’t forget that, before anything else, I’m a Muslim.” Later, a mutual friend of ours, working in Mozambique, showed me a photo of the journalist. He was unrecognizable, with a bushy beard that covered his whole face. On the back was written: “Here is the portrait of a true Bosnian.”
In fact, I ran into the journalist this year in Paris. He lives as an immigrant in France. And he confessed to me as I left him: “Today I know that, above all else, I’m a European.”
We could ask: when did this journalist truly identify himself? Probably always. His identity was drawn and redrawn by his own life experiences. That man never ceased to be waylaid by History.
We, in Mozambique, have not undergone such dramatic changes. But History has occasionally ambushed us as well. Those who, like me, are forty or fifty years old have already lived through very different historical realities. They have belonged to many Mozambiques. At first, they belonged to colonial Mozambique. To a Mozambique that wasn’t yet Mozambique. At that time, they spent their money in a bar belonging to a Portuguese who, sometimes, got the local language right but always gave them back the wrong change. They didn’t spend much because money was scarce. Then came Independence, and the bar owner packed up his life in a hurriedly filled barrel. The bar owner left the country and Mozambique embarked on socialism. So now we spent our money in the People’s Store. (Spent is a euphemism, because there was nothing to spend our money on.) Then came what, for want of a better term, we call the civil war and the ex-bar became the ex-People’s Store. Everything went up in flames and even the bar owner’s nostalgia was burnt up in some far corner of Portugal. Finally, capitalist Mozambique arrived and the bar reopened with an owner who occasionally gets the language right, but still gives us the wrong change.
But it wasn’t only the country that underwent change. We changed. Our own notion of who we are was modified. During the seventies and eighties, our identity was straightforward and homogeneous: we were Mozambicans. And that was it. It was unthinkable, at that moment in time, to conceive of ourselves as Makua, Makonde, black, mulatto, white.
Generally speaking, the main feature of our identity, as far as we are all concerned, is still the fact of being Mozambican. But nowadays, other forms of belonging are beginning to take shape. For many of us, other primary forms of identity are emerging. They may be racial, or tribal, or religious identities. This sense of belonging may collide with what we call “Mozambicanness.” To think that I may ally myself with someone because we are of the same race isn’t just mistaken but it is historically unproductive.
Today some of the possible questions may be: am I a white Mozambican or a Mozambican white? Am I an Indian African or an African Indian? Am I a Muslim Mozambican or vice versa? These terms may look the same but they aren’t always so. We may be different things. The mistake is made when we only want to be one thing. The mistake is made when we want to deny that we are various things at the same time. As Simone de Beauvoir would have said: We aren’t born white or black, we sometimes become white or black.
I’m going to tell you a true story. The managers of my company are Muslims. Quite by chance, I happened to be sitting at the desk of one of them when the phone rang. It was a new client who thought he was speaking to a colleague of mine called Amade, and he immediately introduced himself in the following way:
“Assalaam aleikum, bey?”
Then, in the face of my reticence, he realized that the person at the end of the line wasn’t the person he thought it was. It was someone else. With some hesitation, he asked to speak to Sr. Amade. At that point, my colleague appeared, they both spoke, and quickly reached an understanding.
It wasn’t about any particular request, any unmentionable favour. But the man clearly felt more at ease speaking with his brother in religion. This may reveal complicities that should be avoided, but in itself, it is not a mortal sin. A woman often feels more at ease talking to another woman. And there’s no attitude of exclusion in this case.
What happens is that we have created a system that causes difficulties, even over the most trivial matters. Difficulty creates an opportunity for gaining advantage, for various types of opportunism. This system isn’t exclusive to Mozambique. It is common throughout the world. But this system makes us feel alienated, insignificant and dislocated. It’s the policeman, the teacher, the nurse, the tax man, the official, it’s a whole conspiracy of people who earn their living by complicating our lives. In this sea of complicating factors, it’s good to hear someone at the other end of the phone line whom we recognize as being one of “ours,” someone from our region, our ethnic group, our sex, our religion.
On the surface, it’s not wrong for someone to make use of one of their multiple identities to navigate these murky waters. What certainly is wrong is to attempt to create hierarchies: those who are more Mozambican, those who are less Mozambican. What can be dangerous is to create “fortress identities,” identities born from negating the identities of others.
The truth is that no one is “pure.” This human species of ours is made from mixtures. We’ve been crossing, exchanging genes, trading values for millions of years. We’ve been able to survive because of this diversity. There’s no one in this room who doesn’t have a multifaceted, plural identity. Identities, my friends, are like the fingers of a hand. From time to time, one of these fingers swells up and conceals the other fingers. Each one of us, at a certain point in our lives, has felt this swelling in our soul. There were days when we belonged to more than one ethnic group, one religion, one club. But our hand is still composed of multiple fingers.
On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question:
“We’ve heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?”
And Harper replied:
“I don’t know, I’ve never asked him.”
The Taste for Debate
Many of the debates that cut across our public space nowadays are strange. Sometimes, they descend into aggression. We stop discussing ideas in order to attack people. The need to be right, to win at all costs, destroys our civic duty, which is one of our reasons for being here. Debates should be used to arrive collectively at productive concepts, to create ideas that may help build a better Mozambique. We already have to contend with too many destructive and divisive factors.
Just recently, for example, an Internet forum was created to debate the nationality of Eusébio. Young folk ask whether Eusébio is Mozambican or not, to what extent he should feel or can possibly be Portuguese, whether he can be Portuguese and Mozambican.
We have to be careful. We should be wary of the ease with which we invade the souls of others. Who can authorize us to talk so lightly about other people? No citizenship can give me the right to speak in public about the intimate feelings of anyone, no matter whom. We can discuss general instances, principles, ideas, but we have no right to bring into the arena of the press matters relating to the soul and heart of Eusébio, or any other citizen.