In 2014, I discovered something that changed my view on many things permanently. During a random conversation involving my mom one day, it emerged that she had been sexually abused as a teenage child by an older male church member. Elsewhere, I have written extensively about my experiences with violent child abuse growing up, so you can imagine that it came as quite a surprise to find out that the perpetrator of said child abuse and my personal tormentor was herself in fact, also a child abuse victim.
In the larger scheme of things, the news that an obscure Jehovah’s Witness congregation in an underprivileged part of Surulere harboured sexual abusers was hardly headline news. The reason it was such earth-shaking information to me was that for the first time, I saw a different side to the single-story I had in my head. Instead of an ogre who simply enjoyed inflicting pain on defenceless children for some unspecified reason, I caught a glimpse of a complex, multilayered human being who was both a victim and an aggressor at the same time. This was the start of my introduction to the word “nuance.”
Absolute Villainhood and Absolute Victimhood Are Myths
The reactions to a recent essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminded me of my own reaction to the information I discovered in 2014 – albeit from the other end of the spectrum. While I had been surprised to realise that the person I thought of as a monster was also in fact a victim deserving of some sympathy, many readers were surprised to realise that a few individuals who had become prominent within feminist circles were in fact acting like monsters.
In my pre-2014 mind and in theirs, human beings were a series of zeroes and ones. You were either a “good” person or a “bad” person. The realisation that several shades of grey exist between absolute black and absolute white shattered the pre-conceived notion of perfect victimhood or absolute monstrosity. It turned out that it is in fact possible to be objectively oppressed and victimised and also be an oppressor who victimised others.
While examining my own emotional response to the account of a female writer using the tragic death of Chimamanda’s parents as a stick to beat her with as part of a pro-transgender internet performance routine, I was reminded of a quote from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ironically written by J.K. Rowling. When Harry expresses a suspicion that the odious officious Dolores Umbridge must be one of Lord Voldermort’s Death Eaters, Sirius Black replies, “The world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters.”
In other words, regardless of my feelings about her behaviour, the feminism of the person in question is no less valid than that of Chimamanda, whom I like and respect tremendously. Certainly, the reasons for the existence of a feminist movement still exist. Therefore feminism itself has nothing to do with nasty, odious behaviour – there is no inherent contradiction between feminism and bad behaviour, just like there is no contradiction between feminism and Chimamanda’s graceful, well-considered behaviour. People can be and are many things at once.
The Importance of Ending this Single Story
The key takeaway from the firestorm generated by Chimamanda’s essay and the responses to it is that the entire treatise of allegedly progressive social politics needs to do away with the unrealistic expectation of a si guard crib sheet for all its constituents. It is not smart, realistic, or politically impactful to run a political movement like an obscure secret cult led by a self-anointed prophet in Ijebu-Ijesha.
If the purpose of progressive social movements is to advance the global cause of live-and-let-live, then the use of in-group terminology, cult-like behaviour, malicious persecution of dissenters, and rabid hatred of outsiders is fundamentally unsustainable. It will inevitably eat itself, and in fact, some would argue that it is already doing just that. Throwing one of the most impactful and beloved liberal writers under the bus because she expressed a factual, common-sense opinion about transgender people (“Trans-women are Trans-women, and have a different experience to that of biological women”) is a sure sign of a movement that has lost its way.
Impaling her at the stake and immolating her as a public spectacle like one of the Salem witch trials is the exact opposite of what a supposedly progressive movement should be trying to do to a successful, fiercely intelligent, graceful, and intellectually prominent woman. The entire ecosystem of what is considered to be liberal politics including feminism, LGBT rights, and anti-capitalism will have to figure out a new path for itself if it wants to avoid the inevitable crushing social rebellion against it that is coming.
Because this – whatever this was – this wasn’t it.
