Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Skin is the largest organ of the human body, the envelope that keeps everything else together. It’s also a map that tells strangers something about who we are, like our approximate age, and the kind of life we live – skin that is callused and weather-beaten suggests a life spent laboring outdoors, while skin that is smooth and soft says we live and work mostly indoors.

But the biggest thing that some people notice about another person’s skin is what color it is. Because for them, the color of someone’s skin is how they decide what category that person belongs in, and then they know how they will treat them. But how do you treat someone whose skin says one thing, but whose voice and manner says something else?

And if you are living in that skin, and wondering why you don’t feel like the person you were raised to be, then how do you discover if it’s your outside or your inside or both that are rubbing you raw?

Apartheid. Segregation by skin. From 1948 to 1994, it was the official policy of the government of South Africa.

Philippa Yaa de Villiers was born in 1966, to a white Australian mother and a Ghanian father. She was given up for adoption and raised by a white family in South Africa.

“I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I’d have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative ‘truths’ of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification.”

“Because I wasn’t told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up.”

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