Dreadlebrity

(excerpted from travel blog to South Africa, March 2004, http://sbmhome.typepad.com/south_africa)

… Everywhere we go, people are sure that George is famous. He moves through the world with a charisma and charm which certainly contribute to the overall star quality he carries. In Madrid, after we had finished our evening meal, one of the waiters walked up and very tentatively asked, “You are musician?” George confirmed that he was indeed a musician. Very excited, the waiter continued, “You play reggae?” We all smiled and looked and George as he said, “Well, some, but mostly blues.” The waiter’s exuberance almost had him levitating off the ground at this point, so he really wasn’t listening. He exclaimed, “You are UB40!”

George very graciously explained that he was flattered, but was not a member of UB40. “I’m from Chicago, home of the Blues.” The waiter thanked us and kept smiling and nodding. He was sure that he had served a bottle of water to a celebrity – our dreadlebrity.

It can be uncomfortable to be a dreadlebrity in South Africa. George says that there is a certain “South African Gaze” that he feels as people watch him in many of our, still very exclusively white, surroundings. I’ve seen them stare. Their eyes do not question my (almost translucent) presence at all. They pause to figure Amy out, but only briefly because they can deny her transgender position if necessary, then move quickly to classify Rose and find her colored not black, but their eyes linger on George. As soon as we open our mouths and sound American, the gaze is veiled, we are explained as a group, and accepted. After that, it moves into much more familiar territory. Instead of stares, the glances are there, but much more covert – just like home.

To me (and George, Rose, and Amy may feel very differently from their very distinct subject positions), it’s not a threatening gaze. There is almost an audible “tick, tick, tick” of matter-of-factness. Unlike the decorum covered racist situations in ritzy places in the US, it feels like a quickly trained survey of the lay of the land. The classification and cataloguing is not hidden at all, nor is the interesting mix of superiority and fear. I think what is most interesting to me is that here, they are only 10 years beyond apartheid. We, at home, have 40 years of the civil rights movement behind us, and there is still an American gaze.