Fragile Identities

Abstract

People are not only social beings; they are also fundamentally emotional beings. There has been a tendency amongst academic authors to erase the traces of feeling and emotion from the analysis of coloured identities.¹ I will argue that as all identities are by definition hybrid and impure,² all identities are emotional and fragile. The fragility of all identities is ambiguously constructed through weakness and strength, continuity and discontinuity, difference and sameness, clarity and confusion. The analysis of hybrid identities is directly relevant to the contestation and understanding(s) of coloured identities in Cape Town. For example, many crude labels have been cast over coloured communities,³ such as “mixed masala” (mixed spices), “emotional,” “childlike” and “confused.”⁴ Although I won’t explore the hurtful effects of labeling and stereotyping in this chapter, I will interpret particular emotional experiences and patterns of popular memory amongst coloured residents of a Cape Flats community. This paper is drawn from 23 oral history interviews with former (and current) residents of the Windermere community as of 1993. All the interviews for this paper were conducted in 1993, and unless otherwise stated, “the present” refers to when the interviews occurred.