There should be a word for the act of staring at people who do not look - racially speaking - like you. Xenoscopia? This is a neology that just came to me, but I am always very careful about giving the import of racism, or even the slightly euphemised racialism, to everything. When you shout and wolf-cry 'race' at every glance, wink, or even bodycheck, it will inevitably stew your mind into a witch's brew of paranoia, self-pitying prickliness, victimism and even inverted racism. Racism must be confronted and properly chastened, but to put the exponential of race and racism on everything is to teeter on the borderline of maladaptive neurosis - which most racists suffer from, anyway.
Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic in Central Europe - not in Eastern Europe, as the late Iron Curtain might have delineated it. Perhaps this is why someone from the United Kingdom, say, would call someone from the Czech Republic an Eastern European (and for other reasons). The point I am trying to make is that Prague is not exactly in the farthest corner of Siberia or in some sort of bumpkinish Boratland where the apparition of a black person would call forth a million stares during a metro ride. I am fairly well-travelled in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and I can say that even in free-spirited Spinozaland (Holland), in Amsterdam to be specific, interracial gawpy stares have not exactly become passé, except that in a comparatively fair-sized city like Hamburg in Germany it is not as monomaniacal and zombie-like as in Prague. I daresay, though, that straying into the hinterlands of Bavaria or the steppes of Finland might, understandably, invite such spectatorial interest.
Patronage has not been wholly threshed out of the 'collective unconscious' of Europe and Europeans (not all), particularly concerning people from Africa. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, set off a squall of debate over the word 'swarm' when he used it for immigrants trying to get into Britain from France, the most visible of whom are Africans from the so-called 'horn' of the continent. Only a couple of weeks ago, editors of NRC Handelsblad in Holland thought it was cool to write: Nigger, Are You Crazy? This is clearly reminiscent of how the editors of Charlie Hebdo thought it was kosher to simianise a black woman as a kind of appropriative satire. Even so, I am instancing things that one might use the careless derivate 'casual racism' for (I'd call it 'cavalier racism'). But when you are stared at with such autistic automatism that the good citizens of Prague contrive to enact and sustain everlastingly, then I think it would be unfair on them to call it 'casual racism.' How do you begin to second-guess the thoughts of a young man, woman, or an elderly man or woman eyeballing you? Of course, you know it might have something to do with your race, your colour, your muchness of melanin - or, in my own case, my bald pate. After all, there has always been an under-discussed lookist dimension to baldness. It's even possible to give the stares racist overtones, but I am, alas, a thoughtful person. Now these are not dirty looks, not glowering, smouldering transfixions, not the sort of stares that followers of Santeria in South America would call 'evil eye.' These Prague stares are mostly chess player-like, dry, seemingly incurious, eyes-wide-shut deadpan. They are by no means friendly gawps, nor are they staringly unfriendly; they are neither cold nor warm, neither furtive nor shifty, not an astonished goggle nor the kind lovestruck gazey ogle you might direct at the object of your admiration.
My teenage daughter, who spent much of the time reading on the metro, exclaimed to me as we came out at a stop: oh, people stare here, don't they? I replied: yes, they do. Why? I don't know, I replied. Thank goodness she's always been a good reader of books; I would have thought she was trying to screen herself behind the book. This would not have worked anyway because if there was a word for anyone watching someone as they read, I would have used it to describe a young woman who eyeballed my daughter for so long that you might wonder whether she was furiously incubating a short story entitled 'Young African Girl Reading On Prague Metro.'
After all, Prague is the quintessential city of culture, writerly culture for that matter. The first thing I saw when the plane taxied to a stop was Vaclav Havel Airport. This had induced a favourable impression on me: here is a country naming its major airport after a writer. Can we have Chinua Achebe Airport in Lagos or Abuja? Then I remembered that Havel was not only a writer but also a 'statesman' who became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1990. Havel had brought up Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I recalled Klima's book of short stories set in Prague, in which I mainly read dark tales about ordinary lives in the city. It's not really hard to see how Klima came up with those stories. It's almost 30 years since the long death rattle of communism in Czechoslovakia lost all momentum, giving life to free-market openness with its accompanying palette of late-modernity. However, you could still see the signs of statist regularity and brooding amplitude in Prague's architecture. The hotel we stayed in, the International, is a huge secular cathedral, limestony, Soviet-built, its massive columns capstoned by sturdy simulacra of workers.
I did not go to Prague as a culture vulture, hungering for and grubbing through the rich entrails of the city's bohemian soul; I only went for a short break with my family. But I had to 'see' and 'do' Prague. There were the bookshops, so many of them. Posters advertising Mozart's Don Giovanni. Plays. Operas. Galleries. Museums. Alfresco cafes. The Jewish quarters. Medieval synagogues and churches. With its abiding images of Spring 1968, Wenceslas Square is a large screen showing films about the event. The square recalled Paris's Champs Elysée, a boulevard, foreshortened, like a monumental upended plinth at the head of which rests the huge National Museum. A quick visit to the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures - which has its own corner of 'African' artefacts. And the black-themed Franz Kafka museum, the piece de resistance of my touristy saunter. Kafka might not have been subjected to 'xenoscopia' in Prague, but - as a Jew in a country full of Czechs, with a sizable German population, and at a moment in history when the poison of antisemitism which would culminate in the 2nd World War was marinating, he was, potentially, a 'marked man.'
Now back to the stares - I'd rather give the apparently compulsive, even instinctual, act an anthropological explanation rather than racial. Humans generally tend to subject the unfamiliar, the other, to 'the gaze.' If a Czech person found himself in a local market in Niamey, Niger, he might also attract glances and double-takes, not because some of the people who stared may never have seen a European but because the 'white man' looked different. Now some of the more irate race warriors might argue that there is always subterranean politics to stares. Implicit in one stare is innocuous curiosity, even slightly quizzical adoration, if not approbation, and inherent in another is detestation, even dehumanisation - since the stares I received were not indicative of Afrophilia, the reasoning might go, it was undoubtedly Afrophobia, there can be nothing inbetween. As an African I understand this prejudice very well: while it might seem black-and-white and not the sort of position I would take without good reason, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The stares might very well be an expression of a certain kind of unease, discomfiture; it might be the bemusing attempt to grasp what some scholars have called the 'idea of Africa,' the Hegelian, louche idea of Africa conceptualised and nurtured by the European mind.
Rather than fling the word 'phobia' around lightly, I would use the term 'betenoire complex' to describe the spectrum of unconscious responses to the 'idea' of racial 'blackness.' I had to plumb humanity's psychic depths to come up with this coinage. I'll illustrate. Close to midnight, I was walking down a well-lit, if solitary, street of the north Kent town I live in and a few meters before me, I made out the apparitions of two young women saying goodbyes as they descended from the porch of a house, making a beeline for a car which had just been smart-readied. As if by a cue, both women had turned to see the dark figure looming, and both had slewed on their stilettos and skittered towards the house like chicks who had glimpsed a bird of prey in good time. As I went past, I could see them disappearing into the porch. Would they have panicked and doubled back to the safety of the house if they had glimpsed a 'white' rather than a 'black' face? I don't know, but over against philosophical balance and dispassion, it would be difficult to argue that a dormant, if unreasonable, reflex had not been in play or undercut the fact that measuring the panic threshold of the women's response might borrow some percentage from pigmentation. Not so long ago, the 'black man' was used by some white parents to induce good behaviour in their children - here comes the nigger, the monster, the ogre. This is the sum of the 'betenoire complex', and those who suffer from it greatly, clinically, may still find the black-bogeyman cautionary stratagem useful.
The stares of Prague may be set down in the Kafka-absurd, vague, and minor end of the scale of the 'betenoire complex' - at least many of them. Because, again, the motive behind stare A may be different from that of stare B. For instance, in the concourse of Prague's central train station, there were posters depicting global 'cultures' and peoples. I noticed that the only representation of Africa was a montage of black-and-white pictures of Pygmies of the Kalahari, half-naked, 'primitive,' and peculiarly picturesque. In one of the frames, a white man stands amidst the Pygmies, tall, commanding, like Gulliver among Lilliputians, beaming with with paternal aplomb. Against the background of this poster, I'd caught a couple of people lost in a glaring brown study. I also found subliminal images of racialism in the lobby of Czech's Academy of the Sciences, where I was welcomed with images of Mursi women in various states of undress, dust-coloured, lips stretched out with large discs, disked dangling earlobes, cropped hair, and knocked-out teeth. Beautiful women all right, and one has to acknowledge the scientific good intentions and the anthropological truth-seeking which informed such displays. But you do not need to be a close reader of Chinua Achebe's disquisition on the politics of 'image' to know that if a child is fed with certain stereotypes, inoculated with single-coloured impressions of peoples of a continent, he might grow up to stare and stare again, puzzled, puzzling over this black being, mulling the dark vision he's just seen over, probably to validate the preconceptions he had. Even then, this cannot be defined as racism; some of the stares might very well be informed by other aesthetic, impressionistic or even anthropological rationales.
After a few hours in Prague, I came up with a strategy. Stare back, hold your stare, and make it a grainless, straight-faced stare. Turn the whole thing into a staring game; do not be outstared; stare down whoever you entered into the game with. I actually wished I had a talent for hypnosis, to put those who stared for too long into deep sleep and make them miss their stop. I wished I had the power, African voodoo if you please, to turn anyone who overstared at me into stone or a pillar of salt.
Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic in Central Europe - not in Eastern Europe, as the late Iron Curtain might have delineated it. Perhaps this is why someone from the United Kingdom, say, would call someone from the Czech Republic an Eastern European (and for other reasons). The point I am trying to make is that Prague is not exactly in the farthest corner of Siberia or in some sort of bumpkinish Boratland where the apparition of a black person would call forth a million stares during a metro ride. I am fairly well-travelled in Western Europe: France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, and I can say that even in free-spirited Spinozaland (Holland), in Amsterdam to be specific, interracial gawpy stares have not exactly become passé, except that in a comparatively fair-sized city like Hamburg in Germany it is not as monomaniacal and zombie-like as in Prague. I daresay, though, that straying into the hinterlands of Bavaria or the steppes of Finland might, understandably, invite such spectatorial interest.
Patronage has not been wholly threshed out of the 'collective unconscious' of Europe and Europeans (not all), particularly concerning people from Africa. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, set off a squall of debate over the word 'swarm' when he used it for immigrants trying to get into Britain from France, the most visible of whom are Africans from the so-called 'horn' of the continent. Only a couple of weeks ago, editors of NRC Handelsblad in Holland thought it was cool to write: Nigger, Are You Crazy? This is clearly reminiscent of how the editors of Charlie Hebdo thought it was kosher to simianise a black woman as a kind of appropriative satire. Even so, I am instancing things that one might use the careless derivate 'casual racism' for (I'd call it 'cavalier racism'). But when you are stared at with such autistic automatism that the good citizens of Prague contrive to enact and sustain everlastingly, then I think it would be unfair on them to call it 'casual racism.' How do you begin to second-guess the thoughts of a young man, woman, or an elderly man or woman eyeballing you? Of course, you know it might have something to do with your race, your colour, your muchness of melanin - or, in my own case, my bald pate. After all, there has always been an under-discussed lookist dimension to baldness. It's even possible to give the stares racist overtones, but I am, alas, a thoughtful person. Now these are not dirty looks, not glowering, smouldering transfixions, not the sort of stares that followers of Santeria in South America would call 'evil eye.' These Prague stares are mostly chess player-like, dry, seemingly incurious, eyes-wide-shut deadpan. They are by no means friendly gawps, nor are they staringly unfriendly; they are neither cold nor warm, neither furtive nor shifty, not an astonished goggle nor the kind lovestruck gazey ogle you might direct at the object of your admiration.
My teenage daughter, who spent much of the time reading on the metro, exclaimed to me as we came out at a stop: oh, people stare here, don't they? I replied: yes, they do. Why? I don't know, I replied. Thank goodness she's always been a good reader of books; I would have thought she was trying to screen herself behind the book. This would not have worked anyway because if there was a word for anyone watching someone as they read, I would have used it to describe a young woman who eyeballed my daughter for so long that you might wonder whether she was furiously incubating a short story entitled 'Young African Girl Reading On Prague Metro.'
After all, Prague is the quintessential city of culture, writerly culture for that matter. The first thing I saw when the plane taxied to a stop was Vaclav Havel Airport. This had induced a favourable impression on me: here is a country naming its major airport after a writer. Can we have Chinua Achebe Airport in Lagos or Abuja? Then I remembered that Havel was not only a writer but also a 'statesman' who became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1990. Havel had brought up Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I recalled Klima's book of short stories set in Prague, in which I mainly read dark tales about ordinary lives in the city. It's not really hard to see how Klima came up with those stories. It's almost 30 years since the long death rattle of communism in Czechoslovakia lost all momentum, giving life to free-market openness with its accompanying palette of late-modernity. However, you could still see the signs of statist regularity and brooding amplitude in Prague's architecture. The hotel we stayed in, the International, is a huge secular cathedral, limestony, Soviet-built, its massive columns capstoned by sturdy simulacra of workers.
I did not go to Prague as a culture vulture, hungering for and grubbing through the rich entrails of the city's bohemian soul; I only went for a short break with my family. But I had to 'see' and 'do' Prague. There were the bookshops, so many of them. Posters advertising Mozart's Don Giovanni. Plays. Operas. Galleries. Museums. Alfresco cafes. The Jewish quarters. Medieval synagogues and churches. With its abiding images of Spring 1968, Wenceslas Square is a large screen showing films about the event. The square recalled Paris's Champs Elysée, a boulevard, foreshortened, like a monumental upended plinth at the head of which rests the huge National Museum. A quick visit to the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures - which has its own corner of 'African' artefacts. And the black-themed Franz Kafka museum, the piece de resistance of my touristy saunter. Kafka might not have been subjected to 'xenoscopia' in Prague, but - as a Jew in a country full of Czechs, with a sizable German population, and at a moment in history when the poison of antisemitism which would culminate in the 2nd World War was marinating, he was, potentially, a 'marked man.'
Now back to the stares - I'd rather give the apparently compulsive, even instinctual, act an anthropological explanation rather than racial. Humans generally tend to subject the unfamiliar, the other, to 'the gaze.' If a Czech person found himself in a local market in Niamey, Niger, he might also attract glances and double-takes, not because some of the people who stared may never have seen a European but because the 'white man' looked different. Now some of the more irate race warriors might argue that there is always subterranean politics to stares. Implicit in one stare is innocuous curiosity, even slightly quizzical adoration, if not approbation, and inherent in another is detestation, even dehumanisation - since the stares I received were not indicative of Afrophilia, the reasoning might go, it was undoubtedly Afrophobia, there can be nothing inbetween. As an African I understand this prejudice very well: while it might seem black-and-white and not the sort of position I would take without good reason, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The stares might very well be an expression of a certain kind of unease, discomfiture; it might be the bemusing attempt to grasp what some scholars have called the 'idea of Africa,' the Hegelian, louche idea of Africa conceptualised and nurtured by the European mind.
Rather than fling the word 'phobia' around lightly, I would use the term 'betenoire complex' to describe the spectrum of unconscious responses to the 'idea' of racial 'blackness.' I had to plumb humanity's psychic depths to come up with this coinage. I'll illustrate. Close to midnight, I was walking down a well-lit, if solitary, street of the north Kent town I live in and a few meters before me, I made out the apparitions of two young women saying goodbyes as they descended from the porch of a house, making a beeline for a car which had just been smart-readied. As if by a cue, both women had turned to see the dark figure looming, and both had slewed on their stilettos and skittered towards the house like chicks who had glimpsed a bird of prey in good time. As I went past, I could see them disappearing into the porch. Would they have panicked and doubled back to the safety of the house if they had glimpsed a 'white' rather than a 'black' face? I don't know, but over against philosophical balance and dispassion, it would be difficult to argue that a dormant, if unreasonable, reflex had not been in play or undercut the fact that measuring the panic threshold of the women's response might borrow some percentage from pigmentation. Not so long ago, the 'black man' was used by some white parents to induce good behaviour in their children - here comes the nigger, the monster, the ogre. This is the sum of the 'betenoire complex', and those who suffer from it greatly, clinically, may still find the black-bogeyman cautionary stratagem useful.
The stares of Prague may be set down in the Kafka-absurd, vague, and minor end of the scale of the 'betenoire complex' - at least many of them. Because, again, the motive behind stare A may be different from that of stare B. For instance, in the concourse of Prague's central train station, there were posters depicting global 'cultures' and peoples. I noticed that the only representation of Africa was a montage of black-and-white pictures of Pygmies of the Kalahari, half-naked, 'primitive,' and peculiarly picturesque. In one of the frames, a white man stands amidst the Pygmies, tall, commanding, like Gulliver among Lilliputians, beaming with with paternal aplomb. Against the background of this poster, I'd caught a couple of people lost in a glaring brown study. I also found subliminal images of racialism in the lobby of Czech's Academy of the Sciences, where I was welcomed with images of Mursi women in various states of undress, dust-coloured, lips stretched out with large discs, disked dangling earlobes, cropped hair, and knocked-out teeth. Beautiful women all right, and one has to acknowledge the scientific good intentions and the anthropological truth-seeking which informed such displays. But you do not need to be a close reader of Chinua Achebe's disquisition on the politics of 'image' to know that if a child is fed with certain stereotypes, inoculated with single-coloured impressions of peoples of a continent, he might grow up to stare and stare again, puzzled, puzzling over this black being, mulling the dark vision he's just seen over, probably to validate the preconceptions he had. Even then, this cannot be defined as racism; some of the stares might very well be informed by other aesthetic, impressionistic or even anthropological rationales.
After a few hours in Prague, I came up with a strategy. Stare back, hold your stare, and make it a grainless, straight-faced stare. Turn the whole thing into a staring game; do not be outstared; stare down whoever you entered into the game with. I actually wished I had a talent for hypnosis, to put those who stared for too long into deep sleep and make them miss their stop. I wished I had the power, African voodoo if you please, to turn anyone who overstared at me into stone or a pillar of salt.
PS: I had to end this piece with lighthearted satire. A lot is going on in the world. Hunger. Famine. Wars. Genocides. Untold human suffering. Racism in its most malign form. The so-called 'migrant crisis.' And, of course, xenophobia. With all these, why should I get myself worked up about mere stares? About mere xenoscopia.
