What could be more innocent than clothing yourself? A necessity by all intents and standards, unless you want to cause public outrage, live against the norm, or have a fondness for the general parkiness which going about clotheless and carefree in springtime UK is bound to bring. However, start unravelling thought on this largely unthought-through daily activity, and you end up with a host of interesting questions: from implications to constructing a public identity, right down to whether clothing yourself is as innocent an activity as first seems.
Recently I was reading a series of short stories by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi (Nozee) Adiche. The set begins with the tale of the humbling of a cocky, privileged young man – who, falsely imprisoned, wears his oppression as an ugly badge of pride; not realising that it is his parents influence, the bribes they bring weekly for the guards, that keep his day to day life relatively cushy (given the circumstances). What is it, then, that humbles and brings a grave sense of reality to this young man? The answer is simple, challenging and transformative: the suffering of an other.
This nameless other, in Adiche’s fictional world, seems to stand for everyone, out of our line of vision, who suffers. We know they exist, but rarely does the extent and style of their existence encroach on our daily life, our everyday world, our daily concerns and way we do things. It often takes another’s suffering to make us realise what we have, and how what we consider as injustices to ourselves, often pail in comparison to the unseen made seen; and this is what happens in this short story.
Adiche’s other is an old man: frail, impoverished, helpless – with no money or status, with no family or influence - he is literally thrown into the young man's daily prison world. It emerges that this man has been falsely imprisoned as a kind of human ransom: the old man’s son is a revolutionary on the run; in imprisoning the father, the government hope to snare the son: appealing for him to turn himself in to end his father’s abject humiliation and treatment, inflicted on him by his gaolers. This doesn’t happen. The humiliations continue.
What stood out to me, reading the descriptions of the humiliations heaped on this old man, was how many of them were related to clothes, or at least the prominence lack of clothes given in Adiche’s description: one description stands out in particular, in exchange for basic rations of food, or water for drinking and washing, the guards order the Old Man to parade naked up and down the corridor for their express amusement. His nakedness, publicly paraded, served to both elate and empower the guards, whilst simultaneously sickening the young man who witnesses, attempting to avert his gaze out of respect for the wounded dignity of the Old Man. Being clothed, and remaining clothed, then, confers a kind of status: the uniformed guards form a pack with power, who attempt to bestialise and demoralise a ragged individual, by removing that which covers his body: in that way their joint gaze is fixed on him, imprisoning him, judging him, hounding him: both literally: he is incarcerated in abject conditions, and in another sense he is also fixed, or imprisoned, in his nakedness: he exposed utterly before these guards, and this extreme exposure in which he is frozen by the gaze of others, robs him of identity and power to assert, project or even feel his own humanity. There is nothing for him to hide behind: he is rendered powerless and demoralised.
Reading this story was, you may have gathered, a pretty powerful experience and it caught me up in thoughts about the connection or relation between power, social gaze, concealment and unconcealment. As it stands that’s just a barrage of words, but once we start thinking about the lines we might draw between them, things get interesting.
Power. Social Gaze. Concealment.
It seems that in the case of the old man, dignity is eroded when the right to conceal his body is taken away; or to put it even more accurately, dignity is eroded when he is forcibly made to ‘bear all’ in exchange for an allowance of basic necessities. Think about the phrase ‘bearing it all’, it’s one which would commonly inspire fear in the hearts of many (or alternatively, it might provoke unbounded joy of liberation for others – either way, reactions are limit reactions, you’d probably not get a blasé response from someone asked to ‘bear it all’) – take away our clothes, and you’ve literally nothing to hide behind; terrifying or liberating, I’ll leave it to you to decide.
The phrase ‘bearing it all’, in my mind at least, is connected to thoughts of laying yourself completely open, the very being of you, as you are, without apology, conforming or adornment: in this way we begin to see the link between self-identity and embodiment: the tradition of phenomenology, specifically when we turn to philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and even Sartre, emphasise that our bodies, and the things they allow us to do, are strongly related to, and constitutive of, our personal identity. Our bodies are markers of our personal history, and activities. Every individual body contains markers of what we’ve been through, or are able to do: this scar stands as testimony of a fall down Edinburgh hill, his well developed calf muscles, indicate that he likes to run. However, in concealing and clothing our bodies in a certain way, you reserve the right to keep these bearers of past, of ability, intimate. In this way, appearing clothe-less before of another, is often a mark of trust, respect and one of the highest forms of intimacy.
What effect, then, does a denial to conceal and clothe the body have both on us, and those who witness us?
I’ll not presume to answer for you, but will simply suggest you loose an immediate channel with which to project a certain air, express individuality or sense of belonging, to avoid an invasive gaze of others. You are robbed of the opportunity to conceal aspects of yourself which are utterly intimate, not for general public view. (as an aside to this: this about reports of people squirming whilst reporting ‘it felt like his eyes were undressing me’ - clothes are a buffer to invasion.)
All this goes without saying, but it is the harshness, and the lack of humanity contained in Adiche’s description of the helpless stripped naked, stripped from the ability to keep a part of himself sacred, which reveals this forcefully. When this is enacted before and for others, it reduces the power, dignity, humanity of one individual and aggrandises the other, who gains a sense of superiority over the other. I’ll stop here, with thoughts of social gaze and concealment in mind.
