Idiosyncratic Identity
"Defined by nothing!"
Dali Mthembu – an African- albino and a genuinely amiable human being, talks about how he expresses his unique identity though style and gender, whilst living in a profoundly sick society.
Dali is sitting in front of me, opposite the kitchen table, at my house. He is wearing a pink, tight- fitted top, which accentuates his rib bones, with a ruffled sleeve gently falling down his feminine shoulders. Dali’s face is oval, shaped by sharply outlined chin and cheekbones. His lips are thick and rosy, and open in a heartfelt smile. He is looking with wandering eyes, with only his pupils visible against the while background of this watery eyeballs, like two small dots. His short blonde African curly hair is blending with his pale skin tone. He is neither black, nor white. He is a non-binary and is living in such. Dali is an African- albino.
Albinism is a lifelong condition, which affects the pigmentation of skin due to the reduced amount of produced melanin. According to NHS Choices, because of inherited genetic mutations (faulty genes), the cells that produce melanin do not work properly. The condition also causes problems with the eyesight and affects the hair but doesn’t perpetuate normal life.
Notwithstanding, the majority of people treat albinism differently from other health conditions such as ADHD, Anemia and Dyslexia. Albinism is characterised by distinct symptoms such as changes in hair and eye colour, but the lack of awareness of the condition causes misunderstanding, confusion and often discrimination.
Dali explains: “I was not just black, but an albino. So people really didn’t know how to treat me or approach me”. Moreover, the condition is imbued with implications about sensitive subjects such as racism and abuse. Dali has adopted the idea of having “a set- up piece about albinism that people can understand rather than them just coming into their own incorrect conclusions about things”, in an attempt to shield himself from misjudgement and mistreatment.
However, this approach fails to succeed in a society which is intent in its outright misconceptions about the world. At the early age of 10, Dali and his family move from Africa to Hull, UK, where he attends school. One of his fellows – Charlotte Cook – who remains his best friend up until this day, shares: “We had a special lesson to teach us about albinism before the teachers introduced him in class, so that we could understand what was going on”.
At that time, he used to go by the name Bully, and this is how Charlotte and his school friends still call him. However, this provoked other kids and even adults to make up demeaning jokes about his name: “Oh, Bully, did you get bullied?”. Even though the school wanted to make sure the children were not actually racist, they were. “And the only reason for that is that the parents were. It wasn’t racially diverse in Hull”, says Bully.
While life in Hull as an outsider might have been despiteful, the torment he goes through in boarding school in Africa is nothing to be compared with. Described as “one of the worst experiences in my life”, Dali and his sister, who is also an albino, go through the misfortune of just being themselves but different from the rest. “It was just hell, because all of the black children took all of their frustrations on us”. Furthermore, the white authority used to cane them. “And I’m pretty sure there was some kind of abuse going on, but I cannot confirm or deny”.
His sister also has albinism, and she is sickened by the profane and imprudent interpretation that society has attached to it. In people’s eyes, it is an anomaly, a deviance, which intimidates and perturbs their ‘stable’ life, and they do not know how to act towards it: resist it or accept it, fight it or embrace it? Or just be indifferent as to all other ‘normal’ human beings – because this is what they are.
“In boarding school, I definitely felt like I was always looked up and feared”, confesses Bully. And so forth, they were constantly being brutally beaten, unjustly blamed for all the mischiefs the other kids did and mentally bullied. Dali recalls with anguish of one particular case. His sister used to have a beautiful long blonde hair, but the school authorities would shave it every so often. “And it was obviously demoralising because many people take pride in their hair”.
All that racial complexity and society’s absurdity perplex Bully’s perception of himself and his positioning in the world. He tries to answer his own questions about his identity, obscured by the mist of albinism:
“At that point I was very confused. I tried to not think about it too much. It never occurred to me to label it. There were certain periods of time when I would look down and just wonder intensely for a second what I would look like if I was black? But, it would be the same thing as wondering what I would look like if I was ginger. That had the same kind of significance to me. Because to me, I’ve always just been me, the colour I am and the ethnicity I am”.
Dali longs for people to see beyond the mask of albinism and judge the person he is with transparency. Although he was at the early age of eight while attending boarding school, Dali had already self-created a husk to insulate himself from the monstrous world. He decided to (re)construct his identity.
The character he adopts is one of a very intelligent person. Bully explains that in South Africa in meant a lot to be academically excellent, because education is seen as the high macro of status. His strategy is to draw people away from the fact that he is an albino and more into the fact that he is a knowledgeable person. Always hidden behind a thick-cover book, he would push away people who try to approach him:
“I wanted to radiate this impression that I was a really well-read, really intelligent, smart kind of person. If I did that, that is what people would stick in their mind when they see me. ‘Oh, smart albino’, not just albino”.
A major catalyst in Dali’s life plays the London scene, where extravagancy and bizarre individuals are praised. He moves there to study physics at St. Mary’s University College. Once again, he takes the big city as a blank page, the same way he took Hull, followed by a change in his name.
“In London, I decided I’m going to go by Dali, I’m going to reinvent myself in as many ways as I could think of to enclose the ideal of the kind of person I want to be”.
The first socially entrenched ideology that he queries is gender. According to the famous theorist in gender, power, sexuality and identity, Judith Butler, “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” Influenced by the new- age liberal and free way of thinking circulating around London’s metropolis, Dali starts to consider how he identifies himself in terms of gender.
“I distinctively remember times when I just felt like a woman. It just felt wrong that I didn’t have a vagina for some reason”. But then other times, he would be completely comfortable with being a man – what his biological determination defines him as. “The admirable qualities that I am looking for in myself and in others do not exist in a gendered field, so I never take gender seriously.”
“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”- writes the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in Second Gender. In the same manner, Bully appraises to place himself within the frame of one or the other. He would have that “euphoria” of gender trouble “that would come and go”, and in the end, he comes to the conclusion that it is not of a big matter. “It should be like a mood thing. It should be like putting on clothes,” he explains.
In fact, fashion is the second shift that he makes in the remodelling of his personality. “I always thought that fashion was just kind of a shallow social identity of dignified status”. His father has tried to instil in him the idea that he needs to dress in a way that people will take him seriously. “And, I didn’t take anyone seriously, so it [fashion] never really occurred to me” – adds Bully.
In London, Dali breaks out from his cocoon of matching shirt and trousers, a coordinated tie and collar, and transforms into a splendid butterfly. Glitter, sparkles, pink nuances and tight-fitted pants reign in his wardrobe in accordance to his heartbeat. While in Hull “everybody is dressed in a very conventional way, projecting a social identity”, as Charlotte Cook describes it, in London, people are not ashamed of being themselves.
“The more expressive and forceful you are, and projecting a personality, kind of the more status and respect you got” – says Bully. This is how the capital works.
With this new mindset, he feels free to “experiment with a lot of gender presentations without repercussions about whether I would be beaten up in the street, or without it being something I can outlive” – shares Dali. The first time he gains the courage to make his style debut is at a gay club. He wants the choice of clothing to emphasise his “feminine legs” and “feminine butt”.
“But then I didn’t realize that I also had a non- feminine penis, and if I had these really tight jeans, that thing is going to stick up like a pyramid. And half of me getting ready was trying to find an angle that my penis wouldn’t show” – he adds.
When he gets to the club, instead of being made fun of, as would happen in Hull or anywhere else, he receives the opposite response.
“Everybody thought I was really beautiful. I just never had that before. It was… daring”. People are fascinated by the way he looks and want to become friends with him. Initially, he thought that the reason for that is the clothes. But after experimenting with entering the club in a basic shirt and jeans, he receives the same admiration. And the realisation comes to him: all the obsession is because he is an albino. ”No one has seen an albino before and in London the way things work is, the more unique and special you are, the more attention you get” – explains Dali. At first, he uses the spotlight to his advantage – makes a lot of connections with people, does some crazy stuff and explores life as never before, now being not only accepted in the society, but put on the pedestal of quirkiness.
However, soon he recognizes that even people he has been friends with are only interested in the novelty of, ‘this is an albino’, but nobody is intrigued by him, as a person. “No one was interested in what I thought about gender, or race, or the world, or the economy, or any of that stuff” – says Bully. Many times he even felt used by people, who would pretend they are his friends, take a photoshoot of him, for instance, and then never contact him. Once again he feels the same kind of distance he has experienced in Hull, though reversed and inverted. “So, I felt just as alone in London, as I did in Hull” – he concludes.
Fortunately, there a couple of people who fiercely love and care about him – his family and his group of friends from secondary school. He charmingly calls them “the odd assortment of misfits; all the peanut M&Ms that didn’t pass the oval test”. At the moment, he is staying in Newcastle at the house of two of them and is looking for a job in the Toon, since he decided to drop out from university. Charlotte, his best friend, admits: “It cannot be further from my mind that Bully is an albino. It is something that doesn’t matter to me at all. To me, he is the most kindhearted and sincere human being in the world”.
There he is, sitting in front of me on my kitchen table. Black, white, albino, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, beautiful, queer, divergent… Does it matter? No. Meet Dali Mthembu.
