Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on Fucktoys.

搞快点

Overlapping.

Bright chartreuse. Lime-green. Olive. Dark jade. Periwinkle blue water. Pale cerulean and silver-grey. Branches reaching up break into an azure morning sky. Light breeze. Promise of rain carried in the seams.

Reality is not a game.

No GKD.

No God Mode.

The light hasn’t changed all morning. North-facing, so the brightness has a particular quality, flattened, without the warmth of direct sun.

The bedroom balcony looks onto the lake. It’s early October, still spring by the calendar, but the heat is already settling into the afternoons. There’s a promise of rain in the forecast that hasn’t materialised yet. The light tells me nothing has changed since yesterday. The light tells me nothing will change today either.

I sit here, and the conditions I sit in matter. I smoke on a balcony and think about language and reclamation and who gets to name what, while somewhere else a person decides whether to eat today or spend the money on something else. This is not neutral.

Down by the water a man stands half-hidden in the reeds. Jeans open. One hand on the low fence for balance, the other working fast and angry. A thin white arc goes up and drops straight into the lake. Gone. He doesn’t look up.

The game talk bothers me. GKD and God Mode aren’t the same. One just wants everything faster. The other wants the rules taken away. Both are ways of refusing the ordinary pace of things. Reality doesn’t offer either.

And then: Fucktoys.

It carries a history of diminishing people into objects for use. A thing to play with and discard.

Sriram made it the title of a film about AP, a sex worker in Trashtown trying to raise money and lift a curse. AP is funny and sentimental. Sexually frank. Sometimes furious. She doesn’t fit the category the word was built to hold.

The film knows the word’s power. It asks what happens when the person who has been called that name decides to claim it. When she says: yes, that is what I am calling myself, and now you have to deal with what I do with it.

Same syllables. Different ownership. One version puts you in a smaller box. The other says I know the history and I’m using it anyway. Sriram is fighting over who gets to say the word, and why.

My coffee tastes strange. The milk might be turning. I can’t tell. Against my better judgement I down it anyway. I feel my gorge rise and force myself not to be sick. I light another cigarette.

On screen it stops being theory. AP bargains a price, cracks a joke about the curse, then asks for a cigarette and five minutes before the next one. Camera stays close enough to catch the tiredness in her face and the small private smile after the joke. Doesn’t look away. Sex is clear, but she never gets emptied out. That is the reclamation that matters: not only of a word, but of the right to appear without being reduced.

Queer people have done this with language for a long time. Turning insults into something that belongs to them. But that usually stays inside groups who already get it. Putting Fucktoys on a film title sends the word out to people who don’t share that history. Different risk. The word travels further.

There was pressure to change the title. To soften the material. She refused.

Then the Instagram account disappeared. Temporarily, reportedly. The exact reason is not clear—title, sexual content, something else.

A notification arrives on my lock screen. Andrew Scott happy birthday. He is turning fifty today. We’re friends on Facebook. I’m not even sure it’s a real account.

Whatever the reason, the account through which the film was circulating disappeared. Publicity interrupted. Access to its followers lost. A platform does not need to ban a work to shape its public life.

Reclamation is not protection. It does not guarantee that the next person will honour the meaning you have made.

AP looks back. Sriram looks back. The film insists on that looking. The person being named is present, watching, and has something to say about what is being said about her.

That is neither acceleration nor exemption. It is not GKD. It is not God Mode.

I put the cigarette out. Ash falls and balances precisely in the groove of the grout between the fake stone tiles. The lake is still. Leaves hang motionless. Then a few droplets begin to fall from a clear sky, small and unexpected.

God weeps on the back of my hand.

The light stays flat.

The morning holds.

Ashraf Johaardien is a South African writer\artist working across literary, dramatic and visual forms.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e.
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.com

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