Thought Picnic: Those who resort to bastardry should answer for their claims

Refusing to bear the slur

It has occurred to me that there must be a time when you must divorce yourself from illegitimacy and the hold of bastardry predicated on an assessment of your situation with little regard for your lived life and achievements.

Obviously, there were circumstances where children born out of wedlock were considered illegitimate, but it is no fault of the child that they were born into that situation. Unfortunately, the label might dog them in terms of inheritance or entitlement, but what cannot be denied them is the right to live their own lives and set their own course to create their own story.

Other uses of the word bastard might come from attempting to address the child in terms of what they have failed to achieve for wanting of ability and sometimes it is just adversity or misfortune that can happen to anyone, just that someone somewhere seems to be keeping score.

Invariably, anyone can be a bastard, choose to be one or be seen as one. For those who for all sorts of reasons are declared so but refuse to let it define them, the path before them is clear as the light of day. Provenance is helpful, but without it, you can still go on to become the best of who you can ever be for the betterment of people and communities that see you as you are rather than where you are from.

Let them answer for their claims

It is interesting that even royal bastards even with their illegitimacy were rarely without honour or title and many were quite prominent in society without attainder for being born out of wedlock. A child of whom they have been born remains the child of, whether recognised and accepted or not.

If then after so having reached adulthood there are some that seek to lay that unfortunate appellation on you, it is for them to then support that with the evidence of why illegitimacy is their refuge of discourse apart from whatever else you have done and achieved.

Smarting from an encounter that elicited reference and allusion in the mistaken need to trigger a response to attendant concerns, it is not the need to continue engagement that comes to mind even if some advice has suggested a bit more circumspection to limited spheres of adverse commentary. 

Rather, one is inclined to cut off communication for the time being, for once again, a line was crossed and if bastardry was a last resort for one, it became the last straw that broke the laden camel’s back for another.

Blog: Thought Picnic: Battling a dimension of legitimacy

Old Gods Have Retired

Care for the words ye speak

We can be rather emotional beings and so prone to outbursts and communication that in the spur of the moment can damage relationships.

Nowhere is such able to affect you as much as to hear that some rather unpalatable, reprehensible or downright atrocious thing has been said about you and your person in a fit of uncontrolled and animated displeasure.

Gratifyingly, these things are rarely said where one witnesses the vituperation, they are relayed conversations that come to light sometimes long after the event. Amid idle banter, effusive gossip, or the need to convey a veneer of candour, the perpetrator encapsulates quite reductively the character, status or person of someone else into a pithy phrase or word, the hearer unable to escape the impact of what was said.

Absence is not presence

The party to whom opprobrium was intended whilst in their absence then gains knowledge either by a whispering campaign or in unrelated conversation that wends its way to the unintended revelation of a major slight.

You cannot ever mistake the import, it has consequences and it will hurt quite deeply. However, you have to begin to rationalise and hope you misheard. Maybe the issue cannot be corroborated and before one settles into pitiful paranoia, as long as the matter is not addressed directly to one, it might well be best to ignore it altogether, but that takes time.

A bastard of the gods

At least, that is the frame of mind I have, for if one were to act one side of the story regardless of the trust that one has in the source, the old gods of allegiance, filiality, relationship, respect, consideration, honour and duty will be retired never to hear supplications or receive sacrifices of adherents who have justly gone apostate.

Even for a bastard, we are made of sterner stuff than to be rash in judgment and intemperate when provoked. The fight is unnecessary for the conscience to heal from the unkindest deployment of verbiage. We live for a higher cause.

Courtesy of the William Kentridge exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town.