Kisses and freedom

What you can't take for granted

Someone here in Germany asked where we were going next. I said I wanted to go to Albania.

‘Albania?!’

She didn’t use the words ‘shit-hole country’ because she was speaking German, but all the words she spoke amounted to ‘shit-hole country’. Why, she wanted to know, would we want to go there, when there are such beautiful places in Switzerland, in Italy. Why would we choose to go towards misery and poverty?

Then she forgot she was in the middle of insulting and dismissing an entire country and swerved into reminiscences of long-ago holidays in non-shit-hole countries.

The wide view. Taken in Montagu, South Africa. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

For my birthday, Sam bought me an e-book called Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir by a woman who grew up in Albania. But the file can’t be read, which has caused problems that can’t be solved by online support. On Monday, we headed into the city, to the super-mega-huge bookstore the book was bought from, to try and sort it out. Afterwards, we wandered down towards the river where people – sat next to their bicycles on the dry, scrubby grass – were licking ice-cream cones or drinking Aperol spritzes from plastic glasses.

Near us, a group of teenagers sitting and lying in a loose circle ate chips and drank beer and chatted and laughed. They were in my line of vision and I watched them, trying to work out how they fitted together. A blonde girl and the boy she’d been leaning into turned towards one another and planted a quick, familiar kiss on one another’s lips and then turned back to the conversation.

‘Don’t you think kissing is weird?’ I said to Sam, returning to one of my favourite ‘this is such a weird phenomenon’ topics, which I usually keep inside my head.

Sam hadn’t heard this one before and sort of smiled.

‘No, I mean, it’s really, really weird. Two people putting their lips together. They don’t put their ears together. Or their chins. Or touch pinkies together. It’s weird.’

‘Well, the whole thing is weird,’ he said.

I wanted to know what ‘the whole thing’ was. Was it sex?

‘Yes. It’s a bit like a hamburger. You just eat it. You don’t want to open it up and inspect it too closely.’

I hadn’t been thinking about sex, but now that he’d brought sex into things, kissing in public, even chaste kissing, seemed even more odd than it had a minute before.

Did you know that kissing on the lips is not a universal human show of intimacy? Not all people in all parts of the world do it. It is more common where people wear more clothes and less common where people wear fewer clothes. Kissing is a way for us to sniff one another, the way animals do. The more clothes you’re wearing, the less exposed skin there is to sniff, so faces get closer together. And sniffing is how we check one another out.

Also, humans are predisposed to kissing. Our lips are full of sensory receptors, so we’re already wired for pleasure around our cakeholes. (I don’t really understand why ‘cakehole’ is such a rude word for mouth because cakes are nice.) Plus we have the unconscious memory of the oxytocin that flooded our tiny brains when a parent (usually a mother) held us close and fed us (usually by breast). Oxytocin is the hormone that makes us feel safe and loved.

So kissing is all evolution and biology and not at all mysterious and yet … very, very peculiar when you take it at face value. (I can’t think of another way to say ‘face value’ so what looks like a bad joke will have to stay.)

Kissing has nothing at all to do with so-called struggling countries and the infuriating ways cold and crass privilege manifests in casual conversation. Except maybe that kissing has sometimes been banned – like hugging recently was all over the world – and dictators like banning all kinds of things from books and music, to jokes about bananas, to jogging in groups. Banning never makes the banned things stop happening though, so kissing – like queerness – continues.

Ypi, the author who wrote about growing up in a dictatorship in Albania, writes this in Free:

Freedom is not only sacrificed when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.

In South Africa, there is a hard-won ban on the banning of certain kinds of humans. Freedom is a constitutional right we all have. We can kiss – or be queer – and still be seen as human in the eyes of the fundamental law of the country. In theory, on paper, we are free to be how and who we are, as long as we don’t harm our fellow humans in word or deed.

Yet we do not thrive.

First one group (grab and kill), then another (exclude and terrorise), then another (steal and hoard) has oppressed us over hundreds of years.

‘A system that claims to enable people to realise their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive,’ Ypi writes.

So, yes, I want to go to Albania. I find I am more interested in the way ordinary people make lives for themselves in countries that have been oppressed than I am in the complaints of people who live in rich countries with histories of oppression.

I am more interested in ordinary people who cope with lack, uncertainty and broken systems, than in people who, from a position of comfort they don’t have the means to even begin to measure, turn up their noses at entire countries in contempt.

Unë ju dërgoj puthje*,

K.

*The Albanian equivalent of ‘I send you kisses’, according to Google Translate).