BBL 3211: NEW LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
POEMS & SHORT STORIES UNIT 1-5
1
New Literatures in English: An Overview
Topic 1 What is New Literatures in English?
Topic 2 Themes and Concerns of New Literatures in English
Topic 3 Approaches to Writing about New Literatures
2
Poems & Short Stories from Malaysia
Topic 1 Mohammad Haji Salleh and Racial Stereotype – Do Not Say
Topic 2 Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Female Oppression – Ah Mah
Topic 3 K.S. Maniam and Identity - Arriving
3
Short Stories from India
Topic 1 Bharati Mukherjee and Quest for Identity - Hindus
Topic 2 R.K. Narayan and Arranged Marriage –Mother and Son
4
Poems from Africa I
Topic 1 Kofi Awoonor and Images of War – Song of War
Topic 2 Wole Soyinka and Racial Discrimination – Telephone Conversation
5
Poems & Short Stories from Africa II
Topic 1 Nadine Gordimer and Social Justice – Once Upon A Time
Topic 2 Mohamud S. Togane and Cultural Identity - Arfaye
Mohamad Haji Salleh - Malaysia
Do Not Say
do not say my people are lazy
because you do not know.
you are only a critic, an onlooker.
you cannot know or judge,
passing the kampong in your car,
staring at economic data.
do not think my people are weak
because they are gentle,
because they do not build skyscrapers.
have you ever worked in a ladang,
or danced the ronggeng?
can you sing the dondang sayang?
do not think that we have only music
because we love life.
do not write that we have no literature, culture.
have you ever listened to the sajak or pantun
stayed a night at the bangsawan?
have you read the epic shairs
or the theological theses?
how many times have you wondered about history in the blade
and ancestry in the handle of the keris,
or felt the pattern of the songket?
have you lived in a kampong?
do not condemn us as poor
because we have very few banks.
see, here the richness of our people,
the brimful hearts that do not grab or grapple.
we collect humanity from sun and rain and man,
transcending the business and the money.
do not tell us how to live
or organise such nice associations and bodies
our society was an entity
before the advent of political philosophy.
do not say –
because you do not know.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
ladang: clearing for non-irrigated farming
dondang sayang: a type of serenade in which both members of a couple sing verses alternately
bangsawan: Malay opera
keris: traditional Malay dagger
songket: hand-woven cloth, shot with gold or silver thread
ronggeng: dance for couples, sometimes accompanied by song
sajak: form of modern Malay verse
shairs: literary form in which the language is rhythmic
Shirley Geok-lin Lim - Malaysia
AH MAH
Grandmother was smaller
than me at eight. Had she
been child forever?
Helpless, hopeless, chin sharp
as a knuckle, fan face
hardly half-opened, not a scrap
of fat anywhere, she tottered
in black silk, leaning on
handmaids, on two tortured
fins. At sixty, his sons all
married, grandfather bought her,
Soochow flower song girl.
Every bone in her feet
had been broken, bound tighter
than any neighbor’s sweet
daughter’s. Ten toes and instep
curled inwards, yellow petals
of chrysanthemum, wrapped
in gold cloth. He bought the young
face, small knobby breasts
he swore he’d not dress in sarong
of maternity. Each night
he held her feet in his palms,
like lotus in the tight
hollows of celestial lakes.
In his calloused flesh, her
weightless soles, cool and slack,
clenched in his stranger’s fever.
Kofi Awoonor - Ghana
SONG OF WAR
I shall sleep in white calico;
War has come upon the sons of men
And I shall sleep in calico;
Let the boys go forward,
Kpli and his people should go forward;
Let the white man’s guns boom,
We are marching forward;
We all shall sleep in calico.
When we start, the ground shall shake;
The war is within our very huts;
Cowards should fall back
And live at home with the women;
They who go near our wives
While we are away in battle
Shall lose their calabashes when we come.
Where has it been heard before
That a snake has bitten a child
In front of its own mother;
The war is upon us
It is within our very huts
And the sons of men shall fight it
Let the white man’s guns boom
And its smoke cover us
We are fighting them to die.
We shall die on the battle field
We shall like death at no other place,
Our guns shall die with us
And our sharp knives shall perish with us
We shall die on the battlefield.
Wole Soyinka - Nigeria
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. ‘Madam,” I warned,
‘I hate a wasted journey – I am African.’
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
“HOW DARK’ … I had not misheard …’ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?’ Button B. Button A. Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tierred
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?’ revelation came.
‘You mean—like plain or milk chocolate?’
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality, rapidly, wave-length adjusted.
I chose. ‘West African sepia’- and as afterthought,
‘Down in my passport.’ Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness changed her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. ‘WHATS THAT?’ conceding
‘DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.’ ‘Like brunette.’
‘THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT?’ ‘Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, cause—
Foolishly madam—by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black—One moment madam!’ –sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears –‘Madam,’ I pleaded, ‘wouldn’t you rather
See for yourself?’
Mohamud S. Togane – Somalia
ARFAYE
Arfaye: the sweet-smelling one,
fattest Somali in the city of Mogadishu,
city without deodorants.
Everybody knows his nickname and the irony
that sweetness the truth. Nobody knows his real name.
I can see him now in my mind’s eye
in the middle of Main Street
in the frying sun
melting away
about to drown in his sweaty khaki uniform
flinging sweat away from his eyes
trying to direct a traffic of stubborn donkeys,
skittish camels (impatient drivers poking their behinds)
hauling grass and milk;
donkey-carts driven by heedless drivers
who claim the city belongs to their tribe and donkeys;
goats, sheep, and cattle on their way to the slaughter-house;
jay walkers, paraplegic beggars scuttling on all fours
(an American nicknamed them spidermen);
beeping Fiats and thunder-farting ancient trucks without mufflers.
Out of this medley sometimes a relief would appear:
quivering ripe breasts of a careless bushwoman
or some undulating steatopygous behind
then Arfaye would pause, tilt his head in worshipful wonder,
flash a smile, and throw darts of desire.
A short story by K.S. Maniam - Malaysia
“Arriving”
When Krishnan left the coffee shop, where he had been drinking Chinese tea with
his friends, he was unsteady on his feet. The familiar buildings he walked past came tilting at
him. A crow, scavenging at a pile of garbage, squawked and flew to shelter in a nearby rain
tree.
He didn’t mean that, he told himself. We’ve known each other for too long.
Pendatang! Only politicians campaigning for votes used that word. Not always. Some minister
had gone up to the platform to discourage its use. These people are not pendatangs. Their
great grandfathers were pendatangs. Some of their grandfathers are pendatangs. Their fathers
were not pendatangs. They’re not pendatang. The minister had spoken angrily, heatedly.
Krishnan remembered. Newspapers hardly used the word after that. Or only in special cases.
Krishnan remembered that.
As he neared his house, he hesitated. He looked at the corner terrace house he had
bought thirty years ago, drawing out his meager savings for its down payment. You’ll never
become bankruptlah, his friends had told him. Twenty thousand dollars! Lot of money, man!
But he had managed. The house stood as he had bought it; no extensions or renovations
jutted out and distorted the kitchen or the porch.
He pushed open the outer gate – always unlocked – and went up the short,
cemented driveway. His wife appeared at the grille-doors and let him into the house. (She
had insisted that the iron grilles be fitted saying, ‘I’m the one who’s always at home!’)
‘Something the matter?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, lying down on the sofa.
‘Sure? Any palpitations?’ she asked.
She had picked up the word ‘palpitations’ from a pamphlet on stress and heart
diseases, hearing that men in their forties onwards had to be careful.
‘Any pain?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Who’s going to talk? We’ve to do something,’ she said.
‘Not that kind of pain,’ he said.
His wife let him be. The occasion he withdrew into himself, to be alone, were rare
and he always came out of these spells refreshed and cheerful. And he always ate with
renewed appetite. But not that evening. He still lay, not stirring, on the sofa at dinner time.
‘The food’s ready,’ his wife said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.
‘Too much Chinese tea?’
‘I just don’t feel like eating,’ he said, surprised by this anger at his wife.
‘Something’s really wrong,’ she said, sitting down in an armchair, watching him.
He turned his head – something he had never done before – away from his wife,
towards the clutch of darkness in the corner. Mat’s face crowded in on him, large, cynical,
angry. What had he said to make him so furious? He wondered.
‘If you get hungry, the food’s on the table,’ his wife said and went to fold and put
away the day’s laundry.
Krishnan hardly heard her. Had they been talking about imports and exports?
Computer technology? The breaking up of the East European bloc? He couldn’t decide. He
only remembered Mat’s many faces: Mat pursing his lips in indignation. Then the shattering
accusation: ‘You pendatang!’ And Mat had walked away.
What did it mean, pendatang? Arrivals? Illegals?
Pendatang. He had heard the word used on the Vietnamese people coming to the east
coast of the country by the boatlands. Soon they became the boat-people. Thye courage of
these people had astonished Krishnan. He thought of the long, cramped, hazardous voyage.
He read in the newspapers of their being attacked by pirates; the young women raped and
the men flung overboard to drown and the flesh on their bodies sucked away by horny fish
lips. They belonged nowhere; their feet could never touch the firm land. He was horrified at
the defacing done to a people by violence and ideology. In his dreams he was haunted by a
face floating in the sea, ravaged beyond recognition by the greed for power and possessions.
Pendatang. He had seen these other people, the Indonesians, at construction sites.
Building the Tudor-Spanish-Moorish houses in the suburbs. They themselves camped in
makeshift shacks and bathed in the open, at thr common tap. The women’s sarongs, knotted
at their breasts, clung to their bodies like dried, brown blood. The children’s skins were
covered with the soil their parents had dug up to lay the foundations for the houses. In the
evenings, having nowhere to go, they sat under the dim bulbs, and quarreled. Men fought
over women, over the soft touch of love on the labour-calloused flesh. Or had something
gone wrong in the conversation of the ringgit into the rupiah and the relatives back home
forced to starve.
Krishnan stiffened against the sudden, engulfing darkness that threatened to blank
out everything he had known about himself. He was the vagrant, blotted-out face bobbing to
the hidden currents in the sea of dissolution. He clutched at memory, he clawed at
familiarity. But he only floated, set adrift by this new uncertainty, towards an unfamiliar
landfall.
‘The ship stank of human dung,’ his father’s words come to him, ‘and we, the human
cattle, floated above that odour, towards our new land.’
He tried hard to recall his father’s memories of his voyage out to Malaysia but his
mind was choked with some strange obstruction. Krishnan lay in that region between water
and land trying to pull away from the matted, dark intrusion, but his determination seemed
to fail. Yes, it had been determination that had kept him innocent of his father’s experienced.
He had decided, when he became aware of his budding consciousness, not to be influenced
by other people’s memories and nostalgia. He clawed at familiarity. But he only floated, set
adrift by this new uncertainty, towards an unfamiliar landfall.
His wife shook him by the shoulder, startling away the thin, forming lines of
submerged recollections.
“At least come to bed,’ she said and stood, waiting.
He followed her to their bedroom and changed into sarong and T-shirt, his arm
flailing as if against some wave of the unknown, and lay down beside her. In the dark he saw
her shoulder rise and fall like the faint outline of a land he had never known. His son and
daughter – expecting her first child – were out there, absorbed by the land rocking on it
sown, unfathomable centre.
He struggled against the dark waters of uncertainty for a long time. Many times he
was sucked into a fathomless fear but, finally, he rose to the surface, strengthened. He lay
watching the rest of the night crumble away into a new torment.
The morning, when he sat near the door with his cup of tea, did not come up at him
its dew-and-soil soaked grass, did not come with its soft and unimposing light. Instead he
caught a whiff of rotten sewage being carried down the monsoon drain from across the
road. The light falling across the doorway ran points of harshness into his awakened flesh.
Pendatang. One who arrives. One who foes through different experiences to reach the
most enlightening knowledge, he thought. How like my father’s thinking! How foolishly I
thought I didn’t come from his loins!
In the evening he bathed, the water slapping against a new grittiness on his skin, and
put on the pants he had worn to work. He felt he was getting into another struggle, different
from the one Mat and he had gone through with Mr. Cuthbert, their British boss, before
independence.
As he passed, on his way to the coffeeshop, the houses he had accepted as solid and
unshakeable for more than thirty years, he thought he detected cracks here and there. No,
they were not just splits in the concrete work. They were more than that: the Chinese sundry
shop at the corner seemed to wobble on its isolation. He had heard a lot about that shop
when he came to live in the neighbourhood. But, at that time, they had only been stories for
him. A string of words from different mouths, adding colour to the place. Now these stories
became sinister episode in a life that had remained inaccessible to him.
They smacked of the agony of a private history: they all spoke of the attempt of a
man to shape himself after his own dreams. Ah Ho, he no good, they had said. Running
away, hiding from things he done before. Now thinking he only shopkeeper. But he bring
the money from bad deeds he done before. Now dress simple, looking like he never cut
people up or kill them maybe. Didn’t run far. Can’t hide from past too long. These things
catch up, you know. One day a gang come, beat him up, smash up his shop. But the man
still stubborn. Next day he pretend nothing happen. Build up his shop again. Another time
the gang come again. Do bad things to his daughter. Still the man pretend nothing happen.
If me, my spirit will rise. Will smash up the faces of those thugs!
But when Krishnan passed the old man, Ah Ho, standing behind the counter, the
old man smiled at him as if life had been, so far, an untroubled one.
The street beyond Ah Ho’s shop curved into a beckoning distance as each shop
thrust its own past at Krishnan. Getting to the coffeeshop was like traveling against a slope.
Each patch of the road intruded upon him, wanting to be known.
At last he sighted, in the interior of the coffeeshop, the people had no difficulty in
remembering. They were connected, web-lie, to a round marble that reflected the turning fan
and the still glaze of the tea pot. Even as he approached them, he saw their hands weave into
hair-thin fragility their soliditary.
‘Here at last!’ Wong said.
‘What happened to you, man?’ Teng said. ‘Not yet retired from your wife?’
Their laughter brightened the table like the shine of unreal gold.
‘You can’t retire from anything,’ Krishnan said
‘Wah, how the man change!’ eng said.
Wong, the more serious among them, looked at Krishnan as if seeing him for the
first time.
‘All words. Nothing comes from that,’ he said.
‘Only when you’re innocent,’ Krishnan said, ‘To be innocent is to be stupid.’
‘You’ve known Mat for a long time,’ Wong said. ‘You should know better.’
‘I don’t know anything.’ Krishnan said, ‘ But it isn’t too late.’
‘Not late!’ Teng said. ‘Look who’s talking! We’re all late. One foot already in the
grave.’
‘We must go in peace, man’ Francis Lim, a Christian but who had not abandoned his
Chinese habits, said,
‘As if we were never awake,’ Krishan said, almost to himself. ‘But where’s he?’
‘He come once or twice,’ Wong said. ‘Maybe won’t come again.’
‘Something there deep inside…’ Krishnan said.
‘Nothing deep there, man,’ Francis Lim said. ‘Just jetsam, flotsam words.’
Listening to them, Krishnan felt he was cut adrift again and was floating away to
those grasping lips that would tear him to shreds.
He sat there, not listening waiting, recollection. He had once seen Wong striked, with
lightning fury, at the waiter who had not come with his pot of tea on time. Wong had lashed
out with an energy that though lying hidden beneath the surface came exploding through
with instinct-charged aggression. His hand went for the bread knife with practiced sureness.
The proprietor had stepped in, pacified him by reviling the worker and led Wong who still
trembled with the uncompleted assault, back to the table.
Beneath Francis Lim’s Christian sense of charity, Krishnan remembered seeing a
violent-possessiveness. They had been talking about the individual rights of the citizens in
the country,
‘What individual rights?’ he had almost thundered. ‘You take what you can and don’t
let go. Those are the only rights you have.’
‘Chop-chop,’ Teng had said. ‘You fist, you knife, you gun. That give you what you
want. You stand up somebody kick you down some more.’
And he had laughed, saying ‘You know who that somebody.’ He was looking at Mat.
But they had all laughed, including Mat, as if they all accepted the deceptions they practiced
on each other.
‘This not like you, man,’ Teng said now. Think. Think. What for think?’
Krishnan came out of his musings; he stare, disoriented, at Teng. The man’s
humour-jowled face was also laced with a trace of viciousness. His jokes seemed to bite,
cling and make vulnerable Krishnan’s distress. Their rugged edges sawed and dismembered
the fragile assurance he floated upon.
‘For you, all right,’ Krishnan said, ‘No need to think. I have to. Didn’t think all my
life.’
But no one said anything. They sat drinking their Chinese tea and ruminating on the
fading evening light that made the table and chairs, shadows, and the men, ghosts.
The treacherous gloom of the dying day was thick with the betrayals of his friends.
He staggered through the labyrinthian deceit, his earlier determination deserting him as some
fickle frailty. He saw no struggle ahead of him, only surrender. But the thought came to him,
in the light of his new knowledge, that he had always been turning away from circumstances
and people, to give in to himself. How right Mat was! He thought. He was always coming to
himself. Yes, he was a pendatang!
His wife received him again, her face reflecting the bitter strain on his won: htye had
lived close together without really knowing what went inside each other. She glowed when
he glowed; he was please when she was please. Had anything happened behind that glow and
that pleasure?
He hugged this doubt to himself throughout the simple meal she had prepared and
throughout the night as he lay beside the unquestioning heave of known and unknown flesh.
He sweated and strange sounds caught in his throat as he waited for the man of the night
before to reach out to him.
Instead someone else came. At first Krishnan could not recognize him. The flesh
was so young, firm and unlined; the face was so rounded, placid and untouched. Could he
have come from all that confidence? He wondered. Ten he stilled his mind and watched as
this young man moved, worked, talked and fell into the snares of friendship.
There he was moving with Mat. They are in the office and Mat has just come out
from Mr.Cuthbert’s office, after a dressing down. There is an expression on Mat’s face
Krishan does not understand.
‘Upstart!’ Mat says. ‘Who does he think he is? Coming here to teach me. To teach
me!’
Krishnan is reminded of a freshwater fish taken out and put into a bucket of sea
water. The scaly thing bucks and rebuffs, striking out, indignantly, at some substance in the
water that threatens it with domination. Mat’s face is all bathed in a fine sweat of rejection.
Then it changes, breaks into playfulness.
‘A time will come,’ Mat says. ‘Let’s go eat!’
The stairs leading into the sunshine and to the food stalls is covered with their daily
stepping out. The ascent on their return – energies restored – is caked with relief and
camaraderie. But Krishnan sees a shadow following them, in and out of their building, and
sinking out of their sight when they are at their desks, working.
As he watched, the shadow goes underground: it divides and submerges itself in Mat
and himself. Whenever they talk about Mr.Cuthbert, Krishnan can feel it straining against
the tide of words. He watches Mat, he watches himself: the faces are flushed by a common
sympathy, by a common fear. Now the door to Mr.Cuthbert’s room does not remain shut
on some impenetrable world of authority. It swings outwards, beckoning, and draws Mat
and Krishnan past its fearsome threshold.
Getting accustomed to its darkness, they see that there is no furniture in the room.
The walls are maps; the floor is time moving without pause. When they try to steady
themselves their bodies shiver. Mat and Krishnan look at each other, their skins sweating
fear. Only their minds are alive, preparing to ward off the shadows detaching themselves
from the maps from the time-floor.
Then, suddenly, their minds cannot repel anything, not the shadows, not the
countries that come hurtling at them through time. The fear they have held on to leaves
them. The boundary of their self-centered consciousness, breaks, and releases them into the
continuum of a new awareness. And the people come through the centuries, their clothes
patchy with history but their faces aglow with abstraction, aglow with enigmatic wholeness.
Krishnan and Mat are specks of fascination in the tide of wholeness.
And as specks of unenclosed awareness they flow along the banks of time,
recognizing here a primeval adventurer, there an Alexander outdistancing their native lands;
there is Buddha in his bubble meditation and further down the Greek sages wrapped up in
their own wisdom. Riding the time cells, they go past the cataclysm of nations at war,
cultures in conflict and come to their own histories and see the conquistadors bringing their
ships and their ways of living to the country’s shores. There is no stopping time and soon
Mr.Cuthbert comes into their vision, puny, and defeated, his personal history in tatters but
his spirit shining through to the future. Then Mat and Krishna come face-to-face with the
figure of a man, historyless, moving on the current discovery and when they look behind
him there is nothing; when they look where he is looking there is a swirling mist of
everything.
Then Krishnan stepped out and awakened into his own consciousness, His fear was
gone, banished by a wide ranging bewilderment. In the dark he sensed the contours of his
wife’s body, enclosing emptiness. Their lives had been a mere accumulation of days, the shell
of a house, the husks of practical tasks. He had turned away and reduced to a comfortable
dot all that he did not want to understand. That had been his reaction on being summoned
to Mr.Cuthbert’s office: to shun that which made one man dominate another and turn
inwards into his cocoon of assurances.
‘The loins of my father, the loins of history,’ he thought, wonderingly, as he got up
quietly from the bed and went to the living room. He switched on the dim wall light and
opening the front door, looked out on the quiet street.
‘Pendatang’ he told himself as he observed the shadows of the trees, telephone and
electric poles trail off into a deeper, richer blackness. He had the feeling that he was looking
at what had happened before and what lay before him without dismay, without fear.
‘Pendatang,’ he said softly, gratefully. ‘Pendatang. Pendatang. Pendatang.’
The word went inside him, into something other than self-consciousness. It went
beyond the fish-sucked bodies of the boat-people, beyond the clay-covered skins of the
construction workers. It went beyond the pursed indignation of Mat’s lips, the puffed-up
smugness of his cheeks. It did not take Krishnan into himself; it took him into the beyond.
Daylight and his wife found Krishnan seated beside the door, gazing soberly on the
street that ran past the house.
‘You didn’t sleep at all?’ his wife asked.
‘Sometimes you must be more awake than asleep,’ he said, turning to look at her.
The smile that had been absent for a while returned to her lips. She went to the
kitchen to make his coffee, wondering if he would have the ravenous appetite that marked
his emergence from the occasional and self-imposed isolation.
When she served lunch, he ate like someone about to begin an endless journey,
relishing every morsel and yet not overfilling himself. She thought she saw in his eyes a light
she had not seen before – a light that gathered whatever happened around him to the
pinpoint of a large purpose. In the evening she watched him go out to meet his friends and
though she barely understood what he had gone through in recent weeks, she could not help
noticing a new dignity that carried the figure of her husband over puddle and drain, past hut
and bungalow, round the corner to the unfamiliar.
Krishnan walked towards the cofeeshop, the calm unsteadiness inside him absorbing
whatever he saw and heard along the way. As he approached the garbage can he saw the
crow that squawked away before now foraging among the offal of fowl and fish,
unperturbed. Its glossy, folded wings landscaped a darkness that reached into the one inside
him. He thought it looked like a conquistador pecking away at the wastes of history, trying to
salvage. ‘As Ah Ho did,’ Krishnan thought as he passed the sundry shop.
When he entered the coffeeshop he saw Wong, Francis Lim and Teng seated at the
usual table as if they had not left since the last time he had been with them. The table still
held in its glaze its gesticulating shadows, given, he thought, to surrender.
‘Look who here!’ Teng said. ‘So fresh! So wife service you good, ah?’
‘Your wife given up already?’ Krishan said.
Wong and francis Lim looked at him, coming out from their self-absorbed stillness.
‘Your friend here lah, looking for you,’ Teng said.
‘That Mat,’ Wong said. ‘Strange man’
‘We should try to understand him,’ Krishnan said.
‘You wasted your whole lifetime doing that,’ Francis Lim said.
won’t.’
‘Maybe I looked from the wrong side.’ Krishnan said.
‘You can change your position as many times as you want,’ Wong said, ‘but he
‘The change will be good for us,’ Krishnan said.
Teng laughed and the others sniggered; Krishnan listened to the ripples of
skepticism, undiscouraged. He saw before him many evenings, filled with light and filled
with shadows. Unchanging, between light and shadow, Mat would say, ‘Pendatang!’ Krishnan
would say, ‘Yes, I’m always arriving, arriving. I’ll never reach. Reaching is dying. Reaching is
not arriving. Arriving at what? I don’t know. Only arriving. Never getting there. Arriving.’
“Once Upon A Time”
Nadine Gordimer – South Africa
Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children.
I reply that I don't write children's stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book
fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for children.
I think of sending a postcard saying I don't accept that I "ought" to write anything.
And then last night I woke up—or rather was awakened without knowing what had
roused me.
A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious?
A sound.
A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a
wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again:
the creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from
room to room, coming up the passage—to my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under
the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my
windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how
do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs
who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he
was knifed by a casual laborer he had dismissed without pay.
I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark.
I lay quite still—a victim already—the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way
and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could
never listen intently as that in the distractions of the day, I was reading every faintest sound,
identifying and classifying its possible threat.
But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human
weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it.
The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my
bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed
the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the
whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of
brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my
heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by
the Chopi and Tsonga1 migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the
earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water
from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.
I couldn't find a position in which my mind would let go of my body—release me to sleep
again. So I began to tell myself a story, a bedtime story.
In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other
very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very
much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had a car and a
caravan trailer for holidays, and a swimming-pool which was fenced so that the little boy and
his playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely
trustworthy and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by the neighbors. For
when they began to live happily ever after they were warned, by that wise old witch, the
husband's mother, not to take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a medical
benefit society, their pet dog was licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and
theft, and subscribed to the local Neighborhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque
for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be
intruder. He was masked; it could not be said if he was black or white, and therefore proved
the property owner was no racist.
It was not possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot
damage. There were riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another color
were quartered. These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable
housemaids and gardeners, so there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she
was afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU
HAVE BEEN WARNED and open the gates and stream in... Nonsense, my dear, said the
husband, there are police and soldiers and tear-gas and guns to keep them away. But to
please her—for he loved her very much and buses were being burned, cars stoned, and
schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarters out of sight and hearing of the suburb—
he had electronically controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled off the sign YOU HAVE
BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates would have to announce his intentions by
pressing a button and speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The little boy was
fascinated by the device and used it as a walkie-talkie in cops and robbers play with his small
friends.
The riots were suppressed, but there were many burglaries in the suburb and
somebody's trusted housemaid was tied up and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was
in charge of her employers' house. The trusted housemaid of the man and wife and little boy
was so upset by this misfortune befalling a friend left, as she herself often was, with
responsibility for the possessions of the man and his wife and the little boy that she implored
her employers to have burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an
alarm system installed. The wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So from
every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw
the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the
fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off
the alarm keening through the house.
The alarm was often answered—it seemed—by other burglar alarms, in other
houses, that had been triggered by pet cats or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one
another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became
accustomed to, so that the din roused the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak
of frogs and musical grating of cicadas' legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies' discourse
intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television
sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry
enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey
in the cabinets or patio bars. Insurance companies paid no compensation for single malt2, a
loss made keener by the property owner's knowledge that the thieves wouldn't even have
been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking.
Then the time came when many of the people who were not trusted housemaids and
gardeners hung about the suburb because they were unemployed. Some importuned for a
job: weeding or painting a roof; anything, baas3, madam. But the man and his wife
remembered the warning about taking on anyone off the street. Some drank liquor and
fouled the street with discarded bottles. Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to
drive the car out of the electronically operated gates. They sat about with their feet in the
gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a green tunnel of the street—for it was a
beautiful suburb, spoilt only by their presence—and sometimes they fell asleep lying right
before the gates in the midday sun. The wife could never see anyone go hungry. She sent the
trusted housemaid out with bread and tea, but the trusted housemaid said these were loafers
and tsotsis4, who would come and tie her and shut her in a cupboard. The husband said,
She's right. Take heed of her advice. You only encourage them with your bread and tea.
They are looking for their chance . .. And he brought the little boy's tricycle from the garden
into the house every night, because if the house was surely secure, once locked and with the
alarm set, someone might still be able to climb over the wall or the electronically closed gates
into the garden.
You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old witch,
the husband's mother, paid for the extra bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his
wife—the little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales.
But every week there were more reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the dead
of night, in the early hours of the morning, and even in the lovely summer twilight—a
certain family was at dinner while the bedrooms were being ransacked upstairs. The man and
his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the suburb, were distracted by the sight of the
little boy's pet cat effortlessly arriving over the seven-foot wall, descending first with a rapid
bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer vertical surface, and then a graceful launch,
landing with swishing tail within the property. The whitewashed wall was marked with the
cat's comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there were larger red-earth
smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet
of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.
When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the
neighborhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect
lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and
devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost
option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron
grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison
architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns of
neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted pure
white). Some walls had a small board affixed, giving the name and telephone number of the
firm responsible for the installation of the devices. While the little boy and the pet dog raced
ahead, the husband and wife found themselves comparing the possible effectiveness of each
style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they paused before this barricade
or that without needing to speak, both came out with the conclusion that only one was
worth considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure
concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted
of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there
would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled
in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a
deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. You're
right, said the husband, anyone would think twice... And they took heed of the advice on a
small board fixed to the wall: Consult DRAGON'S TEETH The People For Total Security.
Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of
the house where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily
ever after. The sunlight flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns
encircled the home, shining. The husband said, Never mind. It will weather. The wife said,
You're wrong. They guarantee it's rust-proof. And she waited until the little boy had run off
to play before she said, I hope the cat will take heed . . . The husband said, Don't worry, my
dear, cats always look before they leap. And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in
the little boy's bed and kept to the garden, never risking a try at breaching security.
One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book
the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who
braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to
life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his
little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and
head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the
itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him,
and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his
wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up
wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the
security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it—the man, the wife, the
hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener—into the house.