Coetzee
Coetzee, J.M.
Wade, Michael
(Rev.) Foe by J.M.Coetzee, Michael Joseph, London; Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 157pp.,
hbk, 1986 0 86975 308 8
Southern African Review of Books, 2 (Winter)/1987/1988
Foe is a hard nut. It is, among other things, a retelling of The Life and Strange Surprising
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by Daniel Defoe (1719), though with major
variations. First among these is that Coetzee's tale has Susan Barton, marooned by rebellious
mariners and cast up on Crusoe's (Cruso's in Foe ) island, as the narrator. The second variation
is the narrative concentration on what happens after Cruso, Friday and Barton are rescued.
Cruso dies on board ship on the way home to England, and Barton and Friday seek out the
author, Foe, to write and publish their story. The third variation is the enigmatic nature of
their fate after their return to England. Foe is a disappointing ghostwriter, being forced to hide
out from bailiffs and creditors, and he tampers with Susan Barton's conception of her
narrative. But worse, he introduces a young woman who claims to be the daughter Barton was
seeking in Brazil -- the reason for the commencement of her adventures. Then Susan Barton
and Friday (mute, his tongue cut out perhaps by a slaver, perhaps even by Cruso) venture on
foot across England to Bristol, seeking a ship's captain who will return Friday to Africa. But
Barton finds only rogues who will resell Friday as a slave if she gives them the opportunity.
The ending is a liberation from time and the conventions of 'realism' which were equated for
so long with 'writing' in the narrative tradition of industrial civilization.
Daniel Defoe stands at the beginning of the tradition of narrative realism in English literature.
That tradition is associated with the Enlightenment, the triumph of reason, the consolidation
of the Protestant work ethic, the emergence of capitalism and the establishment of an
industrial-commercial economic base. The original Robinson Crusoe is an archetypal
statement of the Enlightenment view of (Western) man's relationship with his natural
surroundings -- a relationship intensely manipulative, intensely controlling, intensely
projective -- 'I am monarch of all I survey'. The verb 'to survey' is highly suggestive in this
context, with its connotations of measurement for the purpose of imposing structural change.
In Foe, however, Cruso's Enlightenment behaviour is obsessional rather than creative; his
control over his environment is barely adequate to ensure primitive sustenance. And his major
enterprise is the building of terraces for agriculture, clearing them of stones and using the
stones to build their walls. Susan asks him what he intends to plant:
"The planting is not for us," said he. "We have nothing to plant -- that is our misfortune." And
he looked at me with such sorry dignity, I could have bit my tongue. "The planting is reserved
for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed."
Foe himself -- preoccupied with his problems of debt, and interested in revising Susan
Barton's story to make it commercially viable -- is scarcely an ideal image of Enlightenment
man. But in one respect his faith is strong, and shared by Susan Barton. Within days of her
fortuitous arrival on his island she is expressing her bitter disappointment to Cruso over his
failure to record his experiences: 'What I chiefly hoped to find was not there. Cruso kept no
journal, perhaps because he lacked the inclination to keep one, or, if he ever possessed the
inclination, had lost it.' And Cruso's response to her passionate persuasion on the subject is
remarkable. He is 'unmoved':
"Nothing is forgotten," said he; and then: "Nothing I have forgotten is worth the
remembering."
Susan Barton is much excited and upset by this response; but in trying to rebut it she is forced
into a denial of her own Enlightenment assumptions and into a defence of logocentricity
which is remarkable for its subversiveness.
Foe's faith in the logocentric universe emerges from the untamable problem of the muteness
of Friday. Susan Barton's obsession with trying to compel Friday into dialogue is paralleled
by Cruso's barren enterprise of moving a hundred thousand stones to build terraces which will
never be planted. Towards the end of the narrative, Foe proposes a solution to Friday's
muteness: '"Have you shown him writing?" said Foe.' Thus the written word's hidden purpose
in the logocentric universe of the Enlightenment is revealed: to defend man against the
evidence of reality, of the finality of his status as 'poor, forked creature'. 'Let us persevere,'
says Foe, because 'Friday may yet surprise us'.
But the surprise, when it comes, is both enigmatic and threatening. On the slate which is the
tabula rasa of his Enlightenment-conceived soul, Friday produces what looks to Susan Barton
at first like a design of leaves and flowers:
"But when I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot:
row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes."
The surprise is compounded by Friday's reaction when Susan tries to show the slate to Foe:
Friday holds it tight and rather than obey Susan's command to give it up, he wipes the design
off with his fingers and spittle. The next surprise is Susan's reaction: '"Mr Foe, I must have
my freedom!"' Thus Coetzee explores the underside of the relationship between civilized man
and the 'noble savage' whom he enslaves, and finds Enlightenment man the prisoner of his
self-invented glory, of the wall of words he has inserted between himself and Nature -- both
his own and that surrounding him.
The book ends with a vision of the narrator discovering her supposed daughter, herself, Foe
and Friday, all involved in a scene of advanced decay. Susan finds herself bumping into the
shroud-wrapped body of (presumably) her (presumed) daughter, weighing 'no more than a
sack of straw', on the stairs; in the room she finds herself and Foe (again, presumably) lying:
side by side in bed, not touching. The skin, dry as paper, is stretched tight over their bones.
Their lips have receded, uncovering their teeth, so that they seem to be smiling. Their eyes are
closed.
There is no smell of decay: the couple, 'he in a nightshirt, she in her shift', give off a faint
odour of lilac. But there is no escape from this dead civilization. Even Friday, though warm,
has the pulse of life damped down in him so that it can barely be distinguished. But: 'From his
mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island'.
So Friday is not entirely separated from Nature, even in the suspended animation allowed him
by the Enlightenment. But his message remains enigmatic, indecipherable, non-verbal to that
logocentric civilization and its successors that have distorted the essence of his being.
For us the special question remains: how is Foe to be read as a South African document? Or
does Coetzee elude that classification in this novel? I believe that Foe is part of a growing
tendency among South African writers (especially the white ones) to try to make sense of
their situation by depicting it as part of a larger canvas, in which that strange and potentially
tragic experience relates to other elements in a wider unity and may thus be better understood.
(For the sake of a neat inversion one could argue that this is a convenient demarcation of the
tensions and differences between black and white writers in South Africa now: the blacks are
increasingly localized and specific -- and necessarily so -- in their accounts of their segment
of South African experience.) We have seen Coetzee do this kind of thing before, in both
Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians -- and of course we know of similar directions
taken by Gordimer, Brink, Christopher Hope and others.
There are two respects in which Foe speaks both to and about a South African audience, and
both are related to the mute, black Friday. First, Coetzee talks to a South African audience
through the tableau of living death at the book's end, which suggests a whole civilization
trapped in stasis, cut off from its instinctual roots by the logic of its choice of reason as its
guiding light. One is inevitably reminded of the insistent reiteration by the ideologues and
political leaders of white South Africa over the years that theirs is a bastion, an outpost, a
guardian, or the best surviving example, of that civilization which claims to be guided by the
rational mind. In South Africa both black and white are trapped by the ideology of the
Enlightenment; Friday's voice of instinct has been torn, with his tongue, from his mouth.
Susan's leap overboard is, in this context, an attempt to cancel the deadening effect of reason,
to re-establish contact with the instinctual origins of all human sensibility. (In this it suggests
Coetzee's interest in Blake and D.H.Lawrence.) It is at least an escape from the brutalities,
mutilation and enslavement meted out (in South Africa and elsewhere) in the name of
'Western civilization'.
Second, in our last glimpse of Friday, he is reduced (perhaps by now to death) by the dust and
decay of Enlightenment realism, but it is in this moment that his body at last gives off a
comprehensible sign to the narrator:
Friday, in his alcove, has turned to the wall. About his neck -- I had not observed this before - is a scar like a necklace, left by a rope or chain.
The scar demarcates a difference -- between slavery and freedom, perhaps -- but its message
is more complex than that. Its immediate importance in the context of the relationship
between black and white experience in South Africa is that it is communicated -- that
something comprehensible flows from black to white and is somehow received by the white.
This final scene of decay and inanition is set ironically in the present. The uncorrupted
corpses of Foe and Susan, in ambiguous embrace, and Friday in his niche, lie in silence in a
house which bears a Greater London Council plaque on the corner of its facade: 'Daniel
Defoe, Author, are the words, white on blue, and then more writing too small to read'.
The effect of the vision of Friday's necklace scar on the narrator is another leap in time -- she
'slips overboard' into the sea, surrounded by petals Friday, in an earlier scene, had cast on the
waters in what Susan assumes to be a ritual act of remembrance or worship. She swims
underwater to the scene of the shipwreck, the accident that starts the story, and brings strange
civilizations together. Perhaps she is searching for a new beginning, or a new understanding
of herself, prompted by the sight of that scar, the visible sign inflicted on Friday by the culture
she inherits. Significantly, it is Friday's holy site that she seeks first.
Coetzee, J.M.
Parry, Benita
(Rev.) Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee, Secker and Warburg (London), 12.99, 17 September
1991
Southern African Review of Books, 17 (January/February)/1991
The strenuous pleasure of Coetzee's texts is in recognising and appreciating the audacity with
which literary convention and linguistic usage are estranged. So when benevolent reviewers,
repelled at South Africa's egregious regime, welcome his most recent novel as a political
allegory, the initiated reader can anticipate that they have mistaken an exercise in displaying
the impossibility of such a form for its intended and accomplished performance. It is true that
because Age of Iron feigns the modes it imitates with less flagrant irony than Coetzee's fans
have come to expect, a critique of South Africa can be more readily identified, especially as
the narrator situates herself as orator of 'my truth: how I lived in these times, in this place' (p.
119). Hence there do appear to be signs encouraging the acceptance of the narrator's insistent
analogizing of her own impending death with the ending of a moribund political system as the
pivotal metaphor of a parable. However the suspicion that Coetzee is too knowing a writer to
make a personal affliction serve as a symptom of a diseased body politic without alienating
such a redeployment, may lead us to notice that the fit between the stories of Elizabeth
Curren's agonized dying days and the violent death of a malignant social order is always
under threat of dislocation.
If instead we read the novel as a study in naming, then the narrator's reiterated identification
of her cancer with a social malaise, registers the failure of her own discourse to find a noun
adequate to the scale, intensity and ramifications of white oppression in South Africa: 'The
country smoulders, yet with the best will in the world I can only half attend. My true attention
is all inward, upon the thing, the word for the thing inching through my body' (p. 36). For this
is a novel where signifiers are both given a life of their own and a great responsibility in
specifying a particular here and now. As Elizabeth Curren reconstitutes herself in the letters
she writes to an absent daughter, she becomes fascinated with the instability of words
('gratitude and pomegranate' she sees as sister-words; 'Borodino, Diconal ... Are they
anagrams ...? But for what, and in what language?' p. 116; 'A word appeared before me:
Thabanchu, Thaba Nchu ... Nine letters, anagrams for what? p. 158) and comes to observe
how meaning is deferred on a signifying chain: 'A gradient from stupid to stunned to
astonished, to be turned to stone' (p. 26).
But hers is a curiosity that extends beyond gaming and leads her to grasp that in the
conflictual world she inhabits, words are signs of differentials and disjunctions. Thus
Elizabeth Curren knows that her servant Florence does not 'entrust' her with the real name of
the baby daughter, and that the name of the son known to her as Digby is Bheki; she learns
that Mr Thabane who is introduced as Florence's cousin, refers to her as 'my sister', and she
herself responds to the murder of an African youth with linguistic scruple: 'I was shaken ... I
won't say grieved because I have no right to that word, it belongs to his own people' (p. 113).
The central word is of course missing, the absence of 'apartheid' inducing recognition that it
has lost its power to shock and must be renamed, a task the narrator attempts with a 'pit of
disgrace', 'a zone of killing and degradation'. Instead the local specificity of the unspoken
'thing' is marked in the meticulous mapping of a topography which rather than screening
particularity as in Life and Times of Michael K , demystifies the romance and promise that
European voyagers brought to their encounters with the fairest Cape in all the world, The
Cape of Good Hope. Here the smiling pensinsula of legend is configured in a rain-soaked
suburb, its houses built by convict labour; the drably named False Bay is redesignated a 'bay
of false hope'; and a land renowned for its scenery and sunshine which is derided for its
'uninspired name ... Let us hope they change it when they make a fresh start' (p. 64), 'Fixed in
the mind as a place of flat, hard light, without shadows, without depth' (p. 76)
In In the Heart of the Country Magda laments the contraint of the language available to her as
daughter of a patriarchal father and mistress of servants -- 'I create myself in the words that
create me'. Here the terminally ill Elizabeth Curren, for whom writing is the foe of death,
valiantly embarks on writing herself in the multiple discourses that have written her as a
person of British ancestry, a wife, mother, retired lecturer in classics, and a liberal. The
authenticity of a text self-consciously situated in the humanist tradition, would appear to be
guaranteed by declarations of adherence to decencies, and allusions to the Classical Age and
The Classics, to elite music and quality prints -- an idiom which in fictive terms is appropriate
to the genealogy, education, tastes, social position and moral disposition of a good white
woman of Cape Town. However, through the the dialectic she enacts with language -- 'with
each word I feel my way' -- the act of composing an elegy to liberal humanism, becomes a
discovery of its inability to produce a critique of the condition she excoriates: 'when I walk
upon this land, this South Africa, I have a gathering feeling of walking upon black faces' (p.
115).
Mid-way through the book the mother directs her daughter as assumed reader to suspend
belief: 'attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words,
listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily. Read all, even this
adjuration, with a cold eye' (pp. 95-6). And in heeding the caution, we can observe how her
interrogation of the only discourse to which she has access, reveals its limitations by being
taken to its limits. Because her wrath and loathing are directed against the Boers, whom she
names as the architects of her shame, she could appear to be acquitting her own community of
any culpability, and explicitly so when she voices the customary protest of an old South
African liberal tradition against an illegitimate and irrational dominion which stops short of an
unequivocal opposition to white hegemony: 'Legitimacy they no longer trouble to claim,
reason they have shrugged off. What absorbs them is power and the stupor of power!' (p.25).
Blame is decisively shifted when she situates herself as a victim of:
A crime committed long ago ... So long ago that I was born into it. It is part of my inheritance.
It is part of me, I am part of it ... Though it was not a crime I asked to be committed, it was
committed in my name ... So that when in my rages I wished them [the men who committed
the crime] dead, I wished death on myself too. In the name of honour. Of an honourable
notion of honour. (pp. 151, 149 50)
If this indulgence in self-mortification seems to be a pastiche of Paul Scott's gallant
exculpation of the British in The Raj Quartet, then we must read it with scepticism, since the
narrator of Age of Iron exposes its bathos by focusing her 'liberal-humanist posturings'
through the eyes of the seasoned and cynical police. Thus when she invokes a better old world
to which she belongs, and indulges in nostalgia for the golden days of her childhood, 'when
the world was young and all things were possible' (p. 50), the acerbic reader anticipates that
the underpinning lie of the memories will be demolished.
On recollecting a family photograph taken long ago in her grandfather's burgeoning garden,
she now recognises that those who tended the seeds were 'outside the picture', and tries to
imagine a procedure which would yield a new kind of negative 'in which we begin to see what
used to lie outside the frame, occulted ... no longer does the picture show who were in the
garden frame that day, but who were not there' (pp. 103, 102). The narrator's
acknowledgement of the exclusions, returns us to the impossibility of a privileged author
depicting and giving voice to those who are beyond her experiential range, an inaccessibility
which Coetzee examined in Foe and negotiated by a refusal to exercise the power of the
dominant culture to speak for the oppressed, at the cost of situating Friday as outside
language.
Here the narrator's endeavour to bring the African into representation issues in imitations of
modes which Coetzee is known to eschew: the description of her servant's husband at work on
a poultry farm and her recreation of their marital life on Florence's days off, is written in the
overtly 'naturalist' style of Poppie Nongena ; and when naked plot-manipulation takes the
narrator into the black township, she enters the terrain of A Dry White Season , the atrocities
of police violence registered in prose that comes before us as at least second hand. Only when
she is challenged by hostile and contemptuous Africans to 'name' the crime, does the novel
return to its principal and principled concern with its own failure to find 'a word for the thing':
These are terrible sights ... They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other
people's words. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the truth ... To
speak of this ... you would need the tongue of a God. (p. 91)
And since she lacks oracular powers, the truth of her words rehearses the case against
violence, her disgust at a country officially prodigal of blood and brutal death, equalled by
detestation of a 'mystique of death ... this killing, this bloodletting in the name of comradeship
... they may start by being careless of their own lives and end by being careless of everyone
else's' (pp. 148, 136, 45). If she sees a sign of the return of The Age of Iron in the zealotry of
'both armies fighting a merciless war', this for her is etched by children schooled 'never to
smile, never to cry, to raise their fists in the air like hammers' (p. 46). In recoiling from both
sanctioned state cruelty and the strength and determination of the 'the insulted and injured, the
trampled, the ridiculed' to resist, the narrator symbolically looks back to kinder epochs, to the
age of clay' the age of earth. More literally, she looks back to a time when children were not
guardians of the people and parents to their parents, her censure of Florence's pride in the
militancy of the youth -- 'There are no more mothers and fathers' (p. 36) -- an implicit
criticism of a political discourse inscribed by Don Mattera' poem 'No Children ...':
There are no children ...
No children in Soweto...
Not a child left in Sharpevllle...
The children have all become men.
Here we reach the blunt edge of her humane discourse, when in the face of the Africans' cold
indifference to her homilies, their curt responses to her gestures of sympathy for their grief
and concern at their sufferings, she acknowledges that she cannot 'honourably' urge them to
turn their backs on the calls to 'Freedom or Death', conceding that ''I have no voice' (p. 149).
In borrowing Coetzee's neologism for the title of this review, I have tried to suggest that a
novel which is so eloquent in its imprecations of a degraded present, is unable to
accommodate a politics of fulfilment and metamorphosis, registering no utopian prefiguration
of a to-morrow ('the future comes disguised, if it came naked we would be petrified by what
we saw', p. 149), and looking to the past for softer times. But because the narrative of
Elizabeth Curren's dying occupies a different discursive space from the construction of South
Africa's bloody interregnum, a story that speaks an intimacy with death (the book is dedicated
to three recently deceased people, two old, one young), can contemplate a personal
redemption which, sharing nothing with 'a smooth passage to Nirvana', is an epiphany to the
conservation of integrity: 'In order not to be paralysed with shame I have had to live a life of
getting over the worse ... For the sake of my own resurrection, I cannot get over it this time'
(p. 115).
Whereas the narrator's acquaintance with Africans is constrained by the mistress-servant
relationship, effects no enlargement of her inner world, and does not impinge on her dying,
the arrival of Verceuil, the tramp as-angel-of-death, is an annunciation of her salvation -- a
theophany anticipated when she is reading Tolstoy, 'not the famous cancer story ... but the
story of the angel who takes up residence with the shoemaker' (p.13). Verceuil, whose name
could indicate Huguenot ancestry, and could equally be an anagram of words appropriate to
the novel's concerns, is out of Beckett by Tolstoy: his dress, smells and habits limning the
prototypal derelict who lives on the refuse of Western cities, a saturnine figure given to
laconic utterances both gnomic and homespun, the profound indifference of his ascetic's
stance alternating with the incompetent performance of small domestic tasks. More likely the
name signifies verskuil, that is the Afrikaans for concealment or of masking of the self (p. 34).
Perhaps he is white, perhaps not; what matters is that he who has become Elizabeth Curren's
constant companion, on specious grounds that are necessary to keep the stories disjunctive, is
not with her when she journeys to the hell of the African township. He belongs only to the
narrative of her mortality, by his presence helping one who is already fluent in a dead
language, to learn the language of death, and ensuring that in the disgraceful state of South
Africa, she will die in a state of grace.
White South African writing has been described as narrowly and obsessively concerned with
the crisis of and in white consciousness, and it can be simultaneously anguished, agitated,
self-important and didactic. All these registers are parodically imitated in Elizabeth Curren's
testament. But where is that chamber-work which she might have written, had her maker
devised for her a different means of negotiating the prison-house of discourses, and which
would condense the austerity and intensity of Seamus Heaney's lines: 'wanting no more from
them but that they keep/ the wick of self respect from dying out?' (The Haw Lantern , 1987)
But perhaps such distilled restraint is what this voice, witness to sanctioned persecution,
possessed by guilt and righteous anger and fearful that it may not be at home in the new South
Africa, cannot speak.
Conyngham
Cope, Michael
Engle, Lars
Cf. Conyngham: Engle
Conyngham, John
Engle, Lars
(Rev.) Spiral of Fire by Michael Cope, Africasouth Paperbacks, David Philip (Cape Town),
163pp., January 1988; The Arrowing of the Cane by John Conyngham, Paperbooks, Ad.
Donker (Johannesburg), Bloomsbury (London), 154pp., pbk, 1986
Southern African Review of Books, 4 (Summer) 1988
It's hard enough, one might say, to write a first novel without having to write one as a white
South African in the 1980s. To deal with the voice in the ear saying 'what clumsy writing' and
'how derivative all this is' and 'what do you really think you have to say' is the lot of any first
novelist: to have to listen to other voices saying 'isn't this a cop-out', 'what do you really know
about the suffering of others', and 'shouldn't you be able to propose something more
politically constructive than this' is the added burden taken on by contemporary South
Africans. Both of the authors under review make, or try to make, a virtue of this necessity.
Both, in fact, feature voices in the ears of their protagonists giving ethical information and
asking questions. Their movements toward the uncanny are typical of white South African
fiction at this moment.
Spiral of Fire is an interesting and in the end powerful short novel, which runs together
fragments of what appear to be memoir with fragments of science fiction. It might be taken as
the concatenation of two writing projects, one a diary and the other a utopia; if that is what it
is the combination works extremely well, better than either would work by itself. The pieces
are strung together on the recognizable lines of the white South African 'what is the right
thing to do' novel, with its rhythms of retreat into socially innocuous work (and art, the
imagination) and advance into politically dangerous involvement (action, violence, the
likelihood of failure).
Billy Marks, blond Zambian Jew, ex-hippie and software writer, presents a largely thirdperson account of a swatch of his life from May to early July 1986. During this time his lover
Sue moves in with him, quits her job, and returns to political activity. He gets a lucrative
moonlighting assignment to programme a security system for a sinister company called
Crencor, brings to near-completion (or at any rate to an obscure climax) a science-fiction
novel he has been working on for a long time, and returns a locked briefcase loaned to him by
a former hippie friend now active in the ANC. He also manages to tell his therapist about the
suicide of a woman in whose house he lived during his hippie phase in 1972. Though the
time-sequences are scrambled somewhat, the unfolding line of information is fairly straight,
and our sense of the different contexts in which Billy operates (the different 'exchanges' in
which he is involved, as his science-fiction novel asks us to describe them) gets steadily richer
and more significant. The novel ends, however, rather tantalizingly at the edge of either
climax or disappointment: we aren't quite sure whether the obscure piece of computer
sabotage Billy plans will happen or not, and he himself has failed to consult with his ANC
friend about it, as he had hoped to do.
In bare outline, this may sound like a disaster of a plan for a novel -- something written in
serial patches by Nadine Gordimer (the white professional faced with a dangerous opportunity
for involvement which focuses a set of linked uncertainties in his erotic and imaginative
history), J. M. Coetzee (the mythic landscape on which questions like 'what is evil?' get asked
in encampments at the edge of large violent empires and people have dreams in which they
torture each other), and Ursula Le Guin (the traveller to a planet where wise golden-eyed
humanoids answer questions like 'what is evil,' live in a peaceful, balanced, motherly society,
and successfully resist the evil incursions of bureaucratized and mechanized armed males).
But one of the most engaging things about Spiral of Fire is that it tries out, eagerly and in
good faith, if sometimes clumsily, various fictive trails which seem naturally to lead in
incompatible directions, and plausibly unites them in the pleasant, mildly anarchic personality
of Billy. His lover Sue is impatient with his novel and the central woman character in it, a
character from whom Billy tries to get wisdom about his own situation.
-- I don't understand why it has to be Science Fiction anyway. It's so out there, so
disconnected.
--Well, how can I say, I can't have her here. I mean, I can't explore these ideas on Earth, now.
There's no place where you could locate this kind of stuff. And I'm not writing a tract. Where
I could sort of, you know, just hold forth. I want to let it all live . Imagine it in practice.
--You're such a fuckwit, you know. Listen to you. Why not put it into practice?
-- I am. I'm writing a novel. And I don't need you falling over your own tongue contradicting
yourself only to undermine me like that. (pp.137-8)
The dialogue gives a sense of Cope's frankness and openness, and of the way his novelistic
problems get woven into his book. There's nothing arty about the self-consciousness of Spiral
of Fire . Although its jacket promises us 'a dazzlingly innovative contemporary novel', and the
interweaving of different genres is a non-traditional (if not especially innovative) feature, the
book has and depends on traditional novelistic strengths: its characters are appealing and
believable, and they develop in relation to one another.
To like it as much as I do, a reader will have to have some taste for Le Guin-like sociological
science fiction. Billy writes his book as the rest of the novel proceeds, and it develops in
thematic counterpoint to events in his life. Thus as Billy rages helplessly at the police assaults
on Crossroads he tries in his novel to discover the principles of social harmony and the
decorum of successful resistance. Billy's protagonist, an earthling trans-planetary
anthropologist named Peter, studies the culture of Imbr-ast, a village whose inhabitants seem
to have found the secret of proper social relations.
But Imbr-ast is an anomaly on its planet, and it turns out to be in conflict with the large
hierarchical empires around it. Toward the end of Spiral of Fire Peter witnesses the arrival in
the village of the state power, in Hippo-style armoured vehicles, bringing a female prisoner
and searching for the fellow saboteurs. Take me to your leader, asks the officer in charge. But
there is no leader, no political hierarchy, since this village practices the philosophy of equality
in exchanges which Billy's novel has been fuzzily but ardently laying out for many pages, and
the whole population of the village sings 'an ancient song of sorrow, a song for the loss of a
lover ', while guards hold the woman in front of their trucks. (Cope's book has several
different type-faces to distinguish different narrative levels. Unfortunately the italic font for
Billy's novel, which I'm quoting here, and the font for his internal monologues are almost
indistinguishable -- his publisher has served him badly here.)
Peter's main informant is Mylia, named by Billy's lover Sue while he is giving her a back-rub:
I had asked Mylia about the place of the individual, only three days previously:
"There's no such thing. None. Except in a very special sense. One human is not a sufficiently
complex system. A person alone is nothing, worthless, can't survive, can't reproduce. There
have been instances, here and there, of children found in the wild, of children reared by
animals. I've read accounts, old stories.
"This also happened on Earth, long ago. There was a king who was said to have had a child
brought up among cattle, denied all human contact. To satisfy his curiosity."
The story of the experimenting Pharaoh is told by Herodotus (Histories , 2:2); perhaps Cope
wants covertly to claim Herodotus's wonderfully speculative accounts of the behaviour of
distant tribes as ancestors of his own s-f.
Mylia nodded and looked down, drew a circle on the earth with her foot. She said: "These
children, they have no mind, as we would understand it. No spirit. The mind is a special
complexity, held and guarded by society, like language. Your individuals die, but the mind
continues, speech continues. The will, the ability to love, to cherish life, these are held and
passed on by the communion of humans."
"Is the, er, single person, unable to change things, unable to change this, whatever you call it,
society?"
"Everything changes, the matrices are born new all the time. For a change to be real, to have
energy, fire and meaning, it must change not only its society, but also the way that things are
passed on, are reproduced. Such a change is also a communion."
I thought I'd caught her out, for once: "And where do new things, new ideas come from then?"
"From the womb of the mother and the seed of the father, from combinations and what may
look like chance events in the body of the human matrix and the way it relates to the substrate.
Societies are not static things, and new ideas that can breed and perpetuate themselves can be
incorporated: are, all the time. Even this idea of an individual, of a separate self, lives only in
the body of the mother. And don't forget how easily this isolated being can stray from the path
of equality." (pp.147-8)
Such a message, not directly useful under South African conditions (or indeed those of any
other current polity) may still, the wise alien suggests, live in imagination or language and
achieve some presently unthinkable usefulness later on. Cope's book wisely leaves the
integration of Billy's novel and the various fragments of Billy's life to the reader, while
registering the extent to which fiction may potentially serve socially as well as personally
therapeutic ends. It is a pleasure, reading Spiral of Fire , to feel Cope's writing and his sense
of where he is going grow stronger and stronger.
Sugar cane, an infertile cultivar, must be cut when full of sap and before it 'arrows,' wasting
its sweetness and going to seed in a vain attempt to reproduce. John Conyngham's The
Arrowing of the Cane is, among other things, a short tract in symbolic agronomy. It makes
much of the intensive cultivation of the barren and of other possibilities for ironic prophecy in
the situation of a self-isolating Natal sugar planter as South Africa lurches toward a race war.
It is James Colville's task to keep things going on his inherited estate, to keep the cane from
arrowing, to keep his labour contented and at bay, to foil the arsonists who set fire to his
fields, and to keep himself convinced that this effort is worth while. He is a fourth-generation
Natalian, descendant of emigrant offshoots of Anglo-Irish aristocrats (themselves eventually
burned out of their manor near Coole Park in the '20s), with a forebear assegaied at
Isandlwana and a brother killed by a sniper's bullet in Angola. He is haunted by his greatgreat-aunt, the daughter of a Ceylonese tea-planter, who was widowed at the washing of the
Zulu spears. His Natal neighbours include white Kenyans driven out by Mau Mau and Indian
merchants trying to decide where to hop to next now that South Africa is heating up. In short,
as he sits on his veranda, knocking back an unhealthy amount of J&B, playing his flute to a
dancing bushbaby, and talking with the ghost of his aunt, James Colville focuses the pathos of
empire, the eventual failure of British long-term investment in the exploitation of indigenous
majorities.
Colville's situation, close to Mehring's in Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (Penguin,
1974), also resembles that of the magistrate in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
(Penguin, 1982), and both in style and structure Conyngham's novel owes a good deal to
Coetzee's tour de force of apocalyptic stoicism. Arrowing , like Waiting , is a first-person
present-tense account of a an unconvinced administrator's alternation between modes of
discipline and modes of decadence. Colville writes in short sentences with few commas and
offers recurrent deadpan descriptions of violence. When dialogue occurs, it is often reported,
filtered through the ironic self- awareness of the hero. Other people are less vivid than dreams
or hallucinations. The Coetzee influence, recognizable as garlic, is there from the opening
paragraph:
It is, I suppose, the beginning of the end. Hundreds of monkeys are trapezing up the valley.
With the leopards gone, they have run amuck. Troops scour the trees for fledglings and eggs.
Sorties raid the orchard and steal stalks from the fields of cane adjoining the belts of subtropical bush. Plunder, then back to the foliage. Therefore the pressing need to cull. And with
all the predators decimated, it has become my task. Ape versus ape. Despite being hopelessly
outnumbered, there is fight in me yet. I take my toll. (p.9)
Perhaps fortunately, Conyngham sustains neither the ironic intensity nor the stylistic economy
of his opening paragraph. His hero cannot long be as elegantly hard on himself as a Coetzee
protagonist, and we soon get passages of straightforward political description laced with white
self-pity as well as self-dislike:
Both the Indians and us so-called liberal whites are faced with the same predicament. Caught
between the Afrikaner nationalist hegemony and the rise of black consciousness, we can only
wait at the ropes and hope not to be injured while the contestants wrestle. Unfortunately, as in
a tag-team bout, it is inevitable that we will be dragged into the mêlée.
Being emasculated minorities, we vacillate between support for the regime and the liberation
movements. Trapped by the urgency of our indecision, we accumulate wealth while the
going's good. Gradually this greed becomes hysterical and only those with sufficient acuity
can arrest their deterioration. The remainder, finding the tension intolerable, either leave the
country or continue until the paralysis sets in. As the centre softens, so we undermine our own
resistance. I can see it so clearly now but in seconds it will be clouded again.(p.32)
Or, later, after instinctively sparing a puff adder which crosses the driveway in front of his
Land Rover:
Why save the snake? I ask myself again as the answer appears like a spectre from the smokescreen. That a snake is a snake is no fault of its own. That I am what I am is no fault of my
own. To be born a white on a black continent in a time of dissolution was not of my choosing.
Conversely, to be born a black here during a period of increasing racial consciousness was
none of the insurgents' choosing.
But Conyngham seems uncertain whether he is writing a novel about being a sugar planter in
contemporary Natal, in which intense realization of a particular human bind reveals a
symbolic dimension à la Conrad, or whether he is writing a novel about writing a novel, about
reintegrating and dispersing self through art, whose significance depends on the
generalization of Colville's situation and his capacity to achieve detached poetic perspective
on it. The book has epigraphs from 'Coole Park, 1929,' the 'Ancestral Houses' section of
'Meditations in Time of Civil War,' 'Never Give All the Heart,' and, inevitably, 'The Second
Coming.' Colville quotes or alludes to Yeats often in the text, keeps Lady Gregory's Journal
by his bed, slops J&B on a photograph of Lissadell, talks about masks and gyres, and borrows
a bit of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as he makes love:
Here I am in Andrea, the person whom I hold dearest. I possess her while she possesses me.
Like the scribbling inside my prep school Latin primer: this belongs to James Colville,
Rangoon Estate, Manning's Post, via Nonoti, Natal, South Africa, Africa, Southern
Hemisphere, World, Universe. (p.56)
Irish modernism runs rampant as Colville casts a cold eye on everything in sight, including
his own literary pretensions: 'From Yeats I take my cue. This laboured screed is my attempt at
immortality ' (p.145). The problem is that the pretensions survive the book's irony at their
expense.
But it would be unjust as well as unkind to leave it at that. Though Conyngham's writing is
uneven, it is at times powerful and dense, and the book makes a lot out of its two main plotgenerating fictions. The first of these is that Colville is writing the narrative each night as it
happens, intending to leave it in an asbestos tube in a crack behind the bottles in his wine
cellar to survive the expected revolution. This allows him to meditate intelligently on the
extent to which our evaluation of his account of things will depend on what happens in Natal:
you too must look to your successors for the significance of your actions. Did you find this
asbestos cylinder amidst smouldering ruins or in the cellar of an old, peaceful
bungalow?(p.28)
The other main plot-device is Colville's search for the burners of his cane. This takes him, in a
memorable scene ('right out of Rider Haggard', Colville remarks, though there are also
analogues in Robert Ruark's awful books about Mau Mau, Something of Value and Uhuru ) to
visit a Zulu sangoma, who tells him with Delphic economy to search for one 'who is to you as
his forebears were to yours' (p.47). From this point on Colville's preoccupation with Sarah,
the ghost of his aunt, and his attempt to find out who is sabotaging his farm, run together. He
visits the battlefields of the Anglo-Zulu War to find out about his ancestor's death, and in the
process keeps running into evidence of the inherited enmity of black and white. Thus when he
solves the question of the cane (without telling us who exactly is burning it), presumably he
has come to realize that the entire Zulu nation is in the same relation to him as its forebears
were to his. Whatever he realizes, it causes him to give up his plantation and the various
historical continuities the narrative has traced. I don't find The Arrowing of the Cane an
entirely successful book, but it's an intelligent and ambitious one.
Let me close with two observations about both books under review. These are novels about
amateur novelists, fully employed whites who take refuge in the life of the artist -- remaking
the world in private -- from their dissatisfaction with the possibilities for meaningful action in
their public lives. In doing so, both novels document uncanny encounters with liberated or
separated parts of the mind. Billy Marks communicates with his wise Galactic, and regards
what she tells him as coming somehow from outside himself: 'She comes out with phrases and
things that I'd never have thought up' (pp.15-16). James Colville talks with Sarah, meets
another ghost, and chooses at the end of his novel to disappear himself: 'Ideally, just like a
crew member on the Marie Celeste , I must respond to the strange voice ' (p.144). This
movement toward the uncanny, a preoccupation with the spirits of the dead and the unknown
powers of the mind, is, I think, characteristic of contemporary white fiction in South Africa.
These are the areas of human experience that puzzle the will, and when the will is already at
something of a standstill (as it is in Cope's and Conyngham's protagonists, or in many white
South Africans as they look toward the future) the uncanny becomes a congenial area to
explore.
At the same time, however, both of these books cuddle up to their readers. We can see this by
contrasting them to Zoë Wicomb's splendid first collection of stories, You Can't Get Lost in
Cape Town (Virago, 1987), which seems brilliantly indifferent to whether or not we like its
heroine. Cope clearly wants us to like his protagonist, his protagonist's girlfriend, and his
protagonist's science-fic
Brink
Brink, Andre
Berthoud, Jacques
States of Emergency by André Brink, Faber and Faber (London), 256pp., 3 May 1988
Southern African Review of Books, Issue 4, Summer 1988
André Brink is known for his informed and discriminating novels about life under apartheid
and his latest novel, States of Emergency , is a response to the state of emergency that has
been clamped on South Africa since 1986. Whatever reservations one may have about certain
aspects of his English writing, it has helped to focus a humane perspective in his country, and
to show that the responsible appraisal of South African attitudes serves a useful social
purpose. His penultimate novel, The Ambassador , suggested however that this programme
was beginning to falter. This new novel confirms that it has collapsed. This is not because
Brink has ceased to concern himself with it, but that he no longer seems to be taking it
seriously.
States of Emergency poses the question of whether a love story can be written in what it calls
'the post-apocalyptic age after 1984'. It begins when the narrator (following a famous
precedent we will call him André) receives an unsolicited manuscript from a young woman. It
turns out to be an arresting love story which he tries to place with a publisher abroad, but
unsuccessfully, for it lacks 'insight into the political situation'. He then discovers that this
irrelevant novella is in fact a record of the tragic affair of its author (Jane Ferguson) with a
notorious radical doctor in flight from the police, that this man (Chris de Villiers) has been
captured and killed in jail, and that Jane has burnt herself to death. Moved by an odd sense of
solidarity with this girl, André decides to write a love story of his own. But the current civil
disturbances are raging around him, and he finds that all he can produce is a provisional
scenario. This hypothetical narrative is set where and when it is being worked out: in a
university town in the Eastern Province from the middle of 1986. It deals with the adulterous
affair of a professor of literary theory, Philip Malan, with a junior member of his staff,
Melissa Lotman; and it is meant to reflect in its despairing intensities the political violence in
which it tries to survive.
André has failed to produce a novel about love; Brink has succeeded in writing one about
failing to write one. Is the real subject of States of Emergency then, not love, but literature?
Hardly, for that would constitute what we have been taught to call 'the crime of aestheticism'.
In fact, it is a version of that very crime -- the distinction between fiction and reality that
confers a privileged status on 'the text' -- that the novel claims to be attacking. The public
emergency is so fierce that it prizes open 'the boundaries between "text" and "world"'. The
text can no longer keep the world at arm's length, so it can no longer write about it; nor
(presumably) can the environment disown its textuality, for in South Africa environment is
only too clearly the product of human agency. By invading the text, the world destabilizes it;
because the world is itself in a process of disintegration.
This intermingling of what is inside and what is outside a text diverts the novel from
representation to self-reference. States of Emergency sets several narratives revolving within
each other like Ptolemaic spheres: Jane Ferguson's novella (1) is contained within the love
affair disclosed in her diary (2), as they are both contained within the Philip-Melissa scenario
(3) as André is trying to construct it (4). Moreover as the inside writer André is doubled by
the outside writer Brink, so the represented realities of the novel are supported by by bits of
actuality in the form of documentary summaries of the 'events' and of quotations from the
writings of the heroes of contemporary culture (Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, Lacan, Gadamer,
etc.).
This drawing together of fiction and history is continuously exploited. For example, in
André's scenario Philip and Melissa occasionally visit a run-down hotel in the hills above 'the
town'. A reader who identifies Philip with André, and André with Brink, will be tempted to
recall or imagine the landscape around Grahamstown. But if he reads on, he will discover that
this hotel, its inhabitants, the incidents associated with it, the phrases that describe it, are also
in Jane Ferguson's diary, in slightly altered form, and located in the countryside near Richard's
Bay. Is reality inside the fiction (Jane's Northern Natal) or outside it (Brink's Eastern
Province)?
Under such conditions what meaning can a love story retain? Jane produces a poignant
novella, ostensibly self-sufficient, but owing its force to the tragic reality behind it, and
demanding her life as the payment for its perfection. By contrast, André's project remains at
the stage of 'notes'; yet this inability to complete is offered as a success. More evocative in its
sketchiness than a lacquered exhibition piece, it represents an honest response to intolerable
conditions, and for that reason it is able to disclose the truth about the three discourses it
activates: fiction, love, history.
What is this truth? That 'structuralism' is wrong and that 'post-structuralism' is right. These are
the very terms proposed by the novel. About three-quarters through the book, after Philip has
been detected in flagrante by his wife Greta, and Jane has learnt that her lover Chris has
'committed suicide' in prison, André decides to take stock.
To keep things apart, distinct, separate (man and woman; life and death; beginning and end;
the inside and the outside of a text; life and story) must end in the collapse of the mind which
tries to keep the distinctions going. In this lies the failure of apartheid, and the failure, as I see
it, of structuralism surely the most terrible revenge must come from the denial of the fluid
oneness of things in favour of the principle of isolation.
These are ominous formulations. For most of us, structuralism was the attempt to turn de
Saussure's hypothesis of a differential system in linguistics into an explanatory model for the
other human sciences. To be sure, a differential term presupposes the binary opposition, in
that it draws its significance from its relationship with an absent term. (For instance, the term
'binary' is logically dependent on the term 'unitary'.) For André, however, the idea of
structuralism suffers an enlargement, which is also a reduction, into the capacity for making
distinctions . He is thus driven to the conclusion that the very capacity that has heretofore
marked the presence of mind is the symptom of its collapse. Yet even he must concede that
not all distinctions are necessarily transgressive. At the very least he must accept the one that
distinguishes 'structuralism' from 'the fluid oneness of things', especially in view of the fact
that he makes it the organizational principle of his multiple narratives.
André himself asserts it in his decision to abandon his historical novel, The Lives of
Adamastor , with its formal chronology, for the open-ended uncertainties of his scenario. As
for his protagonist Philip, he starts with 'an implicit faith in the text', and considerable
suspicion 'when it comes to post-structuralism' -- in contrast to his new girl-friend Melissa,
who is 'inspired by Derrida', and feels obliged to say:
"No prof, one must go further than Saussure. In his paradigmatic category each word in the
sentence 'displaces' all other possibilities that might have operated there. But we tend to forget
that this displacement is never absolute. It's not just either/or. All the others still resound in
the one which actually materializes, like vibrating strings. The totality of language vibrates in
every word."
Any attempt to suppress this vibration -- for example by trying to give to or receive from a
sentence a determinate sense, is already, it seems, a brick in the wall of apartheid. And this is
true of every discourse.
In love, an established marriage safely tucked away in the private realm silences the
vibrations; a passionate affair, open to the diversity of historical and cultural harmonics, keeps
them active. 'Every new love repeats Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, Siegfried and
Brünnhilde, Tristan and Isolde, Samson and Delilah, Adam and Eve, Isis and Osiris, ad
infinitum. ' Every new lover's life echoes with the dissident or consonant voices of its time.
His very name signals the irruption of the social into the sensual.
In fiction, an authentic narrative will not countenance being segregated into the Bantustan of
the stable text. André, being sophisticated, realizes that he determines the story that defines
him as he writes it. He will therefore not hesitate to interrupt Philip's first love-making session
by giving him a phone-call. Or he will remind him of the absurdity of anxiety in someone
whose sole mode of existence is literary. Or, in planning his scenario, he will offer three
beginnings and three endings, with the latter remembering the former. Or, to keep
intertextuality from falling out of sight, he will corrugate his text with quotations and crossreferences.
Seldom has 'post-structuralism' -- which as a philosophy dwells on the paradoxes arising from
the fact that we cannot go beyond language except by means of language -- been required to
work harder than in this novel, where it is at once a recipe for fiction, a programme in erotics,
and a diagnosis of institutionalized racism. Accordingly, it has exacted some revenge by
driving Brink to extravagant feats of manipulative dexterity.
But has it thereby justified itself? Jane's diary confirms André's political analysis: 'Apartheid.
The great either/or. Never the whole. Love gone wrong.' In short, the endemic public violence
documented by the novel, with its obsessive images of fire, its human torches (necklacing,
immolation, dynamiting), its flaming buildings (farms and barns and outhouses), its
conflagration of townships, districts, forests, mountains, must be understood as the
consequence of repressing 'love' (Jane) or 'the fluid oneness of things' (André).
The vacuousness of these notions in a writer of Brink's calibre can scarcely be credited. What
blacks are short of in South Africa is not love but respect. They can do without dips in the
oceanic matrix. The present emergencies are a direct result of their being denied access to the
public realm, where they could rationally relate to the nation as men and women, not forcedly
as tame animals. Admittedly, the conditions required for intelligible common action -freedom from lies and freedom from violence -- are not easily or soon achievable; but what
one can expect, surely, from writing that aspires to political relevance, is a subtler and firmer
sense of these priorities. It is not sufficiently ambitious, though it may be internally consistent,
to justify the political effect of a university protest march as the experiencing of 'a single, vast,
electric field', or to prolong this potent charge into the ultimate orgasm achieved by an excited
Philip and Melissa after their return from the demonstration.
The novel quotes Barthes' reference to love as 'a socially irresponsible word'. It seeks to show,
of course, that 'love' cannot escape 'society', any more than a sentence can evade language or a
text literature. But the way it inserts 'love' into the public domain confirms Barthes' diagnosis.
Love belongs to the private world; attempts to use it for political purposes invariably falsify it.
Hannah Arendt (the habit of quotation is infectious) has said that love has 'an unequalled
clarity of vision for the disclosure of who , precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of
total unworldliness with the what the loved person may be'. What I am exists publicly, in the
form of my status, role, reputation, property; who I am is the unique me, independent of my
successes and transgressions, existing only in my individual story. A literary method,
therefore, which repudiates determinate narrative as 'structuralist', demanding in its place the
provisional, the hypothetical and the interchangeable, disqualifies itself a priori from treating
love. Indeed, the fear that the 'trading in recollections' indulged in by lovers ('show me yours
and I'll show you mine' is the vulgar footnote) will expose love to the intrusions of language
and society seems scarcely less disabling.
Thus an aura of the spurious hangs over André's scenario, as it does not (or less) over those
parts of the novel that escape the scenario's preconditions: Jane's narrative (despite her fatuous
dad who takes his pipe out of his mouth and says things like: 'If its true that history is only
that which is recorded, then I suppose in the long run a person also only exists in terms of
what has been verbalized about him'); or political figures like Milton Thaya and Chris de
Villiers, who have identifiable goals, and try to alleviate suffering before they are killed for
their pains. But I have to report that it is very difficult to fall in love with 'Melissa's elusive
codes' -- just as hard, in fact, as to fall in love with Saussure's fixed ones. And that is because
all André is left with after the post-structuralist fall-out is tasteful gymnastics ('the vagaries
and inventions of love'), romantic clichés ('the clear cascade of her laughter', 'a tumbling mass
of blonde hair'), and portentous archetypes (a blow-by-blow recoding of Siegfried's
awakening of Brünnhilde).
It is clear that deconstruction has disseminated its trace over the writing, which perforce goes
through the routine of smart etymologies and prevaricating puns ('beginnings fascinate me no
end', etc.). This is tiresome but scarcely culpable, even when Rome is burning, -- until it
distracts the author from his essential business. For a man who brings a novel to a close with
the words, 'And all I have is a word The only sign, perhaps, of our dignity', his lack of
fastidiousness in his handling of the language is astonishing. He allows to stand, unredeemed
by contextual irony, such phrases as: 'they are battling against the odds', 'making a
breathtaking discovery', 'she must live [the day] to the hilt', 'an atmosphere you could cut with
a knife', 'the wave [of indignation] swept through the university like a tide', etc; and solecisms
like 'jumping up to take the matches from her, his hand brushes her wrist', and 'the stranger
laid down beside her'. States of Emergency is a demoralized book, not because one can't write
well under extreme conditions, but because marketing a product should not be confused with
manufacturing one. It serves neither Derridaean deconstruction nor South African literature.
André Brink should not worry about the first, for it is currently being very well looked after.
About the second, however, he might allow himself a twinge of guilt, for on present evidence
it needs all the help it can get. But accepting as I do the distinction between author and text, I
have no reason to suppose that he is no longer up to the task.
Gordimer, Nadine
Gordimer, Nadine
Driver, Dorothy
"Nadine Gordimer at 70"
Southern African Review of Books, November/December 1993)
Nadine Gordimer is the first South African writer to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Characteristically for a writer who has consistently spoken out against
censorship, and who has seen it as one of her tasks to help place the work of aspirant
or unrecognised writers before magazine editors and book publishers, she took care in
her acceptance speech to draw attention to those South African writers who have
suffered banning or imprisonment. She has long been aware of her own relatively
privileged and secure position. In her acceptance speech she also drew attention to the
conflict she has felt to be an increasing part of her writing since the start of her career
-- between her responsibilities to political change, on the one hand, and what she
called 'the word', on the other. Although she tried to resolve this conflict by quoting
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'The best way a writer can serve the revolution is to write as
well as he can', the particular way she negotiates 'politics' and 'art' in her writing gives
it its distinctive flavour: the signature by which her work has come to be known.
Since the start of her writing career in 1937, Gordimer has produced ten novels and
over two hundred short stories. She has also collaborated in various television films
and two photographic studies of South African life, has produced a considerable
amount of literary and socio-political criticism, and has always been generous with
interviews and talks. Since she has been the subject of more critical analysis than
other South African writers, it seems worthwhile looking over certain aspects of her
critical reception, partly to assess what has been said about her responsibilities to
politics and to writing.
More than any other South African writer, Gordimer has been the subject of intense
critical scrutiny, both local and abroad: seven critical books, by Robert Haugh (1974),
Michael Wade (1978), Christopher Heywood (1983), John Cooke (1985), Stephen
Clingman (1986), Judie Newman (1988), and Andrew Vogel Ettin (1993), nearly two
hundred critical essays -- some of which appear in Rowland Smith's Critical Essays
on Nadine Gordimer (1990) and Bruce King's The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer
(1993) -- and nearly fifty academic theses. She has given over one hundred
interviews, a large selection of which are reprinted in Conversations with Nadine
Gordimer (1990), edited by Nancy Topin Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, and
has written nearly a hundred and fifty magazine and newspaper essays, the most
substantial of which are gathered in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and
Places (1988), edited by Stephen Clingman. This year also sees the publication of a
bibliography from the National English Literary Museum (NELM), which lists all her
work, in English and translation (including talks, films and so on) and all known
criticism of her writing, along with a large amount of occasional comment.
Much of the critical work on Gordimer is written either by outsiders, unfamiliar with
South African history and politics except in its broadest strokes, or by South African
critics offering an introduction to her work. Essays on her have recently started
appearing in overseas books and journals not solely devoted to South African writing,
sometimes written by overseas critics with reputations already established in work
other than South African. An essay by Homi Bhabha on My Son's Story is a case in
point. In part, this trend signals a shift in the commodification of South African
writing, which has begun to enter world literature through current interests in colonial
and post-colonial discourse. Although it is still too easy for overseas critics to
reproduce Gordimer as representative of white South African writers -- 'We read her
for a progressive white's view of "the situation"', says one American critic (Ettin
1993) -- the intellectual level of critical work on Gordimer is tending to rise.
The placement of Gordimer as the white South African writer/spokesperson appears
to be one of the reasons for the cooler welcome given her work by South African
readers (her 70th birthday on 23 November passed unnoticed, for instance, in the
South African press). Some readers wish not to be represented by a writer so
antagonistic to all that surviving South African liberals hold dear, some object to her
betrayal of 'art' through political 'axe-grinding', and some feel detached from a white
writer who speaks from a secure upper middle-class position. Moreover, Gordimer
has never provided an easy read for an audience not noted for its intellectual tastes -'a nation of philistines', as Olive Schreiner once called us. Her local sales are not high.
Certainly her texts can by no means speak for all South Africans, not even for all
white South Africans. Yet her now famous insistence on the relation between herself
and her work -- 'I have to offer you myself as my most closely observed specimen'
('Living in the Interregnum', 1982) -- points to a way in which she is representative of
white South Africa, just as her very different characters -- Mehring, Rosa Burger,
Maureen Smales -- may be taken as representative. In the most influential of the
books on her so far, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside ,
Stephen Clingman takes his lead from Gordimer's insistence, and thus examines the
characters and the writer/narrator herself as 'typical', in the Lukacsian sense, of this
time and place: as figures in whose lives some of the major currents of history
intersect.
Clingman's contribution is crucial. No doubt because of the political demands of the
time, to say nothing of the 'spectacular' nature of apartheid (to use Njabulo Ndebele's
well-known term), criticism of Gordimer has tended to engage with the historical and
political dimensions of her fiction. But Clingman takes sociological criticism to its
limit by seeing Gordimer's writing as 'history from the inside' -- history as
experienced by individuals who are products of a contradictory and fraught social and
political history rather than just actors in and observers of that history. Gordimer
writes not just of the events and movements of South African history, but also of what
it has been like to live through them.
Thus Clingman suggests that the writer's own consciousness is open to scrutiny in the
fiction as part of the texts' literary production. This is an interesting move for him to
make, not least since some South African readers of her work have judged it harshly
for the way it reproduces the dominant stereotypes of white South African thinking. If
Clingman sees Gordimer as vulnerable to these stereotypes in her early fiction, he
also watches her rise above them, for he develops a thesis regarding her changing
consciousness through contemporary history. Again, he is close to what Gordimer has
said, notably in the oft-cited preface to her first Selected Stories.
Early critics saw Gordimer's development in different terms. Robert Haugh, in the
first book on her work, has been the only one to see it negatively, arguing that
Gordimer's primary interest in the personal was increasingly awkwardly integrated
with the political themes she felt obliged to explore. In contrast, Michael Wade looks
at her work in terms of its progressive turn to 'Africa'. Unusually among her
commentators, John Cooke focuses on individual psychology, addressing the
importance of Gordimer's childhood and adolescence to her writing. He argues that
the novels may be seen in terms of an increasing liberation from the mother's
confining world. Thus for Cooke, too, Gordimer's development is positive, moving
from a private to a public frame of reference. Finally, where Clingman sees South
African history as the conditioning force behind Gordimer's fiction, and thus relates
her work to a realist tradition, Judie Newman argues from a poststructuralist
perspective that Gordimer's writing produces a highly selfconscious reassessment of
narrative realism. For Newman, Gordimer's development involves an increasingly
sophisticated narrative technique which interweaves racial, colonial and sexual
themes.
Newman argues that Gordimer's deconstruction of realism as a way of knowing South
African reality opens up a route to cultural and political decolonisation. Her reading is
not entirely new. It resonates interestingly with that offered five years earlier by
Abdul JanMahomed in Manichean Aesthetics (1983), whose interest is specifically in
the deconstruction of some of the binary oppositions that underpin the colonial
enterprise. But unlike JanMahomed, Newman gives space to textual presentations of
gender, looking at the precise narrative structure of each text -- the discontinuities
with which the Bildungsroman must be infused in depicting women's lives, for
instance, or the particular relation in apartheid society between race, politics and
female desire, or the ways in which the concept 'woman' works in the white South
African subconscious as a symbol on to which political and sexual conflicts are
projected, as well as the ways in which gender is constructed as a function of
economic existence.
One of the questions that critics keep coming up against -- but not fully resolving -- is
the relation between author, narrators and characters. Of Burger's Daughter ,
Newman writes that Gordimer employs the terms of the white racist subconscious in
an attempt to free her art from the complex of racial and sexual projections that
dominate life under apartheid, and to direct it towards a world where a white is able
to address a black not as a 'fantasy projection', but as 'real'.
In his later book, White on Black in South Africa (1993), cultural psychology is taken
up more emphatically by Wade, though more simplistically. On the assumption that
there are a set of mythic structures which have been used to maintain white South
Africans' visions of themselves as part of a 'classic neurotic structure' of defence and
denial which often turns into 'a psychotic perceptual world as the price they pay for
power', Wade sees Gordimer's early work in terms of an authorial entrapment within
this 'perceptual system' or 'mythic structure', whereas her later work offers a more
detached address. Gordimer's project is increasingly, then, to try to adjust those
mythic structures quite as much as it is to record and judge them. (Wade's reading
also resonates with JanMohamed's, but -- in what must be a gesture of Jew-Muslim
antagonism -- Wade refers only once (rudely) to JanMahomed's book, and then
obliquely, refusing to give it scholarly citation. So much for political reconciliation!)
Although Wade's book was not finished at the time of his death, and although he
tends to generalise 'the' white South African psyche, some key parts of his chapter on
Gordimer are well-developed and others are suggestive. In one instance of close
reading, he notes Gordimer's early recognition that the myths white South Africans
construct of blacks as sexually threatening function as a denial of their real threat to
white ownership: 'the prescriptive relationship between white and black in South
Africa is based on property and territory, on power, not sex.' He thus begins to adjust
the 'classic neurotic structure' he derives from Octave Mannoni and Frantz Fanon by
placing it in a political, historical and economic context.
Wade sees Gordimer as capable, then, of standing outside herself, as Clingman does,
in the sense that she recognises something about the way white South African
thinking works. For Wade, she offers no revolutionary gesture: the fact that she
recognises neurosis as neurosis is the first and only step to change. Some of the very
recent work on Gordimer will suggest a different relation to the future than this.
But first let me turn to an argument made by a relatively recent critic probably
unknown to most South African readers, David Ward, whose book, Chronicles of
Darkness (1989), is devoted to various writers on Africa. He argues that her writing
produces a recognition not simply that there is always another way of seeing or
experiencing the world, but, more emphatically, that seeing and experiencing the
world is necessarily 'other' to itself: flawed, contradictory, not after all in command.
Again, I see this as a crucial moment in Gordimer criticism, for it addresses with
intelligence and tact what has hitherto been pejoratively regarded as detachment or
coldness in Gordimer's art. Ward quotes a comment made in 1969 by Dennis Brutus,
that in Gordimer we find 'how dehumanized South African society has become -- that
an artist like this lacks warmth, lacks feeling, but can observe with a detachment, with
the coldness of a machine.' Numerous other critics have called Gordimer 'cold', Alan
Paton among them. For Ward, Gordimer's detachment is a fault neither of the writing
nor of the writer, but an aspect of her ability to produce her narrator as 'other',
alienated not just from the presented world but also from pre-existing ways of seeing
reality.
Ward's focus is very much on the techniques of Gordimer's fiction. One of the
limitations of critical work on Gordimer has been the tendency to see her writing in
stark contrast to Coetzee's. Although there are differences between them, criticism
has tended to place the two writers in such radical opposition to each other that the
opposition keeps mindlessly reproducing itself rather than being offered up for
interrogation: she is concerned with 'politics', he with 'art'. But it seems, looking at
very recent work, that critics are starting to feel emboldened to turn more decisively
to close textual analysis of Gordimer's writing in such a way as to see beyond this
opposition, and thus also to see more complex ways in which Gordimer's writing
deals with South African history.
Again, one turns first to Clingman's work here. His book on Gordimer has recently
been reprinted in a new edition which adds a prologue on her later work. Clingman
keeps to his historical focus. But he also argues that we now need to start reading her
writing not simply in terms of a 'rising historical curve' (as he previously did) but also
in terms of 'an equal and opposite curve beginning to arc downwards'. Upwards, for
Clingman, means 'commitment and engagement'; downwards means an interrogation
of this political development. Gordimer's recent work manifests not just the 'graph of
history' but a 'double graph', which affirms the political at the same time as the need
to question it. Clingman uses Bakhtin's term 'dialogic' for this double movement, and
suggests that the dialogic might be found in all her work if one re-read it, though he is
hesitant enough to add, 'especially her later fiction'.
Clingman recalls that in his earlier work he was interested in the ambiguities and
contradictions in Gordimer's writing, what he termed 'splits' in the writer's
consciousness -- between an African and a white identity, between the personal and
political, for instance. He offers the 'double graph' of history as a means whereby
Gordimer has raised the configurations of her 'split position' to a 'higher historical
level'. She now finds a crucial division within the longed-for moment of liberation: A
Sport of Nature and My Son's Story offer ambiguities regarding the 'currencies of
power' and the idea of nation, for instance. But the interesting truth is that Clingman's
earlier work did not foreground the splits in her narratorial consciousness nearly as
much as he intends to now. His current reading of Gordimer amounts to a re-reading,
then, and one which to some extent closes the distance between Gordimer and
Coetzee, though Clingman still takes care to note Gordimer's political involvement as
a difference between them. For Clingman, Gordimer is now to be read as a writer
whose fiction always 'asked questions, relentlessly and in every direction'. This seems
to produce some unease, for he hastens to say that Gordimer's interrogation of current
history does not amount to a betrayal of the liberation movement: 'we should not
forget that in her personal life Gordimer's commitment is as strong if not stronger
than ever.'
Thinking about what Clingman said -- and didn't say -- about betrayal, I turned with
particular interest to another recent book on Gordimer, Ettin's Betrayals of the Body
Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer. Admirably, Ettin tries to
forge a new path by breaking with chronology, by dealing simultaneously with the
novels and short stories (virtually all other critics separate them), and by treating her
writing as 'one book' (this at Gordimer's own invitation, for she often remarks on her
obsessive return to the same themes). But by 'body politic' Ettin simply means the
South African 'police state', and his book fails to break new ground. Moreover,
considering current readings of Gordimer, his use of 'body' is odd.
More interesting, in terms of re-readings, are some of the essays gathered by King in
The Later Fiction (later means The Conservationist and after), several of which are
implicitly based on the notion of 'split' in Gordimer's writing. Susan Greenstein
argues that the dual narrative structure of My Son's Story combines not the voice of
Will and an unnamed third-person narrator but Will's two voices, as in 'double agent':
'each voice endlessly reflects, refracts, incorporates, and produces the other, in
infinite regression or unending dialogue.' Lars Engle re-reads The Conservationist as
a deconstruction of the oppositions it examines: not simply 'authenticating black
claims and denying white ones', as Clingman and others have argued, but as 'mapping
subtle and largely unseen axes of similarity' between black and white, including
similar and ethically possible desires to possess the land. Brian Macaskill identifies a
'dialogic interruption' which creates a new space where 'politics' and 'art' can no
longer be polarised, a space for what he calls 'political aesthetics'. While these three
see contradiction or duality in positive terms, the other essays which foreground splits
of one kind or another see them at the level of unresolved conflict. In his otherwise
plausible preface, King sets up a new dichotomy in Gordimer's writing: the feminine - 'the instinctual, the personal, the socially and morally conscious' and the masculine - 'public, rational, dominating, distinguishing between public politics and personal
possessions'. Even Gordimer's feminist detractors know that her work refuses
categories as crude and essentialist as these.
In feminist criticism, Gordimer is sometimes praised for producing female characters
who break stereotypes of femininity and sometimes accused of an uncritical use of
sexist ideology, especially regarding the representation of women's bodies. Karen
Lazar's essay in The Later Fiction usefully notes that Gordimer's apparent
antifeminism is often simply an antagonism to 'liberal feminism', which separates
issues of gender from those of race. Indeed, as the interview with Lazar attests (as
does her recent refusal to write for the South African Playboy ), Gordimer is now
making a new space for herself: by defining feminism as narrowly as she does, she
may now respond to the revolutionary potential of (another kind of) feminism which
sees gender, race and class as intersecting forces in people's lives. The most
interesting feminist discussion about Gordimer is in fact concerned with these
intersections (following Newman): in an essay not gathered in the King collection,
Louise Yelin reads Burger's Daughter as a feminist contribution to dialogical
criticism, for it makes visible the terms 'race' and 'gender' occluded in Bakhtin's work
(see Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, 1993).
Significantly, in an implicit address to the ubiquitous topic of 'art' versus 'politics',
Yelin argues that dialogism in Gordimer's writing should not be identified with
indeterminacy or with carnivalesque transgression. For Yelin, Burger's Daughter
insists on moral responsibility. This concurs with Gordimer's own insistence in The
Essential Gesture that her project is not to 'transform the world by style'.
Still, at a certain level style and content are inseparable. Also included in The Later
Fiction is a new essay to this effect by Clingman. Here Clingman reads the antirealism of A Sport of Nature as an act of political transformation, so that Gordimer's
ironic vision is elevated to the status of political strategy. And he makes the kind of
space Macaskill makes for the concept of 'political aesthetics', though their two
arguments are very different.
Clingman also produces the concept of the 'organic body', derived from Hillela's
'bodily intelligence', 'bodily instinct' and 'bodily politics', in order to suggest that
Gordimer repairs splits in consciousness. Thus he buttresses Gordimer's project
against any accusation of irresponsible interrogation which might otherwise linger
after his use of the term 'double graph', with its implications of irony rather than
resolution.
For Clingman, then, not only is Gordimer's moral responsibility bound up with the
idea of resolution, but it is also his responsibility as a critic to assert resolution in her
work. As regards the 'organic body', he argues that each of Gordimer's characters (he
means central characters) 'has searched for this kind of unity with varying degrees of
success, and that it is always involved with a larger political context.' Thus, despite
his interest in interrogation and despite his claim that his earlier work noted splits in
Gordimer's consciousness, his critical thrust is always towards unity and resolution.
On one occasion he spells 'double graph' with a hyphen as if to insist on wholeness
rather than rupture. He also offers a reading of A Sport of Nature in which Gordimer's
fictional and non-fictional works are no longer to be seen in opposition but in more
intricate forms of negotiation.
What is happening in recent Gordimer criticism, then, in Clingman's work and in that
of others, is that a tension is being set up between 'art' and 'politics' at an entirely
different level than the more conventional and banal one deployed earlier. Now 'art'
and 'politics' exist in dialogue with each other rather than in opposition, the two terms
sometimes in harmony ('political aesthetics') and sometimes not. True to the spirit of
the times, dialogue suggests negotiation: Gordimer's critics, quite as much as her
characters, thus stand as 'typical' figures of contemporary history in the sense that
they express current historical desire. Wade suggested that Gordimer helped create
her own readership by opening a space for herself within white South African society.
Certainly the work of her most substantial critics has been extremely responsive not
just to the leads given by the writer herself but also to the adjustments advanced from
one novel to the next. Perhaps most significantly, one of her early antagonists has
now publicly changed his mind: this is Lionel Abrahams, who confessed in a recent
issue of New Contrast that what he saw earlier as a dishonest contradiction in her
work between 'politics' and 'art' (where 'politics' won) is now to be read as a tension
'born of deliberate, difficult choices'. It stands 'challengingly', he says, in the centre of
her consciousness as yet another example of the 'morbid symptoms' of political
interregnum her writing has been shown to depict.
Gordimer's challenge is this, then: to depict a world where 'art' and 'politics', like
'body' and 'mind', 'black' and 'white', 'betrayal' and 'commitment', have separated as
binary oppositions, and to reconstruct a world where they need no longer do so. The
challenge is an intellectual and artistic as much as a political one. As Gordimer's most
perceptive critics have seen, addressing the challenge demands a certain kind and
degree of detachment: not only is a distance set up between observer and observed,
but the observer is also seen to be placed at one remove, as are the strategies or ways
of seeing which the observer employs.
In my own reading of Gordimer, I would stress that such detachment belongs to a
writer who is always watching her language, always aware that she is being written
even as she taps the typewriter keys. Thus, paradoxically, given what has been said
about Gordimer's development, and despite her insistence that in fiction 'the
inhibitions go', the critic needs also to be on the lookout for signs of increasing
vigilance, even repressiveness, in the very texture of the prose. Bodily knowledge and
sexuality have, as critics are now suggesting, always played a part in Gordimer's
fiction. In her best writing (in my view) they have been wrought into the texture of
the prose as part of its imagery and rhythm, and as a way of fusing the splits produced
elsewhere: The Conservationist is the most complex and successfully sustained
example. In Gordimer's very recent fiction, though, the body and sexuality, having
surfaced from the repressed of the characters' consciousness, seem to be increasingly
placed at the level of plot; that is, as part of the 'telling' rather than the 'showing' (to
adapt an old-fashioned distinction). In interviews Gordimer has suggested that the
short story form permits her more play in writing. Without wishing to qualify the
homage being paid, perhaps it is time for Gordimer to re-think the distinction set up
in reference to writing short stories and novels, and to return to the powerful, lyrical
quality that marks her best writing. And perhaps, since Gordimer is re-thinking her
attitude to feminism, she might also consider the political project implied by écriture
feminine, writing from a body that refuses old social and cultural distinctions.
A question must also still remain about the relation between author, narrators and
characters. The relations Gordimer sets up in her fiction are complex, and always
interesting. There is no reason to believe -- and no justification for insisting -- that
Gordimer's fiction should be quite free of the specific neuroses which make up white
South African thinking, however much her writing has developed and however much
it strives for detachment. She has rendered white South Africa visible to itself -- and,
perhaps, she will render black-and-white South Africa visible to itself: as she says in
her interview in these pages, she will continue to pose questions under a new regime.
She offers scepticism but also an ethics, envisioning a world that glimmers
irretrievably beyond doubt.
Langa
Du Plessis, Ménan
Pechey, Graham
Cf. Langa: Pechey
Langa, Mandla
Pechey, Graham
(Rev.) Longlive! by Menán du Plessis, David Philip (Cape Town), 255pp., 1989; A Rainbow
on the Paper Sky by Mandla Langa, Kliptown Books (London), 191pp., 1989
Southern African Review of Books, 12 December 1989/January 1990
The latest novel by Menán du Plessis begins with a call to prayer at dawn and ends on a
question pitched into the darkness of the same day. Between the ever-hopeful affirmation
Allah uAkhbar and the desperate question "Boet, what are we supposed to do now?", both of
them repeated over and over -- the first in a mellifluous polyphony, the second grating "like a
stuck record" -- Longlive! insistently places before us the whole gamut of speech-acts which
go to make up the great dialogue of pain and elation that was South Africa in November 1985.
The book's very title is itself a slogan, and the use of italics in the text marks out not only
slogans but also those other utterances of collective or individual assertion which are to be
heard or read in any city anywhere in the world: graffiti on walls, texts on shirts, chants of
praise intoned in or from places of worship, the cries of those selling their wares on the street.
These instances of the micro-genres of politics and religion and the informal economy chime
across each other, echoing in our heads as we read, just as the words of the past echo in the
consciousnesses of the three people whose day we share from within. Typography equates
these public and private words, makes the generally heard speak to the unheard that we are
privileged to overhear. It is the peculiar blending of these accents that constitutes a unique
experience of urban struggle and crisis, making the site of their interaction and intersection
after all not just any city but inescapably Cape Town.
For Longlive! differs from Menán du Plessis's first novel A State of Fear not only in being
multipersonal rather than a "first-person" narrative but also in the way it draws more
explicitly on the multilingual riches of a place whose verbal vintage is the most subtly
blended and longest matured of any in the territory. This English text's first words are in
Arabic; English meets and mingles with Xhosa and Afrikaans; and translation understood
only too often as the difficult mediation of a daily experience of suffering surfaces as a theme
in its own right in the finely recorded sequences of a trade-union advice office at work.
Language stands out in all its material and historical character as the typical idioms both of
different vernaculars and of different registers within the same vernacular encounter each
other.
Now in all of this Du Plessis's second novel breaks new ground. If my account thus far has
suggested yet another display of (post-)modernist textuality, then it must be said that the
fictional mode of Longlive! is an unclassifiable hybrid, post-modern in a broad sense rather
than technically post-modernist. Where Coetzee's European model is plainly Samuel Beckett,
Du Plessis in this novel reminds one rather of Virginia Woolf. Within its own national
context, however, Longlive! breaks beyond the ethnic-literary deadlock identified by Mike
Vaughan some years ago when he noted the split of South African fiction after its liberal
heyday into a white post-modernism pioneered by the Sestigers and a post-Soweto black
prose of "populist realism"-- one facing the liberal subject with its death or dissolution, the
other celebrating the birth of a new mass subject as the agent of history. Mzamane, Sepamla,
Serote and Tlali are present here, along with a textual self-consciousness: the counterposed
articulacies of Vaughan's schema work together.
Du Plessis here also avails herself of any aesthetic effect which will suit her purpose, "realist"
or otherwise. The beginning and end of the text are again worth noting. Starting with a lyrical
aubade that seems authorial but is later attributed to the waking consciousness of the novel's
"thinker", Andre Binneman, the novel ends with Binneman and his younger brother and the
whole house-sharing group caught in the kind of crescendo of agonized dialogue that brings
down the curtain in the drama of high naturalism, as the full horror of a double catastrophe at
once utterly fortuitous and absolutely symptomatic is brought home to them.
At other levels the mode veers towards allegory: Binneman's name, for example, with its
connotation of interiority, points to a use of flagrantly allegorical naming where the central
group is concerned. Chris Braaf, the "coloured" opera singer on the brink of a career abroad
whose suicide is one element of the catastrophe (the other is Binneman's father's heart attack),
is braaf in the sense that he exists for us as he does for his friends: as a beautiful voice
haunting the others during the day, a talented exterior who splendidly renders other people's
words for bourgeois audiences but is never known from the inside. His name might even be
read as a transformation of Bravo!, the throaty slogan of the cheering opera-lover. Marisa
Siervogel, the "failed actress" of her lover's taunts who is genuinely seeking a political part in
the struggle, is none the less as innocently hypnotized by her own plumage as her
ornithological name implies. Desiree September, who feels more than she ever says aloud,
might seem the exception. That is, until we reflect how much of a community's history of
subordination is contained in a name which stamped a distant forebear with the month of his
sale into slavery and which (to come right up to date) was borne by a woman of the ANC
murdered by Pretoria's agents at what one assumes must have been the time of writing. And
within the hopeful cycle of the seasons -- tentatively and often ironically invoked throughout,
then to be all but obliterated as a motif by the concluding tragedy --September is of course the
turn of the southern year into spring.
That reference to the intermediate season of Spring brings to a focus another whole aspect of
this text, and that is its insistent deflection of the binary ways of thinking and seeing that one
still finds on all sides in South African discourse. The dichotomies of class and race and
gender, material enough as effects of power, take second place here to a complex positioning.
Intermediacy reigns not only in the choice of characters (two Afrikaners, two "coloureds", one
of each sex) and in the effective androgyny of a writing of inner speech which weaves easily
in and out of male and female consciousnesses, but also in the refusal throughout of a colourcoding of attitudes, affiliations and identities. Subjectivity as a constantly adjusting and readjusting process of being in the world has priority over any racial classification of the
subject: the words black and white are nowhere to be found as descriptive terms in the
narrative of this novel, which none the less distances itself from the liberal obverse of racism
that comforts itself with a cosily knowing intellectual superiority to such crudities.
In this respect the novel is at one with Marisa, who on the day we meet her is beginning to
detach herself from Richard, a man whose consciously aphoristic idiom is full of implied or
gestured scare quotes and fastidious qualifiers. Only a training in traditional Literary Criticism
could account for a speech pathology of the kind that hesitates portentously before all phrases
not manifestly of the speaker's own newly-minted brilliance and swathes the simplicities of
others (including, of course, racial categories) in "as it weres" and "so to speaks".
Englishness in this text is less a matter of genes or surnames than the subject position
characteristically assumed by those who, like Andre's UCT colleague David, "would certainly
not negotiate with a faceless mob", or his students who insist that "they were not Afrikaners.
They didn't believe in apartheid". Or (again) a confident Englishness is there in the
assumption of Desiree's co-worker Kate that Desiree will not be going to a UDF funeral that
day because her family's political tradition is that of the programmatically abstentionist Unity
Movement. In the face of this well-meaning but no less power-laden knowledge, this
overweening speaking for the other, Desiree keeps her direct rebuttal to herself, while even
her politer correction goes unheard. Englishness is, finally and shockingly, the
aestheticization of politics, the consumption of insurrection-as-spectacle, as in the flaming
barricades out on the Cape Flats in twilight that Richard describes (in a conversation recalled
by Marisa) as "racks of fire, receding one behind the other, like images in a set of winged
mirrors".
The irony of that framed and highly-finished, almost "written" verbal relishing of the outward
signs of the people's anger would not be so firmly ensured by its context if it were not
precisely the antitype of the text's own way with the ever-shifting perceptions of its three
transparent minds. Our sharing of Marisa's inner ear does part of the job, no doubt, but then
we have already been exposed to the moment-by-moment and far from composed rushinginwards of signs from outside as the whole person of each character is propelled forward on
legs or wheels in the course of the day.
It is this continuum running from the mountain seen sidelong down to the smallest details of
insects and spring flowers that offers an agonistic counter-truth to the besetting binaries of
apartheid cognition and of liberalism, rather than some formal deconstruction or theoretical
refutation of those discourses. This novel moves, as only novelistic discourse can, insistently
in the unresolved and unfolding present of life going on. It does, in other words, what this
reviewing discourse cannot do, but it is hospitable enough to give space to something like the
latter in the ethically charged inner theorizing of Andre Binneman whose democratic
humanism is a self-critical process rather than a dogmatic "line". ("Binarism" appears only
once as an item in the text, predictably in a situation, a moment of choice, and in his unspoken
speech.)
Signs among signs: from the welter of what assails them on all sides everyone in this novel is
reading all the time, listening for "rumours and auguries", indices of what is happening in the
whole confrontation of state and insurgent populace, trying to find out how to act as the
changing context changes the meaning of a course of action even before it is fully chosen.
Riaan's appeal, "Boet, what are we supposed to do now?" speaks for them all in the sofamiliar tones of the really nice ou under a stress for which his SADF training has not
prepared him.
The ordeal of being ambushed by history engulfs everybody. The celebration of Chris's
departure planned for that evening never takes place, and two more funerals loom as we put
the book down. The funeral that does take place happens earlier in the afternoon, and it is a
"political" funeral with the usual state response. Measured against the earnest Marisa's fears, it
is something of an anti-climax: tear-gas is the medium of her initiation into the struggle, not
live rounds; but it is scaring enough and in its humiliations a taste at least of the daily life of
the oppressed. It is also an anti-climax because she doesn't quite play her part, cannot quite
move arm or lips in the slogans and gestures which punctuate the speeches. If it none the less
remains with us as much as the Ibsen-like climax that is because this occasion articulates
directly what the novel itself (belonging as it does to a genre characterized by irony) can only
obliquely hint at: the need to praise. Doubts and reservations belong to the modern Western
individual whose claim to existence rests upon the right to demur. Praise--so much older than
either the novel or the individual -- is anonymous, transindividual, the self-celebration of the
collective, as when the democratic movement affirms its own amandla or wishes itself long
life. In the vulnerable form of Marisa Siervogel the textures of individuality do not quite mesh
with the textures of solidarity, but it is the great virtue of Menán du Plessis's novel to have
shown that they are made of the same fabric.
A Rainbow on the Paper Sky also brings fighting talk and felt life together in its text, and it
too delivers finally a mixed effect of tragedy and celebration. Indeed it ends on a slogan, as
Thokozani Ndungane's daughter chants "Oliver Tambo!" in emulation of demonstrators she
has just heard on the streets. Italics spatter the text here, too, mostly as the graphic bearers of
Zulu words, not only in everyday speech but also in the litanies of the struggle and in its
hymns of praise, the songs of soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe. For this is a novel that puts
rural tradition and the manifest heroism of guerrilla insurgency at its centre, and has its climax
in an episode of fighting (the complex urban counter-hegemony we inhabit in Longlive! , part
of the same movement after all, might be another world). If this writing hears Afrikaans with
anglicized Natal ears -- as the guttural lingo of the state, verbal equivalent of the sjambok,
rather than as the frankly creolized patois with its intimacies and delicate nuances that is its
distinctive Cape identity -- that could perhaps be put down to the setting and to the author's
origins: Mandla Langa is, we could say, only being true to the Anglo-Zulu political culture he
springs from and is here seeking to represent. But this is only one dimension of a much wider
problem, and it is one that makes A Rainbow on the Paper Sky in the end disappointing as a
novel of the struggle.
The problem is fundamentally one of the author's relation to the others he represents, whether
these are individual or institutional, languages or persons. To put it bluntly: this novel which
so sincerely wishes to praise the amandla of successive generations of the oppressed in the
"real" South Africa actually disempowers its fictional representatives within the text itself.
The politics implied by this way with the autonomy of other voices is not the democracy that
Langa and du Plessis and all of us desire, but bureaucracy. As a representative in Britain of
the ANC, Langa himself must subscribe to the Freedom Charter -- a multipersonal political
project if ever there was one, empowering for its creators and inheritors alike, forever open to
re-accentuation and re-inflection by those political actors (now a decisive majority) who take
it as their script. And of course at the level of the novel's overt themes the Charter's vision is
at least implied as the aim of its central, politically active characters. The sad truth is then that
in its "form" (which is here used not in the sense of mere linguistic surface, but in the strong
sense of how the whole addresses its invented voices and, through them, its implied reader)
Langa's text falls short of the enabling openness of the Charter in its every page.
Now I am not suggesting that A Rainbow on the Paper Sky is written in a bureaucratic style -though it is true that too often the contextualizing historical passages taking us from 1964 to
the mid-80s read like unmodified chunks of reach-me-down "movement" history, as in: "The
aim of the ANC was to train men and women inside the country in firearms, explosives,
reconnaissance, topography and communications ... This would make it possible to create
zones where guerrillas could operate freely."
I am also decidedly not making a liberal point about the perils of partisanship in fiction.
Neither am I unaware of the difference between the novel and the manifesto as genres. I am
simply arguing that this novel which follows the varying fortunes of the rebel chief
Ndungane's three children never engages inwardly and dialogically with them, fails to give
these voices their full weight as languages full of their own history. Thokozani's picaresque
exploits first as a born-again Christian preacher and then as a trade unionist who is gaoled for
refusing to shop his comrades; Mbongeni's unashamedly pleasure-seeking life as a musician
who is not averse to compromising political links; Khethiwe's career as a nurse which takes
her back to a people's clinic in her home district of Ingwavuma and ultimately to her death: all
of these are offered as exemplary histories, and in the case of Khethiwe the focus is especially
sharp and sustained, as we move from the eight-year-old's defamiliarizing perception of the
white-run city to the mature woman's commitment of her skills to the popular cause. Not even
in the latter instance, however, do we have a sense that the destiny of the character is being
shaped by anything other than an abstract logic of illustration and exemplification. Khethiwe
Ndungane is as "spoken-for " as Desiree September, and (what is worse) by her own author.
That this speaking-for has a laudable end doesn't make it any the less disempowering of the
African women it aims to praise in the person of Khethiwe. When as a child she "marvel[s]"
at the sights of Durban and yet has "this thing which snagged at the base of her throat which
told her that she would never, on pain of death, be welcome in, or wish to be part of, the inner
circles of this marvel" we might excuse this formula as an adult elaboration of the child's halfarticulate feeling. The difficulty is then that the idiom of her later perceptions is no less
remote from the tones of any credible inner speech, either lapsing into the professionally
authorial observation -- "she knew then, with a knowledge that was prescient as time itself,
that women like Margaret [her shebeen-queen aunt] were fighting a great battle against the
beast of loneliness" -- or precipitately assuming the rhetoric of political oratory, as when she
hears in her brother's singing voice "all the voyages the nation had taken to try to wrest back
that little self-respect which had been snatched away for all these centuries".
Of course we know everything in the text is invented by the actual empirical Mandla Langa;
no one denies that; it is not the psyche or the morality or aesthetic capacity of Langa himself
but rather the image of the author that is at issue here --and it is an issue with important
political bearings and effects.
The corollary of the disempowered character is the disempowered author: into the vacuum
created by the failure to realize and mobilize the voices of struggle as a real struggle of voices
there enter all the oldest reflexes and clichés of an unreconstructed bourgeois realism. The
anonymous author-figure here finds himself speaking the special dialect of authors, foreign to
all ordinary speech, in which characters "regard" or "appraise" rather than look at each other
and in which (for elegant variation) they "put in" rather than simply say things. These are not
minor points: expressions like this carry with them all the ideological freight of individualism,
create a mystique of the interpersonal, compose a language designed to depoliticize
experience. Durban is realized as a city in the urban sequences with words and phrases that
sometimes recall those with which travelogues ventriloquize the response of the excited
tourist (the lights, the dark "chasm" of the sea beyond), and at other times come through as the
neutralized localism of street and shop names dredged from the exile's memory.
Here are Khethiwe and the poet Mark in those streets: "They reached the same spot of yellow
incandescence where the light had led them
Hove, Chenjeerai
White, Landeg
Cf. Mazorodze: White
Mazorodze, Isheunesu Valentine
White, Landeg
(Rev.) Bones: a Novel by Chenjeerai Hove, Baobab Books, Harare, 1989; David Philip, Cape
Town, 1989 Heinemann International, Oxford, 113pp, 21 March 1990; Silent Journey From
the East, by Isheunesu Valentine Mazorodze, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 186pp, 1989
Southern African Review of Books, 13, February/May 1990
These two books, the first an elegiac prose-poem, the second a novel of bald action, continue
the enquiry which has preoccupied Zimbabwean literature since the mid-Seventies into the
struggle for national liberation. It has been an enquiry into violence analysed morally and
psychologically in terms of its rationalisations and its consequences. Ironically, it is the heirs
of the former 'terrorists' who are conducting the enquiry rather than the heirs of the custodians
of 'civilised' values for whom Smith remains compulsive reading.
Tim McLoughlin has distinguished 'two poles' in Zimbabwean writing, 'the one that manifests
historical, social and political forces in external action, the other an exploration of internal
awareness' with violence being seen as a 'necessity and inevitable' in both ('Black Writing in
English From Zimbabwe' in E.D. Killam (ed.) The Writing of East & Central Africa ,
Heinemann, 1984, pp.100-119). There is a further distinction worth making, this time at the
level of language. Consider the following extract from Silent Journey From the East :
Donald listened carefully as the man continued. "It is very important, therefore, to look back
at those times when we suffered, when we lost friends and relatives without emotion so that
we can extract the very important lessons delivered to us by such incidents. The ability to look
boldly into the past without remorse or emotion is, I think, one of the ingredients of success in
life Whether you like it or not, you are part of the war and you should never try to fight
against that reality. Bow yourself down to the rules of the revolution in the same way you
have to bow down to the rules of life. (p. 118)
The language here derives from the English-language politics of the liberation struggle -- a
language of speeches and semi-theoretical debate supplemented by the educational and
bureaucratic English which has become the medium of Zimbabwe's official culture. It is
obviously capable of analytic insight, particularly in the public arena, but it tends when
deployed in literature to depend on regular supplements of 'feeling' or analogy which are
essentially sentimental glosses on the ideological content. Its inadequacies appear most
exposed in poems about the liberation struggle, such as these overloaded lines by Chenjerai
Hove:
Limping hearts leapt sky-wards
and sore throats blackened
as thunder boomed roared
to cleanse defiled tribes
Of human desecration
In camouflaged hearts
Licking bare soles of torn souls
seeking to pay in lead
the debt owed by so few to multitudes
('Hope Fleeing' in Flora Wild (ed.), Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe , Mambo Press, 1988,
p.43)
It's not the poet's impulse that has failed here, the desire to honour the hopes of oppressed
people as the war rages on their behalf, but the language -- too many adjectives,
sensationalised verbs, metaphors which don't work (the debt is being paid the wrong way
round, and why 'licking', why the sudden capitals at the beginnings of lines 5 to 7?)
But there is another Zimbabwean English used in this literature of violence, represented again
by Chenjerai Hove in this extract from Bones :
Did people not get sad when Rukato was stabbed to death? They did -- but they said too that
they hated his way of boasting about having slept with so-and-so's daughter or so-and-so's
wife the day before Yes, what can you do to me? I am Rukato the tree of many hooked thorns.
Who can tackle the tree of many hook thorns without dying? Try to tackle Rukato and only
the neighbours will be able to tell their neighbours what a real corpse looks like But when
Rukato's corpse lay there like a bag of mielie-meal dropped from the tractor by Manyepo's
driver, who did not hear their heart beat with sadness? Death is like that. Even if you wish it
on someone, you may not be the one to see the corpse before anyone else. (p.72, David Philip
edition)
I am no Shona speaker and must be careful about asserting the Shona sources for this English.
It is obvious at once, however, that the doctrinaire message of the first passage could not be
conveyed by the language of the second.
There was a time, following the publication of Aaron Hodza and George Fortune's Shona
Praise Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1979), when there seemed grounds for scepticism
about the sheer lyrical beauty of Shona poetry in translation. The Shona Praises seemed so
unlike the contents of companion volumes in the Oxford series and Hodza who did most of
the collecting was plainly a very fine poet in his own right. Was he using the oral praises as
the inspiration for rhapsodies of his own? His death and the disappearance of his papers to
Cape Town where they are apparently inaccessible does not quite resolve some of these
doubts. But there has been abundant evidence, meanwhile of the ability of Shona writers, even
in English translation, to express dimensions of Zimbabwean experience which bureaucratic
Zimbabwean English cannot match. Colin and O-lan Style's Mambo Book of Zimbabwean
Verse in English (Mambo Press, 1986) contains approximately 240 poems by Zimbabwean
Africans. Fully half of these are in fact translations from Shona (or Ndebele) written sources
and much of the remainder reads like the translation of poets like Musaemura Zimunya and
Eddison Zvogbo operating easily between Shona and English. The richness of the volume
derives for the most part from the number of these poems rooted in Zimbabwe's living
languages as they in turn are rooted in the landscape and culture.
Bones is a marvellous book, drawing on this Shona lyricism to create an English idiom which
persuades, more completely than anything else I have read, that this was how the war was
experienced in rural Zimbabwe. It is a difficult book to get through not, as has been
suggested, because the narrative is confusing but because the writing is so eloquent, such a
sheet delight to read, that the eye keeps pausing to re-read and relish instead of proceeding. Its
success in winning the 1989 Noma award restores faith in literary competitions.
On first reading, there appears to be a number of different narrators -- Janifa (Jennifer) the
girl, Marita the mother of her 'boyfriend', Murume Marita's husband, Manyepo the white
landowner, Chisaga his cook, an Unknown Woman who accompanies Marita to the city, and
the 'Spirits'. By the end, however, it is clear that all these voices exist in Janifa's disturbed
mind. She exists in chains in the local asylum, reliving the tragedy of a war which destroyed
her and the women she most cared for though neither of them witnessed any fighting.
The story is straightforward. Marita married Murume, the son of a chief, but they were unable
to have children, and after years of suffering from herbalists they leave home to become
labourers on the farm of the white settler nicknamed Manyepo. There, at last, Marita has a son
who, in his adolescence, writes Janifa a love letter. He disappears to join the freedom fighters
and Marita and Janifa become friends, joined by the letter in a relationship which stops just
short of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Because of her son's action, Marita is beaten and
raped by the security forces.
She decides to go to Salisbury for news of her son and pays for the journey by persuading
Chisaga, Manyepo's cook who has long wanted to sleep with her, to steal from his boss in
return for sex -- and then leaves before completing the bargain. In Salisbury where she is
again ill-treated, Marita dies and an Unknown Woman who travelled on the bus with her and
who is herself compensating for her husband's betrayal of a group of freedom fighters tries to
claim the body for a proper burial. Chisaga claims Janifa as Marita's substitute and when she
refuses him he rapes her. Her own family disown her as she refuses to marry Chisaga and she
becomes insane.
There are events that are recreated in Janifa's disordered mind, the voices crowding her head
asserting their separate claims. The voices blend, overlapping with each other, creating a
haunting elegy for the sufferings of rural Zimbabwe and especially of the sufferings of
women. They reach backwards in time to a vision like Ezekiel's of the bones littering the
landscape after the first Chimurenga, and they reach forward into the first years of
independence. When the Unknown Woman persists in trying to give Marita a proper burial,
staging her personal protest outside the morgue, the new Zimbabwean officials complain
about the mad people in rags who are allowed to spoil their nice city: 'this stubbornness
couldn't have been heard in the time of the white man's rule: the women would be sitting in
prison now, waiting for tomorrow' (p.94). Meanwhile, back on the rural farm, Manyepo
declares 'I rule here If your government wants to run this farm, let them bloody take over.
Then we will see if they can run a farm' (p. 120).
For the poor of this novel, nothing has been changed by the war. For mad Janifa, conjuring
with visions of alternative endings, there is none that would bring comfort or happiness, none
that would be right.
In an interview with Flora Wild, Chenjerai Hove described teaching near Masvingo in
1977/78:
You always found yourself there with the people, you don't look at it from a Rhodesian
soldier's point of view or a guerrilla's point of view, you look at it from a peasant's point of
view. When you are with them you see their problems, you attend a funeral of some who have
been massacred and so on. And then you begin to understand what it is to be without a gun
between two people who have guns.
This is not neutrality. Later in the same interview, he praises the poet, Wilfred Owen, for
recognising 'the absurdity of war, how wasteful it is of youth, young people going to war to be
butchered', and this vision is present in Bones in the description of 'children' being massacred
in a righteous cause. But the perspective is that of the peasant caught between two sides with
guns. 'You people of the city', says Marita at one point, 'do not know what war was all about'
(p.88). What Hove has done wonderfully is to give a voice to the powerless, creating an idiom
which makes available not only their experiences but a strong sense of their values.
The experiences are vivid -- the schoolteacher's bullying over the love letter, conversations
behind the ant-hill, the overseer's obscenities, the feel of sweat and hunger. But what
resonates most strongly is the bed-rock of rural charity. Marita, for instance, refuses to testify
to the guerrillas against Manyepo insisting 'his badness is just like any other person'. When
challenged in this by Janifa she explains: 'Child, what do you think his mother will say when
she hears that another woman sent her son to his death'. Like Homer, these villagers know that
the death of one's enemy is tragic too.
No such insight mars the complacencies of Silent Journey From the East . Ineptly written and
incompetently plotted it tells the story of three boys form Waddilove school ('loud cheering
from the jovial crowd as the young men scrambled to earn points for their houses') who
cultivate the habit of visiting the local compounds where they are 'touched' by the villagers'
'rural simplicity and straightforwardness'. But they also get drunk and in a scuffle injure a girl
friend's father and then kill the girl herself. Fleeing towards Mozambique, they are
implausibly accepted by the freedom fighters as recruits. They take new names, undergo
many hardships, go through a period of physical and political training, and then make their
'silent journey from the east' towards the war zones. In the heat of the battle, their different
characters are confirmed.
At one level, this book is a Zimbabwean version of the oldest white settler myths. Three
callow adolescents go into the bush and emerge as men, initiated by the disciplines of
violence. There are curious echoes of Rider Haggard and even, in the laboured humour, of
Three Men in a Boat. At another by no means incompatible level, it reflects accurately
Zimbabwe's current political atmosphere, the double-think of socialism and personal
advancement, patrician politics with a revolutionary face. The novel's opening anecdote
preaches that the people must be helped but it is dangerous to help them for they are 'primitive
animals' not to be trusted. The solution lies in submission to the 'rules of revolution' and to the
'rules of life', incorporating presumably the rules of one-party rule.
The novel has one interesting passage, describing the moment the guerrillas re-enter
Zimbabwe and the rituals of their dealings with the spirit mediums. These appear to be based
on experience (the author is an ex-combatant) rather than on a reading of David Lan and the
passage (pp. 143-7) deserves attention. Elsewhere, the quality of the writing is best illustrated
by this grotesque passage introducing the girl killed in the compound:
The girl was indeed a lovely testimony to the infinite artistic capabilities of nature. One could
look at her for hours on end, imagining the skilful hand of nature running carefully through
the deep grooves which formed her eye sockets. One could sit and imagine the skill invested
in placing the eyes so deep into the skull and still avoid depriving them of the gift of sight and
beauty. It was indeed equally amazing how her large jaws (on which her yellow teeth stood)
remained attached to her skull, having been delicately hanging for a staggering period of
seventeen years. (p.15)
Are there no editors at ZPH? Silent Journey From the East is a sympton of Zimbabwe's
disease. Bones , in complete contrast, is part of the cure.
Gordimer, Nadine
Dunbar, Pamela
(Rev.) My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury (London), 277pp
Southern African Review of Books, 17, January/February 1991
In My Son's Story Nadine Gordimer continues her engagement with the complexities and
conflicts of a racially-divided South Africa. As in earlier novels she concentrates on a crossracial relationship in order to focus upon the strains and inhumanities which such a system
entails. But in this novel she employs narrative perspectives which permit her to identify
imaginatively with the cause which she espouses. Alternating sections of the book are told in
the first person by a 'Coloured' youth, Will, and the whole is packaged at the end as 'his' first
book. The other sections are written in the third person, but largely reflect the perspective of
Will's father Sonny.
The story opens when the narrator chances on his father coming out of the cinema in the
company of a white woman. The father is a liberation leader who became involved with the
woman, a human rights worker, when in prison. The affair continues, causing suppressed
tension among all members of Sonny's family. Will, an adolescent who is struggling to reach
sexual maturity, is filled with bitterness against his father. He goes on to his own superficial
and somewhat callous first relationship on what he appears to understand of Sonny's. Will's
sister Baby takes drugs, attempts suicide, then finally leaves home to join the armed struggle.
And when the security police at last raid the family home, it emerges that even Sonny's wife,
the shy and submissive Aila, has become a freedom-fighter.
In her fiction Nadine Gordimer covers territory similar to that which is confronted by
Rudyard Kipling in his Indian stories -- that of the Law which forbids cross-racial
relationships, and of the Desire which compels those same engagements. One might observe
that Gordimer's earlier novel July's People , an evocation of a revolutionary South Africa in
which a white family receives protection from their former servant, is a realistic rendering of
the dream-fantasy in Kipling's 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes'. In this tale a white
man imagines himself to have fallen into a pit in which many Indians are also trapped, and in
which all the racial privileges he has come to expect in the world above are negated. He has to
rely upon his faithful servant to escape. And the Hillela of Sport of Nature, who becomes a
political activist working on behalf of black Africans, is also known as Kim. My Son's Story
contains traces of Kipling's story 'Beyond the Pale' although with the male and female roles
reversed: here it is the man who is the more gravely punished for his part in an illicit affair.
Gordimer's vision, of course, seeks strenuously to avoid the imperialist 'cage' of Kipling. It is
therefore appropriate that she should offer her characters a 'way out' of their entrapment
within the inward and personal and that the way of release should be that of political
engagement. One of the messages of My Son's Story is that once society has been transformed
-- but only then -- will healthy cross-sexual relationships become possible: until then they
remain complicit in the false consciousness which racial taboo engenders. Furthermore, it is
Baby and Aila who most readily make the saving transition into involvement with the cause.
Even Sonny and Hannah whose relationship was forged out of their political activism -- just
as all relationships are in the present climate ultimately political -- move tentatively to a less
sterile relationship, that of 'common good outside self' (p. 224), under the stress of Aila's
arrest and trial.
The final 'event' in the narrative, the burning-down of Sonny's family's home, can also be seen
in this light. The impermanent home of the native, which features prominently in several wellknown post-colonial novels, serves both as a symbol of insecurity and displacement, and as a
sign of a personal integrity and comparative well-being which is both contrasted with public
degradation and to some extent infected by it. In My Son's Story the conflagration has a
complex significance: as well as being an act of white racism it serves as a punishment of
Sonny for his misdeeds, and as a reflection of the earlier breakup of the family. At one point
Will observes, 'Just like Dad. My sex life has no home' (p. 185). As an event which eradicates
the past it is also a sign of hope for the future. And it brings the personal and the political
together in its imaging both of the flames of passion and those of a political apocalypse.
Gordimer situates her narrator, not as a black but as a member of the 'Coloured' community,
which occupies a kind of 'middle condition' between those of the blacks and the whites. This
allows the author to reflect something of her own divided situation -- that of someone who is
by race and upbringing white, by conviction of the black cause. To Will it offers the
possibility for maximum contemplation -- allowing him to experience both the false sense of
superiority of the whites, and the outcast sense of being black, but also to regard both blacks
and whites as Other. Thus he comes in himself to exemplify the divided vision of South
Africa. But, ironically, he is named Will for William Shakespeare, credited with being the
great master of 'transcendence' -- the ability to escape one's own prison of consciousness in
order to enter into consciousnesses other than one's own.
Gordimer combines her adoption of a racially disadvantaged perspective with that of the
sexually privileged -- man as against woman. The radical re-positioning which she has
undertaken in My Son's Story is an act fraught with intentionality. Taking place as it does is a
context within which the racial divide has been considered to be essential, fundamental,
unbridgeable it cannot 'merely' be seen as a sign of Shakespearean transcendence: it contains
the politically subversive implications both of equality and of identity. So the book's radical
political programme is set out in its authorial positioning as well as in its narrative. (The
book's title also suggests something of the complexity of this relocation of perspective: the
story is Sonny's as well as that of his son. And father and son too are perhaps finally
interchangeable. Then ironically again, the title contains the only words which Sonny as
against his son gets to speak directly to the reader.) The book, like J.M. Coetzee's recent novel
Foe , deals in the feminist as well as the racial/political discourse. And, like Foe again, it deals
in the meeting-point between these two discourses, forcing its readers to examine the relative
importance to them of any feminist and racial/ political convictions which they may hold.
In adopting the subject-position of a young man, and shadowing the experiences of his father,
is Gordimer simply implying the equality and identity of male and female experience -- as one
might, on an analogy with her assumption of the identity of a 'Coloured' character, assume?
Perhaps. But in making this choice she has at least as far as this novel is concerned effectively
cut herself off from the experience and perspectives of women: Baby, Aila, Hannah -- all of
them, but especially the first two, move for the most part in a shadowy hinterland beyond that
of the novel's primary focus. The women are kept at a distance, lauded or implicitly criticised
from afar. Indeed, the more they appear worthy of praise the more shadowy they become. It is
difficult to avoid the suspicion that for the Gordimer of My Son's Story radical political
engagement is, or ought to be, an affair of men; that Baby and Aila are simply filling a void
left by a brother/son and a father/husband -- a Will who is will-less, and a Sonny who is no
father either to the family or to the revolution.
Gordimer is on record as supporting Lukacs' contention that the Western literature of the early
twentieth century suffered from subjectivism, obsession with pathological states of mind, the
lack of a sense of history. And she is herself both by talent and by inclination an 'I' (or 'eye')
figure; a sensitive witness to events, one who can at her worst descend into reportage rather
than someone who is herself dedicated to Shakespearean transcendence -- the evocation of
personalities, moods, visions, distinctive speech-patterns, of others. This, paradoxically, may
have to do with her ready entry into the perspective of someone whose race and sex are not
her own.
In Gordimer's novels, and particularly in My Son's Story the personal is usurped b y the
political. The momentous choices that are made by Sonny, Baby, Aila, Hannah -- by everyone
except the would-be writer Will -- between private and public, are all made without apparent
inner conflict. In fact, most are made off-camera, and are succeeded by the subject's departure
from the set. The characters stroll unaffected at any deep level through the crises of their
lives. This is to a large extent because Gordimer, engaged by the political struggle, has not
been concerned to capture those inner lives which according to the logic of the narrative have
been so affected by that struggle.
The only inner conflict we do see a little of is the ready, and somewhat slick, preference of
Hannah for promotion above her relationship with Sonny -- no doubt a reflection of the
emancipated Western woman. The novel is not entirely without its moments of tension, of
heightened emotion, of insight into the complexity of the human condition, but it is perhaps
appropriate, and typically ironical, that these should occur within the domain of the forbidden
-- the brief analysis of the suspect sexual politics of the adulterer for example. The novel
refuses to acquaint us with the tensions of those whom it lauds -- the freedom fighters Baby
and Aila.
The moral high-mindedness of the book and its conclusion avowedly derive from a concern
with the woman's position (and 'woman' here means on the whole the more traditionally
minded black woman). But it seems, as well, to owe something to the puritanism of
dedication to the revolutionary cause.
Nadine Gordimer has for many year been a great and gallant keeper of the white South
African conscience. She continues to fulfil this role in My Son's Stor y. At the same time there
are hints in this new novel that her resolution could in changed circumstances become
inflexibility. If a new order does emerge in South Africa it will be instructive to see how she
engages with it in later novels.
Coetzee, J.M.
Parry, Benita
(Rev.) Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee, Secker and Warburg (London), 12.99, 17 September
1991
Southern African Review of Books, 17 (January/February)/1991
The strenuous pleasure of Coetzee's texts is in recognising and appreciating the audacity with
which literary convention and linguistic usage are estranged. So when benevolent reviewers,
repelled at South Africa's egregious regime, welcome his most recent novel as a political
allegory, the initiated reader can anticipate that they have mistaken an exercise in displaying
the impossibility of such a form for its intended and accomplished performance. It is true that
because Age of Iron feigns the modes it imitates with less flagrant irony than Coetzee's fans
have come to expect, a critique of South Africa can be more readily identified, especially as
the narrator situates herself as orator of 'my truth: how I lived in these times, in this place' (p.
119). Hence there do appear to be signs encouraging the acceptance of the narrator's insistent
analogizing of her own impending death with the ending of a moribund political system as the
pivotal metaphor of a parable. However the suspicion that Coetzee is too knowing a writer to
make a personal affliction serve as a symptom of a diseased body politic without alienating
such a redeployment, may lead us to notice that the fit between the stories of Elizabeth
Curren's agonized dying days and the violent death of a malignant social order is always
under threat of dislocation.
If instead we read the novel as a study in naming, then the narrator's reiterated identification
of her cancer with a social malaise, registers the failure of her own discourse to find a noun
adequate to the scale, intensity and ramifications of white oppression in South Africa: 'The
country smoulders, yet with the best will in the world I can only half attend. My true attention
is all inward, upon the thing, the word for the thing inching through my body' (p. 36). For this
is a novel where signifiers are both given a life of their own and a great responsibility in
specifying a particular here and now. As Elizabeth Curren reconstitutes herself in the letters
she writes to an absent daughter, she becomes fascinated with the instability of words
('gratitude and pomegranate' she sees as sister-words; 'Borodino, Diconal ... Are they
anagrams ...? But for what, and in what language?' p. 116; 'A word appeared before me:
Thabanchu, Thaba Nchu ... Nine letters, anagrams for what? p. 158) and comes to observe
how meaning is deferred on a signifying chain: 'A gradient from stupid to stunned to
astonished, to be turned to stone' (p. 26).
But hers is a curiosity that extends beyond gaming and leads her to grasp that in the
conflictual world she inhabits, words are signs of differentials and disjunctions. Thus
Elizabeth Curren knows that her servant Florence does not 'entrust' her with the real name of
the baby daughter, and that the name of the son known to her as Digby is Bheki; she learns
that Mr Thabane who is introduced as Florence's cousin, refers to her as 'my sister', and she
herself responds to the murder of an African youth with linguistic scruple: 'I was shaken ... I
won't say grieved because I have no right to that word, it belongs to his own people' (p. 113).
The central word is of course missing, the absence of 'apartheid' inducing recognition that it
has lost its power to shock and must be renamed, a task the narrator attempts with a 'pit of
disgrace', 'a zone of killing and degradation'. Instead the local specificity of the unspoken
'thing' is marked in the meticulous mapping of a topography which rather than screening
particularity as in Life and Times of Michael K , demystifies the romance and promise that
European voyagers brought to their encounters with the fairest Cape in all the world, The
Cape of Good Hope. Here the smiling pensinsula of legend is configured in a rain-soaked
suburb, its houses built by convict labour; the drably named False Bay is redesignated a 'bay
of false hope'; and a land renowned for its scenery and sunshine which is derided for its
'uninspired name ... Let us hope they change it when they make a fresh start' (p. 64), 'Fixed in
the mind as a place of flat, hard light, without shadows, without depth' (p. 76)
In In the Heart of the Country Magda laments the contraint of the language available to her as
daughter of a patriarchal father and mistress of servants -- 'I create myself in the words that
create me'. Here the terminally ill Elizabeth Curren, for whom writing is the foe of death,
valiantly embarks on writing herself in the multiple discourses that have written her as a
person of British ancestry, a wife, mother, retired lecturer in classics, and a liberal. The
authenticity of a text self-consciously situated in the humanist tradition, would appear to be
guaranteed by declarations of adherence to decencies, and allusions to the Classical Age and
The Classics, to elite music and quality prints -- an idiom which in fictive terms is appropriate
to the genealogy, education, tastes, social position and moral disposition of a good white
woman of Cape Town. However, through the the dialectic she enacts with language -- 'with
each word I feel my way' -- the act of composing an elegy to liberal humanism, becomes a
discovery of its inability to produce a critique of the condition she excoriates: 'when I walk
upon this land, this South Africa, I have a gathering feeling of walking upon black faces' (p.
115).
Mid-way through the book the mother directs her daughter as assumed reader to suspend
belief: 'attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words,
listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily. Read all, even this
adjuration, with a cold eye' (pp. 95-6). And in heeding the caution, we can observe how her
interrogation of the only discourse to which she has access, reveals its limitations by being
taken to its limits. Because her wrath and loathing are directed against the Boers, whom she
names as the architects of her shame, she could appear to be acquitting her own community of
any culpability, and explicitly so when she voices the customary protest of an old South
African liberal tradition against an illegitimate and irrational dominion which stops short of an
unequivocal opposition to white hegemony: 'Legitimacy they no longer trouble to claim,
reason they have shrugged off. What absorbs them is power and the stupor of power!' (p.25).
Blame is decisively shifted when she situates herself as a victim of:
A crime committed long ago ... So long ago that I was born into it. It is part of my inheritance.
It is part of me, I am part of it ... Though it was not a crime I asked to be committed, it was
committed in my name ... So that when in my rages I wished them [the men who committed
the crime] dead, I wished death on myself too. In the name of honour. Of an honourable
notion of honour. (pp. 151, 149 50)
If this indulgence in self-mortification seems to be a pastiche of Paul Scott's gallant
exculpation of the British in The Raj Quartet, then we must read it with scepticism, since the
narrator of Age of Iron exposes its bathos by focusing her 'liberal-humanist posturings'
through the eyes of the seasoned and cynical police. Thus when she invokes a better old world
to which she belongs, and indulges in nostalgia for the golden days of her childhood, 'when
the world was young and all things were possible' (p. 50), the acerbic reader anticipates that
the underpinning lie of the memories will be demolished.
On recollecting a family photograph taken long ago in her grandfather's burgeoning garden,
she now recognises that those who tended the seeds were 'outside the picture', and tries to
imagine a procedure which would yield a new kind of negative 'in which we begin to see what
used to lie outside the frame, occulted ... no longer does the picture show who were in the
garden frame that day, but who were not there' (pp. 103, 102). The narrator's
acknowledgement of the exclusions, returns us to the impossibility of a privileged author
depicting and giving voice to those who are beyond her experiential range, an inaccessibility
which Coetzee examined in Foe and negotiated by a refusal to exercise the power of the
dominant culture to speak for the oppressed, at the cost of situating Friday as outside
language.
Here the narrator's endeavour to bring the African into representation issues in imitations of
modes which Coetzee is known to eschew: the description of her servant's husband at work on
a poultry farm and her recreation of their marital life on Florence's days off, is written in the
overtly 'naturalist' style of Poppie Nongena ; and when naked plot-manipulation takes the
narrator into the black township, she enters the terrain of A Dry White Season , the atrocities
of police violence registered in prose that comes before us as at least second hand. Only when
she is challenged by hostile and contemptuous Africans to 'name' the crime, does the novel
return to its principal and principled concern with its own failure to find 'a word for the thing':
These are terrible sights ... They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other
people's words. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the truth ... To
speak of this ... you would need the tongue of a God. (p. 91)
And since she lacks oracular powers, the truth of her words rehearses the case against
violence, her disgust at a country officially prodigal of blood and brutal death, equalled by
detestation of a 'mystique of death ... this killing, this bloodletting in the name of comradeship
... they may start by being careless of their own lives and end by being careless of everyone
else's' (pp. 148, 136, 45). If she sees a sign of the return of The Age of Iron in the zealotry of
'both armies fighting a merciless war', this for her is etched by children schooled 'never to
smile, never to cry, to raise their fists in the air like hammers' (p. 46). In recoiling from both
sanctioned state cruelty and the strength and determination of the 'the insulted and injured, the
trampled, the ridiculed' to resist, the narrator symbolically looks back to kinder epochs, to the
age of clay' the age of earth. More literally, she looks back to a time when children were not
guardians of the people and parents to their parents, her censure of Florence's pride in the
militancy of the youth -- 'There are no more mothers and fathers' (p. 36) -- an implicit
criticism of a political discourse inscribed by Don Mattera' poem 'No Children ...':
There are no children ...
No children in Soweto...
Not a child left in Sharpevllle...
The children have all become men.
Here we reach the blunt edge of her humane discourse, when in the face of the Africans' cold
indifference to her homilies, their curt responses to her gestures of sympathy for their grief
and concern at their sufferings, she acknowledges that she cannot 'honourably' urge them to
turn their backs on the calls to 'Freedom or Death', conceding that ''I have no voice' (p. 149).
In borrowing Coetzee's neologism for the title of this review, I have tried to suggest that a
novel which is so eloquent in its imprecations of a degraded present, is unable to
accommodate a politics of fulfilment and metamorphosis, registering no utopian prefiguration
of a to-morrow ('the future comes disguised, if it came naked we would be petrified by what
we saw', p. 149), and looking to the past for softer times. But because the narrative of
Elizabeth Curren's dying occupies a different discursive space from the construction of South
Africa's bloody interregnum, a story that speaks an intimacy with death (the book is dedicated
to three recently deceased people, two old, one young), can contemplate a personal
redemption which, sharing nothing with 'a smooth passage to Nirvana', is an epiphany to the
conservation of integrity: 'In order not to be paralysed with shame I have had to live a life of
getting over the worse ... For the sake of my own resurrection, I cannot get over it this time'
(p. 115).
Whereas the narrator's acquaintance with Africans is constrained by the mistress-servant
relationship, effects no enlargement of her inner world, and does not impinge on her dying,
the arrival of Verceuil, the tramp as-angel-of-death, is an annunciation of her salvation -- a
theophany anticipated when she is reading Tolstoy, 'not the famous cancer story ... but the
story of the angel who takes up residence with the shoemaker' (p.13). Verceuil, whose name
could indicate Huguenot ancestry, and could equally be an anagram of words appropriate to
the novel's concerns, is out of Beckett by Tolstoy: his dress, smells and habits limning the
prototypal derelict who lives on the refuse of Western cities, a saturnine figure given to
laconic utterances both gnomic and homespun, the profound indifference of his ascetic's
stance alternating with the incompetent performance of small domestic tasks. More likely the
name signifies verskuil, that is the Afrikaans for concealment or of masking of the self (p. 34).
Perhaps he is white, perhaps not; what matters is that he who has become Elizabeth Curren's
constant companion, on specious grounds that are necessary to keep the stories disjunctive, is
not with her when she journeys to the hell of the African township. He belongs only to the
narrative of her mortality, by his presence helping one who is already fluent in a dead
language, to learn the language of death, and ensuring that in the disgraceful state of South
Africa, she will die in a state of grace.
White South African writing has been described as narrowly and obsessively concerned with
the crisis of and in white consciousness, and it can be simultaneously anguished, agitated,
self-important and didactic. All these registers are parodically imitated in Elizabeth Curren's
testament. But where is that chamber-work which she might have written, had her maker
devised for her a different means of negotiating the prison-house of discourses, and which
would condense the austerity and intensity of Seamus Heaney's lines: 'wanting no more from
them but that they keep/ the wick of self respect from dying out?' (The Haw Lantern , 1987)
But perhaps such distilled restraint is what this voice, witness to sanctioned persecution,
possessed by guilt and righteous anger and fearful that it may not be at home in the new South
Africa, cannot speak.
Vassanji
Nkosi, Lewis
The Gunny Sack
by M G Vassanji
Heinemann (African Writers Series) Oxford, 1990, 276pp, 4.95 435 90544 9
Harvest of Thorns
by Shimmer Chinodya
Heinemann (African Writers Series) Oxford; Heinemann Southern Africa, Johannesburg,
1991, 248pp, 4.9/R24.99, 435 90544 9
reviewed by Lewis Nkosi
(Lewis Nkosi )

Southern African Review of Books, Issue 18, March/April 1991
Kwasuka kusukela! Once upon a time. At the beginning and so it came to pass! In whatever
language across world cultures, these phrases are markers that stories are about to be told; and
telling and consuming stories apparently is an almost pathological human compulsion
nonetheless as natural as breathing. We cannot live without narrating. As one theorist of
narrative puts it: 'A blank page is poisoned', and 'a book that tells no story kills' (T Todorov).
As readers we are rather like the Wedding Guest in Coleridge's poem who, arrested at the
threshold of the Bridegroom's door by 'the long gray beard and the glittering eye' of the
Ancient Mariner, cannot but stop to listen to the tale of woe in spite of the sound of the
bassoon and the merry minstrels inside the banquet hall. 'There was a ship', that fatal opening
inaugurates the harrowing tale which will hold the Wedding Guest enthralled, paralysed upon
a stone, listening 'like a three years' child' to the story of a crime committed at sea and the
curse that followed.
If we assume as readers, sometimes unwillingly enough, the role of the Wedding Guest, as
writers we assume the character of the Ancient Mariner wrenched with woeful agony, obliged
to tell again and again the story of the killing of the albatross in order to gain relief. In
Coleridge's poem this task is represented appropriately enough as a form of penance: 'Since
then, at an uncertain hour, /That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told,/ This heart
within me burns.' In fiction as in the writing of history, incidents, episodes, actions, what we
call events, are indigestible until they have been worked into 'a form assimilable to structures
of meaning' (Hayden White); that is, until they have been shaped into stories describing
experiences within a moral order that is potentially intelligible. 'And there are so many stories
to tell,' enthuses Salman Rushdie's narrator, already 'handcuffed to history', as he tells us, and
handcuffed fatally, disastrously, it seems, to the passion for storytelling; for this limosis for
narratives can be dangerous. Look what happened to the creator of Midnight 's Children !
Those of us who live in what is called, hilariously, the 'developing world', know at first hand
what happens to people addicted to storytelling. They are severely punished for the 'crime' of
spreading rumours, for contributing to national despondency.
Vassanji's novel is mischievously described by his publishers as 'Africa's answer to Midnight
's Children '. What good can it do him to be tarred with the same brush and feather as that
other teller of midnight tales, it is difficult to imagine. Nevertheless, the comparison is just.
Rushdie and Vassanji display a demonic energy for invention. In episode after episode they
evince quite an astonishing appetite for 'swallowing' up lives and the world before
regurgitating them as newly made stories endowed with meaning. Occasionally, their
narrators invoke the name of Sheherazade, thus anchoring their narratives to a tradition of
storytelling and a particular myth which have special resonances for Oriental cultures, though
Rushdie's filiations as evidenced by his allusions to Gunther Grass's characters, are as
numerous as the configurations of his tales and inventions.
On the other hand, Vassanji's fiction inhabits a culture-zone which is slightly different from
the one normally occupied by African fiction, with London and Paris as its other coordinates.
Vassanji casts only a sidelong glance at the Occident, devoting his full gaze to the cultures of
the East African seaboard facing toward the Orient, especially India; an area not of darkness
so much as of myriad prophets touting new and old religions like fresh merchandise. 'His
name was Kassim Kurji. It was said that Kassim Kurji claimed to be a prophet. He had a
coterie of followers, the chief among whom was my vociferous Aunt Fatu' (p. 131). This is
also a region of religious schisms, of sudden fretful departures and sudden unexpected
arrivals:
A tall, bearded man came in sight, in a long white robe and a white skull cap. Pausing in the
distance, his long wide shadow merging with the darkness of the trees and forest, he began
clapping his hands in rhythm and dancing the rasa. He went one full circle, singing of hope.
They listened. Then like a ghost he disappeared, as he had come (p. 7).
In this novel Porbander and Bombay are linked to Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi and Zanzibar by
the lives of four generations of East African Asians who move backwards and forwards across
the Indian Ocean, commencing with their ancestor Dhanji Govindji's departure from the small
Indian village of Janapur 'early one morning on a bullock cart' on his way to seek his fortunes,
first in the enchanted, perfumed island of Zanzibar then up and down the coast of the African
mainland, from Matamu to Nairobi, from Kilwa and Mafia to Dar-es-Salaam. Dhanji
Govindji's offsprings have two lines of descent: one through union with Bibi Taratibu, an
African slave-woman the other through marriage to Fatima, the daughter of a Zanzibari
widow. Out of this melting pot come three generations of sons, daughters and cousins too
numerous to recall, united at once by common ancestry and torn by fierce rivalries. Their
stories are entangled with the history of the region: the Maji Maji anti-colonial struggle
against the Germans, the attainment of Tanzania's independence under the leadership of Julius
Nyerere, the Okello-led revolution in Zanzibar, the war against Uganda under Amin, rumours
of mutinies, of take-overs and attempted coups.
The story of The Gunny Sack is told by one Salim, nick-named Kala, Dhanji Govindji's great
grandson on the African slave-woman's side. Dying, Salim's grandaunt Ji Bai, had bequeathed
him a gunny sack full of mementos -- a bead necklace, a rolled-up torn photograph, a cowrie
shell, a brass incense-holder, a Swahili cap 'softened by age', a broken rosary, a blood-stained
muslin shirt, and, above all 'three books that never left her bedside, four-by-six-inch, green,
tablet-like, the front cover folding over into a flap fastened with a tiny padlock'. These objects
constitute a bagful of memory, the gunny sack stands as a symbol of the memory of a past that
must be mined to give meaning to the present lives. Equally, the books contained in the gunny
sack, written partly in a debased form of Devanagari script, partly in Swahili using the Arabic
script, are tokens of a past that exert its seductive appeal to the younger generation who may
wish to unlock their secrets. Protected by a strange prohibition, 'He who opens it will suffer
the consequences' inscribed in golden letters on the cover of each book 'one in an Arabiclooking hand and the other indecipherable, supposedly in a secret script', these books simply
increase the lure of illicit interpretation and decipherment.
Handing him the gunny sack, Salim's cousin Aziz says: 'If my family had had their way they
would have burnt it a long time ago. It's brought nothing but bad luck, they say. They want
you to burn it, once and for all to bury the past' (p. 5). However, the invocation of the name of
Sheherazade also helps to remind us that not only are narratives an attempt to give order and
meaning to what would otherwise be a meaningless succession of events, they are also the
ego's defence against that final 'closure' -- death. In a hopeless attempt to stay the evil hour of
that final closure narrators endlessly spin their yarns, as the narrator of The Gunny Sack puts
it, like 'a Sheherazade postponing her eventual demise, spinning out yarns, telling tales that
have no beginning or end, keeping me awake night after night, imprisoned in the basement to
which I thought I had escaped' (p. 5).
But since we also read retroactively, backwards if we want to make sense of these narratives,
openendedness leaves us slightly dissatisfied, asking that most annoying of all questions: so
what was the point of it all? The narrator of Midnight's Children exults in this openendedness:
'In the renewed silence, I return to sheets or paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready
and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air -- just
as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahrya eaten up by
curiosity'.
Plotting is what breeds narrative desire, even curiosity, as some theorists of narrative have
insisted. But is there a 'plot' in all the memorabilia of The Gunny Sack , if by 'plot' following
Peter Brooks and Paul Ricoeur, we 'mean the intelligible whole that governs a succession of
events of any story'? Writing about history, which does not exclude fictional narrative,
Ricoeur explains: 'To be historical, an event must be more than a singular occurrence, a
unique happening. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of a plot'.
Certainly, there is a plot in The Gunny Sack which frames Vassanji's narrative when viewed
as paradigmatic of the story of Asian settlement in East Africa, their relation to indigenous
African society and the former colonial masters.
Nevertheless, some of the incidents seem to hang to the story by the flimsiest of threads. Like
Salman Rushdie, his predecessor, Vassanji is a powerful 'machine for production', generating
stories by the dozens as a segment of a myth of collective settlement and dispersal: a
multitude of characters come and go in its pages but too many are mere names whose
nomination seem to be their only vocation.
Compared to the wild exuberance or Rushdie and Vassanji, Shimmer Chinodya is propriety
itself. His is a story narrated, with minor variations, in the realist mode; a novel which Saleem
Sinai presumably would dismiss as belonging to 'the world of linear narrative, the universe of
what happened next'. The first hundred pages of the novel are quite unpromising, in fact. With
their languid descriptions of township life under the white settler regime, their clumsy
attempts at reproducing through character and dialogue patterns of thought and behaviour to
which the novel is fundamentally inimical, there seems very little to distinguish Chinodya's
representations from those of equally conventional anti-colonial novels.
Because of a prior commitment to faithful reproduction of history under the sign of the real,
the structures of the realist mode of representation run the risk of becoming complicit with the
status quo to which the novel is supposedly hostile, the overthrow of which is its overt or
secret wish. In Harvest of Thorns this is particularly true of Chinodya's presentation of the
character or Mr Clopas Wandai J Tichafa, the hero's father, who at the opening of the novel
works as a messenger in the District Office; with his absurd malapropisms and defective grasp
of social form, oscillating between peacocky self-importance in front of his fellow Africans
and degrading self-importance before his white employers, Tichafa has his antecedent not so
much in Chinua Achebe's Obi Okonro as in Joyce Carey's caricature, Mister Johnson, which
so annoyed Achebe when he first read it that he decided to present his own version or the
'Nigerian character'.
The question is not, or course, whether it is legitimate for an African novelist to portray
African characters who seem to be mentally retarded as well as politically obtuse; the
question is whether it might not be possible to rescue their fundamental humanity for their
moral or political confusion. Happily, these limitations are only apparent in the first hundred
pages or so of the novel before the sections treating of the Bush War, possibly the supreme
achievement of Chinodya's fiction. It was inevitable that the Zimbabwe war of liberation
would produce a wealth of verse and fictional narrative retelling the story of the war. It was
also predictable that in the aftermath of victory many people would prefer the national poets
and novelists to paint this war in gloriously bright patriotic colours without attracting undue
attention to the warts and pimples which mar the face of that victory. In the event, the writers
have only half obliged. Beginning with the shock of Stanley Nyamfukudza's The NonBeliever's Journey , Chenjerai Hove's Bones , and now Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns , some
writers have not allowed the thrill of victory to blur or blot out the memory of occasional
fecklessness, of occasional failure, treachery and cowardice.
There is indeed a 'positive hero' in Chinodya's novel but he is not the usual 'positive hero' of
the traditional socialist novel, distinguished, if not by grand achievement, by high aim and
lofty ambition. Benjamin (Pasi Sellout) did not make a clear decision to join the war; a series
of determinations create the choices he makes, from a politically doltish father and a mother
of limited qualities, to outright political persecution by the social institutions of the white
settler regime. In fact Pasi's understanding or his actions is achieved, as a kind of retroactive
reading of his past, through his participation in the war:
you knew it when you left home and left school but you didn't really know it, until this hunger
and this darkness and these stars and now hearing it made the anger eat you like pepper in
your nose and you wondered how you had been so blind and so passive (p. 115)
It is the very presupposition of narrative theory that 'for every narrative, however 'full', is
constructed on the basis of a set of events which might have been left out' (White). It is also a
well-known fact that most or the official accounts of the liberation wars suppress episodes
which do not reflect too well on the purity of the struggle. Not surprisingly, the body as the
ground of appetite, hunger, thirst and desire, or sex as the libidinal force which all too often
can assure a counter-revolutionary character given its tendency to operate outside the bounds
of order and revolutionary discipline, are frequently missing from such narratives. Quite often
the strategy is to 'unsex' women comrades in order to naturalise the unconvincing absence of
sexual complications. In Chinodya's novel this reticence is not countenanced. One of the most
uncomfortable scenes is the discussion of suspected rape by one of the most fearless
combatants and the discomfiting revelation of sex as the suppressed underground life of the
freedom war, threatening to undo months of patient planning. In this novel rape, masturbation,
revolutionary executions throw light on an underground life in an underground war.
This is a good novel in search of a proper language to tell an important story. Above all, the
act of retelling the history of East and Central Africa by these two gifted novelists, Vassanji
and Chinodya, describing the struggle over land and possession in the region, the revolutions
to resolve the issues of race and ethnic belonging, is to reopen once again a question that nags
too insistently in the wake of collapse of socialist experiments in East Europe. Were the
revolutions botched? Were they inherently unable to deliver the goods to the people who
made so many sacrifices or have the leaderships simply suffered a collective collapse of
nerve? One of the most moving, at the same time the most disheartening scenes in the novel,
is Benjamin Pasi's visit to the demobilisation office to fill in his demob pay forms. The scene
played out between Pasi and the officer might have taken place at the District Office where
his father worked as a messenger before the beginning of the liberation war. 'They didn't learn
anything after the war,' Nkazana complains after Pasi has received rude treatment by a white
saleswoman and an Asian manager at a supermarket. Given the treatment at the demob office,
this is a kind of displacement and a misreading of symptoms. The real question is did the
African leaders learn anything from the war?
Matthee
Schoeman
Pechey, Graham
The Mulberry Forest
by Dalene Matthee
Penguin Books (London), 27 September 1990, 360 pp, 4.99, 0 14 012025 4
Another Country
by Karel Schoeman
translated by David Schalkwyk
Sinclair-Stevenson (London), May 1991, 311 pp, 14.95, 1 85619 049 8
(Karel Schoeman)
reviewed by Grahame Pechey

Southern African Review of Books, Issue 12, December 1989/January 1990
Both these novels have not only come to be translated into English -- in the case of Another
Country with great skill by David Schalkwyk -- but are also in some sense about translation,
about being European in Africa, about transplantation from one continent to another. Reading
them in English (in England), I often found the words on the page flashing back to my
'bilingual' South African consciousness aural after-images of what I imagined to have been
the original sentences written by the authors themselves in the only African language to have
named itself after the continent: Afrikaans . Whatever one thinks of this gesture of historical
self-naming, poised as it is between a (precociously post-colonial) positive valuing of
marginality against European hegemony and an (ominously neo-imperial) monopoly of Africa
on Europe's behalf, the fact remains that any Afrikaner writing about the interface of Europe
and Africa (as Karel Schoeman, for one, has often done) is only making explicit a relationship
to which her or his own language bears constant witness and which that language implicitly
and ceaselessly re-enacts every time it is used.
Afrikaans is one thing, Afrikanerdom is another. It was the latter nationalist formation that
launched itself into history by naming and codifying the mix of creole Dutches that the Boer
migrations of the nineteenth century had carried from the Cape far into the South African
hinterland. Both Dalene Matthee's and Schoeman's novels are set in a period (1877, 1881-83)
when the ethnic mobilization of this community within the context of a modernizing and
industrializing South Africa -- its very imagining of itself as a community with an identity and
a destiny -- was only just beginning. We do not hear of this process of collective story-telling
engineered by a educated indigenous élite in either novel, and not simply because of the
dating. Both are set well away from the sites where it was most prominently playing itself out;
and neither of the two heroes is a regte Afrikaner of the kind that S. J. du Toit was just then
welcoming into his Genootskap . True, the narrator-hero of The Mulberry Forest , Silas
Miggel alias van Huyssteen, speaks Afrikaans, but he calls it 'Dutch'; and the linguistic
politics of Paarl may as well be those of Palermo for all that this wood-cutter of the Knysna
bos , and sturdy defender of local knowledge against global irrelevancies, knows or cares
about them. Racial solidarity simply doesn't enter the purview of this socially isolated
member of the white underclass in a British colony.
Mr Versluis, the 'central intelligence' (as the Jamesian terminology has it) of Another Country
, errs on the other side. This supremely civilized and pathologically fastidious man of private
means is a consumptive Dutchman who has come to Bloemfontein for his health, and for
whom every manifestation of Africa is a shock to his senses. He registers (what would now be
recognised as) 'Afrikaans' only in the barely intelligible speech of barefoot servants, in the
cries of children playing, and in the bad grammar of locals trying to speak his own language
to him -- in short, only as deviation. Moving in urban bourgeois circles, insulated from the
peasantry -- the only farm he visits is deserted -- he never encounters a raw specimen like the
hero of The Mulberry Forest . In Bloemfontein itself, capital of a 'Dutch' republic, the
languages he hears most are German and English. The Dutch schoolmaster Brill's airy claim
that 'this local patois has the potential of becoming a full-blown language' only leaves him
confused and bemused.
On the one hand, then, we have Miggel's innocent Afrikaans, which doesn't even know its
own difference from its metropolitan ancestor; on the other, Versluis's almost visceral
sensitivity to even the slightest difference from the linguistic norms of his age and class. On
the one hand, a hero for whom the Enlightenment may just as well never have happened; on
the other, a hero who might be seen as its typical end product in human terms, an allegory of
the terminal repression of political and libidinal energies in which the Enlightenment had
culminated by the end of the nineteenth century. Neither in Matthee's lovable skelm nor in
Schoeman's panicky buitestaander , anti-heroes both, is there anything with which a
nationalist ideology could go to work. From opposite extremes our two novels imagine not
only a moment before the volk came to full self-consciousness but the very absence of the
language in which they are written, conceived as a literate medium and as a legitimate idiom
of modernity.
Imagining a world without oneself, or as a place where one has been pushed either to the
margins of power or into actual powerlessness, is of course -- unthinkable as it has long been
for the everyday consciousness of the oligarchy -- nothing new in the dissident 'white writing'
of South Africa. Indeed Schoeman himself might be said to have started it all, with his Na die
geliefde land of 1972, his only other novel to have been translated into English (Promised
Land , 1978), and then with Om te sterwe from the crisis year of 1976, five years and more
before the far better known novels of futurological hypothesis by Gordimer and Coetzee.
Instead of desolation in an apocalyptic future, Schoeman and Matthee's novels turn
apocalypse inside-out, offering their white Afrikaner contemporaries the somewhat gentler
post-apartheid therapy of a marginalization projected back into the past. Miggel may
dominate his own story as story-teller, one who is given to reiterating the emphatic and
vaguely judicial first-person formula of 'I, Silas Miggel' -- as if his narrative were a confession
dictated for the benefit of some tribunal of posterity -- but that is all he dominates. We leave
him in utter dispossession, the victim of British bureaucracy and spreading capitalist relations,
fifteen years a lone outlaw in the forest, but without a hint of nationalist pathos; more
concerned indeed with the red lilies that are at the forest's heart and that signify his belated
acceptance of his daughter's sexuality. Versluis we leave cripplingly weakened, leaning on his
cane in the veld, the 'unknown land' his disease will now never let him leave 'familiar' at last,
but no less a spectator of surfaces -- no less adrift in a history he cannot understand -- than he
was at the beginning.
No account of these two novels can proceed for long without turning to the formal and
generic differences between them. As I have hinted, the pre-modern consciousness mobilized
by Matthee is given an appropriately quasi-oral narrative (what in Russian is called skaz and
has its best South African example in Bosman's Oom Schalk Lourens), while the late-modern
consciousness of Versluis is rendered with the full sestiger sophistication in the third-person,
an anonymous narrator letting the inner tones and terms of his hero cut across his own,
recording his every sensation with the delicacy of a valet ministering to his needs. In one we
hear an emphatic voice, the direct audibility of the speaking subject's simple value system; in
the other, two subtle undertones in dialogue defy all voicing in a complex generation of
ironies attuned to the inner ear of silent reading.
Beyond this, The Mulberry Forest is not an 'art novel' replete with prizes and ripe for
canonization like Another Country but a popular historical romance that will not find its way
so easily into the syllabi of Afrikaans-Nederlands courses in South African universities.
Matthee's lilies and (non-existent) mulberries are being marketed by Penguin in Britain rather
like Cape wine or apples, with no mention of the dreaded words 'South Africa' anywhere on
the packaging: 'Africa' is as specific as we get in blurb and biog; and even in the preface
acknowledging her historical sources Matthee (her editor?) resorts to the coy code of 'SA'.
Forests and fruit trees are a problem for Schoeman's Mr Versluis (his forename is an intimacy
to which we are never admitted). They present themselves as hazardous threats to the
regularity of his life and the well-policed boundaries of his body, places where he slips and
falls in the dust, where he glimpses or overhears (mostly in his landlady's garden) sights or
sounds of others' lovemaking. Two circumstances qualify everything he does or says: that he
has left Europe, and that he is also about to leave the world for good. Schoeman uses his
hero's liminal position uncomfortably astride these two borders not only for the perspectives it
offers through Versluis, but also for the way the sense of this liminality provokes others to
reveal themselves in speaking to him.
Africa is for him the combination of too much distance and not enough: the opening sequence
of his coach journey across hundreds of miles is a prototype of this paradoxical experience,
with its looming intimacy of unwashed bodies in a small space aggravated by jolting
movement over vast tracts of glaring land. Bloemfontein when he reaches it is a town of
neatly ordered streets opening on to the emptiness of the veld beyond, civic enclosure floating
upon boundlessness. Just as death is bringing him uneasily close to his own body, he is
thrown into disturbingly close contact with others' bodies. 'Babies disconcerted him', we are
told: any unwonted showing of extremities, any form that violates the privacy of the clothed
and finished classical body -- black women openly suckling infants, black men relieving
themselves in public -- disconcerts him.
This drawn-out crisis of waking seemingly for the first time to a gross corporeality and to the
world's contingency and indeterminacy is punctuated by a series of climaxes, both public and
private. In the first of these, this man whose name connotes the safe containment of floodgates
-- and whose moments of panic are characteristically imaged as a kind of drowning in the
random flow of things -- this walking epitome of his country's skilfully arrested inundation
undergoes an ordeal by water, as a thunderstorm washes him into the shelter of an African hut
and finally delivers his drenched body on his landlady's doorstep, accompanied by (gently
hyperbolic) authorial hints of a new birth. Closing the second section, as the storm closes the
first, and leading to the news that he is dying, is the most public of these epiphanies: Versluis
faints in front of the republic's president at a ball in honour of the German Kaiser. This
realized nightmare of shame under the gaze of the incarnated state (for much of his fear of
illness is a fear of the disgrace of not being able to control its signs) begins his long decline to
a death that awaits as we put the book down.
In his other role as provocateur of confessions from others, Versluis sometimes seems to fill
the part of the 'stranger' in Olive Schreiner's life and writing, the type of mature European
'who has temporarily come to live amongst us who does not share our spiritual world, but who
stands entirely aloof from it all, passing through without being touched by it'. The words are
the Lutheran pastor August Scheffler's; and indeed we find that Schoeman, who has recently
written a study of Schreiner's early life, offers us here a (thinly disguised, somewhat
modified) version of the Schreiners in the Scheffler family. The 'Olive' figure is Adele
Scheffler, brought up with her brother and German parents on an African mission station. She
startles Versluis with the directness and spontaneity of her gestures and speech, with her
grotesquely crippled body, and with her tendency to bare herself spiritually and politically in
what seem to him wayward tangents to the path of polite exchange. Uncomprehending before
the issues of racial division and cultural hybridity which the younger Schefflers raise with
such existential seriousness so precociously early in the territory's history, Versluis looks on
with the same sense of infinite distance at the caring micro-community they make up.
August is a priest with the sensibility of a novelist, plagued by doubts as to his calling and
about the legitimacy of settler power. It is thanks to him that Versluis shakes the hand of a
black man for the first and only time, in another anti-climactic, wrong-end-of-the-telescope
encounter with the forces that would shape a future he could not expect to see. By the end he
finds himself actually almost wanting the Schefflers' company, in spite of the Dostoevskian
depths and heights of an order of conversation 'that was unpredictable from one sentence to
the next'. As the Free State winter closes in, the meaning of intimacy begins dimly to dawn
upon him and he comes as close as he ever has or will to experiencing with Adele this missing
dimension of his life. The book's last and most harrowing climax is not his own death but that
of a lower-class compatriot who dies in his arms in Scheffler's study. Drenched this time in
blood rather than water, he glimpses in a mirror in moonlight an image of this (for him)
unprecedented act of loving care for another.
As Gelmers dies with Versluis, the great world of Southern Africa is preoccupied with the
British annexation of the Transvaal: August's attempt to float the topic a few pages earlier
gets no response. The resulting eerste vryheidsoorlog of 1881 gets no such mention in The
Mulberry Forest , whose action begins in that year. Silas Miggel's battle with the British far
from the theatre of that grander drama is a personal struggle with high-handed officials over
the arrival of thirty-two Italians -- silk-farmers and their families -- in the Gouna highland
where he lives, cutting wood and gathering honey, with his daughter Miriam. The mulberry
forest they have been led to believe in just isn't there, and Miggel and daughter find
themselves caught up in caring for their needs and trying to speed the Italians' swift passage
home. They never leave; it is Silas who has to retreat, from the clearing deep into the forest
itself.
Protecting Miriam from the unattached Italian men becomes the other mission of this man
who often threatens to throw things at the agents of authority, but more often cannily makes
the best of the proliferating difficulties that follow the disturbance of his Eden. Scornful of the
English newspapers he has to buy for the 'foreman' in charge of the immigrants' encampment,
Miggel would no doubt never be numbered among the readers even of Die Patriot . His
unreflecting way of being-African combines with ritual Sunday bible reading a thoroughly
hybridized and localized practical consciousness geared to survival. As his daughter's
marriage to an illicit ivory-hunter redeems the latter from outlawry into property-owning
respectability, he in his turn becomes an outlaw.
Miggel's flight into the bos invites parallels from past and future historical narratives. If in a
nationalist reading it might appear as the 'Great Trek' replicated in little, the reading hinted by
Matthee from her first chapter activates for us the more disturbingly contemporaneous story
of 'unlawful squatting' and 'resettlement', of officially proclaimed distinctions of relative
privilege among the dispossessed. Miggel suffers the indignities attendant upon his subaltern
status -- using the backdoor when he visits the local squire's home, standing when spoken to
by seated officials -- without complaint. His value as a character stems as much from his
global ignorance as from his local knowledge: keenly aware of what is practically possible on
his patch of the highland, he is at the same time unseduced by the grand ideological
legitimations of the harebrained speculative schemes devised by the British for the
development of the colony. The silkworm wheeze is only the latest and most bizarre of these,
and it surely finds its most suggestive reflex in the visionary social engineering which
Miggel's own descendants were to undertake on gaining power in the next century. In the nonexistent mulberry forest we have an early figure of such apartheid absurdities as the viability
of the 'homelands'.
The whole action of the novel is played out in the interim between the threat of 'forced
removal' and the summary hearing in which Miggel is ordered to up sticks and go. Its
episodes are in the main only further trials of the hero's physical and moral stamina, and they
involve the struggle of a man to make his way in confrontation with other men. Promised
dwelling rights if he co-operates in overseeing the Italians, Miggel even gets as far as
scheming with the foreman Christie to buy himself one of the allotments parcelled out to the
Italian 'immigrants'. The plan for a sawmill first of all appals him, threatening as it does the
commodification of his life-world, bringing the economic coercion of wage labour into the
life of somebody who had always seen working for the landowner Barrington in semi-feudal
terms as 'helping out' -- until he sees that by working for it the Italians might earn the means
of their return to Italy. It is with the collapse of this scheme, when the first consignment of
railway sleepers is condemned as sub-standard, that Miggel is finally exposed and isolated.
The other crisis of this moment, the discovery that Miriam is 'with child' (as his sister puts it),
points to a dimension in which this difficult but useful subordinate is found wanting on
criteria which are altogether other than those of his overlords. This time it is his scheme -- the
patriarchal idyll of a life alone with a daughter forever 'protected' from the threat of fully
growing up -- that fails, as it was always going to fail.
In a postscript detailing the later fortunes of the Italians and of the forest, Matthee tells us that
the red lilies tended by Silas in his reclusion were enclosed by officialdom in 'an impenetrable
barbed wire fence against possible damage by stray oxen'. She goes on: 'What they didn't
know was that the bush-pigs were part of the delicate ecology of the lilies and had to root up
the lilies at certain times of the year to limit the growth of the bulbs. After the fence was
erected, the bush-pigs couldn't get to the lilies and consequently all the lilies died'. 'Green' and
feminist concerns converge in this parable which, it would seem, was the seed from which
The Mulberry Forest grew.
If it is also to be read as a brief allegory of apartheid, then we ought to reflect that this
ecological disaster would not have happened with the benefit of wise counsel from the likes of
Silas. What these two novels help us to see is that the metanarrative of Afrikaner nationalism
was not written into Miggel's genes; that it was rather what happened when the Miggels of
this world stepped into Barrington's shoes; and that this particular monster was the historical
mutant produced by grafting a Miggel on to a Versluis.
There are lessons here for all of us, as South Africa staggers into a new hegemonic phase. If
that phase is to bring not a new closure but that eternal 'not-yet' called democracy, we need
more novels to put any pretentious History in its place, 'Marxist-Leninist' no less than
'Christian-National'. Novels are not written by people seated at 'cultural desks': we do not
need these now and we need no 'ministers of culture' in the future. We all need to be able to
see ourselves as only the humble bywoners and unruly takhaars of a truly human history.
Hope
Galgut
Boehmer, Elleke
Serenity House
by Christopher Hope
Macmillan (London), 1992, £14.99 hbk, 227pp, 0 333 56982 2
The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs
by Damon Galgut
Abacus (London), 1992, £5.99 pbk, 170pp, 0 349 10242 2
reviewed by Elleke Boehmer
(Elleke Boehmer)

Southern African Review of Books, Issue 23, January/February 1993
If these two novels by Christopher Hope and Damon Galgut are anything to go by, a welcome
new spirit of experimentation is beginning to stir through the white male South African novel.
These novels feature few of the standard markers of the genre -- liberal agonistics, the
apocalyptic heterosexual embrace, the existential quest journey, studied realism, dilemmas of
identity and language. That their borrowings are located elsewhere -- in post-modern stylistics
and fantasy in the case of the one, in American 'dirty' realism in the other -- and are at certain
points very clearly imitative, does not of course guarantee a successful break with tradition.
But the effort is there, and it usually pays off. In fact so different are the directions these
novels have taken that to speak of them under the single category of white male writing is
patently limiting.
At a literary festival in 1991 Christopher Hope commented that had apartheid South Africa
not existed it would have had to be invented. He has repeated this idea elsewhere, pointing out
that growing up in South Africa laid bare for him the darkly comic sides of human folly; and
the ways in which, given degrees of oppression and self-delusion, the bizarre and dangerous
can be accepted by people as normal. South Africa is the proverbial nauseating and deadly
joke, a metaphor for profligate lies, and for nightmarish improbabilities that turn out to be
real.
Southern Africa does not feature as a subject in Hope's Booker-nominated novel, Serenity
House (though the implacably uncritical Night Matron is an old Rhodesian, thus Hope draws
together representatives of a number of post-World War Two 'democracies'). But grand
phantasmagoric lies, especially those based on racial and national delusions of grandeur, are
everywhere present. Metaphors repeatedly link the personal with the international and the
political, the apparently innocuous with the deadly dangerous. Jack, the 'Giant killer', a central
operator, a snuff movie addict, blond beefcake, moral retard, and the representative in the tale
of North America, wears a disarming Disneyland Mouse mask and coaxes his victims into
death with drug-induced or 'medassist' dreams.
Hope's novel is built on a grid of interlocking allegorical figures. With cumulative force these
work to displace the co-ordinates of the everyday, pointing to the unreality of one of the
things we might take to be most inevitable, most visceral, perhaps most human: death, and
respect for death. The eponymous London old age home, stopping-off place of the mysterious
old-fashioned Englishman Max Montfalcon, one obsessed with 'numbers', is not unlike the
gas chambers where a younger incarnation of Max once worked. Inmates are screened, kept
under surveillance, helped to a quiet end. 'The camps began in the hospitals', Max observes on
an undertone, 'Then the hospitals moved to the camps'. And in turn, both places, running on a
heady mix of delusion and the mass-'through-put' of human beings, are shown to be not unlike
America's showcase and ultimate dreamland, Disneyworld/land. Here too we find
'unobtrusive steely discipline', 'guards carefully placed', 'control of numbers', prettified and
soothing deception, the 'appearance of normality, even optimism'. And the founder here too,
like Hitler, was a product of the Depression. Appropriately, this is the place is where Max will
end his own days, pleasurably, and where he will get the better of pursuer, Jack, the native of
Florida.
The implications of Max's success in evading the past are chilling. His fate indicates the
dangers of amnesia, one of the great seductive conditions of the culture that is also Jack's.
Forgetting is the side-effect of constant stimulus, a life-style of endlessly repeated MSGheightened gratification (Jack is a Chinese-food-faddist also). 'Retrospective moral
judgements in historical matters were vulgar', thinks Max, not of course without significance,
'One did what one did at the time'. Without memory we lose any hope of a moral position, we
cannot compare, judge, evaluate. Without a sense of history we are absolved of a sense of
responsibility. Max experiences his former life and experiments with race character and
eugenics as having happened to someone called von F.
A need for ethics is illuminated here by their complete lack. Also by our apparent inability, in
a post-modern New Age un-reality, where belief is fad, and history theme-fantasy, to plot a
personal centre, to establish, a position. Innocenta Max's loyal grand-daughter is a creature of
instant, short-lasting fixes and fictions: she has been a follower of Bhagwan, of Sri Chinmoy,
a peace activist, a Raelian, a friend of the whale, a member of the International Church of
Meditation and so on. Finally her role is -- amorally, and on impulse -- to assist her massmurdering relative to evade his enemies (Jack and her MP father) and to escape to Florida's
dream kingdom.
As is clear from the start, Serenity House the novel is itself a thing of surfaces, pastiches,
beguiling and shifting appearances, now-you-see-them now-you-don't resemblances, selfconscious parodies of film and novel styles. As Innocenta says, fakes are 'sometimes better
than boring originals'. 'And so one drove away smiling, as the happiest endings insist, into the
sunset' is how the novel closes. The language of the narrative comprises endless verbal
stimulus, lists of jokey proper names, brand names standing in for reality, characters named
by synecdoche (the Five Incontinents). It is bent on thrills, designer jokes, plays on words. In
this way it enacts, very deliberately, the phantasmagoria it speaks of. Breathlessly. And at
times with stupefying effect.
The question which a reader has to ask at the end of it all is whether the novel, finally, was
substantial enough to sustain its own meaning. A number of critics have already asked the
question. It has to bear considerable moral and historical weight, both chilling accounts of
Holocaust (with shades of Southern African discrimination and mass-policing?), and an
indictment of contemporary cults and cultures which pleasure self. Can the story do it? For it
is no epic or saga. As with many jokes, including dark ones, it rests on analogies that may be
merely superficial or temporary. Other than its interlocking metaphors, which are
magnificently done, there is not much else to the narrative as such, other than a notional whodunnit and escape tale: is Max von F? and will Jack the Giant-killer nab his prey, the tall
Giant Max? The surface verbal displays can be distracting, and at times work at the expense
of narrative. Character becomes a sick laugh, a set of slogans, a crafty stereotype.
Yet to require something else -- what might it be? solemnity? graver shades of tone,
reminiscent of a Victorian realist? -- is perhaps to ask this novel to break its own generic
game plan. And to supply what it manifestly suggests Western cultures have misplaced,
irretrievably. Our worlds are decentred. We may have half-memories and dreams of such
authorities as history, fact, the individual, society, but they exist only as possibilities or stories
we might tell, or temporary entertainments. But that is perhaps to give way too readily to the
post-modern effects that the novel colludes in, and to miss that something other it hints at but
cannot state.
For we remain creatures who seek to judge. As readers certainly we are asked to make
meaning, to assess the options. And as such we are in search of the means to talk about and
even condemn Max and his kind. The novel points to the lack of these means, in so far as
these require a shared moral language. But it also points to our need; it goads us into judging,
for ourselves, as interpreters. And as such, parts of this novel for all of their careful postmodernity reminded me of nothing so much as Dickens, though without the leaky
sentimentality.
Here, as in Dickens, there is the gusto of the narrative voice, delighted by the grim grotesques
it displays, the caricatures of social villains, the unlikely yet strangely appropriate names, the
gimmickry and gimcrackery combined with sinister implication. Perhaps most strikingly of
all, in this Hope novel as in Dickens one finds the grand metaphors signifying a general social
malaise, and, as in Dickens' Circumlocution system, the inescapability of contamination. As
in Dickens again there are times when one longs for something slower and steadier, more of a
'lived' tale. Nonetheless within the rules of the genre -- whether of bleak caricature, or of
chilling post-modern pastiche -- Hope has succeeded brilliantly. This is an extremely
uncomfortable novel; its questions worry.
Through understatement, and wonderfully plain, bald, noncommittal sentences, rather than
through excess, Damon Galgut in his novella The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs creates his own
brand of disturbing narrative. For long moments during the opening scenes everything appears
as typical as it can get in a rich white South African family set-up: a broken marriage, two
sons, one macho, one 'sissy'; visits to an Afrikaans ouma on her farm. But soon it appears that
the clear language acts as little more than a thin if tensile protective covering against the
ominous reality 'out there'. The warped mix of personal and social contradictions of that
reality is observed from the point of view of an apparently naive (as his mother describes it),
dispassionate first person narrator. The language is his. Beneath his absorbed plein air gaze,
heightened by the desert emptiness and light, South Africa's disfigurements appear -- if this
were possible -- more strange and pathological than is usually the case: the mother's obsession
to belong in Africa, for which she seeks to have sex with a black man; the son's participation
in Namibia's independence ceremonies following active service in the South African Defence
Force on the Namibian-Angolan border.
The very different lives of the three central characters, the son Patrick Winter, the mother who
at once moves and repulses him, and her black SWAPO lover Godfrey are brought together
and then again blown apart by the assassination and burial ceremony of an important absent
fourth, the white SWAPO activist Andrew Lovell. The image of this man, gunned down in
youth, indeed at Patrick's age, becomes the focus of his obsessions. He is preoccupied by the
death of a friend on the border, a man temperamentally like him, whom he loved, and he is
preoccupied by his own condition, an isolated onanistic individualism. At moments of stress
he is victim of a psychological illness resulting from a breakdown following his friend's
death. The effect of his fits is to defamiliarise the everyday and normalise the strange, he
experiences an intense highly symbolic dislocation, 'I forgot common words, couldn't finish
sentences' (p. 117).
But identifying with Andrew Lovell temporarily dissolves some of these obsessions. As he
becomes more and more involved with the man in his mind, identities and histories
concatenate. Patrick, bizarrely but believably, helps to dig Andrew's grave. As the body
descends into the ground, definitions of innocence and guilt merge in Patrick's thoughts:
Did I shoot Andrew Lovell?
No, I thought, I am him.
He is, yet he isn't. He is victim and killer. Thinking of Andrew dead he feels the stake in his
heart used to slaughter pigs at the farm, but he himself has also wielded such a stake. On the
border he shot a SWAPO fighter. He is a destroyer yet at the same time he is the one who
loved his butter-fingered soldier friend, Lappies, as he now feels drawn to this absent hero.
Patrick Winter's obsessions point to a fundamental question regarding identity in a new or
rapidly changing society: how does one set about being, or about making a self, when the
available models are defunct or fake or no more than creations of fantasy? How is one to
express oneself as a man (and specifically here a man -- a man loving men) when the
examples are limited to one's muscular, testosterone-driven father or brother? Perhaps the
most enduring strength of this novel is that it introduces -- and courageously does not attempt
immediately to answer -- these questions.
Yet in a way that no South African novel in English to my knowledge has yet done, it places
masculinity, gay and straight, in the South African context under close scrutiny. The
pervasive metaphor of the desert, its emptiness, and its light, the searing, stripping quality of
that light (with reflections of Camus' L'etranger ), outlines the need for new investigations.
The Namibia of the novel is independent but strangely empty, embedded with hulks of history
and corpses. To fill the emptiness, to escape 'the insidious wind.of war and ideology',
quickened ways of being, new kinds of loving, are required. 'We need space to live, we need
space to die' thinks Patrick as he digs Andrew's grave.
Short Stories
Isaacson
Padayachee
Wicomb, Zoe
The Finishing Touch -- Stories from the 1991 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award
edited by Andries Oliphant
COSAW Publishing, Johannesburg, 159pp, R27.50, 1992, 1 874879 1SX
Holding Back Midnight
by Maureen Isaacson
COSAW Publishing, Johannesburg, 128pp, R27.50, 1992, 1 874879 18 4
What's Love Got To Do With It
by Deena Padayachee
COSAW Publishing, Johannesburg, 171pp, R27.50, 1992, 1 874879 14 1
reviewed by Zoe Wicomb
(Zoe Wicomb)

Southern African Review of Books, Issue 25, May/June 1993
The privilege of being a white, male South African is to be called up to serve in the military.
There is an initial period of National Service which used to be two years in duration.
Thereafter at the discretion of the military unit commanders and the Minister of Defence, at
least one call-up should be expected each year which can range from a day to three months of
mostly frustration and boredom (Ken Benn 'Weekend Call-up' in The Finishing Touch ,)
The classification -- and especially the occasional reclassification -- of people in terms of this
Act, which rigidly and inexorably divided South Africans into various groups, resulted in
many inconveniences, problems and even tragedies ... The Act dictated whom people could
marry, (even whom they could have sex with!) where they could live, work and go to school
... (Mari Wessels, 'Looking a Dark Horse in the Mouth' in The Finishing Touch ,)
A reader, searching for the authors in the above extracts from award-winning stories in The
Finishing Touch , would be forgiven for thinking that she had picked up the wrong book -this is after all not the mode of narration that one expects of fiction. But then these stories are
not fictions; they are about the real South Africa. As we can see from the effacement of a
speaker, the indifference to a reader, the absence of discourse, these are indeed what the editor
calls 'documentary narrative', which is to say history, and which draws attention to its status
as the real thing, as truth.
In an earlier issue of this journal (January/February 1993) Elleke Boehmer lists the following
markers of white South African writing: 'liberal agonistics, the apocalyptic heterosexual
embrace, the existential quest journey, studied realism, dilemmas of identity and language'. A
taxonomy of South African writing is long overdue: it provides an economical way of
referring to our writing and offers the critic a point of departure. 'Studied realism' does not
quite cover the documentary narrative so that I would like to make my modest contribution to
a taxonomy of our writing by adding the latter. In the process of doing so, I have, of course,
modified Boehmer's racial modifier. In post-apartheid South Africa we no longer speak of
chromatic writing.
As a newcomer to our list, the 'documentary narrative' has not adequately been theorised.
First, we must attend to the flexibility of this mode which can be adopted at any point within
the conventional narrative in order to bestow authenticity. Witness, for instance, its use in the
following extract from Fred Khumalo's 'Ramu the Hermit':
The police would just go straight in there and haul him out. They were that ruthless. They
arrogated to themselves powers to arrest people without a warrant and detain them
indefinitely, without charging them.
Ramu, an African Hindu ascetic who is injured during a political riot which he views purely
as a hindrance to his meditation, finds himself in the bed of a despised prostitute. A reader
who has come to know Ramu through the narrative mode of 'He had chosen his way. The holy
way. The only way to heaven ... He was not going to be moved', will not recognise him as the
focaliser in the earlier extract. Irony -- that politically suspect trope -- used with great effect
by Khumalo, is rehabilitated through the insertion of the documentary. Where writers provide
explanatory apartheid grids in which to fit their narratives, a sharp distinction between
information and the unfolding of the story is drawn. And by placing the information beyond
the temporal framework of the narrative, the situation is deliberately defictionalised.
Like any speaker, a writer of fiction is, of course, crucially concerned with a reader's (or
addressee's) background knowledge. Understanding of a text as discourse is bound up with
the way in which such knowledge of the world is inscribed in the text, so that the writer
cannot take sole responsibility for the understanding of a message. The reader's knowledge of
the world in which the fiction is located is called upon as bridging assumptions in a complex
inferential process activated by the text. Understanding discourse can then be seen as a
process of fitting what one is told into a framework established by what one already knows.
Conventional aspects of a situation are not mentioned since these can be retrieved by the
reader through inferencing.
The phenomenon of redundant elements drifting so wantonly into our texts, as in the above
examples, raises interesting questions about readership. Why mention inferable information
and why the spatial frames of reference that we would not construct in ordinary speech to coSouth Africans? The answer, of course, is that such writing does not address co-South
Africans but rather addresses a foreigner who does not know and who has no inferential
powers. This is not only a misconception of the reading process -- foreigners too can infer -but points to fissures in some of our cherished ideals: the growth of a national literature and
cultural autonomy, when in fact we look hopefully at a world literature in the English
language and at a readership abroad. However, as the globe shrinks under the authority of
world capital and the English language continues to take colonial strides, these desires are not
so unreasonable. But we do need to examine the contradictions underlying our pious claims
for an autonomous national culture as our pens stubbornly follow in the wake of electronic
media and point towards the world, shunning the narrow notion of nation. And a concomitant
lesson to be learnt by writers is that addressing the English-speaking world is not so different
from addressing the nation -- the electronic media have ensured that our bridging assumptions
have become much the same the world over. Lessons in apartheid laws are as redundant as
explaining to the world that Dallas belongs to JR.
In 'Weekend Call-up' Ken Benn's narrator gives an account of resisting military orders. Benn
denies a distinction between author and narrator in the following:
I received a letter from my Officer-in-Command the very next day. He demanded a written
statement of me explaining my reluctance to take command of my troops. The letter I wrote in
return was pretty much a summary of what I've written here.
The story claims to be an unmediated account of events: not quite the letter, but a gloss on the
letter that includes an explanation of the story's authenticity. But a crucial difference is
overlooked: the addressee has changed; the language of the letter cannot be the same as the
language about the letter. Benn's testimony of life in the South African Defence Force has lost
sight of a readership beyond the sterile structures of that institution. When the Officer returns
his letter instructing him to 'Carry out the corrections I've made and resubmit it within three
days' we witness its transformation into a fiction. One suspects that a writer of fiction has
much to learn from the Officer's red pencilled version with its lacunae, its deliberate doctoring
for a particular readership, its self-conscious awareness of its status as discourse and its
controlling voice.
The development of a literary culture is the aim of the short-story competitions administered
by COSAW Publishing. Andries Oliphant says in his introduction to The Finishing Touch that
'the rationale for the award is to stimulate new work by emergent writers and to provide
publication opportunities'. Like elsewhere, the award is something of a lottery, reliant on the
vagaries of individual taste, but a look at the spread of stories begs the question of how
appropriate the literary prize is as a means of stimulating new work in South Africa. Since the
basic material for writing is linguistic competence and since the legacy of apartheid is an
under-developed and ill-educated black majority, the competition can only entrench inequity.
What it necessarily means is to reward writers for their privilege, even as adjudicators ensure
that their choices represent the various racial groups. But, like parties in the Southern suburbs
of Cape Town, the publication volume simply does not and cannot reflect the demographic
reality of South Africa. COSAW's avowed aim at its inception which was to offer practical
help such as writing workshops in the townships, seems a far more realistic programme of
action. It is surprising that no anthology from such a venture has seen the light of day.
'The Story About The Man Who Could Fly' does come from a training programme in cultural
organisation and production offered by the Culture and Working Life Project and COSATU.
It is a collaborative project by five writers and a facilitator who edited and prepared the final
version. The story approaches, as the introduction says, 'the problem of internecine violence
through the fantastical tropes of indigenous oral narratives', a good enough reason for
including it. From the available lines of argument, let us proceed from the pride of place in the
taxonomy of struggle literature that 'oral writing' occupies. (And let us for the moment
overlook distasteful arguments about tradition and nation to which it is so often bound.)
Features of orality in a written text, such as redundancy, repetition or simple sentence
structure, are of course a slap in the elitist face of Gutenberg, and violate our anachronistic
expectations of writing. But the point is that its context of production overrides the notion of
merit. If we agree that such work is of cultural and historical interest, then we can surely not
also subscribe to merit awards. That would be a category error that undermines the very
project of an historicist approach to a democratic literary culture. Taxonomies are also always
political statements -- a volume of 'oral writing' would make a more meaningful contribution
to a literary democracy.
For those irrevocably seduced by Gutenberg: Elise Beattie's 'The Water Diviner', Arja
Salafranca's 'Solly Bernstein's Story' and John Singh's 'The Ultimate Sin', deal with sexuality
in a manner that may well point towards a revision of our tradition.
With the foul Dalip as focaliser, John Singh legitimises his savoured account of Dalip's sexual
exploits. When the protagonist is expelled from school for raping a teacher at knife-point, -'She pushed him away, he pulled out his knife. She let him in, scared at first. Then she seemed
to enjoy it.' -- some readers will correctly infer that our real world misogynistic institutions
share Dalip's view of rape. Which is why Dalips are protected and expelled rather than handed
over to the police. Other readers may have to wait for Dalip's inability to accept 'the disgrace,
the sheer shamefulness' of his own daughter eloping with a black boy, before realising how
loathsome he is.
Beattie studies the articulation of ethnic difference and sexuality through a first person
narrator, Linda, who tells the story of an Afrikaner water diviner on her father's farm. They
have no need of a bore-hole, but Jacob makes himself so useful that he somehow takes on the
role of farm overseer, symbolically displacing the father. Linda's brother, Thomas, bursts out
at dinner table, '"Do you know how many names there are for Afrikaners? You can call them
Rocks or Romans or Dutchmen or Planks or even Crunchies, did you know that?"' Thomas
does not call the Afrikaner names; rather, he refers to the names, echoes them as common
cultural knowledge and so naturalises the contempt. He does not address Jacob. His speech,
ignoring the presence of the man, is significantly cast in the interrogative mood, demanding a
response from the rest of the family, an acknowledgement of the Afrikaner's difference and
inferiority. The boy's dismissal from the table and the father's apologies to the guest point to
their lack of a language for dealing with ethnic difference, and so amount to the
acknowledgement that Thomas demands.
Thomas's hostility is that of an adolescent male who recognises the latent sexual attraction
that Jacob holds for his mother and sister. The lean body, smouldering eyes and swollen red
lips of the Afrikaner indeed represent the concupiscence that the adolescents suspect. After
Jacob molests Linda, she agrees to help Thomas to get rid of him, and the water-diviner with
his symbolic divining stick is driven off the farm. He may not have found water, but he had
uncovered the loneliness and the inchoate desires of the women on the farm.
Salafranca's protagonist, Solly Bernstein, does not waste his time on novels as women do,
which is to say that he is a serious thinker. In one respect we discover that he is right, for it is
surely novels (Boehmer's 'apocalyptic heterosexual embrace') that are responsible for the
popular conflation of sex and liberation. When this finicky, celibate and complacent man is
introduced to sex by the smooth, exploitative Arthur, there is the promise of a new free world.
But Arthur is a shit who disappears back into an unsatisfactory marriage and although Solly
has been jolted into an awareness of the emptiness of his life, his sexual awakening can hardly
be viewed as a gift. What use the liberal-humanist value of self-discovery when you are left
'wounded and weak', when the refuge of your home has turned into a prison and when you
feel too old to act upon the knowledge? Having had his repression and failure to relate to
others revealed, Solly Bernstein is left with nothing. Except for reading about homosexuality,
much as one would consult a medical text on discovery of a new condition.
Maureen Isaacson's, Holding Back Midnight, is remarkable in its lack of a finishing touch.
There is perhaps something inconclusive, something unfinished about these narratives, but
their very impudent delivery reminds one that they do not aim to toe the line. It is the absence
of a single style, her shifts in register from the ice-cool hip-hop or popular journalistic modes
to fancy belles lettres that makes Isaacson's writing so distinctive. We have indeed entered the
post-modern and post-colonial world of collage, where curious conjunctions present
themselves as the normal mode of making meaning. And the short short story, in affordable
pocket-size COSAW format, is just the thing to address new reading practices in our
beleaguered times.
The title story gives a glittering account of the narrator's family waiting in their anachronistic
setting to see in the millennium. The story is about time: the party excitement of waiting for
midnight; the suspension of time as they nostalgically remember other, more luxurious New
Year's Eve parties; and the negation of time in their refusal to accept the present, a New South
Africa. The familial bonhomie, thin as ice, frozen in the era of apartheid, and crisply reported
by the narrator, is at the same time translated into horror by her chirpy voice which identifies
their folly, their resistance to change, the phantasmagoria of their situation:
History is ever-present in my father, like the patterns that shimmer from the chandeliers over
the cracked walls. It is trapped in the broken paving outside this hotel where angels of delight
once fluttered eyelashes as if they were wings at white men.
These collocative clashes speak loudly of displacement and of the inscription of time in the
physical fissures. Temporal and spatial dislocation are also captured in the following
disjunctive dialogue:
my father says, 'False alarm. Who let the dogs out?' Leon is nowhere to be seen. 'Have a
snack.' mother offers. It is anchovy, tart and salty. 'Is it nearly time for champagne?' I want to
know. 'It won't be long now,' says Dad, as if he were meting out a punishment.
Isaacson is not concerned with calendrical time. Midnight that significant marker, becomes
marker of resistance to time, a moment of denial in which the father situates himself
elsewhere, in an imagined space, an imagined time: 'From a great distance I hear my father
saying that there is still one minute to go.' It is not the alienation of modernism, but rather
post-modern fragmentation that characterises the world of her narrators.
A number of the stories deal with the characters' problematic relationship with place which is
to say that being situated geographically in South Africa is necessarily a state of selfconsciousness, one that induces self-reflexivity and one in which language is anything but a
transparent medium of communication. The narrator is often in dialogue with a lover as in
'Jo'burg City' and 'Whose Triomf'; forging a relationship is itself bound up with the ethics of
space. Fredric Jameson's 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping ... the raising of spatial issues as a
model of political culture' springs to mind as the narrator invokes European cities or grapples
with Johannesburg as a geo-political space in which to locate herself. Triomf, the petit
bourgeois suburb built on the ruins of Sophiatown, is filled with the ghosts of the past; place
is shot through with time and the discontinuities imposed by apartheid make it impossible to
view the space as neutral, as simply to be occupied.
The characters of Aunt Sal and the grandfather, Leo King, who knew Sophiatown and
represent the halcyon days of the Drum decade, express that discontinuity. They are
remembered figures from the narrator's childhood, and her obsession with them, her vicarious
experiences through them, testifies to the temporal disjuncture that characterises her own life.
Jazzy Aunt Sal who 'with the fumes and stains and conversation of nights in shebeens'
disrupts the posh dinner parties of their Houghton home and photo-journalist Leo King who
knew Can Themba and Miriam Makeba and spoke tsotsitaal , represent the crossing of
terrains, the geo-cultural exchange between black and white. In 'Whose Triomf' the narrator,
believing that the tragic events of that period are ominously repeated in present times, hints at
an homology of culture. But being cast in supernatural terms, such analysis is unfortunately
dissipated. This mystical dimension which also crops up in some of the other stories is not to
everyone's taste, but Isaacson's facility with pastiche, her play with culture and subculture
carries it off.
There is, however, the author's own unease about her nostalgic representation of the Drum
decade. She preempts criticism by allowing the narrator's lover to accuse her of romanticising,
but the reader from Soweto would surely point out that the crossing of terrain was
unidirectional: whilst whites immersed themselves in Sophiatown, their black friends did not
come to Houghton; the act of crossing geographical boundaries itself encodes a position of
privilege.
Intersecting with spatio-temporal concerns is the question of language, writing and
representation which troubles Isaacson's female narrators. They flirt with the 'liberal
agonistics' of our list as they struggle with the role of stories in their lives, with the metanarrational question of how to represent, and with the relationship between language, writing
and the truth. And underpinning the volume as a temporal framework is the question of
growing up, which also works as metonym for political growth in a changing South Africa.
Isaacson's subversion of the 'identity crisis' is best shown in a story called 'Lies'. In this first
person account an unnamed adolescent discovers that the lesbian mother had inseminated
herself with the sperm donated by an Indian friend who treats the child to stories about
Krishna's birth. The ambiguous inscription of gender makes it possible to read the narrator as
either male or female struggling with the question of sexual identity. There is also the
possibility of reading the entire story of tracing origins as an elaborate fiction which
introduces a parodic element into the exploration of identity. The attempt by the narrator to
come to terms with his/her origins, by returning to 'that Yeoville apartment of my origins'
ends with 'I thought, you can as soon wean a liar raised on lies as you can a week-old calf of
milk.'
Isaacson's imagery as in 'Nights in the warm apartment smelt deliriously of garlic and ginger,
dust and Dickens' is not so remarkable for its standard poetical device of sound patterning, but
rather for its collage of images from different cultures and different times. For the reader with
knowledge of the Immorality Act, the insemination is parodic, but wonderfully refreshing for
South African writing, race is not an issue. The test-tube in which the semen was carried is
variously translated into a spice-jar (marker of 'Indianness'), into a ship in a bottle, into the
glass lift at Sandton City, in other words pervading the entire world of the narrator racked
with identity crisis. Her disparate multi-cultural world, connected through iconic media
images, becomes itself a message in a bottle that could drift to any shore to be decoded by any
reader.
The story is a cunning mixture of parody and pastiche. The mother says the following of the
sun: 'While it's sitting in a pale stupor over the Venetian waters, it is also being aroused by the
dust in Pakistan. While this one dies next to a statue in Vienna, another is born down the road
in Houghton.' Her view of the multi-dimensionality of the universe is pure pastiche of the
sixties-awakened liberal, but these images are also parodied in an entirely credible postmodern collage that the journalist narrator captures in the image of herself 'creating Garbo's
out of workaday TV continuity announcers'.
Isaacson's inscription of politics and history is economical and understood as common
cultural knowledge. However, the known inferential pool from which readers draw meaning
is not a stable entity but rather fluctuates according to our racial and gender differences. When
Vusi in 'Foreigners' explains: 'In South Africa it was always the one thing we dreamed of
doing making love with a white girl. Let me tell you it was a let down. Black girls know how
to please their men', I suspect that this reader's understanding differs from that of the
protagonist. Holding Back Midnight makes an important statement about cultural hybridity
and interdependence, scorning the pieties of tradition and nation, but it is a statement that
Isaacson can only, and consciously makes from a particular position. Other than in
'Foreigners', itself a denouncement of 'liberal agonistics', the narratives are exemplary in their
lack of black characters.
Deena Padayachee's subject matter is also culture but his exploration of 'Indianness' has as
little in common with Isaacson as his collection, What's Love Got To Do With It, has with the
exuberance of Tina Turner. Certainly Turner's song of the same title, dismissing love as a
second hand emotion, goes against the grain of these stories where love has definite social
implications. The 'it' of Padayachee's title can be recovered as cultural difference which, in
answer to the question, is overcome through love. Narratives articulate racial politics and
cultural difference with love, but gender difference, raised in the same context, remains
uncomfortably suspended between the two.
The title story starts with a debate between medical students about the wastefulness of
training women doctors who invariably marry and do not practise medicine. A male character
points out that the 'concept of female doctors goes against every aspect of the Indian cultural
outlook as we know it' and Shenaz, the female student agrees:
... yes, it goes against the woman's basic maternal instinct when her career jeopardises her
home and family. But then we have this terrible conflict within ourselves; on the one hand we
want to do everything we can to use all that God gave us to serve our country ... on the other
hand we have this perfectly normal desire to love and be loved by someone very special to us.
That love should conflict with working as a doctor is an unquestioned presupposition and why
it should do so for women but not men is not explained but rather side-stepped in the
suggestion that apartheid has produced conditions that demand working women, which is to
say demand that their nature be perverted. Why apartheid -- so useful in so many unexpected
ways -- should not also pervert the nature of men and inflict on them altered perceptions about
gender roles in the home and family, is not discussed.
'What's Love Got To Do With It' demands of its reader complex negotiation of its narrative
strands. Shenaz, the strict Muslim who does not date, falls in love with Riaz, a member of a
different Muslim group. Cultural difference is discussed by their friends, and the title,
significantly uttered by a Sotho student, suggests that if people are intellectually compatible
and love each other, racial or religious differences are of no consequence. The love affair,
slow in taking off, is galvanised by Riaz being arrested for protesting against the
government's attempts to exclude African students from their medical school. We are shown
how solidarity amongst people who oppose apartheid helps to overcome cultural difference;
the politicised parents do not object to the marriage. Some of us will remember that this happy
ending constitutes a revival of the earlier argument since 'lovely little' Shenaz is about to
marry and presumably will either waste her education or grow ill under the conflicting roles
of doctor and wife. The text, having nothing to say on this matter, fails to integrate the
question of gender so energetically raised at the beginning of the story.
These themes are concatenated elsewhere in the volume. 'Surprize Package' gives the
converse situation where marriage is an arranged affair between two people of the same
religion who appear to be socially well-suited. But the marriage fails because the woman does
not share the man's enlightened political beliefs and indeed loves another who is necessarily
excluded because of his different religion. The reader, given privileged access to the thoughts
of each as they converse during courtship, understands that her language is formulated to
catch a husband. Her female duplicity, admittedly imposed by foolish observance of religious
difference, is foregrounded in the pathetic scenario of an infant fathered by the previous lover.
In 'An African Lotus' we encounter another articulation of cultural difference with the
authoritarian project of the state. The title is also the name of a collection of short stories
which has been prescribed at black schools and which includes a story is about a 'Ruz girl's
illicit affection for a non-Ruz'. Padayachee's narrative explores cultural politics through an
analogy with The Satanic Verses : a foolish, philistinic campaign excludes the work on
grounds of its religious content and so falls neatly into the hands of the security forces who
object to its radical politics. Insistence on cultural division is shown to be an effect of the
apartheid system which encourages intolerance and fixed cultural identity in order to promote
its own ends.
Many of the stories are concerned with identity, with an 'Indianness' bred under apartheid that
defines itself in terms of pigmentation, financial success and white, bourgeois values. In 'A
Pestilence in the Land' when Mrs Chetty wishes her daughter's suitor to convert his political
energy into making more money, we are told that 'the kungum on her parents forehead gave
her a dignity which was being betrayed by her words'. The respectable members of the
community reject a suggestion that they clear a rubbish dump which the council refuses to
remove: 'WE can't be seen picking up rubbish like common labourers'.
In 'The Finishing Touch' (also winning story of the Gordimer Award volume), Coopoosamy
who changes his name to Cooper because of the obvious advantages that a white name has for
business, is at first portrayed with compassion. But corruption sets in once he is alerted to his
quintessential 'Indianness', his stereotypical lack of finesse, by the loathsome clerk at the
Department of Indian Affairs: ' ... an Indian will sweat blood to build a house, but he won't
spend a Rand on getting his grass verge cut ... An Indian will study hard and qualify as a
doctor but he'll talk like a motor mechanic'. Cooper's attempt to erase his 'Indianness' by
adopting white values, and notably white speech, turns him into a figure of contempt.
Some of the stories creak horribly under the burden of their messages. 'A New Woman in
Town' becomes unintentional burlesque as the sycophancy and double standards of an Indian
community are hammered home in a narrative of absurd coincidences. Whiteness, as also
displayed in the extraordinary portrayal of a white woman who goes out with an Indian man,
is an undifferentiated category that need not be interrogated. This is a mistake, since most
puzzling in Padayachee's grappling with Indian identity, is the inscription of the very 'white'
values for which he whips his characters. Concern about bourgeois respectability is
unmistakable in the authorial voice that describes the background to Shireen's attractiveness
as 'the neat ordered lounge of her parents' flat'. The admirable Riaz greets Shenaz's mother
with: '"Cosy flat you have here, Mrs Vawda; I like your lounge suite," Riaz smiled politely.'
This extraordinary observation, instead of earning him a clip on the ear, finds great favour
with the family. In 'The Guests' where the girl-ghost visits their expropriated home and
befriends the white child, the omniscient narrator takes great pains to describe the Indian
home as being designed to the taste of the European immigrants who need not renovate it. The
unfortunate effect is to skew the moral focus of forced removals which surely is reprehensible
regardless of the class of people or the quality of housing or decor.
With such values underpinning the narratives and valorising bourgeois notions of good taste,
the exposure of Europeanised Indians has to be taken with a pinch of salt. The success of
stories like the satirical 'A Letter to the Mayor', narrated by a member of the security force,
lies in its avoidance of not only ethnic identity but of all the categories in the taxonomy of
South African writing.
Boehmer
Nuttall, Sarah
Screens Against the Sky
by Elleke Boehmer
Bloomsbury (London), 1990
An Immaculate Figure
by Elleke Boehmer
Bloomsbury (London), 231pp, 15.99, 1993, 0 7475 1386 4
(Elleke Boehmer)
reviewed by Sarah Nuttall

Southern African Review of Books, Issue 26, July/August 1993
Elleke Boehmer has written two sharply focused novels: each have heroines who are
characterised by passivity, their failure to see, and to act, beyond the confines of their white
South African lives. Boehmer explores her characters with often acute subtlety and by writing
the kinds of books she does slips the boundaries which have frequently confined South
African writing. They are richly layered texts, alert to the many resonances of Boehmer's
subject, and they confront some of the challenges of writing about 'restricted vision'. I will
talk about her new book, An Immaculate Figure, after looking at her first, Screens Against the
Sky .
Annemarie, the narrator in Boehmer's first novel, lives in her own little white South African
world. Growing up in a suburb of a segregated town in South Africa, she reads the time away
-- and writes in her journal. She is bound up with, but also bound in by, stories: they are a
means of escape, bringing her contact with a different world, but they also enclose her,
providing a substitute for action.
Annemarie makes several attempts to break out of her sheltered life but they are always
limited, too tentative to amount to much. She decides to 'take the affairs of the nation to heart'
by copying out newspaper reports and writing them into her journal. 'The reading made all the
action and was exciting enough', she says. When Simon the gardener reacts to the news of
Steve Biko's death -- announced on the piece of newspaper Annemarie has brought him his
lunch on -- she realises there is a whole other story of which she knows nothing. This is an
'item of information' she cannot immediately transfer to her journal, and, realising that there
are events 'not subject to the control' of her pen, she stops writing the journal.
Simon is connected to a world of political resistance which is doubly inaccessible to
Annemarie not only because she is white, but a woman. When Annemarie takes Simon his
lunch, she also hands him coffee in a mug inscribed with the words 'Our Dad'. Simon, as a
man, is the inheritor not of her father's politics, but of his access to politics. Politics,
throughout the novel, is mediated by men. The 'Our Dad' lettering is also an incongruous
label, suggesting that in the apartheid context, people and situations carry false names (Simon
wears a T-shirt with the words, 'Bay City Rollers'), as well as the absurdity of the mug as
being the last relic of the father's rule (the influence of the patriarch, despite his death, is
pervasive throughout the book).
After her father's death, Annemarie and her mother are thrown together in their isolation.
There is little of the 'sisterly congeniality' Annemarie has hoped for: instead, her mother goes
on tranquillisers, stops playing the piano and grows fearful. Boehmer shows up the tensions
and rivalries between mother and daughter, the way they knock against each other, rather than
warmly bond. Once they have moved to a flat in another town, they sit and read together in an
a-historical vacuum. The radio is turned off at news time and so is the TV because, Sylvie
says, 'it shows the bad in the world too clearly Reading at home, you learn more than you ever
would elsewhere', and Hoopstad, anyway, 'lacks history'.
Annemarie walks 'a little way in the direction of the township' outside Hoopstad, but feels she
must get home to her mother. She also walks to the compound at the back of the clinic where
she has a job 'to have another look at things', but is reprimanded for her trespass. When
Adrian, who by Annemarie's standards counts as a friend, gives her a suitcase for safekeeping,
she does not know that it contains illegal anti-apartheid pamphlets. Her mother finds out,
however, and insists that they dump it on the rubbish pile outside the building. Soon after this
incident, and the disruption it has caused, they again leave town.
Boehmer has written a story about enclosure, and failure to escape. Annemarie again and
again returns to her mother's house, and idiom, and it is a return too to the mother in the sense
that Annemarie never comes to maturity and finds her own means of expression. Her lack of
growth repeats the wider stuntedness of her society, and the inability of certain forms of life to
flourish. It is Annemarie's confinement, her partial vision, which is telling and which is the
locus of the story. It is this lack which has to be understood, Boehmer implies, before white
South African women can escape these limits. White South African fiction too, by drawing
attention to the retardedness of white vision, can open the way for new writing more
audacious and flamboyant, as Boehmer has said, in its concerns.
Boehmer hints at literary 'enclosures' which she seeks to escape: she deliberately writes
against the guilt and 'seen totality' which has characterised the liberal South African novel,
and she refuses to write an unambiguously 'woman's novel'. She writes what she calls 'a Black
Conciousness novel by a white writer': Annemarie is excluded from the black world, but at
the same time it is her nascent political relationship with Simon which is her deepest secret,
and the one more threatening than the secret that she has had sex with her cousin. One of the
richest and lightest portrayals is Boehmer's characterisation of 'African romance'. The day
Annemarie learns of Biko's death is the day, Boehmer writes, 'her African romance ended'.
Just before this, Annemarie and her mother go on holiday to a mountain resort, and
Annemarie falls for the man in the hut next door who smells of grass and sun and reads
adventure stories. He invites her to go 'reconnoitring along the boundary fence' and
Annemarie, although she never goes, takes up the story, complete with macho hunters, in her
journal. Boehmer hits off the careless fortissimo with which romances are written, the
repetition of themes and the adolescent sexual desires that drive them: 'The veld patroller and
I kept watch at border fences, living rough, outwitting strong predators, sharing water mouth
to mouth, enduring. I wrote with my left hand jammed firmly between my thighs. I forgot the
time ...'.
By mapping out these literary identities, Boehmer's own story moves beyond them. She offers
her text as only one reading, signalling the limits of her own vision by refusing to name, and
therefore contain, 'South Africa' in her text. Yet Boehmer also walks a narrow tightrope: the
enclosure of Annemarie's existence which she so vividly creates means that Boehmer's text is
narrowly focused, its energies spent on the portrayal of passivity and lack of response. In her
next novel, though it contains many of the same themes, Boehmer widens her focus, and takes
many more risks.
In An Immaculate Figure , the heroine under-reads the world, or possibly reads it and is not
saying. This is at least the potential promise of the story, and the hope the reader holds out.
Rosandra White is a young white South African woman who has grown up in Cradock, where
she wins the local beauty competition, and has the potential of becoming a national or
international model. She is perfect, immaculate, and apparently vacuous, gliding over the
surface of things, registering little or giving nothing away. To Jem, her childhood friend who
has been in love with her ever since, she is 'inscrutable, a mystery heroine'. Jem wonders
'What had moved her? What had she loved?' Much later, Ahmed says that her charm 'is in her
cute, irrelevant comments' but that 'behind that silence there's an endurance and strength and a
lot of thinking going on'. Yet Rosandra persists in being blank, dead-pan, absent and 'still'.
Boehmer is interested in the way innocence can itself be guilty: the frontispiece to the novel is
a quote from Graham Greene, 'Even innocence ... took on a dubious colour'. Rosandra has 'no
stain on her character' and cannot see 'the taint' in the world around her, but Boehmer gives
her heroine a flaw on her perfect white body: a big, black birthmark. At first it is 'a huge
freckle', 'a gravy stain', a harmless idiosyncrasy. Later it becomes a 'wound', a 'malignant'
growth, a 'rotting, sprouting polyp' with tentacle edges, and the 'outer stain of a hidden
infection'. Rosandra persists in seeing nothing, and, seeing nothing, being absolved, and this is
tinged and tainted as she acquires a 'hidden past', if only a series of acquired images -- a dead
body here, an overheard conversation there. Her implication, growing and spreading, is her
taint, potentially as ugly, tentacled and alive as other harmful perpetrations.
Rosandra is 'taken up' by two men, and she tells the story of her life with them to Jem. Bass is
an avuncular figure in her childhood (it is uncertain whether he is in fact her uncle) who is
based on the figure of Mike Hoare, the South African mercenary who attempted a coup of the
Seychelles in 1980. He is 'a man of Africa and prepared to fight for it' and he looks like a hero
on a comic book cover. He tells Rosandra stories of conquest in Africa, and when she is older
takes her with him to make her 'queen' of the African kingdom he is going to create, which
really means ensconcing her in an hotel on 'Eden island' somewhere off the coast while he
plans a coup. Boehmer hints at literary mappings -- Bass is the African adventurer/ the comic
book hero, while later on Thony reminds Rosandra of 'sagas and suspense' -- but these are
overlaid by other references, to contemporary South African figures and events. Rosandra lies
on the beach and buys a pair of sunglasses which makes her vision 'more fuzzy than it already
was'. Bass gives her a diamante' necklace, a string of false diamonds which doesn't last long:
one of his drunk fellow coup-mates, supposed to be Rosandra's 'date', grabs it as he falls
drunkenly off his chair one night. It is one of many jewel images in the novel, signalling
empty allure, false promise, glitter and cheap ornamentation. The image itself is a 'false
promise', a demonstration of a tinny authenticity ('there would only ever be this moment, this
tinkling and falling').
Left alone after Bass has gone off to carry out his coup attempt which she only half registers,
Rosandra is spotted by Thony, the owner of Star Palace and out looking for 'unspoilt beauties',
a reference to both land and women. Thony is a thinly veiled Sol Kerzner, the South African
entrepreneur who created Sun City in the homeland of Bophutatswana. He has built 'a palace
of light, an empire', and he wants to enthrone Rosandra 'in the midst of all he possessed'.
Thony creates aquaparks out of drought lands, shaving and scraping the dry veld, and a man-
made grotto plastered with jewels and precious stones. Inside the 'crystalline beauty' of the
grotto, Rosandra feels that the hair on her arms looks desperately untidy, and shaves it all off.
Thony collects beauty only to damage it, Boehmer writes, and she weaves together
effacement of the land and of women's bodies.
In addition to the Ford Escort RX 3 which Tony gives Rosandra (which she cannot drive), she
gets a pair of glasses. She finds she can see things more clearly -- 'the scratches and stains on
things, cracks where there had been smooth, uninterrupted spaces'. The world was 'more
exposed than it had been, it was uglier, there was more detail in it, few plain surfaces'. When
Jem is about to hear the story of Thony he thinks that Rosandra might after all be 'a
consenting party, an active agent, self-willed'. The reader too expects that something will
happen, something will be revealed, and Rosandra will emerge from her chrysalis, her foetus
form, to see and act. All that really happens though, is that Rosandra unwittingly becomes
party to confidential information, which deepens the implications of her detachment. She
learns that Michaelis, Thony's black international art buyer, is an undercover agent for the
black liberation struggle. She thus has information of 'other plots', is party to knowledge, no
longer innocent of the facts.
In the final section of the novel, a limited awakening occurs. Rosandra finds herself across the
border from South Africa in a house of anti-apartheid activists (she sleeps with one of them
whom she meets in a bar). Ahmed describes her birthmark to her as 'a beautiful shape, the
colour of brinjals, your little hidden blackness'. There is the potential for her secret and her
shame to become something rich and positive, but Rosandra doesn't respond; he gives her
Siddhartha to read but she says she 'doesn't read much, not politics or poetry'. She does
however drive Ahmed and Sipho on their 'missions' across the South African border, and is
pleased she has something that is not her figure or her face to exchange for her board. Sipho
tells the story of his grandmother who in a Gandhi-like manner (she lives near where Gandhi
set up a community centre) assists the people around her to fight for their rights, and Rosandra
sets off to try and visit her. She gets lost in the township and cannot find her, however.
After Sipho's death -- he is ambushed and killed by the South African police -- Rosandra feels
guilt about the buried images she has retained. She had been lucky, she realises, taking things
as they came, but 'after a while her fortune developed a kind of theme and the theme stuck.
Her fortune was false appearances, men carrying and hiding arms. Sipho was tied up in that
fortune.' She misses a link she might have made, and the chance to use the information she
has, and realises that she 'should have seen'. Jem is both disappointed and reassured to see that
her guilt is made up, though, like the stories she invents ('... an embroidery, a fantasy, like her
stories'): She was 'offering a fantasy as reparation when her feeling of responsibility was
enough' and her guilt set her creating 'new plots, a different past'. The late Rosandra has
echoes of Annemarie in Screens
Against the Sky as both 'authors', creators of narratives and spinners of fantasies: both white
heroines are 'infected' (Boehmer's word in Immaculate Figure ) by stories.
Rosandra sheds her guilt 'like a delusion, a bad dream, it was one of her inconsequentialities'.
She touches Jem's hand but it holds 'no promise, no firmness'. We are back where we began
with Rosandra, or at least we have not come very far. She is in town to do a modelling shoot,
a cross-communal theme with African motifs in which she is the white representative.
Looking
around her she says to Jem in her vacuous way, 'This is so African, isn't it? ...You can
appreciate Africa for what it is, big, hot and intense'. Jem sees that she makes 'an unscathed
picture, a perfect figure'. His words are similar to the opening words of the book ('It made a
picture ... Beautiful entirely').
Yet Boehmer, between the beginning and end of this story which is at once flat plane and
enclosed circle, has raised large questions: Is innocence simply a reprehensible lack of
knowledge, or is it a good thing which can be implicated in guilt? (I think Boehmer vacillates
between the two). What kind of distinction is to be drawn between moral involvement, with
the risk of doing something wrong and the potential to do better, and not being morally
involved at all, being detached? These are questions for any reader but for South Africa too,
where responsibility and 'seeing' can have such powerful implications.
Boehmer has written a more ambitious book than her first novel, and it turns out to be richer,
and less successful in parts. Rosandra shares Annemarie's passivity, but she is not a literary
figure: her 'all surface' quality is located in a wider world of men and travel and arms dealing.
The risk of writing a novel that is not exciting enough is thus both greater and lesser: the
heroine is if anything more of an empty vessel, but the potential for the writing, panning a
wider terrain, is greater. Boehmer signals the danger when she has Rosandra say to Jem:
A story can feel wrong. There might be a bad teller. Or the person listening is in a bad mood.
Maybe he expects too much from the story. It's not exciting enough. You don't have to tell a
story many times to have it go flat. Look at what I've just been telling you. We spent all these
hours and I didn't even manage to give you Bass' kind of story. Bass' stories have real, firsthand excitement. You listen to every word. You know who's going to win, who the hero is.
There's a proper conflict, with real danger, explosions. I could listen to one of Bass' stories
today.
But despite the risk of thinness, there is great richness in this test: Boehmer weaves and
weaves her images, making them resurface and transform as the novel goes on. Jem (as in
'gem') is star-struck by Rosandra, who tells episodes in a 'beadlike' row, and jewel images
reverberate throughout the text, as Boehmer explores the intricacies, as far as it is possible, of
superficial white South Africans and their ultimately cheap constellations. She embeds
metaphors of sight, of the land, and perhaps the best and most striking of her images,
Rosandra's birth-mark, deeply in her text, so that one is not left with a superficial or
lightweight text.
Boehmer creates Rosandra as icon in part, giving her story the shades of parable. Thony refers
to the African icon he has bought from a European art exhibition and to Rosandra in the same
words: 'you beautiful thing'. When Rosandra has what might be sex with Thony, she remains
innocent of what has happened to the degree that she seems unfamiliar with 'penis', the word
or thing. She is aware of surfaces touching, that the 'covering' is human and feels her flesh
open to 'the force'. Rosandra remains pure, virginal, throughout, and this is an 'immaculate
conception', only there is no child: Rosandra has a 'phantom' pregnancy.
Boehmer has written a feminist book, but the heroine's story is a story about not seeing, not
acting, not being implicated; about being acted upon, about living in a fantasy world, even
about trying to retell men's stories, or stories about men. These are darker, deeper sides,
perhaps, to (some) women's stories, and more specifically too to white South African
women's stories. What are the stories that white South African women, encased, ensconced,
and often oblivious, are likely to tell? Boehmer has presented an extreme version, and she is
one of a new generation of white South African writers writing about white women's
experience. Perhaps Rosandra's extremity is needed, her almost obscene innocence, to press
home the extremity of her South African context -- and besides, Boehmer is experimenting
with images of pure fantasy, with the idea of an immaculate figure. Yet perhaps what might
follow on are more ambiguous white South African 'heroines', less stark in their innocence
and absence but woven with the same kind of skill that Boehmer so frequently displays in this
novel.
Van Heereden
Horn, Peter
The Genealogy of Shame
by Peter Horn
(Southern African Review of Books, Issue 36, March/April 1995)
Etienne van Heerden is one of the finest storytellers in South Africa today. Peter Horn
reviews the novel Ancestral Voices, at last translated into English, and a volume of fine short
stories
Ancestral Voices
by Etienne van Heerden
translated from Afrikaans by Malcolm Hacksley.
Allison & Busby, London, 1994, 260 pp., pbk Pound5.99, 0 74900 107 0
Mad Dog and Other Stories
by Etienne van Heerden
translated from Afrikaans by Catherine Knox.
Allison & Busby, London, 1995, 183pp., pbk Pound7.99, 0 7490 0112 7; David Philip, Cape
Town, 1992, pbk R36.99, 0 86486 223 7
(Etienne van Heerden)
Tracing the present back to an 'origin' is not so much a matter of cause and effect, nor of
genetics, but of genealogy: not the genes so much as the stories constructed around the family
trees. Family trees are constructed by stories rather than biology, by attempts to explain
events not in terms of natural causality but in terms of individuals and individual actions and
the imaginary causes in the soul. As the investigating magistrate in Etienne van Heerden's
new novel, Ancestral Voices, says to himself, 'one form of causality flows into another'.
In Ancestral Voices the genealogy of the Moolmans and their skaamfamilie shows a
contaminated parentage, though less complicated, for example, than that of the incestuous
Medardus family in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Die Elixiere des Teufels (Werke, Insel, Frankfurt,
1967, vol. 1). In Van Heerden's novel there is an abyss instead of a family tree, and evil
propagates down both the 'legitimate' and the 'illegitimate' branches of the family. 'It would
seem', the magistrate writes to his wife, 'that the Moolmans are attempting to escape into a
legendary world where normal rules do not apply.' As if infected by some kind of moral
illness, the family lineage is pursued down to its last progeny. The infection, since we are in
South Africa, is said to be mixed blood, which, of course, is bad blood. But in reality (as the
text notes) the infection is not blood but greed and wealth, not the genes in the first instance
but the social norms or mores. Greed produces the insanity that is at the root of the tragedy
and that destroys the Moolmans: 'FounderAbel's wealth had affected his head. The consensus
was that no man could possess so much and remain sane'.
Once you begin to divide a family into a legitimate and a shameful part, such divisions tend to
occur at every generation. There are always the white sheep who conform to the image the
family tree has made of itself, and who are at home in the 'family home' for which Afrikaners
have such an inordinate regard. And then there are the black sheep who transgress the
boundaries drawn by this image, and who are, and at the same time are not, part of the family:
Andreas, the poet, deserter and turncoat, who joins the British army and writes patriotic verse
in English, banished from the farm forever thereafter; Lucius, who spoke Latin before High
Dutch and becomes a barrister; black sheep who cross the colour line like Floris Moolman, or
who marry a Catholic, like Postmaster Moolman, and then produce another 'deviant' like
Mailbag Moolman who is only a 'stepMoolman' and who is therefore not allowed to play with
the 'legitimate' son of the family, Abel; who later crosses the colour line and falls in love with
LittleKitty Riet with her deep blue eyes. Degeneracy breeds degeneracy. Yet Postmaster, one
of the stepMoolmans too, keeps his distance from the skaamfamilie, even if his wife upbraids
him for this: there is always someone even lower on the rungs of the hierarchical ladder. And
that somehow makes up for not being at the top of the heap: having possessions or wealth or
status is associated with having value, but as long as there are people below one, one is not the
very lowest in value.
Shame and guilt are punitive machines in our consciousness that suggest that any kind of
misfortune is a punishment for a sin committed in the past, and that social position is an
expression of value. The mechanism also works the other way round: the classification of
certain groups of people (Hottentots, Catholics, British, artists etc.) allows the Moolman
family to exclude them from inheriting the accumulated wealth and thus to relegate them even
more firmly to the outside: their exclusion then becomes a consequence of some mythic
wrong committed in the past.
Van Heerden's novel recalls another lineage, too, a literary one. In 1955 G.P.J. Trümpelmann
edited a selection of German-South African stories under the title Afrikanische Erzählungen
(Van Schaik, Pretoria), which was then prescribed for many years as one of the local school
matriculation setworks. It includes a story by Hans Grimm, the right-wing German author of
Volk ohne Raum. This story, 'Moordenaars Graf', is about Karel de Savoye, whose son Dirk
falls down an inaccessible rock ledge and whom he shoots to free him from his suffering. In
the end Karel de Savoye commits suicide to conform to his concept of justice. I am not
suggesting an influence on Van Heerden, conscious or unconscious. In fact, Van Heerden has
told Gunther Pakendorf, who reviewed the Afrikaans original, that he did not know Grimm's
story. What I am interested in is how a social set-up and its fundamental assumptions throws
up similar stories in people with opposing political and moral philosophies.
Karel de Savoye's grave stone in Grimm's story carries the Old Testament message: 'Breuk
voor breuk, oog voor oog, tand voor tand; gelijk as hij een gebrek eenen mensch zal
aangebracht hebben, zoo zal ook hem aangebracht worden.' [Breach for breach, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.
Leviticus 24:20]. It is this unforgiving message, the inability to forgive (oneself and others),
which is behind the genealogy of shame, guilt and bad conscience. Nietzsche said in the
Genealogy of Morals that, at their roots, all religions and their associated moralities are
systems of cruelty designed to memorise some idée fixe, reason, seriousness, the control of
our affects, this gloomy activity called thinking. When human beings decided it was necessary
to erect themselves a monument and create themselves a memory, it always involved blood,
sacrifice, victims, torment and agony. The dreamers like De la Rey Moolman, who had never
been able to stomach cold-blooded killing, are outcasts in a world where the original sin is the
bloody conquest of the land.
Like Grimm's Karel de Savoye, who after the 'murder' of his son Dirk is the last surviving
member of the family until his suicide, the Moolmans are in their last generation, producing
only sterile (CrossAbel) and dead children. The only offspring who survives and reproduces is
the 'impossibly beautiful' CrazyTilly Moolman, a branch of the family the rest of the family
would rather forget: 'For Abel, CrazyTilly was the most terrible thing that could ever have
sprung from his loins. He believed this was a curse from heaven'. Antjie Somers, the mythical
child-snatcher and bogeyman, the 'one that runs on padded feet and catches little monkeys', is
never far away. And not only are the Moolmans sterile and degenerate; there is also a curse on
them which becomes apparent in the increasing drying up of the valley and all its previously
bountiful springs.
As Katie Danster, Floris Moolman's daughter-in-law, says: 'The story of the water [...] is the
story of the Moolmans'. The very hole that finally swallows Noah Trickle du Pisani - the last
offspring of the Moolmans, love child of CrazyTilly and Dowser du Pisani, and another
stepchild of the Moolmans - had to be drilled because of the increasing infertility of the
valley. The seven-stone fountains of the spring high up on the Toorberg had dried up and,
according to his father, it was Noah (whose existence was never acknowledged by his
grandfather) whom the Moolmans would have needed most to free them from their curse. But
pruning away all the 'deviant off-shoots of the clan' was beyond OldAbel's power. The curse,
of course, is caused by the injustice of the Moolmans towards their black sheep, their
skaamfamilie.
Another of these stepMoolmans, 'those rejected and shoved aside by the pride of OldAbel and
of Abel', is De la Rey Moolman. He had 'gone to the city and lost his soul among painters,
writers, musicians and others like them who made graven images of God's Creation'. There he
attempted to write a thesis on the 'Nature of Shame' at the university. De le Ray Moolman is
possibly the father of the investigating magistrate, Abraham van der Ligt, himself a cripple
born with only a stump of an arm. Ligt of course means light: like Licht in Kleist's The
Broken Jug, the magistrate attempts to bring light into the darkness of the death in a dark hole.
Neither father nor son are accepted as real members of the family. The son is not the first
lawyer in the family. Lucius already had argued with his father, FounderAbel, 'about guilt and
blame, about capital punishment [...] the Bible and the nature of sin.'
When Abraham van der Ligt, the investigating magistrate, enters town, the ghost of OldAbel
scornfully rejects him: 'You haven't got the guts to pronounce sentence on the sons of Abel.
You're altogether too miserable a specimen.' But the magistrate asserts his birthright: 'this is
my world every bit as much as yours. [...] My judgement on the case will be as much yours as
mine.' And he swears 'he would deliver a judgement in which charge, evidence and sentence
would all be clearer than even the purest borehole water'. He believes that in the end 'all the
myths will have to submit to the truth' and that this truth will be revealed in a judiciary
process. In his letters to his wife (never posted), Abraham van der Ligt is less certain about his
ability to deliver justice: 'I feel that I have a matter to decide which is beyond my capacity.'
He senses that 'the scope of it is much wider than my field, since it concerns the influence of
blood and pride, as well as the sources of guilt and blame.' 'The Law is clinical, it cannot
measure suffering.' He knows quite early on that he is beaten in this game: 'I am like an old
dog licking its wounds.'
There is no real mystery about the 'murder' of Trickle, although no post mortem was
conducted and the child never really buried: the hole into which it fell became its grave. As
Katie Danster says, 'It's out in the open', even if everybody was careful not to become a
witness: 'We were all looking in the other direction, here on Toorberg.' It is not even certain
that Abel Moolman fired the final shot. Trying to formulate a charge, in his interrogation of
Oneday Riet in jail, the magistrate says: 'I put it to you that Abel Moolman left the hole to
fetch his hunting rifle from the library, and that he then returned and cold-bloodedly -- but
with the best of intentions -- gave Noah Moolman the coup de grâce, from above, into the
crown of the child's head.' All that can be established is that there was a shot. As Amy
O'Leary Moolman says, 'there are other means of murder, apart from shooting.'
The real crime is not the killing of Trickle. Instead, it is the way one part of the family lived,
expropriating all the others who also belong to the family, but who are excluded from its
riches under the name of shame. The magistrate is led back to the very origin of the family.
The crime starts with the way FounderAbel treats his servants and his children, except Abel;
and extends to the way CrossAbel charges through the township in his Casspir and to the
imprisonment of Pastor Oneday Riet, the 'political agitator': an entire generation of one family
is involved in the chain of events leading to the 'crime'. CrossAbel's lawful lawlessness is
prefigured in the rebellion of hot-headed Soois, who joins the Cape Boers against the English,
until he is ambushed and shot in Toorberg.
The skaamfamilie is not ashamed of their ancestor Floris Moolman, whose father had
horsewhipped him off the farm for consorting with MaKitty, although FounderAbel had
forbidden all mention of his name on Toorberg. But they are equally proud of their other
ancestors: 'Shala was a Riet, descended in direct line from the Englishman James Read, the
man who had come to bring the holy gospel to this savage land'. His father Andries had
travelled all the way to Pretoria on foot to change his name from Moolman to Riet, and had
rejected all forms of servitude: 'neither I nor my children will ever again sit under a windowsill and howl like dogs when one of the Abels dies'. But they also keep alive the memory of
their other ancestor, TameBushman, who after travelling halfway across South Africa with
FounderAbel was buried in the Bushman Cave high up on Toorberg, a cave still decorated
with Bushman art. What they reject is the slavery embodied in Jan Swaat, the father of
MaKitty, who 'sat outside under the bedroom window and howled like a dog' after the death
of his 'master', refusing all food for twenty-one days, and then died too: 'Jan Swaat, your
grandpa, was the last one with his eyes cast down. From now on we Stiefvelders must always
look up'. One day their day will come: in this belief Andries Riet christened his son Oneday.
While the Moolmans despise the arts, Andries Riet vows: 'His children would grow up with
words, with books and ideas -- not with snares and clubs and rawhide thongs as he had.' And
the grandchildren of Katie Danster are 'the brightest children in the school.' In contrast to the
Moolmans the skaamfamilie is reproductively and intellectually successful, except for Shala
who carries 'the tell-tale sign of sterility among the Moolmans.'
The Moolmans of Toorberg live in the unforgivingness of the Old Testament where the sins
of the fathers are visited on the children of the children. The original (Afrikaans) version was
titled Toorberg. This was translated into German as Geisterberg. The novel has little to do
with Thomas Mann's Zauberberg (Magic Mountain), except that both show the situation of a
society becoming untenable and intolerable. Mann's Zauberberg deals with a thoroughly
'enlightened' and secularised Europe and has no concept of sin. But the Moolmans live in 'a
country that made people feel guilty, a country which made one feel there had to be a reason
why it so seldom knew the blessing of rain.' The Mother Superior of the convent formulates
the underlying flaw of the Moolmans: 'They never bury the dead. And they never forgive'.
Even the magistrate, himself a stepMoolman, is here to 'rake old chestnuts out of the fire, and
people do not like the burnt smell, since these are things that they have consigned to oblivion'.
At one stage during his investigations he thinks: 'Everyone is guilty [...] That is why it was so
difficult to apportion blame.' He pleads that it is his 'duty'. But 'duty' here is a watered down,
secularised form of the Old Testament concept of sin, formulated by Mailbag: 'Sin cries out
for punishment.' Mailbag no doubt would underwrite the inscription on Karel de Savoye's
gravestone: 'so shall it be done to him again'. Even the ghost of OldAbel Moolman does not
deny that there is sin, he merely wants to keep the sin and its punishment within the family.
When FounderAbel argues in his conversation with his son, Lucius, 'We'd be a lot better off
without the Law', he seems to maintain the anarchistic belief of the Moolmans that they are a
law unto themselves: 'They don't think they owe anybody an explanation'.
The magistrate comes in the end to an apparently similar view of the limits of the law, but -and the difference is crucial -- not because he believes that the masters are above the law, a
law unto themselves, but because he begins to understand that any causal account of
criminality and guilt is simplistic. The underlying reasoning of guilt is that someone or other
must be to blame. Even where the physiological cause of an illness, say, is known, as in the
case of Aids, the popular mind latches onto the moral discourse more easily than on to the
medical: rather than dealing with the physiological causation by supporting the use of
condoms, the popular imagination directs itself against the imagined or real immorality of
sexual mores, homosexuality and promiscuity. Religion teaches us that we deserve the
suffering we endure: suffering as the effect of a moral cause. Having 'crazy' children is a
'punishment', not a problem of genetics and physiology. The drought is not a meteorological
but a moral phenomenon, a punishment, in the same way that the medieval mind understood
the plague as a problem not of microbiology and hygiene but of religion and morality.
While Amy does not question the underlying construct of the law and morality, she at least
questions whether it is human, whether it has an element of love in it: 'I am quite sure [...] that
your laws will have nothing at all to say about mercy'. Mercy is the ability to forgive, because
one understands that in any chain of moral causation there are elements which, contrary to the
assumption of the law, are beyond the control of the individual. Mercy is the ability to 'forget'.
There can be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness,
as Nietzsche has said in his Genealogy of Morals. Forgetfulness, he maintained, was a form of
health. Once we lose that health, we lose our sovereignty and we can never reach any goal we
have set ourselves, never come to any end, because we get lost in the mire of the past.
Therefore it is only when Abel buries the drill-bit and has washed the guilt off his hands in the
dust of the deadveld, intending to be pure and clean, that 'the rain came down all over
Toorberg so hard that every dam on the farm broke in the cloudburst' and 'all those useless,
dry boreholes that the machine drilled open on just about every acre of Toorberg -- they all
started spouting water!'
Genealogy is also the central question in one of the short stories collected in Van Heerden's
Mad Dog and Other Stories. In 'Fences' (where Toorberg is referred to as part of the family
heritage) the narrator describes the pilgrimage to his family home as 'visits to my blood'. Part
of this pilgrimage is the ritual opening of the family bible every time he visits his Uncle Isaac
on the farm Zuurpoort. Another part is the reading of the family register, starting from 'Pieter
Wilhelm, eight generations back from you'. In the centre of the story is the four-poster bed, on
whose soft feathers the line of succession was perpetuated. As in Ancestral Voices, it is not
only a question of origin, beginnings, roots, but also one of endings: the signs are everywhere:
in the dragging gate, the slack boundary fences, the rutted road, ticks behind the ears of the
Jerseys, the slightly slouched shoulders of Uncle Isaac. Boet, Isaac's son, rebelling 'against the
pre-ordained pattern that his blood forced him into', refused to take over the farm and entered
the army's Permanent Force. The pride in the blood-line is ironically reflected in Uncle Isaac's
pride in the purity of the bloodline of his rams (one of them South African Grand Champion
three times in succession), and the tragedy of the story is pre-figured in the ewe which 'didn't
breed true'. In the end they anxiously wait to see whether the baby will have the blue eyes of
the (illegitimate) father.
Closer to the present is the story 'The Bull and the Bishop', where the bull in question
continues the concern about breeding and the blood-line: bought as a replacement for a bull
who castrated himse
Schoeman
Coetzee, Ampie
Mad Danie, the Stutterer
by Ampie Coetzee
(Southern African Review of Books, Issue 41, Jan/Feb 1996)
Karel Schoeman's new novel is a search for meaning, a continuation of particularly Another
Country and This Life; but the failure of the quest is verbalised more strongly than ever: 'The
journey travels inwards'. Ampie Coetzee reads about Mad Danie, who sees the angel 'about
three inches above a thorn bush'
Die uur van die Engel
by Karel Schoeman.
Human & Rousseau, Cape Town, 1995, R69,95, 0 7981 3395 3.
(Karel Schoeman)
Karel Schoeman's previous novel, Hierdie Lewe (This Life, 1994), a disturbing book about an
Afrikaans rural past, was subtitled Stemme 2 (Voices 2). Die uur van die Engel (Hour of the
Angel) is called Stemme 3. But there has not yet been a Stemme 1. Should one read in the
chronology some kind of inverted sequence? Perhaps we could also speculate that the
following novel - according to the publisher there is a 'group' of three - may represent a
resounding culmination of the voices from the past; those voices of the marginalised that have
become more audible in this second book.
The events precipitating the action in Die uur van die Engel are the following:
Shortly after midday on a day of the week towards the end of summer, in the year 1838, an
angel of the Lord appeared to Daniël Josias Steenkamp where he was looking after his
brother's sheep in the veld. He - the angel - took up a position about three inches above a
thorn bush, as far as can be determined from available evidence; at least one has the liberty to
deduce that from the description the favoured one has left behind of this remarkable event. (p.
7, my own literal translation).
The central problematisation is implied by the words: 'at least one has the liberty to deduce
that from the description the favoured one has left behind of this remarkable event'.
Danie Steenkamp, Danie Verses, Mad Danie, the stutterer, attempted making poetry of this
experience and of other visions and voices. Brother Danie could, however, not really write,
and his sister inscribed his verses with a quill. This text - 'sheets of paper of different sizes
stitched together with a needle and cotton into a little book' (p. 256) - dominates the thoughts
and actions of all the characters in the novel.
Here we have the voice of the author, that of Jacobus Theophilus Heyns V D M, who
published a thirty-two-page selection of Danie's verses in 1887; and the voice of the
schoolteacher Jodocus de Lange, who published an edition of sixty pages in 1930. In the
present a TV script writer visits the dorpie, where he went to school and where Danie lived, to
research the possibility of writing a script about Danie and his visions. Yet another voice.
Then there are also the voices of the wives of the dominee, the teacher, and of Danie's sister.
But no one was interested in the poems of this first Afrikaans poet, and ultimately the script
writer finds that he cannot make anything of it. We, the readers of the book, never see these
poems either. There is no original text. Did Danie really have visions? Did he really exist?
Does Schoeman's novel exist - or is this merely another post-modern construct?
My first impression is that this is nevertheless a typical Schoeman novel regarding its style, its
stylistic variations, description, milieu, characters, actions, meditations and the creation of
atmosphere. But the materiality of the writing, the texture, tells much more than the story of
Danie's verses and of the boring small town characters with their aspirations, their small
world and small-mindedness. The narrative is about a journey, about text and inter-text, the
role of the writer, the past, memory, the present, the recreation of the past, marginality,
patriarchy, politics, the landscape, South Africa. It becomes a highly complex and intellectual
book.
In an attempt to trace the narrative the following outline could be sketched. The TV writer
returns to the land of his past and tries to relive another world rather than being a passive
traveller. But there are no road signs - 'land marks identify themselves and determine their
own values' (p. 385) - pointers are complicated, and eventually he does not really arrive, the
journey knows no end; because the journey is inwards. The dominee and the teacher came
here to stay, but they never attained what they aspired to.
The author, the TV writer, the teacher and the dominee are searching for a text. It is, however,
significant that the woman, Danie's sister, was the one to inscribe that text. But she has
forgotten about it and now she has apparently become a lesser voice in the author's text. That
is part of the structure of Schoeman's book: that the women's voices are only heard at the end,
marginalised by the patriarchal power of the community of which he is writing.
The most voices are heard and the most action is seen around the creation of texts. The
teacher and the dominee are working on structures for the community and church history they
are writing; they are searching for Danie's verses to anthologise and edit. But both of them
have difficulty in producing and in interpreting the nature of Danie's verses. The only
indication of what he may have said is their Old Testament style, or quotations from the
Dutch Bible. But this book did not really exist for Danie, as his father's Bible was washed
away when they forded the Grootrivier - as a transient signifier therefore. They find merely
the words of an uneducated and illiterate person who made verses in a strange language, who
tried to stutter the unsayable, to say something beyond words. Every narrator struggles with
his own text, just as they have each seen an angel - also in nature, but also unsayable.
Also Schoeman's text - the materiality of the text itself - with its repetitions and re-tellings is a
struggle with the angel. The words of the dominee are also Schoeman's: 'how do I say it, how
do I express myself? - that the voice is stronger than the words, the meaning clearer than the
presentation' (p. 276).
The novel then also has much to say about the role of the writer and the critic - and not
without being cynical regarding the desire to canonise, the urge to introduce unknown verses
to the Afrikaner, to be the bearer of the holy flame. Then about the writer as maker of
documents, as discoverer of the truth, as the voice calling in the desert, as marginal figure.
But ultimately also about the writer as failure, the finder of empty signs, only the spoor: the
verse that cannot express the experience, a grave stone, an object in a museum; but not the
experience itself.
For that reason the novel can only work with signs: angels appearing to the main narrators,
Danie seeing the signs of his own death in a skeleton in the veld. And the voices that are
heard, say nothing, are fragments of conversations from the past: also empty signs where only
the silences are heard.
Everything that is narrated here happened in the past. That is one of the main statements in the
novel: the relationship between present and past. The TV writer travels back from the present
to the world of his past, and sometimes he is momentarily confronted with flashes from that
past. Something happened in that past concerning Danie and his verses which he and the
dominee and the teacher need to document in TV images or in words; but the information is
too little to make something of - even in reconstructing it. This history cannot be written 'so
that later people will know how everything happened' (p. 237), as the dominee would like because there is no clear, unequivocal origin.
That brings us to the nature of historiography - and in recording the past Schoeman has done
much valuable research, the most recent example being his Die wêreld van Susanna Smit
(1995) about the wife of the Voortrekker preacher, Saul Erasmus Smit. The genealogical
historiography problematises history because at the historical beginning of events one does
not find the unimpaired identity of origin, but dissension: the search into beginnings
fragments that which is considered as one; it reveals heterogeneity instead of uniformity. The
analysis of origin leads to the dissolution of the subject. Then we find ourselves within postmodernism and the fragmentation of the subject - and that is what happens to the narrators in
this novel. Not one of them return unscathed from their search, excepting Danie Verses; but
we only learn to know him peripherally.
Historiography of this nature looks, consciously, from the present, like the TV writer; but his
present is uncertain and divided because of the circumstances surrounding his work and his
friends. And the present in which Danie lived was characterised by enormous discontinuities:
war, rebellion, the confiscation of the land of the Griquas. As a result of his 'testimonies' he
was marginalised and charged, and 'although he said nothing about land and violence and war,
and only about the mercy of God ... and about Immanuel and the Lord in our midst, they
called him a usurper who caused unrest and dissatisfaction among the Basters, they called him
the Hotnotsgod and the Bastard prophet (Basterprofeet)'. Ultimately only these people, the
marginalised, listened to his words. The only voice that spoke out at that time, and the only
voice heard clearly in the novel, is that of his sister speaking against his prosecutors. These
are her words at the end of the novel, and at the end of her life; but these are also words for
the history of the present in South Africa, one of the many voices that may become stringent
and frightening as Schoeman's 'Voices' sequence concludes:
They took possession of the fountains and the sheep, and they chased away the people. They
took over the land and added farm upon farm; they built their homesteads, their barns, their
kraals; they laid out their towns there and built their churches; they elected their church
councils and called their ministers to rule over all of them. But it was not right, and I say this
again here at the end of my life to those who built the houses and the churches, who sit in the
front benches and are honoured as rich and devout men: that it was unjust, that injustice had
been done, and that it cannot be forgotten, and that the Lord God sees it and will take revenge
and avenge His people .... (p. 377. My own literal translation. Unfortunately the rest of her
words cannot be translated to convey the same effect. They are from the Dutch Bible, where
the use of the archaic Dutch carries with it a tremendous aura of doom).
Danie's visions and words have in fact no connection to the disruptions of his time, but their
appearance cannot be read apart from those disturbances in the community, as it is from such
discontinuities that history is made. Where wrongs are committed scapegoats have to be
found. Who could be a better candidate than Mad Danie?
In one of his earlier novels, 'n Ander Land (Another Country), Karel Schoeman speaks of the
landscape of South Africa as 'a page that has not yet been written'. In this novel he asks 'Who
can understand this detached and disclaiming landscape that makes no concessions ...? How
can one live in this bare, hard land of stone and rock and dizzying space and light, and is it at
all possible even to survive?' (p. 385).
The search for Danie's texts and the texts of the community, the author's search for that search
- it all becomes part of Schoeman's attempt to inscribe this country, to transform it into text, to
give meaning to it. In the materiality of the land, the landscape, the animals of the veld Danie
saw the signs of the presence of God. Would angels - meaning - not be seen in this land?
In that endeavour Die uur van die Engel becomes a network of texts, within and without the
primary text: political matters such as the expropriation of land, which has now in another
South Africa become the history of the present, and which was also a concern in the previous
'Stemme' novel (Hierdie Lewe). But here are also the texts - the voices - of the Afrikaner's
past and present: the Old Testament - Moses, but also John the Baptist; Susanna Smit,
Erasmus Smit; N.P. van Wyk Louw; the first Afrikaans poet, D.C. Esterhuyse; and the
marginal characters from other Schoeman novels. Also the constant description of landscape
and the influence of the land on the archaeology of meaning.
This novel is a search for meaning, a continuation of particularly Another Country and This
Life; but the unfulfillment of the quest is verbalised stronger than ever, at the end:
'Understanding is not possible: those who are confronted with the vision, can only observe in
silence and with wonder, register and accept, immobile, from the place where they stand. The
journey travels inwards' (p. 386).
Ampie Coetzee is Professor of Afrikaans at the University of the Western Cape.
Brink
Plummer, Robert
New Past for Old
by Robert Plummer
(Southern African Review of Books, Issue 41, Jan/Feb 1996)
Most of André Brink's novels have portrayed the brutalities of apartheid in a realistic mode. In
his new novel Brink returns to the textualist play that he and other Sestigers forsook for
political realism twenty years ago. Robert Plummer reviews
Imaginings of Sand
by André Brink.
Secker and Warburg, London, February 1996, £15.99 hbk, 354pp., 0 436 20259 X
Imaginings of Sand is André Brink's first novel published after apartheid's end, but like all of
his copious output since the mid-1970s, the new novel burrows back into South African
history during the apartheid period and the preceding centuries. On the eve of the 1994
election, Kristien, an Afrikaner woman who left the country more than a decade before, must
return to the family town to see her dying 103-year old grandmother, who has been critically
wounded in a fire-bombing attack. While Kristien is drawn into the march of events towards
the future beyond 27 April 1994, she is also reintroduced to her past, as Ouma Kristina
narrates the history of the women of the family, and passes on to her the custodianship of
these memories.
Kristien's return is also to a house - Ouma's house in the fictitious Karoo town of Outeniqua.
It is an extraordinary mansion, ordered from a mail-order catalogue by an ostrich aristocrat
matriarch a hundred years before, a chaos of different architectural genres, whose sprawling
maze of corridors and rooms reawakens Kristien's memories of her childhood and of the
women before her. In the town beyond the house, she must negotiate conflicting forces: the
resistance of conservatives, led by Casper, the AWB and MCP husband of her sister, whose
commando goes out to avenge the fire-bombing of the house; and the impending arrival of an
ANC delegation, which will include her former lover, Sandile. Faced with future and past,
Kristien must decide whether to stay in South Africa or to return to England.
Into the grid of this contemporary story are poured Ouma's tales about the family mothers,
going back eight generations in South African history. Some of the stories are drawn from
historical sources: the Great Trek diaries of Susanna Smit and the tale of the Europeanised
Khoikhoi woman Krotoa/Eva. The insertion of family history into an account of
contemporary events is a common practice of Brink's narrators, but the genealogical sections
have been placed differently - at the beginning of Looking on Darkness, in the middle of
Rumours of Rain, and appended at the end of An Act of Terror. In Imaginings of Sand Brink
reaches the most satisfying solution, cutting between past and present throughout the novel.
The world of Outeniqua is pervaded by an air of fantasy. As Kristien sits beside Ouma
Kristina's hospital bed, for example, thousands of birds fly into the room, swirl around Ouma,
and then suddenly vanish - as if this Karoo world has been invaded by a Ben Okri novel. But
even less solid is the past world narrated by Ouma - and the fantastical elements of the present
are largely due to the intrusion of the past. Recalling the magic realism of Etienne van
Heerden's Toorberg, ghosts walk the earth, and cause beds to sag under their weight; and
birds, Ouma Kristina explains matter-of-factly, are the spirits of dead women.
So imaginative is Ouma's historical memory that, she explains to Kristien, 'I can remember
things that never happened'. Her account of her own honeymoon is an unlikely story - in the
first telling, she and her husband went to Persia, stayed with Sindbad ('Not the Sindbad, of
course, but a descendent'), fought with Samurai, and travelled home through the Gobi desert.
This story is reinvented several times: later Ouma states that they never went further than
Cape Town, and later still that they honeymooned in Paris. The stories of the women before
her are riddled with the same implausibility, myth and excess. There is a woman who kills a
crocodile with her bare hands; and one who tends to the victims of a Zulu raid with nineteen
assegais sticking out of her body. A woman who strangles her husband with her Rapunzel-like
hair; and one who turns into a tree. 'I thought you were going to tell me the truth', Kristien
protests after her credibility has been stretched too far. 'No', retorts Ouma, 'I asked you to
come so I could tell you stories.' But between stories and history there is, she maintains, '[n]ot
much difference'.
Ever since Brink put down his avant-garde Sestiger palette and turned his eye to real political
events in Looking on Darkness in 1973, there has been a tension within his conception of
history - corresponding to the ambiguity of the very word - between history as an invented
story and history as actual events. The novel's protagonist, Joseph Malan, reflects that the
family history passed down to him has been 'distorted ... reshaped and recreated', but that it is
a real force that determines him: 'I am really an almost incidental pattern fulfilling itself over
generations and centuries'. The relationship of Brink's novels to the history outside them is
similarly conflictual. They refer to actual events but draw attention to themselves as written
texts. Even a story as realistic as A Dry White Season - about the discovery of the truth about
police murders of detainees - is framed by a narrator sifting through documents, considering
the inaccessibility of the past. And a wholly invented story like An Instant in the Wind, about
a white woman and black man traversing the wilderness, is based on 18th-century travel
writings generally, and claims to tell a truth beyond historical factuality.
Brink's last few novels have shifted more whole-heartedly into a view of history as
fabrication, as he has come to embrace the historiographical theory of Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault and Hayden White. The 'story' of history is not found embedded in the events, but is
made by the historian, and superimposed on to them retrospectively. Hence different stories
can be told about the same events. If history is a landscape whose topography is to be mapped
by the historian, this landscape - Ouma Katrina's 'inner desert' - is one of shifting sands: 'that
place of moving dunes that shift position from one day to the next, ceaselessly rewriting their
landscape and redefining their space' (p.197). While the brutalities of apartheid drove Brink to
expose - to write about deaths in detention in the wake of Biko's murder in A Dry White
Season, to smuggle Bram Fischer's banned court statement into Rumours of Rain - he holds
that with the end of apartheid, literature can return to being just literature, and he has moved
back to the textualist play that he and other Sestigers forsook for political realism twenty
years ago.
There may, however, be more to Brink's post-modern treatment of history than mere evasion
and play. History has traditionally been the story of the victors, those who had power to make
a mark on the world and to leave records behind. The powerless are also the voiceless; in the
historical record they are mute. The novelist's invention of histories can therefore have a
political aspect - filling in the gaps in the official annals. Brink's novels have set out to
recreate this silenced history - what Joseph Malan in Looking on Darkness, recalling his
'coloured' ancestors, calls 'the shadow-side of history'. This is the task of the historian-narrator
at the beginning of Instant in the Wind, facing the reticence and opacity of the documents
about Elisabeth's and Adam's journey in the wilderness - documents which Brink fabricated,
sending enthusiastic readers to the Cape Archives in vain. The novel fabricates a story of an
interracial love affair, which runs counter to the official history of racial separation.
Brink's novels have thus far given voice to erased groups such as Afrikaner dissidents and
black slaves. The history which is recreated in Imaginings of Sand is that of women.
Throughout Ouma's stories are images of voicelessness, such as the Khoikhoi woman Kamma
whose tongue is cut out - and we cannot know by whom, because she is unable to say. The
story of the woman Lottie, whose body casts no shadow, is a particularly eloquent fable of the
inability to make a mark on the world. The processes of making history are demonstrated in
the story of Ouma's great-grandmother Wilhelmina, who campaigned against the British
annexation of Natal in 1843. Beside (the historical) Susanna Smit, Wilhelmina demands a say
in the decision, joining the women who threaten to cross the Drakensberg barefoot to reach
freedom. The women's confrontation with the British representative, Henry Cloete, is filtered
through the report in The Graham's Town Journal, which grants Cloete 'a vigorous and manly
protest' and describes the women's demands as 'vulgar and most abusive epithets'. On an
unobserved occasion, Wilhelmina strikes Cloete from his wagon: 'Regrettably, the
confrontation made no difference at all to the course of history. It was not even recorded'.
In opposition to a male family tree, Ouma Kristina creates a family history which traces
ancestry through the mothers. 'Let's keep the men out of this', she says:
The surnames are of no importance. Those have all been added on, you can't rely on them.
Every time a man becomes a father he's all to eager too get his surname into the picture. But
how can we be sure that what he put in is the same as what comes out? We're the only ones
who can tell for certain, and sometimes we prefer to keep it secret. (p. 174)
And indeed in this alternative history paternity is almost always uncertain; and in many cases
the children are probably the result of interracial sex. The earliest recalled ancestor is a
Khoikhoi woman who married a white farmer, grafting the family on to an indigenous root in
the African soil. Mixed blood - which would predestine disaster in the universe of a Sarah
Gertrude Millin - is here seen to authenticate the Afrikaners' belonging in Africa.
Brink's presentation of women and of sex have always been controversial, drawing
accusations of sexism and of obscenity alike. His heroines, from his Sestiger works to Instant
in the Wind to this novel, are strong and independent, but are primarily conceived as sexual
creatures. Coupled with the feminist message of this novel are depictions of women that are
anything but feminist. Time and again women are the undoing of their men, usually through
sexual means. The reader will face descriptions such as this recollection by Ouma of her
pregnancy:
I loved lying on my back and seeing the milk trickle from my nipples across my body and
under my arms ... over my belly and round my popped-up navel, and into my pubic hair, and
down the sides - and to imagine it flowing from me, over the floor and out of the doors and
across the veld, and to see the ants following the trails and crawling all over me. (p. 115)
This is what one has come to expect in a Brink novel - and Brink has warned us himself: the
narrator of The First Life of Adamastor wonders if 'readers who object to descriptions of
sexual intercourse ... shouldn't skip the whole book'. The realisation in The Wall of the Plague
that what appeared to be a woman's narrative is in fact the ventriloquism of a male is not far
below the surface of this novel. Ouma's stockpiling of her blood-stained sanitary towels ('the
testimony ... of all women') is described as a gesture which 'spit[s] the pips of her forbidden
fruit into the faces of the [male] mythmakers'. But this is, of course, another male-authored
myth about women.
The black humour, fantasy and excess of the historical tales sometimes result in the ridicule of
the novel's heroines. Wilhelmina, who opposed the British over the annexation of Natal, and
who negotiated for peace with the Ndebele women, is given a fate of obesity of elephantine
proportions as she turns to compulsive eating. Her husband dies during sexual intercourse and
has to be extricated from 'the bulk and the folds of his wife's flesh'. Her end comes when her
toilet gives way under her weight and she falls into a pit of effluent. Enough to deflate the
heroism of any protagonist.
The most enduring problem that the novel creates for itself is: how is a view of history as
invented story to be reconciled with the need to seek the truth about the past? An emissary of
the ANC says that they are there to 'write a new chapter' but not to 'close the old books': 'We
can't imagine the future by pretending to forget the past'. Brink's novels have always
contended that one needs to remember the past in order to navigate the future. But if this
historical vision is patently fabricated, what stabilising effect can it possibly have? Brink
looks to ideas of myth for his solution - fables which express truths that are not merely
factual. But while Kristien comes to embrace Ouma's tall stories, she is suspicious when the
mayor claims - like many a former cabinet minister - that he was always against apartheid.
Critics of right-wing revisionists who claim that the Holocaust never happened have also
criticised Hayden White's view that history is nothing but a linguistic construct, for it cannot
refute this denial. In a South Africa facing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and
rewriting its history books, is any myth as good as another?
Robert Plummer is a DPhil student at Oxford University working on the treatment of history
in André Brink's novels.
Van Niekerk
Hattingh, Marion
Klipdrift and Coke
by Marion Hattingh
(Southern African Review of Books, Issue 38, July/August 1995)
At a time when many Afrikaner writers are seriously questioning their role in the portrayal of
apartheid, Van Niekerk's first novel has been hailed by Afrikaans reviewers as a milestone in
Afrikaans literature. Marion Hatttingh explains why
Triomf
Marlene van Niekerk,
Queillerie, Cape Town and Pretoria, 1995, 451pp.
(Marlene van Niekerk)
Marlene van Niekerk's first novel, Triomf, is about Afrikaners stripped of human dignity by
poverty. According to almost all Afrikaans literary reviewers, it is a most important milestone
in the history of Afrikaans literature. It exposes the myths of a 'new South Africa' as
convincingly as Etienne Leroux's Sewe dae by die Silbersteins unmasked the decadence of the
1960s. But it is different in one important respect from Leroux: it is more accessible.
Triomf is a conventional narrative written in a colourful and earthy, non-standard Afrikaans.
The novel erodes distinctions between the morally 'acceptable' and the profane, between high
and low literature. It revels in a carnivalesque display of crude humour and exploits our
susceptibility to identify with the cruel twists of fate in the lives of the poor. As a parody on
the sentimentality of television soap-operas, it is a critique of the vulgarity of such escapism.
The novel paints a vigorous and darkly comic portrait of the Benades, a poor-white Afrikaans
family. They are not a closely-knit family in the ordinary sit-com sense. Two brothers, Pop
and Treppie, and a sister, Mol, grow up deprived of basic necessities like food and parental
love. Mr Benades, who came to Johannesburg to work on the railways, could not come to
terms with their degrading circumstances in Vrededorp. As a result he regularly beat his wife
and children. His wife taught his children to rely on one another and to keep to themselves.
This introverted pursuit of self-preservation largely contributes to the degeneration of the
family. Eventually, old man Benades commits suicide and Mev Benades dies of tuberculosis,
leaving the three children isolated in an impoverished urban environment.
The novel begins approximately forty years later with Mol, her son, Lambert, and her
brothers, Pop and Treppie, still living in destitution. Pop, the elder brother, has adopted the
role of his sister's husband and her son's father - disguising incest under the decorum of a
nuclear family. He tries to escape all unpleasantness by constantly sleeping; and although he
played no small part in determining the fate of his sister, his so-called 'wife', and his
brother/son, Lambert, he shows no explicit signs of guilt. On the contrary, the years of
keeping up appearances as a father has convinced him of his own respectability as peacekeeper and compassionate 'husband'. Like the rest of his family, he rationalises and frames
reality in keeping with his personal needs.
Mol, Pop's sister and 'wife', is a typically oppressed woman. She has little space to develop
her own identity or express her own views (the men call her 'the echo machine'), but she is as
much an indispensable member of the conspiring 'triumvirate' as either of her brothers. As
family sex object, she plays an important role in keeping the family together. All the men in
the family, including her own son, have an incestuous relationship with her. Her role as 'wife'
is nothing but a construct to make life more acceptable to society and herself. In spite of years
of suffering and humiliation, she still tries to defuse family quarrels. Usually her efforts are in
vain. Her only consolation (or this may be yet another example of self-deception) is her
'husband's' old-age tenderness and her dogs, with whom she talks like close friends.
The real head of the family is the devilish younger brother, Treppie. His life history is an
important illustration of the critique the novel makes of patriarchy. As a child he is the one
who is caught having sex with his sister and consequently made scapegoat for the sins of all
three of them. His father's harsh punishment leaves him with life-long physical and
psychological scars. Although Treppie carries a self-destructive hatred for his father, he
ironically perpetuates his father's image in his hard drinking, in his relentless exposure of the
others' illusions of hope and happiness, in his suicide threats and in his abuse of Lambert
when he was a child. Although very intelligent (he is the family philosopher and the one who
likes to play with words), his work is useless: his fridge repair business never shows a profit
and he eventually abandons it in favour of odd jobbing for Chinese shop owners.
Lambert, Mol's son, suffers epileptic fits and has a flair for art (he paints strange scenes on the
walls of his den). His tendency towards drinking and physical violence are as much acts of
rebellion against his fate as are Treppie's drunken binges. His ambition is to have sex with a
woman on his fortieth birthday. It becomes an obsession. His struggle for a personal
metamorphosis runs parallel to the great expectations surrounding the 1994 election, and his
eventual painful disillusionment reflects also on the failure of sudden social transformation.
The life history of the Benades reveals how little momentous political change affects the lives
of the poor.
The Benades live in a run-down Johannesburg suburb, called Triomf. It was founded on the
ruins of the black township, Sophiatown, which was bulldozed by apartheid planners - in
some cases with furniture and belongings. In Lambert's paintings, depicting his and his
family's own suffering, he integrates remains of Sophiatown that he digs up in the garden,
emphasising an incessant process of political and economic oppression.
At a time when many Afrikaner writers are seriously questioning their own moral
responsibility as far as their portrayal of apartheid and its consequences are concerned, this
novel makes an important statement. By giving a voice to the lowest social class of Afrikaner,
the novel develops a no-nonsense perspective. Van Niekerk chooses the point of view of those
who have little time for phrases like 'politically correct' or 'morally acceptable'. They call a
spade a spade, swear excessively, make racial and sexist jokes, and show little respect for
public figures or institutions like the church. They do not support any specific group or party.
Even their neighbours detest them. As outcasts they have a freedom of speech that cuts both
ways - they reveal the hypocrisy of society, but at the same time they also reveal their own
self-delusion and racist self-righteousness. Although there are certain correlations with Jeanne
Goosen's use of a similar perspective in Ons is nie almal so nie, Van Niekerk's novel explores
the epistemological possibilities of this angle in a wider range of narrative techniques.
The characters alternate as focalizers, individual styles differing subtly in tone. This illustrates
the Benades' interdependence, isolation and the restricted nature of their world. An ordinary
event, like a visit from the National Party representative or from the Jehova Witnesses, takes
on catastrophic proportions and becomes grotesque. With Klipdrift and Coke (white workingclass cocktails) always at hand and Treppie playing devil's advocate, members of the family
often narrate and act out scenes from past experiences. They distance themselves from painful
events by exaggerating them and making them bizarre. Reality and fiction overlap as the
family members literally become actors in their own cabaret version of events. When they
roar with laughter or wipe away the tears, it is difficult to tell whether the emotions expressed
are genuine or merely part of the act. Treppie's dirty songs and short rhymes underline the
dramatic quality of these scenes - which also serve as a kind of Verfremdungseffekt.
The novel, therefore, is unsettling in the way it confronts us with the unsteadiness of the
concept of reality and the often unaccountable strategies for making sense of it. Treppie
constantly reminds us that 'it's all in the mind' and that happiness depends on your perspective
in telling a story, in this way subverting the myth of permanently given and immanent
meaning. The motto of the novel, a quotation from Modern Refrigeration and Airconditioning, implies that Triomf shows a preference for the kind of meaning that is to be
found in the lightning flashes of illumination in our every day surroundings, instead of some
sort of metaphysical explanation of life. In the Benades' experience of life, grand, redeeming
narratives like religion or political reformation have little or no impact. Lambert's longing for
a woman, the gospel of the Jehova Witnesses, or the prospect of a first democratic election in
the country - all result in disillusionment. No matter what happens, they try to work out things
for themselves and in the final analysis life is reduced to staying together, having a roof over
their heads and having bread and polony to eat.
But Triomf refuses easy reductions. The novel ends with the family staring at the stars and
Mol speculating on a life after death. The way in which she appropriates the concept of
heaven by describing it in terms of the banality of having a decent meal in the Spur exposes
the futility of her vision of hope. Yet this conclusion evokes sympathy in us and concedes at
least the basic human need for the comforting idea of something that is lasting and elevating.
No one, not even the Benades, can live on bread and polony alone.
Marion Hattingh teaches in the Afrikaans Department at the University of the Western Cape
Galgut
Roper, Christopher
New Landscapes
by Christopher Roper
(Southern African Review of Books, Double Issue, 39 & 40, September/October &
November/December 1995)
Damon Galgut's new novel, The Quarry, marks a radical departure from his earlier fiction.
Christopher Roper suggests that this novel signals the beginning of the writing of a New
South Africa in fiction, and certainly the creation of a new authorial position from which to
speak
The Quarry
by Damon Galgut
Viking Penguin, Johannesburg, 1995, R69,99 hbk, 193pp, 0670863289
The most surprising - and the most welcome - thing about Damon Galgut's latest novel, The
Quarry, is that it is new. New both in relation to the writer's body of work -three novels, a
collection of a novella and short stories, and a play - and in terms of South African writing. In
a departure from the intensely personal Small Circle of Beings (1988, Lowry, Braamfontein),
Galgut discovers landscape, the dusty road down which all South African authors eventually
seem to travel, but he makes the journey as a denizen rather than a tourist.
It is a journey which The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991, Scribners, London) hinted at,
with its tale of a young man's trip to Namibia for the 1989 elections. But in this novel, the
landscape, specifically the desert and the Border, functions mainly as a metaphor for the
psychological development of the characters, and the writer re-enacts the classic trope of the
traveller translating the land in order to tell his own tales. So the Border, for instance,
becomes a site of psychic upheaval, where the central character, Patrick, plays out a comingof-age rite and is introduced to homosexual sexuality. Land and character are seen as quite
distinct in what has by now become a cliché of white South African writing. In a particularly
poor scene, Patrick and his soldier friend masturbate each other, and 'spill' their sperm onto
the ground, 'taking revenge' on men 'who had made the world flat'. It is the usual image of the
land as a thing external to the subject, to be written on to and used to convey a particular
determined meaning.
The desert is also a site which functions as a palimpsest, and Patrick sees his life, and the
existence of civilisation, as 'impositions of order on something beyond rules or chaos'. He and
his mother visit the desert as part of her quest, as she puts it, of 'seeking for Africa'. This use
of landscape leaves the reader always conscious of the alienated status of the narrator, his
position as a white South African man in a world that would always be foreign to him.
The Quarry marks a radical departure from this time-worn account of colonising subjectivity.
If it did not involve the perpetuation of a cliché, one would be tempted to state that this novel
signals the beginning of the writing of a New South Africa in fiction, and certainly the
creation of a new authorial position from which to speak. In this respect it parallels Zakes
Mda's She Plays with the Darkness (1995, Vivlia, Florida Hills), which introduces a particular
brand of post-modernism to Southern African fiction through its interrogation of rural
mythologies.
Galgut's writing has always been in some senses the expression of a certain inability of a
young, white male to come to terms with South Africa. The Quarry represents a further stage
of this coming to terms. Galgut's earlier long fiction (I exclude A Sinless Season [1982,
Penguin, Middlesex] as juvenilia, to use Galgut's own word) is characterised by his choice of
the first-person narrative voice. It is always the pseudo-autobiographical subject that tries to
read the landscape as an extension of itself. The Quarry is narrated in the third person, an
indication of the changed status of landscape and the imbedded position of the narrator who
belongs there.
The story in and of The Quarry is a simple one, although my doubling of prepositions points
towards a doubling of language and space that takes place on the surface of the text, and
specifically on the ideogram of the quarry. In the novel, 'quarry' is both prey and place, both a
hunted man (or men) and an excavation.
The 'story of' is about the hunted fugitive, a strange man wanted for some never-revealed
infringement of the law. He takes on the attributes of Frans Niemand, a dominee whom he has
killed and hidden in a quarry just outside an unnamed town. The fugitive impersonates his
victim, and takes up his position as the new minister of the mission station.
The 'story in' is located in the hole of landscape which is the quarry. The trauma of the story is
the trauma of geography. The novel's frightening and inevitable progression is enacted around
and in the quarry as place. It is in the quarry that Valentine grows his dagga crop. Valentine is
possibly a coloured man (no need to add the inverted commas here, as the language of the
novel presupposes the problematic status of terms), and he is the other quarry hunted by the
policeman Captain Mong. It is also in the quarry that Valentine and his brother Small are
discovered with the decomposing body of the dominee, and they are jailed for the murder.
The fugitive and Valentine are defined by their definition as quarry. The fugitive's 'sole
destination is motion', and Valentine feels as if 'his whole life ... had consisted of no substance
but flight'. These narrative metaphors are not new as concepts, but it is in his presentation of
them that Galgut reaches a paleonymic originality. He presents landscape as both psychic and
physical, but above all as outside a model of perception that relies on interpretation. Place and
metaphor are the same - there is no vantage point from outside, you cannot perform a reading
on the text. Galgut cannot bring meaning to the physical aspect of the landscape, because the
landscape is the meaning.
The writer, according to some always already a coloniser, a mere traveller in South Africa, is
no longer bound by a mechanism of seeing from an external point of view and then
interpreting. The landscape is no longer a system of signs to be decoded, except in the
hieroglyphic sense where the quarry represents itself. The writer has entered a zone of
landscape where the anxiety of misrepresentation is an irrelevant one, and he is no longer
compelled to quarry meaning from the landscape, or be the fugitive subject in narrative.
The Quarry echoes with resonances from Galgut's other works. There is still the motif of
hostility and violence towards homosexuals, and there is the customary erotic imbroglio
involving sexuality and religion. Dominee Niemand is bludgeoned to death with a bottle of
communion wine on the edge of the quarry because he attempts to have sex with the fugitive,
and the fascination of Captain Mong for his prey is strongly erotically overcoded. At one
point he dons the fugitive's religious vestments to chase him, a literal crossdressing.
There is also in this novel the fascination with the physicality of the body which pervades
Galgut's earlier work and which is perhaps best realised in the decay and illness of David in
Small Circle of Beings. The Quarry this physicality is exemplified by the 'round perfect mole'
in the centre of Mong's forehead which Galgut presents as an indicator of miscegenation and
concomitant fleshly rupture. But the overriding impression left by the novel is that of
characters driven by an alienation which might be debilitating and destructive, but which is
ultimately South African rather than a grey existential import.
Christopher Roper teaches in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape,
and is co-editor of Inter Action, the journal of postgraduate English Studies in South Africa.
McClure
Peck, Richard
Kramer and Zondi
reviewed by Richard Peck
(Southern African Review of Books, Issue, 30, March/April 1994)
Snake
by James McClure
Faber and Faber, London, 1993
The Song Dog
by James McClure
Faber and Faber, London, 1993
The Caterpillar Cop
by James McClure
Faber and Faber, London, 1993
The Steam Pig
by James McClure
Faber and Faber, London, 1994
The time has come for South Africans to discover one of their own: James McClure. Faber's
current release of paperback editions of some of his crime novels (Snake, 1993, The Song
Dog, 1993, The Caterpillar Cop, 1993, The Steam Pig, 1994) will give an opportunity to
those many South Africans who missed them the first time around. In the US and the UK he is
one of the best-received South African crime writers; but his works disappeared with hardly a
trace in the Republic when they first came out. Reviewed almost solely in Natal newspapers,
they have not been at all easily available in the recent past. To judge from second-hand copies
available, Wilbur Smith and Laurens van der Post outsold McClure by whole bookshelves
full. Even Gordimer has him beat handily, and she doesn't even write for the mass market.
The current popularity of Nair, Grease, Station 70, and Fairyland shows a nostalgia for
simpler politics and melodious music. Although McClure's mysteries have no melody, they
will satisfy nostalgia for seeing criminals caught with a regularity that defies current
expectations. And his treatment of 1970s and 1980s apartheid, if not simple, will at least make
'new' South Africans feel morally superior. Add his refusal to preach, a humour that forces
guffaws, a sensitivity to complex human relationships, and an ability to convey layers of
meaning in mere snippets of dialogue, and McClure should be a best-seller in South Africa.
He now has a second chance to become one.
To be fair, in the 1970s McClure did have followers - both in leftist political circles in
Johannesburg and among the South African Police in Pietermaritzburg ('Trekkersburg'),
where he grew up and where his crime novels are set. Peter Wilhelm, reviewing McClure's
The Artful Egg in the Financial Mail in 1985, reported that whenever he got a new McClure
friends lined up to put their names on his borrowers' list. But those few cognoscenti did not
make McClure a South African best-seller writer.
McClure's best work is his detective series starring Afrikaner Detective Lieutenant Tromp
Kramer and Zulu 'Bantu Detective' Sergeant Michael Zondi of the Trekkersburg Murder and
Robbery Squad. These books are not Wilbur Smith's testosterone-driven fantasies of sex and
bloodsports. They have moments of edge-of-the-seat suspense, and we do learn that Trompie
Kramer is lusty. But his lust is largely confined to a dalliance with the Widow Fourie which
inclines him on lazy mornings to send her children off on longish errands far from her
bedroom. And rather than being stalked by perverted communists through Mozambique,
Kramer and Zondi interview suspects and witnesses, drop by the morgue for post-mortem
results, and follow leads and sift clues until they figure out whodunit. As we watch them,
South Africa's recent history passes by in our peripheral vision. That the history lesson is
never intrusive makes it the more effective.
McClure was inspired to write detective fiction because he:
welcomed the neutrality of the crime story. Every novel about South Africa that I'd come
across until then had been self-limiting, I felt, in that its anti-apartheid slant had made it
appeal only to the 'converted' ... Crime or mystery novels, on the other hand, appealed to
pretty well everyone. ... This meant I could simply write 'the way it was' and leave people to
make their own moral judgements while the point of the tale remained 'who done it?' (James
McClure, 'A Bright Grey,' in Robin W. Winks (ed.) Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned
Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work (Scribner's, New York, 1986), p. 188.)
McClure's early years in South Africa prepared him to capture 'the way it was'. In his youth he
worked as a newspaper crime reporter and photographer, reporting on and photographing
everything from Hindu weddings to Zulu boxers, and especially the South African police, in
whose work he developed an abiding interest. He worked constantly, he says, in an effort to
see everything; but by age 25 he 'had seen too much', and emigrated to the United Kingdom in
1965 with his wife and son, eventually settling in Oxford.
McClure put Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi to work on Trekkersburg's crimes beginning
with The Steam Pig in 1971. They worked their way through crime (and history) in The
Caterpillar Cop (1972), The Gooseberry Fool (1974), Snake (1975), The Sunday Hangman
(1977), The Blood of an Englishman (1980), and The Artful Egg (1984). Then in 1991
McClure published a 'prequel', The Song Dog, set in Natal in 1962. Along the way he also
wrote one non-series novel set in Southern Africa, Rogue Eagle (1976).
Although McClure claimed to be presenting South Africa 'as it is', his novels critique
apartheid. This has been common fare in South African high-culture literature, but is unusual
in mass-market thrillers. Most thrillers are inherently conservative, forcing us to see solely
from the hero's point of view as he defends society against grave threats, but McClure bends
the rules. Society is protected, but we see the rot at its core.
Background details carry devastating commentary. In The Sunday Hangman (1977) a body
hanging in a tree at a roadside pull-off is discovered by black children who are there to search
for food and to beg from stopping motorists. The path they have made is 'dead straight, and as
uncompromising as the hunger that sent small bare feet, numbed fleet by the frost, scampering
down it each morning' (p. 23). In The Gooseberry Fool (1974) Africans are relocated from a
'black spot' to Jabula (meaning 'happiness' or 'beer'). In a typical McClure touch, the
government compensates for siting Jabula on pure bedrock by blasting out graves in advance
(p. 85). When Zondi sends children into the tents to look for a suspect, hunger leads them to
steal from the meagre food. The villagers attack Zondi; 'they were no longer afraid. The gun
was a quick death; what they faced now was slow and terrible' (p. 100). In The Steam Pig a
white reclassified as 'coloured' turns to crime when his hoped-for career as pilot is blocked by
the colour bar; his sister turns to prostitution and becomes part of (and victim of) a scheme to
blackmail her white clients for contravening the Immorality Act.
Our peripheral vision also sees the inequities that made second-class citizens of most South
Africans. Zondi's photographic memory (like a 'little brown computer') was developed to cope
with the lack of text books in his mission school. In the early novels, he and his wife and
children share a room and even a bed in a two-roomed house with rammed-earth floors,
identical with others along the pot-holed dirt road. It takes them a decade and a half to move
up to a three-roomed house with cement floors and finished ceilings and a bed no longer
shared with children (The Artful Egg, pp. 237-238). When Zondi drives too dangerously,
Kramer reminds him: 'I get the free funeral, you mad bastard' (The Gooseberry Fool, p. 17).
We also see the racism that built so many barriers under apartheid. 'Wogs', 'Boys', 'Bantus',
'Kaffirs', 'Pet Monkeys', 'Bloody Baboons', 'Coons', 'Coolies', 'Churras', 'Curry Guts', 'Rock
Spiders', 'Hairy Backs', 'Rooineks', 'Kaffir-lovers' - virtually every racial epithet is used by
someone among McClure's characters, often a policeman, and frequently Kramer himself.
Regulations change: 'The colonel had very nearly said "kaffir", which was now an officially
banned word. Only the day before, a traffic officer had made a public apology for saying it to
one of his Bantu subordinates' (Snake, p. 58). But privately blacks are still 'coons' and 'kaffirs'
to McClure's police.
McClure implies that these terms should grate on the ears even of South Africans. A
miscreant fears her daughter gave the game away when she called Zondi 'boy'. When she
mentions this, the police colonel's half finished comment condemns the system of which he is
a part:
'Amanda keeping on saying "boy", which wasn't very liberal at all, was it? Rather spoiled the
image I was busily trying to ...' 'Ach, I don't think the average Bantu even notices when ...'
(The Artful Egg, p. 280)
McClure's white characters often treat blacks with arrogance. A black woman carries a pine
coffin to the morgue to collect her husband; although she will have trouble taking it away full,
Sergeant Van Rensburg can't be bothered to telephone for a taxi. A white motorist drives off
without paying for the newspaper an 'Indian urchin' has tried to sell to him at the street corner
(The Artful Egg, pp. 43-45).
Contrary to the usual thriller practice, we do not identify totally with Kramer. He is clearly a
racist, if a likeable racist who grows away from his racism over the years. In his earlier years,
we react to him as we might to a bad pun. He is free and loose with racial slurs. On occasion
McClure distances himself from Kramer when this happens. When Kramer demands of an
Indian waiter, 'Brandy and telephone directory, Sammy,' an authorial voice comments, 'The
waiter's name was not Sammy, but his race had been divided by the whites into Sammy units
and Mary units to facilitate friendly relationships' (The Caterpillar Cop, p. 107).
But Kramer's racism diminishes through his association with Zondi. In 1962 when 'a big,
vicious-faced coon, built like a brick abattoir' does not show respect, Kramer shoots an inch
from 'the bastard's left foot'. But Kramer soon develops respect for Zondi. When he wants to
share information with Zondi, despite having been sworn not to tell anyone else, he asks:
'Tell me, when the Almighty made kaffirs, did he give them souls, hey?' 'The boss means the
same as the white man?' 'Uh-huh, of course.' 'Nau, God would never do such a terrible thing,
Lieutenant.'
(The Song Dog, p. 231)
By 1977 both Kramer and the Widow Fourie have genuine concern for Zondi when his
injured leg is slow to recover (The Sunday Hangman, pp. 51-52, 157-9, 172-3, 237).
But the system forces Kramer and Zondi to hide their friendship from others. After Zondi
rolls a decomposed body on to the mortuary tray, Kramer asks for a tissue so Zondi can clean
his hands. Dr Strydom is surprised that Kramer would care. To deflect suspicion, Kramer
explains that Zondi will be driving Kramer's car. That response seems entirely acceptable
(The Steam Pig, p. 84). When Kramer wants to look in on the hospitalised Zondi, another
policeman asks 'What for?'
'Hell, I don't know,' he replied, with a lie and a laugh. 'I suppose just to see how much damage
there is. Maybe I'll have to get myself a new boy.'
(The Gooseberry Fool 139)
Fellow feeling has to be hidden behind self-interest; increased inter-racial affection is not
enough without a change in the system.
McClure also shows the undervaluing of black lives. A white policeman is shocked by seeing
a dead body. Kramer asks if it is his first, and gets the reply:
'H-h-hell, no, sir, but this lady's the first white one.'
'Ja, they're often the worst, so I'm told.'
(The Artful Egg, p. 116)
A blackmailer promised to kill Theresa, a prostitute: 'after all, gentlemen, she was only a
coloured. It was not quite the same thing as killing a white' (The Steam Pig, p. 217).
McClure usually avoids explicit attention to politics. However, we do hear of the
gerrymandering that kept the National Party in power (The Caterpillar Cop, p. 62). And there
is satire on the persecution of liberals as communists. A letter to a boys' detective club
magazine brags: 'in our English-language oral exam I had to pretend that I was a member of
the Special Branch finding out if a man was a liberal. Because I belong to the Detective Club I
knew the proper way to ask questions. The inspector said I was so good that I made him feel
like a real communist!!!' (The Caterpillar Cop, p. 76).
Equal treatment of blacks is politically suspicious. A detective team is surprised to see that
farm workers at a co-operative are 'confident-looking, well-fed and decently clothed black
men':
'Is sir going to give Security Branch a tip-off about this place?'
'Too right, man. You can never tell where something like this could lead to - if it hasn't done
so already.'
(The Artful Egg, pp. 90-91)
And the consequences of dissidence are made clear when Zondi says of someone who is not
surprised to have police cars outside his house, 'I am beginning to wonder about his politics'.
Kramer responds, 'Ja, he's acting like an old hand at the game. Like he's had cop cars outside
his house before' (The Artful Egg, p. 66).
In a satire on Special Branch methods, an attempt to catch a liberal priest by bugging his
confessional goes astray when the Special Branch man goes into business for himself - as a
blackmailer (The Gooseberry Fool). Closer to real history is McClure's comment about Major
'Many Slip' Zuidmeyer whose:
basic problem had been ... 'a lot of bad luck with prisoners'. Two political detainees in his
charge had jumped out of the same tenth-storey window in Security Branch headquarters, two
more had died after tripping and falling down some stairs at the HQ, and no less than three
others had slipped on the soap while taking showers under his supervision, fracturing their
skulls and never regaining consciousness. (The Artful Egg, p. 121)
McClure's only explicit moralising comes in Kramer's observation that 'prejudice doesn't help
in this job' (The Blood of an Englishman, p. 270). It causes investigations to go astray. The
first inclination of the police is to suspect 'a Bantu intruder' or the servant boy. Kramer resists,
but sometimes concludes that 'inescapably, boringly, the wog was indeed the most likely
candidate' (The Gooseberry Fool, p. 28).
Sometimes the misleading prejudice is less racial. When Zuidmeyer's wife slips in the shower
and dies, McClure shows contradicting prejudices at work. Kramer says the Colonel's
prejudice in favour of a fellow police officer is keeping him from thinking straight (The Artful
Egg, pp. 136-137). But Kramer's own prejudice runs in the opposite direction:
'At the moment, the son is most under suspicion ... but we must keep an open mind and ...'
'Prove it was the father, because that is what we believe, boss? Kramer cuffed his hat off, but
caught it before it reached the floor. 'Hey, kaffir, just you watch it, man!' he said with a wink.
(The Artful Egg, pp. 212-213)
This exchange is as revealing as much of McClure's dialogue. The mock racist put-down,
common in his novels, depends on the ubiquity of racist put-downs in the society, but shows
that for Kramer and Zondi they are the stuff of jokes. However, equality only goes so far:
Zondi's use of 'boss' shows that both of them still 'know their place'. On occasion, Zondi
initiates a mock-racist joke in reverse. He proposes to divide up suspects to be interviewed:
'You crafty bugger,' grunted Kramer ... 'That means you get just the one ... while I get the
other three.' 'Are you not three times the man I am, O Great White Father?' 'Six times the man,
kaffir.' (The Artful Egg, p. 81)
McClure's South Africa is not all deprivation and persecution. He also has a good sense of the
daily rebellions of the oppressed and ways prejudice can be used against itself. Zondi often
takes advantage of the prejudice of whites, as when he wants information from a police
station. He goes disguised as a civilian seeking help on his passbook:
Fortunately, my earnest request for advice was not seen as too urgent, so I was allowed to
wait ignored and unattended for many hours, overhearing many things. (The Song Dog, p. 150
)
When forced to fetch coffee 'Zondi ... take[s] care to slop a good deal of coffee into Van
Niekerk's saucer' (The Steam Pig, pp. 154-155). A black sergeant pretends to be a terrible
driver so that his white Lieutenant will insist on driving, whereupon he brags to his peers
about his 'little pink chauffeur' (The Artful Egg, p. 82).
Indeed, McClure's black South Africans often show more ubuntu than whites. A Zulu hospital
guard takes Zondi to the desk 'where five white women snapped at people who asked them
questions'.
'What do you want?'
'This is a policeman, madam. He has here important papers for his boss. He says he must give
these to him by his own hand.'
'Rubbish. We can't have him wandering everywhere with ladies just in dressing-gowns. Tell
him to put his boss's name on it, and we'll see he gets them - nothing ever gets lost here. Well,
go on.'
So the guard said in Zulu: 'My apologies, brother, for the rudeness of this ignorant person.
Can you do as she said?' (The Artful Egg, p. 253)
McClure does have weaknesses. His novels sometimes perpetuate stereotypes, and the mockracial jokes and repeated racial epithets soon grow stale. Moreover, the mass-market genre
virtually forces him to avoid sustained examinations of issues. His humour will attract
readers; but it gives a light and frothy feel to his treatment of the issues. McClure gets too
much mileage out of the ignorance and rudimentary English of Afrikaner policemen,
including Kramer. One policeman, Du Preez, is 'standing there and scratching his right knee
without having to reach for it' (The Artful Egg, p. 92). Another says to a woman involved in a
domestic quarrel, 'if it's just your husband has anal fixations, why don't you get him one of
those blow-up rubber rings he can sit down on?' (The Artful Egg, p. 21) When Kramer hears
an American woman's husband is on sabbatical, he thinks, 'Sabbatical? She did not look
Jewish' (The Gooseberry Fool, p. 86). Interviewing a professor of English, he surmises that
Shakespeare's Hamlet tells the tale of a small village (The Artful Egg, p. 195).
His treatment of South African Indians also sometimes perpetuates an unfortunate stereotype.
In The Artful Egg, McClure makes fun of the hapless, half-baked South African Indian
postman, Ramjut Pillay. A follower of Gandhi, Ramjut is forced to carry his mailbag in front
when his body overreacts to fantasies of experimenting with Gandhi's brahmacharya (testing
his moral purity by sleeping beside nude adolescent girls). Ramjut considers himself quite the
detective because he has taken an appropriate correspondence course (p. 57) and owns
appropriate disguises (p. 139). When he makes a discovery he exclaims 'Euripides' (p. 89) or
'Euphrates' (p. 213). The Greeks had a word for it, but he can recall only that it begins with
'Eu'.
McClure also perpetuates another stereotype in a scene in which Mama Bhengu's house has a
new 'niece' in it - not heavy like the usual Zulu beauties, but 'skinny, flat-chested and narrowhipped as a white woman, and topped ... with an absurd yellow wig.' She is very popular on
weekend nights when 'those who find work in houses, cook boys, garden boys, drivers even,
they all want to try out Missy Madam!' (The Blood of an Englishman, p. 85)
As with most fiction about South Africa, McClure's novels were better at diagnosing
apartheid than at suggesting a cure. Still, McClure might reasonably follow Ikem's response in
Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah when he was challenged by radical students for not
having provided solutions: 'writers don't give prescriptions ... they give headaches'.
McClure's novels are clearly overdue for a South African revival. Those who wish to join that
revival can begin with vintage McClure in the 'prequel' Song Dog (1991). I suspect McClure
set this work in the early 1960s to keep it close to his memories of South Africa, perhaps
because the 'new' South Africa of the 1990s had moved beyond the safe limits of his
imagination. The 'prequel' allows McClure to fill in historical gaps by presenting Kramer and
Zondi to each other (over the barrels of their guns at first), and introducing Kramer to the
Widow Fourie and Zondi to his future wife Miriam.
Kramer, who has arrived in Trekkersburg from the Free State only three weeks before the
opening of the novel, seems from our perspective an unreconstructed racist, but his
contemporaries in 1962 have heard he has 'inclinations to be a bit of a freethinker on the quiet'
(p. 11). He is sent to Zululand to investigate the bomb blast which killed the sexy young wife
of a local game warden and Maaties, a policeman who was 'one of the best' (p. 14). Zondi,
also from Trekkersburg, has been sent to the area separately to work undercover on catching
Matthew Mslope, his cousin who led a mob that destroyed a mission school on Christmas
day, raping and murdering three white nuns. When Kramer discovers that he and Zondi are on
the same side of the law, they team up to unravel the mystery of the bombing, hindered by an
effort to protect the reputation of Maaties by a cover-up (pun intended) of the fact that his
body was stark naked when it was found. They discover the case Maaties was working on at
his death. They follow the clues in that case to a remote mountainside where they visit a
sangoma from whose great spirit, the Song Dog, Maaties had sought advice.
To say that The Song Dog is vintage McClure is high praise. His detective novels are 'good
reads' filled with humour, send-ups of apartheid, clever turns of phrase, and pleasing plot
twists. They may even give headaches to such unreconstructed racists as can be persuaded to
read them. Now, if only the buyers for CNA, Paperbacks, and Exclusive Books can be
convinced to carry them, McClure might yet become the best-seller in South Africa that he
should have been years ago.
Quotes from US paperback editions: The Sunday Hangman (Avon Books, New York, 1979,
reprint of Harper & Row edition 1977); The Gooseberry Fool (Gollancz, London, 1974;
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976; Avon, New York, 1974);The Steam Pig (Gollancz, London,
1971; Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973; Pantheon Books, New York, 1981, reprint of Harper
& Row edition of 1972).
Black Tecs
by Lindy Stiebel
Genres are 'contracts' brokered between writer and reader whereby both parties know
what to deliver and what to expect. Lindy Stiebel looks at the two thriller writers, Nandi
D'lovu and Gomolemo Mokae
Murder By Magic
by Nandi D'lovu.
Falcon Books, Greenberg, Hilton-Barber and Knock, Johannesburg, 1993, no price, 92 pp, 0
9583084 1 1
The Secret in my Bosom
by Gomolemo Mokae.
Vivlia, Florida, South Africa, 1996, no price, 98 pp, 1 86867 036 8
(Lindy Stiebel)
What is one to make of the emergence over the past few years in South Africa of popular
crime thrillers written by black authors? Given the retro mood of both books under review and
the styling of their leading detectives on popular sleuths of the past, a sharp guess might be
that nostalgia is in the air - a nostalgia for a justice system in which the villain gets his or her
come-uppance and is removed from middle class society for a long time, if not for good.
Popular fiction can act as a social barometer of the times, a Zeitgeist , an indicator of wishfulfilment in the writers and their readers:
Like all forms of culture creation, popular fiction both reflects social meanings/mores
and, perhaps more importantly, intervenes in the life of society by organising and
interpreting experiences which have previously been subjected only to partial reflection.
Thus, to 'understand' popular fiction is to examine it as a form of cultural production
and as a process of meaning creation which offers a particular way of thinking and
feeling about one's relationships to oneself, to others and to society as a whole.
(Christopher Pawling, Popular Fiction and Social Change , Macmillan, London, 1984, p. 4)
Murder By Magic carries more wish-fulfilment baggage than first meets the eye. Though first
published in 1993, this thriller caught my eye only recently when I read that the film rights
had been purchased by an American producer for Mbongeni Ngema films with Danny Glover
as possible lead, that the Zulu translation of the book had been presented to King Goodwill
Zwelithini who lavishly praised its hero, Jon Zulu, as embodying 'traditional Zulu virtues', and
that it is to be translated into other South African languages spurred on by its popular
reception in Zulu and English (Daily News, Time Out, 29 January 1996). Excited by the
prospect of a new black South African thriller writer, imagine my surprise when told by the
publishers that Nandi D'lovu is the pseudonym for a white woman. As they say in the classics,
so the world turns. In the apartheid era, some blacks 'tried for white' to improve their
circumstances and in post-apartheid South Africa the reverse seems to hold true. The back
cover blurb reveals only that Nandi D'lovu is a freelance journalist in Southern Africa who is
concerned with community development and who has extensive travel experience 'in Namibia
and Azania'. Only thus far do my sleuthing abilities extend.
Murder By Magic stars Jon Zulu, the 'internationally famous Zulu detective now living in
America', who visits a friend, Abel Ngubane, a lecturer at the University of Zululand. Whilst
on holiday in Northern Zululand, they are appealed to for help by a teenage girl on the run
from her village, held under thrall by a powerful witchdoctor. The plot thickens with the
addition of an American antiquarian looking for the legendary Lala treasure buried during
Shaka's time, 'terrorist gunrunners' and a liberal dose of sorcery. While there are rather too
many balls being juggled in this short work (under 100 pages), all is resolved by the end with
Jon Zulu setting this part of the world to rights.
What interests me about this story is its derivative nature which imparts an air of nostalgia to
the narrative - everything reminds you of something else. Jon Zulu is a James Bond type (a la
Roger Moore) as the newspaper article on the film rights picked up in their headline 'Zulu's
the name - Jon Zulu'. He is smooth, in control, a man of the world, fluent in French, on first
name terms with contacts in Interpol, the CIA and, most interestingly, with Brigadier Danie
du Plessis of the SAP who affectionately calls him 'you American Zulu 'tec.' Zulu's one
drawback is the stilted American accent he is given - 'I don't believe in killin' if it can be
avoided' - and fairly wooden dialogue. The rural setting is pure pre-lapserian, pre-colonial
Haggard:
The ancient trail led them on and on up over sand-dunes that had bordered the Indian
Ocean in times past and now rose many miles inland to become a forest of giant wild fig
trees housing huge spider webs, monkeys and birds of many colours. They passed a few
lakes and pans full of clear sparkling water where crocodiles lived and hippos walked in
deep sandy pools. (p. 5)
as is the legend of the Lala treasure, the secret of which is jealously guarded by the
descendants of the surviving Lala miners, living in a remote village eyrie in Tongaland. In
true adventure story style, the ethos is a masculine one, though in this case particularly
Spartan, with 'no petticoat' as Haggard would have said, to distract Zulu.
The book's 'message' is a confusing mix of traditional and modern - Jon Zulu fights against
'traditional' sorcery and witchcraft at every turn ('it's the year 1992 and you still believe that
stuff?'), yet feels himself 'reverting to his primitive beginnings' under the witchdoctor
Umzula's power. There is a token gesture to contemporary South African history as in the
criticism of the gunrunners working 'for some stupid organisation that prefers killing to
living', but far more interest in criticising European imperialism of a distant past:
Abel took down a thick guide book. 'Right! it says here that even before the 1500's Arab
and Portuguese traders were using the bay of Maputo for trading purposes. They were
after ivory, gold, horns, copper and hides ...' 'In exchange for cheap beads, maize seeds
and their kind of sicknesses?' Jon looked grim. (p 29)
On the plus side, if the book is intended for newly literate adult readers or teenagers as its
length and vocabulary imply (though it needs closer proof reading for spelling and
grammatical errors), Murder by Magic offers an engaging, escapist narrative and in Jon Zulu,
it introduces a man with a mission, if not a golden gun.
If Nandi D'lovu is not who she at first seems to be, Gomolemo Mokae, author of The Secret in
my Bosom is the real thing. A medical doctor with a practice in Garankuwa, one-time
publicity secretary of Azapo and prize-winning writer of short stories and novels, Mokae has
written what Vivlia publishers claim is the first black South African detective thriller.
Thrillers, like other genres of popular fiction, tend to be formulaic - Frederic Jameson
describes genres as 'contracts' brokered between writer and reader whereby both parties know
what to deliver and what to expect (New Literary History 7 (1975) p 135) - and Mokae
delivers his side of the bargain. The formula Mokae draws on is a mixture of a Sherlock
Holmes detective placed within an urban setting reminiscent of the 'hard-boiled' American
thriller of the 1930s, with a strong South African twist. Colonel Lentswe Makena of the CID
is an intellectual detective, legendary in his skills of ratiocination, and one who can 'hold his
own in a discussion on anthropology, physics, archaeology, palaeontology, astronomy,
literature ' Lest one might be tempted to take Makena too seriously, Mokae has commented on
his creation in typical wry style: 'He's too brilliant for a local policeman, let along a black
policeman. If anything, black cops had a worse reputation than white ones for being brutal
automatons' (Sunday Times , 14 July 1996).
In a refreshing 1990s take on the homophobic world of Sherlock Holmes, this modern Holmes
type has a close relationship with his wife of many years who plays the part of Watson (a role
shared with Sergeant Konyana, a junior officer). Khumo Makena is the Colonel's confidante
and sounding board for his theories, in addition to being the source of some of the book's best
one-liners - she wonders whether the suspect kept a 'roll-on', in other words 'a woman you
men like to put under your armpits.' In more traditional style, however, Makena solves the
case under investigation by using his brain. The villain, Maxwell Lesenjane, lawyer, political
activist - turned - stooge, insurance fraudster, loses two wives under suspicious circumstances.
After returning from 'political' exile in the States, Lesenjane is once again investigated by his
nemesis, Makena. Mokae's medical training shows in the denouement which involves the
inability of fire to immolate silicone used in breast implants.
The other strand in this thriller is drawn from the tough urban world of the 'hard-boiled' genre:
a world of fast dames, sharp dressers and tough cops. Mokae has given a thoroughly South
African flavour to the formula, however, tying the narrative very tightly to a political context though at times the pace is too laboured and the tone too dark for the genre: 'The year is 1984.
An acrid smoke of burning tyres and human flesh hangs over many black townships,
generated by the intense internecine violence' (p. 30).
At other times, this is leavened by the black humour and wry cynicism which the reader could
expect:
Though Anikie herself had not been an active member of the movement, Maxwell's
comrades have taken over the funeral. As far as the eye can see there are flags of the
movement, placards, and people in the colours of the movement. Nowadays a funeral is
a God-sent (sic) to the movement, an opportunity to fly its flags and sell its ideology.
Sometimes different components of the liberation movement openly tussle to bury the
deceased, claiming him as their staunch member
There is a sound of a high-powered car coming to a halt in the cemetery ... The sultry
Mumsy Moloi comes swinging her hips. She is wearing a sexy black number which
seductively hugs her bedevilling contours. 'Now that's what I call being dressed to kill!'
Major Lentswe Makena remarks to his revolted wife, Khumo. (pp. 42,43).
Mokae is unforgiving in his criticism of Maxwell Lesenjane, a political high-flyer who uses
the struggle for personal gain and prestige. His indictment of those on the gravy train marks
him as an outspoken loner, much like his detective Makena - indeed he caustically describes
himself as 'the only nigger without a natural sense of rhythm'.
The Secret in my Bosom , though not unflawed (again, a wooden American accent given to
Lesenjane, occasional awkward jumps and implausibilities in the narrative), has a certain bite,
humour and authenticity that Murder By Magic lacks. Also under 100 pages, it deserves more
success than Mokae's Setswana novel which sold only 250 copies. It's a fun, fast and
occasionally thought-provoking read which revives something of the flavour of Drum in its
street-wise ways and shrewd politico-social insights.
Lindy Stiebel lectures in English at the University of Durban-Westville.
Abrahams
Wade, Michael
Peter Abrahams at 70
by Michael Wade
(Southern African Review of Books, June/July 1989)
On my parent's bookshelves in our comfortable home in the East Rand white
suburbia of the late 1940s was Richard Wright's masterpiece, Native Son . I must
have been nine years old when I read it. Those shelves were well stocked with the
progressive writing of the period and I was a precocious reader, but Wright's book
had for me the power of an intimate revelation. Black people were all around me;
they lived with us in total proximity and total remoteness, at the same time. Of
course, I knew that 'we' -- my family -- did not allow ourselves the freedoms of
verbal and physical abuse that constituted the audible and visible norms of the
relationship between white and black even, often enough, in the respectable
ambience of our suburb. But the realness of the lives of the blacks around me was a
mystery, and Wright's book suddenly made that real quality almost accessible,
certainly recognisable. In a way, it must have confirmed things that I had suspected.
Thus when Tell Freedom was published (and found its way with due celerity to our
shelves) perhaps two years after I had reduced the family copy of Native Son to a
food-stained, limp-leafed, ear-folded transitional object, I was ripe for its impact.
From the first word I knew that here was the truth, that this was the real happening
all around me every day, that this was the real childhood of South Africa. Even the
dorp of Elsburg in which the young Abrahams was fostered might have been the
village of that name that sprawled unbeautifully across the hills just east of our
town (though of course, there were many other Elsburgs in South Africa). The book
changed my life.
But there was more to come. Soon after, Return to Goli was there, and though its
descriptions of life in Europe and England both mystified and attracted me, and
Abrahams' own ringing declaration of ideological fealty to liberal humanism in the
opening pages had no meaning for me at that stage, the descriptions of his return to
South Africa, beginning with the archetypal conversation on the aeroplane with the
white South African who wouldn't believe that the author was also South African,
told it like (I already knew) it was. (When it was banned in South Africa, some
years later, I put a different dust-jacket around it; of course, its presence in those
life-determining shelves merely became more insistent -- to me, at any rate).
What could Abrahams' autobiographical essays have to say to a sheltered middleclass pre-adolescent white boy? Years later, in the second half of the 1960s, when I
began (in England, myself an exile from South Africa by that time) to write my
book on Abrahams' work, I discovered the intense emotion those books aroused in
the white South African English-speaking literary establishment, the paucity of
whose achievement had to be concealed and defended before the emotional power
and truth of Abrahams' statement in a slither of patronising and belittling reviews.
Abrahams wrote his first stories and poems for publication when he was still at high
school (Grace Dieu in Pietersburg and then St Peter's Rosettenville -- the religious
roots of his Marxist and later liberal agnosticism go deep and begin early); and
these works made their impact on the tiny community of black writers in the late
1930s. But his work as novelist (which is how he will be remembered) began in
England, with an essentially Romantic attempt to tackle a Wordsworth theme -- life
in the city, or urbanisation. Song of the City (1945) is uncertain in plot and in
narrative style, but it reveals at the outset of his novelistic career the intensity and
tenacity with which he deals with the role of ideas in the lives of human beings -two qualities which remain consistent throughout his writing life. Abrahams himself
must have felt the inadequacies of this early attempt, and his next novel, Mine Boy
(1946), was a reinscription of the urban reality he had tried to convey in his first
effort.
Note the date of publication. Incredibly, two full years before the appearance of
Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country ! Urbanisation was already a powerfully
established subject in the South African novel, with a full set of conventions,
strongly resistant to modification and all functioning to reinforce the white South
African mythology -- even when the writer was black. Plomer, Scully, R.R.R.
Dhlomo and others had inscribed the meaning of urban life for blacks along
deterministic lines. Nothing good could come out of the disaster they described.
Then Abrahams wrote Mine Boy -- and in a characteristic injustice of history, its
force was never felt in the South African reality it described. Instead, the inferior
melodrama of Cry, the Beloved Country came to constitute the benchmark for
literary and cinematic portrayal of black urbanisation, and to reinforce, to recast in
concrete, the stereotypes on which its presentation depended. This is easy to
understand: Paton's was a 'white' version, and it invoked white Christian ideology to
dominate its field. But one has to understand the negative force of those stereotypes
to see the real nature of Paton's project. His black characters, apart from their failure
to live on the page, literally carry the curse of Ham. Only disaster befalls them, and
this seems to issue from a source in the black character itself. They are childlike,
uncaring of consequences, incapable of controlling their surroundings, feckless,
unrestrained. The worst, most destructive and most distorted of these stereotypes is
the character of John Kumalo, the urban black politician and brother of the saintly
Reverend Steven. He is gross, cowardly, concupiscent and in the end betrays his
own brother. His evil comes from within, and was at the time it appeared only the
latest of a multitude of examples of the inevitable stereotyping of the black
politician in white writing.
Contrast this with Abrahams' treatment of Xuma, the hero of Mine Boy . Xuma's
story is the story of a politicisation, of a man coming to terms with the nature of his
material surroundings and concluding that he owes it to his humanity to challenge
and try to change the shortcomings he finds there. Within this story Abrahams
presents a wide range of the realities and possibilities of black life in the industrial
city. School teachers, doctors, domestic servants, mineworkers, fops and pansies,
the exotica of street life, black, coloured and white all come into sharp focus.
Abrahams is immensely -- sometimes extravagantly -- fair in his treatment of them.
Inevitably, he often works from stereotype -- but he always works away from it, in
the direction of a fuller realisation of his character's possibilities. Thus Maisie, the
domestic servant, develops in the course of the narrative from an unremarkable,
though pretty, presence in the entourage of the magnificent shebeen queen, Leah,
into a source of folk wisdom and political support, and a symbol for the stamina of
the masses.
But there is more than this to the achievement of Mine Boy . The novel is informed
with ideas: perhaps the most powerful dramatic action in the narrative is in the clash
between ideas, most centrally, between the initially simple responses of Xuma, as a
black man, to the economic exploitation and political oppression of city life, and the
ultimate complexity of his realisation that against the evidence of his senses, he is
involved in a struggle of all exploited human beings, regardless of colour, against
their exploiters. In Mine Boy Abrahams presents a class analysis of South African
society, which although not new in itself, contains much that is original, not least
the presentation of the destructive effects of urban exploitation on blacks from
within . By contrast, Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country does not express a single
original idea.
I have written elsewhere of the excellence of the description of work (the major
pitfall for novelists of proletarian life, from Dickens on), the masterly dramatisation
in the action of the Marxist concept of alienation, and the sensitive and entirely
credible account of the beautiful schoolteacher Liza's disintegration under the
pressures and conflicts of the life of a member of the tiny black urban élite. But
Abrahams' major achievement is his challenge to a whole white-dominated genre
within South African fiction: he flings the gauntlet in the face of the keeper of the
mighty fortress of inevitability, of black inferiority, of the white man's 'civilised'
mission, of the blacks' inability to withstand the traumas of social change, that
guards the white self-image in its fictive enactment of the saga of the migrant
labourer.
And in his next novel The Path of Thunder he did the same again! This time it was
the intensely sensitive area of miscegenation, that great white whale of a literary
and living obsession, and again Abrahams inscribed an alternative version, which
included the memorable image of the black man armed and defiant, firing back at
his white oppressors. The book has its weaknesses, particularly in the failure to
realise minor but important characters, but this theme has always thrown white
writers into a panicked reliance on the crudest stereotypes, and Abrahams may be
forgiven his vulnerability to the intense emotional pressures of his theme. But he
created an entirely new world of possibility for South African fiction in the
sensitivity and sincerity of his treatment of the love between Lanny and Sarie, and
(I come back to it in admiration and amazement, because of the historical context in
which it was written) that final scene in which the black man and the white woman,
guns blazing, fight and die for their love. This is a revolutionary moment in the
history of South African literature.
And in his next work Abrahams did it yet again. Wild Conquest challenged the
centrality of the white pioneering myth of the Great Trek, enshrined in scores of
novels, both Afrikaans and English, which fulfilled an essential task of reassurance
and reinforcement to both language groups in the white community. Wild Conquest
is a rather strained narrative, over-dependent on the very clichés it is challenging,
and too derivative to throw of f the magnificent showers of sparks of originality in
its two immediate predecessors; the lesser success of the enterprise perhaps
reflected two developments, one inevitable and the other a tribute, in its way, to
Abrahams' ability. He was drawing further away in time from his personal South
African experience, and at the same time closer to the main stream of metropolitan
literary life and thought. Thus the historical judgement is less decisive, and the
creative impulse is a little jaded; the message of reconciliation and warning lacks
ideological clarity. Abrahams was ripe for a decisive reassessment of his identity.
The opportunity came with the Observer's commission to go home and report, the
magnificent immediate literary results of which we have already considered.
Autobiography was a sign of liberation; Abrahams was free to move on from South
Africa in his fiction, to consider the urgent problems of the end of the colonial era
and the realities of the dawn of independence in other parts of the continent.
Ngugi wa Th'iongo told me in an interview more than twenty years ago, when I
asked him about his literary influences: 'Peter Abrahams. I first read him at
university, when I was an undergraduate. I read almost all his novels. He inspired us
because, as Ekwensi has pointed out, he suggested the possibility of an African
living by writing'. Thus Abrahams was a central factor, without, perhaps, knowing
it, in the development of the new Anglophone African literature. Cyprian Ekwensi
began publishing novels and stories in Nigeria in the early 1950s; he and Ngugi
became two of the most important writers in contemporary Africa. Abrahams'
example clearly inspired many others as well!
Abrahams visited West Africa in the 1950s, and in 1956 he published A Wreath for
Udomo , a novel about the struggle for freedom from colonial rule and the problems
of independence itself. Was A Wreath for Udomo a retreat into the reactionary
positions that Abrahams had attacked with such intellectual subtlety in his earlier
fiction? For today's reader the book has the force of prophecy. Its description of the
pitfalls and failures of the post-independence era (it was published a year before
Ghana became independent!!) may be over-Manichaean, and the polarities of
tradition and modernisation over-simplified; but the course of events reveals an
uncanny prescience. The treatment of the themes of power and betrayal are as
powerful as in any novel in English of the post-war period; the ideological
commitment to liberalism is, if anything, extreme. Over the intense clash of ideas
and emotions broods the giant figure of Udomo, ruthless, charismatic and utterly
vulnerable. The only comparable character in modern African fiction is Achebe's
Okonkwo.
This isn't a blow-by-blow account of Peter Abrahams' career as novelist, so the
falling-off of quality in his writing of the 1960s may no doubt be accounted for
briefly by two factors: his relocation from an entrenched position within the English
literary-cultural establishment to a new country, Jamaica, which must have posed an
entirely new set of challenges, personal, artistic and political; and prior to that, the
trauma of 1956, the Notting Hill race riots and the uncomfortable truths they told
about Abrahams' beloved liberal England. Some of the pessimism and not
altogether consciously-expressed conservatism of the two novels of the 1960s (A
Night of their Own [1965] and This Island Now [1966], the first a response to the
crushing defeat inflicted on the South African liberation movement in the early part
of the decade and the second set in the immediacy the Jamaican politics) may be
debited to Notting Hill. His use of a quotation from Auden in the title of the
Jamaican novel was entirely in character: by evoking the genius, born to privilege,
whose quest for belief so resembled his own, though their life paths were so
dissimilar, Abrahams acknowledged the changes in his own ideological position,
changes in which scepticism and pessimism over the individual's capacity to play a
morally meaningful role in the political life of his society loomed large.
Then silence.
Not real silence, of course; more like the silence of a leviathan which has
submerged for an awfully long time. Actually, there were plenty of rumblings on
the non-leviathan scale: gifted travel journalism, political writing in the Jamaican
press, radio work, intense and politicised involvement in Jamaican cultural life. But
Abrahams the novelist submerged himself for nineteen long years. Books and
articles were written about him and his work, but not a novel did he produce. And
then the waters broke, and his longest, most complex and most powerful work of
fiction shook itself free from the depths of his creative mind.
The View from Coyaba (Faber, 1985) combines the strands of a lifetime's (the
biblical span) thinking about people as individuals and in groups do and should
behave towards one another. The span of the novel is amazing, and was duly
commented on by reviewers when it appeared, though it can only be appreciated
properly against the context of Abrahams' relentless concentration on a particular
case in each of his previous works. In The View from Coyaba he goes for the big
time. His aim is nothing less than the reinscription of the history of black folk. He
reviews the entire history of the relationship between whites and blacks in the old
and new worlds form the beginnings of black slavery. He provides a
multidimensional analysis of this review. He sets long sections of the novel in
Jamaica, in the American South, in Liberia, and in Uganda. He explores with the
painful precision of a skilled surgeon the negative potential of the relationship
between fathers and sons; and he celebrates the positive, the triumph of maturity
and reconciliation in the same frame, with a happiness that glows from the page. In
this he resolves triumphantly a lifetime's search for his own father, which
reverberated through the pages of his previous fiction. He sets out to create a black
historic identity. And -- on first reading at least the biggest surprise to the adult
version of the little boy from the East Rand whose life was changed by reading
Return to Goli and Tell Freedom -- he introduces a new theme of major importance:
the incorporation into black life of the message of the Christian gospel as a lived
ethical system.
In fact, the potential for every one of these themes exists in his earliest work; this is
not the place to go into the details, but the fact must be recorded. The View from
Coyaba weaves influences from the Old and New Testaments, Marx, Fanon, Du
Bois, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism
into a rich and deeply satisfying chromatic pattern. So if The View from Coyaba
turns out to be a summation, it will be a magnificently consistent final movement to
the symphony of a lifetime's thought and writing. If there is still more to come, we
the readers will be that much more rewarded.
I end an a caveat. There is a tendency in some quarters to appropriation, to make
Abrahams the particularistic spokesman of a specific group, and to insist that his
message should be understood only through a sort of authorised (not by Abrahams
himself, of course!) refraction through sectional-ideological lenses. Abrahams
belongs to everyone. His personal history, his work and his message ensure this.
Any attempt to claim him in the name of ideological or sectional interests merely
constitutes an injustice to his achievement.
Mphahlele
Es'kia Mphahlele at 70
Nkosi, Lewis
(Es'kia Mphahlele as a young man)
(Southern African Review of Books, February/May 1990)
Es'kia Mphahlele at seventy is indubitably a birthday to celebrate. The life, the work, the
personality enter our field of vision at so many points of development: from what now
appears improbably as an impoverished but almost idyllic years of rural life in the 1920s,
through the benign paternalistic 1940s and the self-imposed exile of the late 1950s, to the
final controversial return of the native in the 1970s. Never a selfish man, always the teacher,
scholar, writer and critic, Mphahlele has travelled, done and seen a great deal for himself and
for others; but as in any other life in what is the mandatory Biblical age of three score years
and ten we not only have an impressive and inspiring achievement before us to applaud, but
we have also the frustrating contradictions to wonder at.
To a certain extent the fault is ours. In spite of the warnings by savants wiser than ourselves,
our nerves strain to fit the fragments of a life into a unity, the warring personalities into a
single identity. The social, religious and juridical conventions require a unitary personality,
innocent or culpable, to which we can attach certain attributes by which an identity is firmly
established and fixed. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere ideology and convention are at odds
with reality. In the case of Es'kia Mphahlele we do not have a single life to view but at least
two, if not more. Not even the original name, long recklessly discarded, remains to connect
the older writer with the young rebel of nearly forty years ago; but then even the new name
seems to split itself down the middle as if to warn us that the Ezekial Mphahlele of Down
Second Avenue only bears a misleading resemblance to the Es'kia Mphahlele of Afrika My
Music .
To write about Zeke Mphahlele at seventy I find I must try to remember the man in various
stages where his and my career have touched. As with Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, Casey
Motsisi and Arthur Maimane, I first set eyes on Zeke Mphahlele when I went up to
Johannesburg from Durban to join Drum magazine. Already in his late thirties Zeke not only
looked the school-teacher he had been before joining Drum , but he seemed somehow out of
place in the wild frontiersland that was Drum Publications those days. 'I had no illusions at all
about my inability to become a journalist', Zeke was later to write about this brief sojourn at
Drum . He had spent two years and a half on the magazine as a reporter and fiction editor.
There is a photograph of Zeke Mphahlele taken when he was reporting the bus boycott in
Everton during which factional fighting broke out. For more than an hour he was trapped in a
house with a gun-wielding host he had gone to interview threatening to blow out his brains.
The photograph may not have been taken at the exact moment of crisis and it is not fear that
the camera is recording since the photograph may have been taken after the event, but it is an
oddly diverting celluloid image which seems to invite a brief but surreptitious scrutiny of the
interior life of the subject. In the photograph Zeke's hair appears to be standing, literally, on
end, and the face is scored with the marks of incipient crisis which seems to undermine his
inexhaustible equanimity.
Threats of or actual violence against Drum reporters was, of course, nothing new; only a few
months before Drum reporters had been testing the doctrine of 'Christian brotherhood' by
attending religious services in white churches with the predictable result that a photographer
was chased down a street by irate church-goers and Can Themba, one of the reporters, was
bundled into a Special Branch car later to be charged with trespassing. Undoubtedly, those
were not the days of Desmond Tutu or Alan Boesak. Themba's appearance on the scene
seemed to touch off the barely suppressed fury of the white worshippers; in fact, for some
incomprehensible reason, Can Themba seemed always to provoke the intensest fury among
white racists, but then he had always thrived on such dramatic moments during which
confrontation between determined opponents and lunatic upholders of the system seemed to
portray the ineluctable violence in the apartheid philosophy. Faced with similar lunacy Zeke
became angry and distraught. 'Always I felt too deeply to be objective in my reporting', he
was to explain in Down Second Avenue , 'and I was subjected to rigorous editorial censoring.
That did not pain me so much as the necessity to be in Drum when I did not really want to be
a journalist. I wanted to teach and I wanted to be a writer.'
That is surely taking the high ground. From the above one might conclude that Mphahlele was
the radical journalist who was prevented from expressing forbidden truths by unscrupulous or
craven editors; but equally some may very well think that the 'censoring' on this occasion may
be merely synonymous with 'sub-editing' which goes on in any journal. To be sure, on Drum
there was the added anxiety of prosecution under the laws of 'incitement'. In fact, sleazy as
Drum may have been, journalists like Henry Nxumalo and Can Themba, and under the
pictorial direction of Jurgen Schadeberg, photographers like Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane
produced work that was the match of the best in the world. It is probable that Mphahlele
would have been unhappy in any ambience which put such a high premium on fast-paced
journalistic quest for the ephemeral. He wrote in his autobiography: 'My whole outlook
resisted journalism'. He was also 'literary' in a way that so pandered to a sense of high moral
purpose that editing short stories for Drum , for the most part tawdry meretricious dross, must
have immeasurably impaired his spirit:
My prose was suffering under severe journalistic demand and I was fighting to keep my head
steady above it all. I felt like a slow-footed heavyweight, wanting to be sure of every punch,
in a ring which required a disposition to duck and weave and gamble and love the game or
quit.
It was not only that Drum's diet of 'sex, crime and love stories' alienated him; Mphahlele's
temperament was far removed from the outlaw atmosphere which reigned in Drum in which
his doppelgänger in reverse was surely Can Themba. Mphahlele resembled a professor in
exile. Remembering his square, sturdy build (in his youth he had boxed) and remembering his
sober manners against the background of the daily shenanigans of the rest of the staff, I am
reminded of the canard told about the British poet Philip Larkin when someone observed that
at twenty-one Larkin already looked quite old for his age and the riposte: 'When has he ever
been young?' Going by the information given in his autobiography there is ample evidence
that however sober-minded he was later to become, Mphahlele had once been very young. In
fact, part of the irresistible power of Down Second Avenue is the enthralling picture it
provides of an African childhood which parallels, among many other such stories, Peter
Abrahams' Tell Freedom and Camara Laye's in L'Enfant noir , and serves to remind us once
again just why the bildungsroman exerts such undiminishing influence on the readers of
novels.
Mphahlele was born into so huge a 'lack', from the age of five to his early teens growing up in
the absence of his two parents, that by all Western accounts of 'personality' development he
should have been the victim of various anxiety traits and character disturbances. That he was
not, so far as we know, attests to the fact that, with respect to pre-industrial societies at least,
such Western narratives of 'personality' development have less to tell us if they lose sight of
the mitigating resources of the extended family. Until he and his brother and sister were
brought back to Pretoria where his parents worked when he was already in his early teens,
Mphahlele, his brother and sister were cared for by a dominating paternal grandmother in the
village of Maupaneng in the northern Transvaal. He minded goats and donkeys and lived on
the diet of corn-meal porridge and pumpkin, occasionally feeding on flying ants, hairy tree
worms and wild spinach, which served as relish for porridge:
About the only time we had goat's meat or beef was when livestock died. A man might have a
herd of fifty or more goats, as we had, and not slaughter one in six months. I can never forget
the sinking carcasses we feasted on.
So for meat the herd boys killed other people's livestock, chiefly stray pigs and chickens
which his brother caught, 'cutting off their heads and legs, putting them in an old rag and
coming home to tell us that he had knocked down birds with a catapult'. What surprised me
about all this -- but which perhaps should not have done -- was how much, in spite of
Government ideology of ethnic difference, the life of a boy in the northern Transvaal
coincided in almost every detail with that of a Zulu child in a village far away in the Natal
province.
I, too, a city boy, had been farmed out to an aunt near Ladysmith at the age of seven or eight;
there I had the opportunity to learn about rural life at close quarters and saw how villagers
often survived on a diet of corn-meal and pumpkin porridge, often supplementing this diet
with relish of 'hairy tree worms and flying ants'! Sugar and meat were rare luxuries at my
aunt's place; whenever little was available it was reserved for the husband as head of the
family. I soon found out, though, that herd boys had ways of overcoming the scarcity of meat.
Using the deadly catapult, we too slaughtered other people's chickens, roasting them in ovens
hollowed out of the giant ant-hills in the veld. No doubt, Mphahlele's grandmother was an
extremely autocratic woman to have driven young Mphahlele into adopting the kind of
desperate stratagems he describes in his book. He tells us that once during a milking, a goat
kicked over a pail of milk:
Knowing that a beating was sure to follow, I poured out some milk into a second pail, pissed
into it so that it soured and thickened. I then invented the story that two or three goats had
been too long in milk and their kids had grown up.
Despite the very real rural poverty described in its pages, in the first few chapters of
Mphahlele's autobiography the brief but festal vignettes of village life, the portraits of
individual characters, and later the kaleidoscopic view of life on Second Avenue in the
Pretoria location of Marabastad, which are recorded with exemplary economy and resolute
honesty, confers on Mphahlele's narrative the dignified status of a classic document whose
resonance was not to be felt again in any other work of his, neither in his second
autobiography Afrika My Music nor in his fiction. Paradoxically, the impression of complete
veracity, of artless candour and incorruptible factuality, may have been achieved through the
cozening strategies of language that never seems to yearn for that noisy 'delirium' which
attends the productions of literature, but what radiates throughout Mphahlele's first major
published work is an intransigent will to truth whatever this may be held out to be. Candour,
above all, is its hallmark. Mphahlele's portrait of his father, a fiendishly violent alcoholic and
a chronic wife-beater, is drawn with such rash, uncompromising impartiality, it is a portraiture
so pitiless in its unblinking filial gaze, that this nocuous man could just as well have been a
complete stranger as the father to the writing son.
Placed alongside his first autobiographical essay Afrika My Music is a creaking machinery of
moral evasion written in a language of wilful concealment. In fact, the two autobiographies
are as far apart in spirit as whisky and water. For the most part, Down Second Avenue is a
triumph of realistic representation, written in a kind of spare uncluttered prose so seemingly
innocent of any desire to manipulate the reader beyond sharing an experience, that we are
liable to forget -- dare I pronounce the heresy! -- that there is an author behind all these
recollections busily shaping the narrative for us; for apart from the fairly florid interludes this
is very nearly as transparent a text as anyone is likely to get, composed in an austerely selfeffacing language which at times gives the impression of having written itself, with the author
as just one more character among many others.
At St. Peter's, the most celebrated school run by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection
in Johannesburg before the much-hated Bantu Education Act was enacted into the statute
book, Mphahlele was for a time a contemporary of Peter Abrahams whose seventieth birthday
was celebrated in these pages last year. 'Abrahams wrote verse in his exercise books and gave
them to us to read. I admired them because here was a boy writing something like the
collection of English poetry we were learning as a set book in school.' But unlike Abrahams
whose passion for creating stories is acknowledged quite early in his own autobiography, Tell
Freedom , we have very little sense of Mphahlele's own urgencies which impelled him to put
pen to paper. Not until he had finished school and got married do we learn that 'way back in
the 1940s I was writing verse in English I wrote short stories too.' When these were issued in
1947 by the African Bookman, a small enterprise publishing monographs and pamphlets by
Africans on social and political subjects, the stories were severely, and it has to be said,
rightly panned by the white reviewers, though sometimes for the wrong reasons.
Understandably, Mphahlele is sore at the rough treatment he received from white reviewers
but what his peers in the black community thought of these early efforts Mphahlele never tells
us; or if this publication never received any acknowledgement from the African press what
this might mean for the cultural priorities of the black intelligentsia of that time.
The later fiction, especially the short stories now collected in the handsome Readers'
International paperback under the title Renewal Time , has its moments of strength deriving
from an internal voice of surprising stoical imperturbability resembling that of a younger
writer, Njabulo Ndebele. This feeling is more palpable in stories like 'In Corner B', 'He and
the Cat' and 'The Barber of Bariaga' in which, as in many of Ndebele's stories, black life is not
entirely contingent on white decisions but constantly renews its own independent initiatives.
Less imperturbable are his two novels which seem to homologise mainly with his bitter
experiences of exile, especially The Wanderers .
While on Drum Mphahlele was studying for a Master's Degree by correspondence. The topic
of his research was 'The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction'. The
substance of this study was to form the core of the literary section of his book The African
Image published in 1962 five years after leaving the country; an expanded version was
published in 1974. A quick survey of English-language fiction inside and outside South
Africa had led Mphahlele to conclude that:
the main weakness in South African writers is that they are hyper-conscious of the race
problem in their country. They are so obsessed with the subject of race and colour that when
they set about writing creatively they imagine that the plot they are going to devise, the
characters they are going to create and the setting they are going to exploit, must subserve an
important message or important discovery they have made in race relations. (Down Second
Avenue , pp. 195-6)
That South African writers, black or white, are 'hyper-sensitive to the race problem' was
hardly a startling discovery; in fact, the opposite would have been more surprising. What was
new in Mphahlele's criticism, given his 'racial' identity, was his treatment of white South
African fiction in which 'protest' is now seen as somehow part of its disablement, preaching
the social message its own undoing. For example, Mphahlele was to conclude that 'Plomer the
fictionist was a very angry man, and although he was clearly the best of a kind, he wrote best
when not emotionally involved in race prejudice, when he was not protesting outright. (The
African Image , p. 136) If some of this sounds familiar enough as what has become a general
criticism of black literature, it has to be said that Mphahlele was hardly unaware of the
parallels: 'We are all trapped, black and white, in South Africa', he wrote. 'Racial strife is our
way of life." (The African Image , p. 133)
In a sense, the white writer was placed in a no-win situation by Mphahlele. If s/he did not
write about black characters or treated them only tangentially, Mphahlele murmured that
'Africans do not loom large' in this particular work; if the writer made a point of the race issue
Mphahlele was quick to discern in this preoccupation an obstacle to the realisation of
individual character in its own right. Mphahlele was attempting to explore what might have
proved a fruitful area of research: how the subjectivity of black characters is dealt with in
white South African fiction, but his pedestrian reading of texts, which consisted of a strategy
no more distracting or disruptive than a simple paraphrase of the plots, a summary of the traits
exhibited by the black characters, a brief commentary on the central meaning or moral to be
extracted from the plot, meant that Mphahlele's project never really got off the ground.
Generally speaking, Mphahlele's criticism is untroubled by the exigencies of literary theory;
even a close reading of the most traditional kind might have yielded better insight than is
evident in this lethargic résumé of the plots. Consider this summing up of Jack Cope's fiction:
Although 'The Tame Ox' is a really funny story and efficient, and there is poignant realism in
'The Gold Oriele', Jack Cope is at his best when he applies a microscopic lens to human
suffering among non-whites. He singles out a character who is in some predicament and
shows us agony at work. (The African Image , p. 193)
This is extremely 'laid-back'! The general tone of this criticism is both hortatory and
admonitive rather than analytical:
Someone will have to tell the whites one day -- writers, politicians, the lot -- in a language
they can understand, that a meaningful literature that uses the South African setting will have
to draw its power from the ironic sense of permanence with which the black man sticks it out
in a city where he is not accepted by whites except as a servant. (The African Image , p. 156)
At the age of thirty-seven, after a struggle to acquire a passport lasting ten months, Mphahlele
left South Africa on 6 September 1957 to teach at a grammar school in Nigeria. Before
joining Drum , as the secretary of the Transvaal teachers' association, he and two other
colleagues had been banned from teaching because of their attempts to mobilise the teaching
profession against the implementation of the Bantu Education Act. The other two who were
sacked with him were Zeph Mothopeng, now president of the PAC., and Isaac Matlare, a
member of what was then the Unity Movement. Not only were they dismissed from their
posts but the Government authorities attempted to have them blacklisted in all the
neighbouring 'British-protected' territories. Isaac Matlare was summarily dismissed from his
post in a school in Swaziland after a visit to the territory by the South African Security
Branch. Similarly, when Mphahlele applied for a teaching post in what was then
Bechuanaland, a British High Commission territory, 'a reply came that a communication had
reached them from the provincial department of education that as I had been "dismissed for
subversive activities" I could not gain admission into the Bangwato College.' Collaboration
between South Africa and the British Authorities for the suppression of unruly natives is
apparently nothing new. Before leaving South Africa, as a member of the ANC Mphahlele
had attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown and had participated in the drawing up of
the Freedom Charter.
Mphahlele spent four years in Nigeria, only fifteen months teaching at the C.M. Grammar
School which had initially hired him, and the rest in the Extra-Mural Department of the
University of Ibadan. His duties, which must have been arduous, consisted in visiting schools
and community centres around the country, teaching English and 'creative' writing courses to
adult students in evening classes. Mphahlele is understandably bitter that the university
department of English refused to recognise his Master's degree from South Africa as
sufficient qualification for teaching internal students, but on the whole he seems to have been
relatively happy during his stay in Nigeria which coincided not only with the country's
attainment of independence but with the emergence of the first generation of modern Nigerian
writers led by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark and
Ulli Beier, the tireless German-born promoter of indigenous art and literature.
In August or September 1961 (Mphahlele gives two dates), the 'Mphahlele clan', as he calls it,
moved to Paris where he had secured a post as director of the African section of the Congress
for Cultural Freedom. What Mphahlele did not know and what many writers and artists,
including myself, did not know, was that the Congress was simply an American front
organisation using culture as an arena for waging the Cold War. Toward the end of the Sixties
this became clear when it was revealed that several foundations, including Farfield which had
paid my own school fees at Harvard, were using laundered funds from the Central Intelligence
Agency with which they supported journals, writers' and artists' clubs, through the Congress
for Cultural Freedom.
Since, so far as we know, there was never any ideological attempt on our collective virtue, it
is difficult to see what American Intelligence hoped to gain by supporting so diverse a group
of writers, intellectuals, journals and cultural clubs. One clue is provided in a recent study by
an American academic of two important literary journals which were supported at one time or
another by the Congress. In his book Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural
Awakening in Africa (University of California Press, 1986), Benson writes: 'Why the CIA
would have wanted to support Transition is still not clear, but as Thomas Powers has pointed
out it was not in those days a particularly tightly organised agency'. Explaining what Benson
calls 'the casualness of those programs' the Agency supported, he quotes the director of
Farfield Foundation as saying:
Well, in those days, we wanted to aid and support the intellectuals of what were then the only
independent classes [in Africa] Our interest was in establishing an independent publishing
program based on Africa and aiding African intellectuals to find their own feet on the ground
We didn't know -- nobody knew -- a person's political affiliations. (p. 161)
Apparently, what the Americans were naively anxious to prevent was the African intellectuals
turning to the Soviet Union or China for assistance in setting up their cultural institutions. 'In
countries where Western-style political institutions were almost everywhere still in place,
stability and economic integrity would keep Africa in the non-communist camp' (p. 161). In
the aftermaths of those revelations Mphahlele wrote bitterly: 'Yes, the CIA stinks We were
had!': then went on to argue: 'But in Africa, we have done nothing with the knowledge that the
money came from the CIA; nor have we done anything we would not have done if the money
had come from elsewhere.'
In any case, Mphahlele's move to Paris in 1961 inaugurates an important phase in his career in
which he is now able to indulge his passion for teaching as well as for nurturing new talent.
There is no doubt that Mphahlele was selflessly, even naively, working for what he hoped
would be the recuperation of African cultures in the post-independence era. He travelled
everywhere in Africa, he organised conferences for writers and academics, and he secured
funds for journals and cultural centres. As well as organising writers' workshops he solicited
funds for the support of literary journals and for the publications of neglected works. Two
South African writers who were banned in their own country, Alex la Guma and Dennis
Brutus, gained their first access to an international audience through Mphahlele's efforts. Both
were first published by Mbari Publications of Nigeria which also published Black Orpheus .
According to Mphahlele: 'The Congress raised money from Merrill Foundation in New York
to finance Mbari Publications, a new venture the club (Mbari Writers' Club of Nigeria)
undertook. Work by Wole (Soyinka), Christopher (Okigbo), J.P. (Clark), and Lenrie Peters
was first published by Mbari, before finding its way to commercial houses'. In Afrika My
Music Mphahlele explains:
With Congress sponsorship, Black Orpheus organised a literary contest for black African
writers. I administered the contest from Paris. Alex la Guma, still under house arrest, ran off
with the first prize for his powerful novella, A Walk in the Night , accompanied by Dennis
Brutus's volume of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots There were noises in white liberal
quarters in South Africa about racism in reverse because I had insisted on the contest being
restricted to black Africans.
Mphahlele also edited anthologies: African Writing Today for Penguin and with Ellis Komey
of Ghana Modern African Stories for Faber. However, there was a darker side to all this
activity. Outside South Africa Mphahlele could not settle down anywhere, neither in Europe,
Africa or the United States. Several times in Afrika My Music he refers sardonically to the
'Mphahlele caravan' having to move on, from Paris, Ibadan, Nairobi, Denver, Lusaka, Denver
and finally at the University of Pennsylvania the thought strikes: 'If only I could teach in my
own native land or continent." So on 17 August 1977 Zeke and Rebecca Mphahlele were on
the move again; this time returning to South Africa after twenty years of exile.
Here begins one of the most doubtful moves in Mphahlele's long and variegated career, for he
was now returning home not to a neutral zone of palatable choices, but to one of intensified
struggle in which every gesture counted. Indeed, by returning to the Bantustan 'state' of
Lebowa where he hoped to obtain a teaching post at the University of the North, he was
returning to the very site of ideological struggle which twenty years before had resulted in his
leaving the country. As a result, when Mphahlele was invited in November 1978 to give a
lecture at the University of Lesotho the predictable happened: 'A group of refugee students
from South Africa decided to bait me. I was accused, in effect, of intellectual dishonesty, of
rationalising my return and aborted intention to teach in the university (the North) that had
been established under a system I had attacked and was attacking I explained that wherever
African students are to be found, and I am allowed to teach them, I will do it '.
Truculent, perversely mocking those of us still living in exile, the wheel seemed to have
turned full circle. When presenting himself for an interview in the hope of recruitment to the
University of the North, a certain Professor Pretorius had asked Mphahlele the same question:
'Why I have come back to seek employment in an institution that is a product of a system of
education I had attacked before I left the country?' In fact, Mphahlele has no answer to these
questions. Afrika My Music is a long apologia for a sad nostalgic retreat from the
inhospitability of exile though it is difficult to see a tenured professorship in one of the best
endowed universities in the United States as quite the Siberia that Mphahlele's glacial rhetoric
makes it out to be on the eve of his return to South Africa.
So sadly, we have at least two Zeke Mphahleles to contemplate in this long career. There is
Mphahlele the rebel who worked ceaselessly to obstruct the nefarious workings of the South
African educational system, the author of a distinguished autobiography, Down Second
Avenue ; and we have another Mphahlele, probably exhausted by a lifetime of struggle to
procure a proper role for the African artist, who could say on returning to South Africa: 'We
are all trapped as a conquered people. I could not presume to judge the territorial leaders from
the relatively safe position of exile'. Somehow, one hears in the brittle prose of Afrika My
Music the sound of a different Drum.