ARTICLE
BY FRED DE VRIES
It's almost 6 pm. The dried-up tea has left a brown film in the cups. For more than an hour we've been talking about post-apartheid literature. And even though the 79-year old Nadine Gordimer shows no signs of fatigue, it's been enough. 'Last question, I'm afraid.'
'OK. Disgrace.'
The Grande Dame of South African literature twitches her mouth, a mini-moment of visible irritation. Then she says: 'Why do you people ask about other people's books. It's really not fair. I think that Coetzee, who's a friend, is a very good writer. But Disgrace is a very troubling book. There isn't one black person who's really a human being. They are all predators in the shadows. It's very much the book - perhaps he was projecting himself into this - of white fears. And the only person that is seen with any real love and feeling is the dog at the end. I'm a lover of dogs, but I can't accept that nothing else could move the central character.'
It's a novel, she continues, that has been written from the frame of reference of a white minority. She cannot imagine a single black family that would hide the rapist and support him as if he's done something brave. 'And I tell you why the book is so popular in Europe. There is deep down a subconscious identification of white people with a white minority.'
With The House Gun Gordimer has written the first real post-apartheid novel. Although the story is set in the post-1994 era, the writer pursues the themes of her earlier work: violence, love and race relations. Gordimer has always adhered to the Manichean adage about the cutting dualism and endless struggle between good and evil, with a divine light hidden in all of us.
Any trace of such hope is absent in the novel of Coetzee. And apart from all the other qualities, that is why Disgrace is a landmark - and The House Gun isn't. Disgrace was a crucial step away from South African mainstream literature, which had apartheid as its touchstone. Apartheid was a sexy subject that did very well overseas, especially when it was presented as a comfortable black and white dichotomy. The cliché was the novel with stereotypes such as 'the bad Afrikaner', 'the good black' and 'the confused liberal'.
'This society needs to get rid of its fur and its faeces', says poet Lesego Rampolokeng. 'And the only way it can do so is by going down on its knees in front of the toilet and pray: oh, mighty faeces.'
That's exactly what Coetzee did. He knelt, prayed and hammered a hole in the toilet wall. Hence he opened a space for disposing of politically correct thinking and false heroics. He created a place for catharsis, a universe full of pain. 'I do believe that I need to scalp myself to dissect myself and expose all the maggots and the worms and the vultures and jackals that are howling in my soul', confirms Rampolokeng. His third collection, The Bavino Sermons, portrays a society that's possibly even more bleak than the one in Disgrace.
It's a lonely space out there. After the official end of apartheid in 1994 it was tempting to be sedated by the euphoria that swept across the New South Africa, with its new leaders and new poets laureates. All the former activists needed was a little push and they'd be sitting comfortably among the new nomenclature. Rampolokeng could have been the hip black apologist of the ANC-government. 'I could have gone to these dinners. I could have been in the Department of Information. At the very beginning I could have gotten myself on that list that had been circulated. Easily. But I didn't. When indeed it seemed the system had its clutches and tentacles out, I stepped back.
Why? Because he would have revoked his own right to look at myself. 'I would have lost that right completely, not even the right to name or call myself by my own name. The point is I can always only be myself, whether it's difficult or not. Does it feel lonely? I think the mind is a lonely place in general. It's even lonelier for people who see the need to use it. But loneliness from another angle, as being conscious of my aloneness within the set up, yes, definitely. It's a cold, cold place to be.'
In 1995, South Africa was still Desmond Tutu's 'Rainbow Nation'. But the new reality quickly revealed itself. Rampolokeng: 'There's a subterranean, an ugly, very hostile and negative spirit, that is fed more and more on human blood, literally. People die so it could keep feeding. It manifest itself physically in a whole lot of prosaic and pedestrian things, people shooting guns, children getting abused and raped, a whole lot of death, maiming and violence of all sorts. Not least of all psychological violence.'
It would be too easy to blame apartheid, he stresses. 'This psychosis, this neurosis, while a lot of it has to do with apartheid, most of the time we contribute to it willingly. Just like some people willingly, once they find themselves in a situation of slavery, contribute to the enslavement of the people who are around them.'
In a country that went through a long history of isolation, repression and quasi-war, it's not surprising that writers have been diligently searching for a new identity. Where they used to have apartheid as a centre of gravity (you were either for or against), they are now floating in space, trying to touch base.
Writer Stacy Hardy (29) grew up in an English speaking family in Pietersburg. 'I come from a culture that had no mythology, little history, very little to look back on or to grasp', she says. Lacking clear roots (there's Scandinavian, English, Scottish and German blood running through her veins), her culture became the American brand. 'America didn't take part in the cultural boycott, so apart from Afrikaans the only other culture you had was American: television, music, films and the mall stuff. So I always had the strange feeling of: what is my history and what is the mythology I come from? Afrikaans people have a very firm grasp of that. I've started to feel less of an outsider now. But what I belong to is very much skating across a lot of surfaces where I feel I don't interact with any culture.'
Hardy succeeds wonderfully in catching that floating feeling in her short stories, which can be found in the literary web-magazine donga. Often they deal with brief encounters with people from a completely different scene. Mysterious personages like My Nigerian Drug Dealer or the Dogman.
In Hardy's world of chaos, violence is the solder. One night in Grahamstown she was woken up by a burglar, who pushed a knife against her throat. 'He wanted me to come out. He pointed between my legs and said he wanted that. And I'm offering him everything else in the room. How about the cell phone? The wallet? The radio rather? In the end I said fine I'll come with you. He tried to force me out of the room. We had a panic button and I managed to get there, and he scuttered out of the window.'
Just like the female character in Disgrace, she rationalizes the experience. It's the price you have to pay. 'It's almost part of the white guilt. I don't know if everyone feels that way, but I can understand it. Turn the table and put yourself there and you can understand it. It's no mystery why there's so much crime and sexual violence in this country. You take a society that is allegedly free but the economics stay in place - and it's not free. It's one of the inescapable things of South Africa. In the apartheid era, it was very easy to protest. In high school I was wearing my little Stop Apartheid T-shirt. Now the enemy is not something easy to point a finger at, because the problem is economics.'
Do you write about that? And if so, how? Biggest obstacle is the politically correct thinking. How difficult it is for a white writer to portray a nasty black. How hard for a black writer to give the murders and rapes a context. How strenuous for both of them to turn a white racist into a plausible character. And how careful everyone must be when dealing with guilt and racism. On top of that, young writers must run the gauntlet if they want to be published at all. Only small publishers like Brevitas and Protea are prepared to take risks.
Aryan Kaganof, previously known as filmmaker Ian Kerkhof, offered his debut Hectic! to various established publishing houses - in vain. 'We can't publish this book, they said, because we're not sophisticated enough to read it, because we'll think you're an AWB-writer. I couldn't believe it', says Kaganof. He then ended up publishing it himself, followed by a Dutch translation.
With Hectic! Kaganof further penetrated the literary space that Coetzee had opened up. He wrote an anti-moralistic novel that is set in Cape Town, and deals with the subculture of young people who hang out in pool halls. That's where Kaganof found the essence of the white South African. 'The whites in this country are all white trash. No European who was on any level a worthwhile human being came into this country. The shit, the detritus and the dirt came here and invented the Negro, the kaffer, because then they could feel better about themselves. So if you want to find those things out you have to go to the lower classes, because that's the history of the country, all the rest is affectation. Culture is very skin-deep with the white South Africans, all ersatz culture. Real South African culture is fighting and drinking and sports.'
He wanted to get to the heart of a subculture he was part of. 'There was no other mission. To show people as they really are, not these people talking political things of change and all this rubbish. And nothing about guilt from the past. Most of the people I know live their life and don't give a fuck about anything. They're pissed off with all that shit.'
Despite this unwelcoming literary climate, there has been a steady stream of young post-apartheid writers, even though it's too early to talk of a movement. 'I could come up with a beautiful, coherent story', says author Etienne van Heerden, who teaches creative writing at the University of Cape Town. 'But the truth of the matter is that everything is still in a ferment, everything is very complex, and everything has a counterargument. This is the first literary generation that doesn't write in opposition, a generation that has to search for subject matter and that is very cynical about involvement. A generation that, contrary to us, the Tachtigers, isn't issue driven.'
Names. Twenty-nine-year old K. Sello Duiker is seen as one of the biggest talents. For Thirteen Cents he received the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region. The follow-up, the multi-layered The Quiet Violence of Dreams, about a black guy getting involved in the gay scene of Cape Town, got excellent reviews. Duiker works with the significance of violence in South Africa in a very non-judgemental way. 'My point is, there is much more to it. I'm not being flippant about it, but it's a whole culture that tries to communicate different messages. For instance in Thirteen Cents I wanted to explore is how violence can also be used as a way of communication. We come from a violent culture and after apartheid we never really had a resting period, or some kind of government or community intervention so people could heal themselves. It's going to take a while before violence has cleansed itself up. I like to look underneath: where is it coming from? Is it hatred, anger, saying something other than the obvious? It is a language.'
Phaswane Mpe (32) published Welcome to our Hillbrow, a novel that is largely situated in the hectic Johannesburg neighbourhood of Hillbrow. Mpe deals with sensitive themes like black xenophobia, aids, rural superstition and witchcraft. All this from the perspective of someone who has killed himself. 'I didn't think I'd ever write a novel', says Mpe. 'Until May 1999, when I got so depressed that I contemplated suicide. A friend discouraged me from doing it, but I still needed a bigger purpose to exist, so I thought let's keep myself busy and I started writing this novel.'
On the Afrikaner front it has been eerily quiet. The Afrikaner literary scene is weighed down by the near monopoly of the Nasionale Pers, where talent spotters are mainly interested in easily digestible bestsellers. The current trend is a revival of the plaasroman (the regional novel). Recent winner of the prestigious Insig Prize for Literature was a 51-year old female farmer who had not published anything before and wrote about life on the farm.
'There's less and less self criticism or critical thinking. They say: "We are under siege and we need to protect our own. This is a little flower, let's give it lots of water". Although it's a fucking cactus', sneers Jaco Botha, one of the new voices. Botha (30) can be filed under 'young, different and promising'. His collection of short stories, Sweisbril, is a ruthless anatomy of Afrikaans working class losers. He has been compared to Raymond Carver. Botha was one of those who wandered around in the dark room of Coetzee. 'Some people say there's racist elements in Sweisbril. I agree with that. And not politically correct language. Yes. But it's not mindless, it's investigative, saying what is the essence of something like racism, why are people racist, ducking into the insecurities of people. On ground level there's still such a lot of racism, fear, resentment. More and more from both sides.'
To write about post-apartheid South Africa, one needs a hard, polished pen, and an faultless feeling for nuance and empathy. One needs a 360 degrees identification radar.
A last name. Ivan Vladislavic (1957). His second novel The Restless Supermarket is the sublimation of the confusion that has had South Africa under its spell since Nelson Mandela was released in1990. The book is the antidote to Disgrace, says critic Paul Wessels. 'Coetzee's text is truly despotic. It allows no thought, no exchange. Absolute repression.'
The Restless Supermarket is, once again, set in Hillbrow, during the transformation from bohemian to lawless. The power of the novel lies in the sublime use of language, and even more in the choice of the protagonist: the retired corrector Aubrey Tearle, an unsympathetic grumbler, a feeble witness to the black invasion in his neighbourhood. Like many of his generation, he doesn't have the means to escape. Tearle is obsessed by language and by spotting mistakes in texts. Corruption of the language is for him the perfect metaphor for the entire country going down the drain. The book captures the kaleidoscopic preamble to Tearle's birthday party, as well as the apocalyptic course it takes.
Vladislavic is a humble man, choosing his words (almost too) carefully. But at the same time he radiates confidence. He definitely lacks the bravura of Rampolokeng and Kaganof, or the hauteur of Gordimer. We are sitting on a outdoor terrace in the quasi-bohemian neighbourhood of Melville. Late afternoon sunlight tempers the macho reflection of the Johannesburg skyline, hawkers try to sell trinkets made from wire, Vladislavic orders a beer.
The Restless Supermarket is not a politically correct book, but neither does it try to shock. It manages to rise above all that. It boils down to sensitivity, says Vladislavic. 'Political correctness is too simple. There's sensitivities involved of perspective and judgement that go beyond purely PC. You have to be very careful to represent people who are different in a situation of this kind. There is a lot at stake. And the values of freedom and freedom of expression are still very fragile here. It's not as if we live in a very secure democracy where these things are untouchable. So clearly there is an argument to be made for being sensitive.'
One of the functions of all art, he continues, is to imagine otherness. 'If you can't imagine yourself in the position of another person, then you have no business.' In his case it's the world of a retired racist. 'Yes', he grins, 'He's not an easy person to identify with. Part of the idea of creating a person who was immediately or obviously dislikeable, was to try and lead it to a more interesting and complicated relationship with the reader. A fair amount of South African fiction has been spoilt by simplistic stereotypical characterisation and easy identification. It appeals to me as a writer and a person to try and find the more complex position. In a transition period it is quite valuable to create a relationship between the reader and the text in which his own values and presuppositions are questioned a bit.'
With his book Vladislavic touches upon the essence of literature; the magic of words in a certain order; the dismay of the reader when, after a few pages, he notices that he has been identifying himself with the repulsive Aubrey Tearle. 'Quite a few readers have said to me they found themselves almost embarrassed by the degree to which they identified with him', says Vladislavic. 'For me that's a wonderful response. This is not an easy place and that almost inevitably translates into responses and attitudes that you don't necessarily feel very proud of, and not necessarily always understand.' Softening the reader's feeling of awkwardness, he adds: 'It's my own response too, as a writer.'
J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace, Secker and Warburg, 1999
Nadine Gordimer: The House Gun, Bloomsbury, 1998
Lesego Rampolokeng: The Bavino Sermons, Gecko Books, 1999
Stacy Hardy, see www.donga.co.za
Aryan Kaganof: Hectic!, Pine Slopes, 2001
K. Sello Duiker: The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Kwela Books, 2001
Phaswane Mpe: Welcome to our Hillbrow, University of Natal Press, 2001
Jaco Botha: Sweisbril, Human & Rousseau, 1999
Ivan Vladislavic: The Restless Supermarket, David Philip, 2001