Please comment on this essay. Your commnents will fertilise its growth and development, which I liken to managing that of a bonsai tree. Trim a bit here, clip a root, invert some bark. This is the third version of the essay in as many weeks. I have just pruned it drastically.
Note that there are numbered end-notes: e.g. [1].
I would welcome any opportunities to share and discuss my ideas. Communicate via the comments please.
I would welcome any opportunities to share and discuss my ideas. Communicate via the comments please.
Note on the name used below. It is a nom de blog, roughly meaning John the Writer in Afrikaans and Zulu, in recognition of the two most commonly spoken languages in South Africa.
Sincere Regards
Jan Mbali
TRAPPING A TRUE STORY AND WRITING TRUTHFUL FICTION
by Jan Mbali (pen name)
Three true stories that I trapped
On a trip to Cape Town in 2003 I was told some stories by two strangers who certainly considered them to be true. As an amateur writer my first response was that if only I could capture the essence of the stories, then they could be transmuted through the alchemy that happens when good fiction is created. However, the stories were powerful and this forced me to think about the morality of the project. Is informed consent required? What if there are consequences because someone recognises the facts embedded in the fiction? These concerns then got buried under a much larger set of challenges, which boil down to one: How best can we truthfully, through fiction, tell stories about our lives and times? The purpose of this essay is to share my reflections on this question.
First, so that you have a sense of what I mean by a true story, you need to listen to the three stories that I heard. Bear in mind that I am a South African, and this influenced the telling of the stories and how I heard them. Their accounts and my accounts are influenced by the history we share and they were mediated by my own experiences and outlook.
The Black man next to me on the plane from Cape Town …
Told me that he was in charge of a catering unit in a prison, a Black empowerment company having landed a massive contract. Never been on a plane before, the company was flying him up to Jo’burg to do a management course. He was sharp, self-educated and seemingly very much in charge of the pressure cooker that was his working world. He told me what each meal cost and how he managed the prisoners and the corrupt warders who supervised them in the kitchens. He had made friends with one prisoner who had been a policeman. Normally a reasonable, even tempered man, in a drunken rage he had shot four people dead at a party. Sentenced to several life terms, he regretted his act with every waking moment. Just recently the former policeman was told that his 12-year-old son had killed himself. Both of us fell silent, the story overwhelming us, biting deep into us and feeding our humanity at the same time. Impossible not to feel, even at this distance, the prisoner’s explosion of grief, regret and despair. A feeling hardly diminished by the thought that the loved ones of his victims must have felt similar emotions. The tragedy so awful that it linked us to the prisoner and one another and cut across boundaries of race, class, culture and geography. I never found out, and did not need to ask, whether the prisoner was white or Black. Something remarkable, even ten years into the New South Africa.
I was in the plane because I was flying back to Johannesburg after visiting my 88 year-old mother in Cape Town. The Coloured [1] woman who was in my mother’s kitchen ….
was for short while her part-time cleaner, companion and general helper. She was driven by an urge to talk to any one who would listen. Torrents of words, as she stood holding a mop or a pile of plates. She talked mainly about the time, not too long before, when her husband worked in a mine in a remote rural area. They lived in a settlement that was little more than the mine compound and the company housing the white and coloured workers lived in. She talked of the whites she lived among at that time and told me a pair of stories that festered in her and bit into me. How one African child of five joined a group of children swimming at the only pool for miles, part of the mining complex. Some white children trampled her underwater until she drowned, in plain view of some frightened Coloured children who later spread the word. The local police chose to do nothing and told the disbelieving parents that it was an accident. The thought that is eating me is this. Are the hearts and minds of those child-killers as callused as their feet? Or will they be condemned to wake up sweating for the remainder of their lives, feeling that warm, squirming body underfoot.
The story she told me had an even more savage bite, biblical in its intensity. It reminded me of Calvinist preachers thundering on Sunday radio in wonderful simple Afrikaans. And it appeared to confirm horribly stereotypes about the older generation of working-class Coloureds. How the Whites dominated them psychologically and physically and oppressed them into a state of permanent subservience. Leaving many only able to express their frustration through self-destructive violence and alcohol abuse. Or compulsive story telling in the case of the woman I met.
The last story is about a poor-white family were the woman’s closest neighbors. Always borrowing from them as payday receded, she told me, but never thanking and never lending, although her family also struggled to survive. The children from the two families often played together. One day some trouble erupted, her seven-year old son was accused of urinating on the face of the little Afrikaner girl. She beat him so savagely she nearly killed him. He was so injured he could not even crawl, and he had to stay away from school for a week. But he looked up into her face and said, “Mummy it wasn’t me. It was her brother that did it.”
“I knew it was true the moment he said it. As true as God,” she told me. “And I fell on my knees and prayed to God to forgive me. The mother of the girl came to my door the next day and told me it was good that I punished my boy, because of the disgusting thing he did. But she could not meet my eyes. And I saw from her manner that she knew her own son was guilty.”
There was a long pause in the torrent of words.
“But I said nothing”, the woman told me. “I said nothing.”
What rubbed in the salt, for me, was the way she kept looking around her, in distant Cape Town and several years later. With real fear in her eyes and telling me “Please do not give my name if you tell these things”.
What happens when a true story is trapped. A visualisation
Our minds are not blank slates - tabulae rasae - for the stories of others to be written on. To use a more modern analogy, they already have the same basic architecture and hardwiring, as well as much shared software and data. Furthermore, our conscious RAM is only a tiny fraction of the memories stored in our hard drives or unconscious. The actual human mind is almost infinitely more complex and the meeting of two or more minds even more so. Which is why it is not entirely ridiculous that researchers have submitted huge theses on the hermeneutics of what happens when two people say hi to one another, or when a child interacts with a Janet and John book. In effect they are dipping a mere thimble into the abyss and attempting to analyse the contents. What Ms. George Eliot in Middlemarch calls “the roar that lies on the other side of silence”. A roar she says we would die of, if we were sensitive enough to hear “the grass grow and a squirrels heart beat.”
This is how I visualise the process. To trap a true story, told by an other, what you have to do is find a space in your two minds is at least partly shared and which includes a desert and at least one oasis. But not only, because it must be hidden or disguised by the normal mess of rivers, lush valleys, forests and human constructions and devices. You then command one of your scouts to wait by an oasis and warn you if a story is approaching. With some people, it is hard to coax their stories out and you need to lay a trail of suitable tidbits across the desert, always leading to the oasis. Others actually prefer the apparent simplicity of the desert, which is a good place to howl or to contemplate. Let us imagine that a story is approaching such an oasis. It is a monster of course, very wild and hairy, but also very shy because underneath the shagginess it is like a newborn lamb, naked and trembling with fear and desire. The desire is the desire to be heard and the fear is the fear of revealing its soft underbelly, entrails waiting to be ripped out. The appearance of the desert is constantly shifting as layers of shared and disputed meanings move under and over and through one another. The story hops from foot to hairy foot, trying to avoid spots that are burning hot or freezing cold; and its many ears and noses are alert for signs of a predator.
Of course it is always a cunning disguise, and we are always fooled by it. You trapped the story and it simultaneously trapped you. Once you have heard the story, and your juices have flowed over it and the process of digestion has begun, it begins to eat you. To extend the metaphor, through my writing the stories have eaten their way out of me and into you, gentle reader. Good luck with them.
Reflections on the power of stories to hurt or to heal
Stories derive much of their power by breathing fresh life into cultural elements that we all share. Our minds are filled from the same historical well. Our inner geographies all have burning tropics of desire and frigid winters of discontent, mountainous ambitions we have to climb and swamps of despair we must wade through. We populate these universes with similar archetypes such as enemies and friends, prophets who lead and those who mislead, foul rapists and tender lovers. Hence we have an abiding attraction to stories like the Pilgrims Progress, road trip movies and quests and searches for holy grails and rings of power. Science fiction writers sense that this is a universal and often have aliens sitting around, scratching their scaly backsides, quaffing some brew and telling long sagas about heroes on quests. Even so, sensitive writers know that we also have a primal fear of being touched too deeply by the stories of others. Perhaps that is one reason why psychiatrists and psychologists charge high fees and why in every society there are priests of one kind or another who, among other things, specialize in exorcising stories that have invaded us.
Most stories we hear in a stable environment are more or less neutral, simply confirming our worldview. But other stories have the potential to inflict great harm on individuals and societies. For whatever deep-seated reason, we have an abiding fear of the other in spite (and because) of our shared history and cultures. This may explain why we are so enthralled by the many alien movies where, without exception, a horrible something gets into someone and eats its way out to reveal its true monstrous nature.
Another feature of these movies is that the alien always has a nest hidden somewhere, an evil brood about to emerge from an enormous pile of eggs, each egg a potential horror story that must be burnt, crushed and annihilated before they breed us into extinction. Have you not heard someone talking about how those Arabs or Latinos or Africans breed? Or even about Catholics. We are often driven by the fear of the other, hitched so often to nightmare ideologies of race hate and xenophobia. And purity. A Berlin wall to keep communism pure and a wall across Palestine that is essentially about keeping Israel pure. The walls created by Apartheid in South Africa that only now are beginning to crumble. Viva impure and messy cultures!
The most dangerous stories are those that are etched into our collective memories with the acid of hate and programme you to kill. The river of anti-Semitism that runs red through European history is a prime example and it is one of many. Recently, during the Balkan conflict more than one commentator explained how harmless seeming grannies carried the seeds of ethnic cleansing in the stories they told their grandchildren. For instance, one journalist was told that one such tale originated in the Second World War. Children are told often that the Ustase Croats and renegade Muslims cut the throats of so many Serb babies that they had to tie knives to their hands, so exhausted were they. This goes a long way to explaining how politicians – be they in Serbia or Rwanda or Iraq - can get people to rape and butcher neighbors with whom they had generally been friendly. If there is no healing process, on the level of whole nations, then this kind of abscess always grows and bursts again. Cultural capital is not all positive, and there always those who will dig out and use elements of a nation’s history to advance their narrow interests.
Spielberg has a wonderful understanding of the contrary sides of our nature, having given us the Alien series as well as ET and Encounters of the Third Kind. In my view they provide an excellent barometer for our current condition. Unfortunately ET seems as dated as a faded clip of a flower child prancing barefoot in the mud at Woodstock. What resonates much more strongly now are films that speaks to a rising tide of sectarian hatred. Would Yeats not once more launch a prophecy, as he did in his “Second Coming” between the two world wars?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Yeats saw the roots of conflict and anarchy in terms of mystical cycles and a lack of respect for elites and their values. We now have the benefit of much hindsight and many more would agree that corporate greed is a more likely cause of modern wars. But whatever the source of conflicts, there is the same use made of negative stories as ammunition.
But even without the help of ET there is much that is positive in stories and truths that can be told in a way that can heal and build rather than destroy. I am certainly not calling for a deluge of Readers’ Digest good news stories. The argument that I develop below is that good fiction, that has integrity by definition, reveals truths about our lives and times that have value. What we cannot understand we may make worse instead of better. A specific author might be reactionary in political terms but may nevertheless achieve a humanist end by writing better than a well-intentioned propagandist might. One of Karl Marx’s interesting asides is that the works of the conservative Stendahl reveal more of value about his society than is evident in the writings of the socialist Zola.
Introducing hard humanism
As stated above, it is evident that authors of almost any philosophical persuasion can turn a true story into fiction that has value for humanity. However, I should make my own standpoint and assumptions clear because I am introducing universal notions of truth and value. My position in this context is a version what can be termed “hard humanism”.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s I often visited the London home of a South African exile family. One reason they were in exile was that a racial purity law (the Immorality Act) dictated that their marriage was illegal. Theirs was a wonderful blend of Indian and Jewish culture, chicken soup and curry, that had at its centre a large table in a warm and welcoming kitchen. At one end was an enormous black poster and on it written in gold letters was an extract from John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. I now understand that the text had a more profound and lasting influence on me than most of the social and political theory and rhetoric I engaged with in those turbulent years. I have realised that the sermon reveals the hard and transforming logic that finds common expression in all humanist aspects of philosophies and religions. Such as certain kinds of Christians, Marxists, Budhists, Muslims, Hindus and Taoists or the Jewish tradition epitomised by the ancient sage Hillel. “What you do not like, don’t do to your fellow man is the whole of the Law; all else is but its exposition,” says Hillel. The logic of Donne leads to the same place: that humankind is indivisible and the loss of any life diminishes the whole.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or
of thine own were: any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bells
tolls; it tolls for thee."
(John Donne, 1624) [2]
A hard humanist who is sincere and consistent must unlock the church, mosque, synagogue and temple so that the homeless do not have to sleep in dark doorways. And to hell with protecting the property of the worshippers, which has always been the primary concern of classic liberals. The leaders of the French and American revolutions, for instance, decided that the property rights of slave owners was of more importance than the denial of the humanity of the slaves. According to a hard humanist they deny their own humanity by so doing, so we are doubly impoverished.
To build on the issue of slavery, a strong argument can be made that ideologies of racial superiority that oppose this crucial principle are arguably the most dangerous form of idolatry in any humanistic religion or philosophy. The worshipping of false gods, or alienation from humankind in a broader sense. The ideology of the whole Western imperialist and colonialist enterprise was profoundly racist and anti-humanist, with the justification of slavery its main driving force. The demon of modern mass racism and intolerance was loosed upon the world and has yet to be put back in the bottle.
To sum up. My view is that the defining characteristic of hard humanism is its insistence that humankind is one and that all lives must be valued equally, at least as an ideal. A very hard row to hoe and many have been crucified for trying. We all die a little each time we compromise or fail, sensing and abetting the erosion of humanity “If a clod be washed away by the sea”.
Defining truth, good writing and the creative space we have to protect
Abstract or pure definitions of a true story are of little use in this context. And neither are relativistic copouts, like Keats saying that truth is beauty and beauty truth. Which is a lovely way of saying that truth cannot be defined because it is always subjective and related to particular people, situations and perceptions. I will argue instead for a particular way of approaching truth and true stories, as I have come to understand and value it.
My contention is that there is a wonderful and universal creative tension (the nature of which itself changes as we evolve) between the objective and subjective and between our individual and collective human experiences. Writing truthful fiction is, at its best, surely about exploring and exploiting this tension, as I trust is illustrated by the example of my own fiction that is appended to this essay. We can extend this argument by stating that there is no way to arrive at a whole range of truths other than through the joys and agonies of attempting to write good fiction. The effort has to be there, hence the insistence on “good”. Recognising, however, that any definition of what is good is bound to be a near tautology and will let in subjectivity. For example, one way to judge the quality of a story is by explaining how successfully an author has revealed this universal tension in his or her writing.
I have not answered the obvious questions: What range of truths? And why through writing fiction rather than by using scientific enquiry, for example? An adequate answer would require another essay and it would involve, amongst other things, unpacking the term “creative tension”. Hopefully here it will be sufficient to claim that fiction is particularly good at revealing truths about psychological states and mechanisms on one hand; and human relationships and historical contexts on the other hand. One reason is that writers of good fiction, through one means or another acquire a deep knowledge of their world and are able to reflect its complexities in intuitive ways forbidden to other disciplines, be they the soft or hard sciences. The barrier is not impermeable – witness the occasionally brilliant examination of literature and authors by psychoanalysts amongst others.[4]
Given the premise stated above, can it be argued that there are ways of incorporating true stories that are more valid, ethical, and effective? And will that not limit the ways in which we can creatively engage with the tensions that drive our universe? My view is that for us humans the issue is rather how we argue about such things, which is critical for how we understand truth and for our general well being.
Answered in one way, we risk being woken up at dawn with boots and clubs and the jangling of handcuffs. Or even worse, we use subtle means to police our own minds: our own journalist, embedded in our own minds. Answered in another way, the better alternative is that we should have the space in which to argue robustly for a particular position while engaging rationally and ethically with the arguments of others. It is probably a permanent feature of the human condition that such space has to be fought for and protected. This struggle in itself presents a danger to creative engagement with yourself and the universe. Brecht wrote that even hatred of injustice distorts ones features and no doubt this applies to our view of the world as well. The case of revolutionaries is especially interesting in this regard. Being driven by one or another historical necessity o they often reveal some profound truths while being blind to others.
My reasoning in relation to the freedom of thought and writing follows the same kind of logic as applies to humanism. However, it is translated into the seemingly soft argument that we are all impoverished when we kill off creative discourse and engagement with ideas and issues. This is a close analogy of the argument for biological diversity. Every child at some time asks the question, “Why are there mosquitoes?” Or flies, or fleas or roaches. What good are they and why don’t we simply exterminate them?” The answer I usually give them includes the millions of years it took such creatures to evolve; their part in the web of life (kill them off and a thousand species of birds will die) and potential uses. A microbe in the gut of a mosquito may some day help us cure a dread disease. My question is: Are there not stories and ideas that are the equivalent of a flea or a cockroach? Off course, sometimes we do the right thing by squashing a blood-sucking pest, or a dictator, or a disgusting idea, but the ideal remains as true as ever. Again, we cannot be complacent. The bland uniformity of views projected by the media houses of so-called free countries puts the boot into the ideal more efficiently than the thugs that serve many oligarchies. Misinformed consent is no consent and a poor basis for any kind of social contract or democracy. The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” will forever remind us of that.
Conclusion and an example of truthful fiction
One concluding thought, albeit not original, is that our understandings of truth and true stories are influenced by our notions of history and the extent to which we can individually and collectively transcend given situations. That is why the stories that are woven into our social fabric can have the power to heal as well as to hurt. One axiom is that in order to write truthful fiction, which by definition is good fiction, we must all learn how to trap the stories we tell ourselves about own lives and times. This entails learning how to find and to engage with our inner voice. Or indeed voices.
My example of truthful fiction is taken from one of my own tales that was quarried out of my memories. The writing process surprised me by exposing and laying some of the ghosts that were haunting me. My contention is that the truth in the story provides that power and it comes from the creative tension between my life, my writing and historical contexts. My best stories were born out of this struggle and this is probably the case with most writers.
One of my sisters recommended a one-hour-per-day plus a weekend “flash fiction” writing course run by Anne Schuster of the Center of the Book in Cape Town. You never meet her, as it is an internet-based course. The writings of the participants, mainly South African women, are shared. The daily hour during the week is structured around excellent techniques that are used to build up your skills and, crucially, to teach you how to put your sub-conscious to work. I discovered that Gábriel Marques [3] is as usual uncannily accurate when he notes that such writing, when it works, is the closest we can get to the experience of flying. It is interesting to speculate on what, in his metaphor, we are flying through. In a sense it is always some kind of collective unconscious, with cultural elements such as archetypes glued together by shared historical experience. On the weekend you produce a piece of flash fiction of a specific length, a very short story on a given theme, in this case the story had to be about something that is found in a house once lived in that was life-changing. Ms. Schuster later gives you detailed feedback. The story appended below is the story that I produced over the weekend.
The house in the story is much as described and was lost to my family in the course of the struggle but not exactly as it is told in the story. The characters are composites and I unconsciously drew on my experiences as a student and member of the South African exile community in the London of the 1960s and 1970s. The character Tiny was born of the profound influence on me of many Black intellectuals I have known or read. Many of whom died in exile before they could taste freedom. The white historian has only a little in common with myself and with my father who was imprisoned but did not die in prison. The character is rather melded from certain historians I have known or whose writings I have loved. The Afrikaner Dirk appeared from nowhere although we are both graduates of the London School of Economics. The main character, Susan, grew from a glance at a woman in the street, as per the instructions of the cunning Ms. Schuster. The black convict that Susan observed being whipped by a prison warder on the lawns of the Prime Minister’s residence is exactly the same man whom I saw. I was running past that same residence as a schoolchild. The prisoner had been assigned to work in the gardens of the residence, which had been donated by the arch-colonialist and racist Cecil John Rhodes. A defining moment in my life as it was in the life of Susan, the character in my story.
Notes
- [1]“Coloured” in South Africa refers to a wide range of communities that resulted from the interaction of settlers, slaves (from Africa and the Dutch Indies), the Khoi-San (so-called Bushmen hunter-gatherers and related herders) and African farmers. The majority speaks Afrikaans, a language these communities did much to bring into existence. They were oppressed under colonialism and Apartheid while being given some privileges by the whites.
- [2] John Donne “For whom the bell tolls”: Published as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no. 17, 1624.
- [3]Gábriel García Marques, Strange Pilgrims, Penguin, 1994, p. xii.
LIKE AN APPLE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
© Jan Mbali 2004
The signs of laughter were marked around Susan’s brown eyes, although she was in her mid twenties. Her casual clothes made soft folds on her full body; the body you felt would always be soft for those who love her. The hearty laughs came from deep within, free and open. Yet she was uneasy, a hidden doubt eating her from within.
They had married in 1968 in an ancient market town, an hour from London. Susan while at a famous art college, and Dirk after completing his masters in international law at the London School of Economics. She was from the minor gentry settled in and around the town, most of them having been taxed off the land and into the more genteel professions. He was an Afrikaner aristocrat, whose rich and sophisticated family owned most of a valley in the mountains near Cape Town and had many political connections. Dirk was as hard as she was soft, with knotted muscles that came from a passion for rugby and doing a tour of duty ‘on the border’.
They had met, in London, at a Church function to raise money for scholarships for black South Africans. Although Susan had little interest in politics, her family had always been liberal and supporters of worthy causes. Dirk was affable and relaxed and talked freely with some black students that hung around nervously. His voice rich and smooth without the whining drawl she found distasteful. Something sparked between them and they went out to dinner.
Within a month she had left the house she shared with other students and moved into his flat in fashionable Chelsea. He completed his degree, brilliantly, and then spent much of his time cultivating a growing circle of black acquaintances. They were closest to Tiny Langa, a rotund law student who had been expelled from a South African university for his ‘activities’. She was fascinated by the ways in which Dirk and Tiny were bound by ties of homesickness, in spite of their differences, and by a tension that ran through their relationship like stretched barbed wire. Each man appeared to enjoy the often violent arguments, but – she sensed – stepping around unspoken issues like matadors around a dangerous bull.
Dirk was mature, compared with the men of his age she had grown up with. But he had an offbeat humour and a whimsical side that brought a touch of magic to their lovemaking. The two of them enjoyed living near the Kings Road, the noisy pubs stuffed with a pungent mix of would-be hippies, from the rich and the dreamy to the ragged and scabby. They developed an appetite for rock music and draft beer, and experimented with pot - he called it ‘dagga’, with a sound like clearing the throat.
They were married a year later, after she completed her studies. Many of his relatives flew out for the wedding, finding much in common with her family despite half-friendly banter about the Boer war. They honeymooned in Cape Town, her first time in South Africa. Susan had read some travel books, but she was unprepared for the wide-eyed beauty of the city. She was also surprised by the house they were to live in, a present from her in-laws. It was very large, but they had paid little for it and the story, told by her father-in-law, created a sense of unease. “The owner was a well-known radical. He was jailed and the wife had to pay heavy legal costs. We offered her cash, and she was glad to take it. Friend of mine in the security police tipped us off”. Susan realised then that she knew little about South African politics, in spite of the hours listening to Dirk and Tiny fence around the issues. She was disturbed by the extreme views she encountered, and by the enforced gulf between the races, signs forbidding this or that on every public building.
The house was a grand old lady, sitting under the granite sweep of Table Mountain. The original farmhouse of the area, with the lands around sold off over a hundred and fifty years. It had wooden shutters like gun ports on a galleon, both downstairs and upstairs, along stoops skirted by ornate ironwork. Susan loved the black and white tiles of the hallway, so cool to the feet, and the spacious rooms that filled with honeyed light when the shutters were opened. You could see clear over across the bay to Robben Island. Susan spent hours gazing at the view, so welcome after the ancient clutter of London. She liked to watch the garden fade into the twilight as a carpet of lights floated up from the city, carrying with it the smell of flowers and the sea.
She slipped into the hot summery lifestyle, with its rounds of relaxed social functions. There were sweaty scrambles up mountains covered by aromatic shrubs and cool swims at spectacular beaches. There was the old gardener, Sipho, who slept in the cellar, and Fatima the cook and two Xhosa women who lived in the servant’s quarters. Busi and Zodwa. She got to know them, chatting in a way that drew the occasional frown from Dirk. This reminded her, with a half-amused shiver, of the Duke in Browning’s poem who did away with his young Duchess because she bestowed her thanks and smiles on everyone. She established a studio on the second floor and began to get into the working rhythm of a professional artist.
Dirk shed his cosmopolitan way with blacks as a snake sheds a skin and had walked into a top government post. Senior military officers and policemen came around often, with smoother businessmen, academics and politicians. Not all were South African, and sometimes Europeans, Israelis or Americans joined them. They dined around the polished table and then continued discussions, with the mood shifting as she left the room.
Dirk told her the job involved coordinating efforts against terrorism and communism. He insisted that he genuinely liked Tiny and the others, but it was terrible the way the black intellectual could be misled by white liberals and communists. Like the professor who had owned this very house. He had used his teaching to poison so many young minds, white and black. What colour was a mind Susan had wondered, with her artist’s imagination, and she remembered Tiny’s solid, assertive arguments.
Dirk filled the house with his energy and physical presence, lavishing attention on her, showing her that he loved her every whim and fancy. Found charming even her doubts and naïve questions. He would ignore social conventions, seizing her delightedly when the mood took him. Dirk took a keen interest in her art, introducing her to buyers who paid her asking price as well as compliments. When they visited his parents’ farm she was overwhelmed by their gracious manners and the valley’s deep, quiet beauty. She had only hints and glimpses of the other side of his life; so adroit was he at steering her away from dangerous waters.
Susan sometimes imagined herself in a kind of Eden. Recalling vivid Sunday school stories, she feared that she might bite, unsuspecting, into the Apple of knowledge. Forcing her to look at the skull grinning under the skin of the life she was leading. Like when she drove past Groot Schuur, the prime minister’s residence, and saw a convict labourer being whipped. He was standing in the centre of a wide green lawn, his back to the warder who was slashing at him.
What haunted her most was not the pain-twisted face of the convict, but the look on the face of the warder. Something fundamental within her rebelled at the naked denial of humanity.
She saw Tiny’s picture on the front page of the local newspapers the following morning. Died in detention. Threw himself out of a window while being interrogated. Allegations of torture. She drew her breath in sharply and thought of Tiny, his passions, his gentleness and his sharp logic. For the first time she consciously decided not to speak of something to Dirk. She moved the paper out of sight so she could not betray her feelings, not wanting to have this unspoken thing between them.
Then Susan found the papers, the pamphlets and the photographs. Like an anti-treasure, the dreaded Apple of knowledge. They were hidden in the coalbunker behind the kitchen. With winter approaching she had thought to take stock of the coal. She dropped a thick file and some pamphlets in the pocket of her artist’s smock. She saw Fatima, the cook, looking at her from the kitchen window, dark eyes expressionless. The man who had owned the house was sentenced for having banned books. Fatima had stayed on, her cooking skills legendary in a city where good food was revered. She had told Susan that her ancestors had come to Cape Town from the East as slaves, leaving their mark on the buildings, the food, the very language of their owners.
Susan hid the material behind some canvasses and read it when Dirk was at the office. Each time she reached down for the documents she felt a jolt of fear and could not help glancing over her shoulder. A feeling and a gesture that was alien and ugly. One pamphlet was about Mandela, Sisulu and the other leaders on Robben Island and she knew that she could never look with simple abstraction across the bay again. Another told of forced removals of communities to the desolate wastelands that fed the migrant labour system. Statistics such as “one child in five dies” meant little to her, until she saw a photograph of rows of little graves under a blazing sky. Some graves with cracked feeding bottles and broken dolls, carefully placed, and some still dark and empty. But the book was what seized her attention.
It was a typewritten manuscript, with photographs. A picture of the author was included, and a newspaper cutting about his death in suspicious circumstances in jail. When she saw the name she realised with shock of guilt that she was living in this man’s house. Then a second press-cutting about his wife’s death, a few months later. This time it probably was an accident, as her car was one of many involved in a highway disaster.
Susan devoured the book. It was crisp and clear and the humanity shone through. She could imagine the man lecturing, turning young minds on in a way unimagined by the hippies of Kings Road. Maybe that was why he had to die. The book provided Susan with points of reference so that she could finally get her bearings. She read of the dispossession of whole peoples. Warriors defending, first with the spear and then with the pen and with pleas that fell on the deaf ears of British colonial rulers. The cold, violent machinery of racial domination and all the wealth sucked out of the land and the people. She remembered that her own family had invested extensively in South Africa.
Susan knew then that she could never again be at ease on the gracious farm in the mountains, or when watching Dirk give orders to servants. Or with herself, smiling and greeting the charming politicians and military types who dined with them and praised Fatima’s cooking and his parent’s fine wines. Men who bought her work, paintings that captured her deepest feelings.
Fatima helped her carry the box to the car. Susan checked the address written on the back of an envelope. She felt Fatima’s warm, firm grip on her shoulder. “Please madam, you must burn the envelope later.” The book she would personally take to London and see it published. Her father was ill, and that was reason enough to give Dirk. She felt a physical pain as her love for Dirk welled up and twisted around like a dying foetus. Then came a great feeling of emptiness and sudden tears wet her cheeks. She put the car into gear.
