Life’s Possibilities amidst Apartheid’s Trauma - Rossouw's What Will People Say

Rehana Rossouw’s What Will People Say was shortlisted for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature. It is a story of contradictions: pitting excitement vis-à-vis violence as unleashed through the Apartheid regime and especially in the agitation for independence in South Africa. But with the attainment of independence there is a glimmer of hope lurking in the shadows of the trail of trauma as unleashed through colour segregation.

The novel vividly portrays the trauma meted out on the blacks and the coloureds. The effects of segregation are particularly unnerving when the reader observes the lives of certain communities and how discrimination has messed up their day to day activities. The story explores the various ways through which trauma is manifested especially in the lives of Cape Town inhabitants – in the infamous Cape Flats. It lays bare white peoples privileges and in the process shows how the wounds of segregation fester and eventually burst open in the form of repressed anger, violence, dehumanisation and alienation among others.

Without an opportunity to express their troubles, coupled with the impotent knowledge of their inability to singlehandedly confront the white oppressor, both the blacks and coloureds turn against each other with a vengeance that is self-destructive. The cruelty and savagery in their actions is a demonstration of what years of oppression have nurtured and nourished – a spirit of self-loathing and an inbuilt anathema for humanity.

Indeed, the novel’s themes are hinged on this triple axis of oppression, alienation and retribution. The insanity of the prevailing atmosphere is aptly captured in the family of the Fouries. Magda Fourie, the wife and mother, escapes into church and its dogma of waiting for a better after-life. In fact, the title of the novel is conceived from her pretence when she lives a life of lies and denies the family from being true to their feelings because she is afraid about “what will people say”. One can argue that the title is based on the coloured’s stereotype of being obsessed with societal expectations at the expense of individual freedom. Thus, Magda pretends that all is well with her family even when she knows that things have taken a turn for the worst. In her fear, we read the human folly of vanity, pride and an obsession with material things which eventually blinds us to the more immediate human need for acceptance, love, understanding, and appreciation.

When the Fourie family begins to disintegrate, slowly but surely, the reader is acutely aware that the inevitable will happen – there shall be death in the family and this is not a romantic novel after all! Anthony, the only son in the family, is coerced into a gang through a traumatising initiation rite in which he is forced to partake of the gang raping of his sister’s best friend Shirley. Although the father musters courage to take him for therapy sessions when the trauma makes him mute, it is a bit too late to salvage him. He is eventually murdered in cold blood by fellow gang members when he reneges on the gang expectations bestowed upon him.

Nicky Fourie, the middle child, the bright one and the hope of the family is disturbed by the immense responsibility and expectations that the rest of the family have on her. Her father believes that she can become a lawyer and her mother has an overwhelming trust that Nicky is the moral superintendent of the family. However, when things go wrong, everyone is forced to confront their worst fears. Nicky finally ends up being a social worker, the parents split and she has to stay with the mother since her boyfriend Kevin departs for Jorburg to attend to bigger nationalistic problems. Indeed, it is in Nicky, Suzette, her mother and other female characters that the strong gender agenda is embedded.

The father, Neville, who has always believed himself to be a hen-pecked man, constantly nagged by the wife to become more active in church finds solace in the arms of their neighbour, Moira – the very woman who has been perceived to epitomise immorality since she has five children from five different fathers. The eldest daughter Suzette, drops from school pre-maturely but somehow through her individual fortitude discovers success in the world of beauty and modelling. On the flipside, her success is marred by the revelation that part of the success comes from white privilege connections!

It is in Ougat and his gang of teenagers – drug addicted zombies, that we visualise the palpable anger, frustration and overall disillusionment in the text. Indeed, the very rape of Shirley is symbolic of a society that is demented. We also discover that even the whites suffer from addiction when Suzette’ white boyfriend Neville has to be taken into rehab. It appears that discrimination is a double-edged sword since when the blacks and coloureds suffer from it, the whites also suffer from insecurity and other related forms of violence as unleashed in retaliation by those discriminated against. This is a society on the verge of self-destruction!

The novel asks a fundamental question: do black parents care more about their reputation as opposed to the well-being of their children? It is clear from this text that when people lose the very essence of their humanity then it is right to conclude that “people got a democratic right to fuck up their lives” since as Kevin says the people have “got used to their oppression, they don’t know any other way” (307). However, there is a glimmer of hope when the individuals become conscious of the need to change the status quo. They begin to look for possibilities, strife to obtain their rights and also agitate for a better society. It is possible to rebuild the society but a concerted effort towards healing is a must. It is possible not to worry about what people will say but the reader has to engage the text in order to agree or disagree with this!

Dancing the Cultural & Environmental Tune in Kulet's The Elephant Dance

Image courtesy of http://www.jamesmurua.com

It is uncommon to come across a text with a title such as “the elephant dance”. But Kulet has done so in his latest novel. Published by Longhorn through its subsidiary Sasa Sema, The Elephant Dance appears to perfect Kulet’s desire for environmental and cultural conservation. This is a fete he had attempted to accomplish through Vanishing Herds. I liked the latter text but now as a reader I am compelled to take sides and thus, I cast my vote for the forma as a better read – I just can’t tell what that text did to me!

In The Elephant Dance, Kulet’s writing has attained a more complex demeanour and a sense of refinement on the part of the writer. I would without a doubt refer to this text as Kulet’s acme as a creative writer. Kulet is able to synthesise a multiplicity of issues in a deft manner such that the reader is not consciously worried of keeping track of the same: environmental conservation, the genealogy of Ogieks and other indigenous communities in Kenya, insecurity, poaching, corruption, courtship, education among others.

This is a story of contemporary business empires and an illumination of how some of them are constructed through money laundering, corrupt business deals and generally with disregard for morals – humanity. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (SMA) are the owners of a thriving business empire driven by the desire to amass wealth at all costs even if this means a total decimation of wildlife. They connive with a local minority community by enlisting the services of ilmorok…. to camouflage their evil pursuits of elephant tusks and rhino horns among other illegal wildlife trophies.

It will take the courage of a young teenage boy, Reson with his elder brother Sena and their uncle Pesi with the help of a feared officer Regina Naitore and her assistant Leah Naipande to rout their bloated egos and cripple their poaching syndicate. What begins as a simple effort for recognition on the part of Reson as a renown hunter in his indigenous community grows into a respected image of the self when he discovers the poachers and leads his brother and uncle to their hideout and to the discovery of the massacre of their beloved animals. The culmination of the arrest of the poachers is symbolic of his coming of age as a young man within the context of his community but it is also the coming of age of the patriarchal structures of his indigenous community.

With a fine stroke of the pen, Kulet remains true to his calling of cultural and environmental preservation. Perhaps afraid of the global trends of the destruction of flora and fauna in the characteristic wantonness of men, the writer hopes that his fiction will serve as a clarion call to tame the insatiable appetite of humans. Infused in this story is a subtle struggle for women emancipation. Although it is not openly articulated, the reader discovers that the young ladies in the story have a raring spirit that makes them daring enough to declare their feelings for the young men in a tradition where it is assumed that such open demonstrations would appear taboo. On the contrary, this attempt at women affirmation is dampened by the competition between two girls who are seeking for Sena to cast a benevolent eye on them. It depicts them as desperate whilst appearing to make the man come across as indispensable.

This text highlights how international syndicates connive with corrupt local individuals to rob local communities their cultural heritage and wealth. Such individuals are driven by a selfish ambition to amass wealth at all costs. Indeed, they would not think twice even if the environment was decimated in a day. The way the poachers massacre the buffaloes and the elephants is an indication of such human greed. They butcher more buffaloes for meat than they would be able to consume and even when they consume, it is with the intention to waste as opposed to the local community’s policy of hunting to meet basic needs.

In this text, the reader is able to see the culpability of local communities when they are lured into a business they know little about. The Ilmirisho are proof of this when they get engaged to hunt on behalf of SMA. A long tradition of deprivation and discrimination appears as a catalyst for the motivation to engage in unscrupulous activities when the local people are provided with ‘modern’ clothes and other paraphernalia in the name of civilisation. They abandon their mores and unknowingly participate in activities that threaten the core of their very being. With no alternative means of survival, it is almost given that once the community destroys the forest, then they sound the death knell of their very existence. 
A hearty congratulation to Henry Ole Kulet for wining "The Text Book Centre Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature 2017" Adult Category for this novel. 

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Author: Courtesy of Google Images

The American Mirage

           There have been a couple of exciting novels, plays and poems from the African continent that tackle the American dream. NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names is part of the literary continuum that helps to illuminate on African’s desires to chase the American dream in the hope of quenching their thirst for the allure of the western glitter. However, as the reader discovers, the journey to reaping the fruits of the American civilisation is fraught with a myriad of discoveries as espoused through the narrator’s eyes of other people’s and her own experience.

Bulawayo’s protagonist is a young girl, Darling, whose growing up in Zimbabwe shades light about the economic, political and social conditions of President Mugabe’s tyrannical rule. His rule is mocked and contrasted against that of a youthful president like Obama. Darling and her friends: Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho, and Stina exemplify the economic stratification of the nation. They live in shanties that epitomise a life of deprivation and a deeply ingrained desire to escape Zimbabwe to anywhere else in the world where the characters can discover reprieve away from such a life of daily toil.
          Rendered from the first person point of view, the novel acquires a sense of impetus owing to the fact that the story is rendered from a position of a child’s innocence. Indeed, one can argue that part of the simple language choices is indicative of a less competent language user. In any case, the child characters are between the ages of 9 and 11 years old. The writer experiments with ingenuous syntactic constructions characterised by superfluous use of conjunctions, semantic oddity through use of pleonasms such as “kill me dead” and other grammatical expressions that demonstrate a pre-teen’s language idiosyncrasies.

          Because the children are almost perpetually hungry, they devise means of survival by crossing over from their shanties in Paradise and feasting on guavas from the neighbouring suburban estate – Budapest. It is ironic that their place of abode is referred to as paradise since it does not harbour in any way the tranquil or serene environment that the word promises. The reader is quick to discover that this is not a healthy place to bring children up in: Chipo is already pregnant after being raped by her grandfather. The traumatising experience denies her a voice and she remains mute until a church experience in which Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro “immorally” prays for a woman believed to be possessed triggers off memories of what the grandfather did to her. The sexual ‘molestation’ of the churchgoer helps Chipo to open up about her wounded psych when she says that her grandfather did a similar thing to her.

          The affluence in Budapest and the fact that these houses are inhabited by whites, fuels the desires of the youngsters for a life beyond Zimbabwe. They express their political undertones and dislike for the ‘intruders’ in their country when they say that one should steal small items that they can eat or hide without being noticed. In the characteristic nature of the narrative, the pre-teens wonder what the whites were thinking in stealing not a small portion of a country but the whole country. The growing angst against the whites is escalated by the fact that they are cast as indulging in a life of extreme wealth whereas the native Zimbabweans are wallowing in dire poverty. This can be perceived as the dichotomy that pushes the violence by majority blacks against minority whites. It alludes to the political undercurrents of the time when it was reported that President Mugabe rallied the blacks to chase the whites from Zimbabwe.

          At the backdrop of such upheavals, the young Zimbabweans find solace in escapist dreams. They imagine of how life would be if they owned the houses, cars and general wealth that the whites have. They dream of escaping to England, America, Dubai, South Africa etc. as long as they can find a better life. Such escapist imaginations are captured in their children games and conversations. In their interactions, one is able to recognise the fears, the insecurity, the growing discontent and the almost rapturous violence that is brewing in the oppressed masses.

          The title of the text borrows from one of the violent scenes in the text when the children attempt to help Chipo abort. In a chilling descriptive excerpt, the children gather around Chipo armed with a collection of rocks, a tin mug of urine and a rusted clothes hanger. They suggest that they need new names so as to enact an American series in which doctors help patients. However, the reader will perhaps see the need for the characters to adopt new names in general since some of their names are bereft of any sense of tangible identity. This might be the cause of the children’s sense of deracination and perpetual desire to desert their country.

          Darling’s wish to join her aunt, Fostalina, in America comes true. However, the racial pride and prejudice denies her and many other immigrants the opportunity to enjoy their stay in America. As Darling realises, America portends a life of misery owing to the economic inequalities and the fact that the immigrants remain illegal since they hardly ever acquire the visas and permits that would hasten their integration. As a result, they result to a life of survival by working odd hours and balancing education with social life.

          The immigrants’ life in America become a tale of lies as they try their best to send money back home and to reassure the rest of their family members that they have not forgotten them. The catastrophe that unfolds is that some of them loose their brains while others resort to illegal means of survival. The struggle to keep their dreams of home intact eventually crumbles as a result of the cultural differences they encounter in the US. The emerging generations of Africans born in the US are further alienated since they do not understand their roots. Contemporary American mannerisms are captured in the colloquial expressions of the teenagers, the use of technology and other socio-economic activities.

          As the text transitions from Zimbabwe to America, one notices the shift in the narrative texture. The text leans more towards stereotypes and almost looses the magical touch of imagination and creative nuances. In an intrusive authorial voice, the writer describes the devastations of the new cultural experience, the broken dreams and the life of misery the immigrants have to endure. As the novel comes to an end, Darling describes her coming of age and the cultural experimentations she has to indulge in. Some of these are ugly memories that she would wish to quickly erase like the immoral flicks she and her friends watch in hiding in her aunt’s basement. Darling also notes that the immigrants’ marriages, whatever nature they are, are doomed to fail.

          The insecurities in the US are hard to bear, the broken cultural fabric beyond repair and the sense of hopelessness pervades and decorates their entire lives. One wonders why anyone would even wish to travel to the US in the first place. Perhaps there is a better story of the American Dream out there but at least it is not in Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. This is a text for any aspiring wannabe and for those dying for a piece of the American Dream.

NoViolet: Courtesy of Google Images