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The Last Refuge?

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I suppose that I have the kind of day job — if one must have a day job — which many other writers would envy. I travel a lot, see different places, meet interesting people, and yes, I have learned how to write in the anaemic claustrophobia of an aeroplane (nothing concentrates the mind like seventeen hours of solitude in a narrow seat and having to survive a ratio of humans to ablution facilities as big as any slum in the world), even if it only is to record my observations of the place I am leaving, to capture something overheard and that I fully intend to steal for the my next novel or short story.

But travelling can also “bring home” the fact that your own country, your nation, your nationhood is not the centre of the universe. Indeed, it is sometimes quite humbling (if maddeningly so) to discover that no one has heard of your President, they don’t know that you have three living Nobel Prize winners, one of them for having practiced the real art of literature in fact, that the last Booker Prize winner, “the guy with the Dutch name?” is your compatriot, of sorts. The closest you come to “brand-recognition” is when you say: it’s where Nelson Mandela comes from.

My most recent trip took me to Puerto Rico, where I befriended a fellow conference goer, an exiled Haitian paediatric cardiologist who lives in Canada with his French-speaking Quebecan wife. Lets call him Pierre and her Jean for the sake of convenience. During the last of those warm tropical nights that we used as excuses to get away from the tedium of finding salvation for children living with HIV/AIDS, we sat drinking beer in the “Maroon” part of San Juan. Basically it is where Puerto Rico’s “Bushies” live. I felt right at home.

Until I made the mistake of offering Pierre and Jean a signed copy of my last novel, Kafka’s Curse. He began to probe: you are of mixed Indian, Javanese and Dutch descent, your mother tongue is Afrikaans, you write books in English, give them titles like Kafka’s Curse, and call yourself a ‘black South African?’

The absurdity seeped into me, slowly and insidiously. In my hotel room, after I had said goodbye to Pierre the Haitian and Marie the Quebecan, both of whom had as much right to claim ‘special status’ as any South African, conferred by exile, physical oppression, language suppression and uprootment of their children (beautiful hybrids, I guessed), I drank a lonely beer and decided I knew what was wrong with the novel I was writing. That long-suffering, tortured flow of words, two years and four hundred pages long, was too South African, too unrelentingly of and in my country, spiritually and physically.

I called my publisher the next day, listened to her dismay — ag nee she said, her angst so particularly and heart-rendingly Afrikaans — and told her there would be a delay in the delivery of this manuscript. Over the next two days, in transit to Johannesburg via New York, an interminable stop-over in Sun Island (that’s what they now call Isle de Sol, that ancient icon of apartheid-days travel) I sat hunched over the burden of history that I had been carrying around me for two years and savagely outlined the changes that needed to be made.

Bleary eyed, but elated (what else can one say of a state of sleepless euphoria, thirty six hours of trying to keep your circulation going and trying not to inhale your neighbours’ increasingly pungent intestinal emissions) I arrived back in South Africa with the quiet realisation: I am free, there is no longer any compunction to be a South African, or more specifically, to be a South African writer.

Yes, the novel is set here, in Johannesburg, Cape Town, a lovely place in the Eastern Cape called St Francis Bay. Yes, it is peopled by South Africans, but the difference is that this South African-ness no longer determines their responses to love, hate, intrigue, passion or its loss (the only sure signs of dying is the loss of passion). In my tired, midnight moments, exhausted by my day job, trying to focus on the (re)writing of this novel, I have moments of doubt. It is a risk, this conscious denial of ‘native’ instincts, the purging of those classic and comforting ethnic, linguistic and spatial colour (what is a more compelling sight than the blood-haze of the sun rising into township smog?) from the detail of one’s narrative.

I am reassured by the recollection of novels like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Set in the United States, written by an émigré Russian, it is neither Russian nor American, even though its characters are typical suburban US of A. Perhaps it is the theme: obsessive love, possessive sex. It has a cosmopolitan boldness, visual and yet visceral. Cinema will recognise this powerful combination fifty years late, first the French and then new wave Hollywood.

And then there is J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of St Petersburg (my most favourite of Coetzee’s novels, just as Disgrace is my least favourite, but that is another debate). Published in 1994, it is a novel set in pre-1917 Russia. It has all the ingredients one would have expected of a truly post-apartheid, exploring-our-past, South African novel: the artist / exile returns, searches for a mythical, imagined truth; immersed in spies and security police, the narrative slowly demystifies revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government, lays bare their pathological habit of intrigue, exposes the gnawing fears of the doomed old order, fears that are destined to prove self-fulfilling, even if only twenty years later. A daring, paradoxical juxtaposition, this uncanny resemblance to an on-the-eve South Africa of 1990, set in icy St Petersburg.

But do these — and a host of other hybrid, variously de-rooted works, Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Ondaatjie’s The English Patient, and even Camus’ The Outsider — give me enough of an artistic framework to keep me from losing hold on reality, will I not drift off into some nebulous stratosphere, that alas, even great writers like Doris Lessing have?

I realise my mistake: even in asserting my freedom from my own heritage, I still go about looking for the classic, upright, rainbow-nation flagpole to run up my flag of independence. Yes, there are certain things about me that are quintessentially South African (I sometimes wish that rapists, hi-jackers and white collar criminals, in that order, could be shot on sight, I bristle when foreigners tell me that’s what we should do), but I know that I will not break free until I flee from the last refuge of a scoundrel writer: nation and nationhood.

Watch this cyber-space.

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