There is no contesting Blacklaws's narrative skill

Meg Samuelson*

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Blood orange, by Troy Blacklaws
Published by Double Storey, 2005
ISBN: 1919930965
Pages: 224
Format: Softcover
Price: R130.95

Troy Blacklaws's Blood Orange is a well-written though somewhat predictable novel about growing up white in apartheid South Africa, and later being conscripted, deserting and fleeing into exile. The title refers to the African sun that this son of Africa yearns for from his vantage point of self-exile, which is shaded by ominous undertones: the title phrase is first mentioned in connection with an itinerant prophet who "mutters rumours of blood" and whose narrative fragment reappears to close the novel.

Part memoir, part fiction, Blood Orange returns to similar concerns, themes and images as those that animated Blacklaws's acclaimed first novel, Karoo Boy. The two narrators share a similar embedding in history, both apparently having been born in approximately 1962 (Dee is fourteen in 1976; Gecko seven in 1969), though Blood Orange covers a more extensive period, from Gecko's preadolescence until his embarkation on adulthood in England and Europe. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish between the narrative voices of the novels, bar some notable differences: Karoo Boy is energised by the death of a twin which creates a plausible conceit for a self-divided narrator; Blood Orange functions by way of narrative fragments that reveal the discontinuous, episodic workings of memory. While such experiments in narrative structure are compelling, I must express my preference for Blacklaws's first novel. Reading Blood Orange after Karoo Boy I often found the degree of repetition tedious.

Literary sleuths may, however, be interested to observe the ways in which an image mutates in the creative mind that such reworkings of material render visible. For instance, in Blood Orange we surely find the spark that ignites Karoo Boy when the narrator speaks of his father:

My father is my hero. He is strong and carries me up high on his shoulders so I can see over the heads at tombola fairs in Howick. My father taught me how to thread an earthworm onto a hook to catch bass, to curve a cricket ball in the air, to carve a cattie out of a forked stick to shoot starlings - ratty black birds that glint hints of green and pink in the sun.
Once a fluke tennis ball flew from his racquet to kill a swooping bat.
My father, like a hardy cowboy, does not cry. (4)

More overtly, perhaps, than the often quite subtle Karoo Boy, Blood Orange records, along with much other "confessional" white South African writing, the confusions of growing up and learning to distinguish good from bad in a society rotten at the core. While weaving his story into the great events of South African resistance history, or at least those aspects of it that permeated into white consciousness - the death of Biko, the imprisonment of Mandela - the narrator does maintain a refreshing self-reflective honesty, pointing repeatedly to his impotence and futility: "Biko dead and Mandela in jail for their beliefs. Me, I run shit-scared blind, headlong into a lamppost. So much for the warrior" (138). More hackneyed and conventional is the guilty regret of how little has actually been sought out and known of Africa before he makes his departure: "guilty for leaving behind faceless and furtive encounters with black Africans. My white eyes averted. I never asked Mila how many children he had in the Transkei. I did not know his Xhosa name. Though Nana made my bed for all my Paarl years I never went inside her house" (172). White South Africans know this only too well, and black South Africans know it even better. How many times do we need to revisit this guilty indifference in print before trying to amend it?

Later, in England, a young-adult Gecko continues to long for an Africa under a "blood-orange" sunset in which black and white are stuck forever in the roles of baashood and servitude:

I miss black faces. Mila. Nana. The hobbling man at the BP garage at Simonduim, who always wipes the windows and checks the tyres and water, knowing my mother will give him a Christmas box. The woman who packs purchases into bags at the Spar. The men who wash your motorcar while it is parked in the sun, for two rand. The barefoot schoolboys who trade handmade wire bicycles and windmills at the crossroads in Klapmuts. (187)

As the title suggests, Blood Orange shares with the growing corpus of expat literature a ritualistic evocation of local colour, which will no doubt be eagerly devoured by other expats, but which may also have something of value for us who live under the "blood orange" sun: among the hurly-burly of everyday life, do we even notice around us the details that the narrator strokes to life at every turn of the page? At points, though, we may cringe at the almost masturbatory cataloguing of the prosaic items that fuel the imaginations of those no longer surrounded by them. What salvages the novel to some degree is its commendable attention to the terror of the everyday; the pervasive aura of danger is generally understated rather than melodramatic (the direction which many similar novels of white childhood under apartheid have unfortunately taken).

The present tense narrative voice mires us in memory, reflecting the extent to which the literary mind of the expat is necessarily "entangled in the past", and the narrative is coloured throughout by shades of distance and longing. Its most pressing subject matter concerns coming to terms with the condition of exile as one of endless longing. When fleeing from the army, a black man who gives him a lift intones: "Run boy run. Baleka baleka. But you will not escape Africa. It is in your bones and your blood" (168). The narrator corroborates this soon after: "Strange that I should feel so English in Africa and dream of Europe, and so foreign in England and long for Africa again. Soutpiel, Maljan would call me. My salty cock dangling in the Atlantic" (187-188). While much of the fluently-written narrative draws us smoothly through its currents and eddies, moments such as these left me wondering how long we will be stricken with a national literature of longing rather than one that grapples with the complexities of belonging.

If the protagonist's guilty conscience uncomfortably mirrors that of some of his readers, they will be gratified to be able to join the author in helping to improve the quality of other childhoods in South Africa: the royalties of the South African edition have been bequeathed to the Homestead Shelter for Street Children in Cape Town. With the assistance of such much-needed donations, perhaps these young South Africans may one day come to write their own stories of childhood so that we may have a fuller literary picture of what it means to grow up in this country.

There is no contesting Blacklaws's narrative skill, or the attention to detail that characterises his memories of home and childhood. While Blood Orange does not threaten to unseat such classics as JM Coetzee's Boyhood or Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, it does stand out among an otherwise largely indifferent, and sometimes embarrassing, set of post-apartheid novels and memoirs of a white childhood in South Africa. Here's hoping, however, that Blacklaws's next novel will turn to new vistas of experience. I, for one, fear that should he return to mine again the material of an African childhood, the result may be as deadening and claustrophobic as those Gauteng shafts that sapped the life of Moses in Karoo Boy.

* Meg Samuelson lectures in the department of English at the University of Stellenbosch

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