"No one says a word, but he knows she has been defeated, put in her place, and knows that he must bear part of the blame." - JM Coetzee, Boyhood.
Early in September there was a bit of a commotion in Afrikaans literary circles after the Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee wrote in the foreword to an anthology of translated Dutch poetry that Afrikaans literature "has never been shy to flaunt its modest achievements".
Whether he is right or not, the indignant yapping and uncertain barking of "whipped puppies" echoed through the Afrikaans newspapers. Many no doubt wondered: How on earth can our own, prize-winning "prince of darkness" say such nasty things about one component of South African literature? Where does he come from?
The answer is simple: Worcester, of course. And here, I can assure civilised readers, I see Worcester not simply as a town, but rather as a construct of memory and resistance.
* * *
In the days when I was still interested in literary theory, I was particularly taken by a school of thought that saw innovative literature as the result of internal resistance. At its most basic level this theory holds that innovative literature develops out of a discontentment with the texts of the father-writers - the Freudian principles of the Oedipus complex, as Harold Bloom puts it in The Western Canon.
If one focuses at a more individual level, the creations of a serious writer can also be seen as a product of internal resistance. They are the ambivalent utilisation of "that which is remembered" in association with the resistance to it. This contradiction of a conscious digging up of "that which one would rather forget" creates the tension and energy that make the writer write. The process could be stated like this: drinking alcohol with the specific purpose of eventually causing a hangover, confronting it and turning it into art.
Does that make sense? Yes?
* * *
In his definition of the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Physics Heisenberg refers to the interaction between the observer and that which is being observed. The thing being observed changes precisely as a result of the fact that it is being observed. The observer thus becomes more of a participant. This truth is used, under different names, in different disciplines.
In the case of Worcester, however, there is little change in what is being observed - small-town life ("provincial life", Coetzee calls it) and attitudes. Change or progression does occur in the observer, but in some way Worcester remains the cold, clay bottom layer of this dammed-up memory content.
JM Coezee, David Kramer, Arno Carstens, Jaco Botha - all originally from Worcester, all writers of books or lyrics in which a certain melancholy or air of defeat is embraced and at the same time offered counter-resistance.
However, as mentioned previously, Worcester is simply a name that is given to this feeling or state of being. There are thousands of similar towns and places around the world - this can be seen through the work of people like Tom Waits and Raymond Carver, to mention just two.
To justify Coetzee's rolled-up-newspaper brush-off of Afrikaans literature, I believe that this literature, as he remembers it, is worcester (specifically written with a small letter) to him. That various memory-content fragments have merged into one. The broken beer bottle floating in the putrid grey water of Worcester Dam has become Worcester itself.
* * *
"From the galaxy of blues, to a universe we choose" - Arno Carstens.
Two years or so ago, also around September, I gave a talk to a book club in Worcester. "In Worcester," I told them, "one basically has four choices: alcohol abuse, adultery, religious conversion, or a combination of the three."
I went on to tell them the story of a woman whose lover was hanged in the town in the late 1800s after being found guilty of murder. She, still convinced of her sweetheart's innocence, then made a pact with the devil: with arms outstretched, she went and stood at the top of High Street, the main street, with her back to the old drostdy, and cursed the town. "This town will never prosper," were her words.
"But our town isn't like that anymore," one timid little lady in a flowery blouse and sober skirt tried to assure me afterwards. "We have driven that demon out," she continued, gazing up at me with a beaming face.
I have been out of the town for too long now and return too seldom to know whether what that little round lady told me is the truth. Perhaps Worcester has simply stagnated in the turbid dam water of my memory, but when I think back, I still feel how episodes cut and dig into one's flesh like loose splinters of a broken bottle on a bare foot.
- High Street, from which the damnation was pronounced,
on a Friday night. The bright red and white lights of the KFC
and, across the road, Saddles and the Spur. The diesel fumes from
the trucks rumbling past and the raucous shout of a street-walker
screaming "your mother's cunt" at her boyfriend.
- The white suburban houses in Panorama and Riebeeck Park,
where the lawyers' and doctors' children live.
- The railway houses on Hospital Hill, which smell like
musty linoleum and pipe tobacco.
- The railway bridge under which the train tracks shine
in the last light of an empty Saturday afternoon.
- The row of bluegum trees and the corrugated iron fence
in the incessant wind next to the tennis courts.
- The evenings of diversion with a dance band playing sixties
songs and drink-till-you-puke parties.
- And, of course, happy Apostolics preaching under neon
lights against cowboy movies, dancing in the Spirit and no longer
having any understanding of the sadness of this old world.
That is the map of Worcester in my head. It's the small glass cuts that move under the skin; the kurpers that bob up with swollen, white bellies out of the putrid, oxygenless dam water.
- The people still hold a show, with its merry-go-rounds
and beer tent, in late January to raise funds for the Lions.
- Politics in the town still revolves around business rights
and the monopoly on alcohol licences.
- The Worcesterites still drink, swear, fuck and pray in
God's name just to be able to continue to forget that they live
in a town with a beaten spirit. A town in which the safe snugness
of mediocrity and uniformity is celebrated.
* * *
"Why are those dogs barking, there at the gates of Paradise?" - David Kramer.
For a large part of my school career we lived in a tall thatch-roofed house with creaking wooden floors and clean furniture in the suburb of Langerig. Over the road, so I was told, was the house in which David Kramer grew up. He apparently used to sit on the roof of that house in the late afternoon and sing and play his guitar. I spent many evenings looking at that house and wondering what it must have been like to sit up there, up above the oppression of the town, and make music. You'd be able to see far beyond the rugby and cricket fields of the primary school across the road and you'd be able to breathe, I reckoned.
Know your place and stay there could easily have been Worcester's motto.
The town was divided right down the middle by Durban Street (if I remember correctly) and the lower half was the coloured area with its small houses, its cheap clothing shops and second-hand furniture shops and, of course, its twenty-odd bars.
Zwelethemba, with its dusty hostels, and later on shacks as well, lay far beyond the town, on the Robertson road, and even after ten years of democracy those uncharted lines of the place are still there.
But the compartments in Worcester are far more comprehensive and wide-ranging than those of colour and class, which are so very common in South Africa.
It's difficult to define, this Worcester way of thinking, but it's no doubt something like Pile On, a game we used to play at school. One largish child would pick out a little one, tackle him and pin him to the ground. Then child after child, generally with the very biggest child right on top, would pile onto the bottom two, until the kid right at the bottom was wheezing and his arms were flailing as the breath was squeezed out of him. Everyone joined in this Pile On, because it was fun after all, and that's what children are supposed to do. Everyone, even the kid at the bottom, would laugh once they'd got up. However, the child at the bottom, still out of breath, would laugh only because he knew: if he started crying, the other children would pick him again and again to be at the bottom; as long as he kept on laughing, he had a chance of ending up higher up in the pile - that's how it works.
For adults the game becomes more complex, but it's still really nothing more than Pile On - the only difference is you get to gossip about it.
"Oh, my child, we're just holding on until we die," I remember the words of one particular woman who later elected of her own free will to go and lie down, before anyone had the opportunity to tackle her.
Snapshots, trauma, dissociation, inheritance, history - these are my memories of Worcester.
* * *
But even so, amidst all the loneliness, emptiness and hardness, there were also one or two who felt like you did:
- the people who introduced you to the rebellious moaning
of Bob Dylan;
- the books by Breyten Breytenbach, which didn't have to
make sense, but which simply appealed to you; and also
- the woman who comforted you between her breasts because
she could feel the same worcester forlornness in and around herself.
* * *
Worcester lies far behind me today and in the meantime I have lived, travelled and breathed a little. But within the framework of Heisenberg's theory, that which was observed also touched and changed the observer.
The writer (un?)consciously maintains the layer of clay below the bottom of the dam of memory contents. The melancholy, small-mindedness and oppression of Worcester are preserved, so that they can be recalled in texts and offer counter-resistance.
Thus Worcester becomes worcester, a word in the thesaurus of our modest little collection of literature. A word that is not restricted to the description of a group of townspeople, but a word that can also define the soullessness of a group of New York brokers, as well as the small academic world within a language department at Oxford. Afrikaans literature; the muesli mixture of a group of triathletes; a week in the life of a label queen - all of this can be "worcester", and this is what literary texts will continue to offer resistance to, in order to expand the human spirit. Amen!
Works by the author:
In Drie Riviere
Sweisbril
(pictured left)
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Jaco Botha is a partner in the small advertising firm
Big Bad Wolf Advertising. He holds a BA degree from the University
of Stellenbosch and a BA (Honours) and MA degree in Creative
Writing (cum laude) from the University of Cape Town. He is
the author of two books (In Drie Riviere and Sweisbril,
both published by Human & Rousseau) and collaborated on several
other works with prominent South African authors. In 1997
he was awarded the M-Net Bursary for Creative Writing. When
not working he enjoys canoeing, cooking, playing cards and
sipping on a good whisky. He thoroughly believes in the philosophy
"Life is not a dress rehearsal, it's the real thing."
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