| Allow me to introduce myself. My name
is Tom Dreyer. I was born in Cape Town in 1972, and grew up in a long,
thin triangle between Melkbos, Johannesburg and Stellenbosch.
I'm standing on a concrete table near Victoria West, watching heat waves shimmer above the tarmac. I'm drinking coffee from a thermos flask, peeling a hard-boiled egg and then tossing the eggshells into a bin labelled Zip dit in 'n zibbie blik ("Zip it in a zibbie can"). I'm chasing my brother through a field of Namaqualand daisies, till we both drop from exhaustion and lie gazing at the uniform blueness of the sky. I'm standing in my dad's garage, the wheelcap of a Variant in my hand, watching his legs disappear deeper and deeper under the chassis. I'm bobbing about in a portapool while my sister is balancing on one leg like a flamingo and the sun is turning the water into shimmering gold.
Somewhere shacks are burning. Casspirs are crashing through roadblocks while a haze of smoke and tear gas obscures the sun. A rubber bullet hits a child in the face. A man lies bleeding in the back of a Landrover, while the driver and his chum talk about rugby or last Sunday's polisiebraai. Then another Casspir screams around a corner and people dive in behind barricades of corrugated iron. And all the while I am lying on the carpet in front of the TV, watching Cassimir, the friendly orange dragon, frolicking in his strange orange world.
In his novel The Good Soldier Ford Maddox Ford tells the story of two couples who visit a certain spa in the German countryside every year. For the narrator these are golden times, until his blinkers are removed and he discovers that his wife and the other man had been having an affair all along. He now finds himself face to face with a dilemma: What happens to precious memories when we discover that they were built on a substrate of lies, on foundations of sand? Can pleasures experienced in ignorance be revoked? Can the delicious taste of a bottle of wine on the terrace of a German spa, or of a glass of Oros in the cool water of a portapool, be recalled as easily as one reels in a fish through the water?
On a certain level it is obviously impossible. The past - with all its moments of happiness or sorrow - is over, and nothing we do or say can change anything about it. The mouth has already laughed, the heart has already leapt and a flood of joy has irrevocably swept through the blood. "If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months and four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" asks Ford's narrator.
But this isn't the whole picture either, for who can deny that empty feeling, that mixture of anger and shame when you realise that the wool had been pulled over your eyes and that the world wasn't at all you had imagined it to be? For Ford's narrator all the life bleeds from his once cherished memories. His dream turns into a nightmare, for his memories are all framed by the shadow of what was really true, and he blames himself for ever having been so blind, shortsighted and self-absorbed.
The past might be over; but if this is the case, then the words and images in our minds are the only place where it still exists - and in the realm of the mind anything is possible. There birds can fly backwards, and wine bottles can pull back their wine from our mouths and glasses.
Like many members of my generation I know the dilemma of Ford's narrator. I find myself in the odd position of having led a happy childhood in a South Africa that for the majority of South Africans was anything but happy. School, family, friends and television conspired to form a safe little shell in which it was possible to believe that South Africa was a country just like any other, and that most people's lives were at bottom basically like my own. Only later, after the heedless days of youth had made way for the agonies of adolescence, would I realise - to my horror - what had really been going on.
But what do I do now with my memories of that earlier time? What do I do with the fact that I was once happy in the phony little world inside the shell? Is nostalgia at all permissible? Is not the worst of all taboos to find something of worth in those terrible times (like Samson pulling a honeycomb from the rotting carcass of a lion)? How could we have been laughing while millions of others were weeping? How could we have frolicked in portapools while the sirens of Sharpeville and Boipatong were wailing all around?
One might respond by trying to distance oneself from one's own past, by trying to live exclusively in the present. But such an approach is problematic, and for the writer most of all.
Writing, for me, involves two distinct processes. One is rational and calculated, the cool appraisal of words and phrases, the meticulous reworking of sentences till they contain nothing half-formed or superfluous. The other process is more instinctive and elemental: it is the creative process itself, that mysterious alchemy that takes place when you suspend your critical faculties for a moment and avail yourself of the pure world of images, archetypes and memories.
One's childhood is one of the major wellsprings of this world. Whenever I dip into the stream from which words are born, the sweet taste of Oros comes back to me; I see the sun gleaming like a halo, or find myself hunting tortoises in some half-forgotten backyard.
It is true that we have many layers of memory; many things happen to us after childhood, and of course these things also find expression in our writing. It is the writer's task to pick at the tangles of human emotion and motivation - and insight into these things comes only through life experience. But I believe that a writer is always also busy with a more fundamental project: exploring the basic condition of "being alive", the underlying reality of things, those qualities that make a stone a stone, an orange an orange, or a human being a human being. This basic grip on the world and what it feels like to be alive is established at an early age.
There is something mystical about childhood memories. They are out of focus, yet somehow bathed in light. Because they are formed in a time of freedom, they retain something of that freedom, as water retains the taste of the bedrock through which it flows. Because they are formed before the prejudices and preconceptions that taint later experience, we perceive them as somehow larger and more universal, as archetypes transcending time and space.
Perhaps I should now first address a question that might be lingering in the reader's mind: How is it possible that anyone could have grown up so sheltered? How could anyone in the South Africa of the 1970's have believed that everything was bright and balmy, or a least bright and balmy enough to be hunting for tortoises rather than taking to the streets or building bomb shelters?
In response to this I would remind the reader that at the time the whole society was geared towards sustaining this illusion of normality. School, church and state worked together to prevent anything from threatening our fragile little shell. Yes, there were correctives - snippets of grown-up conversation, reports of police and protesters clashing, and of course also the constant awareness of other people living on the outskirts of our world, people of whom we knew virtually nothing. There were suggestions that something was amiss, but to us our illusion seemed more real than the scattered clues that another world existed somewhere beyond our own.
It would be wrong to overestimate the political awareness of the average eleven-year-old. Alexander the Great might have been a mere pup when he wept that there were only so many countries for him to conquer. At thirteen Hector Peterson was enough of a man to face the bullets of the SAP. But most of us do not grow up that quickly. And we don't have to blame ourselves for this either. Once we have grown up, there is more than enough time for the worries and responsibilities of adulthood. Carefreeness and enchantment have always been the birthright of a child.
Yet it is probably inevitable that in South Africa our initiation would come a little sooner than elsewhere. I still remember the day - it must have been 1983 or '84 - when we did the French revolution in history class: a nation drawing a line in the sand, prison walls tumbling and sunlight gleaming on the blade of a guillotine. Our teacher must have prayed that none of us would notice the parallels with our own situation here at the tip of Africa, but some of us did notice, and the period turned into one that neither he nor we would soon forget. I remember how I felt when I stepped onto the school grounds afterwards. In my mind's eye I could already see the walls of Louw Geldenhuys-laerskool tumbling, a prospect that filled me with trepidation but also with excitement. Childish? Certainly, but at eleven one is allowed to be childish.
Though nothing was quite the same again after that, life nonetheless reverted to its former rhythm of bicycles, skateboards and kreepy kraulys, now also marked by a growing awareness of the girls in their maroon skirts. True anger and disillusionment about what had been happening in our country, our city and our heads, would dawn only a year or two later - until then we would live recklessly like children in all ages.
We might as well face it, a kind of schizophrenia runs through the minds of our generation, we who grew up under a certain set of rules, but now live in a world where different rules apply. That this change was for the good, and also long overdue, does not mean that there aren't adjustments to be made. I grapple with a sense of guilt about a happy childhood in the days of apartheid. But is the young black writer with happy childhood memories not in an equally awkward position? His experiences are equally at odds with the accepted version of history. (And what about the white writer with an unhappy past?)
Our memories make us who we are. They construct a sense of identity and belonging that makes us citizens rather than refugees. Trying to repress or forget our pasts is bad for our psyches and could spell death for our writing.
I believe that it is the special responsibility of our generation of writers - we who straddle the divide - to bring together the various stories of our pasts, and to reconcile them with one another and with the realities that surround us every day. Only then will our stories lift off the page, and will we begin to get a sense of how it feels, and what it means, to be a South African today.
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Tom Dreyer was born in Cape Town in 1972. He studied at the University of Stellenbosch (BA and BA Hons in English) and at the University of Cape Town (MA in Creative Writing). In addition to short stories and poetry, his publications include the novels Erdvarkfontein and Stinkafrikaners. Stinkafrikaners was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize in 2001. Tom lives in Somerset West and works as a business analyst. 
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