Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor Clouds over the Rainbow Nation. While in France I met people who had fought and won the war of resistance against the Nazi occupation, only to find their lives frozen by the physical and psychological wounds of that wartime experience. I found myself comparing them to the generation involved in resistance to apartheid in South Africa: perhaps they, too, had children who saw them as stuck in the past, or emotionally crippled by "sly and self-seductive glimpses in the mirrors of their personal histories . a need to be recognised as a 'hero of the struggle'." Of course, people are always looking back at the events and relationships that formed them - when they really lived. But the peculiar problem of apartheid in South Africa was that it gave people a warped image of themselves as being sorted by race. And resistance to it, unlike in France, ended in a compromise: "Gave us the government, kept the money." The sense of an on-going betrayal of people's lives - in the past and into the future - is the wounded territory of Achmat Dangor's novel. Set in Johannesburg in the closing months of Nelson Mandela's presidency, it charts the open wounds and disintegrating relationships in a "coloured" family caught up in the "grey, shadowy morality" of an ANC government "bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither principle nor compromise". Silas Ali, the father, is an old ANC activist whose government job in the justice ministry is to liaise with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A South African spin doctor, his fate is to watch the passing of his own life marginalised on TV, "as if it was foreign, fictional". His wife, Lydia, goes to work as a nurse researching HIV transmission while entrenching her distance from an emotionally shell-shocked husband. Their son, Mikey, gets caught up with Muslim activists associated with the vigilantes of Pagad, known for their involvement in the bombings of Cape Town. All the bases are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where all unresolved conflicts might find resolution. The novel's sense of painful disclosure is symbolised in the dark, red seeds of a split pomegranate spilling on to the cover image. Seed is a metaphor that haunts the Ali family. Mikey, the only son - a child of the "new South Africa" - discovers he was born of rape by a white policeman. A seed of contempt germinates in Mikey as he reflects on the failings of his parents' generation: "'The struggle' sowed the seeds of bright hopes and burning ideals, but look at what they are harvesting: an ordinariness." Mikey's response to these levels of deception and self-deception is an insistence on "nowness", a determination to keep his own identity open to change as he goes in murderous search of his biological father. Rape, incest, murder - the fruits of apartheid - unfold across a story told in three acts under the headings of Memory, Confession and Retribution. It's top-heavy, perhaps, with the sins of the fathers and the heat of the action, but Dangor deftly keeps the show on the road by routing his analysis of an underlying malaise through increasingly well-drawn characters in high-profile jobs and situations. The reader has a ring-side seat for witnessing the political, cultural and religious conflicts sweeping the Rainbow Nation. Dangor is clearly well placed, too, to describe the world of post-apartheid South Africa. He grew up in one of the "coloured" - mixed race - townships of Johannesburg, and having witnessed the kind of forced removals described in Bitter Fruit, he rose as an activist to head the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa. Descriptions of the "trite, imperious feeling" of looking out from an office tower in Pretoria, or the account of an ANC "organism" with an heroic ethos turning itself into an "organisation" with a managerial one, offer acute glimpses into the political transformation after apartheid. Yet underneath it all, a mournful river still runs, welling up in feelings both "bruised and discoloured": race, and the unreachable hurt of having lived in a racialised society. The poet takes over from the political writer in Dangor to speak it. It lingers in the imagery of fruit, of flesh, of desire - organic matter in stages of ripeness and decay, the associations of rottenness and guilt. Blond hair along a forearm is glimpsed like the bloom on a piece of fruit, and then the thought of it stifled. Hurt is bastardised with desire. Silas is "dark-faced and dark-minded". A "coloured" girl has "a rough, bastard kind of beauty". Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa. Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor. Achmat Dangor Black Cat Paperback 288 pages March 2005. Rape. Incest. Murder. Memory. Confession. Retribution. The first three themes - the mutilated personal experience of apartheid - are explored in Achmat Dangor's novel under the headings of the latter three stages of evolution of South African identity. Such is the legacy left to the New South Africa explored through the story of a "coloured� family that is, like the rest of the nation, inextricably shackled to a past defined by race while it grapples to come to terms with its current maimed, crippled self. Bitter Fruit is set in Johannesburg during the last months of Nelson Mandela's presidency. Silas Ali, the son of an Indian Muslim father and a European mother, was a member of the ANC. He now has a highly visible government job, as a lawyer working on the concluding report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Silas' wife, Lydia, also from a "coloured� family, was raised as a Catholic in Natal and is a trained nurse. Lydia was never a willing part of the anti-apartheid struggle but turns out to be a victim of it: she only learns of Silas' involvement in the MK, the armed wing of the ANC, from one of his associates well after he first joined, and is then raped by a white security policeman in her home while Silas is beaten up in a van outside as a warning to him about his activist identity. Their son, Mikey, a university student, evolves as the book's central character as he learns of his parents' pasts and has to come to terms with his own identity through either an act of reconciliation or retribution. Betrayal - both public and personal - is an intrinsic part of each character's life. Silas feels betrayed by the post-apartheid government, his colleagues and himself. As the resistance to apartheid ended in compromise, "Gave us the government, kept the money," Silas' destiny is to watch the dysfunction of his own life while it is projected as something vastly different on television, "as if it was foreign, fictional." Lydia feels betrayed by Silas' decision to become involved in the anti-apartheid movement without consulting her and its resulting endangerment of their family. Lydia's rape by Du Boise, the white security policeman, is also in her mind a rape by Silas. It irrevocably alters their relationship. Silas betrays Lydia again when he confronts Du Boise twenty years later and resurrects his presence in their lives. Her fragile sense of peace is shattered, and Lydia's two decades of tacit grief flood the house, leaving the entire family permanently splintered. Mikey surreptitiously reads his mother's diary and discovers that he is the fruit of her rape: this leads to a radical dissolution of his sense of self as he grapples with his newly-discovered identity. All aspects of betrayal are portrayed in this reckoning of South Africa's past and present - Dangor even touches on a relative's involvement in the violence perpetrated against Silas and Lydia. Sex is a dominant and often disturbing force throughout the novel. Sex is used as an act of rebellion and a means for repression. Incestuous and near-incestuous incidents occur; some are consensual while others are breaches of trust. Dangor is equivocal about them, as he is about the use of sex as an instrument of subversion: "You conquer a nation by bastardizing its children," an Imam tells Mikey, while Silas describes Vinu, a friend of Mikey's and another compromised child of South Africa, as "a bushie goddess. Beauty honed on the same bastard whetstone as I. We will make no more like her, or like Michael, for that matter. Our ambitions are too ordinary, a house, a car, a garden. We no longer dream of painful beauty when we make love." Perhaps the most important part of Bitter Fruit - one that has largely been overlooked by recent reviews of the book - is Mikey's draw to fundamental Islam. He becomes engaged with a group of Islamic activists who help him with his personal acts of vengeance and ultimately offer him rebirth as he takes on a new Muslim identity. In April, at "Pen World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature," Dangor expressed frustration at the Western perception that only people beset by poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are drawn to fundamental Islam. He explained that in South Africa, Muslim fundamentalists comprise an influential contingent, and reminded us that it was powerful enough to prevent Salman Rushdie's plane from landing on South African soil after The Satanic Verses was published. In a conversation during the festival, Dangor told me that Bitter Fruit was scheduled to be published in the United States in 2001. However, after 9/11, publishers refused to launch the book because of its Muslim content. Mikey's characterization as a gifted student with a disdain for books - a teacher describes "his brilliance as his problem� - is a little contrived. And Dangor's inclusion of base humor about bodily motions seems out of place. The structure and themes of the novel are heavy-handed, perhaps, but Dangor's spare prose and facility for literary experiment make Bitter Fruit a considerable achievement. The novel is a reminder to us of the preoccupation of identity in South Africa and in the rest of the world. During his self-introduction at a festival panel titled "Africa and The World: The Writer's Role," Dangor said that despite his various cultural, national and racial affiliations, he is now called "a Muslim writer" in the Western world. Achmat Dangor offers us a prodigious gift in Bitter Fruit , a gift that was denied to American readers first, as related by Dangor, because of 9/11, and then because American publishers felt the contents of the book - rape, murder, incest - were unpalatable to the American reader. It was only this year that Dangor's British publisher, Grove Atlantic Ltd., decided to publish the book through Black Cat, a New York subsidiary. How fortunate for the American reader that such an important book is now available in the United States. Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor. This South African novel tells a powerful story of how the toxins of apartheid still seep into the life of one small"Coloured" family: individuals from that group who, in their physical attributes, their cultural baggage, their surnames (Viljoen, Oliphant), carry the history of the conqueror's more intimate conquests. Thanks to Nadine Gordimer and others, the white dissident experience has been documented. Achmat Dangor's novel not only fills a gap, but does so with the elegiac beauty of a work by John McGahern. The catalyst in this family tragedy is the reappearance in the life of Silas Ali of Francois du Boise, a loutish white security policeman who, 20 years earlier, raped Ali's wife having thrown Silas into a police van. The rape was an ugly, drunken affair, accompanied by racial insults. Now du Boise has reappeared, pathetic, disfigured by skin cancer, seeking amnesty for multiple rapes from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Silas, meanwhile, is a lawyer close to the ANC goverment and a participant in the Commission. But the story, for all its political context, is stonger for keeping its focus on the evolving family drama, which it does through a series of interior sequences devoted in turn to Silas, to his wife Lydia, and to their meltingly beautiful but troubled and somewhat Oedipal son, Mikey. Silas is the estranged grandson of a revered Johannesburg imam. Not unusually, the imam took as second wife Angelina Pelgron, daughter of a white working-class Afrikaner, a woman whom the apartheid state saw fit to wrench away for rehab in a bleak white suburb. Silas grows up a streetwise, secular township adolescent, who goes on to move in multi-ethnic dissident circles, though he marries a beautiful, apolitical nurse. Lydia Ali, also from a Coloured family, has grown up a devout Catholic in Natal until hardship drives her family to Johannesburg. Lydia never learns to be comfortable in her husband's world. Her solace is in a kind of telepathic devotion to her son and her hospital duties, while her leisure pursuits are severe. She reads challenging literary fiction and listens, through headphones, to the music of Philip Glass. After the rape, Lydia's two decades of unspoken grief suffuse the house. In an extraordinary vignette, we see husband and wife in what appears a reconciling embrace, a sort of erotic dance, until we realise that Lydia is "dancing" with bare feet on broken glass. Mikey is one of that blessed first generation of post-apartheid youth. He is winning golden opinions at university, both for his English Literature essays and his pale brown body, which older white women can't resist. He has more than his fair share of identity problems which, stewing in the strained atmosphere of home, are about to reach the boil. This is a haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic on its context, gender and generation, its progress like slow dancing. Join our new commenting forum. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.