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RACE AND GENDER IN THE NOVELS OF FOUR CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS
by Anissa Talahite
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Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. School of English The University of Leeds September 1990 A4.1
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RACE AND GENDER IN THE NOVELS OF FOUR CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS
by Anissa Talahite O
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Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. School of English The University of Leeds September 1990 DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to my late father Mr. Bekhlouf Talahite and to my mother Mrs. Claude Talahite. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to everyone who contributed to the completion of this thesis. I would like to thank the Algerian Ministry for Higher Education for sponsoring my studies. I am also indebted to Mr Boukhari from the cultural section of the Algerian embassy for his help and assistance. I also thank the Geoffrey Spink Fund Group, the Africa Educational Trust and the Nancy Balfour Trust for their financial help. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. David Richards in particular, for his advice, support and encouragement in supervising my research. I am also indebted to the late Mr. Arthur Ravenscroft for his valuable help in compiling bibliographies. I would like to thank Liz Paget for offering technical advice and the staff of the Brotherton library, especially Mrs. Pat Shute for her help and patience. Special thanks to Cornelia Al-Khaled, Annie Fatet, Vicki Manus-Briault, Nontobeko Mofokeng, Irshad Motala, and Pat Naidoo for offering their help and support when these were most needed. Finally, I would like to say thank you to my family, especially to my sister Nedjma, for their encouragement. ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the ways in which four women novelists from Southern Africa have approached the questions of race and gender and what textual forms they have developed. Chapter One sums up the recent history of South Africa and of its literature, with a particular emphasis on the contemporary period and on the context in which women's writing developed. Chapter Two sets the theoretical framework of the study by linking the post-colonial theory of the "other" in literature and the feminist psychoanalytical approach to the construction of woman as "otherness" in Western tradition. The last four chapters deal with the analysis of a number of selected texts by the writers who have been chosen for discussion. Chapter Three examines Doris Lessing's psychological exploration of the colonial woman's sense of disintegrating identity. It pays attention particularly to how Lessing builds an analytical approach to the problems of woman's oppression, and to how this approach relates to the politics of race. In a similar perspective, Chapter Four examines how the novelist Bessie Head transgresses the barriers of her society by exploring the forbidden land of dreams, fantasies and myths. The emphasis is on how Bessie Head, as a black woman, creates a mode of expression where language and identity are central, and how this mode is relevant to the politics of liberation in South Africa. Chapter Five studies the textual strategies in Nadine Gordimer's late novels in an attempt to define the link between her textual practices and the collapse of white identity faced with the demands of the black majority. The thesis ends with a discussion on Miriam Tlali's novels, principally dealing with the ways in which they construct a black female voice. This last chapter examines how Tlali's plural narratives are informed by the social and cultural processes at work in her society and by her position as a black woman writing under apartheid. CONTENTS
Page CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I. General Historical Background 1 II. Women's Protest in South Africa 21 III.A Survey of South African Literature 28 IV. The Literature Written by Women 51 CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES I. Critical Approach to Post-Colonial Literature 61 II. Feminist Approach 84 CHAPTER THREE: DORIS LESSING 108 I. The Grass Is Singing.... 110 II. "Children of Violence".. 138 CHAPTER FOUR: BESSIE HEAD 168 I. Maru 170 II. A Question of Power.. 193 CHAPTER FIVE: NADINE GORDIMER 221 I. A Guest of Honour 222 II. The Conservationist 231 111.Burger's Daughter 239 IV. July's people 249 V. A Sport of Nature 260 CHAPTER FIVE: MIRIAM TLALI 272 I. Muriel at Metropolitan 275 II. Amandla 297 CONCLUSION 327 BIBLIOGRAPHY 334 1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
I. GENERAL HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
This chapter is an overview of the history of South Africa and of its literature. The focus of this thesis is on South Africa, although some of the writers which are being discussed lived in and wrote about the neighbouring Southern African countries (Botswana, Zimbabwe). Since the history of the region has been affected by the apartheid regime in South Africa and since it is the political developments there which will determine the future of the region, this study concentrates on South Africa primarily. This does not mean that what has been taking place in other parts of Southern Africa are insignificant events. Research on the literary histories of the different Southern African countries is an important area to be investigated; however, this is outside the scope of this study. The history of South Africa is complex and diverse, and cannot be reviewed in a few paragraphs. Still, in order to understand the present politics of South Africa, it is important to go back to the beginning of the century and to the origins of what is now known as apartheid. South Africa has known various forms of oppression, from 2
British indirect rule to apartheid and multinational imperialism. The formation of the Union of South Africa brought the two Boer republics and the two British colonies together, after the Anglo-Boer war. English and Dutch were made the official languages of the union. South Africa remained part of the British empire. Soon after the formation of the union, the government passed the Native Land Act of 1913, which dispossessed the black people of their land. By allowing blacks to own land only in the "native reserves" (an early version of the present day "Bantustans"), the act encouraged land segregation. One million whites had access to more than 90% of the country, while four million Africans had to live on the remaining 7.3%. As Tom Lodge explains, "The Land Act of 1913 and complementary labour legislation were the legal tools employed to destroy a whole class of peasant producers, forcing them into already crowded reserves or driving them into new and arduous social relationships ....,1 Apartheid as an ideology was put forward by a group of Afrikaner intellectuals in the 1930s. Influenced by the ideals of Afrikaner nationalism, by the theological tradition of the Dutch Reformed Churches, and by the Nazi pseudo-scientific theories of race, the apartheid doctrine lies in the belief that races should develop separately in order to fulfill themselves. Apartheid supporters condemned
1. Tom Lodge, Black Politics In South Africa Since 1945 (London 1983), p.2. 3 the mixing of races and cultures, which they saw as inevitably ending in corruption. This doctrine was in fact to hide a series of economic, social, legal and political restrictions which the National Party, elected into power in 1948, imposed on the black people. The main restrictions are economic and legal. First, the black population was compelled (often with the use of forced removals) to live on the most arid land where no resources are available and no industry, nor agriculture have developed. Therefore, black workers have to move to the industrial and mining centres to look for work. Providing the economy with a cheap source of labour, the system of migrant workers is also a means of controlling the labour force. The influx control laws were passed to forbid blacks from moving freely within the country by allocating them to specific areas and by forcing them to carry passes. Passes offenses are punishable by law, the offender having to pay a fine or go to prison. The second major restraint is the vote. Blacks are only allowed to vote for the local token so- called "ethnic" governments in the "native reserves". The central government remains exclusively constituted of and voted by whites. In 1936, "coloured" people from the Cape, who previously had the right to vote, saw their rights removed and replaced with a vote on a separate roll for three whites in the House of Assembly elected as Coloured 4
Representatives. Recently, the government have passed similar conventions for Indians and, later, Africans, which have been received with mass protest. "One man, one vote" remains the major claim of the opposition movements; the more recent campaigns of defiance against the white-only elections of September 1989 are a reminder of the importance and the urgency of this claim. From its election into power in 1948 to the early sixties, the apartheid government put its ideas into legislative form. This period is often referred to as "baaskap" or white supremacy. Beside the land, population movements and voting restrictions, a number of laws reinforcing segregation and control over the black masses were passed. The Prohibition Of Mixed Marriages Act was passed in 1949; the Immorality Act of 1950 followed and made inter¬ racial sexual relations a criminal offense. In 1949 the Population Registration Act, which divided the people along racial lines, was voted. The system of passes was tightened and was extended to women too. The Group Area Act of 1950 divides the housing areas into "bantu", "white", "indian" and "coloured". To suppress the mounting opposition to the new legislation, in 1950, the government passed the Suppression of Communism Act, which outlawed not only the Communist Party but also other radical left-wing movements. The Native Resettlement Act of
2. J.D. Omer-Cooper, History Of Southern Africa (Portsmouth 1987), p.193. 5
1956 made it possible for the government to rehouse blacks into segregated townships. The Native Labour Act of 1953 prohibits any strike under any circumstances. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956 extends the colour bar and the discrimination to industrial relations. Segregation entered trade-unions and the various sphere of social, political and cultural life. In 1953, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act was passed. Public transport, post-office entrances and other facilities became separate. In 1957, the State Aided Institutions Act enforced segregation in libraries, places of entertainment, sport and health care. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 brought segregation to schools. Education for blacks became explicitly designed to prepare them for their subordinate roles in society; it was removed from the Department of Education and placed under the Department of Native Affairs. In 1957, universities became segregated. Like white domination, resistance has also a long history in South Africa. The first union of Africans (Imbumba Yama Africa) was formed in the Eastern Cape as far back as 1880. The first African newspaper was published the same year. Mary Benson describes this period as follows: Africans, from 1880, began to work within the modern frame and to think in terms of political rather than military action Looking back, two contrary trends emerge - Africans, already influenced by the teachings of Victorian humanitarians and Christian missionaries, began to discover 6
themselves as part of mankind, while Afrikaners, anxious to preserve their small "nation", and feeling themselves threatened, sought isolation from the rest of mankind. Chief Makana, who led the Xhosa rebellion against the colonial army, was sent for life imprisonment to Robben Island in 1819, i.e. 145 years before Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.* As early as the late Nineteenth Century, black people organize themselves in various organizations to protest against the colour bar in parliament, in industry, in education and in administration. The South African Native National Congress (the forefather of the present A.N.C.) was formed in 1912 to protest against the exclusion of blacks from government and from legislative power. Dube and Platjee are among the many leaders who set up the foundations for what was to become the major political organization in the country. Unrest, strikes, protest against pass laws and increasing repression from the state characterize the protest movements against white supremacy in the pre-war period. The second world war in which many Africans took part on the side of the British forces brought the hope of a better future and an equal society in South Africa. Instead of that, Africans saw the implementation of apartheid legislation and the tightening control of the state over the discontented black masses. Consequently, protest 3. Mary Benson, The Struggle For A Birth Right (London 1985), pp.17-18. 4. Ibid., pp.15-16. 5. Platjee as a politician and writer is discussed at length in the third section of this chapter. 7 movements intensified their struggle by adopting a more political and a more radical approach to the problems of the country. The 1943 bus boycott in Alexandra township marked an important landmark in the rise of people's political consciousness and announced what was to become a radical and systematic resistance to white power. The late 1940s also marked the rise of African nationalism, as it is formulated by the A.N.C. Youth League's manifesto. The league rejected the more lenient attitudes of their predecessors by emphasizing the need for self-reliance for African people in order to achieve independence; their doctrines were largely influenced by the rise of African nationalism in West and East Africa.® During the years between 1950 and 1952, protest continued with strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and non¬ cooperation with the state. The 1950s were also characterized by the wider participation of women in the struggle. Women's protest movements will be discussed at a later stage, in our section on women's resistance.
In 1955, the Congress of the People adopted the
Freedom Charter. The Congress was made up of delegates democratically elected by the people who, on the 25th and 26th of June 1955, came from all over South Africa to the Kliptown gathering outside Johannesburg. There the delegates voiced the demands of the people, and the charter was drawn. Consisting 6. See Mary Benson, op.cit., pp.85-86. 8 of 11 general principles under which a number of other points are stated, the Charter makes the claim of a non-racial democracy, of the sharing of the land and of the wealth of the country by its inhabitants irrespective of colour or race. It also demands the removal of all discriminatory legislation, the implementation of equal opportunities in education, work for persons of all races, the nationalization of the banks, of the mines and of the heavy industry, and the redistribution of land. The Congress had previously collected the demands of the people by setting up meetings, discussion groups, study groups and reading groups organized by volunteers all over the country, even in its most remote rural areas. This period was characterized by an intense climate of dialogue and of democratic debating. Notions such as national identity, culture and human rights also found a new meaning and new orientations; cultural diversity was emphasized along with the unity and the oneness of the South African people. The implications of the Freedom Charter are considerable, for it is a major landmark in the political consciousness of the people. Politically, it has also chartered the directions of the mass- democratic movements until today. Its strength lies in its broad outlook and in its relevance to all the other political organizations in the country, such as the trade union movement, the United Democratic 9
Front (UDF), and the religious movements.ÿ Finally, the charter's relevance to the women's movement is not the least considerable aspect of its history; this point will be examined in our later discussion on women's political organizations. The late fifties and early sixties are characterized by a fierce onslaught against the mass organizations. In December 1956 the government accused 156 political activists of high treason and of conspiracy by international communism against the South African state. All of them pleaded not guilty. The "Treason Trial" lasted until 1960 when the accused were finally acquitted. It announced a decade of increasing repression and of brutal police intervention. On the 21st March 1960 the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) launched an anti-pass campaign. Formed in 1959, after separating from the ANC, the PAC organization adopted a Pan-Africanist nationalist approach to the South African struggle, emphasizing the necessity to have a black leadership in the democratic movements and objecting to the Freedom Charter's clause stating that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it black and white". In Sharpeville, their campaign ended in bloodshed with
7. For a comprehensive survey of the Freedom Charter movement and of its implications in today's South Africa, see Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin (ed.), 30 Years Of The Freedom Charter (Johannesburg 1986). This compilation of historical documents, interviews and photographs is part of what a quotation from the book names as "the struggle of memory against forgetting". 10
69 deaths and 180 people wounded, most shot in the back. The event caused widespread protest, especially abroad. On the 30th March, a state of emergency was declared; more repression followed. The ANC called again for protest against pass laws. In April, the government declared the ANC and the PAC "unlawful organizations" and accused them of being "a serious threat to the safety of the public". The bill was voted by parliament; consequently, any person furthering the aims of these organizations became liable of imprisonment
for up to ten years under the Suppression of Communism Act. As a consequence, ANC and PAC became underground organizations. Mass arrests, detentions and brutality followed. In 1961, Nelson Mandela was freed from successive bans and elected leader of a National Action Council. After renewed demands for a National Convention to establish a union of all South Africans in a democratic state, the banned movements resorted to underground activity. Mandela and Sisulu secretly toured the country to organize stay-at-home campaigns. The response was general and almost unanimous. However, as the state increasingly
resorted to brutality and repression, the ANC decided to give up peaceful methods and to adopt the armed struggle. In June 1961, the military wing of the ANC, Umkonto Vie Sizwe (Spear Of Nation) was established with the aim of sabotaging selected installations, avoiding human losses. Similarly, PAC 11 formed Poqo (pure), also a military section of the organization. After his secret tour of the African continent, Mandela was captured and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for having incited the stay-at- home campaigns and having left the country illegally. In 1962, the 90 days detention without trial law was voted; furthermore, torture became legalized. In 1964 Mandela, Sisulu and others were brought to court in one of South Africa's major trial, known as the Rivonia trial. There, Mandela made a series of famous court statements; his address to the Court from the dock is particularly memorable.8 Repression intensified with, in 1968, the reorganization and centralization of the security police around the Bureau Of State Security (BOSS). In the meantime, the South African government tried to gain credit from the international community, who had previously condemned the harsh repression of political activity by the state, by revising its apartheid terminology. Phrases such as "separate developments", "parallel streams", "self-governments" and "bantu homelands" existing within a South African "commonwealth" replaced the cruder apartheid racist vocabulary in an attempt to whitewash the government's image. After the harsh repression of the 1960s and the apparent lull in political activities, South African politics experienced a revival with the birth of 8. For a transcript of Mandela's statements, see Nelson Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life (London 1978). 12
Black Consciousness and the resistance that followed. In the same tradition of the Africanists, the Black Consciousness movement emphasized self- reliance and introspection, with, however, a wider understanding of the term "black" to include oppressed groups other than Africans, and acknowledging divergences and differences (notably Q class differences) within the category "black". On the other hand, students' politics took shape in the early 1970s with the creation of SASO (South African Students Organization), which, with other educational and religious bodies, set up the Black People Convention (BPC) in 1972. These organizations followed the philosophy of Black Consciousness, promoting black communalism, launching literacy campaigns and health projects, encouraging artistic creation, and emphasizing liberation from psychological and physical oppression. The economic recession of the 1970s lead to a climate of unrest. The introduction of the Afrikaans language as a compulsory teaching medium in schools triggered the Soweto students' revolt of the 16th June 1976. The Soweto Students Representative Council, formed on the 13th of June, planned a demonstration on the 16th. The latter ended in bloodshed; the 15 000 demonstrating children were met by brutal police force. At least 575 died and 2
9. For a more detailed discussion of Black Consciousness and of its political consequences, see Tom Lodge's Black Politics In South Africa Sinca 1945 (New York 1983), pp.321-356. 13
389 (according to what Tom Lodge describes as "highly conservative official estimates") were wounded. The Soweto uprising had considerable consequences for the further directions of black resistance in South Africa. It initiated a revival of open political discussion and of the Freedom Charter. Organizations such as COSAS (Congress Of South African Students) and AZAPO (Azanian People Organization) are examples of this political revival. Also, the trade union movement experienced a boost with the formation of the Federation Of South African Trade Union (FOSATU). Despite its emphasis on factory issues and its lack of overt political aspirations, the trade union movement was characteristic for its high level of militancy. Finally, the 1970s also marked the campaign of
sabotage launched by Umkonto We Sizwe. The ANC military wing attacked industrial and military bases, avoiding civilian casualties. However, in August 1981, Oliver Tambo, the present leader of the ANC, made the statement that the ANC would in future chose as targets "officials of apartheid", and that there might be "combat situations" and civilian losses. Resistance in the form of school, rent, housing and transport boycotts and industrial unrest continued in the 1980s. The umbrella organization, UDF (United Democratic Front), unified the different 10. Ibid., p.330. 14
democratic movements within South Africa: civic associations, trade unions, student bodies, youth groups, women's organizations, churches, mosques and sport clubs. The UDF based its actions around the claims made by these different groups (housing, education, factory floor demands) by acting as a co¬ ordinating body. It launched several campaigns and had widespread responses throughout the country. The year 1984 was particularly active, with the school boycott which lasted a whole academic year. A Saulvi1le/Atteridgeville Youth Organization representative declared at a UDF rally in July 1984: "We must be difficult to control. We must render the instruments of oppression difficult to work. We must escalate all forms of resistance. We must make ourselves ungovernable..,11 The protest was not only confined to schools, but spread to workers and communities. Miners' strikes, stay-away campaigns, class boycotts, under the overall organization of the UDF, intensified in the years 1984 and 1985. On many occasions, apart from police intervention, the South African army moved into the townships, leaving a high number of deaths and injured, and making arrests of UDF leaders accusing them of ANC collaboration. Furthermore, the government-supported Inkatha movement, promoting a racist view of Zulu nationalism in line with the government's new policy of "ethnic" separateness, created a situation of
11. Julie Frederikse, South Africa: A Different Kind Of War, from Soweto to Pretoria (London 1986), p.178. 15
"black-on-black" violence in the townships, especially between UDF supporters and Inkatha members. By the mid-1985, President Botha (South
Africa's last president) declared a state of emergency in the country and imposed a blanket ban on media information. Since then, although access to information has been limited, due to the ban, the South African political scene has been marked by more action from the democratic movements. In 1988, the government imposed a ban on a number of organizations, including the UDF. Despite the attempts by the state to intimidate protesters and, on the other hand, "whitewash" its image internationally, the stay-at- home and defiance campaigns of the late 1980s have shown that the situation of unrest can only intensify in the future. To quote the words of the journalist Julie Frederikse: If the government and its opponents agree on nothing else, it is that South Africa's future will be resolved through war and more importantly, that it will be a very different kind of war ... The weapons may often be guns and petrol bombs, but the South African people will also fight the government with strikes and meetings, songs and pamphlets. While there is wide agreement that South Africa is already in the early stages of a civil war, there is a great range of opinion as to the future course of this very different war. 2 Finally, before concluding this brief overview of South African history, it is important to assess the direct effect of apartheid on culture, and in particular on literature, of such prohibitions as 12. Julie Frederikse, op.cit., p.180. 16
censorship laws, publishing restrictions and other constraints. The Publication And Entertainment Act of 1963 was addressed mainly to works offensive to moral and religious values. Yet, it was used as a weapon to ban books which were critical of apartheid. Apart from banning books in South Africa, the act also prevented the importation of some foreign works of literature. The act also inhibited writers and publishers by creating a climate of fear; as Andre Brink notes: "the climate of fear and suspicion created by the existence of a Censorship Act is often much more inhibiting than any action in terms of the law itself". * The new Publication Act of 1974 tightened the law on censorship, and also banned books in Afrikaans such as Brink's Kennis Van Die Aand.ÿÿ The writers who have been the most affected by censorship are the generation of the 1960s, like La Guma, Mphalele, Brutus, but also more recent writers, like Miriam Tlali, whose books have been banned for years. They will be discussed at length in our next section. Because they were under banning orders, the works of these writers were not available either to their contemporaries or to the 13. The children's book Black beauty, for instance, was banned because suspected of being part of Black Consciousness propaganda. 14. Andre Brink, Mapmakers: Writing in a State Of Siege (London 1983), p.79. 15. The novel was then translated by the author himself and published abroad as Looking on Darkness (London 1974), where it received a good response. Subsequently, the South African government, worried about its international reputation, proceeded to unban it. 17
next generation of writers. This is a direct consequence of censorship, which had serious effects on literature. However, the indirect effects of censorship are equally serious, although they are more difficult to assess. For instance, publishers do not want to risk publishing books with an overtly political message. Finally, other laws have contributed to censorship, such as the Custom Excise Act of 1955, which gives the authorities the right to embargo works of literature, the Riotous Assembly Act, which can declare books "undesirable" and ban them, and the Suppression Of Communism Act, which bans the works of "listed persons". The South African government has recently been more lenient on censorship in an attempt to gain popularity abroad, especially since Great Britain elected a new conservative government in 1979. It started to unban books, like many of Gordimer's, Brink's and others. On the other hand, although it inhibited the writer in his/her creative process, it also contributed to bringing publicity to his/her works. Censorship stimulated live poetry readings and the performances of plays, before a ban is imposed. Also, censorship has led Afrikaans writers to write in English, thus, widening their perspective, both in terms of audience and subject matter. Nevertheless, the effect of censorship should not be underestimated, for a large section of
16. Andre Brink, Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege, op.cit., p.252. 18
South African literature is still being silenced by legal (or other) restrictions, and writers such as the novelist Miriam Tlali are constantly harassed by the police as well as being censored. Publishing in South Africa has had a fairly recent history. In 1853, J.C. Juta set up the first publishing house, located in Cape Town. The first work of literature was published in 1892 by Argus Printing And Publishing. Until the second world war, the most influential companies were the Central News Agency (CNA), the Lovedale Press, which showed an early interest in black literature, although it also sometimes imposed restrictions on it.ÿ Journalism has also been an important channel for expression, especially for black writers. Some of them have made their reputation in both areas, such as Plaatje. From the 1930s onwards, English-language newspapers appeared in great numbers. The second world war brought about more self- reliance in publishing, since the opportunities abroad decreased. Local publishing houses were set up, like Howard Timmins, for example. This tendency intensified in the 1970s with the creation of Ravan Press, David Philip and AD. Donker. Also, the African Writers Series published by Heinemann Educational Books contributed to promote local literature, in particular black writing. In the
17. See the following section of this chapter discussing Plaatje's novel, Mhudi, which was largely edited by the Lovedale Press when it first appeared in 1930. 19
1980s, a new experience was launched with the creation of Skotaville. Named after the editor, pamphleter, compiler, community leader and General
Secretary of the ANC, Skota, who died in 1936, Skotaville is a non-profit making publishing house, run by blacks, which encourages indigenous and non- established writers. However, it has encountered some financial difficulties, and funds have often to be raised from abroad. The publishing house, Seriti Sa Sechaba, is a new venture by black women launched in 1988; it has started to publish new writers first works. Writers' associations and various debating groups provide a forum for intellectual debate and exchange, especially when those are constantly under the threat of fear and of censorship. The first association dates from 1824, when the South African Literary Society was created, with Thomas Pringle as secretary. In the 1880s, groups like the Lovedale Literary Society started showing interest in "the native question" and in the debate around contact between the cultures. In 1884, John Tengo Jabavu founded "Imvo Zabantsundu" as a platform for black intellectuals and poets and as a publishing place for some of the first black poetry in English. In 1910, S.G. Millin founded the South African branch of the PEN Club with the aim of promoting local writing.
No new groups were formed except for a few short¬ lived literary societies in the late 1960s, such as 20
The Paquino Society and the Artist And Writers Guild Of South Africa. In 1981, the Johannesburg PEN Centre dissolved after pressures from black members who had decided to resign after refusing to work in collaboration with white liberals. The African Writers Association (of South Africa) was created after the dissolution of PEN. There have also been a number of academic and educational institutions promoting English language and literature and administering awards and literary prizes. Finally, there has been, over the years, an increasing number of informal bodies, such as debating societies, creative writing workshops, reading groups and amateur theatre groups. For example, the novelist Miriam Tlali, who lives and writes in Soweto, holds writing workshops with young aspiring writers. Together, they have compiled an anthology of writings on black women's daily experiences. Lastly, before concluding this overview of the elements which have contributed to the cultural and literary life in South Africa, it is important to review briefly the existing periodicals and magazines. Literary journals, gazettes and reviews abound in the history of South African literature, although they were, on the whole, very short-lived. Periodicals also contributed early to the tradition of literary criticism, by publishing reviews of books and articles. Among many others are the Cape Of Good Hope Literary Gazette (1830), Voorslag (1926; facsimile edition 1985), Vandag (1947) and 21
Standpunte (1945). In the 1950s, Drum Magazine played an important role by giving a voice to the emerging black writers of that period, who are often known as the "drum generation". In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, other periodicals were created, such as The Purple Renoster (1956), Africa South (1956) and Contrast (1961). Also, poetry journals like Mew Coin Poetry, Ophir and Izwi appeared. It is also in the
1960s that The Classic and the New Nation were founded.*® Since then, the major development has been the publication of Staffrider (1978) by Ravan Press, a magazine which gives a voice to the new and emerging artists. Other publications appeared on the literary scene in the 1980s, such as Heresy (1979), Upstream (1983) and Frontline Books (1983).
II. WOMEN'S PROTEST IN SOUTH AFRICA
Women's protest movements have had a relatively recent development in South African politics. Women came into the political foreground in the 1950s, with the implementation of the apartheid policies. However, women's resistance can be traced as far back as 1913 when 600 women marched to the Municipal offices in Bloemfontein, where they deposited their passes in an act of protest. Relating this event, Mary Benson writes: "For the first time South Africa witnessed passive resistance from the African 18. The Classic, founded in 1963, was dissolved and replaced, in 1975, by The New Classic, which resumed publication. 22
people. This action by African women took place at the time of the suffragettes' protests in England.”
This form of protest spread to other parts of the
country; many women were jailed for having defied the pass laws.ÿ However, it is only from the 1950s onwards, after the government had started implementing its pass laws policy for women, that the movement against passes intensified. In October 1955, women organized the first large protest march against the passes. Organized by the Federation Of South African Women (which had been set up during the Freedom Charter movement), the protest gathered 2000 women who marched to Pretoria. Protest spread out to Durban and Cape Town. However, in 1956, the government began to force passes on women. Marches and pass burning by women followed in different parts of the country. Organizers were harassed, arrested or banned, notably Mrs. Ngoyi, who was arrested and imprisoned more than once during the campaigns. The largest demonstration was launched in August 1956, when twenty thousand women (ten times as many as in
October 1955) marched to Pretoria, where Mrs. Lilian Ngoyi knocked at Mr. Strijdom's (Prime Minister) door, but only to be told that he was not there.
This event is remembered in the history of South Africa as the victory of women over male and white power. The women sang the ANC national anthem and an 19. Mary Benson, op.cit., p.33. 20. The FSAW will be discussed at length later in this chapter. 23
old Natal song adapted to the new situation: "Strijdom, you have struck a rock once you have touched a woman", before dispersing. By the end of 1957, 1 200 women were arrested in the Johannesburg Fort, of whom 170 were with their babies. Resistance was not limited to urban woman solely, although they have been the most active; women in the rural areas have also organized themselves around issues of increase in taxation, influx control and other restrictions on the rural population. Protest by rural women often lead to direct confrontation with the authorities, and many women were jailed. Tom Lodge records an instance of rural rebellion by women where the men joined in support of their fellow-protesters. This was in Harding in August 1959 when men marched to the jail, demanding the release of their wives who had been imprisoned after a protest against the Department of Bantu Administration.ÿ Men also joined women in anti-pass stay-at-home campaigns; in the Marico reserves, some protesters lost their lives during protests against the passes. Confrontation between women and the authorities often took place in the townships, when the government imposed restrictions on home brewing. Beer making is a traditional domestic function of women in Southern Africa and a main source of income for many of them. The imposition of brewing permits 21. See Mary Benson, op.cit., pp.184-185. 22. Tom Lodge,op.cit., p.146. 23. Ibid., p.149. 24 and the creation of beer halls by the state triggered protest from the women beer brewers. In Durban, in the year 1959, women attacked beer halls, destroyed government property and clashed with the police. Women's movements in South Africa have a long history, especially in the form of self-help organizations, community-based groups and church councils. However, it is only in 1937 that women organized politically with the formation of the National Council of African Women (NCAW) as a branch of the All African Convention, an umbrella body bringing together all groups and organizations in the black community. Ellen Kuzwayo describes the council as "the first formidable black women's organization in South Africa" with the aim "to serve their race and to liberate themselves from the shackles of humiliation, discrimination and systematic psychological suppression by their own menfolk as well as by the state through its legislation and administrative regulations". However, one has to wait until 1948 to see the proper establishment of the ANC Women's League.27 Before the 1950s, women's resistance was centred around informal popular movements, church-based associations and trade-union activities. Tom Lodge
24. Ibid., p.148. 25. For a detailed account of women's self-help organizations in South Africa, see Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Ma Woman (London 1985). 26. Ibid., p.101. 27. Tom Lodge, op.cit., p.141. 25
for example notes that "the communists drew African women into their ranks because many of the issues they took up the cost of food, the right to brew beer, lodger permits were of fundamental importance to women in their domestic capacities".ÿ®
Women started to take part in political activities with the defiance campaigns of the early 1950s. The
Freedom Charter movement also contributed to the growing politicization of black women. On the 17
April 1954, the "Women's charter" was adopted and the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) was launched. In 1954, the Federation Of South African Women was formed as part of the Freedom Charter
movement. The organization formulated its aims by adopting the Women's Charter; it also compiled "the women's demands for the Freedom Charter", a document which was to be submitted to the Congress of the People and, later, incorporated in the Freedom
Charter itself. The two documents call for better health care, for free educational facilities for the
youth, for better homes and public services, for
better diet and controlled prices, for the right to own land and to choose one's place to live, for the abolition of passes, for the right to vote, for equality in employment and equal pay and for equal rights before the law. These demands apply to both men and women; however, the document emphasizes some specific concerns relative to women, such as maternity leaves, birth control clinics, equal right 28. loc.cit. 26
with men in matters of property, marriage and child custody, and the abolition of the colonial rule which considers African, coloured and Indian women as eternal minors, and prevents them from owning property, from entering into contract and from exercising guardianship over their children. Amanda Kwadi, an executive member of the Federation of Transvaal Women, defines the women's struggle in South Africa as follows: We are waging a struggle different from that in the United States and Western Europe. Ours is for national liberation and the type of demands found in the Freedom Charter reflect this. The vote is denied to black South Africans. That is so basic a right that it is taken for granted by Western European and United States feminists. Without the vote we do not control our own country, let alone have rights as women. That is why many of our demands are ones for which we struggle shoulder to shoulder with our menfolk. Women's rights are on the agenda of the liberation movements, as most of them agree on the fact that women are the victims of a double oppression. However, the latter have been reluctant to hand over their demands to the male politicians solely, and have organized themselves into separate organizations. Cheryl Carolus, an executive member of the United Women's Organization and a UDF official, voices her distrust for the concern which certain liberation movements have shown for women's rights. Although once a militant in Black Consciousness herself, she criticizes the latter for
29. Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin (ed.), op.cit., p.158. 27
its being basically "male” and for its treatment of women as if they were "just coincidental". As she strongly puts it, in the philosophy of Black
Consciousness, "asserting your blackness went hand in hand with asserting your maleness". Even though South African women acknowledge the
shortcomings of liberation movements on issues concerning women and the need for more female
participation in them, they seldom separate their struggle from the larger issue of national liberation. For instance, Cheryl Carolus's frank
criticism of male-centred politics does not prevent her from acknowledging the fact that "women's liberation cannot be won in a vacuum".ÿ1 The development of the struggle within South Africa in the mid-eighties, with the umbrella organization UDF coordinating the different struggles and the different levels of resistance, has shown the part played by women within the democratic movement and their high level of political awareness. What seems to be at stake is more the implications of the struggle for women, rather than the often over-stressed conflict between women's liberation and national liberation. The participation of women in politics led to a growing assertiveness on their part and has enabled them to articulate a specific analysis of the situation.
30. Ibid., p.157. 31. loc.cit. 28
III. A SURVEY OF SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE
The origins of South African literature go as far back as pre-colonial times. Epics, proverbs, folktales and songs have been for centuries, and until now, collective forms of expressing grief, praise, and other concerns. These artistic forms have survived throughout history, and have been adapted to fit the changes that have affected the country. Mazisi Kunene's restitution of the African traditional epic through the medium of the English language in his famous Emperor Shaka The Great, published in 1979, is one example. In her extensive and comprehensive study of African oral tradition, Ruth Finnegan criticizes the usual distinction between written and oral literatures as one which involves more value judgment and ideological bias than real aesthetic evaluation. The New Black Poetry of the 1970's has attempted to recreate the oral tradition and to revive the role of the African spokesman as both artist and politician (the "imbongi" or praise singer in Zulu). The South African short story also 32. Mazisi Kunene, Emperor Shaka The Great (London 1979). 33. Ruth Finnegan writes: "We still hear, for instance, of the 'savage' reliance on the 'magical power of the word', of the communal creation of 'folktales' with no part left for the individual artist, or of the deep 'mythic' consciousness imagined to be characteristic of non-literate society." Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford 1970), p.26. Chinweizu takes a similar stand in his Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (London 1985). 29 takes roots in the oral tradition, in that it is in many respects a continuation of the traditional folktale. Therefore, if one refuses the hierarchical categorization of literature into oral and written forms, it is possible to see a continuity in South African writing from orature to the contemporary novel. South African written literature is more recent; it starts with missionary and colonial writings. Stephen Gray's introduction to Southern African literature concentrates on white writing and on the colonial and the liberal literary traditions. * His study pays particular attention to the literary representations of the encounter with the South African land by the first white adventurers, missionaries, and settlers, which has triggered off the tradition of heroic writing about the exotic encounter with the "dark continent". Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) is a pioneer in this tradition; he came to South Africa with the British army and started writing heroic accounts of the white man's taming of the rebellious land and, by extension, of its "insurbordinate" people. Stephen Gray argues that "there is in Southern Africa something of a central literary consciousness which can be seen to be sustained by myth".*ÿ He studies the ways in which mythical figures, such as the Adamastor (the dormant monster associated with 34. Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town 1979). 35. Ibid., p.34. 30
Table Mountain, the first visible piece of land from off shore Cape Town bay), appear throughout the development of white writing in Southern Africa. His analysis is interesting in the ways in which it reveals how colonial literature was reinforcing colonial power and authority through the use of myths. It also shows how this power was also subverted by the reverse use of its very forms of expression. For example, Olive Schreiner, in The Story Of An African Farm, "has taken the outstretched glove of hunter-adventure fiction and tried to turn it inside out".®® Nevertheless, it is regrettable that Gray's interesting account of the development of literature in Southern Africa allocates only one tenth of his book to the emergence of black writing. Similarly, J.M. Coetzee, in his book on white writing in South Africa, studies the role of the landscape as the site of a collective colonial memory and of a collective unconscious.®"ÿ He defines the task of the white writer as "the burden of finding a home in Africa for a consciousness formed in and by a language whose history lies on another continent". Coetzee does not seem to differentiate enough between the claims made by the white writers and what their real concerns were, often indulging in self-pity for the "unsettled settler" in search of roots, and not seeing this claim as a way of 36. Ibid., p.156. 37. J.M. Coetzee, White Writing (London 1988). 38. Ibid., p.173. 31
legitimizing the whites I presence on the South African land. Coetzee's study of white writing in South Africa underlines the themes of Eden and of the empty and silent African landscape. It shows a continuity in the use of colonial myths, images and motifs in the works by white South Africans. For example, the pastoral fiction, as best exemplified by the writings of Pauline Smith, is readapted and subverted in Nadine Gordimer's fiction, which Coetzee describes as anti-pastoral. Coetzee pays particular attention to the silence of this kind of writing on the presence of the black people on the land, notably of the black labour force. However, rather than analyzing this silence in terms of power struggle and in the light of the whites' concern for justifying their illegitimate presence in Africa, Coetzee seems to dwell on describing the pain and the moral suffering on the white writer caused by the impossibility of belonging, and by the inadequacy between a consciousness shaped by a European language and cultural heritage and the African landscape. Coetzee's romantic elevation of the white writer's implacable sense of exile from the land reaches its paroxysm when justifying Gertrud Sarah Millin's blatant racism in God’s Step-Children by describing her as "a practicing novelist adapting whatever models and theories lie to hand to make writing 32 possible". Nevertheless, Coetzee's historical mapping of white writing in South Africa throws some light on the origins and the development of the pastoral mode, which has been widely borrowed and adapted by contemporary South African writers, black and white. The two traditions in South Africa, that is the oral indigenous tradition and the white settlers tradition of the pastoral, are not totally isolated. The writings which have come as the result of the encounter between whites and blacks in South Africa, and of its dramatic historical development, draw upon the two traditions, not with the aim of a reconciliation but with the view of transcending the manicheism of their cultural heritage by creating new modes of writing, themes and aesthetic forms. Influential novels, such as Solomon Plaatje's Mhudi and Olive schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, exemplify the attempt by South African writers to create an original literature, born of cultural and of linguistic diversity. Mhudi, believed to have been written in 1917, is the first known novel by a black South African. It was published in 1930 by the Lovedale Press in an edition which excluded much of the traditional African oral narrative techniques and of the linguistic specificity of the text. It was, however, republished in 1978 (61 years later!) by Heinemann in its integral version. Solomon Plaatje was not 39. Ibid., p.162. 33
only a novelist but also a prominent politician and a founder member of the African National Congress, of which he became the General Correspondence Secretary. He was sent on a mission to London to appeal to the British government against the Native Land Act of 1913, but failed because of the coinciding outbreak of the First World War. Plaatje was also a journalist, a linguist and a literary translator. His works include the first Sechuana phonetic reader, produced with the English linguist Daniel Jones, and many translations of Shakespeare's plays into Sechuana. In Mhudi, Plaatje combines his literary and linguistic talents to produce a work of fiction which adapts the oral tradition (not only the Sechuana tradition, for Plaatje had also a knowledge of Zulu, Tswana, Koranna and many other African languages) to other literary traditions; his Shakespearian use of language and of dramatic effects is one example of that. Plaatje's intention was "to interpret to the reading public one phase of 'the back of the native
II mind / as he himself wrote in his preface to Mhudi.*® The novelist uses his voice as a writer to express his people's discontent in the aftermath of the Native Land Act, which legalized the dispossession of the black people of South Africa. Although the story in the novel deals with the 1830 war between the Barolong and the Matabele, and the consecutive dispossession of the first tribe by the 40. Solomon Plaatje, Mhudi (London 1978), p.21. 34
latter who imposed taxations on the land, Mhudi is also an allegory for the South Africa of the beginning of the century. Tim Couzens writes in his introduction to the novel: Mhudi is not only a defense of traditional custom as well as a corrective on history, but it is also an implicit attack on the injustice of land distribution in South Africa in 1917. * Mhudi and Ra-Thanga, her husband, are two survivors of the Matabele's raid on the Barolong. The novel depicts their perilous adventures, as they join the other Barolong in their resistance against the Matabele. The Boers appear in the story, not as the main enemies, but as one of the destructive forces which contributed to the dissolution of the peaceful traditional way of life. As in Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, colonization is seen as "an incident, a catalytic incident merely" taking place within a historical vista which is predominantly African. Plaatje's descriptions of "the tragic friendship of Moroka and the Boers" (Moroka is the Matabele chief), as he puts it, reenacts the tumultuous and complex encounter between Europeans and Africans, between the imperialist economic interests and a self-sufficient system, and between different cultures. His writings are characterized by a pervading sense of a tremendous humanity within his characters. His emphasis is on the traditional indigenous values, 41. Ibid., p.17. 42. Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (London 1975)/ p.7. 35
such as hospitality and the ancestral respect for others. These values are expressed through his extensive use of proverbs and traditional wisdom. Although often dismissed as a mission writer advocating reconciliation between the different antagonistic historical factors in South Africa, Plaatje heralds some of the major cultural and political concerns of contemporary South Africa. His veneration for the African past and his rehabilitation of the African tradition pave the way for the writings by the Black Consciousness writers and poets. The originality of his use of language, narrative techniques and of the linguistic diversity of his country points at the topicality of such issues as language, history, the past, which have until now been major concerns in the debate about culture, both in Southern Africa and in independent Africa. Mhudi also has relevance to the struggle of the South African women. It portrays a courageous and sensitive heroine leading her people through successive battles against the oppressors. Mhudi, the eponymous heroine, is not a conventional female character confined to a traditional role. Her sense of social purpose seems to have made the book popular among its female readership. For instance Bessie Head's strongly emotional response to the novel makes one think that there is more than simply a writer's admiration for another's talented piece 36
of writing. She expresses her extreme admiration in the following way: When I first read this beautiful book, I was absolutely in despair. I needed to copy the whole book out by hand so as to keep it with me. It is more than a classic; there is just no book on earth like it. All the staÿre and grandeur of the writer are in
The other major landmark in the history of South African literature is Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm.** Published in London in 1883, this original novel portrays the "exotic" life in the Karoo of a community of eccentric people, who are more of caricatures than real characters. Aunt Sannie is a powerful portrait of the Boer woman, a victim of the narrow-mindedness, ignorance and seclusion imposed by her society. Bonaparte, the English adventurer, makes his fortune by abusing the naive and simple Boers. Gregory Rose is the most caricatural figure in the novel, and his male- centred egocentric romanticism is parodied in the final part, where he is described pathetically attending to the dying Lyndall dressed in nurse's clothes. The only "genuine" character in the novel is the faithful and loyal Uncle Otto, who does not survive this harsh environment. In this complex social combination of various restrictive traditions, Lyndall grows up as a young woman rejecting marriage (by refusing to marry her lover, and by bearing an "illegitimate" child), and 43. Back cover of Solomon Platjee, Mhudi, op.cit. 44. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Harmondsworth 1939). 37
fighting for a status in society and for an education. The novel follows the typical pattern of the contemporary woman's novel where the heroine, who has transgressed the taboos of her society, faces death as the only alternative to marriage.4ÿ Olive Schreiner's concern for social-feminist issues, which she tackles through the character of Lyndall, is also expressed in her non-fictional pieces of work, notably Woman and Labour (1911), and in her active participation in the Suffragettes' campaign while in Britain.4** The Story of an African Farm remains a major landmark in South African literature. Nadine Gordimer acknowledged its impact by describing it as: A contemporary and relevant piece of writing reminding South Africans that though they may have changed and shaped themselves according to the laws and ideals within their particular situation, and though their novel does and of necessity must concern itself with making sense of what has happened to them, they have not contracted out of the wider human condition.47 Nadine Gordimer's appraisal of Olive Schreiner suggests a particular affiliation between the writers. The image of the unconventional woman in search of self-fulfillment in a society which ignores her very existence is of particular relevance to the writings by Southern African women. Lyndall, the heroine alienated from her society 45. For more details about this narrative pattern, see Rachel Du Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington 1985). 46. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (London 1979). 47. G.D. Killam, African Writers on African Writing (London 1973), p.50. 38 because of her being a woman, from European feminism which cannot provide her with a critique of that society, and finally from black women because of her privileged social status, is certainly an important theme in the fiction by white Southern African women, such as for example Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing. Lessing also expresses her special relationship to The Story of an African Farm, which she read as early as at the age of fourteen. In her afterword to the novel, she relates how she responded to Schreiner's "sense of Africa", for this novel was, for once, not about Russia, France or England but about what Lessing "knew and could see".ÿ® Her response to the book is mystical, and it reminds one of Bessie Head's comment on Mhudi: I discovered that while I held the strongest sense of the novel, I couldn't remember anything about it. Yet, I had only to hear the title, or "Olive Schreiner", and my deepest self was touched. ®
Lessing describes Schreiner as "a sister [who] could have been [her] grandmother", acknowledging the closeness of their respective experiences. The similarity of experience between the two writers suggests the existence of a tradition, in spite of the fragmented aspect of the South African society. This particular point will be examined at a later stage in this introduction, when we attempt to 48. Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice (New York 1974), pp.98-99. 49. Ibid., p.99. 50. loc.cit. 39
define the tradition of women's writing in Southern Africa. Like Olive Schreiner, many writers have attempted various interpretations of the South African world (or worlds). For example, Pauline Smith and Alan Paton have described the Boer world, the former in her stories set in the Little Karoo and the latter in his accounts of white-black relationships in South Africa. Pauline Smith's short stories collected in The Little Karoo, published in 1925, depict the desolate and simple world of the Karoo Boer peasants, whose austerity is reinforced by a strict Calvinist religion. Smith shows this world in opposition to a growing industrialized .urban landscape. The strength of the stories lies in their evocation of the landscape and of its impact on the people who live in it. The stories also deal with the ways in which people interact, how they use power to achieve control over one another, and how they are fundamentally alienated and estranged from their own selves. Alan Paton tackles the famous theme of "Jim- comes-to-Jo'burg'* in Cry the Beloved Country (1948). This novel describes the tensions and the dissolution of South African society undermined by racial conflict. Reverent Stephen Kumalo is a black parson who comes to the city in search of his son who has left his home in the country. He encounters the harsh realities of life in the township with the 51. Pauline Smith, The Little Karoo (London 1925). 40
ignorance and naivity of a country man. Reverent Kumalo's son is put in prison for having murdered a white man, who was in fact a "good" liberal fighting for the rights of blacks in South Africa. Paton's book is full of compassion and feelings of pathos (its subtitle is: "A Story Of Comfort In Desolation"). It reflects its author's belief in redemption through suffering and his optimism as far as black-white relationships are concerned. It has often been criticized for its sentimentality and its missionary spirit, and for its underlying assumption that the freedom of the spirit is more difficult to attain than political freedom. Paton's novel reflects his time and the post-war optimism which preceded the violence that intensified at the beginning of the sixties with the banning of the black opposition movements, ANC and PAC. Peter Abrahams' Mine Boy (1946) brought a novelty in the South African literary scene, announcing the emergence of black writers writing about black experience. Set in the "coloured" location of Vrededorp, it tells the story of Xuma, a survivor of the traditional epic-hero type, who is confronted with the shadowy and corrupt world of the township. Like Paton's novel, Mine Boy contains undertones of the optimism and of the triumphant humanism characteristic of this period. These have often been wrongly interpreted as naive sentimentality from the author. Abrahams I autobiography, Tell 52. Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy (London 1954). 41
Freedom: Memories Of Africa (1954) relates the writer's own experience of growing up as a township boy.5ÿ It also announces the new literary genre of autobiographical writings by black South African, which deals with similar experiences as Abrahams, such as Es'Kia Mphalele's Down Second Avenue (1959),54 Mphalele's Down Second Avenue (1959) brought a note of despair and of helplessness in the writing by black South Africans. The purpose of the book is to convey the harsh reality of life in the township, with a determinate will not to allow for any "nice" feelings, such as the hope and optimism of the previous generation of writers. Mphalele describes his book as an "ironic meeting between protest and acceptance in their widest terms". Down Second Avenue has an overwhelming atmosphere of danger and of uncertainty. Tradition is no longer a source of comfort, but the expression of a world inimical to human existence. Along with other artists, Mphalele belongs to the "Drum generation", i.e. the writers of the 1950s who celebrated township life and culture, especially through the image of the "shebeen" (illegal bar) and through the rhythm of jazz music. Drum magazine provided a forum for this
53. Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (London 1954). 54. Es'kia (formerly Ezekiel) Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London 1959). 55. D. Adey, R. Beeton, M. Chapman & E. Pereira (eds.), Companion to South African English Literature (Craighall 1986), p.70. 42 new "literary renaissance", which was to be soon destroyed by a massive repression of the 1960s. The events of Sharpeville and Langa in 1960 brought about a massive repression from the state and had dramatic effects on the South African people and on their literature. The draconian measures taken by the government resulted in the departure of many writers who left the country on a one-way exit permit, such as La Guma or Bessie Head. La Guma's first novel, A Walk in the Night (1962) describes the violence and the inhuman conditions in District Six, Cape Town "coloured" urban slum.ÿ The book came out at the time La Guma was a banned writer in South Africa, and was published in Nigeria. Despite his gloomy realist descriptions of squalor, the book retains, however, an overwhelming sense of a faith in humanity and in the people's struggle to keep their dignity. La Guma described himself as a "romantic", refusing strongly to be cynical about humanity. The evocation of District Six is to be placed in the line of the tradition of township writing and township artistic expression, which can take many forms, from novels to poetry and music. This tradition is represented, for instance, in the New Black poetry, in the fiction by Richard Rive and Jack Cope, in the music of Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand) and of many other township jazz musicians. 56. Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night (Ibadan 1962). 57. Information collected from the late Mr Arthur Ravenscroft. 43
Poetry has also been a popular genre and a means of resistance against white oppression. Dennis Brutus, for instance, sees himself as a "troubadour", a public voice: delighting in the test of will when doomed by saracened arrest choosi like unarmed thumb, simply to stand.Si' Reviving the traditional Zulu figure of the imbongi, and also borrowing from the English tradition of poetry (mainly from Keats, Donne and from the Romantics), Brutus's poems achieve an original syncretism. Their tremendous sense of peace, quietness, tenderness and of fragility hide a more tumultuous reality, which is constantly suppressed. Brutus's most powerful and most successful pieces are his early poems from prison, his later poetry written in exile tending too often to indulge in feelings of self-pity. Dennis Brutus is not only known as a poet, but also as a strong opponent of apartheid. His virulent attacks against it lead him to prison, and later to exile. In the 1970s, South African literature experienced a new birth with the emergence of a wave of young poets, following the long silence of the 1960s. Robert Royston, in his introduction to his book, Black Poets in South Africa, explains why poetry was the chosen medium of expression in this literary revival by stressing the fact the New Black poets (as they are usually referred as) had little
58. Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust (London 1973), p.2. 44
access to the literature of the previous generation of essayists, fiction writers and autobiographers, most of whom having had their writings banned and having had to go into exile. Royston's prediction is that these poets will later produce other forms of literature, such as stories and novels. The New Classic and its predecessor, The Classic, published most of this poetry. Oswald Mtshali's Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971) sold a record number of copies for a book of poems in South Africa.®ÿ It was particularly popular amongst white liberals. Mtshali's collection announced the rise of black poetry, and heralded some of the themes of the later black consciousness poets. His poems, and most of the poems of the New Black poetry, describe township life in a bitter but compassionate tone. However, Mtshali's poetry has often been labelled as sentimental, compared to the more vigorous and uncompromising tone of the later poets of the movement, notably those of the post- Soweto poetry. The New Black Poetry puts a major emphasis on performance and on the notion of poetry as a communal, rather than individual, act. James Matthews, Mongane Wally Serote, Sipho Sepamla and 59. Robert Royston (ed.), Black Poets in South Africa (London 1974). 60. Most of South African literary journals were short-lived and irregular, mainly because of censorship. 61. Oswald Mtshali, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (London 1972). 62. In this respect, it is also a revival of the traditional imbongi figure. 45
Mafika Gwala (and many more) stress the community- shared sense of rhythm in their poetry, and attach particular importance on the oral performance. For example, Wally Serote usually recites and performs
his poetry in public, although he also has it published.
The New Black poetry communicates to its audience the inarticulateness of anger and the chaotic reality of South Africa by privileging rhythm (mainly jazz rhythms) and sound over lyrical language. The following extract from Mafika Gwala's "An Attempt At Communication" conveys the general mood and tone of the New Black poets: Hot it cool, right we have the music blues to bury the dead blue in us. Give yourself a forwardpush Africa rhythm - start off and go. Then you're jazzhappy63 Two main events triggered off the growth of the New Black poetry and its radicalization: the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the principles of which were expressed by SASO (South African Students Organization) and in particular by its leader, Steve Biko; the second factor is the Soweto uprisings of 16 June 1976. SASO was founded in 1968 and was a strong reaction against white power, in particular against the half-committed white liberals, who were not completely willing to lose their privileges.
63. Robert Royston (ed.), op.cit., p.62.
à 46
Largely influenced by the American Black Power movement, Black Consciousness promoted black culture in all its aspects and advocated a return to the roots of African tradition, history, language and cultural values. Its motto was: "Blackman you are on your own". But, above all, Black Consciousness was a political movement which articulated itself around the idea of black independence. Steve Biko, its leader who died under torture while in detention in 1976, criticized the whites' liberal conscience which he described as "deriving pleasure and security in entrenching white racism and further exploiting the minds and bodies of the unsuspecting black masses". Black Consciousness is a total refusal by blacks to see themselves as "appendages to white society".ÿ Culture plays a major part in this process; it is "a culture of defiance, self- assertion and group pride and solidarity ... a culture that emanates from a situation of common experience of oppression". Biko also advocates a special emphasis on Black Art. As he writes: The adoption of black theatre and drama is one such important innovation which we need to encourage and to develop. We know that our love of music and rhythm has relevance even in this day. 7 The second event, the Soweto uprisings of 1976, occurred as a result of the attempts by the white regime to make the Afrikaans language compulsory as 64. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (London 1978), p.50. 65. Ibid., p.51. 66. Ibid., p.46. 67. Ibid., p.96. 47 a medium of educational instruction in schools. This decision provoked the revolt of the students, which was not directed against the Afrikaans language as such but at what it symbolized; an increasingly ruthless white power trying to gain more and more control over the black masses. The students' revolt intensified the tendency towards a radicalization of the New Black poetry. As a consequence of the uprisings, there has been a tradition of writings about Soweto and 1976, which celebrates the youth who fought unarmed against the brutality of the South African regime. Wally Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Sipho Sepamla's A Ride in the Whirlwind, and Miriam Tlali's Amandla, all published around 1981,are novels which celebrate the resistance of the Soweto youth.68 The language usqd by these novels is one of action, which often mixes township patois and vernacular expressions with English.®ÿ Drama has also been a popular form of protest, and one which has suffered most from censorship and from various restrictions. It was only in the mid¬ sixties that the South African theatre acquired a national and international reputation. Before then, it was provincial or often restricted to performances of foreign plays by foreign theatre companies. The theatre in South Africa has had to fight against a series of impediments, such as the 68. Wally Mongane Serote, To Every birth Its Blood (Johannesburg 1981), Sipho Sepamla, A Ride in the Wirlwind (London 1981) and Miriam Tlali, Amandla (Johannesburg 1980). 69. See, for example, Sipho Sepamla's writings. 48 absence of venues, the lack of funds, and the racial segregation both in cast and audiences. The emergence of new theatres in the 1970s, such as The Market Theatre or The Space Theatre (later known as The People's Space Theatre), combined with the work of theatre groups, notably Fugard Theatre Group, contributed largely to the rapid development of drama during that period. Also, the movement of Black Consciousness sped this growth and channelled it towards what is known as Black Theatre. Theatre became, thus, a medium of consciousness-raising among black audiences as well as a way of representing and exploring the reality and the daily problems facing blacks in contemporary South Africa. The plays of Rente Gibson, Zakes Mda, Maishe Maponya and Athol Fugard, to cite only a few, explore the theme of "oppression-and-liberation" in its various forms by tackling the diverse socio-political issues at stake in the country.”*® The idea of a Black Theatre for black people is linked also to the Brechtian notion of a people's theatre which closes the gap between what is commonly labelled as "art" and "life". Athol Fugard's drama, for instance, is a collaborative work involving the co-operation between actors, director and audience in the traditional African dramatic tradition. This theatre
70. See, for example, Rente Gibson's How Long? (1973), Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot (1961), Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), Maishe Maponya's The Hungry Earth (1983) and Zakes Mda's We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1979). 49
rejects the western notion of authorship and of completeness of the dramatic text in its emphasis on the shared creative process in theatre. The most prominent figure of South African theatre is undoubtedly Athol Fugard, who wrote a great numbers of plays, acted in some of them and set up the Circle Players theatre group in Cape Town. Fugard's achievement is described as one that "has been to play a key role in rescuing SA (sic) theatre from its dependence on the trivial entertainments of the West End stage, and to lead the way towards a theatrical experience, which may be thought of as meaningfully South African I »1 71 Fugard tackles the themes of power and identity, and of personal freedom under a highly restrictive and destructive network of personal relationships. For instance, Boesman And Lena portrays two characters, a man and a woman, who taunt and try to abuse each other in order to acquire recognition in a society where one's sense of existence has become associated with one's domination over others. However, although Fugard's characters are dispossessed, helpless and powerless, they are still full of spiritual force. Their strength lies in their sense of irony, in their ability to look at themselves and laugh. The liberating force within human nature is emphasized, as well as the idea of the indomitable spirit of the people.
71. D. Adey, R. Beeton, M. Chapman & E. Pereira (eds.), op.cit., pp.87-88. 50
Political unrest triggered off a new dimension in South African fiction, and in particular in the South African novel. Fictionalized testimonies of life in the township appeared (see our previous discussion) in the late fifties and early sixties. Women novelists, such as Gordimer and Lessing, started writing accounts of growing up as a white adolescent girl in colonial Southern Africa. All in all, the late 1950s and the 1960s are dominated by the realist mode of fiction, with novels such as La Guma's A Walk in the Wight or with the early novels of Gordimer and Lessing, which follow the European tradition of the bildungsroman. Also, the 1960s are characterized by the renewal of the Afrikaans novel and short story, and by their promulgation to wider audiences through translation. The "sestigers" (writers of the 60s) rebelled against what they saw as a restrictive white South African society dominated by sexual and racial taboos. Breyten Breytenbach and Andre Brink are two example of novelists of the 1960s, who followed the tradition of rebellious writing against white society first set up by people like Plomer and Campbell. Since the 1970s, the South African novel has experienced major changes, notably a move away from conventional forms of narrative and a tendency towards modernist questioning of forms of representation. Novelists like Coetzee, Gordimer and Head have experimented with narrative techniques to convey the idea of a world undermined with 51
uncertainties. Many of their works are turned towards a future South Africa where questions of culture and power sharing have to be sorted out. This thesis, which concentrates on the writings by women from the 1950s onwards, will have a special emphasis on this period which seems of particular relevance to our concerns. Lastly, a very popular genre in South Africa,
which remains to be acknowledged, is the short story. Dating as far back as the traditional folktale, it has, however had more recent modern developments. It flourished with the proliferation of literary and cultural journals, periodicals and magazines, which have provided a perfect format for stories. Many novelists are also short story writers, such as Lessing, Gordimer, Head, Mphahlele, Paton, Rive and more. Some of them have made their reputation solely on their stories, like Dan Jacobson and Stuart Cloete.
IV. THE LITERATURE WRITTEN BY WOMEN
It is difficult to separate "male" and "female" writing according to thematic, stylistic or other criteria. However, some female writers from South Africa have shown some distinct feminist concerns, notably by exploring the interactions between their oppression as women and the political set up of apartheid. 52
The South African literary scene before the turn of the century was on the whole male and white dominated. With the exception of Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith and Sarah Millin, writings by women have been very scarce. From the 1960s onwards, there has been a proliferation of writings by white women and black women, although the latter have had a more recent development. Literature by white women ranges from the popular detective story and children books to poetry and to the feminist and political novel. Among this variety of writers, only a few have dealt with the issues of South African society in a way which engages with the political issues. Following the tradition set out by Olive Schreiner, many novelists have described the stifling and restricted life of the young white woman growing up in a fear- ridden community. Novels like Jillian Becker's The Virgins or Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days explore this theme as an insight into their society.'72* The woman's novel describing the decline of white middle-class values has a more recent development. Novelists like Nadine Gordimer and Sheila Roberts have depicted with emotional intensity the dead end of the white ethos in South Africa.7ÿ It is also interesting that these two novelists also use the theme of a sexual crisis to tackle indirectly political and moral issues. Women's novels have also 72. Jillian Becker, The Virgins (Claremont 1986), Nadine Gordimer, The Lying Days (London 1983). 73. See, for example, Nadine Gordimer's The Last Bourgeois World (Harmondsworth 1982) and Sheila Robert's Jack in Corners (Craighall 1987). 53
explored the possibilities of transformation through mysticism, such as Sheila Fugard's novels, stories and poems, which use Eastern philosophy as a way of transcending the conflicts of present day South Africa.ÿ4 Similarly, Doris Lessing's late interest in Sufism and Bessie Head's mysticism show similar directions. Finally, there is also a tradition of poetry by white women, mainly in Afrikaans. Some of them, notably Ingrid Jonker, have tackled political issues and expressed their anger at the injustice perpetuated by their people. Beside writing about their condition as colonial women trapped in the contradictions of being white and female, white South African women have also lent their pen to describe the oppression of black women. Biographies of black women by white women abound and have become a common literary phenomenon. From Elsa Joubert's Poppie to Part Of My Soul, a biography of Winnie Mandela by Anne Benjamin, the voices of black South African women have been mediated through the writings of white women who, in the liberal tradition, have put their literary skills to the service of recording black women's history. Although undoubtedly permeated by a sense of liberal 74. See, for example, Sheila Fugard's The Castaways (London 1972). 75. See Ingrid Jonker, Selected Poems (Cape Town 1988). 76. Elsa Joubert, Popple (London 1981) and Winnie Mandela's Part of My Soul (London 1985). Among many other examples are Carol Hermer (ed.), The Diary of Marla Tholo (Johannesburg 1980), and Shula Mark's edition of Lily Moya's and Mabel Palmer's letters, Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate World of Three South African Women (Bloomington 1987). 54
"good conscience", these writings have permitted black female voices to be heard internationally. They also reveal the attempt by white women to form a different notion of womanhood. Political non-fiction by white women has a tradition, with works such as Helen Joseph's Side by Side and Mary Benson's biographies of prominent African political figures.77 Even though white women's actual involvement in the South African struggle remains minimal, the political writings of the few white women who have identified with the black masses is not without importance. Above all, these writings could be read in relation to the attempt to create a new definition of woman, one which is political and which transcends the barriers of race, gender and class imposed by South African society. Novelists such as Nadine Gordimer have attempted an articulation of the female self along these lines; through a self-conscious political self-definition. Whether it is by means of a male protagonist, as in Rose Moss's The Schoolmaster or a female character, as in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter and A Sport of Nature, the desire to transcend one's predetermined self is the same.7® Black women's writing in South Africa has a fairly recent development. It follows the emergence of black writing in the 1960s and 1970s (mainly 77. Helen Joseph, Side by Side (London 1986) and Mary Benson, Nelson Mandela (Harmondsworth 1986). 78. Rose Moss, The Schoolmaster (Johannesburg 1981), Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter (London 1979) and A Sport of Nature (London 1987). 55
poetry). Dorothy Driver argues that it is the Black Consciousness movement which has given it the impetuous. She writes: "whatever the masculine bias of Black Consciousness, its very assertion of communality alongside, of course, increasing publishing opportunities seem to have offered women writers a possibility for literary engagement that does not threaten the construction of women in terms of the 'feminine I fl Autobiographical writing is the dominant genre among the emerging black women writer. As Dorothy Driver points out, autobiographical writing by black women is undoubtedly a distinct genre, for it poses specific problems of identity, self-representation and voice, rather than simply providing information about "life as a black woman under apartheid".®® As it will be discussed in the present study, the autobiographical "I" is a site of identity, power and struggle for the black writer, and even more so for the black woman writer. Writing in the 1960s, Noni Jabavu commented on the cultural multiplicities and specificities of her country, and on the process of modernity as it relates to African tradition.®1 Her observations constitute an early example of a cultural analysis of South Africa based on a feminine perspective.
79. Dorothy Driver, "Women and Voice in Colonial Discourse: Self-Representation in Writing by South African Women", p.4. 80. loc.cit. 81. Noni Jabavu, Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts (London 1960). 56
Noni Jabavu's special status as the daughter of Dr. Jabavu and her Western-orientated education in Britain makes her a rather a-typical and early example of an observer and analyzer of cultural difference. Dorothy Driver notices a doubling of self in Jabavu's writings, as she alternates between an individualistic "western" construction of identity and a more communal "indigenous" conception of self.®2 The 1970s marked a major development in black women's writings, since, for the first time, these showed a departure from the direct recording of their experience and a movement towards fictionalized versions of reality. This new trend took different aspects, from Miriam Tlali's realistic narratives to Bessie Head's use of the fantastic mode. This phenomenon continued in the 1980s with the publication of a fair number of novels about the daily experience of living in South Africa. Lauretta Ngcobo's Cross of Gold (1981) uses the figure of the revolutionary hero fighting against the odds of his country to portray the inhuman system of apartheid. Other novelists such as Zoe Wicomb, Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam depict the
82. The terms "western" an "indigenous" have been placed between inverted commas, since it seems to us that such a neat opposition of views could itself be in the danger of perpetuating what the critic herself calls "the system of binary thinking about gender and race", Ibid., p.2. 57
daily life of the South African both at home and in exile. 88 Writings by black women touch on issues of prime importance, notably on the difficult position of the black woman trapped in an oppressive interaction of race and gender power relations. For instance, they address the question of the western heritage of mission education and the relative freedom it offers black women and, on the other hand, the traditional way of life, which in some respects is also oppressive, but could provide women with a status which they are denied under apartheid. Maud Motanyane's story, "Two Minutes", tackles the question of sexuality as a site of oppression for black women. As a school girl in a catholic mission school, the narrator is exposed to the puritan education of Sister Marietta, "armed with a bible and a strict catholic upbringing ... determined to save the whole African continent from death and destruction".84 Later, after leaving the school, the narrator's sexual encounters do not liberate her from the stigma of her upbringing, but, on the contrary, confirm the severe warnings of Sister Marrietta. They leave her "discarded like an empty shell and the whole world spitting at [her]",85
83. See, for example, Lauretta Ngcobo, Cross of Gold (London 1981), Zoe Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (London 1987) and Farida Karodia, Coming Home and Other Stories (London 1988). 84. Ann Oosthuizen (ed.), Sometimes When It Rains: Writings by South African Women (London & New York 1987) p.ll. 85. Ibid., p.17. 58
Whether she cannot liberate herself from her restrictive upbringing because of her strong feelings of guilt, or because of the gender inequality which she resents too much, or because of the country's dehumanizing effect on the people, what remains at stake is the moral suffering of the narrator unable to "untangle the knot in [her] heart and mind”.®® Adopting an almost "separatist" line of feminism, as Dorothy Driver argues, Kuzwayo, in her autobiography Call Me Woman, prefers to explore the relationship between women and to analyze the notion of sisterhood.®7 Other black women writers have described feelings of solidarity and love between women. For example, Tlali's novel, Amandla, is a celebration of this feeling of communality and sisterhood. On the other hand, Bernadette Mosala in her story, "A Notion of Sisterhood", relates how the friendship between a black woman and a white woman is betrayed by the latter's ambition. Jean uses her best friend to get a job as a social worker, which requires of applicants a knowledge of the black community. Tizzy and Jean, who have fought together at university the racism of white women (notably during a national women's conference when Jean got beaten up in her bed trying to cover up for Tizzy, the intended target of the attack) eventually fall 86. Ibid., p.18. 87. Ellen Kuzwayo, op.cit.. Dorothy Driver argues that Kuzwayo adopts the separatism of Black Consciousness to formulate her position as a black woman. Dorothy Driver, op.cit., pp.16-17. 59
into the roles prescribed by apartheid. The story closes on Tizzy's realism: "You are white and I am black. That's what matters in this country and it looks like life can never be lived on a human level in this land".88 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, fiction by South African women have questioned the act of writing itself. For example, Mhlope's story, "The Toilet", is told from the perspective of a black female narrator who, before starting work in a Johannesburg clothing factory, spends a few hours in a public toilet where she finds peace of mind for daydreaming, reading and for writing poetry. The
story touches on crucial themes despite its matter- of-fact style. Having found, as it were, "a room of her own", the narrator has also found (in telling
the story) "a position from which to write", as Dorothy Driver puts it, that is, a narrative perspective, a voice and a place where to construct her identity. Yet, the story does not end on the victory of writing against apartheid. Instead, at the end of the story, the narrator finds that "her" toilet has been locked up, and she is forced to look for another shelter. Women's writing in South Africa covers a wide range of perspectives, genres, styles and themes. Recent developments have shown a tendency towards a self-questioning prose and an experimenting with
88. Ann Oosthuizen, op.cit., p.85. 89. Dorothy Driver, op.cit., p.20. 60 form as it relates to ideological content. Also, women's writing addresses the theme of tradition versus modernity and approaches the issue of a cultural transformation in South Africa. It also questions the traditional genre division of literature by challenging categories, such as autobiography versus fiction. Their feminist message is not always direct and obvious, but it is there for most women writers. Our next chapter attempts to link history with theory by investigating the theoretical underpinning of post-colonial women's writing. 61
CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
I. CRITICAL APPROACH TO POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE:
The historical survey has highlighted the relations between literature and context as well as extracted a number of trends in the development of South African literature. Before proceeding to the actual analysis of literary texts, it is important to develop a specific theoretical approach. The aim of the present chapter is to throw some light on the similarities between the post-structuralist and the feminist concepts of otherness and to use this theoretical basis as a reference point for the study of particular writers. Theoretical critical analysis of colonial ideology as it appears in literature and other forms of cultural expression has recently been developed in the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, sociology and linguistics. Many theories have been established with variations and differences, especially as far as the identification of the colonized subject as the "other" and his/her representation are concerned. The object of the present chapter is to show how these theoretical views could be applied to the study of the writers l which are to be discussed. The question of 62
representing the "other" (colonized and female) and its corollaries, such as the notions of marginality, centrality, subversion and difference will be examined in the light of the theories presented in this chapter. By looking at the politics of race and gender in literature as textual and ideological representations, one can then analyze the form and content of a text as one single process. Frederic Jameson develops the idea of the narrative form as "an ideological act in its own right" and coins the word "ideologeme" to designate "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes".* Therefore,the post-colonial creative writer provides symbolic and narrative "solutions" to the contradictions generated by the mechanism of the dominant discourse. For instance, he/she would rewrite the old colonial ideologemes, subverting the distorted and exotic image they convey in such a way as to expose their relation to economic and political power. Jameson's theory opens the way to various interpretative applications of the concept of ideology. Jan Mohammed, for example, studies the ways in which colonial and post-colonial novelists attempt to bridge the gaps created by the manichean structure of their society. In Manichean Aesthetics he looks at how various novelists create forms 1. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London 1981), p.76. 63
adapted to the world view they want to put forward.ÿ For example, Nadine Gordimer represents the crisis of white liberalism by questioning its modes of representation. Martin Green, in his Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, also adopts Jameson's theories in examining the ways in which the myth of the white man's colonial mission, first expressed in literary forms in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, was then altered and subverted by post-colonial novelists. Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor, for instance, reads as a series of reversals of the Robinson crusoe tale.* The survivor replaces the entrepreneur, the woman the man; the sense of a beginning gives place to a sense of an ending; and finally, instead of going abroad, the narrator never leaves home. Green describes Doris Lessing as an "empire-originating novelist" as opposed to Defoe, the "empire-oriented novelist" par excellence, since she so meticulously undoes the work of the empire ideologists. It seems that, more than being a homogeneous and coherent reunification of manichean contradictions, the ideological function of the literary text resides in the ways in which these conflicts are revealed to the reader. In that respect, writers do
2. Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst 1983). 3. Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London 1979). 4. Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (London 1974). Another example is J.M. Coetzee's Foe (London 1986). 64
not provide "solutions" but only ask questions and highlight particular problems. The idea of a "counter-text" running against a main narrative is useful but could easily lead the critic into a mechanistic and equally manichean view of opposition. Therefore, keeping in mind the ideological "sub-text" as a plural text which, instead of being transfixed into one single meaning, is in its turn translated into many levels of interpretation, it is possible to avoid simplistic oppositions. One could try to apply Derrida's notion of language as a limitless web of circulating meanings to the ideological sub-text. Ideology is a transcendental meaning; or, as Terry Eagleton writes, "it is just that out of this play of signifiers, certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position, or made the centres around which other meanings are forced to turn".5 Thus, the ideological function of post¬ colonial or feminist writing seems a contradiction in terms, for their very task is to undermine paramount concepts of authority. The question which remains is therefore the following: Is it possible for a de-centered approach to take any ideological stand? Terry Egleton argues that this is the main limitation of post-structuralism : If meaning, the signified, was a passing product of words and signifiers, always 5. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford 1983), p.131. 65
shifting and unstable, part-present and part-absent, how could there be any determinate truth or meaning at all? If reality was constructed by our discourse rather than reflected by it, how could we ever know reality itself, rather than merely knowing our own discourse? Was all talk just talk about our talk?6 A pluralistic approach to meaning as fragmented and scattered in the text is undoubtedly relevant to post-colonial literature. Writing against the colonial ideology entails disrupting an idea of meaning as unified and impenetrable. However, as Terry Egleton points out, this attitude has its limitations and dangers. As it appears, ideology seems to be centred on the dichotomy between a totalizing versus a plural view. Edward Said's Orientalism seems to fall into the same dilemma between plurality and totality.”ÿ In looking at reality in terms of a conflict between consistent ideologies more than in terms of plurality inherent in them, Said runs the risk of reinforcing the very object of his critique. He describes the great divide between East and West as part of the ideological set up legitimizing economic and political domination. He calls this system "orientalism " and , through a detailed study of its consecutive phases, establishes a theory around it. Said's purpose is to point to the biased and ill- founded premises of such an ideology which holds a self-centered position of power vis-a-vis the reality it describes. Yet, by doing so, Said
6. Ibid., pp.143-44. 7. Edward Said, Orientalism (London 1978). 66
contributes to strengthen the edifice it aims to destroy. By describing orientalism as a "self- contained" and "self-reinforcing" system, Said does not leave much space for what could emerge as a disruptive force undermining the colonial edifice.8 In that particular respect, the theory one adopts also determines the strategy of the text itself. Without putting too much emphasis on the reader, one could that his/her position has consequences for the ideological sub-text. Thus, one has to consider carefully one's own critical approach, for it is part of the factors that shape the ideological substance of a work. This point will be developed at a later stage in this chapter when dealing with post-colonial literary criticism. Said's Orientalism and the many writings describing the process of "othering" in literature have sprung mainly from the works of Frantz Fanon. Written in the 1950s and central to Fanon's thinking, Black Skin, White Masks anticipates the major debates of the post-colonial era. It is important to stress that what characterizes Fanon's writing is its "non-alignment" to the traditionally accepted notions of history and culture and the refusal of canonisation and categorization. Towards the end of Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes:
8. Ibid., p.70. 9. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London 1986). 67
Man's behaviour is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a reaction ... To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.10 Fanon sees the black man as a fundamental negation, as he is defined in relation to white values posited as the norm. At the same time, he is an affirmation of life and of his inalienable freedom in that his consciousness constitutes an absolute. Therefore, he is, as Fanon puts it, a "yes" and a "no". Man is capable of transcending his being, of moving beyond the inarticulate scream. Fanon writes: "My Negro consciousness does not hold itself as a lack. It is. It is its own follower".11 All Fanon's concepts will be shaped around this basic principle. For instance, his idea of a national culture is one that is perpetually moving forward, always stretching beyond itself. Hence, the crucial role played by the struggle as a never ending movement into the future. For Fanon, meaning is never fixed. On the contrary, it is created in the spur of the moment. This idea and its consequences for the definition of such concepts as nation and culture are amply elaborated in The wretched of the Earth and in A Dying Colonialism. * As it has been suggested, the colonized is divided between his/her immediate present condition
10. Ibid., p.222. 11. Ibid., p.135. 12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth 1973) & A Dying Colonialism (Harmondsworth 1970). 68
as an oppressed (ie. as a negation) and his existential desire to transcend it (ie. a "yes"). Fanon describes this split as the existential and pathological crisis of the colonial subject. Colonizer and colonized are caught up in a narcissistic drama. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes at length the black man's "situational neurosis" and his attempt to escape that condition. Searching for a recognition from the "white world ", the colonized soon realizes that s/he could never enter that world, for its very existence was based on his/her exclusion. When s/he falls back on the other side of the manichean divide, the "black world", s/he finds that it has "gone" : "I wanted to be typically negro - it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white that was a joke..,14 Blackness has become a meaning the white man has imposed on the blacks. Therefore, it is no longer possible to be genuinely "black". Fanon writes again: And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself , but it is the meaning that was already there pre-existing , waiting for me. This is precisely, according to Fanon, why Négritude was not only a relative and ephemerial phenomenon as Sartre tried to demonstrate. For Fanon, consciousness "has to lose itself in the
13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, op.cit., p.60. 14. Ibid., p.132. 15. Ibid., p.134. 16. See J.P. Sartre, Black Orpheus (Paris 1964). 69
night of the absolute, the only condition to attain
1 "7 to consciousness of self". ' This is what Négritude does and, in that sense, it is capable to transcend the meaning imposed on the black man. However, Fanon does not see the colonial crisis as a dead end. Instead of facing his/her condition as a dilemma ("turn white or disappear..18) the colonized realizes a third alternative: to exist through the struggle, through transcending one's existence. At a political level, it is through changing the oppressing local factors that one can find a solution: In no way should my color be regarded as a flaw. From the moment the Negro accepts the separation imposed by the European he has no further respite, and 'is it not understandable that thenceforward he will try to elevate himself to the white man's level? To elevate himself in the range of colors to which he attributes a kind of hierarchy?' We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies a restructuring of the world. ® The questions one then inclined to ask are: how does one transcend one's immediate condition? What are the modes which direct the colonized's protest towards an affirmation of the self? An important point in Fanon is the idea of an infiltration. The colonized infiltrates colonial discourse by attacking its breaches from different angles. The Fanonian text exemplifies this notion in its use of a multiple set of perspectives (psychological, 17. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, op.cit., pp.133-34. 18. Ibid., p.100. 19. Ibid., pp.81-82. 70
sociological, cultural, philosophical) undercutting the dominant discourse of colonialism. Also, Fanon's concept of culture overflows its usual boundaries to include various areas of human action ranging from psychiatry to political resistance. Fanonian discourse breaks the barriers erected by western ideology through corroding its discourse and laying it bare. In that respect, one could describe Fanon as a deconstructivist avant la lettre. In Black Skin, White Masks, he presents his goal as being the destruction of the colonial system by means of analysis and deconstruction . In the introduction to the book, he writes : I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistensial complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it. ® Fanon blurs the boundary between theory and practice (praxis) by looking for an anticipation of what he sees as a theory of decolonization in the continuous flow of action. His mixing of different genres (essay, poetic prose, scientific report, political pamphlet) and styles illustrates also the subversive aspect of Fanon's writings in that they question the categories of our modes of thinking. His style is also disturbing and thought provoking. Images of wounded flesh and blood - surely informed by the surrounding violence at the time he was writing his books stand as metaphors for a more profound psychological violence. His prose abounds
20. Ibid., p.14. 71
with images of signs "cutting into" the black man's skin and flesh. To use his terminology, the "epidermalization" of meaning, the emphasis on the visible are expressed through the representation of the human body as a carrier of signs and values. In a perspective close to feminist theory, Fanon sees his task as being the "un-masking" of the meaning which has been imposed on the black man. Fanon's works are very condensed, written on the spur of the revolutionary movement, they are totally directed towards action. Many ideas have been left undeveloped, probably because Fanon did not see the need to develop them at that stage. The second reason might be that he was writing under great pressure and died soon after having completed The wretched of the Earth. Therefore, he left behind him a rich, complex but brief and diverse account of the colonial condition which, without making a prophet out of Fanon, is today of extreme relevance to the analysis of post-colonial cultural politics. In this particular context, a few aspects in Fanon's works need further elaboration and perhaps re-evaluation so that one could envisage their applicability to the study of literature. The first idea I wish to examine is Fanon's notion of a split at the centre of colonialism which places the colonial subject within a major contradiction. Black skin, White Masks describes the colonized subject as the product of tensions between 21. Ibid., p.13. 72
" masks" and "identities ", "identities" as "masks" and vice-versa. It reveals how colonialism works to 7 improve and also disavow identities. For example, having imposed the Afrikaans language on the
totality of black students in an attempt to mould
them according to the Afrikaner idea of national
identity, the South African regime promotes, at the same time, an idea of ethnicity legitimizing apartheid and based on so called "tribal specificities". Homi Bhabha elaborates the idea of the divided colonial subject which was left undeveloped in Fanon. While Said, for example, looks at the orientalist as a producer of discourse about a passive Orient, Bhabha brings both colonizers and colonized at the centre of discourse. Colonialism also affects the colonizer, according to Bhabha, in that it also divides him/her and modifies his/her sense of identity. Drawing on Fanon, Bhabha defines human being as his/her alienated image, and destroys the myth of the autonomous individual by revealing
his/her reliance on an "otherness" relegated beyond the boundaries of the colonial world. He sees in the image of post-enlightenment man the symbol of the perverted and distorted colonial dynamics of representation. The colonized is the white man's reflection "that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of 73
his being". The self/other dichotomy gives place to "the 'Otherness' of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpset of colonial identity".23 Similarly, the relations between self and society, self and history, self and culture are no longer seen as forming unitary concepts, but are undercut by the split in the colonial subject. Bhabha explores the site of ambivalence created by the manicheism of colonial societies in order to disclose the space of political subversion. As he writes: The disavowal of the other always exacerbates the 'edge' of identification, reveals that dangerous place where identity and aggressivity are twinned. For denial is always a retro-active process; a half acknowledgement of that otherness which has left its traumatic mask. 4 The colonial subject exploring the "dangerous place" of difference created by the manicheism of his/her society and its "non-dialectical movement" transgresses the boundaries within which s/he had been confined. Using Fanon's title, Bhabha describes this ambivalent space as the moment of uncertainty between difference and identity, when the mask slips. This idea will be central in the present study, for it is this space that writers dealing with the issue of race and gender explore, inhabit and repossess in their fiction. As women living in a highly manichean society, they explore their
22. Homi Bhabha, "What Does the Black Man Want?", New Formations, no.l (Spring 1987), p.119. 23. Ibid., p.119. 24. Ibid., p.122. 74
marginal place both inside and outside the system they are fighting against. Bhabha's vision of a
"dangerous place" will prove useful, for example, to deal with the idea of different worlds which the writer inhabits, explodes or escapes. Gordimer's interregnum, Head's inner worlds, Tlali's community and Lessing's multiple worlds could read as alternative spaces where the artist confronts identity and difference in the face of an
overwhelming hegemonic system.
This aspect takes us to the second point in Fanon's theory which I think is relevant to literary analysis: the notion of a corroding anti-colonial discourse infiltrating the structures of language and ideology. The anti-colonial writer has to create a space where s/he can think her/himself out of an overwhelming hegemonic and manichean ideology. S/He
has to oppose a system of thought which legitimizes an economic and political domination. Given this important if not basic aspect of post-colonial writing, one should also attempt to model a framework of analysis to match up to the kind of literature it is discussing. One should try to define the terms of a post-colonial cultural practice and literary criticism taking into consideration the notions of cultural resistance, historical context and positionality . In order to define post-colonial discourse, it is important to examine a number of points. Helen Tiffin describes post-colonial texts as "meta- 75
counter-discursive", ie. subversive of the colonial master narrative and engaging with their own textuality and speaking position as texts. One should first specify the relation between history and narrative in colonial and post-colonial ideologies. As many critics and theorists have pointed out, the colonial subject is "written off" the colonial system of representation as lack. Colonized people are displaced outside historical representation. As Said describes it, the process of "othering "involves the transformation of the colonial subject into containable and identifiable "units of knowledge".ÿ® Using Foucault's notion of knowledge as power and discourse as a set of practices regulating social groups, it is then possible to situate colonial and counter-colonial discourses in opposition. The main problem remains the transposition of history into narratives for the post-colonial writer inscribing him/herself back into historicity. Reclaiming texts and, therefore, his/her place in history, s/he subverts the master narrative by fissuring and undercutting it. As many post-colonial texts, such as J.M.Coetzee's Foe, have demonstrated, counter-discourse consists mainly in an intertextual dialogue through writing back against a dominant literary tradition. Ali Mazrui describes at length the political dimension of
25. Helen Tiffin, "Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse", Kunapipi, vol.9, no.3 (1987), p.23. 26. Edward Said, Orientalism, op.cit., p.67. 76
literary texts in post-independence Africa, and were particularly the repossession of literary discourse as part of the overall ideological framework. He shows how Nyerere's translation of Julius Caesar into Swahili has contributed to produce a language of socialism for East Africa. It would be interesting, at this stage, to examine Bakhtin's views on language, meaning and intertextuality. As Holquist argues, Bakhtin could be placed between two tendencies within the theory of meaning: the personalist which holds meaning as the product of individuals, and the deconstructivist view which sees it as socially constructed. Yet, instead of using the traditional categories of the social versus the individual, Bakhtin seems to displace the debate around ideology to the opposition between what he calls the discourse of authority and the discourse of persuasion. While the first is complete in that it is fully realized in people's consciousness, the second type of discourse remains unfinished as it is open to the "unrealized possibilities" of the individual consciousness. The two discourses engage in a dialogic relation with one another in the sense that they continuously modify and subvert each other. This opposition has considerable implications, especially when Bakhtin
27. Ali Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague 1975). 28. Michael Holquist, "The Politics of Representation", Greenblatt, S.J. (ed.), Allegory and Representation (Baltimore 1981), p.178. 78
post-colonial writing, for the voice determines and reflects the interactions between self and society and how the writer positions him/herself within it. This particular problem will be examined in depth towards the end of this first section, when dealing with the problems of language and voice. Going back to Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, it seems crucial to clarify what has been referred to as post-colonial intertextuality. According to Bakhtin, a text is not a unified and autonomous entity, but is in dialogue with other texts. In addition, within a single text, different discourses could be at work. For example, Bakhtin himself uses in his texts different discourses (marxist and religious). According to Holquist, Bakhtin used the marxist voice of his student Volominov under whose name he published his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language "to ventrilocate a meaning not specific to Marxism even when conceived as only a discourse". Another example is the manipulation of conventional narratives, such as Robinson Crusoe, and their ideological transformation. Dialogue could be more subtle and the master narrative could not always be as obviously distinguishable as in Coetzee's Foe for instance. Rather than looking at form as a disguise for content, one is more inclined to look at the ways in which language, not only represents, but is also represented. Holquist writes: 32. Michael Holquist, op.cit., p.174. 78
post-colonial writing, for the voice determines and reflects the interactions between self and society and how the writer positions him/herself within it. This particular problem will be examined in depth towards the end of this first section, when dealing with the problems of language and voice. Going back to Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, it seems crucial to clarify what has been referred to as post-colonial intertextuality. According to Bakhtin, a text is not a unified and autonomous entity, but is in dialogue with other texts. In addition, within a single text, different discourses could be at work. For example, Bakhtin himself uses in his texts different discourses (marxist and religious). According to Holquist, Bakhtin used the marxist voice of his student Volominov under whose name he published his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language "to ventrilocate a meaning not specific to Marxism even when conceived as only a discourse".ÿ2 Another example is the manipulation of conventional narratives, such as Robinson Crusoe, and their ideological transformation. Dialogue could be more subtle and the master narrative could not always be as obviously distinguishable as in Coetzee's Foe for instance. Rather than looking at form as a disguise for content, one is more inclined to look at the ways in which language, not only represents, but is also represented. Holquist writes: 32. Michael Holquist, op.cit., p.174. 79
I can appropriate meaning to my own purposes only by ventrilocating others. A first implication of this principle is that as speakers we all participate in the rigors of authorship: we bend language to represent by representing languages. 3 Meaning is viewed, not as whole and homogeneous, but as changing, changeable and impossible to contain or be contained. Moving away from a mechanistic view of discourse as opposed to counter¬ discourse, one should start conceptualizing language as ambivalence and dialogue. Representation becomes extremely problematic for writers engaging in counter-discursive modes of expression. Very often, representation and meaning constitute the very themes of post-colonial fiction such as, for example, Bessie Head's A Question of Power, which could be read as an experiment in finding a form outside the colonial and male configurations. By referring to its own textuality, post-colonial writing becomes a form of cultural critique or, as Stephen Slemon puts it, "a mode of disidentifying whole societies from the sovereign codes of cultural organization, and an inherently dialectical intervention in the hegemonic production of cultural meaning".34 Therefore, it contains its own critique, and by avoiding fixed and hegemonic meanings, it is continuously displaced and never placed at a level of authority. Nevertheless, the danger for post-colonial writing is to fall into a 33. Ibid., p.169. 34. Stephen Slemon, "Monuments of Empire: Allegory/ Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing", Kunapipi, vol.9, no.3 (1987), p.14. 80
kind of systematic counter-discourse that could turn into a position of authority. Post-colonial essentialism could threaten the plurality and the refusal of the discourse of mastery discussed earlier on in this chapter. Yet, as Helen Tiffin points out, it would be a "provisionally authoritative perspective, but one which is deliberately constructed as provisional", as the task of post-colonial literature is to emphasize "the cultural construction of meaning". The meta- textuality of post-colonial writing and its refusal of fixed meanings pose a problem for the critic whose task is also to be re-defined. Thus post¬ colonial texts become meta-critical, ie. a critique about the ways in which one interprets signifying practices. Chinweizu's Towards the Decolonization of African Literature is, in that respect, a major statement about the relativization of the Western canons of literary criticism when dealing with African literature. His remarks could be extended to post-colonial literature as a whole. As it entails the questioning of one's interpretative strategies, this kind of writing seems to extend beyond its traditional boundaries and to encompass a larger area of practices one could vaguely refer to as culture. Chineiwzu challenges the validity of the very concept of literature and suggests the term
35. Helen Tiffin, op.cit., p.23. 36. O.J. Chinweizu & I. Madubuike, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and their Critics (London 1985). 81
"orature", instead, to describe the African tradition. Thus, both post-colonial writing and critical theory lead to re-evaluation of such basic
concepts as literature, expression, culture,
ideology and form. Also, in the same perspective of representation, it is important to pay attention to the relevance of figurative modes such as symbolic language, allegory
and myth. Stephen Slemon suggests that allegory constitutes a major mode of representation in colonial discourse and, for that reason, has been reappropriated by post-colonial writers to subvert the master code of narration. He writes: Within the discourse of colonialism allegory has always functioned as an especially visible technology of appropriation; and if allegory literally means "other speaking", it has historically meant a way of speaking for the subjugated others of the European colonial enterprise - a way of subordinating the colonized, that is, through the politics of representation.37
the reshaping of the colonial forced "heritage" of language and representation becomes crucial for post-colonial writing. Working at the level of
symbolic and metaphorical representation is part of the task. Bessie Head is a good example of this as she makes symbolic language both the content and the form of her novels. The post-colonial writer does not only borrow and subvert the existing symbolic forms, but also he/she creates new ones in order to have a grasp of his/her particular condition.
37. Stephen Slemon, op.cit., p.8. 82
This brings us to the last point in Fanon's work which I want to stress and which all the questions raised in this chapter seem to lead to. It is the
quest for a voice as it relates to the dynamics of representation in post-colonial literature. The post-colonial writer is caught in a double and contradictory process of naming and unnaming. In
other words, through re-inscribing his/her history into narrative, s/he is also engaged in the deconstruction of a master narrative. In order to do so, s/he has to use the representational language available. Martin Green describes the post-colonial writer as the one who begins to "build with bricks
made out of the same materials as the Empire- Builders themselves use, trying to take up the same psychic and cultural space as the house we actually live in, trying to displace that house". It is precisely this displacement which constitutes the
equivocal aspect of the literature which is seeking a voice. Is it ever possible to speak outside the colonizing language, outside its system of representation, and outside the identificatory system it has set up? When Fanon stressed that to speak means to endorse a specific culture and
support the weight of a civilization, he surely foresaw one of the major problems of post-colonial discourse. An example of the ways in which a specific language provides its speaker not only with a syntax but also with a sensitivity and a sense of 38. Martin Green, op.cit., p.338. 83
identity is Ali Mazrui's comparison of the French and the English language in Africa. He writes: The English language, by the very fact of being emotionally more neutral than French, was less of a hindrance to the emergence of national consciousness in British Africa. 9 An anti-colonial speech delivered in English will be far less incongruous than the same one delivered in French. Similarly, the relationship of the Négritude poets to their metropolitan language becomes loaded with a significance absent from the way in which the english-speaking writer relates to language. One is then confronted by the issue of language and identity. Again, language is the site of a double process: as it provides definite identities, it also disidentifies and displaces its subject. To conclude, the main contradiction which post¬ colonial writing is faced with is the double task of producing a meaning while dismantling the signifying
system which makes it possible for this meaning to exist at all. As it has been demonstrated, it is a highly complex work which entails a total re- evaluation of one's ideological and representational modes. Before moving onwards to the various responses to this problem as they appear in fiction, I shall clarify the notions of ambivalence, language, identity and voice a little further.
Looking at the problem from a feminist perspective will complement this discussion on post-colonial
39. Ali Mazrui, op.cit., p.50. 84
discourse. Although it uses different parameters, feminist criticism has also attempted to deal with the issues of language and difference and with the possibilities for expression outside the
colonial/sexist discourse.
II. FEMINIST APPROACH
The second part of this chapter concentrates on feminist approaches to language and meaning in order to highlight their relevance to the criticism of the literature written by Southern African women. It will examine the ways in which feminists have redefined male theoretical concepts, placing gender issues at the centre of their analysis. The aim is to give our critical perspective a feminist angle by revealing the close links between sexism and racism/imperialism. Looking at French Feminism in particular, we will see how women have turned the tradition of psychoanalysis against itself and altered its foundations by giving it a different political content and a feminist orientation. The aim of this chapter is to place feminist theory within the context of the double struggle against apartheid and male domination. Such an approach will
enable us to define the theoretical problems of Southern African women's writing. The relationships between gender and literature represent an area which feminists have paid particular attention to, especially over the past 85
three decades. Before the turn of the century, Virginia Woolf expressed her concern for the problem of women's exclusion from literature and academia, for the woman writer confronted an environment hostile to female creativity and to the absence of a recognized tradition of women writers.ÿ® She also tackled the questions of women, language and feminine consciousness, which now represent some of the central issues of modern feminist critical theory. Although Woolf's theory of writing and her multi-voiced and decentred textual practices have widely influenced Western feminist thought, there have also been some reservations about the validity of her social analysis. One of the main criticism has been her lack of social awareness and her political naivity. On the other hand, other feminists have analyzed gender by looking primarily at the sociological factors that construct the idea of womanhood. In the 1950s, Simone De Beauvoir, theorized the construction of woman as man's "other" in existentialist terms, emphasizing the priority of social conditioning over predestined biological difference. Her famous sentence "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" has now become a commonplace among feminists. Writing at a time when feminism as a movement was still in its infancy
40. See Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" in Collected Essays, vol.2, (London 1966). 41. See Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own (London 1929) and Three Guineas (London 1938). 42. Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Middlesex 1972), p.295. 86
and when a distinct feminist consciousness did not stand on firm grounds, De Beauvoir took some time before being able to identify herself as a feminist and preferred, initially, to call herself a socialist. However, her analysis of gender through the roles ascribed to women, through myths and other mental constructions was a pioneering piece of feminist study at that time, and is still a source of reference for feminism today. In the 1960s and 1970s, while Anglo-American feminists, like Juliet Mitchell and Kate Millett, were denouncing and rejecting Freud's theory of penis-envy for its sexism, French feminists were placing the foundations for a theory based on psychoanalysis but which would reconsider Freudian and Lacanian concepts in a new light. This theory tackles the domain of the relations between language, the construction of the speaking subject and gender. It is also concerned with disentangling the female voice from patriarchal discourse by revealing the male-centredness of the signifying practices of the West and, in particular, by questioning the male tradition of psychoanalysis. Lacan's theory of the mirror stage dividing the child's identity into a self and an other has largely been exploited by feminists to look at the construction of difference. Before acquiring language, the child does not have a 43. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London 1985), p.96. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth 1974) and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London 1971). 87
sense of a separate self as s/he is unified with the mother's body in what Lacan calls the "Imaginary Order". A sense of a self as distinct from the other appears with the acquisition of language, which is associated to the introduction of the law of the father and which Lacan refers to as the "Symbolic Order". Toril Moi gives several usages of the Lacanian concept of otherness: The most important usages of the Other are those in which the Other represents language, the site of the signifier, the Symbolic Order or any third party in a triangular structure. Another, slightly different way of putting this is to say that the Other is the locus of the constitution of the subject or the structure that produces the subject. In yet another formulation, the Other is the differential structure of language and of social relations that constitute the subject in the first place and in which it (the subject) must take up its place. 4 As we will see, feminist theory draws on and at the same time challenges Lacanian concepts in an attempt to develop a distinct and original feminist approach. The methods of analysis of feminist theorists is of particular significance to the themes dealt with in this work. Rather than reinforcing the "vertical" relation between critical theory and literature, that is the attitude which consists in "explaining" literary texts according to some theoretical observations, feminist theory has problematized the theory/practice binary opposition itself and concentrated on the ways in which women could theorize their own voices without reproducing 44. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, op.cit., pp.100-101. 88
the patriarchal discourse of theory. This section will hopefully help make clear the theoretical premises of this work by approaching race, gender and difference from a feminist perspective. Whereas Anglo-American feminists have centred their argument on an unconditional demand for equality between the sexes and for the integration of women into the existing structures of society and politics, French feminists have exploited the idea of difference and of the specificity of women's experiences. Language is for the latter a privileged site where difference is at work. Consequently, considerable space and attention have been given by these critics to women and writing. In the course of this section, we will concentrate on a few theorists and literary critics who have articulated the problematic relations between women and language. We will examine Julia Kristeva's definition of the speaking subject, how Luce Irigaray sees the problem of symbolic representation for women, Helene Cixous's use of poetic language as a way of defining and performing "écriture feminine", and Gayatri Spivak's deconstruction of French feminism in order
to find a place for the specific problems of third world feminism. From Kate Millet to Julia Kristeva, Western feminist thought has attempted to reassess and reformulate the concepts of Western philosophy and psychoanalysis. Kristeva dealt with the Freudian division between pleasure principle and reality 89
principle and its Lacanian equivalent, the Imaginary versus the Law, by bringing the issue of language and gender to the foreground. In Lacan's Imaginary, signifier and signified are undifferentiated. On the other hand, the Law involves the discovery of language and of sexual difference. Terry Eagleton sums up this process as follows: The child must now resign itself to the fact that it can never have any direct access to reality, in particular to the now prohibited body of the mother. It has been banished from this "full", imaginary possession into the "empty" world of language. Language is "empty" because it is just an endless process of difference and absence: instead of being able to possess anything in its fullness, the child will now simply move from one signifier to another, along a linguistic chain which is potentially infinite.45 In a world of division, fragmentation and lack, the subject tries to achieve fullness by creating a meaning. Like Lacan, Julia Kristeva goes to the roots of meaning and language as socially and psychologically constructed by investigating the relationship between language and the formation of the speaking subject. Yet, for her things are slightly different. The categories of the Imaginary and the Symbolic which she renames the Semiotic and the Symbolic orders - are contiguous within the subject, who is not a fixed subject but a "subject in process". For Kristeva, all enunciation is thetic in that it involves a split between the speaking subject and the self. As she puts it, there is "no
45. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford 1983), p.167. 90 meaning prior to the thinking ego". Borrowing Plato's term, she refers to the "chora" to designate the "heterogeneous articulations" prior to the sign. The symbolic order appears with the sign and the thetic phase; it implies an arbitrary positioning of the subject vis-a-vis his/her utterance: Any enunciation is thetic, whether it be words or a sentence: any enunciation requires an identification process, that is a separation of the subject from its self- image.46 Therefore, the speaking subject is split along the duality between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. The description of the act of speech as a fissure within the subject and its self-image is particularly relevant to the study of ideology in texts. Only when the speaking subject finds a position in the Symbolic order can s/he produce a meaning. A relation between signifier and signified has to be established in order to have a meaning. On the other hand, the Semiotic overflows the limits of the Symbolic order in, using Kristeva's words, "a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position".47 Kristeva defines the circulation of meaning from the Semiotic into the Symbolic as "jouissance", deliberately sexualizing the act of speech. Therefore, two processes are at work: the thetic process which distinguishes the Semiotic from
46. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York 1984), p.42. 47. Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford 1986), p.119. 91
the Symbolic and from which meaning originates, and "jouissance” which goes beyond the thetic split and reassesses this meaning. The thetic split, from which the sign originates, represents the critical moment of enunciation. As in Homi Bhabha's theory, the emphasis is on the ambivalent moment of transition between the two orders: the ambivalent moment of difference when the mask slips, or the interaction between the chora and the Symbolic order in Kristeva's definition.*® Kristeva also refashions Bakhtinian dialogism by looking at it as a form of discourse. In texts, the subject is defined as an "ambivalence of writing" which comprises the text, addressee (implicitly present) and the context. The notion of a hegemonic individual enunciator is replaced by intertextuality. In the post-structuralist tradition, Kristeva approaches the literary text as the outcome of interactions between different signifiers rather than a fixed product. As Roland Barthes demonstrates in his detailed study case of Balzac's Sarrasine, the literary text is a dialogue between different codes; the reader's code is also part of the process of "signification" (meaning as a process), which Barthes contrasts to "sens" (meaning as a product).*® Kristeva's decentred approach focuses on the receiver rather than on the author of a text. Narration becomes an interplay between the 48. Homi K. Bhabha, "What Does the Black Man Want?" in New Formations, op.cit., pp.118-124. 49. Roland Barthes, S/Z [Paris 1970). 92 initiator of discourse and the addressee. The latter is described as the "signifier in his relation to the text and signified in the relation between the subject of narration and himself Subject and addressee merge together into a "code", an "anonymity": It is the addressee, the other, exteriority (whose object is the subject of narration and who is at the same time represented and representing) who transforms the subject into an author ... In this coming-and-going movement between subject and other, between writer (W) and reader, the author is structured as a signifier and the text as a dialogue of two discourses. 1 Writing becomes a plural process of dialogue between different texts. Similarly, poetic language is defined as an "infinity of pairings and combinations" which cannot possibly fall into a signifier/signified vertical categorization. As she puts it, "the minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms of co one and other". * As she explains: A literary semiotics must be developed on the basis of a poetic logic where the concept of the power of the continuum would embody the 0-2 interval, a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed. 3 For Kristeva, monologism (i.e. the 0-1 sequence) represents the law and the authority embodied in figures of authority, such as the father, god or the 50. Julia Kristeva, "Word, Dialogue and the Novel", A. Jardine, T. Gora & L.S. Roudiez (trans.), Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, op.cit, p.45. 51. loc.cit. 52. Ibid., p.40. 53. Ibid., p.41. 93
state. It is sustained by the belief in a "transcendental signifier" surpassing all others as a final and unalterable meaning. Against monologist and hegemonic ideologies, Kristeva puts forward plurality as the basis for communication. She sees monologism present in the epic genre and in the realist description, and examples of dialogism in the Menippean dialogue between the Law (Aristotelian logic based on the 0-1 sequence) and its other (the carnivalesque). In the same way, poetic language is viewed as basically structured on a 0-2 linguistic model. As it has been pointed out, the assumption of this chapter is that anti-colonial and feminist theories have in common their pluralist approach as a means of subverting a dominant patriarchal and imperialist discourse. Kristeva regards women as a subversive force which represents a potential for change. The feminine is identified with the site of otherness and "woman" used as a category of criticism. We will see in this thesis how, for instance, Bessie Head adopts similar approaches by using her "otherness" as female and black to undermine the dominant symbolic language. Kristeva sees woman as the place of marginality; she explains how sexual segregation forms the basis for what she names "transcendental monologism": Monotheistic unity is sustained by a radical separation of the sexes: indeed, it is this very separation which is its prerequisite. For without this gap between the sexes, without this localization of the 94
polymorphic, orgasmic body, desiring and laughing, in the other sex, it would have been impossible, in the symbolic realm, to isolate the principle of One Law the One, sublimating, Transcendent Guaranto-r of the ideal interests of the community. 4 Women make it possible for the law to exist; yet, they are fundamentally excluded from it. They are paradoxically inside and outside the law in that their marginal function within discourse is part of the system that enables men to occupy a central position. As the colonized make it possible for colonialism and imperialism to exist while being excluded from its system, women represent the absent support of male discourse. The dependence of the colonizer on the existence and exclusion of the colonized, which is discussed in details in the previous section, shows how the issues raised by feminist theory are similar to the post-colonial critique of imperialism. "Woman" and "colonized", thus, become decentred categories, marginalized from the position of power, which subvert dominant ideologies. Bhabha's notion of the split colonial subject as a site of ambivalence that undermines the rigid boundaries erected by colonial and imperialist discourse and Kristeva's definition of female marginalia as a privileged access to the Semiotic treat the ideas of otherness and difference as privileged positions.ÿ For Kristeva, the production of art, and in particular women's writing, 54. Ibid., p.141. 55. Homi Bhabha, op.cit., pp.118-124. See also Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism" in Screen, vol.24 (November-December 1983), pp.148-72. 95 represents an opening into the Semiotic reassessment of the categories of the Symbolic. Because it deals with language and representation, literature can infiltrate and alter the law. In this context, post¬ colonial women writers occupy, theoretically, this place of subversion. One of the theoretical assumptions of this thesis is the fact that women's writing undermines and undoes patriarchal and colonial hegemonic discourse. Miriam Tlali's plural narratives, Gordimer's merging of different subtexts, Lessing's emphasis on socially constructed discourses and Head's questioning of "reality", are all explorations of the ambivalent space which post¬ colonial and feminist criticism has described as a site of conflict. The possibilities of expression for the marginalized woman is double-edged. The polarization of the sexes faces women with the possibility of gaining power through repressing their identities as women and becoming "Electras": The Electras "deprived forever of their hymens" militants in the cause of the father, frigid with exaltation are they then dramatic figures emerging at the point where the social consensus corners any woman who wants to escape her condition: nuns, "revolutionaries", even "feminists"?ÿ® As it will be examined in more detail, some of Nadine Gordimer's heroines tend to endorse the role of the electras as a way of escaping both their condition as female and as white. Gordimer's women revolutionaries or "guerrilla groupies" (Rosa 56.Toril Moi(ed), The Kristeva Reader, op.cit.,p.152. 96
Burgher in Burgher's Daughter, Hillela in A Sport Of Nature) seem, as it will be argued in the fifth chapter of this thesis, to identify with a masculine version of Black power, and, therefore, to only partially abdicate their power as white women. The second category which Kristeva identifies is the rejection of the electras and the retreat into the a-temporal space of the unconscious where women are outside the law: If a woman cannot be part of the temporal symbolic order except by identifying with the father, it is clear that as soon as she shows any sign of that which, in herself, escapes such identification and acts differently, resembling the dream or the maternal body, she evolves into this "truth” in question. It is thus that female specificity defines itself in patrilinear society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious,a witch, a baccanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian Dionysian orgy.57 This dilemma is what constitute the central theme of Bessie Head's most controversial novel, A Question Of Power, where the protagonist is faced between the impossible choice between the mental hospital and the institutionalized "madness" of apartheid. Head explores the possibilities for expression outside apartheid categories, that is in the a-temporal space of the unconscious as an insight into the collective dreams of her society. As it will be discussed, Head's writing is ambivalent in that it transcends the electras/witch binary opposition and reaches for a third category which Kristeva describes as follows: 57. Ibid., p.154. 97
A constant alternation between time and its "truth", identity and its loss, history and that which produces it: that which remains extra-phenomenal, outside the sign, beyond time. An impossible dialectic of two terms, a permanent alternation: never the one without the other. It is not certain that anyone here and now is capable of this. An analyst conscious of history and politics? A politician tuned the unconscious? Or, perhaps, a woman...i§io Kristeva's definition is evasive and elyptic. One is inclined to think that the "it" in the comment "it is not certain that anyone here and now is capable of this" is the problem rather than "its" actual conditions of production. Helene Cixous develops the idea of a feminine or female writing, "écriture feminine", capable of transcending the contradictions and dilemmas of women's expression within patriarchy. Cixous uses Derrida's concepts of "differance" and desire in language to celebrate her own difference as a woman: For Cixous, feminine texts are texts that "work on the difference"..., strive in the direction of difference, struggle to undermine the dominant phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality. 9 Cixous's poetic language is to be considered against the background of Freudian and Lacanian emphasis on the notion of the lack as a basic feature of sexuality for Freud, and of language for Lacan. Cixous sees the speaking subject as a full object ("objet plein") and denounces the "antinarcissism" which men have imposed on women in 58. Ibid., p.156. 59. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, op.cit., p.108. 98 making them subjects always striving for what is lacking in them. Women repossess language by transgressing the rule of the word. As she puts it, women "steal" words, using the double- meaning of the word "voler" in French (stealing and flying). Helene Cixous emphasizes the intrinsic power of women to subvert the master narrative and their in¬ born qualities as poets. Her characters are archetypal women whose voices sing the primeval song of a time before the law. As an alternative to male hegemonic power, Cixous suggests another type of power which is based on difference and otherness and which defies any attempt at defining or labelling it. Cixous's use of poetical language to celebrate difference recalls the Négritude poets in its emphasis on poetic sensitivity: We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking. 0 Cixous has been criticized for essentializing the notion of feminity. Sartre's essay on Négritude in Black Orpheus highlights the transitional and ephemerial quality of Négritude: In fact, Négritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position 60. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh Of The Medusa" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.l, no. 4 (Summer 1976), p.878. 99
of Négritude as antithetical value is the moment of the negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself and the blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without racism. Thus Négritude is dedicated to its own destruction, it is passage and not objective, means and not ultimate goal. At the moment the black Orpheus most directly embraces this Eurydice, he feels her vanish from between his arms. 1 This description could be applied to feminist essentialism as a necessary stage which contains its own problems and its own contradictions. On the other hand, the elevation of "woman" as a universal concept, which permeates French feminist theory as a whole, has also been criticized as a dismissal of the social and economic reality which divide women into class and race. One of the criticism made of Cixous is her individualistic concern for pleasure and her overlooking of social reality. As Toril Moi pointed out, by essentializing femininity, Cixous and other feminists run the danger of evading the real social, cultural and other differences.®ÿ Yet, the contribution of the feminists who have emphasized difference is perhaps, as one feminist wrote, to demonstrate that "differentiation is not distinctness and separateness but a particular way of being connected to others".®'*
61. J.P. Sartre, "Black Orpheus" in Presence Africaine (Paris 1963), pp.59-60. 62. For a criticism of this particular aspect of feminism, see J. Newton & D. Rosenfelt, Feminist Criticism and Social Change (London 1985). 63.Nancy Julia Chodorov, The Future of Difference (London 1987), p.ll. 100
Writing is one of the ways in which women as "colonized" reinscribe themselves back into language. The "constant alteration" between different voices, which Kristeva describes, will be a major point of analysis in the course of this study. Like post-colonial writing, writing by women is based on the plurality of voices and the dialogic reconstruction of the self and the other. The idea of women's mimicry has been analyzed by Luce Irigaray as a problem of representation and self- identification. Woman, by having always been defined in terms of man, that is as his absence or his other, has never been the object of a positive definition. Irigaray traces this negation of woman in representation down to sources of Western thought. As other feminists, she reassesses psychoanalytical theories and looks at post¬ structuralism as a model of male-dominated theory. She questions Lacan's theory as a non-problematic handling of the linguistic models inherited from a patriarchal philosophy establishment. For her, woman is to be regarded as the mirror in Lacan's theory, that is as the object which enables man to position himself as the centre. Irigaray replaces Lacan's image of the mirror by the image of the speculum, as the latter renders an inverted image of reality and not its exact replica. Her analysis is in many ways an inversion of the dominant and institutionalized modes of thinking; her book on Western philosophy is an example of this in that it reverses the 101 historical time sequence by starting with a critique of Freud and ending with a reflection on Plato.®ÿ Irigaray's writing blurs the borderline between theory and practice as it serves to illustrate and to make her points. Toril Moi sums up Irigaray's method in very broad terms: Caught in the specular logic of patriarchy, woman can choose either to remain silent, producing incomprehensible babble (any utterance that falls outside the logic of the same will by definition be incomprehensible to the male master discourse), or to enact the specular representation of herself as a lesser male. The latter option, the woman as mimic, is, according to Irigaray, a form of hysteria. The hysteric mimes her own sexuality in a masculine mode, since this is the only way in which she can rescue something of her own desire.®5 Once again, women are caught in the conflict between hysteria and mimicry. As Homi Bhabha defines the post-colonial condition as "a constellation of delirium", feminists also pose the problem of female writing as an almost impossible task.®® How is it possible to speak of woman as a decentred self without relegating her to the non-representational margin? Neither feminists nor post-colonial critics give definite and clear-cut answers to this problem. Irigaray makes an attempt by suggesting what feminist theorists should develop: In fact, there is lacking in Lacan a theory of enunciation which would be sufficiently complex, and which would allow him to 64. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca 1985). 65. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, op.cit., p.135. 66. Homi Bhabha, What Does the Black Man Want?", op.cit., p.119. 102
account for the effect of sexua1 difference on the production of language. 7 Her view is that the feminist critic should continuously question the medium through which s/he is working and that the unconscious, the repressed and the marginal should be privileged over formal theoretical models such as Lacan's theory. Like the post-colonial critic, the feminist critic does not keep theory and practice separate, as his/her analysis is based on a questioning of the tools and language that made this analysis possible. Thus, theory is closely bound to the object of criticism, as both are part of the same question. As I have argued in the previous section, post¬ colonial writing is largely meta-linguistic in its criticism of its own position within language. In a similar manner, feminist theory contains its own critique. This is what Gayatri Spivak demonstrates when deconstructing and placing French Feminism in an international frame.68 Spivak turns French Feminism against itself to reveal its gaps and loopholes and, by doing so, finds a place where she, as a third world feminist, can speak. Spivak's criticism of Kristeva's About Chinese Women reveals how Western constructions of the East have to be considered within their own context, that is in a Western/first world frame, rather than in an international frame: 67. Luce Irigaray, "Women's Exile" in Ideology and Consciousness, no.l (May 1977), p.69. 68. Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism in an International Frame" in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London 1987). 103
The fact that Kristeva thus speaks for a generalized West is the "naturalization transformed into privilege" that I compared to my own ideological victimage. 9
Later, she adds: ...a deliberate application of the doctrines of French High "Feminism" to a different situation of political specificity might misfire. If, however, International Feminism is defined within a Western European context, nthe heterogeneity becomes manageable. 0 Spivak warns us against an unproblematic handling of first world criticism and concepts, which could easily become hegemonic and erase the basic differences and unequal positions between the West and the third world. As she points out, the position as "woman" can become a privileged place of power: The pioneering books that bring First World feminists news from the Third World are written by privileged informants and can only be deciphered by a trained readership... This is not the tired nationalist claim that only a native can know the scene. The point that I am trying to make is that, in order to learn enough about Third World women and to develop a different readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated, and the First World feminist must lÿearn to stop feeling privileged as a woman. * Spivak does not dismiss French Feminism as an "ethereal" doctrine totally irrelevant to the "harsh" reality of the third world, but reconsiders its assumption that "woman" is a privileged place of subversion. French Feminism has often been criticized for its definition of "woman" as a homogeneous concept defying historical and cultural 69. Ibid., p.140. 70. Ibid., p.141. 71. Ibid., pp.135-136. 104 differences. Placing French feminism within its own historical context is necessary in order to extract from it the positive elements which this study could benefit from. It is important to relativize the feminist concepts developed by Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous before approaching the question of third world feminism. The marginal position of race and class in their analysis, their emphasis on language solely as the site of struggle, and the elitism of their cultural practices make the relevance of this type of feminism to the third world scene rather problematic. Rewriting first world feminism in the light of the experiences of women in parts of the world which are under economic and cultural imperialist domination is an area which has started to be investigated. As feminism is gaining importance in the third world and as, in many countries, the fight against imperialism has become coupled with a self-conscious feminist battle against gender discrimination, it is important to reassess feminism in an international context. First world feminism is losing the predominance it had in the 1960s and 1970s under the influence of a new analysis of gender which takes into account the place of woman within international politics. The Egyptian writer Nawal El Sa'adawi describes third world feminism as follows: Women in the third world, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are exploited internationally, nationally and personally as women and it is very difficult for us to separate the international oppression, 105
national and personal oppression ... For women in the West, because maybe they are not exploited internationally because they live in the West ... concentrate on the personal and the sexual. They separate it from the political. So the main difference is that we politicized feminists of the third world, we make feminism a political issue.72 Inequalities between East and West are perpetuated as, for example, women from the third world are still highly dependent on Western feminist publishers and often have to comply to their standards. In Southern Africa, the situation is more complex, especially in South Africa, where first and third worlds coexist side by side. This, undoubtedly, defies the idea of feminism as a homogeneous and non-contradictory movement. Miriam Tlali illustrates this problem as follows: A white feminist movement in South Africa! Why should there be? The Black woman is there to act as the "shock absorber". The white woman just looks after herself, the Black woman is there to take her kids for a walk. Even though the white woman is oppressed herself, she has a vested interest in apartheid. If the husband's shirt has lost a button, he says, "Mary, Mary, why is my shirt without a button", to the Black "girl" not to his wife. We not only have the male, patriarchal white apartheid system on our necks, we also have the white woman on our necks. Taking into account these major facts, this thesis looks at the various literary responses to the questions of race and gender in the writings by four Southern African women novelists and aims to 72. As quoted in Jo Beall, Shireen Hassim and Alison Todes, " "A Bit On The Side"?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa" in Feminist Review, no.33 (Autumn 1989), p.34. 73. Elean Thomas, "Inside The Belly of Apartheid", interview with Miriam Tlali, Spare Rib, issue 200 (April 1989), p.24. 106
develop a plural perspective and to avoid a prescriptive approach as well as the question of "relevant writing". Part of the task is to break the hierarchical division between theory and practice and to look at literature as self-justificatory and as a process rather than as a product to be diagnosed. In other words, the purpose of doing a case study of the literature written by Southern
African women is to reveal its diversity, the plurality of its perspectives and approaches, and the non-homogeneous and non-circumscribed area of its scope. Starting with the early fictional works of Doris Lessing, this thesis examines their psychological- orientated approach to the issues of race and gender and how the novelist constructs the idea of a "feminine consciousness". Moving to the novels of Bessie Head, it analyzes how similar psychological explorations relate to the idea of a black female voice subverting white and male ideological constructs. The study of Nadine Gordimer's later novels illustrates the need of the white liberal to question his/her forms of representation and to search for new ways of linking consciousness with form. The final section concentrates of the novels of Miriam Tlali, as they represent a new direction in South African literature. It examines how they develop the idea of a collective voice through a realist and biographical mode of writing, through the use of oral forms, and through the 107 reconsideration of what the category of "art" means. It also looks at the ways in which these relate to the issues of liberation and gender struggles. 108
CHAPTER THREE: DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing has been, as a writer, integrated into the British literary establishment. Nevertheless, her writings have been strongly informed and shaped by her experience in former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which she left in 1950. Her fiction, and especially her early novels and stories, are an insight into the politics of race and gender in Southern Africa. Her portrayal of the colonial woman (which bears many similarities with Nadine Gordimer's heroines), her interest in the relations between gender and politics, and her uncertainties about identity and roots are all part of a wider literary tradition of writings by women in Southern Africa. Therefore, in this chapter, I will examine the ways in which Lessing moved progressively towards a political articulation of her experience as a white woman in a colonial society, how she dealt with the problematic relation between self and colonialism, and how she portrayed the colonial collapse of self-identity from a feminist point of view. Lessing's feminism has become a landmark. Her most acclaimed work, The Golden Notebook, has often been described as "the book of revelation" among the 109 feminists of the 1970s. Lessing started her literary career in the early 1950s, at a time when feminism as a philosophy was coming into being in Europe and America. It was also the time when black nationalist movements in Africa were making themselves heard. Looking at Lessing's early novels, The Grass is Singing and the "Children of Violence" series (with the exception of the last volume, The Four-Gated City, which is set in London), this study concentrates on the novelist's response to the demands and pressures of her place and time.ÿ The Grass is Singing explores the total disintegration of its female protagonist confronted by her male and black "other", in whom she sees with horror the reflection of her own fears, while the "Children of Violence" novels coincide with the writer's own development, although she always strongly denied their autobiographical significance. Martha Quest leaves home, marries, has a child, becomes involved in politics, falls in love, has a mental breakdown, all in a continuous movement towards self-discovery. This chapter will examine Lessing's gradual move towards an articulation of a "feminine consciousness", and its relevance to the context of Southern Africa.
1. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Harmondsworth 1966). 2. Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (London 1980), Martha Quest (London 1966), A Proper Marriage (London 1966), A Ripple From The Storm (London 1966), Landlocked (London 1967), The Four Gated City (London 1972). 110
I. THE GRASS IS SINGING
Lessing's task in respectively The Grass Is Singing and the "Children of Violence" novels differs largely. Whereas her first novel is brief and cyclical (it starts with the news of Mary Turner's murder and ends with the actual murder), the series is linear and sequential in its development. Mary Turner in The Grass Is Singing is, in many respects, an undeveloped version of Martha Quest, in that she faces the same conflicts without, however, the same introspective and analytical mind. Besides, The Grass Is Singing does not have the depth and variety of experiences (from Marxism to feminism) present in the characterization of Martha Quest. Those are reasons why Lessing's first novel is often considered as a draft version of her subsequent achievement. However, its lack of elaboration, its emphasis on the desolation and bareness of the landscape, and its tragic ending are all part of the general purpose of the book in describing the condition of the colonial woman. By portraying madness in the character of a woman alienated from her society, from her gender group, and eventually from her own self, Doris Lessing explores the colonial psyche as a kind of journey into the underworld. By breaking the boundaries of our reality, Doris Lessing explodes the conventional forms of consciousness and questions her society's notions of sanity and Ill madness. Through its violent confrontation of a white woman with her black servant, the novel puts across to its reader a particular message about madness, society, the female gender and the colonial other. Our analysis will hopefully shed more light on that particular aspect. By means of a confrontation between two characters belonging to opposite racial and gender groups, Doris Lessing approaches the issue of oppression in Southern Africa, revealing the sexual dimension of racialism. The novel explores the sexual fantasies upon which colonial society forges its ideology. By transgressing the taboo of interracial sex, Mary and Moses disrupt the colonial silent code of morals. The outcome is tragedy, murder, and the disintegration of Mary Turner's reality. Doris Lessing reveals the sexual basis of the colonial hierarchical stratification of society by bringing the female self and its colonial counterpart face to face. Even though Mary and Moses are reunited in death (for Moses will eventually be executed), and in their roles as transgressors and sacrificial victims of the system, their antagonism is never resolved. Nowhere in the novel is the self in unity with the world of the other. The jarring quality of the landscape (reminiscent of The Wasteland, which the title of
3. Bessie Head undertakes a similar task in A Question of Power, as I will discuss in the next chapter. 112 the novel is inspired by) never allows the reader to escape into a vision of unity. Moses is not treated as a character in his own right, but rather as a means of expressing the conflicts within Mary's divided self. By acting as a mirror to her fears, he progressively imprisons her inside her own psychosis. Ironically, Moses's role is subverted by the contradictions inherent in his very characterization as the colonial other, and finally results in a collapse of the novel's notion of reality. Doris Lessing, at the surface level of the novel, endorses the typical colonial projection of the ego onto the "dark other", but, at the same time, reveals its contradictions. The transfer of hatred within the hierarchical power structure of colonial societies is depicted through flashbacks into Mary's childhood. In her dreams, the image of her father, a symbol of white and male-dominated society, and the figure of Moses, who has no existence in that society but who is a powerful figure in terms of its symbolic structure, are reunited under the dream image of a giant. Mary projects the traumatic experience of her mother's abuse by her father onto the symbolic figure of Moses. In the heart of the conflict with Moses, she dreams frequently of scenes of sexual abuse between her parents. Roberta Rubenstein explains Mary's transfer in Jungian terms by which Moses becomes a "screen" onto which Mary projects her self-hatred or "shadow self", as opposed to her more positive 113 self.* Thus, Moses appears as a pure product of Mary's imagination, and becomes the mirror for her overtly sexual fears. In her review of Van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari, Lessing recognized that no white writer is safe from reproducing, to some extent, the typical colonial fantasies about Africa. In this review, which she wrote in 1958, she explained the matter as follows: An African once said to me that beyond all the white man's more obvious crimes in Africa there was the unforgivable one that 'even the best of you use Africa as a peg to hang your egos on.' To this charge Mr. Van der Post is open. So are the rest of us. Mary also transfers her frustrations as a woman in a man-dominated world on her relationship with her husband. She envies his place in society, for, "he might be a failure and a weakling, but over this, the last citadel of his pride, he was immovable".** Even though she hates him for being "weak and goal-less, pitiful", her resentment turns into envy and into a desire to imitate him. Replacing her husband in the field during his illness, Mary uses her position to victimize a worker who has dared ask her for some water in English (an offence in the white moral code of value). Moved by forces beyond her control, she
4. Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision Of Doris Lessing (Chicago 1979), p.24. 5. Doris Lessing, "Desert Child", New Statesman, vol.56, no.15 (November 1958), p.700. 6. Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, op.cit., p.131. 7. Illness is a constant feature in the novel; having given up all hopes of marrying Dick Turner, Mary visits the doctor for unexplained tiredness. 114 flings the whip across Moses's face and is left, afterwards, with mixed feelings of victory and anger. Like Maureen confronted by July's resistance in Gordimer's July's People, Mary reproduces the typical master-slave relationship which obsesses her.8 The story of Mary and Moses is largely pre¬ determined by Mary's upbringing and her consecutive psychosis. Mary's repressed sexuality is the core around which the plot revolves. Girlish at the age of thirty, Mary shows no interest in men and marries out of convention. In a very condensed chapter, the author goes over Mary's history, not allowing any gaps for the reader's imagination. The all¬ encompassing authorial voice of the narrator provides information about every aspect of Mary's life, as in an attempt to fill in its emptiness. Very much like the writer herself, the heroine leaves home early to work in town as a typist, after a lonely childhood spent in the mine district where her parents run a grocery shop. Her birthplace leaves an indelible mark on her, not in the sense of providing her with a sense of identity and roots, but, on the contrary, by forging her feeling of existential estrangement from reality:
Illness is related to mental exhaustion and is largely psychosomatic. 8. There are similar scenes in Bessie Head's A Question of Power (London 1974), where, for instance, the protagonist reproduces the relationship of power which has caused her breakdown by shouting racist abuses at a Batswana shopkeeper. 115
The family moved three times before Mary went to school; but afterwards she could not distinguish between stations she had lived in. She remembered an exposed dusty village that was backed by a file of bunchy gum trees Dust and chickens; dust and children and wandering natives; dust and the store -always the store.
Mary goes through her childhood and her adult life until the age of thirty with indifference and lack of purpose, mixing with crowds in the girls club to forget about her own inner void. In middle age, Mary is "a woman of thirty without love trouble, headaches, sleeplessness or neurosis". Although an oddity, she still manages to be "one of the girls" and to lead a social life in a society where individuals take refuge in group identities as a compensation for their feeling of insecurity. Mary's crisis begins when she reaches the age of getting married and when she becomes aware of her inadequacy and of her growing sense of incongruity: "They laughed, rather unpleasantly; in this age of scientific sex, nothing seems more ridiculous than sexual gaucherie...11 Mary's fear of sex and men brings about the collapse of her self-image which she had, until then, succeeded in maintaining whole. As the narrator comments, her "idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself A product of her environment and of her code of value, Mary is also and at the same time
9. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.35. 10. Ibid., p.40. 11. Ibid., p.45. 12. loc.cit. 116 alienated from it; she is an outcast and the symptom of her society's disease. The authorial voice never allows her to express herself outside the norms and frames which have been assigned to her. Mary will never be really able to "frame the self". The rest of the narrative portrays her gradual disintegration and her final annihilation.
Although published ten years after The Grass Is Singing was written, R.D. Laing's seminal study of schizophrenia, which influenced Doris Lessing at a later stage, describes the conflicts between the self and the world in a way which is very close to that of the novel. Laing challenges the clinical approach to madness by revealing its ontological and existential foundations; he also advocates a descent into the "underworld" of psychopathology for a better understanding of it.ÿ3 Insanity is a maladjustment between the self and society; yet, the delusion of the psychopath could also be the sign of a better insight into the "truth" of that society. Therefore, the analyst should be prepared to question his own approach to madness and to normality by looking at the patient-doctor relationship as a reciprocal interaction. Normality and objectivity become relative notions in Laing's view of reality as a social construct. One cannot see neutrally but only according to one's
13. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London 1972) p.25. 14. Ibid., p.27. 117 interpretation of reality. Very much in the line of Sartre's concept of "being-in the-world", but also in the tradition of Jung's identification with the patient, Laing treats ontological insecurity as a feature of our time, that is a time when identities are being threatened. The body is also a source of identification and a way of positioning oneself in the world. Laing shows how schizophrenics become divorced from the body as a symbolic link with reality. In the The Grass Is Singing , Mary's feeling of insecurity is felt as emptiness, as she sees herself as "a hollow inside, empty, and into this emptiness would sweep from nowhere a vast panic, as if there where nothing in the world she could grasp hold of",16 Her lack of sexual desire is also a sign of her "disembodied self". In a feminist tradition, Doris Lessing depicts the disintegration of women as they face marriage as the only alternative for self- expression. Perhaps it is more in a tradition of feminism associated with colonialism that one should look at Doris Lessing. Mary Turner is not only the tragic rebel against marriage, but also a tragic victim of her own status and identity as a colonial woman. Like Olive Schreiner's heroine in The Story of an African Farm, Mary Turner finds herself in a society "outside reality", as it were, the latter being associated with the metropolis, England. Her 15. Ibid., p.31. 16. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op. cit., p.45. 118 uprootedness is double-edged, allowing her, on the one hand, greater "freedom" and a lesser sense of social convention, but also, on the other hand, making her a complete outsider with no means of social identification. Having "inherited an arid feminism, which had no meaning in her own life at all, for she was leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa ... she understood nothing of conditions in other countries, had no measuring rod to assess herself with". Thus, Mary not only experiences the emptiness of the woman trapped in a stifling marriage, but also the void of colonial life cut off from the metropolis. The dreams and cultural fantasies that make the colonial identity are all present in the character of Dick Turner, a subdued figure in the novel whom critics, on the whole, have tended to leave aside. His is the dream of an arid veld as the source of stoic consolation. We are told that he suffers from claustrophobia and seeks refuge in his farming land. His hatred for the city arouses violent feelings in him. Looking at the "pretty little suburbs", his impulse is "to swear and to smash and to murder" and to "kill the bankers and the financiers and the magnates and the clerks-all the people who built prim little houses with hedged gardens full of English flowers for preference".ÿ® Like Mehring in Gordimer 1 s The Conservationist, Dick Turner
17. Ibid., p.36. 18. Ibid., p.47. 119
entertains an emotional relationship of love and hatred with the land. His only consolation is work; as we are told, he works on the farm "as only a man possessed by a vision can work". His other compensation is the dream of getting married and perpetuating his name through his children. His life is a lonely exhaustion through hard but unproductive labour (his farming is a series of misfortunes). Mary is part of Dick Turner's dream, and he can never relate to her as a person. Similarly, for Mary, Dick remains "a spare, sunburnt, slow-voiced, deep-eyed young man who had come into her life like an accident, and that was all she could say about him".2® Although both suffer from moral exhaustion and schizophrenia, Dick can still find solace in his land. His masculinity in a male-made world enables him to endorse the dream of the white male conqueror of new land. Mary is, however, forever excluded from that dream. Phantasmagoria is a major feature of The Grass Is Singing; it is also its framework of narration. Dream and reality merge to form complex patterns of interactions in the novel. As Mary's dreams take over the narrative, the novel slides towards a sustained state of confusion between fantasy and 19. Ibid., p.48. In that particular instance, Doris Lessing seems to be drawing upon the Pastoral tradition as exemplified in Pauline Smith's short stories. The desolation of the landscape, and the simplicity of the rural people (as opposed to the growing industrialization) contributes to the Pastoral mode of the novel. 20. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.51. 120 reality. As I have already suggested, both Dick and Mary are presented as deluded characters on the verge of dissolution. As Mary sinks into delirium, the narrative takes the shape of her inner chaos. The transition occurs when the couple settle on the farm. Mary leaves the city behind as a place of sanity which becomes irretrievable as the story proceeds. She attempts to "go back into town for that lovely peaceful life, the life she was made for, to begin again", but eventually abdicates and returns with Dick to the farm.ÿ Mary projects her fantasies onto the landscape, which is depicted as a pathetic fallacy. The veld is associated with the "natives" and is transformed into Mary's consciousness into a threatening force which is about to bury her along with the farm. The heat becomes an obsessive fixation for Mary, while Dick "could never understand her fluctuating dependence on the weather, an emotional attitude towards it that was alien to him".ÿ The emptiness of the veld also becomes a reflection of Mary's feeling of void. The landscape metaphorically imprisons Mary Turner in a process of "engulfment". Commenting on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Barbara Hill Rigney explains this process, using Laing's theory of "implosion": The sense of engulfment, according to Laing, can be compounded by a fear of what he terms "implosion". If the ontologically threatened person feels the self as a vacuum, as empty, 21. Ibid., p.103. 22. Ibid., p.137. 121
then he or she perceives a danger that reality or the world may impinge, rush in to fill that vacuum and overwhelm the self.2in The weather changes as Mary's mood changes; and the heat increases as she progressively loses all contact with the reality: She thought of the heat ahead with dread, but not able to summon up enough energy to, fight it. She felt as if a touch would send her off balance into nothingness; she thought of a full complete darkness with longing. Her eyes closed, she imagined that the skies were blank and cold, without even stars to break their blackness. 4 The whole landscape is reduced to a reflection of Mary's split self. In other words, the novel has adjusted the whole reality to the dimension of Mary's alienated psyche, so that it is impossible to differentiate between what is inside and what is outside it. The process of "enclosure" has been reversed, boundaries have been broken, and Mary's mind is now able to encompass new frames of reality. It is the cosmic vision in The Grass Is Singing which makes possible for the schizophrenic feeling of "inclosement" to be perceived in a perspective of enlargement. The character's consciousness holds the vision together in unity; Mary is described as "holding that immensely pitiful thing, the farm with its inhabitants, in the hollow of her hand, which curved round it to shut out the gaze of the cruelly critical world".
23. Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel (Madison 1978), p.53. 24. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.149. 25. Ibid., p.202. 122
As Roberta Rubenstein points out, The Grass Is Singing is not only a "breaking down" but also a "breaking through" of consciousness. As she writes, "in an insane situation, madness may not only 'make sense' but may be the only option available to the individual".ÿ® Doris Lessing not only questions such concepts as normality and sanity, but also situates her argument in a position where these concepts become crucial. The Laingian approach which she adopts urges her to define a new terminology to describe madness, one which would do away with the old stereotypes. It is interesting to note, in that respect, that Moses, as a character and as representing the oppressed "other", remains silent. Unlike Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing does not attempt to articulate her story from his point of view. Therefore, she is not faced with the same urgency to create a new language. In one of her interviews, she reflects on the possibility of writing Moses's story: With the anonymity I tried to sum up how the white people would see someone like this because they wouldn't see him very much as an individual at all. If I had made Moses a very particularized individual, that would have thrown the novel completely out, it would have been a different novel. Supposing I rewrote it from his point of view. For a start I don't think I be able to do it, which is another thing.A It seems, therefore, that what Doris Lessing is concerned with in this novel is to give a voice to
26. Roberta Rubenstein, op.cit., p.31. 27. "Doris Lessing. Interview", Kunapipi, vol.4, no.2(1982), p.126. 123
"the mad woman in the attic", following a Victorian literary tradition, rather than to give a voice to the colonized. Doris Lessing's emphasis on consciousness articulates the novel in a perspective of self- analysis . Although the heroine is on the verge of disintegration, she can still achieve moments of truth and self-illumination. Mary's dreams achieve the clarity of mind which her life has failed to give her. Before meeting her death, she sees herself "standing above the house, somewhere on an invisible mountain peak, looking down like a judge on his court". Then, she also sees herself as other people would see her: "an angular, ugly, pitiful woman". Her dead body, described as "a stiff shape under a soiled white sheet" at the beginning of the novel confirms the absurdity and meaninglessness of her life and of her death. x Through her dreams and her psychosis, Mary becomes increasingly aware of the falseness and self-destructiveness of life in the colony. She refuses to participate in it by resisting Dick's attempts at sharing his farming plans with her, confining herself to the house and, later, to the bed. Paul Schlueter reads the character of Mary as pure negativity, interpreting her childlessness as a
28. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gilbert, The Mad Woman in the Attic (London 1979). 29. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., pp.206-207. 30. Ibid., p.207. 31. Ibid., p.17. 124 sign of waste and desolation which reinforces the novel's sense of pessimism. Although he acknowledges "a persistent self-examination and analysis, an obsessive concern about female sexuality, self-conscious concern about 'freedom' in an essentially masculine world", he describes these attempts as abortive.ÿ Schlueter's view seems to exclude and dismiss Mary's attempts at breaking through new forms of consciousness. Without elevating Mary's death to an act of heroism, it is still possible to read it as a social indictment. Eva Hunter writes about Mary's death: the writer rejects her character, to the point of killing her off. The novel is not merely cautionary, it is also punitive of its protagonist, while even the note of high seriousness on which Mary's death takes place is double-edged in that it entails glorification of an act of (female) self- sacrifice that benefits no one. 4 This particular aspect of the novel has raised some concerns among critics in that its treatment of social reality remains ambiguous. As Betsy Draine's analysis has it, tragedy as a literary form entails a certain amount of determinism which takes the various forms of social and psychic predetermination in the novel and leads to fatalistic conclusions. The main contradiction is summed up as follows: "she [Doris Lessing] wants to present fully and vividly the mind of the white oppressor, represented here by 32. Paul Schlueter, The Novels Of Doris Lessing (Evansville 1971). 33. Ibid., p.21. 34. Eva Hunter, "Tracking Through The Tangles: The Reader's Task In Doris Lessig's The Grass Is Singing” in Kunapipi, vol.8, No3 (1986) pp.121-134. 125
Mary Turner. The more complete the sympathy for her (the oppressor), the less sharply the reader will condemn her racist cruelties". The problem, according to Draine, is that Doris Lessing presents her argument in tragic terms; and although this "helps to save dialectical method of analysis from being reduced, in the course of artistic representation, to the level of a static polarity", it also endows the heroine with romantic pathos and individual heroism. Draine concludes her argument by placing the tragedy of Mary and Moses "in their having been trapped by the collective conscience of their respective social groupings".ÿ7 Although tragic emotion is the dominant tone and shape of the novel, "within that shape, political realities are contained and transformed", as Draine finally concludes. Draine's argument illustrates the problematic relationship in the novel between the individual and the collective. The debate seems to lie between the socially and psychologically predetermined aspect of the story, on the one hand, and the space allowed by the novel for the characters free will and responsibility for their acts. Like Nadine Gordimer's characters, Mary is very much "shaped" by her environment, although she is also marginalized
35. Betsy Draine, Substance under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing (Madison 1983), p.4. 36. Ibid., p.6. 37. Ibid., p.24. 38. Ibid., p.25. 126 from it. Paradoxically, it is growing up on the farm that makes her a rebel. Mary Turner's final act of self-sacrifice does not bring about a conclusion, nor does it solve the main conflicts set up by the novel. It remains an individual act with no more repercussion than a few lines in a local newspaper. However, at the level of the community's collective consciousness, Mary Turner's murder has further reaching implications. In the first pages of the novel, the narrator provides a lengthy and detailed account of the reaction of the white community to the news of the murder. It is one of "anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something has happened which could only have been expected"., 39 Mary becomes the object of mixed feelings of protection and spite, "as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to be murdered".. 40 The presence of Mary's body "under a soiled white sheet" comes to epitomize the fears of whole community. What is more significant is that people keep silent in an attempt to repress the unconscious knowledge brought about by Mary's death. Mary Turner acts as the unconscious core of the collective psyche of her community, a projection of their fears and of their ambivalent feelings of
39. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.9. 40. Ibid., p.11. 41. Ibid., p.17. 42. Only the narrator can break that silence and provide explications. 127 supremacy and insecurity. As feminist theorists maintain, woman is the symbolic core around which patriarchy can hold itself together. It is the eternal other indispensable for the definition of a hegemonic masculine self. This is why woman is so often elevated and venerated as the keeper of the community's values. Although the Turners do not abide by the community esprit de corps and are in many respects ostracized by them, the murder of Mary still brings about a group reaction. Thus, through her death, the reader is able to assess the collective psyche of the white minority threatened by their own fears. Mary's death is no longer an isolated and meaningless act of abdication, but an event which questions the whole existence and legitimacy of the community. Therefore, what may seem, at first glance, an individual act with no political significance by a desperate and marginalized woman is given, in the novel, a social dimension. In other words, Doris Lessing places women back into the socio-historical sphere from which they had been displaced. She is aware of the complex interaction between individual and society, which becomes all the more problematic when it comes to being a woman in a predominantly male-integrated society. The Grass Is Singing deals with the dichotomies between the individual and the social, determinism and free will, male and female, black and white, through the use of an all-encompassing consciousness 128
capable of comprehending the contradictions it is faced with. it is, above all, a rational consciousness capable of describing chaos and destruction from a rational perspective. For instance, madness becomes an insight into our society and towards a better understanding of it. Lessing does not proceed by opposing the rational mind against the irrational forces of life, but by revealing how both are deeply dependent on each other. Therefore, the self is seen as a construct embedded in the social. Human beings and the world form a whole difficult to disentangle. The sociological and psychological discourses in the novel do not help organize reality into separate units, but reveal the complexity of it and the fact that it can never really be categorized. Consciousness and viewpoint are important notions to the novel. As the narrator of Bessie Head's A Question Of Power states, they present the reader with an incursion into a world "with the barriers of the normal, conventional and sane all broken down".*ÿ The "implosion" of the self enables the narrative to inhabit other spaces and to explode the conventional frames of reality. The distorted vision is an important element of the novel. Mirrors and frames recur in an attempt to capture the self into a picture. In the hotel room where Mary has escaped 43. This consciousness is later developed into a "feminine consciousness" in the "Children of Violence" novels and in The Golden Notebook. 44. Bessie Head, A Question of Power (London 1974), p.15. 129 from the farm in a last and unsuccessful attempt to return to normality, she encounters her own image in the mirror. For the first time, she realizes that "she [has] changed, in herself, not in her circumstances".*ÿ Then, Dick joins her in her contemplation and appears in the mirror reflection as a grotesque creature: "his sleeves flapped over spare burnt arms; his feet were sockless and thrust into hide boots".*® Both characters appear as portraits estranged from their own selves. Only Mary can attach a meaning to her self-image, noticing that she has changed "in herself". The image of the mirror is to be placed in the context of the novel's concern for psychoanalytical representations of the self, both in terms of race and gender, as in the case of the projection of Mary's sexual fears onto the character of Moses. Observing represents a central action in the novel. For instance, Mary watches Moses wash with an overtly sexual meaning attached to the scene: "He was rubbing his thick neck with soap, and the white lather was startingly white against the black skin".*ÿ Moses catches her gaze: "As she looked, he turned, by some chance, or because he sensed her presence, and saw her".*® Mary's reaction is one of anger at the idea that she could be sexually attracted to him. The gaze becomes loaded with
45. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit ♦ , p.107. 46. Ibid., p.108. 47. Ibid., p.152. 48. loc.cit. 130
significance in a society where "a white person may look at a native, who is no better than a dog".4** The narrator also tells us that "when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip". Catching each other's eyes, Mary and Moses also face their self-images and self¬ reflections. The gaze, as it has been suggested, is a way of framing the self. The "moment of fear" which Mary experiences after having whipped a black worker in the fields recurs when she sees her own feeling of guilt reflected in Moses's eyes: "she was trembling with fright, at her own action, and because of the look she had seen in the man's eyes".51 Similarly, Tony, the English visitor, catches Moses in the act of helping Mary put her dress on. While Moses performs his duty with "indulgent uxoriousness", Mary is looking at herself (once again in the mirror) with the attitude of "a beautiful woman adoring her beauty".52 This highly symbolic scene is underplayed by Tony's comment about the empress of Russia who used to undress in front of her servant because she thought little of them as human beings.53 Mary represses the ambiguity 49. loc.cit. 50. Ibid., p.153. 51. Ibid., p.127. 52. Ibid., p.197. 53. Ibid., pp.198-199. 131 of her relationship with Moses by answering Tony with self-righteousness, arguing that Moses "must earn his money".54 Lacan's essay, "Le Stade Du Miroir", highlights the role played by mirror reflections in the process of subjectification.ÿ The mirror sends back images of a fragmented body (le corps morcele), and not of a whole entity. Mirror images structure the relation between the self and the world. Significantly, mirrors abound in the novel. One of the first objects Mary notices when entering her new bedroom is a mirror: "There was a hanging cupboard, again of embroidered sacking; a stack of shelves, petrol boxes with a mirror balanced on top...56 Again, towards the end of the story, Mary catches Moses's eyes in the same bedroom mirror. In The Grass Is Singing, the problem of identification is both linked to being a woman in a male-dominated society and to living in a colonial society. The exchange of looks and the reading into each other's face which has been described earlier enacts a complex game of recognition and disavowal. Christine Brooke-Rose reads the mirror-images in literature as textual rather than psychoanalytical representations. She defines the two main functions of the mirror as distancing and framing. The mirror
54. Ibid., p.199. 55. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, Studies in the Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge 1981), p.161. 56. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.57. 132 / delineates the scope of the narrative, "for a mirror is not only a reflected instance, it is also a frame, as is a picture, as is any work of art ... which concentrates, and so intensifies, all that is explicitly within it, and leaves implicit all that is without". Brooke-Rose studies the mirror structures of James's The Turn Of The Screw in parallel with its subject matter and themes. Frame becomes equated, in the narrative, with consciousness, as it "is constantly expanded and shrunk, like the narrator's consciousness at the beginning, and it positively bursts, expanded to metaphysical heights and shrunk to sordid suppositions and trivial though passionate questioning.....58 Narrative frames open onto the "reality" of the text and, therefore, carry its ideological slant. Writers manipulate frames in various ways in order to achieve specific effects. As Brooke-Rose points out, texts elaborate strategies of framing through references intended to the "encoded reader" and through the use of narrative point of view and of mirror structures. Thus, writers construct their own versions of the "real" and of the "unreal". The frame is both the transition from reality to fiction and the representation of reality in fiction. Brooke-Rose holds the argument that in a world undergoing a "reality crisis", such as ours, such notions as
57. Christine Brooke-Rose, op.cit., p.164. 58. Ibid., p.187. 133
"real” and "unreal" are experiencing deep mutations, the nouveau roman being one example of this. To go back to our novel, it is important to show how its narrative pattern corresponds to its specific purposes. The double narration carried out by the omniscient voice of the narrator and by Tony, the English visitor through whose eyes the murder is first reported, is also one aspect of the novel's mirror structure. Beside the omniscient narrative voice who knows everything about the characters , the second narrator possesses a partial knowledge, mainly abstract, of the racial conflicts in Southern Africa, from what he has collected from his few theoretical readings on the region. Thus, the reader is offered different versions or interpretations of the drama. At the beginning of the novel, the omniscient narrator provides some information about the characters's backgrounds, explaining them to us in terms of socio-cultural characteristics. The reader is invited to read the characters within a sociological framework, as I have already pointed out. The rest of this chapter will examine the ways in which more direct insertions of "frames" within the novel occur. The novel starts with three quotations, which make the actual story of the book appear more distant. The first two are the extract from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the quotation from an unknown author ("It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its 134
weaknesses”). The two contrasting quotes (one acknowledging an English literature tradition, the other emphasizing the universality of the tale) introduce the main theme of the story. The extract from T.S. Eliot, from which the novel bears its title, not only announces the mood of the book but also presents us with a world where frames of reality have become distorted and no longer fit. To use a metaphor, the world Lessing describes in her novel is like the poem's "empty chapel" where "only the wind's home"; the absent windows and the doors that swing with the wind in the poem echo a world where borderlines between inside and outside have been erased and where frames have become empty, meaningless and of no use. The third quote is the newspaper extract describing Mary's murder. This is the first version of the story which is offered to us and which, as readers, we are invited to read together with the fictional local people who "felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction" and then "turned the page to something else" Still, the narrator is able to analyze critically the white people's reaction to the news of the murder, thus establishing a distance between the story and the narration. Therefore, from the very beginning of the novel, the reader is offered an ambivalent view of the events. He/She is invited to share a glance of
59. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, op.cit., p.9. 135
him/herself in the communal reading of the newspaper extract, which acts as a collective mirror reflection (i.e., the district people, looking for a self image, interpret Mary's death as a confirmation of their own existence as a community); and, at the same time, is offered a critical perspective on this image by a narrator (Charlie Slatter) who is often
too dogmatic or, sometimes, too naive. The reader, therefore, is left with the ambiguity of the narration and of the multiple mirror reflections which only complicate the matter, instead of clarifying it. As it has already been discussed, Mary's psychosis has the effect of blurring the borderline between fantasy and reality. At the end of the story, it is difficult to differentiate between what
belongs to Mary's imagination and what actually happens. The problem is to determine whether this aspect of the novel undermines its social message by giving it entirely subjective premises, or if it is
a language the novel adopts to put forward a more politically orientated meaning. The answer seems to reside in the political significance attached to frames of reality in the novel. Before Mary gets married and before she moves to the farm, one of her rare entertainments in town are the pictures. We are told that she goes there regularly and that this has the effect, mainly, of deeply unsettling her. She reaches a point where what she watches on the screen does not mean 136 anything; and she realizes that a displacement has occurred in her life, as "there seemed no connection between the distorted mirror of the screen and her own life; it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was offered".ÿ Not only does Mary fail in relating to what she sees on the screen, but she also rejects the screen as an improper reflection of reality, a "distorted mirror" that only reminds her of her own inadequacy. Because she feels alienated from a society where woman has no symbolic place, the heroine fails in identifying the self with the world. On the other hand, Dick does not simply understand how people could go to the pictures at all. He feels bored and cannot concentrate: "After a while he ignored the screen altogether, and looked round the audience ... at the hundreds of people flown out of their bodies and living in the lives of those stupid people posturing there". Dick Turner belongs to a different dream: the land as the sole and unique source of desire. He can only find meaning and self-identity there, whereas Mary is not able to share his dream, despite all Dick's attempts to induce her to do so. Dreaming, as a symbolic act, is an area where men and women do not achieve equality. At no point does Doris Lessing reunite her characters in an all- encompassing and reunifying dream. Fantasy is used as a way of putting forward inequalities grounded in
60. Ibid., p.45. 61. Ibid., p.47. 137
the social reality, and is far from diluting Lessing * s argument into an essentially psychologizing discourse. On the whole, frames and mirror images are
important to the general meaning of the novel. Beyond the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams, transfers, and self-representations, lies a deliberate intention to subvert our frames of reality, our versions of madness and sanity, and our reading frames to a certain extent too. One could generalize and say that the deterministic discourse of the novel, which I have identified earlier, is counterbalanced with a certain ambivalence in the narration. In other words, what enables the story to go beyond the dream, the myth, or the tragedy as fixed forms of reality and archetypal images, and also to go beyond the socially deterministic factors which lie behind Mary's murder, is the analytical and rational voice of the novel. This voice expresses itself mainly through the ambivalent frames which act like mirror images of reality and question their own validity as such. Psychosis and alienation are seen as ways of inhabiting new forms of realities. This idea prevails in Lessing's subsequent works and is developed in various ways. The second section of this chapter will examine how the novelist carries on her critique of our conventional approach to reality in her five novels series, "Children of Violence". 138
II. "CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE"
The "Children of Violence" novels, published over a period of seventeen years, follow the development of its largely autobiographical heroine, Martha Quest, born in Zambezia (a fictive name for Southern Rhodesia) towards the beginning of the century. The novels follow her development throughout her childhood and adolescence on her parents' farm, her life in the city, her marriage, her involvement in leftist politics, and her departure for London. The series starts as a conventional nineteenth century bildunsgroman, featuring the heroine's gradual development towards knowledge, awareness and maturity and ends on a radically different note by leaping into a futuristic apocalyptic vision. * While following a linear structure (starting with Martha Quest's childhood on the farm), Lessing also builds up other non-linear forms of narrative. As her writings question our ways of apprehending reality, they also reenact the problematic relationship between language and ideology, words and reality. The writer maintains a consistent framework throughout her series. The "quest- structure" of the novels channels Martha's consecutive experiences and her striving for "truth"
62. Briefing for a Descent into Bell (London 1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (London 1976) are Lessing's first experiments into what she calls "space fiction"; her later five volumes series, "Canopus in Argos: Archives" (1979-1982) explores this area fully. 139
and unity. Through this rather constant character, the novelist experiments with different discourses and inhabits different levels of reality. Martha is a rather mobile character, moving between various social circles and discovering different strata of her society. Lessing's attempt at writing a social psychology of the individual leads her to examine closely the complex relationships between the personal and the social. This constitutes a major theme in the novels, which read as an insight into the ways in which the self is constructed in an increasingly alienating world. The central theme of the "Children of Violence" is the growing awareness of the colonial woman brought up in a restrictive society, but whose marginalization allows her a deeper and more critical insight into it. As Nicole Ward-Jouve puts it, Martha is basically "uprooted"; she was born "uprooted" and this is what makes the originality of her vision.ÿ4 Her uprootedness is the starting point for her critique of society. The history of colonialism in Southern Africa is part of that general critical outlook; yet, it never constitutes the specific concern of the writing (unlike in the writings by, for example, Nadine Gordimer). In one
63. In that respect, Doris Lessing seems to subscribe to a realist tradition in her choice of names for her characters. Martha Quest becomes, ironically, Mrs. Knowell after her marriage. 64. Jenny Taylor (ed.), Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing (Boston 1982), p.91. 140 of her interviews, Lessing clearly confirms this point: You can't see the race feelings as if they're confined to Southern Africa. For example, India is as full of colour feeling, colour prejudice, as anywhere. You still have the untouchables system, a horrendous system. I think as long as one sees these problems in isolation, so long you'll not be able to understand them. If you're going to say in Southern Africa that the problem is that the whites want to enslave the blacks and that's the end of it, you're overlooking a great deal else. The aim of the present section is to study Lessing's approach to the issues of race, gender and self-representation. The ideas which are developed in "Children of Violence" will be examined in direct relation to the descriptions of "life in the colony" to see how both are connected. Even though Lessing never makes a clear-cut distinction between the historically specific and the cosmic vision, her writing still bears the mark of her time and place. Hers is a response to Southern African society which she expands into a philosophy of life. The autobiographical aspect of "Children of Violence" has often been a point of agreement among critics, much to the dismay of the writer. Without looking for a perfect reflection of the novelist in her character, one can still point out the very close interaction between the narrative self and the author, which seems to be part of the novel's overall concern for self-representation. Autobiography is an important feature of the writers 65. Eve Bertelsen (ed.), Doris Lessing (Johannesburg 1985), p.95. 141
who are the subjects of this study. It binds together the problems of narrative voice, of self¬ representation, of art in relation to reality, and to the personal as it relates to the collective consciousness. The interactions between the author and her heroine could be first examined in the light of their almost identical experiences. Like her character, Doris Lessing is the daughter of a "poor" (in terms of white Rhodesian society standards) farming family. She left home at an early age to work as a typist in the city, got married (to Douglas Knowell in the novels), and divorced ten years later, leaving the children of this marriage behind. Becoming politically involved, Doris started then to work for the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party, and was at the same time participating in a small Marxist group fighting for the rights of blacks. She married again in 1945, a Jewish German Communist immigrant (whose fictional name is Anton Hesse), whom she divorced four years later; she kept the son of that marriage. She left for England in 1950, carrying with her the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing. In 1956, she returned for a visit to former Rhodesia, and was subsequently banned as a "prohibited immigrant" because of her affiliation with the Communist Party. Doris Lessing left the Communist Party after Stalin's atrocities had been 66. See in particular the chapters discussing Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan and Bessie Head's A Question of Power. 142 revealed to the world. She has been living in London since then. This rather factual background information is necessary to understand the significance of "Children of Violence” and the way in which they stand in relation to reality. Covering a period of approximately thirty years (from the 1920s to the 1950s), with an emphasis on the climatic period of the Second World War, Lessing's concern is with revealing the interpenetration of personal lives and history. It is around the idea of an individual divorced from his/her world (as a colonial woman rebelling against her society), but also, and at the same time, of an individual who is a product of that society, that Lessing articulates her notions of self, society, determinism, freedom, and commitment. Martha's childhood is depicted at length in the first volume of the series, Martha Quest. From an early age, Martha feels dissatisfied with her environment; she seeks solace in books and in the desolate landscape surrounding the farm. Doris Lessing describes Martha's exaltation as follows: ... what I was describing in Martha Quest was that kind of ecstatic experience that many adolescents do in fact have. It's very common to adolescents, and I think perhaps it's overvalued. You'll find it described in religious literature too. It's not an uncommon thing, but it is a reminder perhaps that life is not quite so black and white and dried as we sometimes make it, and if you have had this kind of thing happen to you then it's something to refer back to, if 143
you are to make things too over- simplified.algçjut Martha's moments of epiphany are traversed with rebellious feelings against her family and against social conventions. Her friendship with the Cohen boys (the sons of the local Jewish shopkeeper), especially Solly Cohen, helps widen her intellectual horizon. Later, after having moved to the city, Martha joins the Left Book Club, before eventually becoming an active member of the Zambesian Communist Party. Shortly after her marriage, Martha experiences feelings of emptiness and estrangement. She violently rejects her image as a married woman, feeling "that everything about it [marriage] seemed false and ridiculous, and that Matty who apparently was making such a success of it had nothing to do with herself".68 The heroine is constantly divided between Martha Quest (her authentic self) and Matty, Martha Knowell or other social roles that she takes on. Even though Martha is aware of the fact that society forces her into taking on roles, she does not, however, rejects those norms altogether. Martha is still dependent on society for her existence. Lessing shows how Martha is trapped in the social norm in the sense that she is an intrinsic part of its culture. This idea is exemplified by her visit
67. Doris Lessing, "Interview with Michael Thorpe" in Kunapipi, vol.4, no.2 (1982). 68. Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage (London 1966), p.45. 144
to Solly, who has opted for celibacy and for an
austere existence amongst a community of "enlightened" intellectuals who have chosen to live in the "coloured" quarters of the city. Martha crosses over the forbidden line and enters the township where Solly lives. Solly's community is named "Utopia", (not intentionally, for the house bore that name before they moved in it, as Solly maintains). It does not host women, for, as again Solly explains, they would resent "to be torn away from [their] bright lights and [their] clothes".69 Solly strongly resents Martha's marriage as a betrayal to their friendship and to their common beliefs. Whereas Martha does not hold fixed principles, and whereas her feelings of inadequacy are confused and inarticulate, Solly is definite about his acts. He does not feel the discrepancy between principles and action, words and their significance, which is at the roots of Martha's malaise. Solly cannot share Martha's doubts, and he remains unsympathetic to her appeals to renew their friendship. Lessing's main point is that freedom from social constraints does not only mean transgressing the taboos, but also means a total cultural transformation. "Children of Violence" depicts the long and difficult journey of Martha across words, phrases and images. Lessing's notion of a "feminine consciousness" does not evade the problem of social, 69. Ibid., p.48. 145
psychological/ mental, and also symbolic conditioning. Lessing lets her character evolve, as it were, in the hands of her own contradictions. As the story proceeds, Martha develops as a character born of her own experience rather than the passive product of her society. The main difference between Solly and Martha lies in the gap between Martha's fragmented sense of identity and Solly's integrated self. Martha envies his clarity of mind and his lack of self-doubts. Solly's physical description shows no sign of fragmentation or self-questioning: Since she had seen him last, he had been to the university, quarrelled with his family, made a trip to England, almost got to Spain, had a love affair, returned, thrown up university for good. None of this showed on his face. He was exactly as he had been, tall, very thin, with a loose knobbly look about his movements. ® As in The Grass Is Singing, Lessing shows how men and women, despite the fact that they are both victims of the same system, do not share the same symbolic representations in it. In other words, she refutes the simplistic reconciliation of opposites by revealing how deeply rooted into our identities social images are. She never lets the reader believe that, behind Martha's imposed identities, lies a more authentic self. The "real" Martha is a myth, a necessary illusion for her existence in the world. Lessing's position is close to Sartre's definition
70. Ibid., p.47. 146 of the self as being dependent upon the other for its own existence. The quest structure of the novel seems to suggest that there is a truth at the end of Martha's "journey" which is sketched all through the five volumes series. Behind Martha's self-questioning, there is a constant yearning for a unified self protected from the divisive effect of society. As in The Grass Is Singing, the dominant voice of the narrative reunifies and organizes it into a single coherent and meaningful pattern. Martha feels increasingly divided as the idea of marriage as "a gigantic social deception" becomes clearer to her. Her body ceases to be her link with the reality: ... it was not that calm and obedient body which had been so pleasant a companion. White i.t was, and solid and unmarked but heavy, unresponsive; her flesh was uncomfortable on her bones. It burned and unaccountably swelled; it seemed to be pursuing ideas of its own. Inside the firm thick flesh a branch of bones which presumably remained unchanged: the thought was comforting.71 Her feeling of disintegration and of being "held together by nothing more than an act of will" are balanced with her moments of epiphany, where she sees herself as a unified whole.7ÿ She projects her longings onto the image of a second self, which is embodied in the idealized figure of a black woman as an integrated part of her community. This woman is
71. Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage, op.cit., p.74. 72. Ibid., p.75. 147 reunified with her world in a pastoral idyll. She is part of Martha's daydreaming: During those first few weeks of her marriage Martha was always accompanied by that other, black woman, like an invisible sister simpler and wiser than herself. 3 Martha's construction of a black female "other" corresponds to her growing sense of isolation and her incapacity to communicate her problems to others. Also it has to do with her failure in identifying with other (white) women in a society made of a "multitude of seclusions", and which perpetuates the myth of the nuclear family. Martha reaches out for the black woman as an alternative to her male-dominated and alienating society. Yet, her identification with black women does not go beyond the dream figure of the "black sister", who stands as the emblematic figure of unity within the self. Martha's pregnancy is also experienced as a splitting of the self, for its significance has been taken over by social norms. Martha's visit to the doctor is, in that respect, very revealing. First, she is led into the doctor's office by her friend Stella, who already knows the codes and the rules of the medical body. The doctor, who is of course male, books a room for Martha in advance in the clinic before telling her that she is pregnant, in case she refuses to keep the child. Martha has no control over her body and over her reproductive functions, both having been taken over by the medical power.
73. loc.cit. 148
She never really becomes reconciled with motherhood; and, after she separates from her husband, she decides to leave her daughter behind, as she does not want to reproduce her mother's image. In the light of Laing's theory of the split self, Martha's existential crisis could be explained in psychoanalytical terms, that is as schizophrenia caused by a discrepancy between the individual and his/her environment."ÿ Lessing's method follows, in many respects, a Laingian approach, in that it is not a pathological study but a method which explores mental disorders as a way of questioning its own sanity. In 1972, Lessing described Laing as a major influence who epitomized the ideas of her generation of intellectuals, for "all educated people look for a key authority figure who will then act as a law giver. Laing became that figure". Laing's influence on Lessing is apparent in the way in which Martha's crisis is minutely analyzed and in the manner in which its implications are thoroughly considered in the light of the relationship between the self and the world. The passage describing Martha's birthgiving reenacts a long and painful process by which the mother's sense of identity is threatened with
74. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London 1969). 75. Doris Lessing, New School for Social Research (27 September 1972), quoted by Nancy Shields Hardin, "Doris Lessing and the Sufi way" in Annis Pratt and L.S. Dembo (ed.), Doris Lessing: Critical Studies (Wisconsin & London 1974), pp.154-155. 149
dissolution. Martha tries hard to keep her sense of self whole: ... she kept alert the determination not to lose control of the process; while she was lit with curiosity as to the strange vagaries of time and, above all, and increasingly, almost to the point of weeping fury, that all her concentration, all her self-consciousness, could not succeed in creating the state of either pain or painlessness while its opposite was in her ... And when she was writhing with in the grip of the giant fist, she was gasping with determination to imagine no pain. She could not. With all her determination, she could not. There were two Marthas, and there was nothing to bridge them. Failure. Complete failure.76 Nothing can bring control over Martha's suffering, not even the other woman on the next table, whose pains are described as being "in jarring opposition to her own rhythm".77 Only the "native" cleaner's song brings comfort to her: She laid her wet dirty hand on Martha's striving stomach. 'Bad,'she said, in her rich voice. 'Bad. Bad. I As a fresh pain came, she said, 'Let the baby come, let the baby come, let the baby come. I It was a croon, an old nurse's song. Martha trembled with exhaustion, and tensed herself, but the woman smiled down and sang, 'Yes, missus, yes, let it come, let it come.'78 The black woman's entry into the narrative, just before the birth of the baby, reconciles Martha with her body. Martha listens to the sound of the brush Q "as if it were the pulse of her own nature".79 The black woman's presence near Martha is a hint at more organic community of women which stands in direct opposition with the "multitude of seclusions" 76. Doris Lesing, A Proper Marriage, op.cit. 164. 77. Ibid., p.165. 78. loc.cit. 79. Ibid., p.166. 150
described in the passage. Once again, the black woman appears momentarily in the shape of a highly idealized protective figure. The parallel between the body and otherness, symbolized in the image of the black woman, is significant in the light of the theories about the political interpretation of the body discussed in our second chapter. In Lessing, the role played by the representation of the body as a construction of the self is of considerable importance. As in Nadine Gordimer, the body moves away from the merely biological to become both a social and a political entity. Martha's effort to achieve unity within her fragmented body is also a way of voicing her striving for a united and homogeneous community. As in The Conservationist, body/other/community form a complex web of relationships. In the third and fourth volumes of the series, Martha moves away from the world of the individual body and enters the communal world of the political group. The Second World War and the rise of Communism are the two events that enable Martha to leave the confines of her home and to articulate her search in political terms. This period also corresponds to the breakdown of her marriage. It is in this outburst of violence, but also this storm of new ideas and this era of debate that Martha earnestly quests for "truth" and clarity. In this "state of embattled ideas", a group of idealistic 151
"ideological fighters" set up a communist party.®ÿ It is, however, remote from the reality of the country; and its clumsy attempts at establishing links with black political groups fail successively. Elias Phiri, the only black member, turns out eventually to be an informer.®1 The Zambesian Communist Party is of course a fictional representation of the Rhodesian Party of which Doris Lessing was a member. She herself describes the latter as being "a group of enormously idealistic and mostly intellectual people [who] created a Communist Party in a vacuum and a kind which no real Communist Party anywhere in the world would have recognized as such".®ÿ Like life in the colony, Martha's (and Lessing's) involvement in group politics bears the mark of exile, uprootedness and, to a certain extent, idealism. Lessing's concern seems to be with the articulation of a certain discourse (in this case, communism) rather than with the reality behind it. The black masses of Southern Rhodesia are a shadow in the text; in the group, they are absent except as topics of discussion involving the whites concern for universal humanism. Therefore, politics is looked at as a language among all the "languages" Martha endorses and
80. Annis Pratt & L.S. Dembo (ed.), Doris Lessing, op.cit., p.8. 81. The period described by Lessing precedes the rise of the nationalist movements, ZAPU and ZANU, which developed after the fifties. 82. Annis Pratt & L.S. Dembo, op.cit. p.8. 152 defects from (marriage, motherhood, communism). Politics as a text dominates the third volume of the series, A Ripple from the Storm, in which the history of the Communist Party is related in its smallest factual details. What is at stake is not so much the development of the party itself (for, as Lessing stated, it was politically insignificant), but the ways in which the war brought about new ideas which affected people's inner lives. Thus, the emphasis is on the mental and intellectual impact of historical and political events, rather that in the way in which those affected the reality. Doris Lessing records history as it is felt and as it is integrated into people's consciousness. Because, once again, the colony is remote from the metropolis and from its history, Lessing is only able to record a far cry from the main events, or as the title of the book suggests, a "ripple from the storm". The title could also be a hint at the ways in which events become significant only once they are part of our modes of thinking. In other words, the writer is concerned with conveying the subtle repercussion or "ripple" created by larger events on the individual conscience. Lessing questions our reality by distancing herself from it and by reading it as a text which has already been filtered through our consciousness. As Paul Schlueter notes, Martha thinks in literary 153 terms.®® Lorna Sage writes: "Martha ... is not only a character in a novel, she acts like a character in a novel”.®4 Literary references infiltrate the text of "Children of Violence"; and books play an important part, although they often are a random and eclectic collection of unrelated material, which Martha obtains through various channels. In her parents' house, the books which are available to her from an early age vary from fairy stories, poetry, to Dickens, Scott and Thackeray. There are also "books on 'politics' in her parents' sense of the word, such as the memoirs of Lloyd George, or histories of the Great War".®ÿ Yet, Martha, from an early age, shows a preference for poetry over "factual" books. Her relationship with the two sons of the local Jewish shopkeeper has the effect of widening her intellectual horizon and her scope of reading. From them she borrows works on the Jewish question and social histories. Through books Martha also becomes acquainted with socialist ideas. It is again a book ("the book" as it is referred to among the Communist members) which, revealing to the world the atrocities of the Stalinist era, brings about the collapse of Martha's political ideals. Similarly, Martha learns to map out her body with the help of "the book", a manual on sex and pregnancy.
83. Paul Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Carbondale & Edwardville 1974) pp.36-38. 84. Lorna Sage, Doris Lessing (London 1983) p.46. 85. Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, op.cit., p.35. 154
As it has been suggested, Lessing is generally concerned with recording discourse and with analyzing reality as a text. There is in the novel a departure from the dominant meaning of words and from the dominant notion of reality; the emphasis is, on the contrary, on positioning, on ideological bias and on reading between the lines. Lessing states this intention clearly at the beginning of A Ripple from the Storm: Again Martha did not listen to what was being said: the shortest acquaintance with politics should be enough to teach anyone that listening to the words people use is the longest way around to an understanding of what is going on.86 The rest of the novel is a detailed and subtle description of the relationship between language and politics, and of the ways in which our relation to reality is manipulated through language. The group's "intellectualism" adds to the novel's interest in ideas and to the latter's primacy over action. At the end of the fourth volume, Landlocked, Martha defects from politics as a discourse, and opts for the prophetic "vision" as a truer insight into reality. After having read Thomas's (her former lover and fellow activist) notebook full of obscure and random observations (sociological monographs, jokes, poetry), which he collected while having retired to a remote village of Southern Zambesia, Martha has a vision of truth. She tries hard to convince her comrades that Thomas's manuscript 86. Doris Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm, op.cit., p.13. 155 should be published, for, in her view, it is a revelation and a better insight into reality than any of the political pamphlets produced by the party. Yet, she soon realizes the incongruity of her idea, and the discredit which would affect the party if such a thing was ever to be done, and aligns herself to the party line. Lessing always keeps a distance between herself and the mystic tone that she sometimes adopts. As it will be discussed in the rest of this chapter, the overall frame of the series remains within the boundaries of the social reality, although it subverts and problematizes its significance. What Lessing is concerned with is the interdependence of language and reality. Her approach develops the Marxian idea of a dialectical relation between words and reality, the two being impossible to grasp in isolation. As Bertell Oilman explains, "for Marx the basic unit of reality is not a thing but a relation". Thus, the same words used in different contexts signify different things.®”ÿ In a silent interior tirade Martha Quest addresses the group of young Communists who are taking over the party after the old group have dissolved. She has a brief vision of history repeating itself; her tirade is tainted with deep pessimism: But my dear, sensible friends, without the "unreality", "the lunacy" (you'll be using 87. Bertoll Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (London 1971), p.71. 156
such phrases for years; you two will probably even get married on the strength of your disappointment over the "unreality") there would never have been anything at all, that's the point; it always happens like this; that is the point; the "if only" which is so important to you, which you will be muttering to yourself in five, six years' time to soften your feelings of shame, waste, nostalgia for what-might-have-been, well, that "if only" shows you never understood the first thi about what was going on. And never will.W Martha claims utopia as the only source of reality and shows her impatience with words and phrases. Her angry speech reveals a repressed side of herself, that is the mystic side which strives for unity, but which the rational mind, which knows the complexities of reality and the fact that contradictions can never be fully resolved, does not allow to take over. Lessing's Marxist heritage is manifest in her treatment of reality as a social text. As the Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson, writes: ... history is not text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but ... as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and ... our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.89 Language cannot be divorced from the reality it describes; both form a whole difficult to disentangle, unless by means of a conscious ideological analysis. In other words, one cannot escape from ideological bias. Martha is constantly
88. Doris Lessing, Landlocked, op.cit., pp.283-284. 89. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London 1981), p.35. 157 aware of the different registers of language and of ideology which she uses, and of the fact that she can not express herself outside them. However, she is not a total prisoner of her social and linguistic conditioning, for it is the consciousness of her limitations which paradoxically constitutes her freedom. This Marxian notion of freedom through consciousness is the basis of Lessing's treatment of reality. She incorporates it into her narrative structure by creating an all-encompassing consciousness in the novels which is able to contain all contradictions and to rationalize chaos. In her famous essay on novel writing, "A Small Personal Voice", Lessing makes explicit her aim in the series "Children of Violence". She describes the novels as "a study of the individual conscience in its relation with the collective".®® Lessing takes up the theme of social and psychological conditioning which she tackled in The Grass Is Singing, and articulates it according to her views on gender, society, politics and the self. Martha loses her sense of individuality as she acquires a group identity: "She lived in 'the group' and did not care about the judgments of anyone else. She felt as if she were invisible to anyone but the group". The group becomes a kind of shelter and a solace for Martha's "damaged" self, after the
90. Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice (New York 1974). 91. Doris Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm, op.cit., p.26. 158 breakdown of her first marriage and her refusal to be a mother. In other words, Martha deserts the life of the conventional woman, punctuated with childbearing and with household duties to adopt the life of an active political party member. As in Burger's Daughter, party comrades form a large "family", which replaces the conventional and institutional family and becomes a place where the heroine can find a new identity as a woman. After her disillusionment with the group, Martha opts for a retreat into solitude. She also, for the first time, achieves a fulfilling relationship with a man, Thomas. The garden loft where the lovers meet reunites Martha to the repressed world of her childhood. In this enclosed space, sexuality and self are rediscovered, after the collapse of her belief in politics. The fourth volume of the series, Landlocked, which deals with this period, gives way to dreams, visions, moments of recollection, and interior monologues much more than the previous ones. Martha takes refuge from the world in the tree-house to meet Thomas, or "simply to turn a key on herself and be alone". Unlike Gordimer in Burger’s Daughter, Lessing does not apologize for letting Martha indulge in a retreat from the world and in what could be termed a "narcissistic" contemplation of the self. The loft becomes
92. This book paves the way for the futuristic vision and the exploration of the psyche in The Four-Gated City. 93. Doris Lessing, Landlocked, op.cit., 103. 159 gradually her "home" and a place of survival in the midst of a crumbling world. According to the critic Nicole Ward-Jouve, Lessing has chosen not to belong: She [Lessing] has chosen herself as a being without a subconscious. Estranged equally from the dark continents of childhood, of Africa and of an inherited incorporated culture The text of The Children Of Violence chooses to ignore that it is informed by detachment rather than rootedness. It claims to be inclusive when it is exclusive. Like its heroine, it chooses exile, and claims there is only truth in exile. There is truth in exile. The only truth? Martha chooses to become a grail-seeker. A Quest. She chooses the way of the father.
This interpretation is of particular interest to our study of the ways in which identity is constructed in the Martha Quest series. Under the apparent smooth and coherent surface of the text lies a more chaotic reality which the text tries to repress. This undercurrent is what Ward-Jouve refers to as the "blanks" and the "blindness" of the text. It comes up to the surface at times as, for instance, in her traumatic relationship with her mother, in the repressed outburst of mysticism in her relationship with Thomas, in the silence over the mother-daughter relationship between Martha and Caroline. Contradictions are relegated to the margin, which is itself excluded from the text. 94. Doris Lessing explains how she had had, from an early age, visions of her childhood house crumbling and being submerged by the landscape. See Doris Lessing, Going Home (London 1957). 95. Jenny Taylor (ed.), Notebooks/memoirs/archives: Reading And Rereading Doris Lessing, op.cit., p.103. 160
Ward-Jouve distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge in the text: ... the "bodily" knowledge, which I shall with all the reservations and queries made earlier call "feminine", and which is certainly feminine in the sense we have a woman writer using the closely autobiographical medium of a female character to convey her sense of place; and the "abstract", political, knowledge of politics at large ... ® As Jouve's interpretation has it, Martha opts for the "abstract" and political knowledge, while still retaining some of the "feminine" concern with the personal, autobiography and with writing the body. Yet, Doris Lessing does not seem to oppose the two types of knowledge in such a way as Ward-Jouve describes it. Furthermore, she does not even view the two as being antagonistic. In her view of an integrated social set-up, such oppositional and irreconcilable concepts have no place. Far from advocating difference, Lessing seems to refuse the marginalization of women, as she transgresses gender barriers by putting forward the view of a dominant consciousness very close to Virginia Woolf's notion of the androgynous creative mind. The discovery by Martha of Thomas's manuscript is the climax of her gradual inclination towards the mystic experience. All through "Children of Violence", besides a realist prose consisting of naturalistically rendered details and of life-like dialogues, runs a more obscure stream of consciousness. Martha is split between the clarity 96. Ibid., p.109. 161 of mind that she achieves within the group and the feelings of illness and insecurity that recurrently take her away from the group. She then finds herself on more shaky grounds which she finds both attractive and dangerous: "the languor of fever was pleasant to her. She had been dreaming and she wished she might return to sleep, for the dreams had had the peculiarly nostalgic quality which she distrusted so much, and yet was so dangerously attractive to her".®** Martha dreams of imagined lands, of inner landscapes which she names "that country": She had been dreaming of 'that country'; a phrase she used to describe: a particular region of sleep which she often visited, or which visited her and always when she was overtired or sick. 'That country' was pale, misted, flat; gulls cried like children around violet-coloured shores. She stood on coloured chalky rocks with a bitter sea washing around her feet and the smell of salt was strong in her nostrils. 8 Images of the ideal city (the four-gated city), which, from her childhood, has been her place of retreat and solace from the world, recur throughout the series as a reminder that the quest pursued by the heroine can never be fully achieved. One is constantly aware of Martha's inner life standing in maladjustment with the world, despite her efforts to see herself as a symptom of her society, and, therefore, as part of its structure. As in Nadine Gordimer's prose, there is a "mystic" and poetic
97. Doris Lessing, A Ripple From The Storm, op.cit., p.95. 98. loc.cit. 162 undercurrent running alongside a more realist type of writing. Lessing, however, makes a deliberate and self-conscious decision of reconciliation in her writing. Even in the midst of chaos and confusion, Martha never loses grasp of her understanding of society. Her alienation is what paradoxically links her to the rest of society. Sydney Janet Kaplan describes Martha's consciousness as an "awareness of a historical perspective an awareness that her own personal history (and the history of her culture) has conditioned her response".” Martha's place in her society is never really threatened, although her sense of self is at times uncertain and on the verge of dissolution. Lessing makes Martha in control and able to explain her sense of dissolving identity. Lessing's concern for unity leads her to articulate the self and society according to a dialectical movement, i.e. she reveals how the two influence one another in turn, and how, instead of forming irreconcilable entities, they are part of a whole unifying system.100 Like Mary Turner, Martha has turned into an all-encompassing and integrated consciousness. Her unifying mind is her way of resisting the pressures of her manichean 99. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness In The Modern British Novel (Urbana 1975), p.148. 100. For a detailed study of the dialectical movements in the whole series of "Children of Violence" and how they relate to the writer's purpose, see Claire Sprague, "Dialectic And Counter- Dialectic In The Martha Quest Novels" in The Journal Of Commonwealth Literature, 14 (August 1979), pp.39- 53. 163
environment. Doris Lessing's concern for unity leads her to adopt Marxism or psychoanalysis as systems of thought which contain the individual within rational limits by explaining him/her according to his/her social or psychological history. In "Children of Violence”, Doris Lessing develops her analysis of the self fully by linking it to her notions of ideological frames and of a "feminine consciousness", which she first approached in The Grass Is Singing. Martha feels excluded from her society where values are predominantly male and white. Moreover, as a middle-class colonial, her knowledge of current affairs is second- hand and filtered through newspapers and books. Nevertheless, as it has already been suggested, Martha is still at the centre of society in the sense that she is depicted as essentially a product of it; a product of colonial politics, of the war in Europe, of post¬ war politics, and of the gender politics: Every fibre of Martha's body, everything she thought, every movement she made, everything she was, was because she had been born at the end of one world war, and had spent all her adolescence in the atmosphere of preparations for another which had lasted five years and had inflicted such wounds on the human race that no one had any idea of what the results would be. Martha did not believe in violence Martha was the essence of violence, she had been bred, fed and reared on violence. conceived, Lessing never fully reconciles Martha Quest with her world, with men, with the plight of other women which is never identical to her own, and with her 101. Doris Lessing, Landlocked, op.cit., p.202. 164 black "other" whom she unsuccessfully and repeatedly reaches for. Although the similarities between Lessing and Gordimer are obvious, Lessing, unlike her contemporary, does not seem to be concerned about whether or not her private experience as a white woman is relevant to the politics of her country. Instead, she describes how her version of reality is part of a system which it also intends to alter. There is undoubtedly in Gordimer a sense of a threatened identity, linked to the idea of a threatened position in society, both absent from Lessing's writings. There is also in Gordimer's fiction a strong sense of belonging to a time and place, which does not seem to be as central in Lessing's African fiction, which often transcends its setting by locating the plot within the larger context of world politics. Surely, Lessing's writings do not bear the pressures of time and history which are at the roots of Gordimer's writings, as we will see in chapter five of this thesis. Lessing wrote "Children of Violence" in London with most probably a British audience in mind, and with the aim of communicating her own experience to people from a wide range of backgrounds. On the other hand, Gordimer's books address specifically the white people of South Africa, by putting forwards values distinct from those promoted by apartheid ideology. The first book of the Lessing's series, Martha Quest, has often 165 been compared to the early Gordimer (in particular to The Lying days). In an interview Gordimer confessed that she had no knowledge of Lessing's books when she started writing: there was a similarity of development and experience between us where and when we grew up. In another sense those early novels complement each other, I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, "a continent" more more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. In their respective accounts of their isolated childhood experiences, growing up as a white female adolescent in a colonial society, Lessing and Gordimer get very close to each other and to their predecessor, Olive Schreiner. Schreiner expressed the conflicts of the white woman insulated within the confines of colonial life. However, she did not investigate the area of colonial and racial exploitations as much as she explored the dynamics of gender in her society. In both her fiction and in her political writings, blacks are very much peripheral to her concerns. On the other hand, Lessing's and Gordimer's writings are a response to the need to redefine white identity within the context of black nationalism. Even more so in the case of Gordimer, the idea of woman as the centre of male and white identity is part of the criticism of colonial society. However, it seems that for Lessing, who was writing at an earlier period,
102. Nadine Gordimer, "interview" in Kunapipi, vol.2, no.l (1980), p.25. 166 blacks are an abstract concept which does not occupy a central position. The "feminine consciousness" which is developed throughout "Children of Violence" leads to a general and global outlook on society. The final book of the series ends on a futuristic vision of apocalypse where humans have developed new means of perception in order to survive in their new post-nuclear environment. Gender and race differences are, therefore, transcended in the total mutation which has taken place. The transformation which Lessing advocates is of course ideological and involves new forms of understanding of the world. The novelist uses the body as an image for this mutation. In Landlocked, Thomas articulates this view as follows: "Perhaps there'll be a mutation though. Perhaps that's why we are all sick. Something new is trying to get born through our thick skins".103 The idea of change through a transformation dominates the view put forward in the series. It is a transformation which privileges the mind as the main site of oppression. Ideological categories have to be exploded to give space to new forms of understanding. In this perspective, race and gender are seen primarily as mental, rather than social, categories. Lessing's emphasis on ideology reveals at times a disregard for the more direct forms which oppression takes in society. Her recent collection of essays, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, 103. Doris Lessing, Landlocked, op.cit., p.122. 167 exemplify this tendency, notably in its concluding that parody and laughter represent the privileged means through which one can successfully destroy social constructs.104 To conclude, the study of Doris Lessing's treatment of politics, representation and ideology, as they relate to race and gender, has revealed an emphasis on the relative and "biased" nature of the relationship between fiction and reality. Lessing's approach is concerned with a certain number of basic issues, such as the way in which language structures our idea of reality, reality as an ideological text, the notions of fragmentation, rootlessness and cultural transformation. The next chapter will examine similar issues as they are treated in the novels of Bessie Head, and will discuss the latter's contribution to the debate around race, gender and identity.
104. Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside (Toronto 1986). 168
CHAPTER FOUR: BESSIE HEAD
Most studies of Bessie Head have placed a particular emphasis on the circumstances that shaped her life and her writing.ÿ- Head used her life story as fictionalized material for her novels extensively, revealing the interdependence of personal and collective histories. Despite the recent doubts raised by Susan Gardner about the veracity of Head's life story, it is still worth giving a brief account of the dramatic circumstances of her birth. Bessie Head summed up her origins as follows: I was born on the sixth of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplace was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me - naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman. Avoiding a sensationalist account of her life story, it is, however, important to recount the particular events that made "her story". Bessie Head was handed over to a "coloured" family, after having been
1. See, for example, Charlotte H. Bruner, "Bessie Head: Restless in a Distant Land" in When the Drumbeat Changes, 1981, pp.261-277. 2. For more details see Susan Gardner, IV VI Don't Ask For The True Story": A Memoir Of Bessie Head" in Hecate, Vol.12, No 1&2 (1986), pp.110-129. 3. As quoted in Charlotte H.Bruner, op.cit p.264. 169 rejected, firstly by her mother's family (after her mother committed suicide), and then by her white foster parents who thought she was "too black" to stay with them.4 At the age of thirteen, she moved to an Anglican mission orphanage, where she completed her schooling and obtained a degree in primary school education. She then took a post as a teacher, and later worked as a journalist, concentrating on teenagers I columns. In 1964, because of the failure of her marriage and her general disillusion with South Africa, she decided to emigrate to Botswana on a one-exit permit. She first worked as a teacher in Serowe, then moved to Francistown in 1966, where she began her carrier as a writer. In 1969, When Rain Clouds Gather was published and Head returned to Serowe, where she was to experience a series of psychic attacks. She was admitted in Gabarone psychatric hospital and only fully recovered after a year. In 1971, her second novel, Maru, was published; and two years later A Question of Power, a novel recalling her mental breakdown, appeared in print.® She then turned to writing accounts of rural life in Botswana and social histories of Southern Africa. She also published a collection of stories, The Collector of 4. For a more comprehensive review of Bessie Head's life, see Susan Gardner & Patricia E. Scott, Bessie Head: A Bibliography (Grahamstown 1986), pp.3-15. 5. Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather, (London 1969). 6. Bessie Head, Maru (London 1971) and A Question Of Power (London 1974). 170
Treasures, in 1977.ÿ In 1981, a documentary portrait of the Batswana village where she lived, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, was published.® A fictionalized history of Southern Africa, A Bewitched Crossroad, was her last published work before her death in 1985.® Posthumous publications have, since then, appeared. Donker in South Africa issued a collection of short stories, Tales of Tenderness and Power, earlier this year, which is due to be published by Heinemann in October 1990.ÿ® Head's correspondence with the editor of the New African, Randolph Vigne, appeared in print in August 1990.11
I. MARU
Ma.ru marks Bessie Head's move towards introspective fictional modes, which corresponds to her growing interest in dealing with the themes of identity, culture and alienation. The novel deals with the relationships between four characters who adjust to the changing power relations in contemporary post-colonial society. Margaret, the principal character, takes a job as a teacher and
7. Bessie Head, The Collector Of Treasures (London 1977). 8. Bessie Head, Serowe: Village Of The Rain Wind (London 1981). 9. Bessie Head, A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (Craighall 1984). 10. Bessie Head, Tales Of Tenderness And Power (London 1990). 11. Randolph Vigne (ed.), Selected Letters Of Bessie Head (London 1990). 171 is, for the first time in her life, confronted by the reality of her society. Having been brought up in the sheltered world of her foster-mother (from whom she bears the name), a white missionary woman who, in a moment of compassion, decided to adopt the Marsawa orphan child, Elisabeth inherits a humanism which she tries to adapt to the harsh reality of her environment. Her friendship with Dikeledi, a fellow teacher, and two men, Moleka and Maru, who are competing for her love, develops into a complex pattern of relationships. In dealing with the personal lives of the four characters, their antagonism but also their affinities, the novel explores the transformation of traditional Batswana society and the changing relations of power, especially those to do with gender. Drawing on the tradition of story telling and fable, Head is able to do away with realist conventions. The characters, for example, can foresee future action and alter the course of events by casting spells on each other. Gods and demons inhabit the lives of the characters as an expression of how they interact and of the different relations of power that determine their relationships. Beside their normal function as human beings, the characters are endowed with god-like proportions, which give the tale the aspect of an allegory and which, as it will be discussed later, imply that the tale is not to be taken at a single level of interpretation. 172
Like many African prose works, such as, for example Amos Tutuola's Tha Palm Wine Drunkard which attempts to revive the oral tradition of story telling through the English medium, Maru is a novel which combines the double heritage of European and African cultures and which addresses the cultural problems of contemporary post-colonial Africa. However, often blamed for writing "un-African" fiction, Bessie Head does not emphasize so much the clashing of cultures but explores the interacting influences of European and African cultures. In an interview, she explained her lack of cultural identification arguing to have "no frame of reference beyond [herself]". Nevertheless, as Christopher Heywood has demonstrated, Head draws, in her novels, on the San and the Batswana oral tradition and history. Like her African contemporaries p'Bitek, Soyinka and Achebe, Head uses the traditional past to understand the present reality of Africa. In Heywood's words, she offers "the vision of a future which has accepted and modified but not betrayed the traditional African past".ÿ4 This chapter will examine, among other things, the ways in which Head articulates her
12. Amos Tutuola, Tha Palm Wine Drunkard (London 1952). 13. Bessie Head, "Notes from a Quiet Backwater" in Drum, February 1982, p.35. 14. Christopher Heywood, "Traditional values in the novels of Bessie Head" in Daniel Massa (ed.), Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature (Malta 1979), p.17. 173
double heritage in order to deal with the questions of identity and multiculturalism. The plot of Maru is inspired from the story of King Cophetua, Head's favourite tale for many years. Again, Head did not choose a traditional Tswana folktale as a model for her book, but a story that she probably came across during her mission school days. King Cophetua, in Thomas Percy's Reliques Of Ancient English Poetry, falls in love with Penelophon, a beggar maid who has caught his eye.*ÿ Having previously cared little for women whom he treated with no regard and "did them all disdaine", King Cophetua becomes captivated with the beggar maid and marries her. The story ends on a glorious note: Their fame did sound so passingly, That it did pierce the starry sky, And throughout all the world did flye To every princes realme. 7 Ma.ru borrows from the ancient English poem not only the fairy story plot structure but also the simplicity of its tone and its allegorical connotation. On the other hand, as Head herself explained, the novel is a retelling of the pre¬ colonial history of Southern Africa in that it tries to provide a modern version of the story of the people who deserted their tribes because of power
15. Susan Gardner and Patricia E. Scott, op.cit., p.7. 16. Thomas Percy, Reliques Of Ancient English Poetry (London 1900). 17. Ibid., p.139. 174 rivalries and migrated elsewhere to start a new life: Power struggle were at the back of a lot of tribal migrations in the old days and I am fascinated by the people who gave way and moved off to start a new life elsewhere. I am trying to build it up with a philosophy behind it ... There was never peace about who would rule and African tribal history has a long list of assassinations murders and poisoning, a hunger for power, so that it built up two sets of people; people who hungered and those who gave way and fled in horror. In her short story "A Power Struggle", Head tackles the same topic and describes the conflicts within Davhana, the Tlabina chief's eldest son destined to rule but who is challenged by his power-hungry brother, Baeli, who attempts to assassinate him. Like Maru, Davhana opts for exile as a political choice, as he takes refuge with a neighbouring tribe. The people of the Tlabina clan eventually abandon Baeli, as they start to understand the message of Davhana's exile. The theme of Maru centres around the idea of power struggle but also as it relates to racialism and prejudice. It is also a model for Head's own exile. "To write an enduring novel on the hideousness of racial prejudice", as Head once said, was the purpose of Maru. The originality is that the story is not set in apartheid South Africa but in independent Botswana. 18. As quoted in Jane Grant, "Bessie Head: An Appreciation" in Bananas vol. 22 (1980), p.26. 19. Bessie Head, "A Power Struggle" in Bananas, op.cit., pp.23-24. 20. Bessie Head, "Social and Political Pressures that Shape Literature in Souther Africa" in World Literature Written in English, vol.18, no 1 (1979), p.23. 175
Head expressed several times the impossibility of writing in and about South Africa and the necessity for transposing the setting of her novels to Botswana. As she explained: "I could create a character like Maru, state that he was Motswana, but put three-quarter-part of my own stature as a human being into him. Create a Basarwa girl, put in three- quarter-part of my own stature as a human being into her" But also, by avoiding a particular setting, the story achieves a universal meaning as well as a warning about the future. In addition, Head avoids centring her subject on the issue of colonialism and apartheid. As in The Collector of Treasures, she does not hesitate to denounce the prejudice and the intolerance of traditional society, especially when it comes to its treatment of women. * Head uses the theme of the Marsawa as an oppressed group and centres her approach on the traditional past of Southern Africa and on the more recent history of colonialism in order to show the interdependence of the past and the present. According to her, oppression did not come to Africa with the arrival of the white man, but was already existent in the structure of traditional society. Thus, the struggle for freedom does not only mean a fight against white racism but a complete change of the power structures
21. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton (ed.), Between The Lines: Interviews With Bessie Bead., Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali (Grahamstown 1989), p.12. 22. Bessie Head, The Collector Of Treasures, op.cit.. 176 in society (including gender structures). The following passage in Maru illustrates this view in clear terms: Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the techniques of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man. 3 The rattling tin cans are what Margaret, when a child, was subjected to because she was a Marsawa, a member of the race of "untouchables" used by the Batswana as slaves to look after cattle. Head touches on the question of gender as part of her whole approach to power. Although they are not the central theme of the book, as is the case in her short stories, women's issues, however, occupy a relatively important place. The relationship between the white woman who adopts Margaret and the real mother who dies in labour is a complex and unresolved relationship of half-identifications across race and gender. Margaret Cadmore does not succeed in drawing a picture of the dead woman who fascinates and puzzles her. Frustrated, she scrawls the following cryptic note below the sketching with the words: "She looks like a Goddess". She can only partially share the woman's dejection but is unable to express this feeling. Her emotions are
23. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.ll. 24. Ibid., p.15. 177
hidden behind pseudo-scientific theories which secure her a position of power: She had no children, but she was an educator of children. She was also a scientist in her heart with a lot of fond, pet theories, one of her favourite, sweeping theories bedjÿg: environment everything; heredity nothing. Margaret Cadmore is also described as a woman with "a temperament high-strung, nervous, energetic, that made her live at the speed of a boat shooting over the rapids". Unable to express herself, she "took revenge with a sketch and pencil".ÿ® Margaret inherits the therapeutic knowledge of the white woman in the grips of her own neurosis by taking to painting. Her art brings her solace and comfort, especially during her period of mental depression.
Comparing the art of the two women, Dikeledi notices the almost identical styles "except that the younger disciple appeared greater than the master. It was a „ difference of temperament .27 The complex relationships of mirror-images between the bushwoman, the missionary woman and Margaret, who is the product of the two, point at the similarities between them, keeping in mind their unreconciled positions in society. Bessie Head saw the situation of black women as one which "[was] going to be very much to the forefront" As in her other pieces, the scramble for power and supremacy is associated with masculine 25. Loc.cit. 26. Ibid., p.13. 27. Ibid., p.87. 28. Fathers are absent from Margaret's childhood. 29. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.14. 178
attitudes. For example, men are described as being manipulative and unscrupulous about how to gain access to power. Maru employs three spies to control Margaret's actions and to confirm his intuitions. One of them, Ranko, is said to have "a camera inside his brain", a metaphorical image of male control. ® Pete, the school principal, Seth, the education supervisor and Morafi, Maru's younger brother who has an eye on the succession of chietancy, are an echo of the three spies in their vindictive attempts to dominate Margaret. The three men are portrayed as being insensitive, power hungry, irrevocably stupid and grotesque. They are a caricature of tribal prejudice and narrow-mindedness as well as opportunistic and bureaucratic attitudes. The education supervisor, for instance, is a comic copy version of the colonial officer "down to the Bermuda shorts".3ÿ The three men's worries over the scandal caused by the Marsawa teacher and their fear of being blamed by the Totems for having employed her in the school lead them to all kinds of scheming. Not being able to dismiss her on the basis of her race, since the school employment regulations do not allow it, the principal ponders over the idea of using the tacit discrimination against women: "She can be shoved out ... Its easy . She's a woman". But, not wanting to risk anything in case somebody "important" is backing her, they finally agree that
30. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.49. 31. Ibid., p.41. 179 they should instead orchestrate a riot in her OO classroom. * The decision-making positions which the men occupy reinforce their opportunistic attitudes and their sexism as they find themselves in total control over others. Moleka, also, uses this power when refusing first to give accommodation to Margaret. Later, Maru makes use of a similar device when taking back the bed which Margaret had borrowed. Women's sexual abuse is also an issue which Bessie Head approached in most of her fiction. Moleka's treatment of women as sexual objects and his control over them "there was nothing Moleka did not know about the female anatomy" coincide with his lust for power. Women are shown as the helpless victims of male domination, particularly as they have no means of avoiding pregnancy, which is presented as a major setback to their emancipation. Moleka's numerous children born of different women whom he had abandoned are associated with his destructive power. Later, Moleka seduces and impregnates Dikeledi in an act of revenge against Maru, who has fallen in love with Margaret. The rivalry between Maru and Moleka is part of their masculine desire for possessing. However, the unequal relationships between male and female characters are submerged by the metaphysical significance of the novel. Head does not make these
32. loc.cit. 33. Ibid., p.35. 180 issues the central theme of her analysis of power. Instead, the male rivalry between Maru and Moleka is presented as part of their mystic quest for truth. Margaret represents the inaccessible object of that quest. As it has been suggested, the symbolic element in Maru implies that the story is not to be taken at a first and literal level of meaning. The novel uses the language of dreams and symbolic images to put forward its message. For instance, words like explode, boil, kill, bomb, sea, wave, cloud are part of a symbolic code which refers to states of mind of the characters and to the ways in which they interact: Moleka was a sun around which spun a billion satellites. All the sun had to do was radiate force, energy, light. Maru had no equivalent of it in his own kingdom. He had no sun like that, only an eternal and gentle interplay of shadows and light and peace ... Did the sun have compassion and good sense? It had only the ego of the brightest light in the heavens. Maru preferred to be the moon. Not in any way did he desire Moleka's kingdom or its dizzy, revolving energy, but somehow a life-time of lovina between them was over in those few seconds. 4 The image of the earth, on the other hand, is associated with fertility and female creativity. Dikeledi embodies this idea: Dikeledi's kingdom was like that of the earth and its deep centre which absorbed the light and radiations of a billion suns and planets and kept on dreaming and brooding, recreating life in an eternal cycle. 5
34. Ibid., p.58. 35. Ibid., p.83. 181
Dikeledi falls pregnant at the end of the novel, echoing Margaret's outburst of creative energy. Head's use of male/female categories is part of her cosmic vision of a fragmented world, which also represents the unequal sharing of power in society. Once again, the symbolic dimension of the novel takes over the concerns for social and gender equality. As it will be demonstrated later, the two aspects of the novel, far from being mutually exclusive, carry the same function. As it has been suggested, the symbolic element in Ma.ru implies that the story is to be read at a second level of metaphorical meaning. Head's use of language and her characterization in Maru merge together the mundane and the symbolic, the literal and the metaphorical and challenge the reader's expectations of what a story should be like. The following passage provides a good example of this: There were two rooms. In one his wife totally loved him; in another, she totally loved Moleka. He watched over this other room, fearfully, in his dreams at night. It was always the same dream. Moleka would appear trailing a broken leg with blood streaming from a wound in his mouth and his heart. No one ever cried with such deep, heart-rending sobs as his wife did on these occasions. Often he would start awake to find those hot tears streaming on to his arm from her closed eyes. 6 Whether the two rooms are used metaphorically as two parts of Maru's mind or as dream images, whether Moleka's wounds are real or symbolic, and the fact that Maru's dream has the power to wake up his wife
36. Ibid., p.9. 182
are insoluble matters which blur the line between the real and the symbolic. As a result, the reader is constantly made aware of the arbitrary division between the two levels of meaning and of the uncertainty and subjectivity of reality. In an interview, Head acknowledged two literary influences on her writing, which also correspond to her two-fold personality: on the one hand, Brecht, whose insistence on rendering social problems appealed to her "practical person", and, on the other hand, D.H. Lawrence, whose "huge view of life" satisfied her attraction to "the mystery and riddle of life".ÿ In When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power, the influence of Brecht on Head takes the form of an emphasis on describing the development co-operatives which carry out small- scale community work. In Maru, the peasants working on the land and performing their daily chores provide the background of everyday reality and practicality, which Head saw as indispensible. The peasant women carrying water down the hill are the theme of one of Margaret's pictures. The emphasis is on both the physical detail ("the powerful curve of a leg muscle, resilience in the back and neck") but also on their symbolic Brechtian message ("Look! Don't you see! We are the people who have the strength to build a new world!"). Head also applied
37. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., pp.8- 9. 183 her idea of the practical act of survival to writing itself: Eventually writing begins to seem like any other chore. There is this strongly practical side to me, so that the things of the everyday world have high priority in all my works. Everything that is related to the everyday world is much more lovely than anything else. I remember very well saying, because that was one of my attitudes, 'Not the special "lily-white" artist, but somebody who touches the earth'. I remember relating the writing of books to baking bread and peeling potatoes. ° Writing constitutes the firm ground of certainty against the abnormality and insanity of reality. It seems that Head never resolves the tension between practicality and abstraction, inner and outer selves, the urge to communicate a message and the distrust in language, but she exploits these conflicts to convey the idea of everlasting and unresolvable contradictions in the human condition. These tensions are also apparent at the level of characterization. Rather than characters in their own right, Maru and Moleka are the two sides of the same personality. Arthur Ravenscroft interpreted the two characters as "symbolic extensions of contending character-traits within the same man". Craig Mackenzie sees all Head's characters as divided into two aspects as a consequence of her own sense of a split identity: The point is that Head is unable to affirm the values of African tribal socialism because of her alienation from 38. Ibid., p.24. 39. Arthur Ravenscroft, "The Novels of Bessie Head" in Christopher Heywood (ed.), Aspects of South African Literature (London 1976), p.179. 184
this world. Her ideal is the fulfillment of individual desires, yet her context is African, and so she divides one character into two each part of which a different yet equally necessary role.pÿays Male characters, particularly, are endowed with attitudes that make them types rather than characters as such. Whereas Maru and Moleka tend to stand for values and social norms, Margaret and Dikeledi have distinctive individual traits.ÿ There is, in the novel, a sharp contrast between inner and outer realities, and between the world of social norms and the individual aspiration for freedom. Maru's conflict is between his desire for self¬ integrity and the demands of the tribe chieftaincy. Feeling protective about his privacy, Maru affirms that "there is a section of [his] life that they will never claim or own". His place in society is that of the enlightened liberator; as he put it: "if I have a place it is to pull down the old structures and create the new".ÿ Like the novelist herself, Maru chooses the journey into the self: "All he wanted was the freedom to dream the true dreams, untainted by the clamour of the world"..43 He finally resolves this conflict by abdicating his kingdom and joining Margaret in her spiritual quest. The characters in the novel have double identities: their real self and the roles imposed by
40. Craig Mackenzie, Bessie Head: An Introduction (Grahamstown 1989), p.28. 41. This aspect intensifies in A Question of Power where the two male protagonists exist only as dream figures. 42. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.68. 43. loc.cit. 185
society. Head turns away from the roles to examine their "soul reality". Hers is a further exploration of Margaret Cadmore's motto: "environment everything; heredity nothing", since notions such as social environment and cultural conditioning fall short in Head's definition of identity. Her search is for a new terminology to express the relationship between inner and outer realities, social norms and individual freedom, self and other.
Therefore, Head expressed the tensions which are felt by her characters by drawing a fragmented portrayal of them. The whole notion of the character seems to be disrupted in Ma.ru in a manner which recalls the technique used in Virginia Woolf's novels. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus never meets Clarissa Dalloway; still, she is able to communicate with him and to anticipate his suicide. Septimus is the repressed self of Clarissa, who, as a woman of the world, has to perform a certain social role. The idea of the character as complete and rounded - as E.M. Forster defined it seems to be, in this case, false and not reflective of reality. In other words, the fragmented self can only be represented if there is a total reshaping of the notion of the character.
The characters interact at the level of unfathomable meaning and through the language of 44. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London 1925). 45. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth 1964). 186
dreams and symbols. Margaret and Maru are able to communicate through their dreams and visions, which are characterized by the same images, like the fields of yellow daisies that stretch to the cloudy horizon. Margaret's paintings are also a way of communicating through symbolic representations. All in all, there is in the novel a distrust for ordinary language and a reluctance to write a text which would easily yield its meaning. As we will try to demonstrate, this aspect is part of the relation between power, meaning and possessing which Bessie Head tries to articulate.
The search for a language is at the core of Head's two main novels, where the novelist undertook to write the self outside the social norms which shape it. In Maru, Margaret looks for a language through her paintings, which are a representation of her own history. The "snow white" mother goat and her "pitch black" baby who serve as models to her sketches are a reflection of her own history (and also of the personal history of Bessie Head). Painting is also the means by which the artist combats her alienation, for it is "the last link she had with coherent, human communication". Going back to the comparison between Head and Woolf, the ending of Maru bears some similarities with the final scene of To the Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe, in a last gesture of despair and torment,
46. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.100. 187
communicates with reality through her painting.47 Artistic creation is once again the bridge between the self and the world and the condition for her survival. The borders between the characters being blurred, they often seem to merge in one single consciousness. W.B. Yeats, referred to at the beginning of the story as the poet who made Margaret cry because she could not grasp his description of "a land other than her own arid surroundings", seems to occupy a larger place than that of a displaced poet. Yeats's notions of a single and universal "great mind" and of a "great memory" which is "the memory of Nature itself" are close to the idea of a spiritual unity between different minds, which underlines the whole novel.4® Maru's dreams "stretched across every barrier and taboo and lovingly embraced the impossible".4® Similarly, the narrative transcends the scope of the individual and reaches for the universal and all-encompassing voice. It ends on a vision of unity, as Maru and Margaret are "heading straight for a home, a thousand miles away where the sun rose, new and new and new each day".ÿ It is also probable that Head had read Jung or was familiar with his theory of the unconscious, although she never referred to him explicitly. Like 47. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London 1927). 48. B.W. Yeats, Essays And Introductions (London 1961), p.28. 49. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.110. 50. Ibid., p.125. 188
Jung, Head believed in reincarnation and in the power to communicate through dreams and visions. Jung explored the "darker side" of the self, that is the repository of timeless myths and symbols and primitive memories which he saw as the repressed side of our history. By analyzing his patients dreams as well as his own, Jung was able to discover his "own myth", as he put it, meaning the reality of his and other people's unconscious.ÿ As he wrote himself: "the content of psychic experience are real, and real not only as my own personal experiences, but as collective experiences which others also have".ÿ For Jung, the loss of identity, which he experienced at an early age, and the experience of the mentally ill were insights into the major problems of his time. In the dreams of his patients, mainly people who had lost their religious faith, Jung searched for "[a] personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires [which] lie behind the psychosis" and which represent "the substratum of our natures". Writing at a time of collapsing religious values and at a time when the two world wars brought about uncertainties and confusion, Jung was reacting against what he saw as the dehumanising effects of science and rationality:
51. Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.24. 52. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London 1963), p.69. 53. Ibid., p.186. 54. Ibid., p.127. 189
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daimonisation of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of the super- intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious." The myth, according to Jung, is "the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition" and a way of learning about the human condition.ÿ® Like Jung, Head undertook to write history from the point of view of the unconscious in order to reveal the hidden and suppressed side of human existence. As Jung was trying to come to terms with the prevailing ideology of his time by letting the unconscious speak for itself, Head expressed her own anxiety as a black woman who had inherited both the hidden dreams of colonial power and the aspirations of the suppressed and silenced blacks. Her cultural fragmentation is a way in to exploring the fragmentation of her society and of her history. As Gordimer creates sub-texts against a male and white dominant discourse, and as Lessing develops the idea of a divided female self,
55. Ibid., p.301. 56. Ibid., p.288. 190
Head gives a voice to the silenced world of myths, dreams and psychic delusions by situating her fiction in the subterranean level of the unconscious. Other writers have attempted to rewrite colonial and post-colonial history through a mythic journey through the unconscious. Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock, for instance, reconsiders the Conradian myth of the journey into "dark Africa" by telling the story of a group of travellers representing the different sections of contemporary Guyana society sailing upstream towards a mythic destination.ÿ In Beloved, Toni Morrison rewrites the history of slavery through a voyage into the memories of an ex-slave woman. Many women writers, such as Toni Morrison, Angela Carter and Nikki Giovanni, have acknowledged Bessie Head as a source of inspiration for their writing. The originality of Head resides in the fact that her approach as a black woman is an attempt to restore the silenced and repressed history by linking the themes of race and gender. Ann Pratt, in Archetypal Patterns In Women’s Fiction, analyzed how women writers escaped the pressures of male-dominated society by creating a Shakespearian "green world" of archetypal images where the female self can express itself fully. Examples such as Margaret Atwood's Surfacing show 57. Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London 1960). 58. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London 1987). 59. Susan Gardner & Patricia E. Scott, Bessie Bead: A Bibliography (Grahamstown 1986), p.3. 191 how women and Nature are used as a metaphor to put forward a message about the condition of women in a male-made world. Explaining the relevance of utopia to women's writing, Ann Pratt wrote: Just as in the novel of development and in the equal-marriage novel, the only possible abrogation of sexual politics is to project other worlds of being (extrasocietal solutions) Transcendence necessitates passing through and beyond sexual politics to a new environment, a new kind of space. This visionary fiction depicts the process by which the patriarchy's most marginal heroes attain a centricity within a wholly a-patriarchal space. 1 This does not necessarily imply that a essentially distinctive female culture exists in reality but that women artists resort to a fictive and a- patriarchal discourse as a means of expressing themselves. In this respect, Bessie Head seems to use a similar approach in that she creates "spaces" in her fiction where the spirit cannot be colonized. As she puts it: There was a world apart from petty human hatreds and petty human social codes and values where the human soul roamed free in all its splendour and glory. 2 Bessie Head had, from an early period, expressed the need for escaping the pressures and the harsh reality of apartheid through using non-realistic means of artistic representation. In October 1963, she reviewed the exhibition of a South African woman painter, Gladys Mgudlandu, who drew crowds of admirers. She described her work as follows: 60. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London 1979). 61. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington 1981), p.70. 62. Bessie Head, Maru, op.cit., p.67. 192
In her calm green valleys through which half-naked tribal women wend their peaceful way homeward in the late African sunset one can recline restfully with a cocktail and the past is the future and the present is the past... Who can resist her hypnotic call when life and reality mean ninety-day detentions and banning orders and bang, bang, bang?®ÿ
Thanking the artist for her "kindly service" and for not describing the squalor of life to her audience "who would rather forget", Head stressed the need for "a brief escape from the permanent madness of reality".ÿ4 Considering the fact that Head was expressing this view in the early sixties, at the time when realist novels about life in the township like La Guma's A Walk in the Night were being published, her attitude is most a-typical of her time. Nevertheless, Head's a-typicality is more than a simple matter of individuality and should not be taken at face value. Her handling of the themes of racialism, culture, belonging and the place of woman within the dominant ideology shows the topicality of her approach and sets her as a pioneer in the relatively recent tradition of fiction by African women. In her elegy poem "For Bessie Head", Ama Ata Aidoo called her "such a fresh ancestress", thus rescuing the writer from the marginal position which has traditionally been assigned to her.®ÿ Head's
63. Bessie Head, "Gladys Mgudlandlu: The Exuberant Innocent" in New African, vol.2 nolO (1963), p.209. 64. loc.cit. 65. Ama Ata Aidoo, "For Bessie Head", Kunapipi, vol.8, no.3 (1986), p.117. 193 next novel, A Question of Power, reveals the relevance of her approach to the questions of gender, race and discourse.
II. A QUESTION OF POWER
A Question of Power addresses the central themes of Bessie Head's life and work: identity, self, power and the quest for a voice. In this strongly autobiographical novel, Head took a journey into the underworld of her own psychological drama as a way to exploring the drama of her society. Making, this time, the subterranean world of dreams the frame of her novel, Head develops the idea of a collective unconscious experience, which she had previously touched on in Ma.ru. A Question of Power is a novel which has raised some controversy as far as its political content is concerned. It was also the first book by Head which did not sell.®® In Tasks and Masks, Lewis Nkosi described A Question of Power as a "disastrous failure" pointing at the "subjectivity of the writing [which] limits our sympathies". Furthermore, he described Bessie Head as "politically ignorant", although admitting that "she has only this moral fluency of an intelligent, intensely lonely individual, worrying about the problems of belonging, of close interpersonal
66. Jean Marquard, "Bessie Head: exile and community in Southern Africa" in London Magazine, 1978-1979 (New series vol. 18, nos. 9&10), p.54. 194 relationships, of love, value, and humanity".®7 Another critic, Kolawole Ogungbesan, saw Head's characters as only "interested in the business of living which she considers higher than politics, nation, race or colour".®® The purpose of this section is to challenge this view by showing the ways in which Bessie Head's novel is a political text, how the qualities listed by Nkosi as marginal and individual concerns are in fact essential notions, and, finally, how the novel contributes to the debate around the issues of discourse and representation, which have been approached throughout this study. A Question of Power follows the psychological paths of Elisabeth's disturbed mind rather than a plot structure as such. The scenes of "madness" are counterbalanced with scenes of everyday life in the village and of the community's efforts to set up a local agricultural project. As in Mam, the reader is directly confronted to the "soul reality" of the characters. The innovation is that, this time, certain characters have no existence outside their function as dream symbols inside Elisabeth's psyche. Sello and Dan other versions of Maru and Moleka appear only during the nightmares and the bouts of
67. Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks (Harlow 1981), pp.99-101. 68. Kolawole Ogungbesan, "The Cape gooseberry also grows in Botswana: alienation and commitment inthe writings of Bessie Head" in Presence Africaine, vol. 109 (1979), p.101. 195 psychic delusion which make up the largest part of the book. Elisabeth is haunted by the presence of Sello and Dan, who divide the novel into two parts bearing their respective names. More types than characters, they reflect the aspects of Elisabeth's personality which she has to come to terms with, such as her cultural fragmentation or her relationship with men. The dream sequences are a complex play of mirror images and projections, as they are part of Elisabeth's struggle to retrieve a sense of identity. The writer states her purpose clearly at the beginning of her novel: One might propose an argument then, with the barriers of the normal, conventional and sane all broken down, like a swimmer taking a rough journey on wild seas. 9 Elisabeth's quest goes beyond the boundaries of sanity and normality. The perception of the alien and of the insane constitute the narrative view point. As an "out-and-out outsider" in Botswana society, Elisabeth's perception is that of the woman exiled, who had already experienced marginalization and exclusion in her country of birth. Although she "had also lived the back-breaking life of all black people in South Africa" and although she identifies with the victims of oppression, Elisabeth never fully identifies with a specific group. Her
69. Bessie Head, A Question of Power (London 1974), p.15. 70. Ibid., p.19. 196
feelings of rejection by both white racialists and
Pan-African nationalists alike lead her to form friendships with a small circle of lonely individuals like herself. Eugene, Birgette, Kenosi and Tom are involved in local development schemes and represent an example of international cooperation with which Elisabeth identifies. Their friendship with her is one of the few positive elements in the novel. On the other hand, Elisabeth feels totally marginal amongst the local village people. She watches the peasant women setting off to plough the fields with a deep feeling of exclusion. Asking if she could join them, the only reply which she gets is: "a foreigner like you would die in one day, it's too dangerous".71 Rejection, inferiority and marginality form the basis of Elisabeth's insecurity. Her nightmares are dominated with the fear of being defective. For example, the Medusa blames Elisabeth for not being in tune with her people and for not knowing any African languages, as she also displays her genitals in front of her and accuses her of not having "anything near that".7ÿ Pointing at the nightmarish image of the agonizing "coloured" homosexual men dressed in women's clothes, the Medusa compares them to Elisabeth: "That's your people, not African people. You're too funny for words. You have to die like them".7ÿ The agony of the men is associated to 71. Ibid., p.60. 72. Ibid., p.44. 73. Ibid., p.45. 197 their being "coloured" and homosexuals, that is to their exclusion from the norm. Elisabeth's disintegrating sense of a cultural identity is merged with her feeling of sexual annihilation. Throughout the novel, the parallel between sexuality, identity and cultural identification plays an important part, emphasizing the sexual basis of racial prejudice. The narrative repeatedly remarks on the fact that Elisabeth has lost her analytical mind, that what is happening in her mind is beyond her control. Possessed by the idea of being a racialist herself, she eventually verbally abuses a Batswana radio salesman. She loses all control over herself and is, consequently, sent to a mental hospital. She later recovers, but falls under another psychic attack later. Yet, during her bouts of madness, she is able to achieve moments of intense lucidity into the problems which have caused her depression. Her voyage into the underworld of madness is also, as in Lessing's "Children of Violence", a breakthrough in that it enables her to express the stigma of her experience as an outcast from society. The subject matter of the story is how the colonized (Elisabeth as a black and as a woman) internalizes her/his oppression. In a Fanonian perspective, the novel is concerned with the psychological effects of colonial cultural domination and with how one can reconstruct a psychic structure without reproducing the patterns of power of the dominant ideology. Yet, Head does 198 not consider colonialism as an isolated phenomenon but as part of the larger question of power which the novel tries to analyze. The urgency to tell one's story is at the basis of A Question of Power, which Head identified as her most autobiographical piece of work."ÿ In 1962, Head expressed this urgent need to write a story: When I think of writing any single thing I panic and go dead inside. Perhaps it's because I have my ear too keenly attuned to the political lumberjacks who are busy making capital on human lives. Perhaps I'm just having nightmares. Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I’ve just got to tell a story./s Writing a story become equated with going beyond the colour-bar: If I had to write one day I would just like to say people is people and not damn White, damn Black and still make people live. Make them real. Make you love them, not because of the colour of their skin bqt because they are important as human beings. 6 Yet, it was more than ten years later that Head was able to, as it were, tell her therapeutic story, the story which would make her retrieve her psychic balance. Elisabeth's spiritual journey is an exploration of collective images and of the concept of power as part of our mental constructions. Through a disturbing ritual passage into the underworld of collective images, the protagonist searches for a
74. She wrote:"Elisabeth and I are one". Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.25. 75. Bessie Head, "Let me tell a story now..." in The New African, vol. 1, no9 (September 1962), p.9. 76. loc.cit. 199 meaning. Her first quest is for defining an idea of god outside the figures of authority provided by religions. Sello dressed in a monk's robe is the other face of Sello as a politician dressed in a brown suit. Elisabeth is aware of being excluded from the male concepts of religion and metaphysics, and she defines her relationship with Sello as being essentially masculine. She is conscious of being an intruder in an area where women have no place. As her friend Tom, with whom she shares a lot of her metaphysical anxiety, remarks to her: "You know, men don't really discuss the deep metaphysical profundities with women. Oh, they talk about love and things like that, but their deepest feelings they reserve for other men".77 Later, Elisabeth remarks on the fact that "journeys into the soul are not for women with children, not all that dark heaving turmoil.....78 The novel is a series of comments on how people throughout history have constructed ideas of power. Through fragmented visions and images (from a wide range of sources: Roman history, the Indian caste system, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism,...), Elisabeth tries to draw parallels between different periods in history. As she remarks: Nearly every nation had that background of mythology looming, monstrous personalities they called- "the Gods", personalities who formed the base of their attitudes to royalty and class; personalities whose deeds
77. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.24. 78. Ibid., p.50. 200
were hideous yet who assumed powerful positions,...7|nd South Africa is in the background of her quest. Her own history identical to Head's is given to us in detail at the beginning of the book. Life in South Africa, which is described as "living with permanent nervous tension", is what causes Elisabeth to question the ways in which inhuman and uncreative social systems have been erected: It was not a creative function. It was death. What did they gain, the power people, while they lived off other people's souls like vultures? Did they seem to themselves to be most supreme, most God-like, most wonderful, most cherished? Elisabeth felt that some of the answers lay in her experiences in Botswana. That they were uncovered through an entirely abnormal relationship with two men might not be so much due to her dubious sanity to the strangeness of the men themselves.a The narrative refers to the history of South Africa very little and in an allusive manner. For example,
Dan is said to have "gained directorship of the universe in 1910", which is the date when the Union of South Africa was formed.®ÿ- On the other hand, classical myths are given a major place in the novel. These, as it will be developed, constitute one of the most important aspects of the novel. Sexual metaphors are also a central aspect of the novel. As in Gordimer's late fiction, they carry a political message. Dan's "nice-time girls", as Joyce Johnson's interpretation goes, are a metaphor for different "political factions and interest groups
79. Ibid., p.40. 80. Ibid., p.19. 81. Ibid., p.25. 201 with which the nationalist leader may be allied from time to time". For example, each girl carries a symbol which identifies her with a particular group: peasants, agricultural workers, urban proletarian groups, unemployed workers, bourgeois nationalist OO groups, overseas interest groups. Similarly, the Medusa's aggressive sexuality is associated with her exclusive nationalistic attitudes. Elisabeth's inability to endorse a national identity is not only a problem of cultural identification but has also to do with her gender. Head's criticism of male politicians points, once again, at the difficulty for women to have a place and a voice within male- made social and symbolic structures. The question of women and national identity is an important one for Bessie Head who saw herself above all as "an international kind of person". Head was concerned with defining a common ground of identification beyond national boundaries in the face of cultural fragmentation. Hers is the unified vision of a future where the idea of the nation would no longer be relevant: Hand in hand with world government I clearly foresee a new race of people not nations or national identity as such but rather people - who are blending of all the nations of the earth ... These are the themes that have preoccupied me as a writer.84 82. Joyce Johnson "Metaphor, Myth and Meaning in Bessie Head's A Question of Power in World Literature Written in English, vol. 25, no. 2 (1985), p.207. 83. Bessie Head, "Writing out of Southern Africa" in New Statesman, vol. 110, no 2839 (August 1985), p.22. 84. Ibid., p.23. 202
Head's rejection of nationalism as narrow-minded and isolationist and the fact that she associates it with masculine identity point at the fundamental exclusion of woman from the concepts of nation and national identity. Women the world over have been regarded as the keeper of the national virtues around which a national identity can forge itself. The myth of a Mother Africa is an example of such a construction of "woman" as a symbol of the land which men are fighting to retrieve from the colonialists. The symbolic association between the rape of the country and the rape of a woman is deeply ingrained in both the colonialist's and the nationalist's collective unconscious. Miriam Tlali commented on the Mother Africa myth as follows: It is a problem when men want to call you Mother Africa and put you on a pedestal, because then they want you to stay there forever without asking your opinion and unhappy you if you want to come down as an equal human being!85 The revalorization of women as the mothers of the nation is a subtle form of exclusion and marginalization. In the colonial context where the identity and cultural integrity of the colonized are being threatened, woman acquires a larger significance for the men who see in her the last chance of survival as dominators. Thus, women become the symbol of the values which are in danger of
85. As quoted in Mineke Schipper, "Mother Africa on a Pedestal: The Male Heritage in African Literature and Criticism" in Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer & Marjorie Jones (eds.), Women in African Literature Today (London 1987), p.49. 203
being annihilated by the colonial power. Frantz Fanon's observations about colonial Algeria provide many examples of such a phenomenon. Fanon defines the colonized's resistance as a counter-offensive which is dependent on the colonizer's actions: In an initial phase, it is the action, the plans of the occupier that determine the centres of resistance around which a people's will to survive becomes organized. It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates négritude. To the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil. ® Fanon's interpretation of the cult of woman as a defensive reaction and as a means of resistance against colonial power occults the complex and problematic relationships of gender that underlines the social hierarchy of power. In other words, the colonized is not a homogeneous and unproblematic entity; on the contrary, it is also undermined by unequal relationships of power, notably relationships based on gender division. Although Fanon devoted a large part of his writing to the question of women's place within the struggle for independence and to their resistance against colonial and male domination, he did not problematize the idea of woman as a symbolic object and tended on the whole to regard the nation as unproblematic and undivided. Bessie Head deals with the areas which Fanon left unexplored by bringing
86. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (London 1970), pp.32-33. 204 the issue of gender to the forefront of her analysis of power. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf examined the place of women within the concepts of nation and patriotism.®7 On the eve of the second World War, Woolf was raising the question of whether women should blindly support the "nation" in its fight against fascism or if they should instead start questioning their place within the structures of power. For Virginia Woolf, patriarchy and fascism were one enemy. Yet, her comparison between fascism and the oppression of women was, at the time, regarded as scandalous: And abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion... The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together.® Because they remain economically and legally excluded from the centre of power, women are outsiders within the concepts of nations and countries: She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to 87. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London 1968). 88. Ibid., p.187. 205
protect "our" country. It If our country,"" she will say, "throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possession, "our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. "Our" country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our" country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For, "the outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."89 Forever displaced in the collective and national memory, women have to find a place elsewhere. The "whole world" is the place where women as an oppressed group remain undivided and unattainable by the categories which have been imposed on them for centuries and which have denied them their rights as human beings. Head's vision of a world without nations or countries expresses the same desire to situate herself outside rigid categories. In A Question of Power she develops the idea of "woman" as a construction of man's ego. The story of Isis reconstructing Osiris's body by putting together the dismembered parts of his body is described as the first work Elisabeth and Sello, in some previous existence, did together. In the ancient Egyptian story, Isis searched the land for the fourteen
89. Ibid., p.197. 206 scattered parts of her husband's body, which had been dismembered and scattered by Set, the god of darkness and drought.ÿ® Isis gathered the parts and buried them, except for the reproductive organs for which she was doomed to search endlessly. As a consequence, the land was struck with a drought; but Isis's tears for the dead Osiris (the dew) fell into the river Nile and unexpectedly provoked an inundation which made the land fertile again. Isis is a symbol of the "great mother" (also the teacher of agriculture) in a way which recalls the myth of Mother Africa. Elisabeth is identified with the figure of Isis as she is trapped in the roles of mothers and sisters which have been handed over to women for centuries. Yet, she also struggles to build a separate and independent position. As she tries to create a sense of an autonomous self, Elisabeth is continuously thrown back into the flow of icons and images which Sello and Dan project in front of her and into which she never fits. For example the Medusa and the Mystical Madonna restrict her within the binary opposition of the Madonna/whore and prevent her from expressing her own sexuality. As we are told, "sex had never counted in the strenuous turmoil of destiny behind Elisabeth". Sexuality, in the novel, is never described except as an alienating experience. The
90. Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology Folklore and Symbols (New York 1961), p.1420. 91. Ibid., p.845. 92. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.63. 207
image of Dan breaking the legs of "Miss Pelican
Beak" in order to make her fit into the size of Elisabeth's body conveys an image of masculine sexuality as essentially aggressive and destructive. Because he remembers "his role of God", that is one of control over the world affairs, and decides that the Pelican-Beak is "too dangerous", Dan cannot accept the carefree attitude of his partner and, instead, recreates a passive and "feminine" image of her by re-designing, as it were, her body.**'* As in Gordimer's and Lessing's fiction, the body is the site of identification and conflict. For Head, the fragmented body is a symbol of displacement and loss of identity. A Question of Power uses the language of dreams and myths as an insight into the reality. Drawing on various mythologies (Classic, Egyptian, Indian, African), the novel aims at achieving a universal meaning beyond cultural specificity. Head merges different myths from different origins together and creates a vision of unity. Joyce Johnson has studied in detail the symbolic patterns of Bessie Head's novels and has singled out a number of recurring symbolic images. The images of the sun and the moon, for example, are part of the Xhosian oral tradition which differentiate between "power which displays itself openly" and "power which is held in reserve
93. Ibid., pp.167-168. 208
or exercised in secret".ÿ4 The symbolism of the sun dissipating darkness is also associated with the classical figure of Perseus, whose labours represent the career of the sun and whose slaying of the Medusa symbolizes the victory of light over the dark forces of evil. In the morning, Perseus is separated from his mother, who is prisoner of darkness in the evening. Finally, the moon and the sun also are associated with the figures of Isis and Osiris. Besides representing the moon, Isis is also the wife and mother of the sun. Osiris, her husband, is a castrated figure whose eyes represent the sun and the moon. Bessie Head's favourite symbols (the rain, the sun, the moon, the darkness) convey an image of a world of primitive elements and cosmic images which is also the world of the subconscious, of the dream, and of the story submerged by the dominant version of history. Head identified the Botswana setting with this dream of an archetypal landscape where beings are finally reconciled with their environment. She described it as follows: South Africa, with its sense of ravages and horror, has lost that image of an Africa, ancient and existing since time immemorial, but in Botswana the presence of the timeless and immemorial is everywhere - in people, in animals, everÿÿay life and in custom and tradition.
94. Joyce Johnson, "Structures of Meaning in the Novels of Bessie Head" in Kunapipi, vol.8, no.l (1986), p.63. 95. Gertrude Jobes, op.cit., p.1258. 96. M.J. Daymond, J.U. Jacobs & Margaret Lenta, Momentum on Recent South African Writing (Pietermaritzburg 1984), p.278. 209
The description of the landscape reflects Head's utopian dream for roots and for a society where one can live in peace with oneself. She not only found in the land of Botswana the emotional distance from the trauma of her experience in South Africa, but also the necessary illusion of roots and identity which made it possible to write and recreate a sense of a self outside the restrictive boundaries of society which she abhorred. Thus, Botswana was for Bessie Head the mythic place where the imagination of the artist can find a place for recreation but also a home for the displaced woman in a male-dominated society. Like the fantasy worlds of her novels, the one in which she lived was also perceived as one of magic and myth. Stripped of its temporalness, it becomes an archetypal landscape of primordial elements. This is reflected in her descriptions, as in the following passage of A Question of Power: A lot of other things clicked into place after that. She had some savings. There was the small patch of unused school ground outside the school fence. A small whitewashed house sprang into existence there, overnight, built by the builders' work-group of Motabeng Secondary School. A dusty brown road swept past the door. The bush slept all around, and at night the insects communed with their own selves in long, brooding, plaintive soliloquies. The deep, black midnight sky vibrated with a billion soft blue lights, and at dawn the sun arose like a majestic king thrusting one powerful golden arm above the flat horizon. Only the bush, the brown road, the insects, the stars and the yellow-gold dawn remained a tender, background symphony.*'7
97. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.70. 210
The swift change from the descriptive account of every day life in the village to the cosmic vision blurs the line between the temporal and the timeless, and between the reality and the mindscape of the main character. The transition from night to dawn corresponds to Elisabeth's flow of emotions and to the symbolic passage from darkness to light. The text continues, leaving behind the description of the landscape and concentrating on the internal reality of the protagonist: There was no beauty or tenderness in her learning: What is love? Who is God? If I cry, who will have compassion on me as my suffering is the suffering of others? This is the nature of evil. This is the nature of goodness. 8 The landscape has in fact become the character's interior life and a projection of her dream of a more equal society. A Question of Power is permeated with a fascination with the land as a source of comfort and solace from the world. Elisabeth spontaneously chooses to work on the vegetable garden when Eugene offers her a job in the community development project. Gardening provides her with a sense of involvement and help restore her psychic balance. The image of the Cape gooseberry growing roots in the arid soil of Motabeng has been largely commented on as a symbol of Elisabeth's victory over her
98. Ibid., p.70. 211 alienating experience.” The novel ends on the image Elisabeth reconciled with her surrounding : As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over the and. It was a gesture of belonging.îoè It is interesting that Bessie Head has often been described as a "reincarnation" of Olive Schreiner and she herself showed great admiration for her writings which she described as "rich and beautiful".*®1 Head saw herself in the same position as Olive Schreiner, that is as a marginal woman in the grips of personal solitude. Beyond the divides of apartheid, Head attempts to set a tradition of women's writing through her identification with Olive Schreiner's role: I have much in common with Olive Schreiner - I too have a pioneering role as she did. I have been concerned myself with the trends that will evolve with independence. I'm caught between the times Africa was not independent and when it was. She had similar tendencies. She bothered about all South African questions particularly. I would say I've been concerned with African questions as a whole.1®* More than just the dream of belonging to Africa, Head's longing for a land involves more than one dimension. Her insecurity as a black woman deprived of all means of identification with a male-centred and white-dominated social structure lead her to an original treatment of the themes of land, identity,
99. See Arthur Ravenscroft on Bessie Head's novels in Christopher Heywood (ed.), Aspects of South African Literature (London 1976), p.186. 100. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, p.206. 101. Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.17. 102. As quoted in Jean Marquard, op.cit., pp.52-53. 212
and belonging. Like Schreiner, she revises the colonial tale of survival in a strange land by bringing into it the present politics of her country. The idea of a belonging to the land becomes a metaphor for having a place and a status within society. Yet, Head differs from Shreiner in that her analysis focuses, not only on gender politics and the marginalization of women, but also on the displacement of the colonized woman, excluded from her land, her people and her own self. As it has previously been suggested, although Head described women's oppression in harsh terms, she seems to concentrate on the symbolic structures of society as the place where one should make one's claim for equality, rather than on its material conditions. The emphasis is on spiritual growth as a precondition for social change. As she points at the manichean divisions of her society and at the difficulty to escape fragmentation at a psychological level, she also creates a utopian image of a reconciled world and of a consciousness which, like the love between Sello and Elisabeth at the end of the novel, "ha[s] included all mankind [and] equalized all things and all men".103 By creating a world where differences and conflicts have been erased, Head is also asserting a common morality beyond the divides created by apartheid. As Elisabeth explains to her friend, Birgette:
103. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.202. 213
'Something happened to me here, she said. 'It was the total de-mystifying of all illusions. The human soul is alone in the battle of life. It is helped, I think, by profoundly moral social orders, such as Moses established for the Jews. But at best they can only be outer guide-lines, outer reminders. The questions of tenderness, love, compassion, truth, still lie within. I can be destroyed.'104 Yet, as she demystifies the idea of power by revealing the inequalities behind it, Head also mystifies what she considers as an alternative to brutal and coercive power. This alternative is never fully formulated and remains, in the novel, latent and undeveloped. In an interview, the novelist commented on the fact that A Question of Power was written in gaps: What has been charming about the book is that people are not inclined to deride it. They accept it as some kind of account, but then it's a sort of book that's written in such way that it invites people to fill in gaps and notes where the author has left blank spaces. There are actually blank spaces in the book where the reader walks in and fills in. So the people who take up the book have a love of it, simply because of the uncertainties. I can tell you as much of myself as possible, but I don't know a],1 the answers to my particular experience.105 Rather than providing answers, the novel stresses the conflicting and unresolvable aspect of reality. As in Gordimer's fiction, Africa is presented as a field of contradictions which can never be fully resolved: The wild-eyed Medusa was expressing the surface reality of African society. It was shut in and exclusive. It had a strong theme of power-worship running through it, and 104. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.86. 105. Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.27. ' 214
power people needed small, narrow, shut-in worlds. They never felt secure in the big, wide flexible universe where there were too many cross-currents of opposing thought. 06 The condition of being divided between different values and cultures is seen as a state of turmoil and insurmountable tensions. Elisabeth is aware of a clash between her religious outlook inherited from her mission education and her African environment: So harsh was the present face-to-face view of evil that in a subconscious way Elisabeth found her mind turning with relief to African realism: a woman was simply a woman with legs; a man simply a man with legs, and if good and noble they earned a certain courteous respect, just as Christianity and God were courteous formalities people had learned to enjoy with mental and emotional detachment - the real battlefront was living people, their personalities, their treatment of each other. A real, living battle of jealousy, hate and greed was more easily understood and resolved under pressure than soaring, mystical flights of the soul. Conflict is easier to understand and resolve than cultural synthesis. It is interesting that when Head touches on problems of multiculturalism, her language becomes more cryptic as in an attempt to escape interpretation. The "soaring, mystical flights of the soul" remain within the domain of the unutterable. By refusing to provide answers and insisting on leaving blank spaces where the reader can "walk in", Head is undoubtedly aware of the power of language as a carrier of ideology. A Question of Power constantly reminds its reader of the acts of naming and of interpreting as political acts of power. 106. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, op.cit., p.38. 107. Ibid., p.66. 215
Reality is seeen as a series of interacting ideological texts. As Elisabeth examines all the elements which have contributed to her experience and to her person as a product of certain historical factors, she also reassesses the ways in which she had constructed a certain meaning of herself. The reader is also invited to consider the way in which meaning is being constructed by participating in this very process. The relationship between text and reader is itself dramatized as one of power, as reading is also creating a meaning. Head has been criticized for confusing the reader by blurring the line between reality and fantasy, history and fiction. For example, her history of Southern Africa, A Bewitched Crossroad, was described by Craig Mackenzie as a novel which "fails as a piece of fiction, and yet cannot claim its place as a thoroughgoing historical work either", the main problem being that the book lacks the rigour of a historical analysis and is dominated by the subjective voice of the narrator.108 Yet, the writer made her purpose clear at the beginning of the novel when she wrote: "the novel is not intended to be an accurate history of the Sebina clan or family but rather that the personality of Sebina was shaped as being representative of what history could have been like then".109 Head's interest lies in representing personality rather than fact. Writing 108. Craig Mackenzie, op.cit., p.47. 109. Bessie Head, A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (Craighall 1984), p.7. 216
history is exploring the "subtle war” of personalities, "not the war of spear and shield against cannon and gun, already fought and lost by most of the Southern African tribes”.110 The book concentrates on the history of the Sebina clan in the nineteenth century, its internal feuds, its encounter with European missionaries and with the foreign powers interested in exploiting the gold mines. The emphasis is on the interactions between traditional custom and Christianity and how personalities such as chief Khama the Great reformed traditional society without alienating it from its roots. Head concentrates on the "great men" who made history and is aware of the problems of such an approach. In an interview, she apologized to feminists: ...oh, I love these big men! If I haven't got them, I create them! You see, simply, leadership and power have so often been in the hands of men. There's this big feminist movement in the world today and we dare not say "this grand man" but rather, "this nitwit". Well, anyway, forgive me, feminists...111 Like Miriam Tlali, Head does not want to falsify history by creating unrealistic female heroines. However, this does not mean that she does not give women a voice. The book devotes one whole chapter to the abolition of bogadi (bride-price) by Khama in 1890 and to the condition of women under customary law. Paid in the form of cattle, bogadi which
110. Ibid., p.57. 111. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.16. 217
still persists nowadays in certain rural areas of Botswana - keeps women totally dependent on their husbands. Although it gives women a privileged and honoured place in the society, bogadi makes women the property of their fathers and husbands and prohibits them from inheriting cattle wealth. Khama also made the kgotla (chief's court) accessible to women who previously had to ask a man to appeal on their behalf. Therefore, women are present in Head's historical account, which tries to give a different angle of perspective from the history textbooks which have, more than often, been written by white men. One would be tempted to add to the words on the book cover describing the novel as a "unforgettable story ... seen for the first time through the eyes of a black African” that it is also seen through the eyes of a black woman whose task is to inscribe women back into the history from where they have been displaced. Going back to A Question of Power and to its purpose as writing history from the point of view of the displaced and marginalized, it is interesting to consider the definition of history proposed by Frederic Jameson and Julia Kristeva. Jameson's definition sees the relationship between history and its narrativization as a fundamental and necessary
112. See Bessie Head's article written for the international women's year: "Despite broken bondage, Botswana women are still unloved" in Times (London), 13 August 1975, p.5. 113. Bessie Head, A Bewitched Crossroad, op.cit• / pp.164-173. 218
distortion of historical "fact". In her essay "Women's Time", Julia Kristeva examines the problematic place which women occupy within history. She defines two concepts of time: on the one hand, the linear time of language and of the father, and on the other, "monumental time", i.e. the domain of the repressed and of the unconscious. She argues that the first generation of European feminists fought for a place within linear time by identifying with a universal concept of woman and by claiming equality with men. The second generation of feminists (post 1968) coincides with a distrust in the political and with a questioning of patriarchal notions of history and time by inhabiting the space of "jouissance" and subjective time.114 In the light of Kristeva's ideas and of what has been argued earlier about woman's place within the concept of the nation, Head's distrust in the discourse of black politicians and her reluctance to identify with ideologies become signs of a conflict arising from her being a woman in a male-dominated world. It seems that Bessie Head is faced with a similar contradiction as the one highlighted by Kristeva. Hers is an exploration of women's space of difference and of their fragmented identity rather than an identification with male power. Eventhough, as it has been stressed, she deals with the practical issues of unequal power sharing, she does
114. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time", The Kristeva Reader (Oxford 1986), pp.187-213. 219
not put forward immediate solutions or reconciliations, but instead emphasizes women's position in society as eternal "others" and outsiders. The journey into the images of both the unconscious and society raises our awareness about what is usually relegated to the margin. Head writes history from the point of view of the insane, the exile, the marginalized woman and the colonized. And it is as such that the novelist takes us to the forbidden spaces of transgression to re-examine our mental constructions of race and gender. So when Lewis Nkosi wrote: "Bessie Head is not a political novelist in any sense we can recognize", he made a point, for the purpose of A Question of Power is to explore the non-recognized areas of discourse. Before ending this chapter, it is perhaps appropriate to give Bessie Head the last word about her political intentions in writing A Question Of Power: I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall in the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations and I work both within the present and the future if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, or a
115. Lewis Nkosi, op.cit., p.102. 220
world that's much grander than the one we've had already.116
116. Lee Nichols, Conversations With African Writers: Interviews With Twenty Six African Authors (Washington 1981), pp.55-56. 221
CHAPTER FIVE: NADINE GORDIMER
Nadine Gordimer's fiction from the mid-sixties onwards marks a departure from the liberal faith in reforming society and reflects the need for more radical changes, and for a total restructuring of white identity. This radical shift in her fiction starts with The Late Bourgeois World (1966), which confronts the failure of a white liberal who has committed suicide, and the choice which his wife has to make in deciding whether or not she should help the black nationalist movement or, like her husband, abdicate. Liz, like her author, has reached the stage where no compromise is possible and where one has to make choices. Gordimer's subsequent novels are shaped on a similar pattern which leaves the ending open, suggesting that the rest of the story (and of history) is still to take place. In her late novels, Gordimer leaves the safe ground of her early realist prose and explores more original forms of narration as a way of dealing with reality in a more radical way. Also, the novelist approaches the themes of race and gender as related issues by translating political problems into sexual terms, and vice-versa. History, landscape and sexuality form a complex and intricate structure yielding to various interpretations, as in The 222
Conservationist, for instance. Gordimer also portrays the contradictions of the white woman in South Africa, privileged by her colour but oppressed on account of her gender. Following the feminist line of women writers like Olive Schreiner and Doris Lessing, she portrays the contradictions of the white woman struggling in a hostile and patriarchal society. Gordimer's late heroines react against the stifling boundaries of colonial life by reaching for the "black other". The novels' treatment of gender will be the particular focus of this section.
I. A GUEST OF HONOUR
Starting a discussion on Nadine Gordimer with A Guest of Honour is, in a way, beginning with the end.ÿ The novel opens with the return of Bray, an ex-colonial commissioner who had been expelled from the country because of his involvement with the black nationalists, to an unspecified newly independent Southern African country (probably Zambia). A Guest of Honour is an attempt to break the stifling boundaries of South African life and explore the larger space of third world politics. In line with the Pan-African philosophy of the 1960s an early 1970s, Gordimer undertakes to write the politics of national liberation into fiction. She does so through the character of Bray who struggles
1. Nadine Gordimer, A Guest Of Honour (Harmondsworth 1973). 223
to establish a continuity between an unretrievable past and a new emergent Africa. Bray travels over the African landscape recollecting memories of his previous stay as a district commissioner. At the same time, he enters a new era and a new country, even though the latter remains largely dependent on the colonial cultural legacy. Like Lessing and Head, Gordimer is concerned with describing the psychological dimension of the colonial and post¬ colonial condition. Bray realizes that he is a stranger in a familiar place as he is welcome for the first time as a guest of honour and not as a master. Although he joined the blacks in their struggle and suffered the consequent retaliation from his fellow whites, Bray faces the fact that he
had not fully grasped the implications of his return to independent Africa. As he leaves the capital and enters the remote and neglected province of Gala, his sense of confusion heightens. This transition corresponds to a subtle change in the mode of narration. From a realist "comedy of manners" style, the novel moves to a more abstract and mystical mood. Two alternating styles, the political essay and poetic prose, run throughout the book; the latter, however, takes over when Bray becomes increasingly absorbed in a mystical relationship with nature. The novelist uses her talent in creating dialogues and her acute sense of interpersonal relationships and their transposition into politics to present her reader 224
with a view of internal power struggles and personal intrigues. She refuses to romanticize the idea of independence as the ultimate goal, and is more interested in dealing with the conflicts and contradictions which arise from the process of de¬ colonization. The latter does not simply entails replacing one set of values with another, but a total ideological restructuring. The text of the novel consists for its largest part of factual accounts of African history, important dates, names of famous politicians and main ideological debates. Bray's story and the story of Africa are two separate texts running in parallel and which never merge together in Bray's fragmented consciousness. They appear in a relation of contiguity and, therefore, questions Bray's position as an ex¬ colonial. There is in A Guest of Honour a self-conscious attempt to construct an African tradition. The narrative includes a wide range of references, from Frantz Fanon to Nkrumah, and discusses the various debates in African politics. Bray's historical text is of a different kind; it is shaped around the well-ordered images of his English country house in Wiltshire and of his wife, Olivia, the two being inseparable in his mind. As he tries to link the two histories, his mind fails and, on more than one occasion, is submerged by an overwhelming feeling of void and confusion. In the midst of insurmountable contradictions, Bray experiences some intense 225
moments of epiphanic clarity. His symbolic crossing of the river to meet Shinza, the exiled leader is one of these epiphanic moments: Feeling his way through the past, he drove, without much hesitance at turnings, to Shinza's village. A new generation of naked children moved in troops about the houses, which were a mixture of the traditional materials of mud and grass, and the bricks and corrugated iron of European settlement. It is significant that Bray should go back to Fanon on a sleepless night to look for Shinza's words quoted from The Wretched of The Earth: "Stop thief!", a warning against the birth of a national bourgeoisie after independence, and against simplistic definition of power as black versus white. Although Bray takes in Fanon's message, he still returns to his mother ideology and his mother country in order to interpret his experience: All the hours of these nights when he was in turmoil he was also in the greatest peace. He was aware of holding these two contradictions in balance. There was a crony of his mother's who used to say gleefully of anyone who found himself suddenly subjected to extraordinary demands Now he knows he's alive. He wondered if she had known what she was saying. As in E.M. Forster's fiction set abroad, the novel emphasizes the inadequacies of the white man in comprehending his new surrounding in terms of his inability to feel and of his desire to control the reality around him through his rational mind. Now, Bray realizes the shortcomings of his rational explanations: 2. Ibid., p.124. 3. Ibid., p.310. 226
All his life he had lived by reason; now unreason came and paradoxically he was resolved; whole; a serpent with its tail in its mouth. An explanation? The point was that he didn't feel any necessity to ask an explanation of himself. None at all. A certain "truth" is finally attainable in the midst of contradictions and chaos. Yet, it is never articulated in the novel. Bray is shot down by mistake by a gang (probably rioters who mistook him for a government agent) on his way to the capital. He dies on the verge of a revelation which is never formulated: Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a word of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I've been interrupted, then - * The last sentence is also interrupted and Bray's story is, as it were, never completed. Bray's death is ambiguous and has been interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, Michael Wade reads it as a challenge to the traditional conception of the novel as tending to an ameliorative end, that is one from which a lesson of experience can be learned. It is also a move from the romantic hopes of revolutionary change which prevail in Gordimer's preceding novel, The Late Bourgeois World. In portraying a cyclical vision of life based on continuity rather than
4. Ibid., p.316. 5. Ibid., p.492. 227
finality, the novel holds change and renewal as basic patterns of reality.® This interpretation reinforces our previous remark about the non- definite and contradictory nature of the post¬ colonial condition. However, it seems difficult to go as far as Stephen Clingman does in interpreting Bray's death as an act of commitment: If his life is in part a struggle to claim Africa as his own, then at least in his death Africa has claimed him. Above and beyond the colour of his skin, therefore, Bray is in a sense a new "everyman" in Africa, searching for new grounds of affiliation in new historical conditions. Gordimer does not give solutions, nor solve contradictions; she only reveals how the white liberal ethos has failed to comprehend the reality of Southern Africa. Besides, the main criticism of liberalism as an ideology has been that it failed to take on board race, class and gender differences and has merged together unequal sections of society in an idealistic and unproblematic concept of "humanity". In A Guest of Honour, Gordimer draws a analogy between politics and sexuality, which she takes up again in her following works. Bray is going through a political crisis, but also through a middle age crisis. His affair with Rebecca reflects his fear of growing old and his uncertainties. Bray refers to Rebecca repeatedly as "the girl" and enjoys
6. Michael Wade, Nadine Gordimer (London 1978), p.161. 7. Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer (London 1986), p.125. 228
patronizing her: "Ah yes, how nice to set oneself up as the mentor of a rather lonely young woman, to explain her to herself".8 However, more than an indictment of the masculine complex of superiority, the contrast between the doctrinal and the sensual (Bray/Rebecca) serves to portray a different way of belonging. Rebecca is associated with the landscape and its regenerative forces, and is often pictured barefooted merging with the earth. Using the cliche of the "earth goddess" (a kind of white version of Mother Africa) with no formal theoretical knowledge, Gordimer contrasts two ways of belonging. Unlike Bray, Rebecca does not see herself as a foreign body in the landscape to "be spewed out once and for all, or ingested".ÿ Instead of posing herself in these terms, she rejects ready¬ made concepts and is "proprietorial with pleasure"; words fail to convey her presence: There she was, herself. The self that couldn't be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was there. 0 Whereas Bray progressively "disappears" and his sense of identity dissolves as he never comes to terms with his new experience, Rebecca remains the strongest element in the novel. She survives Bray and, although she returns to Europe, she never finds a home there. The novelist seems to suggest that 8. Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour, op.cit., p.250. 9. Ibid., p.223. 10. Ibid., p.407. 229
because the white woman is "colonized", she does not carry the weight of Western civilization, and, in a sense, as a "privileged oppressed", has a claim on the land. In her short story "Six Feet Of The Country", the male protagonist is startled by the resemblance between his wife and his "boy", despite their physical differences.ÿ If women do not bear the burden of civilization, the question is how do they enter history. Rebecca's symbol is the island, i.e. a place of retreat and escape. The psychoanalytical significance of the island and the symbolism of water associated with Rebecca is brought to the novel to contrast an idea of masculine sexuality as domination. Elaine Fido, in her essay "A Guest of Honour: A Feminine View Of Masculinity", interprets Bray's search as a quest for a masculine identity. Bray associates political power with sexual potency. He sees in Shinza an image of both and feels jealous of him. Elaine Fido explains: Clearly then, Gordimer is in line with feminist thought in examining the relation of sexual potency and political drive in the masculine psyche. Like other feminists, she criticizes, in the person of ay, paternalism and patriarchal domination. As Fido points out, Mweta and Shinza represent two versions of masculinity. Mweta is described as "small", "feminine" and "handsome", whereas Shinza
11. Nadine Gordimer, Selected Stories (London 1983), p.79. 12. Elaine Fido, "A Guest of Honour: A Feminine View of Masculinity", World Literature Written in English, vol.17 (1978), p.35. 230
is closer to Bray and fits into the conventional image of masculinity: he is "tall" and "physically imposing". Bray feels admiration mingled with envy for Shinza's paternity. The image of the father holding his baby boy, an ironic reversal of the Madonna with child, haunts him long after his visit to Shinza. Mweta and Shinza are very much portrayed from the outside, for Gordimer's experience prevents her from an internal insight into Black politics. But, above all, the two politicians are used as reflections of Bray's conflicts and complexes, rather than as characters in their own right. By identifying Shinza with masculine power and by projecting his own feelings of failure onto Mweta, Bray subscribes to the colonial sexualization of the other.
Finally, the two female characters, Olivia and Rebecca, remain in the background and do not play an autonomous part in the novel. Nadine Gordimer is dealing primarily with the male-dominated world of politics, where the part played by women is restricted to wives and lovers. Gordimer is, as it were, stealing glances into the world of Black politics where she is doubly excluded as a woman and as a white South African. She seems, however, to enter this world in a rather uncritical manner. Considering the fact that the novel reads, in many respects, as an expose of African politics, as it has been pointed out, it is surprising that no 13. Ibid., p.34. 231
mention is made of the role played by women in liberation struggles. It is all the more startling since black male politicians themselves have made this point part of their political agenda. A Guest of Honour makes the link between sexuality and politics, a theme which Gordimer goes back to in her subsequent fiction. Rebecca heralds Gordimer's future heroines in Burger's Daughter and A Sport of Nature. Yet, as it has been suggested, Gordimer's portrayal of women is strongly reliant on cliched images and on the metaphor of woman as nature. This point will be analyzed further in the rest of this chapter.
II. THE CONSERVATIONIST
In the The Conservationist, Gordimer portrays the downfall of the white ethos in South Africa through the character of a white city industrialist who retreats on his country farm where he thinks he belongs.** Mehring's land is described as: The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season. A landscape without theatricals except when it became an arena for summer storms, a landscape without any picture- postcard features (photographs generally 14. See, for instance, Samora Machel, "The Liberation of Women is a Fundamental Necessity of the Revolution", Opening Speech at the First Conference of Mozambican Women, 4th March 1973, Mozambique: Sowing the Seeds of Revolution (Zimbabwe 1981), pp.17-32. 15. Nadine Gordimer, The Conseirvationist (London 1978). 232
were unsuccessful in conveying it) a typical Transvaal landscape, that you either find dull and low-keyed or prefer to all others (they said). 6 Gordimer ironically keeps a distance between herself and the tone of the description. The farm corresponds to the whites I ideal of an "authentic"
African landscape; a higher and empty place remote from the indigenous people (significantly, the narrator notes the absence of "indigenous bush or trees" in the landscape). As the novel proceeds, Mehring becomes pray to his own fears which he projects on the landscape and on the obsessional image of the dead body found on the farm. Mehring's haunted mind and the reality around him merge together in the final sequence of the novel where he becomes the (imaginary?) victim of an attack. The end of the novel is ambiguous in that, although it is not clear whether Mehring physically dies, he disappears totally from the narrative. The image of the land is important in the novel in that it links the different levels of Mehring's personality together. It is the reflection of his repressed unconscious which he explores as he moves about on the farm recollecting fragments from his past married life. The land also represents the female body which Mehring violates in the same manner as he tramps on the land. It is the symbol of the white ruling class originally formed on the "African farm" as well as the site of a pre-colonial African tradition. 16. Ibid., pp.24-25. 233
The different codes of the novel are connected through a series of transpositions between the sexual, the political and the psychological. The novelist takes up the parallel between the political and the sexual developed in her previous novel. Mehring's ownership of the land goes hand in hand with his obsession for possessing women. He refers repeatedly to the "special pleasure in having a woman you've paid"., 17 Mehring sexually abuses a young girl on an airplane; reconstructing the girl's body in his mind, Mehring is in fact exploring his own boundaries. As Judie Newman puts it, Mehring's sexuality is basically autoerotic.1® Woman as a mirror for masculinity runs in parallel to Mehring's denial of the blacks' existence. His liberal-minded wife and son arouse suspicions and mockery in him. The idea that his son might be a homosexual, beside being a conscientious objector, provokes violent reactions in Mehring. The second parallel is between the landscape and the image of the body. Gordimer exploits the cliched metaphor of the land as a female body. As Mehring walks across a lucerne field, he feels the air as "a sweetish whiff of summer breath from the mouth of a cow, or the mouth of a warm sleepy woman turned to in the morning".1® The body is not only female but
17. Ibid., pp.77. 18. Judie Newman, "Gordimer's The Conservationist: "That Book of Unknown Signs tl tl in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol.22, no 3 (1981), pp.36. 19. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, op.cit., p.10. 234 it is also the dead body of a black man found on the farm, who is also strongly associated with the earth. Instead of removing him as Mehring ordered it, the police officials bury the dead body on the farm. The flood brings him back to the surface, and it becomes a haunting and obsessional presence for Mehring who tries to get rid of it. The dead body is a "black spot" on the immaculate island which Mehring has created for himself. At a psychological level, it represent his unconscious premonition of death. Mehring is struggling to leave his mark on history and on the landscape. He is obsessed with the image of animals or people leaving a space in the landscape after they have left. He watches the mark left on the grass where the children have played; when his guests have left, he stares at their dents in the chair cushions. Yet, the irony is that, instead of leaving his mark on history, Mehring is ousted from it and from the narrative by the body of the dead black man. Gordimer makes the marginal dead body the centre of the narrative around which all the other images revolve. There is an analogy between the dead body ousting the white figure of authority out of the story and Kristeva's definition of the Semiotic remodelling of the Symbolic order in that the former is associated with the subterranean forces of the unconscious and the repressed side of human existence. At the narrative level, Gordimer abandons the realist techniques of her previous novels and 235
uses the stream-of-consciousness as a main device. Mehring's wandering mind becomes the trajectory of the novel. It moves in and out of reality, as Mehring is in a state of stasis between sleep and consciousness, between life and death. The story
itself is set in the static autumnal season, "a pause between two seasons", which, as we are told, is the time when white settlers frequently commit suicide. Mehring's monologues are progressively submerged by another narrative. Stephen Clingman sees subversion , in its literal sense, as the main feature of the book: Just as the body, buried beneath the surface of Mehring's farm, comes to control his destiny and reclaim the land, so the sub¬ text - or sub-version, we might call it - of Zulu myth comes to control and appropriate the surface narrative of Mehring's stream of consciousness, and take possession of the text as a whole.20 The other narrative is conveyed through the use of Zulu myths and the rituals of initiation performed by Phineas' wife. Judie Newman studied in detail the use of myths in the novel and the extracts from Henry Callaway's anthology of Zulu myths, quoted as epigraphs at the beginning of each section of the novel. She writes: The quotations are the organizing points for a sub-text which slowly comes into the foreground. The story appears to be that of Mehring and the white in South Africa but reveals itself as that of the blacks. Each quotation introduces or reinforces an event
20. Stephen Clingman, op.cit., p.163. 236
in the novel, surreptitiously at first, later more explicitly.21 The myths refer to the cyclical patterns of birth, creation and rebirth. For instance, the image of the reeds, which symbolizes the origins in Zulu mythology, is used as a symbol of rebirth.22 The dead body is also part of the sub-text, re- emerging to the surface of the main text, haunting it, and eventually taking over. Stephen Clingman suggests that: From the perspective of those in power, who have imposed a "social text" on their world, the replacement of a framework of reality is nothing less than a social insanity; it is the known world that for them disappears, and a "wor turned upside down" that replaces it. In other words, the basic pattern of the novel is that of a revolution, of the subversion of one framework of reality by another, of a Bakhtinian carnival. This is a step forward from the reformist outlook of Gordimer's early fiction where reality was reinterpreted with a view to being improved eventually. Clingman's historical contextualization of the novel points out the radicalization of the opposition movements in the 1970s and the fact that reforms were no longer on their political agenda. Thus, the novel is in alignment with Black Consciousness and with its rejection of white liberalism. The relations between narrative, ideology and history are apparent in the structure of The 21. Judie Newman, op.cit., p.32. 22. Ibid., p.32. 23. Stephen Clingman, op.cit., p.166. 237
Conservationist. However, the division between text and sub-text seems sometimes to be contrived and, as Clingman notices, the novel's reliance on symbolism makes its political message unclear and vague. Also, the insertion of Zulu myths clashes with the rest of the novel. The gap between "means and ends" and "desire and reality", as Clingman puts it, indicates uncertainties on the part of the novelist. As in the novels of Bessie Head, fragmentation at the level of narration seems inevitable. Jan Mohamed also remarks on the fact that: Because a practical synthesis between black and white cultures is rendered actually and even potentially impossible by the decades of apartheid segregation, Gordimer resorts to a rather vague mystical - symbolic merger in The Conservationist. 6 The transition from realism to symbolism also corresponds to the passage from a liberal mode of thinking based on definite truths to a more uncertain and different kind of "truth". Gordimer uses symbolism as a quotation in what Clingman on describes as a post-modern collage. ' This point is of considerable importance, especially placed in the context of the problematic post-colonial representation of reality. It seems that Gordimer's definition of culture is based on an acceptance of
24. Ibid., p.168. 25. Ibid., p.160. 26. Jan Mohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst 1983), p.125. Jan Mohamed uses the word "utopia" to describe the symbolic mode of the novel. 27. Stephen Clingman, op.cit., p.162. 238 disruption. Quotation is, for Gordimer, a means by which she expresses her adhesion to the majority. In her essay "Where Do Whites Fit In?", she writes: Those of us who stay will need to have the use of our heads in order to sustain the emotional decision that home is not necessarily where you belong ethnogenically, but rather the place you were born to, the faces you first saw around you, and the elements of the situation among your fellow men in which you found yourself and with which you have been struggling, politically, personally or artistically, all your life. 8 At the end of the novel, a more pessimistic tone takes over as Mehring is overcome by a state of chaos that deprives him of a coherent language. His terror is reminiscent of Kurtz's vision of horror at the end of Heart of Darkness. This vision of horror is also the writer's own despair and her own sense of a disintegrating identity. The final question is whether the novel includes gender as part of its sub-text. The novelist undoubtedly associates race and gender in her representation of otherness as black and female. As it has been discussed previously, Mehring's relation to women is part of his denial of otherness. His final confusion coincides with his fantasies of being seduced by a hitch-hiker. Gordimer portrays what Edward Said refers to as the sexualization of cultural difference. Mehring's delirium is a perfect illustration of Homi Bhabha's theory on the distortion of otherness in the colonial psyche. As it has been stated, there are reasons to assume that 28. Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (London 1988), p.34. 239 the confusion is also the writer's own crisis as a producer of meaning. Yet, it seems that in the case of Nadine Gordimer, the despair is more that of the white liberal faced with the inadequacies of her modes of representation, rather than the despair of the woman struggling to find a voice in a male- dominated world. Judie Newman writes: "Significantly, a woman comes to express Zulu culture and to resolve its problems", as it is Phineas' wife (who is named through her husband's name, however) who carries out the rituals of death and regeneration. Still, this point remains undeveloped in the novel. Gordimer's vision of chaos remains intrinsically linked with the idea of a white power having been disrupted, rather than with a female voice struggling to be heard.
III. BURGER'S DAUGHTER
In Burger's Daughter, Gordimer goes back to the autobiographical theme of her earlier fiction which describes the experience of growing up as a woman in white South Africa. She takes up the theme of the female quest for self-fulfillment which she tackled in The Lying Days, but this time putting the questions of racism and of political commitment to the forefront of her novel. Rosa, the daughter of a white communist activist who died in prison, attempts a complete reassessment of her double 29. Judie Newman, op.cit., p.35. 240 ideological heritage as a white and as the daughter of Lionel Burger. After her father dies, Rosa has no other family than distant relatives and her parents friends. She first seeks refuge with her lover Conrad whose concern is for books and music rather than for the politics of his country. Rosa indulges in this hedonic and carefree existence as an escape from the austerity and the self-abnegation with which she has been brought up. She joins her father's former wife, Katya, in the south of France where, again, she attempts to cut herself off from her past and live only for the present. Her eventual return to South Africa throws her to the deep end of political unrest as she becomes involved in the 1976 uprisings. Stephen Clingman places Burger's Daughter in its historical context by reading it as a response to the generation gap between the liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s which were suppressed with the banning of the ANC and the PAC in 1960, and to the new generation of children who launched a spontaneous revolt against their white oppressors. He writes: the schoolchildren consciously saw their assertion as being not only against the white state, but also against their parents whom felt had been passive for too long.3%hey Historical destiny is the outcome of Rosa's story as she realizes that she cannot escape from her history as a white South African but has to face the full consequences of it. Her itinerary reinscribes 30. Stephen Clingman, op.cit., p.180. 241 her into historicity, as her journey is a full circle which brings her back to South Africa. This problematic "entry" into history is expressed by the contrast between the personal and the political. Judie Newman sees in the novel a major conflict between "a private world of sensual joy and art" and the world of politics.3* Brandt Vermeulen, the publisher and art collector whom Rosa pays a visit to in order to obtain a passport, is an example of this world of art cut off from the reality, which Judie Newman calls "solipsistic art". Among his eclectic collection of pictures ranging from local Cape and Karoo landscapes to Picassos and Kandinskys, Rosa notices the bronze sculpture of an African woman: a life-size plastic female torso, divided down the middle into a blue and red side, with its vaginal labia placed horizontally across the outside of its pubis, like the lips of a mouth. The tip of a clitoris poked a tongue. The nipples were perpex, suggesting at once the hardness of tumescence and the ice of frigidity. 3 Rosa sees the sculpture as a symbol of the fixity and the stultification of the colonial iconography. The grotesque distortion of the black female body, reminiscent of the various representations of the Southern African Hottentot Venus, brings the racial
31. Judie Newman, "Prospero Complex: Race and Sex in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter" in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.20, nol (1985), p.95. 32. Ibid., p.81. 33. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, op.cit., pp.181-182. 242 and the sexual at the same level.3ÿ The transformation of otherness into monstrosity which Rosa reads on the sculpture is described in the novel as "life-in-death". Against the backdrop of paintings, of which Rosa can only identify a few, the heroine sits "unpainted". Her task is to deconstruct fixed images to find her own expression. Lionel Burger's charismatic figure is part of the iconography that she has inherited. The novel reaches its peak with the transfixed image of a man beating a donkey which constitutes the point of departure in Rosa's consciousness: I didn't see the whip. I saw agony. Agony that came from some terrible centre seized within the group of donkey, cart, driver and people behind him. They made a single object that contracted against itself in the desperation of a hideous final energy. Not seeing the whip, I saw the infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishment without the ravisher, torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it.35 The image brings a series of others to Rosa's mind: political prisoners, solitary confinement, labour camps. Rosa realizes that she cannot come to terms with the suffering caused by her people and
34. For more details on the representation of the Hottentot Venus, see L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medecine, and Literature", in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago & London 1986), pp.223-261. 35. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, op.cit., p.208. 243 that, as she puts it, she does not know "how to live in Lionel's country".36 She runs away from the vision of horror, as Mehring in The Conservationist and Maureen in July's People do, because "even animals have the instinct to run a mile from sickness and death".®7 Burger's Daughter continues the search for alternative modes of thinking and of representation outside the ones provided by the dominant white ideology. The novel is directed towards action as the epigraph in the second section, a quotation from Wang Yang-ming, confirms, "to know and not to act is not to know".3® Stephen Clingman's following remark: "there is a sliding scale of typification in the novel from Burger, who establishes the historical situation, to Rosa, through whom its implications are examined" points at Gordimer's self-conscious attempt to bridge the gap between fiction and action.®® This is a step away from the formalism noticed in the way in which text and sub-text were brought together in The Conservationist, in that the sub-text is now the main line of action. However, there remains a certain amount of idealism and contrivance in the way in which the novelist articulates her political message. Gordimer develops further the technique of monologues which she had experimented with in her
36. Ibid., p.210. 37. Ibid., p.69. 38. Ibid., p.213. 39. Stephen Clingman, op.cit., p.174. 244 previous novel. Rosa addresses different characters (Katya, Conrad and Lionel) in turn. She also addresses herself, as she initially goes through a narcissistic phase of adolescent self-definition. The narrative viewpoint is often that of Rosa's self-inspecting gaze; her first sentence is addressed to herself: "when they saw me outside the prison, what did they see?".ÿ® The monologues move from a self-centred "conservationist-like" vision to a reciprocal dialogue involving the other. Rosa soon realizes that her relationship with Conrad belongs to the "mutual culpability" from which she is trying to escape: When we spoke to each other there was the clandestine quality of talking to oneself; the taunting and tempting of mutual culpability. You acknowledged me in you rather than looked towards me. 1 Judie Newman quotes a phrase from Fanon describing the task of Burger’s Daughter as to reconstruct "the world of the You" by altering the conventional modes of narration. The omniscient narrator represents the controlling eye of the surveillance agents following her, and is undermined by a multitude of voices in dialogues. Rosa's consciousness is, to use a Sartrian terminology, "in situation", as it is the product of the different influences that have shaped her life. Her voice is,
40. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, op.cit., p.13. "They" could be the security agents tracing Rosa's whereabouts. 41. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, op.cit. p.69. 42. Judie Newman, op.cit., p.85. 245 thus, the voices of others speaking through her. Significantly, the novel opens with a quote from Claude Lévi-Strauss: "I am the place in which something has occurred”, emphasizing the predominance of socio-historical determinants. The extract from the speech by the Soweto Students Representative Council which is quoted at length towards the end of the novel marks the obliteration of Rosa's individuality as the voice of the majority takes over. The dramatization of self and otherness as sites of conflict and incommunicability culminates in the telephone conversation between Rosa and Zwelinzima, the son a black activist whom the Burger family had once sheltered in their house. Rosa and Zwelinzima were once united as brother and sister in the womb¬ like swimming pool of the Burgers' house, where Rosa's real brother had drowned. Rosa remembers Zwelinzima as "Baassie”, the nickname given to him by the Burgers, which ridicules the master-servant relationship while retaining some of its patronage. Zwelinzima phones Rosa late one night after having met her at a left-wing party in London to tell her that his name is not "Baassie" but Zwelinzima, which means suffering land. Zwelinzima resents the publicity given to Lionel Burger while black activists, like his own father, have died in silence and oblivion. The conversation takes place in the dark in a dream-like atmosphere. The opening sentence sets the scene beyond normality: "the 246 telephone ringing buried in the flesh".4ÿ Even before picking up the phone, Rosa is overcome by chaos. She cannot face her other brother and "has no name for him".44 She begs him to postpone the conversation and to go to sleep. Sleep, as in The Conservationist, is an obsessional yearning for peace and forgetfulness: Come tomorrow today, I suppose it is, it's still so dark- you didn't put the light on, then. I told you to. They began to wrangle. Look, I'm woken up like this. And there's so much I want... How old were we? I remember your father - or someone brought you back only once, how old were we then? - I told you to put it on. - She was begging, laughing. - oh but I'm so tired, man! Please, until tomorrow -45 Zwelinzima's claim is clear: "I don't want to live in your head".4*’ Zwelinzima questions the white communists's initiative to speak on behalf of the blacks and voices Black Consciousness's claim for self-definition. Communication between blacks and whites is described as a painful and almost desperate act. Zwelinzima speaks to fiosa "as if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them".47 His words move subtly from reproach to protest, from personal address to a speech directed to the totality of the white South Africans. It ends in silence: "Neither spoke and neither put down the receiver for a few moments...48 43. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, op.cit., p.318. 44. Ibid., p.319. 45. loc.cit. 46. Ibid., p.323. 47. loc.cit ♦ 48. loc.cit. 247
Once again, the reader is left with a blank space to fill in, as Gordimer seems reluctant to bring the dialogue to a close. Burger's Daughter also touches on the issues of race and gender. Rosa's search for an identity entails a questioning of the white patriachal order embodied in the father figure of Lionel. Like Rebecca, Rosa resists dogmatic ideologies by opting for the sensual, which is in the novel associated with the feminine. The world of female experience runs as a sub-text alongside the main reality as a sub-conscious stream: But outside the prison the internal landscape of my mysterious body turns me inside out, so that in that public place on that public occasion (all the arrests of the dawn swoop have been in the newspapers, a special edition is on sale, with names of those known to be detained, including that of my mother) I am within that monthly crisis of destruction, the purging, tearing, draining of my own structure. I am my womb, and a year ago I wasn't aware physically - I had one. 9 - It is interesting to note that this is one of the rare moments when Rosa mentions her mother, who has also, like Lionel, been detained. She appears here in a parenthesis and in the suppressed context of the body and of matrilinear continuity. Later, the body becomes Rosa's only remaining link with the reality, as she joins her father's ex-wife (her new mother) and leads a life of carefree pleasures. Her return to South Africa is a renunciation of this
49. Ibid., pp.15-16. 248 life. Susan Gardner interprets Rosa's reaction as the novelist's shying away from feminist issues: Burger’s Daughter shows a woman rather passively accepting her familial and political inheritance after considerable resistance throughout most of the book's action.50 she also writes: Gordimer uses culturally pre-given stereotypes concerning sex and gender less critically and carelessly than she would racial ones.m£fe Gordimer has often condemned the pettiness of the issues raised by white feminists and their total irrelevance in the face of the political issues at stake in South Africa. Yet, the kind of feminism which Gordimer has in mind when stating the triviality of gender issues compared to the urgency of the national question is the concerns of the white woman who already occupies a privileged place in society: the woman issue withers in comparison with the issue of the voteless, powerless state of African blacks, irrespective of sex.|guth As she is taken to prison, Rosa finds herself sharing a cell with "Coloured", Indian and African women, for "prisons for women awaiting trial and women detainees are not among the separate amenities the country prides itself on providing". There is 50. Susan Gardner, "Still Waiting For the Great Feminist Novel: Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter" in Hecate, vol.8, nol (1982), p.68. 51. Ibid., p.71. 52. Nadine Gordimer, "The prison-House of Colonialism" in Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1980, p.918. 53. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter, op.cit., p.354. 249 a suggestion that women can defy the racial categories of apartheid; and one can infer that the novelist herself sees her position as a woman as redemptive. Yet, when it comes to defining the feminist claim for a voice, we have seen that Gordimer's position is problematic. Rosa Burger goes through the transformation into a political being with moments of despair mixed with optimism and idealism, which she probably shares with her author. Interestingly, Rosa is a series of collages involving a certain amount of esthetic formalism which corresponds to the writer' own political uncertainties.ÿ Gordimer's experiment with techniques of narration (multi-voiced text, collage) is part of her search for an identity as a white South African woman. Her next novel shows a definite step in that direction.
IV. JULY’S PEOPLE
July's People is set in a futuristic post¬ apartheid South Africa where the balance of power has shifted and where whites have become refugees EC fleeing the cities where war has broken out. J The Smales family find refuge in a village where their former servant is now their new host, while he still keeps part of his identity as a servant. Bam and
54. For a detailed study of the "quotations" and intertextuality in the novel, see Stephen Clingman, op.cit., pp.186-189. 55. Nadine Gordimer, July's People (London 1982). 250
Maureen Smales and July can only relate on the basis of a master-servant relationship. The novel deals with the role reversals brought about by the new situation. The two sides of the apartheid divide are brought together in a confrontation which is dramatized as a fight to the death between the two antagonistic forces. In this context of total upheaval, the novel touches on the problem of the whites collapse of identity in the face of the growing certainty that blacks will eventually have the last word. It engages with the issues of language, sexuality and identity as sites of conflict in the colonial psyche. July's People marks Gordimer's entry into a marginal world where identities are disintegrating and meanings becoming more and more uncertain. Fragmentation takes over the narrative and with it the certainties of the novelist who is no longer able to provide truths. One of the main narrative strategies is inversion. As its title suggests, the capitalist relation between July and his masters has been inverted. Besides, his masters are now identified by the villagers as "his people". They have, ironically, become July's possession. Gordimer also addresses the question of how the whites belong in Africa: the Smales are July's people, tied up to him by three centuries of a common history, which they have to come to terms with. As in her previous novels, Gordimer explodes the roles and identities imposed by society. Because he 251 is no longer their servant, July has lost his function in keeping whole the world of Bam and Maureen. The narrative follows Maureen's horrified vision of destruction: Us and them. What he's really asking about: an explosion of roles, that's what the blowing up of the Union Buildings and the burning of master bedrooms is. 6 July is also ironically the "landmark" around which Bam and Maureen struggle to retain a sense of identity as he becomes their "saviour". He is the transition between the two worlds that had previously separated them and the vital link which enables the Smales to survive. Their position of dependency is not a new one, since July has always looked after them with an intimate knowledge of their needs. July always kept the house keys when the family were away on holiday and has even acted on their behalf, like when sometimes answering the phone for them. He now sees no reasons not to keep the car keys in his possession, especially since everyone in the village assumes that the car belongs to him. Yet, for the Smales, and particularly Bam, the car and the gun are the two remaining symbols of their past supremacy which they cannot relinquish. The irony of the novel is that, now that July has become the Smales's only ally, Maureen tries to approach him on an equal basis. July does not respond to her attempts because he knows that Maureen is only acting. Instead, he persists on
56. Ibid., p.117. 252
calling himself the "boy" and her the "mistress", "refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding". Maureen realizes that she has no language to relate to July apart from the "kitchen English" with which she used to give him orders. The only form of communication possible between them is one of conflict and humiliation: they stepped across fifteen years of no- man's-land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other's breath before they turn away to the regulation number of paces, or conspirators who will never escape what each knows of the other. Her triumph dissembled in a face at once open, submissive, eyes for a vision to come, for them both. At the end of this passage, the authorial voice becomes more distinct and suggests that the common vision is unreacheable unless there is confrontation and open warfare. July's People explores the relationships between language and identity through its subtle use of dialogues. At the same time, the narrative voice has
'access to the characters's interior steam-of- consciousness through the omniscient narrator. The dialogues between Bam and Maureen are closer to monologues in the sense that the two characters have no separate identities but a couple identity acquired after their fifteen years of marriage. Gordimer sees their marriage as part of the ideology which has provided them with ready-made phrases and definite truths:
57. Nadine Gordimer, July's People, op.cit., p.71. 58. Ibid., p.72. 253
The other half in collusion, one for purposes of income tax, one to provide an audience at school sports, one in those moments when, not looking at each other, without physical contact or words, they clasped together against whatever threatened, in the nature of menace there was back there professional jealousy, political reactionism, race prejudice. the wine-tasting temptation of possessions. 9 Maureen's and Barn's well-ordered reality is collapsing and their relationship as a couple is, therefore, undermined by the changes that have occurred in the power structures which had previously ruled their lives. Their sexuality is described as a "wrestling" where communication between the bodies is unattainable. It is "the sacred power and rights of sexual love as formulated in master bedrooms", in the same way in which July's love life has been regulated "in a wife's hut, and a backyard room in a city".®® Love cannot exist outside the racial and gender inequalities of apartheid. Gordimer seems to suggest that there can only be love in confrontation, struggle, and perhaps suffering. Her portrayal of inter-personal relationships in July's People marks a departure from the dream of interracial love in Occasions for Loving, since it shows a clear cut refusal to romanticize love as an absolute standing above the social reality. It is a direct attack on the white liberals I uncritical belief in a humanism for which they have provided their own definition: the absolute nature she [Maureen] and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to 59. Ibid., p.105. 60. Ibid., p.65. 254
everybody was no more than the price of the master and the clandestine hotel tariff.gÿedroom As the quote from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks cited as epigraph at the beginning of the novel states, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arise a great diversity of morbid symptoms". Language plays an important part in this process of transition. The Smales witness the désintégration of their old terminology without being able to define a new one. The fragments of news which they try, with enormous efforts, to piece together are echoes of their own interior chaos. Maureen remarks on the ironic fact that whites who are used to dealing with "natives" in pass-offices and labour bureaux will be the only ones who would understand the news, now broadcasted in local languages. As she remembers her sense of guilt when, as a child, she heard her father speaking to his "boys" on the mine in "the bastard black lingua franca", Maureen realizes the fallacy of her position as a liberal critical of apartheid but incapable of challenging it. In return, July's language regurgitates the whites's definition of blacks-whites relationships in that he refuses to think himself beyond the categories of the language which has been imposed on him: beyond "I'm your boy" and "I'm work for you for fifteen years". It is only when addressing his mother in his indigenous language (reported in English in the text) that July
61. loc,cit. 255 appears in his full human dimension. It is also the first time that he expresses himself grammatically: - More than fifteen years. Yes... The first time was in 1965. But I didn't work for them, then. I worked in that hotel, washing up in the kitchen. I had no papers, that time. All of us in the kitchen had no papers, the owner let us sleep in the store¬ room, he locked us in so nobody could steal and take food out"®ÿ Even though the linguistic contrast is not apparent, since the novel is written all in English, the reader is constantly aware of the presence of another language in the background. The interview with the chief whom July introduces the Smales to is carried out in both English and in the chief's language, which July translates for Bam and Maureen. Eventually, July resorts to his own language to express his anger at Maureen: You He spread his knees and put as open hand on each. Suddenly he began to talk at her in his own language, his face flickering powerfully. The heavy cadences surrounded her; the earth was fading and a thin, far radiance from the moon was faintly pinkening parachute - silk hazes stretched over the sky. In the same way in which Zwelinzima, in Burger's Daughter, brings Rosa face to face with his real identity, July reveals his alterity to Maureen. Once again, Gordimer shows that the dialogue between blacks and whites cannot be except as a confrontation. Nevertheless, July and Maureen are able to communicate: she understood although she knew no word. • Understood everything: what he had had to 62. Ibid., p.133. 63. Ibid., p.152. 256
be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him.64 July's name is only revealed towards the end of the novel when the chief, to the great surprise of the Smales, calls him by his real name, Mwawate. The epigraph from Gramsci about the interregnum confirms the idea of a symbolic transition, a middle passage between the old and the new in the novel. The Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque might prove useful to clarify this idea of a transitional phase. As Bakhtin explains, carnival creates a space outside the norms of society: We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the "inside out" (a 1'envers), of the "turnabout", of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.65 The "uncrowning" of Bam takes the form of a dispossession, first of his car, then of his gun, the two symbols of power without which he cannot be. Carnival enters the novel directly when the gumba- gumba (traditional travelling entertainer) arrives in the village. As we are told, he carries out "the grotesque ceremonial presence without which carnival forgets its origin is in its fear of death".66 Carnival confuses the categories of death and birth, and of high and low: in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the
64. loc.cit. 65. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington 1984), p.ll. 66. Nadine Gordimer, July's People, op.cit., p.141. 257
dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis. 7 The novel insistence on repulsive details describing filth and excrement recalls the exaggerated emphasis on the procreative and excremental functions in the carnivalesque image of the body. The other carnivalesque image present in the novel is the banquet. Bakhtin describes the banquet as a ritual of human victory over the world: The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself. ® The ancestral primitive act of eating takes place during the feast given in honour of the wart-hogs that Bam had shot. The Smales celebrate separately and do not share the meat with the people in the village, who have their own celebration. The scene of ancestral gathering, wine drinking and story telling, turns into a symbolic murder. Maureen "massages" the flesh of the wart-hog with salt, as if preparing the victims. Then the family become "intoxicated" with the meat, rivalling with the dogs and the half-craven cats in a primitive excitement over the meat. Bam realizes that he is "a killer", "a butcher like any other in rubber boots among the slush of guts, urine and blood at the abatoir, although July and his kin would do the skinning and quartering".” The triumphant act of eating which 67. Mikhail Bakhtin, op.cit., p.24. 68. Ibid., p.281. 69. Nadine Gordimer, July's People, op.cit., p.78. 258
Bakhtin describes as an expression of human labour and its victory over the forces of nature, is, in July's People, turned into a scene of murder. As it has been said, the detailed and exaggerated descriptions of the body, especially of its digestive, excremental and procreative functions, introduce an element of the grotesque into the novel. Bakhtin defines carnival as the transgression of the limits between the world and the body: the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that leads beyond the body's limited space or the body's depths.7® The carnivalesque body celebrates the entry into the communal world of the other. July's People seems to use the image of the body to make a statement about the relationship between the individual and society. The body comes to symbolize a disjunction between the self and the reality, and the necessity for the white in South Africa to redefine his/her place in the world. As Bakhtin writes: Not the biological body, which merely repeats itself in the new generations, but precisely the historic, progressing body of mankind stands at the center of this system of images. Thus, in the grotesque concept of the body a new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness was born and took form: not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history."7* There is, in the novel, an emphasis on the body as female. Maureen's body goes through a slow 70. Mikhail Bakhtin, op.cit., pp.317-318. 71. Ibid., p.367. 259 process of physical changes. She, who had been a dancer in her previous existence in the city, is now overcome by feelings of inadequacy and clumsiness. Once again, it seems that Gordimer uses cliched images of the female body by associating it with dirt and monstrosity. Maureen is the character who is the most aware of dirt on her body, the children having become immune to their environment and Bam spending most of the hours in a state of half¬ sleepiness. Eventually, her escape from the village is described as a "monstrous orgasm", confirming the idea of a link between the monstrous and the female in the novel. The end of the novel is not triumphant, nor is it desperate. Gordimer leaves the ending open and does not provide a final meaning to the contradictions which have been raised throughout the story. Maureen runs away from destruction into an uncertain future. She crosses over the river which she had never gone beyond before into an unknown territory: She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility. She can still hear the beat, beyond those trees and those, and she runs towards it. She runs. As in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing, this territory is also the inner landscape of Maureen's consciousness, the confines of which are now
72. Nadine Gordimer, July's People, op.cit., p.158. 73. Ibid., p.160. 260 exploded. The final vision of chaos is reminiscent of Mary Turner's descent into madness, as both writers explore the mental frameworks of their colonial and gender-divided society and explode their boundaries.
V. A SPORT OF NATURE
A Sport of Nature reviews the South African political scene from the 1960s to the present time, with an incursion into the future at the end. The events of the country are related through a young heroine, Hillela, whose life runs in parallel to the politics of her country. The novel is close to Burger's Daughter in its attempt to reconstruct an iipage of the white South African woman. It deals with the themes of belonging, exile, the family, sexuality and self-identity through Hillela's picaresque journey around the world. Hillela is a heroine who has no bonds or roots. She was handed over as a child to her aunts, Olga and then Pauline, by her parents who had divorced. She grows up in boarding schools, then in Olga's bourgeois home, and finally ends up with her liberal and morally committed aunt Pauline before leaving South Africa for a number of different destinations. Gordimer comments on Hillela's childhood with the emotional distance of a detached omniscient narrator. In fact, Hillela never comes "alive” as a character, but remains, on the whole, a vague 261 theoretical reference, a definition, a life principle. The heroine is on the whole defined through her body. This is partly a reaction against the detached white liberal handling of politics, of which her aunt Pauline provides a good example. She reject the life where "everything was read out from newspapers, everything was discussed", and opts for a more direct experience."*ÿ She finds herself absorbed in the 1970s pop culture: she plays Joan Baez on her guitar (which she always carries with her), wears hippy bracelets, and indulges in a mystic return to the earth. Music plays an important part in the novel as a privileged medium of communication. As in Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, it is always played in the background as an expression of an alternative culture. Music seems to be the means that can bring whites and blacks together. Hillela's classmate, Gert Prinsloo, a typical "Boere boy", who has learned to sing African songs from a black boy who worked for his father, sings "in the black man's voice and cadence, in the black man's language", as "a song that is not his own sings through him".73S Hillela is outside the categories and restrictions of apartheid and has little knowledge of them, for, as we are told, "categories were never relevant to her ordering of life".'*® Hillela is,
74. Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature (London 1987), p.162. 75. Ibid., p.69. 76. Ibid., p.129. 262 above all, ignorant of the politics of her country. She leaves South Africa with a spy for the government who is on the run under the disguise of a freedom fighter, and who later deceives her. She then becomes more aware of what is happening in her country by coming in contact with the community of South African exiles. She eventually marries, Waila, an A.N.C. militant in exile, who provides her with a political identity. Pauline describes Hillela as being "a-moral... in the sense of the morality of this country". Gordimer creates a character essentially free from her past, and free from the white liberal guilt complex. Hers is the reality of the body as a way of articulating one's experience; Hillela is described as having a privileged contact with nature, especially with the sea with which she is reunited in a kind of maternal womb. However, beneath her natural and spontaneous character, runs an undercurrent of suppressed feelings and a weaker part of her personality. The African language which she grew up with without understanding is an unconscious stream which runs like "the lullaby without words, for her, surrounding all her childhood".'7® As in The Conservationist, two streams of reality run in parallel, suggesting the split at the core of the characters' personality. However, Hillela's inner reality remains on the whole
77. Ibid., p.56. 78. Ibid., p.139. 263 unexplored, for she is most of the time seen from the outside. Only her relationship with her cousin, Sasha, provides an insight into her emotions. Hillela's "incestuous" relationship with Sasha is part of her natural disrespect for authority. She eventually leaves Olga's house and its restrictiveness. Also, the presence of Hillela's mother in the novel is an unresolved problem;
Hillela never comes to terms with her mother's story which she reconstructs through the latter's correspondence with a Portuguese lover, with whom she eloped to Mozambique, abandoning her husband and her daughter. Ruthie "wanted passion and tragedy, not domesticity", we are told.ÿ® In a way, Hillela follows her mother's footsteps in her hedonistic attitude to life and in her rejection of the white South African restrictive way of life. Ruthie is abandoned by her lover soon after having left South Africa. Hillela's encounter with her mother in Mozambique is one of the rare emotional moments in the book. Theirs is a different kind of mother- daughter relationship:
A long, long silence, twenty-nine years of silence uncoiled around the two women, it stretched and stretched to its own horizon, like the horizon drawn by a landscape of cloud rimmed by space, seen from a plane thousands of feet removed from the earth, from reality. Silence was another dimension: "mother", "daughter". ®
79. Ibid., p.59. 80. Ibid., p.337. 264
In an interview, Gordimer used the word "picaresque" to describe A Sport of Nature. The term "picaresque" appeared in Spain in the 16th century to describe the narratives about "ingenious rogues, the servants of several masters, who eventually repent the error of their ways". Later, it developed into a wider genre of episodic novels describing the eventful journey of adventurous heroes. Hillela's character draws on the picaresque hero in that she also sides with different groups, partly because she is not aware of their ideological differences. Her condition is one of exile, rootlessness and endless wandering. However the picaresque hero is essentially male. How Hillela fits in the world of politics and in the liberation movements with which she comes in close contact is the most problematic point of the novel. The heroine also runs away from the restrictions of the white patriarchal society and its rigid definitions of motherhood and family. She cannot endorse the ideology of family bondage and wants to reconstruct its premises. Her dream of "the rainbow family" which she tries to build with Waila fails. Waila dies and Hillela realizes the fallacy of her hopes for a perfect future; her final conclusion is that "the rainbow family stinks", and that it is not
81. Nadine Gordimer, Interview with A. Sampson, Sunday Observer, 29 March 1987. 82. Margaret Drabble (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford 1987), p.762. 265 possible to build a small individual safe island within a society which is divided.85 Hillela becomes a mistress and then a wife with the same spirit, not aware of society's values. After leaving her aunt's household, Hillela spends some time on Tamarisk Beach sleeping rough; she is then adopted in the house of a Belgian diplomat, and becomes his mistress. She then leave them and marries Waila. Someone in the novel describes her as a "natural mistress, not a wife".84 Hillela resists the patriarchal order through a total disregard for social norms. However, as she rejects the restrictions of white patriachal South Africa, she seems to have a less critical outlook of the gender relations among the blacks whom she meets through her journey. Her following remark: "an African wife isn't a wife if she doesn't produce children" is ambiguously situated on the borderline between irony and accepted fact. It seems that her maternity is a way for her to endorse an "African" identity as a South African who has rejected the white ethos. Hillela breaks the matrilineal line of her aunts and her mother: not to have reproduced herself, not to have reproduced a third generation of the mother who danced away in the dark of a night club, the child before whom certain advantages lay like the shadow of a palm tree, the aunts who offered what they had to offer.85
83. Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature, op.cit., p.291. 84. Ibid., p.205. 85. Ibid., p.228. 266
Her daughter, Nomzamo, is the means through which Hillela feels that she belongs with the black people. The language from which she felt excluded as a child, the foreign lullaby, has now become the language reuniting mother, father and daughter: From the first words a parent speaks down to the new-born whose sensory responses are still attuned only to the sound of the mother's heartbeat and gut noises, Waila spoke to the baby in his language - theirs. Hillela picked up a little from them, as the child learned to speak; but the child always, from her first words, spoke to her mother in English.86 Nomo grows up to speak English, the common language of exiles. She remains on the whole, like Hillela, a principle rather than a character. She is never portrayed as a person; instead, she appears in a series of transfixed images: the face on the cover of a fashion magazine or the "namesake" bearing the name of Winnie Mandela. She represents Hillela's (and perhaps Gordimer's) desire for a "black other" whom she cannot reach. Even before Nomo is born, Hillela realizes the unreality of her dream: Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn tight by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn't exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one- milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful - but a creature made of love, without a label; that's a freak.87 After Waila's death, Hillela becomes the wife of the President of the O.A.U., General Reuel, and eventually returns to Waila's country. Hillela is
86. loc.cit. 87. Ibid., p.208. 267 totally absorbed into Black culture, for, as we are told, she "assumed instinctively from observance of those with whom she lived the appropriate attitude".88 Furthermore, she becomes integrated into this culture through her marriage. By giving birth to a black child, Hillela breaks with her white lineage. Hillela identifies with Waila because he represents power: Waila had for her, beyond sensuality, a concentration within himself that kept her steadily magnetized. The presence of a power. It was related to, but not, in effect, the awareness she had had before the fallen statue. It did not bring fear. The concentration was like that a woman must feel when a general comes to her the nights before a great offensive begins.°$9 Hillela's attitude is that of the soothing and listening mother capable of understanding men's problems, although she is excluded from their world. Her friendship with the market women who admire her baby is described with detachment as "the female freemasonery or other tribalism that drew her into their warm shelter". Hillela feels more at home with men than she does with women. By seeking existence through male leaders, she shows her dependence from the patriarchal definition of female identity as an appendage of man's identity. Masculinity, blackness and authenticity form a paradigm in her mind, while her position as female and white are not the means through which she can achieve power in a world where black politicians, 88. Ibid., p.222. 89. Ibid., p.234. 90. Ibid., p.223. 268 most of whom are men, have taken over. Hillela has no scruple about using power to achieve her means. Gordimer herself admitted that Hillela was in many respects a character with little sense of morality, for whom she herself had little sympathy. The author's feelings towards her character are ambiguous, bordering on contempt and pity. However, it is also clear that Hillela is a means through which the novelist is seeking for a self¬ definition as a white woman in a future post¬ apartheid South Africa. Robin Visel writes about Hillela: Hillela as other: a natural rebel and nonconformist who is immune to society's "inducements to complicity," fearlessly embraces blackness. For her alone among Gordimer's heroines, blackness is not alien, but rather her native element. But Hillela, like the buried body in The Conservationist, is a mythic rather than realistic character; she is a symptom of her creator's desperate hope rather than a believable personality. 1 Hillela is the sign of an unattainable dream, "half joke, half wistful dream". She is the writer's hope for a future free and non-racial South Africa, where whites could still belong. A Sport of Nature can be read as either a highly idealistic utopia or a profoundly pessimistic statement about the future. Most of the action consists of symbolic gestures which never materialize, like the naming of Hillela's daughter after Winnie Mandela, or the "handclasp" which stands for the relationship 91. Robin Visel, "Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer's Colonial Heroines" in Ariel, vol.19, no.4 (Oct.1988), p.39. 92. loc.cit. 269
between Waila and Hillela. If as Robin Visel argues, "the heroine's attempt to empathize with the black other as her fellow in oppression leads her to discover, confront and set free the other within her self", her means are on the whole rhetorical, contrived, and hardly convincing. Sasha, Hillela's cousin, remains the most viable alternative in the novel. After resisting conscription and rebelling against the state and his family, he becomes involved in political activities which result in his imprisonment. His letter to Hillela, smuggled out of prison, is intercepted by the security police and produced publicly during his trial. Sasha's letter is an intrusion of "reality" into the fictional prose of the novel. It breaks the barrier between the private (the letter) and politics (the pamphlet). Written in a mixture of political language and poetical prose, the letter associates the private world of the womb and of mother-son relationships with the oppressiveness of his prison cell, the killings with what he sees as "the patricidal and infanticidal loves between parents and children" White kids are being killed in landmine explosions and supermarket bombings, on Sunday rides and shopping trips with their loving parents. The mines and petrol bombs are planted by blacks, but it's the whites who have killed their own children. The loving parents and grandparents and great- grandparents. The white family tree. * 93. Ibid., p.41. 94. Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature, op.cit., p.332. 95. Ibid., p.373. 270
His revolt against the state is also a revolt against his mother and other liberals. Sasha's letter is an intrusion of a different version of reality, a sub-text which, as in The Conservationist, questions the validity of the means offered by the main narrative. In her famous essay "Living in the Interregnum", Gordimer borrows Hegel's concept of the state of interregnum as disintegrated consciousness to describe her condition as a white South African belonging to the "segment" of white people who have rejected apartheid but whose lives are still regulated by its principles. As she writes: however hated and shameful the collective life of apartheid and its structures has been to us, there is, now, the unadmitted fear of being without structures. The interregnum is not only between two social orders but also between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined.96 This contradiction constitutes the core of Gordimer's fiction which, as we have seen, undermines the dominant order by deconstructing its texts. History is a major theme, for it is the starting point for defining a white identity which does not equate belonging and possessing. For Gordimer, belonging to history is more important than the surrogate colonial attachment to the land. Finally, Gordimer's novels contribute to the debate around the construction of otherness as black and female and the links between sexism and racism. 96. Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, op.cit., pp.269-70. 271
They explore the colonial fantasies and subvert their images by proposing another version of reality: sub-texts emerging through the surface of the main narrative and taking possession of it. Although Gordimer points at the role of gender in the hierarchical construction of power and of social identities, she does not directly address the question of the suppressed female Voice. In other words, she does not seem to disentangle the association between political struggle and masculine values. As I have argued, Gordimer's heroines pose the problem of female identification with male power by resorting to cliched roles and images, although there is also a strong sense that their part in constructing a more equal society is essential. 272
CHAPTER SIX: MIRIAM TLALI
Miriam Tlali has published two novels, Muriel at Metropolitan and Amandla, and is also the author of two collections of short stories and essays, Mihloti and Soweto Stories. She has also been writing pieces of journalism and of short fiction for the magazine Staffrider, of which she is one of the founders. She is the author of its popular column "Soweto Speaks", featuring interviews and reports on events and people in the township. Her stories have also appeared regularly in the magazine. She has also written two plays which have not appeared in print. One of them was translated into Dutch and performed in Holland, but was never shown inside South Africa. Miriam Tlali lives and writes from Soweto where she is involved in community work and creative writing workshops for women. Among many other activities, her interest in live performance lead her to participate in an oral literature project in which writers read from their works and audiences participated in the performance. Besides the active part which she played in setting up the influential magazine Staffrider, she is also the
1. Miriam Tlali, Muriel At Metropolitan (London 1979), Mihloti (Johannesburg 1984), Amandla (Johannesburg 1980) and Soweto Stories (London 1989). 273 only woman on the board of the black publishing house, Skotaville. Far from being encouraged or flattered by being the first published black woman novelist inside South Africa, Tlali describes her experience as "a terrible, solitary kind of life".ÿ The intense climate of censorship, fear and harassment from the security forces (of which Miriam Tlali has been a regular victim) has unfortunately been an impediment to her creative activity, but has also strengthened her protest against apartheid. Despite all the difficulties, Tlali continues writing from Soweto and from the heart of her community, which she considers to be a vital element. Muriel at Metropolitan was first published in 1975 in Johannesburg by Ravan Press in an expurgated version. In 1979, Longman in London published a complete version of the novel which included the "undesirable" material excluded from the first edition. The Publication & Control (censorship) Board of The Republic of South Africa banned the two editions of the novel, arguing that its description of Mrs. Stein as "a lousy boer" on page 12 of the book was considered offensive. Similarly, her following novel Amandla was banned just after publication. It was unbanned along with the two
2. Thomas, Elean, "Inside the Belly of Apartheid", interview with Miriam Tlali, Spare Rib, issue 200 (April 1989), p.23. 3. See Jean, Marquard, "Profile: Miriam Tlali", Index On Censorship, vol.9, no5 (October 1980), pp.30-31. 274 editions of Muriel at Metropolitan in 1985 under the recent initiative by the government to improve its image in the face of international protest against apartheid.ÿ However, Tlali's works are still not easily available, for after having been banned for so long they have gone out of print or have fallen into oblivion. In her first novel, Tlali attempts to give a picture of apartheid in its daily suppression of human dignity. The writer uses the critical mind of her heroine, Muriel, to portray the absurdities of the system of apartheid. Her next novel, Amandla, concentrates on the resistance of the people of Soweto after the events of June 1976. There, she explores fully the voice of her community and epitomizes it in a book which has been described as the best 1976-Soweto novel. Meanwhile, Tlali has also produced stories, journalistic pieces, travelogues and interviews, which show her concern with recording history in the making. The themes of her stories circle around the prevailing idea of solidarity among blacks in South Africa, and especially among black women. Sisterhood is a theme which is explored in many of her stories. Besides, Tlali also deals with the ideas of a cultural resistance against apartheid, of African tradition 4. See Criticism An Ideology: Second African Writers Conference (Uppsala 1988), p.202. 5. Njabulo Ndebele wrote: "Amandla is, in my opinion, the best of the novels written on the events of June 1976", "Turkish Tales And Some Thoughts On South african Fiction in Staffrider, vol.7. no 3&4 (1988), pp.336-37. 275 versus white domination, and with the whole notion of a culture for another South Africa.
I. MURIEL AT METROPOLITAN
Muriel at Metropolitan is first of all a testimony of life as a black woman under apartheid. It describes the conflicts which Muriel, the heroine, faces throughout her stay as a typist at Metropolitan Radio as she tries unsuccessfully to reconcile her moral conscience and her sense of social justice with her position within the apartheid machine. The contradictions in which she finds herself trapped illustrate the position of the black who is half-integrated into the middle-class but who remains at the bottom of the social ladder because of his/her colour. The novel follows the pace of everyday events in the hire-purchase shop, where from her marginal position (Muriel is separated from the other white typists with marshed wire), the silent and observant protagonist studies and analyzes the behaviour of her workmates and the relationships which they develop. Through a wide and diverse range of typical but also idiosyncratic, comic but also often tragic, characters (from Mr Blosh, the patronizing boss, to Adam, the old and resigned shop assistant), Tlali draws a sharp picture of "petty apartheid" and of the ways in which it affects personal relationships. Her descriptions of South Africa show a society 276 which has sunk into self-destruction and absurdity. An example of its archaism is the card catalogues in which Metropolitan Radio customers are classified according to their "ethnic" groups. The descriptions of Muriel's tedious work, which consists in keeping the books up-to-date and in good order, convey an incisive image of apartheid. Through the heroine, the reader is allowed to glance at the suspicion and divisions which prevail under apartheid. The elaborate description of Muriel's day-to-day existence, where trivial matters such as using the lavatories or making a cup of tea become issues, compels the reader to follow the protagonist in the most repelling aspects of apartheid. The novel is first of all concerned with the corruption of human relationships under the racialist structure of South African society. Beyond its humanistic concern, the novel also articulate a political message. The aim of this chapter is to examine the link between Muriel's political analysis and the way in which Muriel at Metropolitan is written and the way in which it reads. Humour plays a considerable part in keeping a distance between the events narrated and the narrator herself, and between the narrator and her emotional reactions. The novel comes very close at points to a Brechtian play where the actors and the audience are involved in a mutual process of self- analysis. Muriel observes and comments on the scenes which take place around her in a detached and 277 critical manner, often turning things to ridicule. Also, Tlali uses cultural and linguistic discrepancies to create situational irony, emphasizing the human side of the characters and their ability to laugh even in the most difficult situations. For instance, a comic sketch takes place in the office when the black salesmen greet one another in a parodied customary way. The whole history of detribalization is summed up in a few gesture: Agrippa, the ruthless and unscrupulous black employee, who uses the system to his own advantage, is ironically likened to the dignified figure of a man "entering a kraal and dressed in a amabheshu making bayete (salute) of the days of Shaka".® Agrippa, who is charged with "repossessing" the goods from customers who have failed to pay their debts, is chosen to illustrate the idea of an ancestral culture of which blacks in South Africa have been dispossessed. The vitriolic image of "repossessing" and its parallel with the whole idea of possessing in South Africa as well as its problematic legitimacy are undoubtedly not a coincidence on the part of the writer. Muriel makes her first "entrance" in the novel as one of the silent blacks queuing up for employment at Metropolitan Radio office desk. She is described as a black female typist seeking employment, that is in terms of her race, gender group, class and
6. Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan, op.cit p.42. 278 position in the labour market. As the reader has already been introduced to the character/narrator, i.e. the anxious Muriel who enters Metropolitan for the first time, s/he is now presented with a character as defined by the South African social hierarchy.7 Besides depicting a character who is reduced by her society to a pass-book and to a letter from her previous employer, Tlali also makes the latter the powerful narrator of her story. Thus, the protagonist occupies the transitional position between the "voiceless mass of Africans" and the critical and incisive voice of the narrator. As the novel proceeds, her voice becomes increasingly assertive and analytical. She often addresses her reader in an "aside", commenting directly on a particular incident in the office. These comments develop to take the form of direct condemnations of apartheid and of the South African regime. Each incident is for Muriel a lesson learned (and, for the reader, to be learned), and which contributes to her gradual move towards a radical analysis of the situation. The strongly didactic prose alternates with the realistically rendered daily scenes of injustice at Muriel's workplace. At some points, the writer uses Muriel directly as a mouthpiece to put forward some clear political arguments. For example, her comments on the whites' dependence on the black labour force and on the
7. Ibid., p.10. 279 effects of a sit-down strike on the South African economy take the form of a direct political comment: These fast-moving multitudes are the black proletariat. The sunny Republic of South Africa - the white man's paradise - would never tick without them. To their labour the Republic owes her phenomenal industrial development. If they were suddenly to divert their course of movement now, at this moment, to their so-called homelands instead of to the location on fringes of the "white" towns, the white masters would go down on their knees to beg them to remain."® Each episode in the novel is followed by a theoretical analysis which is put forward through Muriel's monologues. The chapter entitled "A Token of Love" is a good example: it deals with the long and degrading ordeal which a customer has to go through in order to be able to buy a portable radio. First, Muriel has to take his pass-book details and his wrist number (mine workers have to wear a wrist band with a number on it for identification). His humiliation reaches its paroxysm when, at the end of this, Mr. Blosh, the white boss, makes him swear in Zulu an oath that he will pay the license money later. The chapter ends with Muriel commenting on the incident: He had succeeded in buying a beautiful portable radio for his girl-friend, a present and a token of his love for a woman who was the mother of his illegitimate children.9 The narrator, who had until then kept silent as Muriel unwillingly performed her tasks, now uses the first person to endorse her discontent:
8. Ibid., p.lll. 9. Ibid., p.60. 280
It is a system based on cheap labour, which undermines all laws of morality and decency, making nonsense of the concept of the family unit. On it the mining industry in the Republic of South Africa has flourished. To my mind, it is comparable only with the slave trade. ® Tlali is concerned with showing how human feelings are distorted and made absurd when people's humanity is trampled down. The black customer in the above example has to bargain his dignity in order to acquire a "token of love" for a woman for whom he cannot pay lobola (bride price). The man's present becomes an unrealizable idea which is part of his alienation. Once again the parallel with the hire- purchase system and the "token of love" comes out as a powerful and a vehement analogy, as human feelings have also been, as it were, confiscated. This approach differs widely from Head's concept of love as a all-encompassing ideal leading to insight and illumination. In this particular instance, Tlali comes closer to Gordimer's criticism of the liberal elevation of love and humanity above its social and economic determinants. Finally, Tlali, unlike Head who does not hesitate to depict women's oppression under customary law, assumes (or, at least, does not question) the fact that the man's love for his concubine would be authentic in tradition. She describes his children as "illegitimate", thus confronting the "unlawful" law of apartheid with the legitimacy of traditional law. Tlali leaves the area of women's place within tradition and within
10. Ibid., pp.60-61. 281 apartheid undeveloped in this novel, although she alludes to it in many respects through her powerful portrayal of a black female character who seeks expression in a system in which she has no status. One of the reasons for the fact that the author leaves this area rather untouched and uncriticized seems to lie with her inhibited feminist analysis. As she herself confessed in a recent interview, Muriel's anonymity is partly due to a protectiveness on the part of the writer who wanted to protect her family life: I was a young woman, and I was going to have an ideal home, an ideal life, that kind of things. I said when I was getting married, Now I'm moving into another world, a world where you realize all your dreams. But it wasn't to be that way. In the end I forgot that I would perhaps change. And the society in which I live is subjected to so much. 1 In her following novel and in her shorter fiction, Tlali deals with feminist matters in depth and more complexity and seems to have partly done away with her earlier reluctance. A distinctive feature of the novel, which is part of its didactic intentions, is the fact that the psychological and emotional stigma of living under apartheid is indirectly referred to without ever being fully elaborated. Muriel's subdued voice seems to be in control of the situations and of her own emotional reactions. Muriel is never left disorientated or unable to explain her inner 11. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton (ed.), Between The Lines: Interviews With Bessie Head, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali (Grahamstown 1989), p.82. 282
turmoil. This is far from implying that she lacks a psychological dimension, but this one is never allowed to become the dominant tone of the novel. Muriel's more vulnerable self appears, for instance, unexpectedly at the end of a sentence: These damnable laws which dictate to you where, and next to whom, you shall walk, stand and lie ... This whole abominable nauseating business of toilets and "separable but equal facilities" ... What is one to do anyway? One is forever in a trap from which there is no way of escape ... except suicide. 2 She continues to describe these suicidal impulses as follows: I crossed the road like a robot against the red light, with no presence of mind. The next moment, I was standing dead still in the middle of the road ... From some distant place came the shrill screaming voice of a woman; and in a split second, a car squeaked to a precipitate jerky stop next to me, missing my tremulous numb form by a fraction of an inch. This passage shows the depth and seriousness of the problems that Muriel faces. However, this moment of uncertainty does not last long; the following sentence describes Muriel back at her desk, typing her letter of resignation and "no longer trembling and hesitant Unlike Bessie Head who makes turmoil and "madness" the insight into her position as an oppressed, Tlali avoids excess of emotions and always returns to the rational and analytical comment as the final appreciation. Her emotions are 12. Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan, op.cit., pp.189-90. 13. Ibid., p.190. 14. loc.cit. 283 restrained and controlled under her amazingly self- disciplining voice. The next step of this chapter is to grasp how much the will to follow a strict political line partly expressed in the voice of the narrator and also in the time-sequence of the novel (as it will be developed in the next paragraphs) - is realized in the writing. Muriel's stream-of-consciousness is constantly interrupted by some incident in the office. Reality always takes over the narrative in an inescapable manner. The few passages where Muriel is allowed to leave the confines of Metropolitan Radio are cut short by sudden interruptions and she is returned to the harsh reality. For example, when Muriel accompanies the driver to the white district of "Triomph", the old Sophiatown, memories of her bridal hopes and of the 1950s dream of a free South africa are triggered off by the drive through the new district. It is interesting to notice again that the hopes of the young bride are associated with her political hopes, therefore stressing the interdependence of private life and politics. Muriel recalls the singing and the dancing in the church on her wedding day, the "freedom” songs and the resistance of the ANC Women's Section; she also pictures in her mind the siege of Sophiatown and its eventual destruction by the South African state. She is abruptly woken up from her "reverie" by the driver's pleasantly mocking her for being mesmerized 284 by the "beautiful European houses".*® Later, Muriel is once again plunged into daydreaming after she receives a phone call from her mother. The latter is disillusioned about the future of South Africa which she has left to settle in Lesotho. She insists on her daughter leaving the firm and choosing a better position. Muriel is left with conflicting feelings, as she understands her mother's concern but does not see any way for redemption within the system of apartheid. Muriel is once again abruptly brought back to reality and does not remember how long she has been dreaming.*® The reader is made aware of the oppressiveness of the job and of the need for Muriel to seek an escape from it; yet the narrative unremittingly returns to the mundane and anecdotal descriptions. It seems that the whole novel is organized around a continuous syntagmatic time-sequence which conteracts any attempt to escape from it. The chronology of the novel creates a pattern which both Muriel and the reader have to keep in pace with, from the time Muriel enters Metropolitan Radio to the moment she resigns which are the opening and ending of the book. Muriel's resignation from her job is the end of this movement forward. The time- sequence of the novel implies the idea of inescapability. In other words, the message is that one cannot live on the brink between two worlds, and
15. Ibid., pp.127-28. 16. Ibid., pp.140-41. 285 that one has to take side in a conflict which is becoming increasingly urgent. The lesson Muriel is learning is that it is impossible to compromise with one's moral conscience in such an oppressive system. Restrained into a strict narrative pattern where very little space for disgression, speculation or extrapolation is left, the reader also moves forward in the story with a feeling of urgency and of time running out; like
Metropolitan Radio customers, s/he is pressurized by time. Life under apartheid is described as a series of ordeals; everyday is a new trial bringing more feelings of insecurity. To a certain extent, the image of the hire- purchase shop epitomizes the nature of Muriel's conflict: like the customers, she is buying time, only postponing the final realization that she cannot go on accepting her fate passively. Throughout the novel the reader is restrained to one possible interpretation as s/he is made to follow a strict narrative line. This does not mean that the story reduces the conflicts to simplistic options. On the contrary, the scenes derive their comic quality from their ambiguity. Contradiction is celebrated as part of human nature as it enables people to survive through laughter and derision. Examples of this are the descriptions of Mr. Blosh as a charitable person behind his blatant racism or of Mrs. Kuhn's motherliness coexisting with her sudden outbursts of violence. The restriction which 286
has been discussed earlier does not lie in a limited observation or analysis, but in a deliberate attempt to channel the story through a strict political and ideological direction. The emphasis on the anecdotal and on matters which would normally be dismissed as trivial gives the novel the appearance of an inventory of events,
a list of accumulated details. The narrator reports, enumerates and gives proliferating information on the smallest incident in the firm. It seems that Muriel clings to her story as it is the only thing she really "possesses"; therefore, every detail is important. In one of her interviews, Miriam Tlali
stressed the fact that she wrote about what she saw and experienced, and that her characters were inspired from living persons whom she has known. For example, most of Mr. Blosh's remarks are what she actually heard her boss say. ' She also reiterates her commitment to reality and her refusal to be involved in "dreaming about ideal situations when we don't have them".-'-® Yet, in the same interview, she stresses the importance and difficulty for the black woman to have peace of mind and to have time to dream in order to be able to analyze situations.ÿ-®
V'- Tlali acknowledge despair and helplessness as part
of Muriel's experience, yet she always achieves control over them; it seems that her own definition
17. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.78. 18. Ibid., p.77. 19. Ibid., p.71. 287 of "dream” refers to a deeper involvement with reality rather than a flight away from it. It is the same sense of despair as that which Bessie Head describes in A Question of Power which makes it an imperative for Muriel's story to be told, although, unlike Head's, Tlali's description of Muriel's feeling of insecurity, remains grounded in a socio¬ economic analysis: It hangs like a dark cloud over the head of every non-white worker no matter how hard you try to evade it. It is always there, it haunts you all your life insecurity. There is nothing firm for you;- nothing you can hold on to or fall back on. It is like that with everything you try to build up in every sphere of your life your home, your work, your future, the future of your children - everything hangs on a thread. At any moment everything about you can be snapped off just like that. Your fate depends entirely on the whims of the white masters! 20 Tlali's determination to depict "reality as it is" is also manifest in her emphasis on the detail in order to reconstruct the real; that is to piece together the fragmented parts of the apartheid system, revealing its basic structures and its failures. For example, the descriptions of the white people undermine the myth of an homogeneous and united white ruling class by revealing its disparities and inner divisions. As the narrator writes, "the whites of the Republic of South Africa can be so segregated in the imaginary oneness".2ÿ The differences between English-speaking, Afrikaner and Jewish whites are exploited to destroy the idea 20. Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan, op.cit., p.70. 21. Ibid., p.174. 288 of a coherent and invincible social structure. Tlali is concerned with showing her reader how apartheid works. Like Lessing, her perspective is that of an analytical mind capable of approaching society as a whole system and, as it were, to "dissect" it in order to lay its parts bare for the reader to see. Her naturalistic style differs, however, largely from Lessing's kind of realism. Tlali's realism does not consist in giving long, elaborate and detailed accounts of the different feelings which her characters experience; her interest, however, lies in matter-of-fact descriptions of people and situations, with details such as names, numbers or other factual data such as the information on the catalogues files. Similarly, the dialogues come closer to records of real-life interviews rather than to a narrative. The close connection between the novel and the documentary, interview and journalistic account, points at the common purpose of Tlali's writings; like her stories, travelogues, accounts of living history and other testimonies of life in South Africa, her novels express the determination to record real-life events and to report them in writing. This brings the debate to the question which Lewis Nkosi raises when he expresses doubts about the possibility of producing "literature" under the conditions of apartheid.
22. Lewis Nkosi, Home And Exile (London 1965), p.126. 289
Rather than looking at this problem in terms of a dead-end of literature or an incapacity to express, it seems that it would be more productive to see how texts such as Muriel at Metropolitan question the very notion of literariness. Beside the bourgeois classification of writing into different degrees of literariness, critics of African literature have blamed the restrictiveness of western-centred canons of literature and their irrelevance to African modes of aesthetics. But it seems that more than being a matter of European versus African, this problem involves the question of a dominant form of cultural aesthetics as opposed to a subversive sub-culture, the question of "Africanness" coming under these categories. As it has been pointed out in the earlier chapters, Gordimer and to a lesser extent Lessing, tend to treat this sub-culture an an idealized image of an authentic "other", who often is African. In Head, the novel situates itself in sub-culture, that is in the subterranean world of fantasy images and hallucinations which opposes and subverts "normal" reality. As for Tlali, it seems that the notion of a sub-culture is also central to her novel in that her story poses itself as an alternative version of reality from the point of view of a black South African woman. Muriel is telling "her" story, that is her version of events which does not fit into that of the whites. She also 23. See O.J. Chinweizu's and I. Madubuike's Towards The Decolonization Of African Literature: African Fiction And Poetry And Their Critics (London 1985). 290 stands against the other characters in the novel in her clear-sightedness and sharp analysis of her own condition, although she also belongs to them as a community. The first person narrative contributes in giving Muriel's story the aspect of a testimony and of the rehabilitation of truth by making a certain number of demands on the reader, such as making him/her accept Muriel's view point as the truth of the matter. There is, in Muriel at Metropolitan, a similar process of writing and experience. In other words, it is as if Muriel kept a diary on her desk and, now and then, would jot down a remark or a comment. This procedure could be compared to the separate notebooks where Ann, the heroine of Lessing's The Golden Notebook, keeps a record of the different areas of experience in her life.ÿ* As Ann is writing in her diaries, she is also telling her story to the reader, part of which writing also represents a particular form of experience which has to be recorded. The diary-form of Muriel at Metropolitan and the voice of the narrator/heroine as part of the experience narrated suggest that the concern of the novel is with self-expression, that is with the ways in which one succeeds in articulating an analysis besides one's immediate concern for recording and reporting.
24. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Harmondsworth 1972). 291
Tlali makes her purpose clear towards the beginning of her novel as her narrator expresses her unwillingness to provide a professionalist version of human behaviour and her distrust of knowledge as authoritative: I am no authority in the study of human behaviour. I do not profess great knowledge. I am not a writer. But I do not have to be any of these to know about Africans, feelings, hopes, desires and aspirations. - It is possible to interpret this quote as the reluctance of the writer herself to put herself forward as writer; as a holder of knowledge; but it is most probable that this shying away of the character from being regarded as a writer or autobiographer corresponds to a reaction to a particular situation where writing has become equated with power and control. Muriel's tirade continues as follows: I have read a lot of trash by the so-called "authorities" on the subject of the urban Africans those who spent most of their lives with the whites in their business places and their homes; who travel with them day and night from place to place all over Southern Africa, who toil side by side with all the other races in all walks of life to make this country the paradise it is said to be.26 The novel situates itself clearly as a rehabilitation of the urban black in South Africa. Muriel's endeavour is to tell the real story of the African people, which has been usurped by an erroneous official version of events.
25. Miriam Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan, op.cit., p.10. 26. Ibid., pp.10-11. 292
Muriel is retrieving the voice of the silenced black and giving it a channel of expression. The first person autobiographical Il J II becomes tied up with the collective "we", although the narrative does not shift from Muriel's viewpoint. At several intervals the narrator situates Muriel's voice as part of a larger social context in a direct and explicit manner, as in the following passage where the "I" is replaced by the "hundreds of others": I thought I knew what was coming, and I thought with relief that I was ready to welcome it. It had to come some time, I had already resigned myself to the idea. It was nothing new. What was happening to me was happening to hundreds of others like me all over this country - victimization and unconditional dismissal. 7 The plot of the novel is organized around Muriel's final decision to leave Metropolitan Radio. Her gradual movement towards the realization that she can no longer be "part of a conspiracy, a machine deliberately designed to crush the soul of people" results in her final gesture. Resigning is presented as an act of liberation, a refusal to
collaborate with the system. The novel ends on Muriel finally typing her letter of resignation: My handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands, but also my soul. Muriel's victory consists mainly in the realization that her spirit cannot be tramped on, although she might be physically part of the
27. Ibid., p.70. 28. Ibid., p.140. 29. Ibid., p.190. 293
apartheid machine. Like Lessing, Tlali does differentiate between two forms of oppression (physical versus ideological) as she describes Muriel's condition as "the shackles which had bound not only [her] hands, but also [her] soul".ÿ0 Yet, at the end of the novel, she seems to move towards a more reconciliatory mood contrasting with the previous tone of anger and protest. Her use of the words "soul" and "heart", which increases in the last pages of the novel, brings her close to Head's mystic vision which has been criticized earlier in this study. Although Tlali stands opposite to Head in her extensive usage of realistic techniques of narration and in her strong refusal to indulge in introspective exploration, she seems to share more with Head than one would be inclined to think. The chapter entitled "One Human Heart For Another" combines the two tones of the novel; the militant versus the conciliatory. The heart transplant from a "coloured" donor to a white recipient triggers off a heated discussion among the typists. Muriel alternates between a mellow voice stressing the human vulnerability of the white people and an uncompromising and harder tone. Mrs. Kuhn, for instance, is described as "a great lady, always hard-working" and "a devoted mother" who has reacted courageously to the loss of her daughter in a car accident. Muriel remarks "how inextricably the
30. loc.cit. 294
lives of whites and non-whites are interwoven". She also describes Mrs Stein's voice as "normally harsh, offensive and guttural when speaking to Africans" but "transformed into smooth beautiful tones" when speaking to her fellow white Afrikaners. Muriel even marvels at the fact that "this Afrikaans could be a beautiful language after all".ÿ However, these considerations do not make her protest against white racism milder. Richard Rive's criticism of Tlali's work as "modest" and "subdued" seems on the whole unfair, for, on the contrary, the writer succeeds in putting forward a strong indictment of apartheid without losing sight of the human element in the relationships between whites and blacks. Muriel's verbal attacks on the white women as they blindly defend the apartheid regime and its methods during the heated discussion about the heart-
transplant story seems to be a point in case which contradicts Rive's assumptions. Njabulo Ndebele, in his essay entitled "The Discovery Of The Ordinary", describes two modes of representation in South African fiction. First, the spectacular, which he describes as follows: The spectacular, [sic] documents; it indicts implicitly; it is demonstrative, preferring exteriority to interiority; it keeps the larger issues of society in our minds, obliterating the details; it provokes identification through recognition and feeling rather than through observation and analytical thought; it calls for emotion rather than conviction; it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering 31. Ibid., p.174. 32. Ibid., p.175. 295
intimate knowledge; it confirms without necessarily offering a challenge. It is the literature of the powerless identifying the key factor responsible for their powerlessness. Nothing beyond this can be expected of it. According to him, recent South African writing breaks with this tradition and "deromanticizes the spectacular notion of struggle by adopting an analytical approach to the reality ....,34 He names this new trend the ordinary: The ordinary is sobering rationality; it is the forcing of attention on necessary detail. Paying attention to the ordinary and its methods will result in a significant growth of consciousness. •* Although it is difficult to classify neatly Muriel at Metropolitan in either of these categories, for it seems to be falling in both, Ndebele's analysis is helpful in that it helps the critic approach the notion of individualism and its value outside its traditional association with bourgeois liberalism. His essay examines and rehabilitates the value of introspection and of individual analysis; it considers the literary function and the implications of such an approach to politics. Ndebele examines the "origins", the "method of operation" and the "effective audience" of the new trend which he identified as the ordinary. As he writes, "the writing will validate itself in terms of its own primary conventions; in
33. Njabulo Ndebele, "The Rediscovery Of The Ordinary: Some New Writings In South Africa" in Journal Of South African Studies, vol. 12, no 2 (April 1986), pp.143-57. 34. Ibid., p.152. 35. loc.cit. 296
terms of its own emergent, complex system of esthetics". Ndebele brings a new light onto the traditionally accepted categories of committed and non-committed literature. Similarly, it seems that Muriel at Metropolitan also calls for an alternative approach to the problems of writing a political text, as it subtly combines the slogan, the solitary monologue, the naturalistic description, the deep introspective analysis, the collective voice and the autobiographical search for a narrative. Besides, as a woman's text engaged in articulating the contradictions of the female voice, the novel also problematizes the traditional polarities between the private and the public and the difficult position of women within it. It is important to note the originality of approach in the novel and the many questions which it raises, notwithstanding the fact that they remain, for the most, vague and undeveloped. This is partly due to the fact that Muriel at Metropolitan is Tlali's first and mainly experimental novel. Tlali's following long piece of fiction sheds more light on the points raised above. Muriel at Metropolitan is a novel which tackles a number of important cultural issues in South Africa, such as the notions of voice, of the female self and of writing as an instrument of change. Her following novel, Amandla, articulates these themes in a fuller and more extensive manner. Nevertheless, one should 36. Ibid., p.148. 297 also acknowledge the importance and significance of Tlali's first novel as a testimony of life in South Africa which concentrates of personal relationships and on the individual's experience as an insight into the question of power. It stresses the necessity for women's participation in the cultural debate in South Africa. Although the novel does not directly engage with a feminist debate, it does construct, as it is argued in this chapter, the idea of a black female voice in control of its position.
II. AMANDLA
Amandla is the first "Soweto 76" novel written by a woman. Like Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Sepamla's A Ride on the Whirlwind and Mzamane's Children of Soweto, Amandla was written as a tribute to the children who took part in the 1976 uprising. Banned just after publication, it has gone unnoticed and has had very little publicity. It has recently been unbanned but remains widely unavailable, since it has not been published again after its last publication went out of print. Miriam Tlali commented on the readership of her books as follows: I don't know why Longman haven't tried harder to get Muriel circulating in this country. It's two years since it was unbanned, it's still not circulating in this 37. See Wally Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (Johannesburg 1981), Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane's Children Of Soweto (Harlow 1982) and Sipho Sepamla's A Ride On The Whirlwind (London 1981). 298
country as much as it is circulating abroad. Even abroad I've got to areas where they find it difficult to get hold of my books. But I'm much more known... well, I wouldn't say that. The black people, even if they don't have my book, they know about me, they're aware of my presence they feel my presence. But the actual readership is, I think, still very much abroad. Even in this country, the people who could get my book to read it when it was first published were the white people and the Indians and Coloureds. It was still too expensive for black people to buy. They were aware of it, but when some of them tried to go to CNA [Central News Agency] to get it, it was never displayed. They would have struggled to get it even before it was banned. ® Moreover, hardly any attempt has been made to save the book from oblivion, and very little reviewing has been done. Amandla, as this chapter will demonstrate, makes important statements about culture, resistance and the role of women in the struggle against apartheid. Tlali takes the analysis of her fellow male writers further by incorporating the dynamics of women's experience of oppression, as these relate to the whole question of transfer of power in South Africa. Amandla represents a shift from the first person narrator of Muriel at Metropolitan, in that it adopts a multiple view-points technique in its narration of the collective story of the events of 1976. Through the collective voice (mainly dialogues), it enters the lives of the community of Soweto, and moves from one scene to the next, and from one group of people to another. The scenes
38. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, Between The Lines: Interviews with Bessie Bead, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali (Grahamstown 1989) pp.81-82. 299 alternate, at a rapid pace, between fights with the police, underground meetings, funerals, prison scenes, political discussions, public speeches, and informal gatherings. The novel provides a personal picture of history by showing how events have entered the lives of ordinary people, bringing violence, death, separation of children and parents, and eventually exile for some of the youth. It renders the atmosphere of unexpected violence by starting the story in a place far away from politics and social unrest. A couple of young students, Felleng and Pholoso, are sitting in a Johannesburg cinema, when the news of the riots which have broken out outside reaches them. They are abruptly taken away from their adolescent romance and thrown into the turmoil of the events. At first, the rumour spreads that the "terrorists are here" (another version is that these are "Japanese and Lebanese terrorists"), which provokes amusement among the people inside the cinema. The situation rapidly turns into a drama, as Pholoso's best friend is shot dead by the police. Pholoso is arrested and placed in solitary confinement. He escapes from a police van which is to take him to a detention camp. He is then on the run from the police and escapes through the border to Botswana. The main story line is interrupted by a series of sub-plots involving various characters. The narrative enters the lives of the characters and relates their personal stories in a series of 300 interrelated incidents involving one family and their circle of relations. In a method reminiscent of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, the story explores the individual stories of each character; for instance, it tells us about the marital problems of Agnes and her alcoholic husband, about Teresa's affair with her husband's subordinate police officer, or about Gramsy's attempt to save her grandson, Pholoso, who has joined the underground movement, by consulting a "witchdoctor" The narrative explores the private dreams of the characters, even of those who are not directly connected to the plot, such as Makalo Magong, an old man who has ended in the city after the scandal caused by his sister's white child in his native village.ÿ® The emphasis on individual names in the novel, which are often juxtaposed with the names of famous political figures, reinforces the idea of individual matters being given particular prominence, and of the ordinary being elevated to the level of the political. Makalo Magong is a real- life character whose story Tlali incorporated in the novel. As he silently watches the blue flames of a government building burning, the reader is allowed into his reminiscences about the past and about the events that have led him to Soweto and to the scene of the unrests. All these private anecdotes are
39. Wa Thiong'o Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat (London 1967). 40. Craig Mackenzie and Cherry Clayton, op.cit., p.78. 301
interspersed with events affecting the whole community, such as the burning of the municipality offices, the school boycott, the "Zulu impi" (fights between local residents and migrant workers), or the boycott of the Christmas festivities. The main purpose of Amandla is to draw a picture of resistance as an act of culture and as an act of spiritual revival. The novel reveals how any form of personal struggle represents an act of resistance, and how the personal and the political have become one. A predominant idea is that the political situation revolutionizes people's lives by challenging them on a day-to-day basis. Like Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism, Tlali describes how symbols of oppression are turned into sites of struggle by the oppressed. The colonized, in order to free him/herself has to turn culture into an instrument of resistance. For example, the burial of Dumisani starts as a traditional African celebration: "... We Africans respect and revere our dead. They are our saints and mediators. We believe that after death they are more active than when they are alive. We keep them "alive" by naming our children after them so that the living link with them is never severed. We remember them from time to time in many of our family ceremonies...H41 and continues as a direct denunciation of apartheid and as a call for more action from the youth. The traditional remembrance of the dead is turned into a
41. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit., p.76. 302
political speech. Tradition is used as a disguise for more radical forms of resistance. Culture, for Tlali, is deeply rooted in the present. People as makers of culture prevail over notions of ancestral heritage. Her view of history is close to Walter Benjamin's definition of the historical past in Illuminations. Benjamin criticized the definition of the past as a transfixed notion which he saw as a step towards fascism: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. 2 This definition stands in direct opposition to the attempts by the white ruling class to legitimate its position of power by turning to a nostalgic vision of Afrikaner history as a heroic resistance against a hostile land and hostile people. Tlali's portrayal of history goes against official versions by pointing at the historical moment as the sole legitimation. The image of the nameless and sourceless river which carries human corpses along with dead animals and used cars epitomizes the turmoil of the historical moment. As the narrator comments, what matters is how people as makers of history turn objects into meanings, and not how objects impose their meaning on the people. The description of the river goes as follows:
42. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London 1973), p.257. 303
Although it was mid-winter, the grass on the gentle slopes was still stinkingly green, sheltered from the biting winds and irrigated by a constant stream-with-no-name, possibly a tributary of some "unknown" river. This odorous stream emerges from a far-off place: the residents of the many townships of Moroka have never really bothered to investigate it to the source. The steady brook and the Rockville Lake have both been accepted as part of the landscape, as objects of either beauty or menace, depending upon how the individual regards them. Decayed corpses have been fished out of the lake; floating carcasses of dogs and other animals have also been removed by police while horrified spectators, local people and children looked on. Distressed people attempting suicide have been timeously (sic) rescued from the notorious pool. Runaway cars, attempting to evade a police chase, have on many occasions smashed through the steel borders along Vundla Drive and plunged headlong into the lake. The river meanders on, digging dongas right across the locations of Phiri, Mapetla, Senoane and Moroka, where it broadens out to form the Moroka Lake and flows on through Klipspruit, Orlando Mzimhlophe to an "unknown" destination.cÿd This passage deserves quoting at length, for its insistence of the "unknown" origins and destination of the river combined with the precision of names, again, points at the ambivalence of historicity: claiming no other origin than the present, the river still meanders through a land which bears the mark of the people who live on it and who belong there. It is significant that, at the end of the novel, the river takes away in its flow the medallion which a white man had given to Pholoso. The man, chased by the angry mob, made this last gesture of redemption before his death. The token of solidarity drops into the water as Pholoso is about to depart the country. It is interesting that one of the rare symbolic 43. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit., pp.61-62. 304
moments in the novel aims precisely at de-mystifying the idea of solidarity between blacks and whites. The anti-symbolic content of the passage, once again, counteracts the official apartheid culture which mystifies reality and history. History is a major theme in Amandla. The novel reads in many ways as a historical document, keeping the past of the black people alive by relating individual stories. Although fictionalized, the events have a strong hold on reality. Tlali explained in an interview that she was urged to write Amandla by people who wanted her to tell their stories. As in her regular column "Soweto Speaking" in the magazine Staffrider, Tlali tells the events "as they are" without discriminating them in order of importance. In "Soweto Speaking", popular history is recorded through interviews with "ordinary" people, such as self-employed women struggling to make a living, women office cleaners living in the fear of being assaulted during their night shifts, people facing problems of bureaucracy (renewal of pass-books, etc.), men and women who have lived through important historical events, like Rev. Tsolo who was in a prison camp during the Anglo-Boer war. The idea came from a book by the American Studs Terkels, who compiled the result of three years of interviews with working people (from midwife to gravedigger), recording their personal
44. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., (Grahamstown 1989), p.78. 305
history, their aspirations and "how they feel about themselves". As it is explained in the first issue of Staffrider, the aim is to turn "everyman" into an author. Like Tlali's journalism, Amandla is a series of personal anecdotes, the significance of which does not, at first, seem to link up with the rest of the novel. Each scene is a fragment of reality juxtaposed to another. The question is to determine how these multiple fragments and voices are structured, and how this structure relates to the themes and content of the novel. In other words, the transition from the fragment to the unified vision, from the anecdote to the political analysis, and from the fact to the story will determine the general meaning of the novel. The next paragraphs will deal with the ways in which Tlali puts history into dialogue, how she places the events of 1976 in perspective by engaging in a debate about education, how the novel articulates itself as a didactic piece of writing, and how it is directed towards a collective act of reading. The longest scene in Amandla deals with the confrontation between two opposite ideological positions. Killer, an old guard of socialism argues with his friend Toboho Moremi, a liberal-minded and middle-class aspiring character who sees access to capital as a step towards the liberation of blacks. The passage engages with the debate around the issue 45. Staffrider, vol.l, no.l (1978), p.2. 306
of socialism and with the transition from white to black rule. By confronting two different points of view, Tlali puts the history of South Africa into dialogue. The discussion is a means of presenting the reader with a personalized picture of history and of South African politics. The discussion is shared by a small "audience" of young men who take part by cheering and encouraging the two "contestants". Killer's erudition enables him to keep the upper hand, although his argument fails to be accurate at points, especially when it comes to his denigration of the Soweto students' uprising as lacking leadership and organization. Killer belongs to the Unity Movement, which Ten Points Programme he cites at length. The NEUM (Non- European Unity Movement) was formed in 1943 by elements who were dissatisfied with and critical of the African National Congress, especially on the issue of class. Holding a Trotskyite analysis of exploitation, the Unity Movement aimed "to build up an alternative mass movement to those influenced by the Communist Party Yet, the movement lacked direct involvement and, instead, concentrated on ideological work. Mary Benson sums up its action as follows: In print their record was powerful: militant resolutions repeatedly called for total boycotts. In practice they achieved little. It was as if the extremity of their 46. Rob Davies, Dan O'Meara & Sipho Dlamini, The Struggle for South Africa: A Reference Guide to Movements, Organizations and Institutions, vol.2 (London 1984), p.311. 307
programme on paper and in their journal, Torch, psychologically satisfied the need for action. 7 Apart from its emphasis on ideology, the Unity Movement was particularly sensitive on the issue of education. Its membership was mainly teachers from the Cape African Teachers Association and the Teachers' League Of South Africa.4® Its leader, Tabata, is a well-known figure who, among various writings, published a book on Bantu education, Education For Barbarism, from which Killer, in the A Q novel, quotes whole arguments. 9 The significance of this long debate between the two characters remains open to interpretation. Tlali shows definite sympathies for the positions of the Unity Movement. Killer's speech can be read as a warning against compromise and against capitalist- oriented attitudes among blacks who see capital as access to political power. In the light of the recent talks of negotiation in South Africa and the worry that certain demands by the Black people might be compromised, Tlali's message is of particular relevance. However, rather than centring her argument around economic issues or around which system of development should be followed as an alternative to apartheid Capitalism, Tlali concentrates on the issue of education as a main point of focus. The
47. Mary Benson, The Struggle for a Birth Right (London 1985), p.122. 48. Rob Davies et.al., op.cit., p.312. 49. I.B. Tabata, Education For Barbarism In South Africa (London 1960). 308
major point in Killer's argument about education. Largely inspired by the ideologists of the Unity Movement (Tabata, Jabavu), his argument emphasizes the need for writing and reading the history of South Africa, and for adopting an alternative system of education in order to re-establish the link with the past, which has been severed by the banning and imprisonment of writers, intellectuals and politicians. I.B. Tabata wrote about the role of education: Now, in any society, ancient or modern, it is the duty of the older generation to prepare the young to take their place in the economic, intellectual and social life of the community. In modern times this duty falls largely to the State. It provides a system of education in keeping with the highly complex activities of man in an industrial age. The paramount importance of systematized education has long been recognized. For the future of a society is intimately bound up with and to a great extent dependent upon the way the youth are prepared for the task of maintaining that society. Any system of education, therefore, is concerned not only with the teaching of certain skills and professions, but with inculcating certain ideas which are basic to the society and necessary for its perpetuation. Education is carefully designed and organized so that the children imbibe those moral, cultural and intellectual attitudes that are the essence of that society. 0 In the same line of thought, Killer, in the novel, calls for more awareness about the past and for the necessity to rewrite history: Most of our young people are not aware that this struggle has been on for a long, long, time. That is why the majority of them accuse their parents of being cowards. They ask such questions as "Why did you agree to leave Sophiatown and Western Native Township 50. Ibid., pp.3-4. 309
and come and live so far out of town?" They have to be informed of the efforts of our leaders of yesterday. They must know for instance why the A.N.C. and the Unity Movement disagreed. They must appreciate the endeavours of our great thinkers, of the African men of vision who toiled day and night to extricate our people from this yoke of serfdom ... We must look into the past and together with our youth learn from the successes or failures of bygone times and strive to find solutions to our present problems. That is why we have to re-write our history and relate and reflect true events and not what we find in most text¬ books in this country."ÿ1 In this particular respect, Killer's speech is a good example of alternative education. Addressing a small "audience", he provides a historical perspective on the development of the country, with a special emphasis on the education. Apart from Tabata and Jabavu, he quotes from the SASO (South African Students Organization) leader, Onkgopotse Tiro, from the historian Monica Wilson, but also from Wilberforce, Rhodes and Livingstone. His "lecture" also includes quotes from the laws and acts passed by the white parliament. Killer denounces the "intellectual genocide" perpetrated by the white government against blacks. He gives the example of Nazi Germany where "the main target was education", for it was in the schools that the Nazi "indoctrinated the youth with the myth of racial superiority". Killer concludes by urging the youth to "get hold of the right books and read them".ÿ Like Gordimer in A Guest of Honour, Tlali conceives her novel as a "textbook" on African
51. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit ♦ , pp.244-45. 52. Ibid., pp.225-31. 310
politics by referring extensively to the major political arguments and ideological splits in the history of resistance against colonial power. The narrative is explicitly didactic and the "audience" follow Killer's speech with all the respect due to elders. Killer has taken on the role of the teacher, of the spiritual healer and leader of the community. His aim is to educate his people but also to pass on history to the younger generation. Given the context of the 1976 students' protest, it is not surprising that education occupies such a central place in the novel. As Killer explains, Bantu Education is part of the government strategy of "separate developments" aimed at keeping blacks in a position of inferiority and within strict "ethnic" boundaries, so that "he can become a worthy member of the Bantu race instead of having to be a "synthetic Westerner". The task which Tlali undertakes in Amandla is to destroy this concept of "ethnicity" by drawing a picture of the black people as a multilingual and multicultural group, involved in the future of the country as well as in its past, and finally as a people who have achieve a successful syncretism of their complex cultural heritage. The dialogues, for example, include a wide range of linguistic variations: Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and the many languages which contribute to the making of the lingua franca of the township, as well as Afrikaans and English. The narrative explicitly 53. Ibid., p.218. 311
points at the linguistic diversity of the country through combining different languages, most of the time providing a translation into English. The imposition of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of education which triggered the 1976 uprisings was in fact to mask the will of the government to keep blacks away from competing for jobs with whites by providing them with a low standard of education. Tlali reveals how such concepts as cultural difference and "ethnicity" are used for specific political purposes. Language also is manipulated to mask political strategies; as a group of teachers ironically comments, the word "bantu" will probably be replaced with another label still retaining the basic structures of the present education system: "Ye-e-s. Tomorrow is the day of the big test. The children must go to the Bantu - no, the "something new" Education schools." "So the name has had to be scrapped! Their favourite word "Bantu" must go. What will they call it then?" The man who'd said he'd rather starve than drive for PUTCO took up the question, and after a few moments of serious reflection offered his answer. "Maybe "African Education" or "Black Education" - anything!" "No. They won't use those words," replied another man, leaning on the steel bars across the window, his eyes fixed on the strange vehicle at the bus stop, bristling with its "security precautions". "The name "African" translated into Boer language would be "Afrikaner" and they will not like that because it would then be "Afrikaner Onderwys", which would make it ambiguous - and they detest that. In the Afrikaans form the word must only be applied to them, you see - in fact it is now their private property!" 312
There were giggles and laughter, and the man went on to explain, his eyes pinned on the automobile outside: "As for "Black" Education, there's the fear that we shall come to call it "Black Power Education". I need not tell any of you what that would mean. Just hearing the words "Black" and "Power" coupled together like that makes them shiver!" "They'll give it a nice little name. Something like "Peaceful Education"; "Progressive Education"; "Good Education"; "Modern Education", names like that."54 Particular emphasis is placed on words and names. Translations and quotation marks abound in the novel, making the reader aware of the linguistic process which is taking place within the whole struggle to retrieve history. Language becomes a site of resistance, and new words are created to fit the demands of the situation of emergency, such as, for instance, the word "power" which has entered the syntax of everyday language: Things have changed. These are different times. We now have "Power" stoves, "Power" children, "Power" everything!"55 Against the stale and static concepts of "ethnicity" put forward by the supporters of apartheid, black people respond with linguistic creativity and diversity. As Frantz Fanon showed, language is often the tool of the oppressed against the oppressor.55 The importance of performance in Tlali' writings has already been stressed in the previous section of this chapter. In Amandla, the novelist explores the idea of a fictional audience sharing the narrative 54. Ibid., pp.117-18. 55. Ibid., p.105. 56. See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (London 1970). 313
with the reader further by drawing upon the oral tradition of story telling. Yet, she presents her readers with a modernized version of it, once again, adapted to the immediate reality. She takes from tradition the idea of a shared communal experience as opposed to the solitary activity of novel reading. Walter Benjamin saw the act of reading a novel as individualistic, possessive and even destructive: A man listening to a story is in the company of the story-teller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated more so than any other reader. (For even the reader of a poem is reader to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener). In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates the novel is very much like the draft which stimulates the flame_ in the fireplace and enlivens its play.57 In Amandla, Tlali has abandoned the autobiographical narrative and its individualist concerns to turn to the community and to collective forms of expression. The resurgence of "orature" in the novel (dialogues, story telling, audience sharing) coincides with Tlali's notion of a homogeneous community. The fictional community of the novel plays an important part in articulating its message. The reader is constantly aware of an audience of characters whose stories are not told
57. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller", Illuminations (London 1973), p.100. 314
but whose presence as listeners can be felt. The narrative only covers a small part of the network of relationships between the different members of the community. The characters form a chain of relatives, friends and neighbours brought together by the circumstances: a crowd in the street, a gathering in a shop, a funeral, for instance. The sum of these multiple voices structure the novel into a syntagmatic pattern. The chain is not only a central motif but also the junction between theme and structure, form and content. This is where the transition from the personal anecdote to the structured story takes place. Tlali brings the personal and the collective together by making the community the central character of her novel. Pholoso, the hero, acts in the background. His voice, unlike Muriel's, is never allowed to take over the narrative. Thus, in Amandla, Tlali leaves the first person narrative aside and opts for the collective voice as a place from where to articulate one's claims. In becoming the mouthpiece of her community, Tlali gives a priority to articulating women's voices. The question is to examine how she situates the female voice as part of the larger context of the community, and how she conceives of the specific claims of women for gender equality within the politics of liberation. The question of gender is a central point and, consequently, will be dealt with 315
as the object of a separate analysis in the rest of this study. Women, in Amandla., represent an important economic and cultural force. They organize the Christmas festivities boycott, prepare funeral ceremonies which turn into debating forums, and set up community programmes which include education as well as small-scale agricultural schemes. They enable not only the material but also the spiritual regeneration of the community. For example, Pholoso inherits his father's books through his grand¬ mother, who had carefully kept them for her grandson. Women as the keepers of the past and as the holders of traditional values are usually seen as conservative ideas. Tlali's statements about the place of women in the liberation struggle emphasize the difficulties which women face when taking part in politics. When asked if "the demands made by the struggle on women are those of sacrifice for and support of men who play the major role”, she answered: It is my view, yes. They play a supportive role because they are not allowed to come to the forefront. If they were allowed by the system and by the men - they would. Many women -protect their husband's egos by playing up to the fact that they are merely supportive, and they really know they are the very ones who are behind the forceful nature of the men. ® In other circumstances, Tlali did not hesitate to call herself a feminist, although "not in the 58. Craig Mackenzie, op.cit., p.75. 316
narrow, Western kind of way of speaking about a feminist", and to condemn the way in which the accusation of being a feminist, as she once said, "is thrown into your face in the same way in which Communist is thrown into the face of the blacks in South Africa". Amandla articulates feminist issues in a line which differs from conventional Western feminism and which sheds more light on the complex interaction of race and gender when it comes articulating the claims of the black South African woman. In the novel, women are shown as decision makers and as powerful speakers. Tlali's emphasis is on strength rather than passivity and sacrifice. Her women characters are symbols of resilience and of personal initiative, from Gramsy who struggles to organize a funeral ceremony for her late husband to the shebeen queen who saves Pholoso from the police. Far from being relegated to the margin of society, women come to the forefront to voice their opinions and their demands. During the meeting which follows the funeral, a woman emerges from the kitchen and interrupts the men who have been discussing politics: He took the ashtray from the table it was already full of ash and the -many cigarette-stubs he had been smoking one after another without a break - and handed it to one of the women to empty in the kitchen. Then he frowned in disgust, shook his head and pulled a fresh one from the 59. Ibid., p.74 & Kirsten Holst Petersen, Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference (Uppsala 1988), p.185. 317
packet near him. The woman returned with the clean ashtray and handed it to Killer, smiling. She gauged the tense atmosphere from the expressions of the menfolk and decided to come to the rescue. She asked: "If you cannot come to an agreement, why waste time why not leave it to us, the women? I am sure we would do a quicker job if only you would let us." Some of the men laughed, shuffled their feet uneasily under the table, looked askance at the woman, and did not bother to ask what solution she would advance. They considered her remark a mere joke. 0 The woman then puts forward the community programme set up by the women in collaboration with the youth. It is a project based on self-awareness, education and self-reliance, and which aims to "teach people to be themselves".6ÿ- Against the opinion that women's groups divide the struggle against common oppression, women in Amandla are shown as a strengthening and radicalizing force within the struggle. Their programme applies to the whole of the community and preaches unity in order to overcome the divisions created by apartheid. As one woman explains: There's no such a thing as a middle class as far as we are concerned. People know that we are all equal and that whatever inequalities seem to exist, are false. They are made to look real by the system. We know that given equal opportunities, any one of us can succeed in any endeavour.62 60. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit., pp.253-54. 61. Ibid., p.258. The emphasis on self-reliance and self-awareness and the special way in which the women relate to the youth as a group with which they can identify point at the strong influence of Black Consciousness on the writer. For more details about the links between Black Consciousness and women's writing in South Africa, see Dorothy Driver, "Women and Voice In Colonial Discourse: Self-Representation In Writing By South African Women", paper presented at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 22 May 1989. 62. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit., p.258. 318
The novel deals with the inequalities and divisions created by society by putting forward a view of a unified and homogeneous community, where women constitute the central core. Once again, Tlali speaks from the heart of the community rather than from its margins. Nevertheless, this does not prevent her from dealing with women's issues specifically. Tlali brings women's problems to the fore by showing how the personal and the political have become one in the struggle for liberation. At the thematic level, She tackles the issues of marriage breakdown, domestic violence, sexual abuse and aspects of women's experience which are usually kept silent. Agnes tells how she has been battered by her alcoholic husband, others narrate how they have been harassed by white men in higher positions (ticket examiners on trains, prison wardens). In her latest collection of stories, Tlali goes into more detail about describing black women's daily experiences of abuse caused by the laws of apartheid and by male supremacy in society. Women narrate the loneliness, the hardship but also the small joys and the sisterhood which enable them to survive in their hostile environment.ÿ* At a narrative level, women are perceived as the performers of the oral tradition. They report the
63. Her story "Devil at a Dead End” which is about a black woman being sexually assaulted by a white ticket collector was banned in South Africa. 64. Miriam Tlali, Soweto Stories (London 1989). 319
action which takes place in the street and act as a kind of "chorus", providing information and commentaries on particular events. Women carry the narrative of the novel whereas the men perform the action. This traditional "division of roles" raises questions about the feminist content of the novel. It is also true that the main character is a man and that he is portrayed as a heroic revolutionary who has risen above petty personal preoccupations. The question is to determine whether this unproblematized handling of gender roles necessarily signifies that women are denied positive roles and actions in the novel.
Looking at the woman's question in perspective, that is within the South African politics of race, gender and class, it is necessary to reassess the context within which women are fighting against oppression. The devastating effects of apartheid laws (land act, migrant labour) on the family
structures (forced separations, women left alone to fend for themselves and their children) have led to a revalorization of the traditional family. Unlike Lessing and Gordimer, Tlali does not associate the traditional family with patriarchy. For her it is a source of support and a means of survival. This is the reason why a classic Western-orientated feminist approach to gender roles, in the tradition of Kate Millet, fails to provide, in this case, a satisfactory analysis of gender relations. In an article mapping out the main ideas of "socialist 320
feminism", a new phenomenon in South Africa, Jo Bell, Shireen Hassim and Alison Todes wrote: Because women's role within the household are the very roles by which they accord themselves value, it is relatively easy to organize women around these issues or activities. This is most frequently done within a conservative discourse. Progressive and feminist women's organizations have often failed to recognize the value women place on their roles as wives, mothers and homemakers and have thus lost opportunities for engaging with popular consciousness in a critical and creative way. 5 This is the view which Tlali seems to adopt as she turns away from unrealistic descriptions of "free women" and shows a preference for detailed
descriptions of the daily struggle of women within
the existing structures of society. Like Lauretta Ngcobo who has often commented on her inability to create a female character (hers "kept dying" as she put it) because of the absence of status for women
under apartheid, Tlali also refuses to falsify the reality. Instead, she puts considerable emphasis on describing women's daily gruesome existence,
refusing to indulge in artificial elaborations of "freedom". The important point is that women are not excluded from the narrative. Women are incorporated even when they are absent from the scene of the action. For example, Pholoso raises the issue of women's membership in the underground students' movement and explains why women are absent: 65. Jo Bell, Shireen Hassim and Alison Todes," 'A Bit on the Side'?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa", Feminist Review, no.3 (1989), p.46. 321
"There is another very important matter. I am surprised that no one has asked why there are no women members of this innermost core. The reason is that it is very difficult for them to move about easily from one point to another without the risk of being molested in some way. As you all know we have very active women who are indispensable to the cause. In many instances, they are our "feelers". They do a lot of conscientising by engaging in the many women's organizations which attract large numbers, in the church, for instance. It is our duty to penetrate all spheres, cultural, religious, sports and so on. Like us, our women exert their influence everywhere. Our word should become the popular word of the people. We must set the pace, and provide examples. 6 Pholoso then elaborates on the necessity for women to educate themselves and urges his companions to take their sisters, aunts and mothers with them to the library and to encourage them to learn. As he puts it, "the women were brainwashed into believing that the only thing they could do was to wait on us and be at our disposal".®ÿ He finally reminds his friends of the imperative of women's liberation as part of the whole battle for freedom and of the fact that "if you keep a person down, you remain down with him (sic)".68 The absence of women freedom fighters in the novel does not entail an exclusion of women's role in the struggle, which is, on the contrary, addressed directly. Tlali goes even further than simply acknowledging the role of women in the struggle as she analyses the changing gender positions in society. The final scene of farewell between Pholoso and Felleng plays
66. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit• t pp.88-89. 67. Ibid• t p.89. 68. loc.cit. 322
down the heroism of Pholoso's political involvement by articulating Felleng's determination to express her claims as a woman. The scene is a strong reminder of Tlali's story "Point of No Return", which describes the parting between a man who is about to join the underground movement and his wife who is adjusting to the idea of life as a single mother. At first glance, the story reads as a cliched representation of female passivity and resignation and of male determination and heroism. At another level, it reformulates the traditional gender roles and tries to analyze the implications of the changing structures. Mojalefa's father has paid "lobola" (bride price) to Bongi's family so that they can marry and avoid an "illegitimate" child, although Mojalefa showed some reluctance because of his commitment to the movement. At the end of the story, Bongi accepts to renounce the dream of the happy family: Bongi stood up slowly. She did not utter a word. There seemed to be nothing to say. She seemed to be drained of all feeling. She felt blank. He thought he detected an air of resignation, a look of calmness in her manner as she moved slowly in the direction of the opening into the street. They stopped and looked at each other. She sighed, and there were no tears in her eyes now. He brushed the back of his hand tenderly over the soft cheeks of the sleeping Gugu and with his dry lips, kissed S'bongile's brow. He lifted her chin slightly with his forefinger and looked into her eyes. They seemed to smile at him.” This passage needs quoting at length, for Bongi's attitude means more than abdication; her silence and 69. Miriam Tlali, Soweto Stories op.cit., p.137. 323
equivocal body language (the repetition of the verb "seem" leaving areas of doubt and uncertainty) do not completely resolve the conflicting emotions which she feels about Mojalefa's departure. Although the passage emphasizes the passivity of the female character, it does not totally silence her. This long comment on "Point of No Return" will hopefully shed some light on the significance of the final passage of Amandla. There, Felleng's response is more fully articulated than Bongi's enigmatic smiles. When Pholoso attempts to draw her away from politics by leading the conversation into conventional romantic tones, Felleng reacts by reminding him of the inseparability of their personal lives and of the politics of the country: Pholoso smiled and tried to change the subject. He drew the girl nearer to him, feeling her warmth. 'Let us talk about more pleasant things, Felleng. Let us talk about ourselves.' But we are talking about ourselves, Pholoso. Talking about this land is talking about ourselves.'7® The conversation goes back to the immediate concerns of the characters: the unrest in the township, the detention of fellow students. In this last scene, which Njabulo Ndebele rightly described as one of the most powerful moments in the novel, Tlali engages with the issue of personal love and the struggle by stressing the need to fight "not only physically but also mentally".7* Like Lessing, Head and Gordimer, Tlali is cautious about indulging 70. Miriam Tlali, Amandla, op.cit., pp.287-88. 71. Ibid., p.289. 324
in descriptions of romantic love, for it cannot be disentangled from the relations of power which affect it. Still, whereas Gordimer often rejects romance as a form of egocentric narcissism, Tlali does leave some space in her fiction for intense moments of lyricism. Underneath the rigid and self- disciplined writing, one is still aware of more complex and uncontrolled feelings. For instance, in the brief meeting between the lovers which takes place while Pholoso is on the run from the police, the reader is made to look at Pholoso through the eyes of the female character. The scene abounds with candid expressions of love and cliched images, emphasizing the youthfulness of the characters and the simplicity of their emotions: Even the bullets of the Boers will never stop me from coming to you. You are like a prize. I must fight to get you. You are like a whole package of... of... what shall I say? A package... of sweetness... of bliss. And to think that you are all mine.. You are Mother Africa - and how I love you!,'72 In her travelogue "Setsumi Qoqolosi", Tlali reflects on the degrading effects of apartheid and dreams of pastoral idylls as she walks through the country area of Setsumi Qoqolosi. Her conclusion is that "some dreams you have to abandon as unattainable; what you should never do is to stop dreaming. How many of our goals do we ever reach?„73 In other words, dreaming should not be rejected as such, but has to be problematized. Tlali deals
72. Ibid., p.71. 73. Miriam Tlali,Mihloti (Braamfontein 1984), p.68. 325
with this duality on the one hand, describing her condition as a suppressed human being under apartheid laws, and on the other hand, expressing her own desires- by using irony, by distancing herself from the emotions of her characters and by stating her commitment to reality in clear terms. In an interview, Tlali stated: "I don't think I should at this time in our history be involved in a lot of talking and dreaming about the beautiful skies and the moon, and so on, and dreaming about ideal situations when we don 1 1 have them.«74 Paradoxically, Amandla is traversed with intense moments of lyrical prose submerged under the descriptions of the daily struggle for survival. This conflict is, to some extent, another version of Tlali's mistrust for metaphorical language and her alignment with a syntagmatic and chronological narrative structure, which has been discussed in more detail in the first section of this chapter. Amandla is more than a piece of journalism, in the same way in which Muriel at Metropolitan is more than a piece of autobiography. It articulates important points about history, culture, education and about the role of women in transitional society. As it has been discussed, her emphasis is on cultural resistance, multiculturalism, collective action, social change and on a reconsideration of women's changing roles in society. Her account of
74. Craig Mackenzie & Cherry Clayton, op.cit., pp.76-77. 326 the particular events of Soweto 1976 and of their impact on the lives of the people who lived through them leads her to an analysis of her society and of the different forces at work. Like Lessing, Head and Gordimer, Tlali articulates the issue of gender as part of the whole problem of power. Amandla remains a valuable piece of historical recording of the black people's resistance against apartheid as much as an authentic account of personal emotion and of personal relationships under difficult circumstances. 327
CONCLUSION
The analogy between the patriarchal oppression of women and apartheid racism has become a commonplace for those who support a free and democratic South(ern) Africa. Equality between the sexes is part of the liberation movements' political agenda. Cultural debates have emphasized the role of women in creating a democratic culture and the necessity for re-assessing gender relations as an essential part of the liberation process. However, feminism as a philosophy is still being defined according to white models; and the word "feminism" itself still bears the stigma of a privileged position which cannot take on board class and race issues. By looking at the contribution of four Southern African women to the debate of feminism, this study has raised a number of points about the relations between race and gender. Firstly the choice of including both black and white writers in the material of this thesis originates from the hypothesis that women's writing in Southern Africa is directed against a dominant white male ideology. All four writers in this study have proved to fulfill this task, although not in the same ways. The converging points between them could be summed up as being a concern for finding a 328
position from where to speak, and from where to construct a sense of identity and self outside the categories of apartheid. Literature has revealed itself as a space where identities are reassessed. Women's writing in Southern Africa has addressed the questions of identity and power with intensity and from various angles. It has established a tradition of literature which is plural and which is not restricted to one dominant mode of writing. It has shown that literature is a process whereby writers reassess the colonial and sexist constructions of self and otherness. Doris Lessing, by writing about schizophrenia as a way of breaking through different forms of consciousness, has explored the domain of socially and psychologically constructed self-images from the point of view of the colonial woman. The "game" of recognition and disavowal played by Mary and Moses in The Grass Is Singing is a scenario which can be found also in Gordimer's July's People. Blacks as a projection of the white self haunt the fiction by white women who attempt to find a voice through reaching for the "black other". Although Head and Lessing use a similar psychological approach to the woman's alienation in a male-dominated world, Head introduces into her argument the questions of power and meaning from the point of view of the black woman. Through her particular use of symbolic language and myths, she combines the post-colonial and feminist 329
preoccupations with forms of representation. Identity is a site of struggle, especially for the black woman writer who is fighting a double battle. Head's fiction addresses some crucial points in post-colonial politics, notably the place of woman within the ideology of black nationalism. Nadine Gordimer, on the other hand, attempts to reconstruct a sense of a self as a white woman faced with the dead end of white liberalism in South Africa and with the demands of Black Consciousness. She endorses a constructed "African" identity through the use of multi-voiced texts, sub-texts, collage and through inverting and subverting the roles ascribed to blacks and to whites by South African society. However, her fragmented narratives and the superficial and at times contrived aspects of her textual strategies betray a deeper unresolved manicheism at the roots of her writing. The strength of her fiction comes from her description of the colonial/apartheid transposition of the sexual onto the racial and the political and of the typical sexualization of otherness in the white psyche. Tlali's concerns are different from Lessing's and Gordimer's and, to a certain extent, different from Head's too. Tlali's use of the autobiographical first person narrative in Muriel at Metropolitan draws her close to writers, like Ellen Kuzwayo, who have attempted to construct a black female voice through the larger voice of the black people. Drawing on the oral tradition and combining 330
different genres (autobiography, drama, realist novel, story telling, journalism), Tlali's writings present the readers with a plural form of narrative reflecting the complexity of the cultural dynamics at work in her society. The modes of expression of Tlali's novels are reminiscent of the Black Theatre of the 1970s in that they are concerned with bridging the gap between "art" and "life", with using literature as a tool for education, for consciousness raising and for self-knowledge. Tlali's novels remind us, as critics, that literature is above all a process that is to be approached through a wider context than the literary text. They also remind us that constructing a voice is not solely a matter of finding textual strategies, but also involves other battles, such as finding publishers and resisting censorship. Women's writing in South Africa is determined and defined by the colour-bar, and differences between black writers and white writers cannot be erased or overlooked. Comparing Gordimer's July's People and Tlali's Amandla, published at nearly the same time, there can be no doubt about the polarity between the two writers. The first fantasizes and imagines the struggle for liberation as a way of coming to terms with the whites I feelings of anxiety and fear about the future of South Africa, whilst the second proposes a definite practice of resistance. The alienation experienced by Nadine Gordimer's female characters springs essentially from the difficulty 331
of reconstructing the relations between self and other in terms of race. On the other hand, alienation for Tlali's heroines is tied to the fact that black women have no status whatsoever in apartheid society. Unlike the female characters of Tlali's novels, who represent the voice of the black people from whom they do not separate their
struggle, the white heroines of Gordimer's and Lessing's fiction, who have rejected the white
ethos, are in basic conflict with their own heritage. Bessie Head holds an original position in that her white heritage in terms of origin and upbringing clashes with her non-status in society as a black. It is obvious that the conflicts which divide South Africa are bound to be reproduced at the level of narrative.
The act of writing being an act of power, who is writing in terms of colour, particularly in South Africa more than anywhere else, is a question which needs to be addressed. Writing as a black or as a white, whether man or woman, has different implications. Beyond the basic differences of position and status in society, the high rate of illiteracy among blacks, the black writers I dependence on white publishers and the problem of censorship, there are less obvious obstacles for black women writing under apartheid, such as the absence of an established literary tradition. Miriam Tlali's comment on this matter illustrates the problems facing the black woman writer: 332
I might be very well known, but to me it's really nothing. My real aim is to one day see a lot of young people coming up to do exactly what I am doing. I am not flattered at all by the fact that I'm the only one who has been a published novelist writing from inside South Africa. It is a terrible, solitary kind of life, whereby I cannot for instance have people with whom I can discuss my writing, unless I leave the country and meet people like Bessie Head, who died, or Buchi Emecheta and Ama Ata Aidoo. I work with a number of young people who are aspiring to be writers and we have put together an anthology of Black women writing about their experiences from inside South Africa. We have called it, When the Caged Bird Sings, inspired by Maya Angelou. Writings by black women is a .recent development in Southern African literature, and is gradually gathering momentum. Among the most recent publications are Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988), which depicts the cultural conflicts of growing up as a black woman in colonial former-Rhodesia, and Lauretta Ngcobo's And They Didn't Die (1990), a novel which pays tributes to the resistance of the South African women in the rural area of Southern Natal in the 1950s and 1960s. Both novels tell the untold stories of the women whose lives are dictated by racist and sexist laws. This study has highlighted an area of literature which still remains marginal, unknown and seldom acknowledged. Literary criticism and academic research have traditionally concentrated on white 1. Elean Thomas, "Inside the Belly of Apartheid", interview with Miriam Tlali, Spare Rib, issue 200 (April 1989), p.23. 2. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London 1988) and Lauretta Ngcobo, And They Didn't Die (London 1990). 333 women writers, such as Lessing and Gordimer. Black women's writing has still to find a place and a recognition in the literary and academic institutions of African literature. 334
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The Novel in the Third World, Washington: Inscape Publishers, 1976.
Lodge, David (ed.), 20th Century Literary Criticism [1972], London: Longman, 1986.
Lukacs, George, Studies in European Realism, London: Hillway Publishing Co., 1950.
Manganyi, N.C., Being-Black-In-The-World, Johnnesburg: Spro-Cas/Ravan, 1973.
Marx, Karl, Early Writings, London: Pelican, 1975. 346
Massa, Daniel (ed.)/ Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature, Malta: Old University Press, 1979.
Mazrui, Ali A., The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective, The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Memorial International Frantz Fanon, Paris: Presence Africaine, 1984.
Mohamed, Abdul R. Jan, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, Amherst: The University of Massachussetts Press, 1983.
Morris, Robert K., Continuance and Change: The Contemporary British Novel Sequence, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Mphalele, Ezekiel, The African Image, London: Faber & Faber, 1974.
Narasimbaiah, C.D., Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, New Delhi: Sterling Press, 1978.
Nichols, Lee (ed.), Conversations with African Writers: Interviews with Twenty-Six African Authors, Washington: Voice of America, 1981.
Oilman, Bertell, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, London: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Pieterse, C. & Munzo, D., Protest and Conflict in African Literature, London: Heinemann, 1969.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
"Orientalism Reconsidered", Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the [8th] Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, Barker, Francis et.al. (eds.), Colchester: University of Essex, 1985, 14-27. 347
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Black Orpheus, Aile, S.W. (trans.), Paris: Presence Africaine, 1963.
Cu'est-ca-que La Littérature?, Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Slemon, Stephen, "Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing", Kunapipi, vol.9, no.3 (1987), 1-16.
Soyinka, Wole, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988.
Tiffin, Helen, "Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse", Kunapipi, vol.9, no.3 (1987), 17-34.
Todorov, Tzvetan, Mikhail Bakhtina: Le Principe Dialogique, Paris: Seuil, 1981.
Théorie de la Literature: Textes des Formalistes Russes, Paris: Seuil, 1965.
__ Theories du Symbole, Paris: Seuil, 1977.
White, Allon & Swifield, P.S., Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986.
Yeats, W.B., Essays and Introductions, London: Macmillan, 1961.
V. CRITICISM ON SOOTH AFRICAN LITERATURE:
Barnett, Ursula A., A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (1914-1980), London: Sinclair Browne, 1983.
Beeton, R., "The Achievement of the South African Novel", New Nation, October 1968, 4-5.
Bunn, David & Taylor, Jane (eds.), South Africa: New Writing, Photographs and Art, a special issue of Triquaterly, Northwest University, 1987. 348
Campschreur, Willem & Divendal, Joost (eds.), Culture in Another South Africa, London: Zed Books, 1989.
Carusi, Annamaria, "Post, Post and post. Or Where is South African Literature in All This?", Ariel, vol.20, no.4 (October 1989), 79-95.
Christie, Sarah, Hutchings, Georffrey & Maclennan, Don (eds.), Perspective on South African Fiction, Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1980.
Coetzee, J.M., White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, London: Yale University Press, 1988.
Daymond, M.J., Jacobs, J.U. & Lenta, Margaret (eds.), Momentum on recent South African Writing, Pietermaritzburg: University on Natal Press, 1984.
Driver, Dorothy, "Women and Voice in Colonial Discourse: Self-Representation in Writing by South African Women", paper presented at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 22 May 1989.
Gerver, Elisabeth, "Women Revolutionaries in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing", World Literature Written in English, vol.ll, no.l (April 1978), 38-50.
Gordimer, Nadine, The Black Interpreters, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1973.
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, Stephen Clingman (ed.), London: Jonathan Cape, 1988.
"The Prison-House of Colonialism", Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1980, 918.
and Abrahams, Lionel (eds.), South African Writing Today, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967.
Gray, Stephen, Southern African Literature : An Introduction, Cape Town: David Philip, 1979. 349
Heywood, Christopher (ed.), Aspects of South African Literature, London: Heinemann, 1976.
Holst Petersen, Kirsten (ed.), Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers' Conference, Stockholm 1986, Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988.
"Unpopular Opinions: Some African Women Writers", Kunapipi, vol.7, nos. 2&3 (1985), 107-120.
Lessing, Doris, "Desert Child" (review of Van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari), New Statesman, vol.56, no.15 (November 1958).
Mackenzie, Craig & Clayton, Cherry (eds.), Between The Lines: Interviews With Bessie Bead, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali, Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1989.
Marquard, Jean, "The Farm: A Concept in the Writing of Olive Shreiner, Pauline Smith, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordomer (sic) and Bessie Head", Dalhousie Review, vol.59, no.2 (Summer 1979), 293-307.
J'Mathonzi, Risimati, "Defiant South African Women's Voices", Kwanza Journal, no.6 (1980), 3-4.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel, The African Image, London: Faber & Faber, 1974.
Ndebele, Njabulo, "Interview with Kirsten Holst Petersen", Kunapipi,vo1.6, no.3 (1984), 71-73.
"Noma Award Acceptance Speech", Staffrider, vol.6, no.2 (1985), 39-40.
"The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa", Journal of Southern African studies, vol.12, no.2 (April 1986), 143-157.
"The Writer as Critic and Interventionist", Interview with Andries Walter Oliphant, Staffrider, vol.7, nos.3&4 (1988), 341-46. 350
"Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction", Staffrider, vol.7, nos 3&4 (1988), 318-340.
Ngcobo, Lauretta, "The African Woman writer", Kunapipi, Vol.7, nos. 2&3 (1985), 81-82.
"My Life and my Writing", Kunapipi, vol.7, nos. 2&3 (1985), 83-86.
Ngwenya, Thengamehlo, "Mafika Gwala: Towards a National Culture", interview with Mafika Gwala, Staffrider, vol.8, no.l (1989), 69-74.
Nkosi, Lewis, Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature, London: Longman, 1981.
Home and Exile, London: Longman, 1965.
Parker, Kenneth (ed.), The South African Novel in English: Essays in Criticism and Society, London: Macmillan, 1978.
Ravenscroft, Arthur, "South African Novelists as Prophets", Literature and the Art of Creation, Welch, Robert & Bushrui, Suheil Badi (eds.), Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988, 124-139.
Rive, Richard, "Writing or Fighting: The Dilemma of the Black South African Writer", Staffrider, vol.8, no.l (1989), 48-54.
Sam, Agnes, "South Africa: Guest of Honour Amongst the Uninvited Newcomers to England’s Great Tradition", Kunapipi, vol.7, nos. 2&3 (1985), 92-96.
Seroke, Jaki, "Black Writers in South Africa" (interview with Miriam Tlali, Sipho Sepamla and Mothobi Mutloatse), Staffrider, vol.7, nos 3&4 (1988), 303-09.
Sigwili, Nokugcina (Mhlope, Gcina), "Women Writers", Staffrider, vol.3, no.l (February 1980), 44.
Tlali, Miriam, "Quagmires and Quicksands", Index on Censorship, vol.ll, no.5 (May 1988), 95-97. 351
Uledi-Kamanga, Brighton J., The Female Character and the Theme of Identity : A Study in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head, Diss. (Ph.D.)/ Dalhousie University, 1984.
Welz, Dieter (ed.), Writing Against Apartheid: Interviews With South African Authors, Grahamstown: National English Museum, 1987.
White, Landeg & Couzens, Tim (eds.), Literature and Society in South Africa, Harlow: Longman, 1984.
VI. FEMINIST CRITICISM
Abel, Elisabeth (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982.
Bazin, Nancy Topping, "Weight of Custom, Signs of Change: Feminism in the Literature of African Women", World Literature Written in English, vol.25, no.2 (Autumn 1985), 183-197.
Beall, Jo, Hassim, Shireen and Todes, Alison, "'A Bit on the Side'?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa", Feminist Review, no.33 (Autumn 1989), 30-56.
Broe, Mary Lynn and Ingram, Angela, Woman's Writing in Exile, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Brown, Lloyd W., Women Writers in black Africa, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Christian, Barbara, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspective on Black Women Writers, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985.
Cixous, Helene, "The Laugh of the Medusa", Cohen, Keith & Cohen, Paula (trans.), Sign: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.l, no.4 (1976), 875-93.
Davies, Carole Boyce & Graves, Ann Adams (eds.), Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986. 352
De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex [1949], Parshley, H.M. (trans.), Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972.
Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth- Century Women Writers, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Eisenstein, Hester & Jardine, Alice (eds.), The Future of Difference [1980], London: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
Evans, Mari (ed.), Black Women Writers (1950- 1980): A Critical Evaluation, New York: Anchor Books, 1984.
Gilbert, Sandra M. & Gubar, Susan, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [1979], New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1980.
Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, Gill, C. Gillian (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
"Women's Exile", Ideology and Conciousness, Venn, Couze (trans.), no.l (May 1977), 62-76.
Jacobus, Mary, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, London: Methuen, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, Waller, Margaret (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
The Kristeva Reader, Moi, Toril (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Marks, Elaine & De Courtivron, Isabelle (eds.), New French Feminism: An Anthology [1980], Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1985.
Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics, London: Hart- Davis, 1971. 353
Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.
Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen, 1985.
Newton, J.& Rosenfelt, D., Feminist Criticism and Social Change, London: Methuen, 1985.
Nkosi, Lewis, "Women in Literature", African Woman, vol.6 (September/October 1976), 36-37.
Olsen, Tillie, Silences, London: Virago, 1980.
Pratt, Annis, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982.
Rigney, Barbara Hill, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist & Lamphere, Louise (eds.), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.
Ruthven, K.K., Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Scott, Joan W., "Deconstructing Equality-Versus- Difference: Or, the Use of Post-Structuralist Theory for Feminism", Feminist Studies, vol.14, no.l (Spring 1988), 33-50.
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Methuen, 1987.
Taiwo, Oladele, Female Novelists of Modern Africa, New York: Saint Martin Press, 1984. 354
Visel, Robin, "A Half-Colonization: The Problem of the White Colonial Woman", Kunapipi, vol.10, no.3 (1988), 39-45.
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own, London: The Hogarth Press, 1929.
Collected Essays, vol.2, London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.
Three Guineas [1938], London: The Hogarth Press, 1968.
VII. MATERIAL ON SPECIFIC WRITERS
On Bessie Head:
Brown, Llyod W., "Creating New Worlds in Southern Africa: Bessie Head and the Question of Power", Umoja, Vol.3, no.l (Spring 1979), 43-53.
Bruner, Charlotte, "Been-To or Has-Been: A Dilemma for Today's African Woman", Ba-Shiru, vol.8, no.2 (1977), 23-31.
"Bessie Head: Restless in a Distant Land", in When The Drumbeat Changes, Parker, A. & Arnold, Stephen A. (eds.), Washington: African Literature Association and Three Continents, 1981, 261-77.
Clayton, Cherry, "A World Elsewhere: Bessie Head as Historian", English in Africa, Vol.15, no.l (May 1988), 55-69.
Gardner, Susan, il I Don't Ask for the True Story': A Memoir of Bessie Head", Hecate, vol.12, nos.1&2 (1986), 110-129.
"Production Under Drought Conditions", Africa Insight, vol.15, no.l (1985), 43-47.
Geurts, Kathryn, "Personal Politics in the Novels of Bessie Head", Presence Africaine, 1986, 47- 74. 355
Grant, Jane, "Bessie Head: An Appreciation", Bananas, 22 August 1980, 25-26.
Johnson, Joyce, "Metaphor, Myth and Meaning in Bessie Head's A Question of Power", World Literature Written in English, vol.25, no.2 (1985), 198-211.
_ "Structures of Meaning in the Novels of Bessie Head", Kunapipi, vol.8, no.l (1986), 56-69.
Mackenzie, Craig, Bessie Bead: An Introduction, Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1989.
Marquard, Jean, "Bessie Head: Exile and Community in Southern Africa", London Magazine, vol.18, nos 9&10 (1978-79), 48-61.
Ogungbesan, Kolawole, "The Cape Gooseberry Also Grows in Botswana: Alienation and Commitment in the Writings of Bessie Head", Presence Africaine, vol.109 (1979), 92-106.
Ojo-Ade, Femi, "Bessie Head's Alienated Heroine: Victim or Villain", Ba-Shiru, vol.8, no.2 (1977), 13-21.
Ola, Virginia, "Women's Role in Bessie Head's Ideal World", Ariel, vol.ll, no.4 (October 1986), 39-47.
Pearse, Adetokunbo, "Apartheid and Madness: Bessie Head's A Question of Power", Kunapipi, vol.5, no.2 (1983), 81-98.
Tucker, Margaret, "A 'Nice-Time Girl' Strikes Back: An Essay on Bessie Head's A Question of Power", Research in African Literatures, 1988, 170-181.
Wilhelm, Cherry, "Bessie Head: The Face of Africa", English in Africa, vol.10, no.l (1983), 1-13. 356
On Nadine Gordimer:
Bailey, Nancy, "Living Without the Future: Nadine Gordimer's July's People", World Literature Written in English, vol.24, no.2 (1984), 215- 224.
Clingman, Stephen, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.
Cook, John, "African Landscapes: The World of Nadine Gordimer", World Literature Today, vol.52 (1978), 533-38.
Donaghy, Mary, "Double Exposure: Narrative Perspective in Gordimer's A Guest of Honour", Ariel, vol.19, no.4 (October 1988), 19-32.
Fido, Elaine, "A Guest of Honour: A Feminine View of Masculinity", World Literature Written in English, vol.17, no.l ( April 1978), 30-37.
Gardner, Susan, "Still Waiting for the Great Feminist Novel: Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter", Hecate, vol.8, no.l (1982), 61-76.
Haugh, Robert F., Nadine Gordimer, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974.
Hewson, Kelly, "Making the 'Revolutionary Gesture': Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility", Ariel, vol.19, no.4 (October 1988), 55-72.
Hope, Christopher, "Out of the Picture: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer", London Magazine, April/May 1975, 49-55.
"Interview with Johannes Riis", Kunapipi, vol.2, no.l (1980), 20-26.
Laredo, Ursula, "African Mosaic: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer", The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.8, no.l (June 1973), 42-53. 357
Lomberg, Alan, "Withering into the Truth: The Romantic Realism of Nadine Gordimer", English in Africa, vol.l (1976), 1-12.
Newman, Judie, Nadine Gordimer, London: Routledge, 1988.
"Gordimer1s The Conservationist: 'That Book of Unknown Signs'", Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol.22, no.3 (1981), 31-44.
"Prospero's Complex: Race and Sex in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.20, no.l (1985). 81-99.
Ogungbesan, Kolawole, "Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour: Politics, Fiction and the Liberal Expatriate", Southern Review, vol.12, no.2 (1979), 108-123.
Peck, Richard, "What's a Poor White To Do? White South African Options in A Sport of Nature”, Ariel, vol.19, no.4 ( October 1988), 75-93.
Ravenscroft, Arthur, "Nadine Gordimer's New Assurance" (review of The Conservationist), The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.10, no.l (1975), 80-81.
Roberts, Sheila, "Character and Meaning in Four Contemporary South African Novels" in World Literature Written in English, vol.19, no.l (1980), 19-36.
"South African Censorship and the Case of Burger's Daughter", World Literature Written in English, vol.20, no.l (1981), 41-48.
Sampson, A., "interview with Nadine Gordimer", Sunday Observer, 29 March 1987.
Smith, Rowland, "Inside and Outside: Nadine Gordimer and the Critics", Ariel, vol.19, no.4 (October 1988), 3-8.
"Living for the Future: Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter", World Literature Written in English, vol.19, no.2 (1980), 163-73. 358
"Masters and Servants: Nadine Gordimer's July's People and the Themes of Her Fiction", Salmagundi, no.62 (Winter 1984), 93-107.
Smyer, Richard I., "Risk, Frontier, and the Interregnum in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer", The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.20, no.1 (1985), 68-80.
Visel, Robin, "Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer's Colonial Heroines", Ariel, vol.19, no.4 (October 1988), 33-42.
Wade Michael, Nadine Gordimer, London: Evans, 1978.
On Doris Lessing:
Bertelsen, Eve (ed.), Doris Lessing, Johannesburg: Me Graw-Hill Book Company, 1985.
Burkom, Selma R., Il I Only Connect': Form and Content on the Works of Doris Lessing", Critique, vol.ll, no.l (1968), 51-69.
Draine, Betsy, Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Hunter, Eva, "Tracking Through the Tangles: The Reader's Task in Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing", Kunapipi, vol.8, no.3 (1986), 121- 134.
"Interview with Michael Thorpe", Kunapipi, vol.4, no.2 (1982), 95-126.
Porter, Nancy M., "A Way of Looking at Doris Lessing", in-- Female Studies VI, Hoffman, Nancy et.al. (eds.), New York: The Feminist Press, 1972.
Pratt, Annis & Dembo, L.S. (ed.), Doris Lessing: Critical Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1974. 359
Rose, Ellen Cronan, The Tree Outside the Window: Doris Lessing's Children of Violence, Hanover & New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976.
Rubenstein, Roberta, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Sage, Lorna, Doris Lessing, London: Methuen, 1983.
Schlueter, Paul, The Novels of Doris Lessing, Carbondale & Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
Seligman, Dee (ed.), Doris Lessing: An Annoted Bibliography of Criticism, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Sprague, Claire, "Dialectic and Counter-Dialectic in the Martha Quest Novels", The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.14, no.l (August 1979), 39-53.
Taylor, Jenny (ed.), Notebooks/Memoirs/ Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Thorpe, Michael, Doris Lessing's Africa, London: Evans, 1978.
On Miriam Tlali:
Engle, Lars, "Muriel in Soweto" (review of Soweto Stories), Southern African Review of Books, vol.2, no.6 (August/September 1989), 5-6.
Marquard, Jean, "Profile: Miriam Tlali", Index on Censorship, vol.9, no.5 (October 1980), 30-31.
Thomas, Elean, "Inside the Belly of Apartheid", interview with Miriam Tlali, Spare Rib, issue 200 (April 1989), 22-25. 360
VIII. DICTIONARIES AND GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES:
Adey, D. et.al. (ed.), Companion to South African English Literature, Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1986.
Beeton, D.R. (ed.), A Pilot Bibliography of South African English Literature (from the beginning to 1971), Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1976.
Blamires, Harry (ed.), Twentieth Century Literature in English, London: Methuen, 1983.
Drabble, Margaret (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature [1985], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Driver, Dorothy, "Appendix II: South Africa", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 1986, vol.22, no.2 (1987), 124-139.
Galloway, Francis (ed.), S.A. Literature/ Literatuur, vol.1,2&3, Johannesburg: AD. Donker, 1982-85.
Gorman, G.E., The South African Novel in English Since 1950: An Information and Resource Guide, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1978.
Jobes, Gertrude, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, New York: Scarecrow Press, vols.l,2&3, 1961.
Zell, Hans M. et.al. (ed.), A New Reader's Guide to African Literature, London: Heinemann, 1983.