“Ways of Staying”

“WAYS OF STAYING” PARADOX AND DISLOCATION IN THE POSTCOLONY Kevin Jon Bloom A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Johannesburg, 2009 1 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted for any other degree or examination in any other university. ---------------------------- Kevin Jon Bloom Twelfth day of February, 2009. 2 Abstract The first section of the thesis is a narrative non-fiction book-length work titled Ways of Staying , which is to be published by Picador Africa in May 2009 and is a journey through selected public and private concerns of contemporary South African life. Written in the first-person, it seeks to give the reader an intimate view of some of the more significant headlines of the past two years – the David Rattray murder, the ANC Polokwane conference, the xenophobic attacks, to name just a few – and to intersperse these with personal accounts of the fallout from violent crime (the author’s cousin Richard Bloom was murdered in a high-profile attack in 2006). The objective of the book is to present in a non-solution orientated (or heuristic) manner the various textures and paradoxes of a complicated country. The second section of the thesis is a reflexive essay on the above, where Ways of Staying is located within a range of thematic and symbolic influences, specifically: the work of novelist VS Naipaul vis-à-vis the parallel and incongruous dislocation of self and other in the post-colony; the work of Alan Paton, JM Coetzee and Rian Malan vis-à-vis the theme of ‘fear’ as a dominant force in white South African writing; and the non-fiction work of Antjie Krog vis-à-vis race and identity in a post- apartheid context. My conclusion, if it can indeed be said that I have one, is that the ‘unease’ of the modern white South African (or at least a large enough number of us for the generalisation to be made) is an inevitable and necessary consequence of history, and so is perhaps better publicly acknowledged than willfully ignored. 3 Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER), which has enabled me, through its generous Writing Fellowship, to dedicate myself full-time to this project. My supervisor Jo-Anne Richards has been an invaluable source of moral and narrative support throughout the process. My editor Ivan Vladislavic has helped me to improve the structural quality of the work (I look forward to working with him further prior to publication). Michael Titlestad’s wise counsel has likewise been of much value. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration Abstract Acknowledgments SECTION I Primary narrative: Ways of Staying 6 SECTION II Reflexive essay 2.1 Background 217 2.2 The narrative engine: paradox & dislocation 217 2.3 Structure & form 219 2.4 Central themes 223 2.5 Publication: the likely criticisms 230 SECTION III References 3.1 Works cited 235 3.2 Interviews cited 236 5 SECTION I: PRIMARY NARRATIVE ‘Yes, they have a story to tell. Its setting is in the interstice between power and indifferent or supportive agency. In that interstice, the English-speaking South African has conducted the business of his life. Now he was indignant and guilty; now he was thriving. This no-man’s land ensured a fundamental lack of character. With a foreign passport in the back pocket of the trousers, now they belong – now they do not. When will they tell this story?’ – Njabulo Ndebele, Fine Lines from the Box ‘For the circulation of horror stories is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia about being chased off the land and ultimately into the sea.’ – JM Coetzee, Stranger Shores 6 Prologue Umbrellas are unfurled, yellow and blue and bright orange. The Johannesburg sun is fierce and the men wear dark suits, the women heavy dresses. Laurie and I don’t have an umbrella. We stand at the back, in the sun’s full glare. The rabbi is far away, concealed in the crowd, and his voice fades and resurfaces on the wind. We catch excerpts of psalms, the eulogy, the Kaddish . By rights we should be nearer the grave: Laurie’s grandfather and Brett’s grandfather were brothers. But we must leave soon so I can stand with my own family at the next funeral. At the next funeral they are burying Richard. I turn around again to make sure we can get away. We’re still in the clear, I see. We can walk up the hill and onto the path between the conifers. I see a lone worker up there, a gravedigger perhaps, waiting in the shade with his newspaper. The story is no doubt on the front page. Slain actor and fashion designer to be buried this morning in Westpark Cemetery...the bodies of Brett Goldin (twenty-seven) and Richard Bloom (twenty- eight) were discovered on Monday beside the M5 freeway in Cape Town… Discovered, that is, four days ago. The funerals should have happened sooner, I’m thinking, in accordance with the custom of returning the dead to the earth without delay. Of course custom – whatever its virtues – must occasionally bow to the laws of the state. And who can complain that the state has been tardy? Post-mortem completed, evidence filed, corpses ‘reconstituted’ and flown up to Johannesburg for burial. So now, while a long queue of mourners performs the mitzvah of shoveling soil – three spades each – into Brett’s grave, Laurie and I hurry back to the ohel , where in the middle of a bare anteroom Richard’s coffin lies on an old steel gurney. My name is called as a pallbearer. I take my place on the left, behind my father and my uncle Jonathan. My father sobs once, a deep sharp heave, and then he is quiet. We wheel the casket out of the room. 7 We stop in the central hall, where the rabbi speaks briefly about Torah and ‘the world to come’. The next pallbearers are called; the casket is wheeled out the back door and into the sun. More than two hundred mourners follow, the only sound in the procession the rattle and clank of steel and rubber on broken tar. I walk with Laurie, beside my parents and my sister. My uncle Tony and aunt Sandy walk just ahead. Tony’s shirt is torn, a sign that today he is burying a son. Between Tony and Sandy walks Derek, Richard’s twin. I can barely look at my cousin. Later, in the car on the way home, Laurie and I don’t say a word. We’ve been fighting all week, venting at each other, and now our anger is spent. When we get to the apartment I head for the couch. Laurie goes to the bedroom with her guitar. She can’t know it yet, but the song my girlfriend composes will be broadcast one day to a large international audience. She writes it in minor chords, a Paddy Griffin- type sound, spare and precise. She names it for a line in the chorus – ‘What else is there?’ – and she decides not to include in her lyrics a reference to the fact that they were murdered. They’re gone, she sings. That’s all. 8 1 City in Disguise At the far end of downtown Johannesburg, where a six-lane highway separates the city from the industrial suburbs to the south, stands an invisible skyscraper. The building rises twenty floors and boasts almost two thousand windows, and nobody has seen it in months. Instead of a chocolate brown seventy-eight-metre-tall office block, what you see when you drive past Penmor Tower – 1 Rissik Street, completed 1974 – are skyscraper-sized billboards for an insurance company. It is only when you leave the safety of your car, to peer into the building’s empty lobby, to walk on its crumbling concourse, that you notice the other, smaller billboards. There are two of them: one facing north, where there is a fenced-up tavern called Bender’s Arms, the other facing east, where a forbidding concrete monolith houses the deeds registry office. The smaller billboards show a picture of a smiling and attractive woman, and extend the following invitation: ‘Sexy Space to Let! Live, Work & Play in the City!’ * A Monday morning in late summer 2007. From where I wait Penmor Tower is one block to the south. I wait in a silver Alfa Romeo, a 156 Selespeed, with a sunroof and spoilers and red and black leather seats. The car – which hides beneath its racing exterior perhaps the worst gearbox in the history of the marque – is parked on Anderson Street, just off the corner of Loveday. On the corner opposite is Johannesburg’s newest street sign, a diagonal red line through a man next to a table stacked with goods: no hawking. Themba Jacky Koketi, aged twenty-seven, is on foot. He has walked to this end of town from Saratoga Avenue, from his room in an old carpet factory more than three kilometres away. He arrived at eight, at opening time, to ask the people at the 9 municipal office to reconnect his water supply. I call Themba on his cell phone and say, again, that I can come to him. ‘No,’ Themba says. ‘Wait where you are.’ In five minutes he appears, a face at the passenger window.

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