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Thirteen Cents Postcolonial Text Vol 15, No 1 (2020) Post-Apartheid Hybridity Discourse and the Narrative Distinctions of Duiker’s Thirteen Cents Michael D'Itri McGill University, Montreal, Canada Nothing I am, of not tribe or race, and because of it full of a childish arrogance to defend myself against all of you —Bessie Head, The Cardinals1 Introduction In the foreword to Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly’s Writing South Africa, the authors suggest that South African literature before and after apartheid produced texts which “recorded or satirized state- enforced racism, explored the possibilities of resistance and rebuilding, and creatively addressed the vexed question of literature’s relation to politics and ethics” (i). Published in the aftermath of apartheid South Africa, I suggest that K. Sello Duiker’s first novel, Thirteen Cents (2000), presents a narrative that responds to the political impact of apartheid’s legacy, explores what resistance and rebuilding might entail for the nation’s inhabitants, and addresses literature’s relationship to politics. Duiker’s protagonist, Azure, is a dark-skinned orphan with blue eyes who lives in the violent, tumultuous streets of post-apartheid Cape Town. Throughout the first-person narrative, we witness Azure’s physical, financial, and sexual exploitation by street gangs who rebrand him with the name of his racially ambiguous eyes, Blue. After the gang leader Gerald saws off the cast on Azure’s broken leg, Azure climbs the nearby Table Mountain in a state of madness that results in the unexpected and fantastical destruction of the entire city. Thirteen Cents thus concludes with an intriguing, if not baffling, sequence of apocalyptic events on Table Mountain that have most commonly been read by critics as the conclusion of a Bildungsroman about Azure’s empowerment, overcoming of adversity, and esoteric self-knowledge among the lingering phantasmagoria of post-apartheid Cape Town. In State of Peril, Lucy Valerie Graham similarly argues that the novel ends as an anti-Bildungsroman which reworks the genre in order to emphasize Azure’s exploitation and expulsion from the nation-state. Picking up on this argumentative trend, Edgar Nabutanyi and Andrea Spain have recently tried to steer Duiker criticism away from the focus on a Bildungsroman reading of Thirteen Cents with respective readings that analyse the novel as a dystopia and a depiction of uncertain queer futurity. However, these readings do not offer a full account of the postcolonial implications of muddling the violence of Azure the literary character with that of Duiker the author. This article insists that to read the novel’s apocalypse sequence as a part of a Bildungsroman—in which Azure’s increased appeals to “getting stronger” (Duiker 121) are a form of marginalized “empower[ment]” (Nabutanyi “Powerful Men and Boyhood Sexuality” 39) —is to ignore that Azure increasingly appeals to patterns of domination, violence and re-victimization that have been previously inflicted on him by the colonial institutions and their legacy within South Africa. Azure’s apocalypse cruelly wipes out both victim and perpetrator, both innocent and guilty, in much the same way that the post-apartheid oppression of Cape Town—which is inherited and experienced by Azure as gang violence and sexual exploitation— ignores distinctions between child and adult, or White and Black. Azure’s conjured apocalypse, I also argue, embraces a form of hybridity which resembles Homi K. Bhabha’s elucidation of the term, and which is hence ideologically and politically disengaged from the realities of racial difference in post-apartheid South Africa. My analysis, taking up Amar Acheraiou, Zoë Wicomb and Gugu Hlongwane’s critiques of Bhabha, thus positions Azure’s embrace of hybridity in contrast to the competing discourses within Duiker’s text which critique postcolonial hybridity’s pragmatic ambivalence. Whereas Kazeem Adebiyi reads the polyglossic features of Thirteen Cents as Duiker’s endorsement of “hybridity,” I suggest that the linguistic differences between those who are exploited and those who perpetrate violence highlights the political implications of language. I similarly read the numerous urban and rural non-human animals in Thirteen Cents, who speak back to Azure’s attempts to collapse their differences, and hence assert their own distinct forms of organization. This article thus distinguishes between Azure as a survivor of post- apartheid exploitation who employs similar models of ambivalence and disengagement, and Duiker as an author who wishes to spotlight this disengagement and the violent consequences it has for the development of those who exist within its parameters. Duiker thus employs a narrative model to counter uncritically homogenizing theorizations of hybridity. Theoretically, this project seeks to continue in the tradition of postcolonial considerations of Duiker’s text, and further extend the critical analysis of the text’s eco-critical, historical, and political implications. Duiker is an author deeply interested in issues of violence, and especially violence as it manifests linguistically. As he said in an interview with Fred De Vries in 2004, !2 Postcolonial Text Vol 15, No 1 (2020) [w]ithout wanting to trivialise [its] seriousness … one can say that violence is a culture that communicates a certain message … I wanted to explore how violence is not only a way of dominating people, but … to show that violence is used by people to communicate with each other and to convey a message. The way in which this happens is deplorable. But we are part of a violent culture, and we never knew a period of rest, nor did we receive help to enter into a process of healing after apartheid … It will take some time still, before violence neutralises itself. I look behind it: where does it come from, is it hate, anger or communication? In any case, it’s a kind of language. (quoted in Raditlhalo “The Travelling Salesman,” 101–2) Duiker acknowledges that violence is a language that is historically inextricable from post-apartheid South Africa, and yet continues to manifest itself in “deplorable” ways which are inherited by Azure. Considering Duiker’s fraught relationship with violence—seen both in his upbringing during the pinnacle of South African apartheid, and in his eventual suicide by hanging—I submit that a more considered analysis of the political, eco-critical and cultural consequences of the destructive power embraced by Azure is necessary in order to critique the postcolonial institutions that wield and direct this power. Beyond the Bildungsroman Critics of Duiker’s Thirteen Cents find themselves in a considerable predicament when faced with its seemingly ambiguous ending, and have often employed one of two readings. As Sam Raditlhalo perceives, the “ending in either hallucinations and/or magical realism … negates closure to what has been written in the social-realist mode” (“A Victory of Sorts” 275). Thus, we may either read Azure’s freedom from oppressive structures via the realm of magical realism as a redemptive, optimistic change (like Shaun Viljoen or Brenna Munro) or believe that these are hallucinations from a pre- colonial past to which Azure desperately attempts to cling (like Meg Samuelson or Sam Raditlhalo in “A Victory of Sorts”). Both of these readings suggest that Duiker attempts to further integrate Azure within the world of the novel as the narrative progresses, whether this means that Azure grows into a powerful member of society, or that he seeks some sort of alternative community on the mountain and successfully joins it. Graham perhaps first recognizes the Bildungsroman as inherent in these critical accounts. In her book State of Peril, she asserts that the novel marks Azure’s failure to integrate into the social world (or rather, the failure of his social world to incorporate and protect him). In the extent to which it foregrounds a street child’s complete marginalization within the nation-state, the novel is enough of a corruption of the traditional genre as to be read as an anti-Bildungsroman. (175) !3 Postcolonial Text Vol 15, No 1 (2020) In this manner, the novel is a critique of the social conditions that have encouraged and sustained Azure’s prolonged alienation from any meaningful communities (176). Graham’s emphasis on Azure’s isolation, rather than focusing on Azure’s agency and power, troubles the assumption that Thirteen Cents ends with an unambiguous optimism for the future. As Viljoen perceives, “[s]till completely alone, but with clarity of mind, [Azure] can, the ending suggests, begin again on the clean slate emerging beneath his feet” (xvii). However, both Graham and Viljoen ignore the colonially replicative violence seemingly endorsed and performed by Azure at the end of the novel, as I shall explore further below.2 Similarly, in his desire to move beyond a Bildungsroman reading of Thirteen Cents, Nabutanyi wishes to focus on the dystopian aspects of the novel without seriously contesting the notion that Azure’s growth and development might be problematized by Duiker himself (“Powerful Men and Boyhood Sexuality”). As Nabutanyi lays out, “[w]ithout disputing these scholars’ claim … it might also be productive to read [the novel] as a commentary on post-apartheid socio-familial dystopia” (35). Although Nabutanyi counters readings that suggest the novel is a “[B]ildungsroman of [Azure]’s sexuality in foundation” (qtd. in “Powerful Men and Boyhood Sexuality” 43), Nabutanyi encourages Bildungsroman readings of the novel’s ending. As Nabutanyi suggests, Gerald and “the perpetrators’ desire to disempower [Azure] fails because … sexual violation spurs [Azure] to regain [his] agency—with Azure hiking into the mountain to regain his independence and agency” (39). Indeed Nabutanyi does not seem concerned with the specific forms of “independence and agency” that Azure seeks, in which reading the end of the novel as an empowering “hike” threatens to misread and ignore the immense violence and colonial legacy that permeates it.
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