RIAN MALAN - RESIDENT ALIEN
Once in a while I have one of these serendipitous days that makes me wonder if things happen as predestined or purely by chance. I met up with my first live fellow bookcrosser, Symphonicca, at the Service Station, a deli in Melville, yesterday morning for coffee.
Adjoining Service Station is a lovely independent bookshop aptly named Love Books; www.lovebooks.co.za, and after browsing through the shop I bought a copy of Rian Malan’s latest book “Resident Alien” which was recently published.
Symphonicca is leaving South Africa and we exchanged some books and the conversation soon turned to favourite books and authors. She is Canadian and will be returning to Quebec next week. Before we went our separate ways I showed her “Resident Alien” and told her that Malan’s “My Traitors Heart” is, for me, one of the definitive books about South Africa that she should consider reading.
“My Traitors Heart” is subtitled “Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself” and was published in the early nineties. I’ve had this on my bookshelf for many years and it is one of the truly great books about South Africa; in particularly for white South Africans of Afrikaans descent.
It is mainly about the Afrikaners struggle with their sense of identity, being part of this stubborn truly South African tribe rooted in the soil of this land as deeply as the history and traditions of all other indigenous peoples. It is also about trying to fit into the ever changing political and social landscape of a newly created democracy.
Late Saturday morning I went to Die Pienk Kerk (The Pink Church) also in Melville which is now, after years of standing empty, being used as a creative space for art exhibitions, book and poetry reading with the odd musician giving an impromptu show.
I knew that Brenda Burnit, the South African songstress, would be at Die Pienk Kerk. I’ve been looking for her CD “Strong in the Broken Places” since last year when I heard her song “Afrikaner” for the first time. I’ve used this song in a previous livejournal post titled "El Presidente Zumaletto and the Afrikaners" and it is also part of the South African Surprise CD compilations that I sometime send out to overseas bookcrossers.
I was introduced to Brenda and told her I loved the song but had to pirate it off YouTube in the end as I couldn’t find the CD anywhere. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders and said that she’d changed management and that the CD was unavailable for some time. I bought a copy which she signed “Thanks for the support and also for the pirating!”
Before Brenda did her set I saw another trio warming up. I thought the guitarist looked sort of familiar. Long thinning grey hair, middle aged, attractive in a worn out way. They started playing; the guitarist, a drummer and the angelic bluesy voice of a thin slip of a blond girl. They were really great and the music soared through the old church on a sunny South African Saturday morning.
Only afterwards I found out that this guitarist is …. Rian Malan. I did not even know he was a musician. I hauled my copy of “Resident Alien” out of the car which he kindly inscribed and signed. Oh and I also bought his CD “Alien/Inboorling” which is surprisingly good.
Serendipity, Pre-destiny, Change? I dunno.
When I got home I googled Rian Malan and found the following comment he made about being a musician:
"I’m a kak (shit) writer and a bad human being, man, but I’m a really good rhythm guitarist. I’m really, really, really good. For a white man I’ve got a truly astonishing sense of rhythm.”
Bashful? I don’t think so…but if you’re good, you’re good and I suppose you needn’t be.
Apparently he appears quite often at “The Radium Beer Hall” in Orange Grove which is a drinking haunt and music venue as old as Jozi itself. “Resident Alien” was launched there.
At the launch Malan said his title is “an oblique reference to white people in Africa”. His speech was centred on what he called his “journey of alienation”, a journey occasioned by his contrary opinions. “This alienation is useful in a way because it gives me a great deal of time to think about what the underlying issues are and get away from the drama - to think the thoughts forbidden by the thought police. A lot of people would disagree but I see myself as a regular, ordinary guy. I’m not a bad guy - I also like to have a dop, have a braaivleis, watch the rugby - and I’m certainly not an intellectual.”
Malan continued, “When my first book was published, I was like a prophet and people would come and asked me what would happen in South Africa and I would say it’s all just fucked. I later saw we were living in a pretty happy state and I was essentially just too drunk to register it. So I decided to turn liberal again but this just alienated me further. So I decided to take up boeremusiek and find a gang that would have me.
“Just when I thought my alienation was complete and I was never going to recover, something very unexpected happened: the lights went out. It was the Eskom crisis of 2008, and the collapse in confidence of most people in the future of South Africa. I had been out there in deepest darkest ideological hyperspace for so many years and suddenly found people were joining me.”
Ah well, the thoughts of a true new-Afrikaner trying to make sense of living a life in this strange, sometimes scary but never boring melting pot of a country at the beginning of a new millennium.