Friday short fiction #29: South Africa
Shahaira de Cuba Hi there 2010
"The white man is the master in South Africa, and the white man, from the very nature of his origins, from the very nature of his birth, and from the very nature of his guardianship, will remain master in South Africa to the end."
- House of Assembly Debates, 15 March 1950, col. 3610.
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
- Desmond Tutu, Today, NBC TV, 9 January 1985.
18 July was Mandela Day. As I've spent half the week in Johannesburg perhaps inevitably I've been reading quite a bit more South African short fiction, but I've found writing from black South Africans is still harder to come by (at least online, as this selection shows). Top of my list to explore more are Damon Galgut and Nadine Gordimer, but there are plenty of anthologies of recent South African writing so it's hard to know quite where to begin. Plus it's a shame there are no Coetzee short stories available online.
Arthur Bacchus, 'Line of Sight' (SOUTH AFRICAN WRITERS' COLLEGE, 2010)
Winner of the 2010 SAWC short story competition. Confined to a wheelchair, a paranoid old woman keeps the intruders out of her apartment with a shotgun. This first-person story held my attention throughout but perhaps the detail that's missing/concealed is from what perspective she was telling it - was it later in custody, or is her story merely an internal self-justification?
Nadine Gordimer, 'Mother Tongue' (NEW STATESMAN, 1 JANUARY 2005)
Concerning the tricky subject of 'belonging' in a foreign country, a German woman marries a white South African and enters his inner circle, with all the linguistic challenges of a country with many tongues. Gordimer's prose is always dense, but she reads easily once you get into her rhythm.
Henrietta Rose-Innes, 'Poison' (AFRICAN PENS: NEW WRITING FROM SOUTHERN AFRICA, 2007)
A re-read of another recent Caine Prize winning story (also the winner of the 2007 SA PEN Award), in which Cape Town is blighted by a major environmental disaster, and some of those fleeing are marooned at an out-of-town service station. This story becomes more haunting as it develops: the narrator is an enigmatic blank slate, yet what she ends up finally doing makes an allegorical point about those not joining the "new" South Africa.
Favourite short story of the week: Damon Galgut, 'An African Sermon' (THE WALRUS, JULY-AUGUST 2004)
Set on a night train from Pretoria to Cape Town, a young white church minister encounters a Rwandan who has fled the 1994 genocide. I like the way Galgut juxtaposes the minister's flexible version of events told to his congregation against the concealed truth behind the story told to him by the Rwandan, and in a subtle way it points out how we can and do use fictions to hide both the best and the worst of our intentions.