Chris Dunton
CHILDREN OF THE DIASPORA AND OTHER STORIES OF EXILE by Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane (Vivlia, R42,95)
THE NAKED SONG AND OTHER STORIES by Mandla Langa
(David Philip, R59,95)
MBULELO MZAMANE’S title for his collection cues us in – his are largely stories that look back to the days of the struggle, and most are set in the countries of exile.
Mandla Langa’s stories take us up to the present (up indeed to the president’s prostate operation); his first-person narrators take note of the amaGents in their gravymobiles; they comment, too, on how easy it is to throw stones at the new democracy. Yet all his stories dive back continually, imperatively, to the years of apartheid.
Exile, as Mzamane records, is times of fear and anxiety, jaw-locking boredom, frustration at the stalling of the struggle, and internecine squabbling with comrades. It is also unexpected victories: in Welsh Interlude, the narrator achieves a union of interests between Xhosa and (his hosts) the Welsh, both up against the suffocation of their culture by the English.
For some readers these stories will not do what they want stories to do. Mzamane’s writing is uncompromisingly didactic. In places, his use of expository dialogue is hard to live with: it’s easier to take an invisible narrator expounding political realities – even if she or he’s a bit stiff – than a pair of wooden characters doing likewise. But to reject his didactic narrative technique out of hand (and some readers are likely to, especially given his priorities in truth-telling) would amount to a sterile, narrowing view of what fiction can do.
Botswana Interlude, for example, is not so much a tale as a space, sketchily defined, within which Mzamane can record material relating to the struggle: the lives of South Africans escaped to Botswana, one a Sowetan student, one an activist who has to flee after spying, hidden in a dustbin, on Zulu hostel workers planning an attack.
What comes across, what Mzamane records for us, is the exiles’ dedication, tough realism, and great, if precarious, courage. Mzamane’s narrators speak directly of the past, as it happens; Langa’s gaze back at the past. And “no one can imagine what we went through”, says one.
The narrators of the stories in The Naked Song audibly grapple for an overview that eludes them. In The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones, Clementine targets her telling on the question of how her father died, and in Chukwa a train of associations leads from an account of a drunkard father’s love for his son to the drowning of a wealthy British madwoman.
Here Langa’s key witnesses confront not only the violence of the state and of those who were/are its beneficiaries, but – inextricable from this – the sense of a terrifying indeterminacy: life on a tightrope of razor-wire, above a barely measurable void. And the struggle to get at least something of this across emerges in stories that mostly dispense with tightly ordered narrative. Even the title of a story here doesn’t necessarily tell you much about its contents or its intentions: the title here is a starting-point for a string of fragmentary recognitions, from lives that are prevented from adding up to more than the sum of their parts.
The detail is harrowing enough (the bludgeoning to death by a farmer of a chicken thief, the hideous death of a boy working in a ship’s engine-room in the Durban docks); the occasional statement of overview is gripping, and not unreasonable to read as spoken straight by Lange – especially in the record of exile, which is packed with detail igniting with the sense it must be released (as in the stories of Mzamane).
Langa does lighten up: A Gathering of Bald Men is charged with suspense and surprise and is sharply, sourly funny. This is a skill that Mzamane also has: when, in one story, newly conscripted Portuguese soldiers in Mozambique are ordered to shoot any potential bearer of weapons, they find themselves confronted by old men and little boys – and, so, are confounded by “the semiotics of age”. (Still they start shooting.)
You might feel there is just too much packed into some of the stories in The Naked Song – but then Langa manages to communicate with fierce intensity how it is all too much. Try There Are Virgins in the Township: I can’t think of any story I have read for quite some time that culminates with such poignancy and such force.