The seeds of Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut might have come from Ferdinand Oyono’s classic on the colonial experience, Houseboy. There, as Toundi the central protagonist lies dying, he asks a compatriot, ”Brother … what are we black men who are called French?”
”Black skins, white masks” — to use a stock Fanonian phrase — have been a preoccupation for black writers and philosophers since the turn of the 20th century; and Matlwa’s book, winner of this year’s European Union Literary Award, brings a youthful exuberance and a quirky interrogative voice to the subject.
Divided into two narratives, Coconut tells the story of two teenage girls, Fiks and Ofilwe, who are, in the parlance, groping in the dark for an identity other than that which birth, circumstance and skin colour gave them.
Ofilwe has been born into a family in which the privileges of the identity that she craves are all too abundant: she lives in the suburbs, goes to a good school and her family is nouveau riche.
This is not enough, as a clever black classmate she adores rebuffs her advances: ”Tell her that I only date white girls.” Similarly, a white classmate refuses to kiss her: ”No ways! Her lips are too dark!”
In the background of all this is the tough figure of Tshepo, Ofilwe’s brother, who tries to re-educate her. ”You will find, Ofilwe, that the people you strive so hard to be like will one day reject you because as much as you may pretend, you are not one of their own. Then you will turn back, but there too will find no acceptance, for those you once rejected will no longer recognise the thing you have become …”
Fiks’s quest, on the other hand, is hamstrung by circumstances. She lives in the squalor of a township with a paedophile uncle and does not boast the education that could smooth her way into an identity of her choice.
These two, ever so briefly, come into contact at the coffee shop where Fiks works and Ofilwe’s family chills out on Sundays. One wishes their frosty relationship could have been explored more because, left as it is, it feels hanging and incomplete. The result is that their two tales feel separate. Had Matlwa dealt a bit more on their interactions at the coffee shop — the meeting place of the newly rich — these two could have discovered that they are, in fact, different sides to the same phenomenon.
This disjuncture, consequently, feels contrived; although their tales may seem separate, they are all joined by their searing pain of rejection, their attempts at negotiating a way out of the racial maze and, most importantly, the blaze of self-hate that is engulfing them. Their fleeting tiff — so, so brief — at the coffee shop is an enactment of their similar but disparate roles at the shrine of the god of whiteness.
Matlwa could have made other characters more rounded — Ayanda and Tshepo especially — and added more flesh to their pitiful skeletal forms. Left in their atrophied state, the real hope for restoration in Coconut is always so distant and what they are up to is something only to be conjectured.
Another curious thing is the author’s choice to give a platform to Ayanda and Tshepo, two boys from well-to-do families working in the restaurants because they just feel like it. An engagement with their fellow workers, whose consciousness has been ground out of them by labour, would perhaps have brought out a different dimension.
This is not to discount this sterling and remarkable effort from a writer with so much potential. She has a way of distilling potentially weighty issues of race, status and identity into an accessible form.
The fruits from Matlwa’s coconut tree have a tantalising zesty flavour. While uniquely South African, the tree’s roots reach out to the fertile earth in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the rest of Africa where the tropical tree has chosen to grow and where coconut issues are staple.