Jane Rosenthal
AL DIE WINDRIGTINGS VAN MY WERELD by Rachelle Greeff (Queillerie, R49,99)
EK STAMEL EK STERWE by Eben Venter (Queillerie, R49,99)
FOR a glimpse of where we are at in the Nineties in the new South Africa, one could do worse than turn to novelists. Two new post-liberation novels, which are already selling well, are Al die Windrigtings van My W?reld by Rachelle Greeff and Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe by Eben Venter, both published by Queillerie. Post-liberation refers here not only to the new political dispensation, but to a generation of writers who do not feel obliged to situate their work within the socio-political context in any specific way.
In flight from the commissars of political correctness (whoever they may be), and the pressures of Afrikaner society, these authors have found their own personal ways to stay sane, pursue happiness, preserve paradise.
According to the blurb, Al die Windrigtings van My W?reld is about “beauty, sensuality and grace”. Which it is, but this understates the case rather, and one suspects that the publisher did not wish to scare off prospective readers, many of whom have had a gutsful of Relevance, Politics, and so on.
A somewhat plotless novel, it is recounted in the first person by one Kiewiet (so called by her grandmother). It begins with her return from London to Cape Town for her grandmother’s funeral. On the plane home she meets an ex-lover and their relationship is rekindled. She moves from this to marriage, childbirth and divorce; her gradual revelation of her life is supported by frequent digressions about the love lives of her parents and her grandmother.
Although she describes an inward and intimate life in her Wynberg cottage with her two small sons, she counterpoints the beauty, sensuality and grace (see blurb) with a telling selection of press cuttings relating to the violence and insecurity of life in South Africa, and thus reminds us of the constant dilemma which confronts the ordinary bourgeois South African: how to get on with life in a hopeful and positive manner in the face of the poverty (squatter camps, beggars at traffic lights) and violence, now seemingly endemic.
Ek Stamel Ek Sterwe is Eban Venter’s second novel. It opens with an hilarious scene in a co-op in a small dorp on the platteland where Constant Wasserman has been sent by his father to purchase various items for the farm. Readers who come from such communities will derive great pleasure from the precision and perfection of Venter’s rendering of the experience of return to a village where one is well known, and the obligations and expectations of the community and family are both suffocating and overwhelming.
It is a measure of Wasserman’s disaffection that he cannot even remember the woman behind the counter’s name and refers to her as “Tannie Dinges”. For me this scene was the highlight of the book, but for Wasserman it is the last straw which makes him decide to emigrate to Australia.
The rest of the novel charts his escape from home and dorp, a sojourn in Johannesburg and a short period in Sydney, where he works in a vegetarian restaurant and is all set to embrace a whole new way of being.
Yet it is one thing to uproot oneself, slough off tradition and guilt, and go and live in another country, but it is another thing entirely to go and die there. Before long, Wasserman discovers that he has Aids. He is cared for during his illness by his good friends, and his brother comes from South Africa bearing Kook en Geniet, that bible of comforting boereresepte. Reconciliation, coming to terms and death follow, gracefully handled and, throughout, beautifully written in an Afrikaans as vigorous and sensitive as the boereseun Wasserman himself.
Both novels deal with the establishing of personal identity and life in exile. Kiewiet, in Greeff’s novel, returns to live in Cape Town, but she is in exile from her original cultural community which she disparages as “beyond the boerewors curtain”. Wasserman, confronted with the final reality, acknowledges his origins. It is not an easy passage for either, and both novels are full of interesting resonances for all South Africans, not to mention a few discomforting questions.