Chris Dunton
ENCOUNTERS: AN ANTHOLOGYOFSOUTHAFRICANSHORTSTORIES
selected and introduced by David Medalie (Wits University Press)
It’s true, I guess, of many, many short stories that they revolve around some kind of encounter – for that brief span of telling, a meeting, a conjunction, a confrontation is ideal to get the stuff of the story moving. But in the encounters found in the South African stories gathered in this new anthology a particular – and national – dimension can be identified.
In editor David Medalie’s words, these stories seem to suggest that “the tenor of our South African encounters … is neither predictable, nor simple; everything that is complex, unique or bizarre within the South African experience leaves its mark on the encounters between individuals”.
Arranged more or less chronologically, here are 22 stories, by 20 authors (Herman Charles Bosman and Nadine Gordimer boast two apiece).
The national dimension – complex, fragmented, discordant as it is – resonates from the outset. Both Pauline Smith’s The Schoolmaster and HIE Dhlomo’s The Barren Wife, the earliest stories, are saturated in a sense of a community’s ethics, of the beliefs, the habits and assumptions of the community within which the stories’ characters live out their experience.
Next, the two by Bosman – not his best- known, but pieces that demonstrate perfectly his unique position in South African storytelling.
Then a piece by Can Themba, iconic Drum writer – again a storyteller whose work radiates the sense of a particular time and place held within a larger span, a broader space. The juxtaposition of Bosman and Themba has the not entirely expected effect of highlighting what they have most in common: their irony.
Many of the stories here represent one strain or other in South African realism: those, for instance, by Gordimer, Alex la Guma, Mbulelo Mzamane, Ahmed Essop and Miriam Tlali.
The latter’s Devil at a Dead End is typical of some of this work in that its straightforward documentary approach might seem bland if you fail to look closely into the hu- man implications of its character’s encounters.
Among stories that avoid realism and employ allegorical elements or the fantastic are Ivan Vladislavic’s Autopsy and Christopher Hope’s finely poised, ambiguous, shocking piece on John Vorster Square’s “accidents”, Learning to Fly.
Representing some of the sharpest and most searching writing is Zo Wicomb’s A Trip to the Gifberge, which has a daughter revisiting South Africa, her birthplace, and her mother, and complexly hating both.
Wicomb handles satire beautifully (an aunt greeting the returnee “dipped liberally into her sack of homilies and sowed them across the arc of attentive relatives”), but the humour doesn’t blunt the pain.
In another especially finely constructed piece, Relatives, Chris van Wyk combines Saki-like twists and reversals with a grimly realistic account of gang warfare.
In his detailed introduction, Medalie points out not only the centrality of the principle of “encounter”, but also how many of these stories focus on power.
One could add that these are also stories that deal with transition, with moments of transformation, with the struggle to enforce change and with sometimes desperate attempts to resist this.
No more ludicrous and disturbing the latter than in Maureen Isaacson’s contribution, set in the new South Africa, at a party held to celebrate the millennium, where even to the stroke of midnight the narrator’s father, a beneficiary of the old order, strives to hold back the coming of the new.