Jane Rosenthal
THE BLOOD SPOT by Gertrud Strauss (Solo)
MY VOICE IS UNDER CONTROL NOW by Peter Horn (Kwela)
By a strange little twist of synchronicity two South Africans with German connections have published collections of short stories this year: Gertrud Strauss The Blood Spot and Peter Horn My Voice Is Under Control Now.
The two collections have certain things in common: both are set in or soon after the apartheid years and speak of passionate political involvement, carefully assessed. Both examine right action proceeding from well-thought-through moral and political positions. Both look at the establishment of identity, reconsidering childhood stories and transitions. And both contain stories exploring the experience of black men and women, daring to speak for them.
Strauss’s writing defies the conventions of form while maintaining a perfectly ordinary, everyday tone in which to deliver inner realities, moral issues, the nuances of personal relationships.
Maria’s Passion is a sustained submersion, since it is written in the first person, in a period of psychic dislocation, grief and gradual return to normality of a woman who has survived not only an abusive relationship, but also the death of the abuser.
Her Flight and Return is an accomplished and polished piece which takes place in the mind of a woman returning by air from Europe to South Africa. In the course of the journey she reviews her life within the context of Nelson Mandela’s release and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; drifting in and out of sleep and reflection, dream and memory, she comes to terms with her mother’s death, tying up four generations of women in the family, Europe and Africa, a Goreki symphony and Zulu funeral dirges.
Horn’s stories, ranging from the drily satirical to recreations of horror and dementia, leave an impression of savage intensity.
Waiting for Mandela, one of the lighter stories, is about a pickpocket who attends the release rally with loot in mind. Here Horn achieves a bizarre and telling counterpoint of the apolitical indifference of this single-minded “skelm” with the lyrical majesty of Mandela’s speech (echoes of both still washing about us).
In Practical Criticism he takes a few swipes at critics and novelists – seen to be living in unseemly and obscene symbiosis -and in The Greenhouse Effect he lampoons Eurocentric isolationist goings-on in Cape Town. These are amusing and pointed, and may well supply assiduous skinnerbekke with something to chew on.
Horn has several stories which relate black experience, all of them powerful, but the most disturbing is My Voice Is Under Control Now, in which a young woman tells of how she resisted having her tongue pegged, her voice silenced according to the tradition of her people. It makes almost unbearable reading. And, for those who bristle and wonder, “How dare he assume this voice?” Horn is, in my view, completely vindicated by the blazing anger directed against men who practise such oppressions and women who comply.
In Many Feet Running Strauss convincingly recreates a week in KwaMashu after the assassination of Victoria Mxenge, when teenage children and husbands are missing, young boys are required to join the impis or the comrades, and the streets are full of tear gas, shooting and many feet running. Told with low-key simplicity, the story allows one to feel the suffering of the women in their small pregnable houses.
For the most part Strauss avoids direct comparison of the experiences of white and black women in those years, and now, but the contrast is there in the separate stories, and telling. In the words of one mother when things begin to calm down, “It’s not entirely safe. Nor will it be again, some say, for a long time.”
Both collections, in their different ways, are compelling and highly readable. Horn manifests his anger in black humour. Strauss, though not less firm in judgment, leaves the reader with a sense of further questions and possibilities. Both collections deserve many readers and careful study.