Brenda Atkinson Bloodlines by Elleke Boehmer (David Philip) There is a powerful and telling moment in Elleke Boehmer’s new novel, Bloodlines, where her twentysomething white protagonist, Anthea Hardy, regards the coloured woman sitting next to her in her car: “Dora’s race is vividly visible, indelible, and Anthea wants to see it, confront it … Confront directly this difference that’s virtually pressed against her arm, her hip. Would Dora, for example, leave a patch on the headrest, like a stain? She can’t cut off the thought, the shuddery fascination, once she gives way to it.”
The “stain” that so obsesses Anthea Hardy is, more broadly speaking, the tarnish of imperialist history in South Africa. She and Dora Makken are brought together by an incident that marks each of them with a different grief: Dora is the “ordinary” mother of a lone freedom fighter whose bomb has killed six people near Durban’s waterfront; Anthea is the bereaved lover of one of his victims. Educated at university on late-Victorian poetry and student leftist rhetoric, Anthea determines to talk to Dora Makken after the devastating incident, sure that “something could emerge from this … a new understanding, a seeing differently”.
What begins to emerge from Anthea’s stubborn pursuit of a reluctant and disdainful Dora is an improbable friendship forged through their mutual exploration – and partly fictional reconstruction – of the Makken family history, which is crucially embedded in the Anglo-Boer South African War. Although the novel begins slowly, and at times a little unconvincingly, Boehmer (who is perhaps best known for her 1995 academic work Colonial and Postcolonial Literature) achieves a compelling and often exhilarating dissection of race, gender, and class in South African history. As heavy as that might sound, the gravity of Boehmer’s subject is articulated for the most part with cleverness, sensitivity, and prose that is most exquisite when attributed to the many women whose letters and narratives knit this complex story together.
That said, there are elements of the book that sit somewhat at odds with its overall impact. One of these is the initially weirdly anachronistic choice of political topic and historical setting: Joseph Makken plants his bomb just after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, just prior to the negotiation of a new political dispensation. It’s a time, Anthea argues, when “people are changing. There are different arguments, a new state to work out.”
Although this context – Durban, early Nineties – allows Boehmer room to move between fixed ideas, to explore the grey areas, there are moments, particularly early on, when the book reads a little like struggle literature, populated with the same tired characters and stereotypes. The city and suburbs of Durban seem less moving Nineties energy than Seventies survivalist nightmare. Anthea’s parents, for example, are one-dimensional representatives of an unbelievably retarded emotional and political hue, and Dora’s friends and family are likewise reduced to shadows of racial otherness. Of course it could be argued that this is in fact how Anthea sees them, but she and Dora are the only characters who are developed in any way. In spite of this apparent awkwardness, Bloodlines is a moving exploration of racial and cultural difference at the cloudy dawn of the New South Africa. Where it reconstructs the recent history of that difference – through the absurdly accidental violence of colonial encounter – it challenges us not only to see differently, but to feel differently about its endlessly painful legacy.