Since his first book in 1982, Achmat Dangor has published stories, poetry, a play and novels. His powerful new novel, Bitter Fruit (Kwela), is set at a key moment of South Africa’s transition: Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratic president, is about to leave office, and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to be completed and delivered. Against this background, a family drama plays out, in which Silas, who works for the department of justice, his wife, Lydia, and their son Mikey, who is just discovering himself, are the main players. Silas and Lydia are haunted by a traumatic event in their struggle past; all of them are grappling with the implications of a hybrid identity in the “new South Africa”.
Bitter Fruit seemed to me in some ways a pessimistic novel — as though you were saying that South Africa today, built on compromise and still haunted by the past, is like a bad marriage.
I would rather say it’s a stark novel. The way it is structured is designed to convey a sense of questioning rather than pessimism. It asks a lot of questions. There’s a lot of ambiguity there, but I decided to live with the ambiguity. There will be two more books that grow out of this one, and they will explore themes such as pessimism.
Do the projected books continue with these characters? Mikey, for instance, with his new-found relationship with Islam, could have an interesting future.
Unfortunately, September 11 is going to make that exploration very contentious, because in what I started to sketch out he was going to go to India and end up in Afghanistan. I still want to explore that, but in a different way now, because there might not be an Afghanistan for him to end up in! But Silas, also, will explore his own father’s history in India — that one I certainly will pursue.
September 11 throws into relief some of the issues you raise in the book, how one negotiaties religious belief in this day and age. [At the moment, Dangor, who was formerly director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, is living in New York, where his wife works for the United Nations in the area of HIV/Aids. He was there on September 11.]
Mikey searches out Islam as a refuge, in the first place, but he sees it in his own mind as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. He questions the imam’s logic; he already has the seeds of doubt. But that exploration is something I want to do, perhaps because it would also explore my own state of being a lapsed Muslim. I want to explore being born into Islam and trying to achieve a secular life for yourself.
In the book, you explore the issue of “coloured” identity — you quote the phrase, “not white enough, not black enough”. This is an issue tackled by writers such as Zoë Wicomb in David’s Story.
First of all, there is an underlying sense of identity of being a South African, and if that is shattered then the country is shattered. But within that there are a whole series of identities. I remember, in my first book, Waiting for Leila, the word “coloured” was in inverted commas throughout, and one critic said it was irritating. But people begin to accept those definitions now as reality, and apartheid has left behind some realities, so in the eyes of even the most progressive thinker in the African National Congress some people still think in terms of African, Indian, coloured, white –those racial dimensions we always fought against. And there are people who are going to have to explore what it means to be labelled coloured. In my own case, I’m so bastardised I can only call myself coloured. The political connotations are starker than the social ones, because I am as at ease in Parkview as I am in Eldorado Park, but politically one constantly gets this question, and we do ourselves a disservice not to explore them. Identity as inherited from apartheid needs to be explored in order to be got rid of.
The interesting thing about exploring coloured identity in South Africa is that we are all realising how hybridised we are, how we can participate in a range of identities. In the novel, different characters negotiate their identities in different ways — Silas, the township “bushie” who is now in government; Lydia, whose sense of herself is changing; Mikey, who is very much finding out who he is, as well as the man who leaves his marriage because he has realised he is gay, and so on. Was that a deliberate strategy on your part or did it arise out of the material?
Midway through the book, I found myself dealing with a range of characters who are very South African yet none of them are sure of who or what they are. I decided that rather than ignore the issue I’d play with it — like the Jewish activist who comes out as gay. Some of my gay friends said that was a whole book in itself! In a sense, it was easier in Mandela’s South Africa to explore these differences than in a post-Mandela South Africa; now it’s a much more fraught issue.
It’s interesting that you set the book at that transitional point, when the Mandela government is giving way to what you might call the “government of the managers”. Many books have explored the transitions of 1990 or 1994, but this is a new area.
For me, what has happened is that we have abandoned the sense of miracle [of the Mandela years] far too quickly. Perhaps if we had kept it it might have made facing the challenges we face much easier, spiritually. By simply saying “We’ve done the reconciliation, can we now get on with the business of managing the country?” we inadvertently jettisoned some momentum we had, when people felt we were all part of a huge miraculous movement. Whatever political views you had, you felt you were part of the same momentum. We shouldn’t have gone from our sense of the extraordinary to the ordinary so quickly. What we almost did, in a sense, was to turn ourselves into the political equivalent of a corporation that says, “Let’s forget about vision now, let’s just get on with trying to deal with the bottom line.” We need to reinsert into our national life the sense of miracle, of achievement.