These two collections present an irresistible Manichaeanism. In the Rapids, edited by crusty ole’ Jakes Gerwel and Linda Rode, all decked out in a smooth, impressionistic swathe of watery colour. Urban One, self-professedly the voice of pop culture in South Africa, is edited by rock’n’roller Dave Chislett and sports a gloomy (and clichéd) picture of a Black Label beer bottle.
We just know which one is going to be edgy and darkly South African and which one is going to be the usual collection of post-colonial soul-searchings. Sadly for this reviewer’s purposes, this is not the case. It would have made life so much easier.
The truth is that both collections boast original, clever, even startling stories and neither is susceptible to glib pigeonholing. There’s a spread of genres and styles, of issues and subject matter. Both claim to contain new South African stories and you could usefully play around with the emphasis in that description. Are they stories of the new South Africa, or are they new stories from South Africa? They are both and more.
Luke Alfred’s sad Dad’s Funeral and George Weideman’s Compress (from In the Rapids) are seemingly autobiographical and universal in their concern with reclaiming personal histories. But they are still unmistakably of their location and culture — not that I’d want to attempt a definition of what that culture is. That’s what storytelling does, and it would be invidious to try to isolate the South Africanness in these stories. That would deny them their status as art works and reduce them to cultural markers. But at the same time — and I know I’m contradicting myself here — it’s hard to suppress a pang of identification when a particular passage captures a pure, unmistakable shard of your own life.
Some of the allegories are so damn South African they’ll make you weep with a nostalgia for a common language we will never all share. In Francois Bloemhof’s tightly constructed Tupperware (In the Rapids), a schoolgirl steals back her boyfriend’s heart from a Britney Spears-lookalike witch. She breaks into the witch’s house, finds the heart and places it in a Tupperware container. The next day, she puts the heart back into the boy’s chest and regains his love. You can read the sustaining logic of an entire South African middle class in the last line of the story: “What would life be without Tupperware? Sandra wondered.”
If In the Rapids is about presenting the variety of experiences, ideologies and sheer absurdities that is South Africa, Urban One has a slightly more focussed agenda, to “capture current South African popular culture”. In the main, and thanks to what appears to be a strict, judicious editorial hand, the stories are controlled and economic, fine examples of the short story genre. The worst of the linguistic excesses you might fear from new writers comes from an editorial introduction. “Lavish lyrics lash lobes lasciviously, like lovers’ licks on girlfriends’ boobs … the way his text has sex with your subconscious”.
These truly awful words (a classic case of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) are on page one, but don’t let them put you off picking the nuggets from this excellent collection. The editor’s own story, Sisyphus Moon, is a beautifully absurd vignette of labour and life in Cape Town. Hagen Engler’s Surfing the Crime Wave is a slapstick tale of drugs, surfboards and small town fuck-ups. It proves yet again that Engler, whose only weakness is his delusion that Port Elizabeth is as cute as the Groot Marico, is one of our great literary hopes.
The story most emblematic of the inventiveness of these books, though, is Buntu Siwisa’s The Big Bad Wolf (In the Rapids) It’s a crazy stream-of-consciousness splurge in the magical realist tradition of Zakes Mda, a melange of imported fairytale, homegrown sociological critique and dry black humour.
As the frightened protagonist struggles to figure out who the big bad wolf is, this bogeyman that electrifies life in South Africa, his comprehension becomes more and more befuddled. His final thought is “bless all the big bad wolves and keep them from extinction”. That could be the coda for these two books: the big bad wolves are what keep our art interesting.