In Oom Krisjan we get a white male take, sublime as it is, on the South African situation. What we don’t have though, is a female take, unless we like it in drag that is. For that we have Evita. She pisses standing up, though. For women that means she has terminal trouble with the toilet seat and that makes her an imposter.
It irks me to open a paper and find no recognisable female character who speaks with the same eloquence as the rogue sage Oom Krisjan. And this is despite the zealous scholarship of feminists in the academies and those who dumb down with Oprah, Dr Phil and Cosmopolitan. They are so busy deconstructing their testosterone-glazed identities that they have lost the plot. They don’t know how to put dumpty together again and give us a literary character even they can identify with. Unless of course we take seriously Madam and Eve, Cathy and other “funnies”.
So what’s the problem here? Is it just simply that their mystery is their essence and so can’t be given form, be it a literary character or otherwise. They talk so much you would swear they had thouroughly worked out the problem of their identity by now; otherwise what possibly could they have been discussing for all these centuries? As a Cosmo reader myself, I’d say its contents suggest they like to talk about sex a lot. Also food and weight, not always in that order, of course. And then there is health and the latest self-help fad. Not to forget that old favourite beauty and fashion.
I know they like Ally McBeal a lot. Maybe that’s because she’s always a fool for love, always on the verge of giving up men for good, which seems something most women identify with: an endless yearning for something they can never have.
This angst is of course elevated in their talk to “pride in their complex sensibilities”, of which they can be quite shrill and vitriolic in its defence. They can never forgive Freud for mistaking this pride for hysteria. And so instead of constructing an identity out of which a character which, I am sorry to say it girls, can evolve with as much “complex sensibility” as Oom Krisjan, they are hell-bent on deconstructing the penis.
But whatever you do, girls, please don’t go looking for that character in Olive Schreiner. Lyndall is not as funny. David Erasmus, Port Shepstone