A couple of of years ago André Brink found himself discussing a serious instance of marital disharmony with a group of students. They had read the author’s note in his most recent novel, Imaginings of Sand, in which he posed for the first time as a woman narrator. The note referred to the fierce debates Brink had had with his wife over his representation of the female experience in contemporary South Africa.
”My wife and I had tremendous fights about that book. I was very careful most of the time to listen to her but there were a few points where I felt that the story required a different take. I gave the students one example of where we had disagreed and I was so terribly pleased because the whole class of 18 — and they were all female — said, ‘But that was the one episode where we felt you captured femininity best.’ It still didn’t convince my wife.” He smiles wickedly. ”But I think I have to rely on my female intuition, too.”
Brink’s latest book, The Other Side of Silence, is a similarly feminised enterprise and traces the fate of a young German woman transported in the early years of the 20th century to the colony of German South-West Africa.
It is the 15th novel by the outspoken critic of apartheid, whose writing Nelson Mandela himself would press on new arrivals at the Robben Island prison.
Brink was the first writer in Afrikaans to have his work banned when, in 1974, Looking on Darkness, his treatment of a fateful sexual liaison between a black man and a white woman, proved too radical for the Pretoria regime. Currently professor of English at Cape Town University, his work has been translated into 30 languages and he has twice been nominated for the Booker prize.
But Brink’s international reputation has been balanced against an increasing awareness that — however racially conscious — what has passed for South African literature until recently has been written in English by white interpreters. Although the end of apartheid technically split the country’s literary scene wide open, new black voices are continuing to struggle for recognition while established whites used to writing against the prevailing orthodoxy have had to redefine their creative terms.
And the 67-year-old Brink seems to have recreated himself as something of a feminist. Hanna, the heroine of The Other Side of Silence, is so relentlessly brutalised by the men she encounters on her journey from an orphanage in Bremen to a women’s camp in the deserts of Namibia that the episodes of horror become almost quotidian. The eventual fantastical vengeance that she visits upon the soldier who disfigured her provides only limited catharsis; Hanna’s subsequent renunciation of rage is a brief chink of hope in an otherwise bleak — but also oddly tub-thumping — vision of man’s inhumanity to woman.
”I became more and more interested in the parallels between the situation of blacks and the situation of women in the country,” Brink says. ”One can’t make comparisons glibly, but they were the two groups against which all the big guns were aimed.” He also cites the influence of his wife Maresa, a committed feminist and women’s rights campaigner, with whom he has three sons and a daughter.
”Since the beginning of the Nineties it became evident that racial oppression wasn’t the only form of oppression and that South Africa is still, like most ex-colonial societies, very much a patriarchal set-up. Once one becomes a writer involved in — terrible word — social conscience, you inevitably go for the underdog.”
Soon after the 1994 elections Brink noted that ”if there is one question South African writers get asked with metronomic regularity it must surely be: what can you write about now apartheid is gone?” Eight years on, the repetition has barely faltered. ”I find it amusing more than anything else. It is an understandable question given the horrific background of apartheid. But there is so much to write about, now more than ever.”
It was not a case that writers then felt constrained to write only about politics, he insists. The impulse was altogether more visceral. ”You had to write about it not because anybody expected you to or because you felt a responsibility to it but because you couldn’t not write about it. Because so many incredible things were happening all the time and, terrible as they were, they offered wonderful stories. Writers are amoral in that respect.”
Brink wrote entirely in Afrikaans until the ban in 1974, which forced him to turn to English, ”very much a second language”. Yet he continued to champion the language of his birth. ”In South Africa it became a language in the mouths of slaves who couldn’t speak the proper Dutch, so I absolutely refuse to accept that Afrikaans is the language of the establishment.”
His own politics are shifting still, he says. ”I’ve certainly become very cynical about the new establishment. It was difficult after really fighting for the cause of the African National Congress for so long, to bring myself to acknowledge that they had feet of clay. One expected so much because of what so many of them suffered personally.”
Brink remains passionately interested in world affairs, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He recognises the distorting emotion and polarisation from his own country’s experience. ”According to the old rationale of violence, every time there is a new suicide attack, more who might have been wavering edge over to the extreme right. Yet there must be a point at which people can sit down. In South Africa the situation was pretty dire and yet we were incredibly fortunate that we had Mandela and [Desmond] Tutu, two people of such calibre at the same time. I don’t think all the solutions have been found. But it is possible in all this mess to find some genuine dedication to that vague thing which everyone calls human values.
Here is where storytelling has its place. ”Inventing stories can offer us a possibility of understanding a little bit more about the world, going back to the basics. They drive home [the fact that] in spite of all the changes that happen in our world, we still remain whatever goes into the definition of
being human. Rather than becoming obsolete, the function of the storyteller is becoming more indispensable.
Brink balks at the suggestion that writers are ever altogether useless, but concedes that it is far more difficult to lodge an idea in a reader’s mind in a relaxed society. ”Or [to do so] in a society where the issues are so vast that there seems to be no point in trying to go against them — globalisation for example. I think most little people now feel there is no point.”
It returns us to the existentialist experience, he argues. Brink was a student in Paris in the late Fifties and early Sixties and was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the day. ”That was what shaped me, and more and more you return to those discoveries — the total impotence of the individual.”
But he is an optimistic soul, he insists. Is it possible to be an optimistic existentialist? ”I think Camus was,” he says. ”Sisyphus knows that he will never get that bloody rock up the hill and keep it there. He won’t ever succeed but he’s damned if he’s going to give up. There’s something about that which I find touchingly beautiful.” — Â