Life in the prisoner-of-war camps in Italy and Germany in which the narrator of Tatamkhulu Afrika’s novel finds himself during and post-World War II is bitter for all the obvious reasons — but it is paradise too. Afrika excels in the creation of this male world and its attendant horrors, yet it is shot through with such delicate and tender moments that one sometimes has to put the book aside to absorb them.
The publisher’s blurb is misleading: it says this is Afrika’s second novel, and that the first, Broken Earth, was published when he was 17; he is now 80 and “living in a little wooden hut in the backyard of a house in Bokaap, Cape Town”. But this is actually the fourth fictional work by this enigmatic man, born in Egypt in 1920 and raised by foster parents in South Africa. He served in World War II, was himself a prisoner of war, came to Cape Town in 1964 and in the decades that followed converted to Islam, joined Umkhonto weSizwe and was banned for five years.
The Innocents, his 1994 novel set during the years of struggle against apartheid, featured a sadistic homosexual security policeman. After its publication Afrika defended himself against charges of homophobia, saying he was merely telling the truth and that his future work would prove his critics wrong. His next offering, Tightrope (1997), depicted a petty Cape criminal finding some refuge in a homosexual relationship.
Bitter Eden must be the culmination of that, a kind of coming out — yet not quite. From the time the narrator meets the black-eyed Danny, the central tension of the novel is whether these two men will consummate their relationship or not. Will they acknowledge the truth, the truth in this case not being that they define themselves as gay men, but that they are so deeply, overridingly, overwhelmingly in love?
The novel opens with an old man, Tom Smith (Thomas Aloysius Smith is his real name, simplified as some sort of egalitarian affectation consistent with the narrator so desperate to be a regular bloke) at home with wife Carina of the “pale and anxious voice”. Her “twitchiness reminds me of the dainty tremblings of a mouse”. A letter arrives and brings with it a flood of memories, primarily of two men in the camps — the maddeningly prim, womanish “aunty” Douglas, who has “every innocuous quality that can set my teeth on edge”, Douglas who likes to possessively call the narrator Tommy so that “the little devil of my hatred of such diminutives is right there beside me, slipping his blade into my side”.
Douglas is his first best “mate” in the camp; Douglas shows him nothing but kindness, but Tom viciously demolishes Douglas when he finds Danny, whose possessiveness he relishes. For Danny, he feels “the bright water of wanting that is washing away the sand beneath me”.
Afrika is brilliant at charting the intricacies of psychological unease, at detailing the motivations that drive his protagonist. All this set in an environment both boring and vividly nightmarish: “Time drags past me like a snake with a broken back and there is a leadenness in me as long as the snake,” says Tom, describing the images still imprinted on his brain 50 years later, like that of “the ex-magistrate who for hours on end will sit on his bunk with a tiny wooden spoon and scoop out margarine that is no longer there from an old Red Cross margarine can, then smack his lips with a relish that is ghoulishly unfeigned”.
Initially a bit verbose — but never less than wonderfully poetic — Afrika’s language calms down as the novel progresses and the story takes hold. It is, in the end, a novel about the nature of love, about instant attraction and the checking process that comes after. It is made more exquisite by its hesitancy — neither man wants to fully acknowledge it, despite the fact that they sleep in a bunk together and breathe each other’s breath, ostensibly for warmth, and hoard food for each other when they are near starving.
Bitter Eden is, perhaps, about a realisation that sexuality is much more fluid than it is generally seen to be or allowed to be, but it is equally about transcending sexual politics.
It could just as well be about any love faced with barriers or inhibitions — race, religion or any other taboo — and the negation of that love is as heartbreaking as any other kind of denial.