During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, as the United States teetered on the brink of nuclear war, Bob Dylan wrote a remarkable anthem — A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall — which captured, in its curious litany of fragmentary, nightmarish images, a national mood of hope and despair. Dylan explained afterwards: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs; so I put all I could into this one.”
A similar impulse seems to animate Ashraf Jamal’s first collection of short stories, and explains their urgent, topical power. As if the author feared he would not have “enough time alive” to get the data down, he offers a series of fraught narrative fragments, rather than considered tales, which track — in his own words — the “states of unease” of contemporary South African experience.
Each story in The Shades (not to be confused with Marguerite Poland’s novel of nearly the same name) features a central actuating character, widely varying in background. For each, Jamal’s third-person narrator seeks an interior voice that is uniquely the character’s own, yet redolent of the author and his repeated concerns: the nature of language and its ability to reflect, refract or bowdlerise experience; the continuous struggle of individual consciousness to assess and understand the savagery of that experience; and the strange interplay of history, myth and ritual of which individuals are shaped, whatever their age, training or station.
As befits a writer of such polyglot origins as Jamal — Scots, Basotho and Indian jostle in his own gene pool — one of his abiding themes is the encounter of those of different cultures, especially Indian or Muslim South Africans, with friends and lovers originating from Europe. Jamal sounds a number of notes — comic, elegiac, whimsical — in a set of tales that meditate on the anomalies, and the potential new syntheses of thought and action, latent in such encounters.
Sometimes Jamal’s concern to explicate an individual’s experience, in almost Conradian detail, clogs the narrative and immobilises the tale. Rich, felt and teeming as his characters’ worlds are, we sometimes long for syntactic light and shade to ease the relentless drum of staccato sentences — the writer’s favoured mode.
At other times, the stammering, febrile intensity of Jamal’s style is apposite — as in the first story, The Shades (which deservedly won a Sanlam Literary Award this year), a story exquisite in its gradations of menace, myth and hope, all held in dynamic tension within the restless consciousness of the teacher, writer and father who broods upstairs in a menacing pitch-black KwaZulu-Natal Midlands night.
A number of the stories, such as Merman, Red Man in the Red or — especially — Junoon, feel like the start of larger narratives, extended novelistic tales that, perhaps, the author may not have enough time alive to write.
Indeed, death, a condition in which life and order and coherence atrophy into nothingness, hovers like a vengeful shade throughout this collection. Its concomitant violence — especially as directed at women, in the form of sexual abuse and assault — is a grim, unflagging leitmotif.
At war with this insistent feature of the South African social landscape is a contrary urge to wrest from bruising experience the rigorous reordering, coherence, and thus beauty, of art. In a Field is an achingly moving paean to the consoling creative process, to the writer who “[returns] dignity to the world”. In Milk Blue, the artist who has lost his lover to Aids witnesses the triumph of his vision, which is the triumph, in fact, of its reception: “He has met with the director of the gallery, made arrangements with a billboard company. Soon the bed of milk and blue will appear in locations throughout the city. If before, he’d wanted no one to see what he saw before, feel the tenderness of his loss, now it is this tenderness, this loss, he wants to gift to the world. He wants to part the curtain, say no to darkness.”
“He wants to part the curtain, say no to darkness.” It is this frank confrontation with the worst in our anarchic present, and our pulverising, destructive past, while simultaneously insisting on the moment of grace that validates all we have suffered — and continue to suffer — that gives Jamal’s remarkable collection its distinctive aura and its value. In a collection such as this, our democracy — as a productive, cohering “state of unease” — comes, at last, of age.