In reading The Lotus People (Institute of Black Research/Madiba Publishers) by Aziz Hassim, who won the 2001 Sanlam Literary Award for his unpublished manuscript, I could not help pondering again about how place is an inescapable denominator in South African writing. It was Es’kia Mphahlele who observed that our literature is marked by a tyranny of place. In the South Africa of the past, living in a particular place was the result of who you were in racial terms, and also determined your experience and identity as a person. If character is fate — how might we think of “place as fate”?
In Hassim’s compelling narrative, we are confronted again with the geographical dividedness of apartheid South Africa. We are taken into the labyrinthine world of Durban’s Grey Street, as important in the literary-political imagination of South Africa as Soweto or District Six. The novel is festooned with references to the streets and arcades in the business district and its periphery — Victoria Street, Prince Edward Street, Queen Street, Leo-pold Street, Kismet and Madressa arcades, to name a few. Reading the novel, you imagine yourself walking in and out of this intricate grid.
But Hassim renders place in a new key by taking us to the subterranean jungle of gangsters and tsotsis, drawing attention to a local topography that has been hitherto occluded in our writing. The “Durban casbah” is also a social crossroads, a theatre of wheeling and dealing, gambling, Fah Fee, drug dealers, pawnbrokers, loan sharks, “uplung” [hot money], shebeens and blackmail. As Hassim writes, “The casbah is another world, another country.”
The Lotus People chronicles the struggles of a single family from the earliest days of arrival from India. Beginning with a small-scale hawking business, the grandfather, Yahya Ali Suleiman, faces many difficulties in his adopted land. The author balances generational continuity and difference by telling of the life of the grand old patriarch as well as that of the father, Dara, and sons Sam and Jake as each responds to the peculiar times and circumstances in which he lives.
In spite of many handicaps the family manages to set up large emporiums in the Grey Street complex. Sam and Jake hover on the edge of the gangster groups in their neighbourhood. While Sam still manages a successful business career, Jake is the angry young man, choosing a more defiant and aggressive lifestyle than his sombre grandfather and father.
Hassim describes the colourful goings-on in the personal fiefdoms demarcated by the different gangs, among them the Crimson League, the crime kings of the casbah, the Victorians and the Dutchenes. These gangs, beginning as vigilante groups, comprising Indian, coloured and a few African youth, were determined to deal with extortionists and unscrupulous businessmen that plagued the area.
Hassim’s mission is clearly about perspective — what we see is related to where we are looking from. With a bourgeois sensibility and decorum one is inclined to view the gangsters as the flotsam and jetsam of society. But Hassim points out that the “life in the casbah was about politics. Children were weaned on it, as children elsewhere were weaned on mother’s milk. It was the logical outcome of the politics of repression.” Hassim provides an interesting angle to the gangster groups by highlighting their political activities, a dimension that is not often known or understood.
Enduring racial slurs such as “coolie” or “curry guts”, seeing their families traumatised by the iniquitous Group Areas Act, the young men are forced to develop a toughmindedness. They remind us that their heroes and heroines were not Al Capone and Dillinger, as we might have assumed, but icons of the political landscape, such as Dr Kesavaloo Goonam [to whom the novel is dedicated], Dr Dadoo, Dr Monty Naicker, Zainab Asvat, MD Naidoo and Fatima Meer.
It is not surprising that in a society that denies one one’s humanity a streetwise macho culture becomes an important means of surviving and asserting one’s identity. Hassim’s novel paints a vivid picture of a “brotherbond” in these back streets, where friends and comrades would lay down their lives for one another.
The novel then is an interesting study in the formation of masculinities in a racially divided society. We appreciate how oppressed black men create “psychic shelter” in a hostile culture, and how “home” becomes that domain where the bruised self is restored.
When one belongs to a gang the street becomes “a cocoon that’s safer than a mother’s womb”.
Hassim paints a complex picture of virile, street-savvy men, who still show a deference to the cultural practices of arranged marriages, negotiating their way through this, a sensitivity to the role of women, the extended family or ancestral history. We are also provided with animated portrayals of the women in their lives. Ruling largely in the inner domestic space, the women are also strong and resilient, supporting their men in their refusal to cower to the indignities of apartheid society.
At a time when questions of identity are bandied about, Hassim’s work breaks new ground. He cuts through all the rhetoric of ethnocentric identity and shows how identities are formed in a welter of diverse experiences.
The present climate in South Africa has been described as a “cusp time”, in which memory itself is a site of struggle.
Reading The Lotus People, I am haunted by the present — the changing character of the CBD, the many decaying remnants of a former history — and the need to tell of the present stories of innumerable feet etching out new footprints, the new stories of struggle and survival, intrigue and disenchantment, neglect and restoration.
The Lotus People makes you ask more questions about the present and the future. As Hassim writes: “If you don’t know where you are coming from, how can you know where you are going.”