Remember King Kong (The Boxer)
by Denis Hirson
(Jacana)
With a cover appropriately decked out in the familiar Chappies wrapper, Denis Hirson’s new book offers a personalised trivia digest of South African culture. Akin to those informative and unbelievable did-you-knows inside a Chappies paper, Hirson delivers a series of I-remembers spanning his Johannesburg youth in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is an easily chewed and digested book; a light read for bedside nostalgia. Hirson’s memories range from the public and political (“I remember when Japanese people suddenly became ‘honorary whites’ after they started trading in steel with South Africa”) to the intensely private (“I remember the danger of half a soggy Marie biscuit slipping into the tea”) and culturally unique (“I remember when it was in for whites to jive at parties”).
The memories seem to cover Hirson’s youth and school years with brief sojourns into his army training and years at Wits, although they are not arranged chronologically. Instead, with “I remember …” being a somewhat limited form, Hirson paces this extended prose poem to keep the reader’s interest, and the memories seem to have an organic progression from each other, based on associative links. This form is mostly successful, although sometimes too literal and lacking in personal voice to be truly poetic, while at other times too obscurely phrased to be accessible. It also suffers from a common symptom of South African publishing — poor proofreading. In a poetic form this is important: a missing comma can change the entire meaning of a sentence.
While such time-specific approach could alienate a number of readers, the highly personal approach also draws in a reader (like me) who did not grow up in that time. The repetition of “I remember” binds the seemingly fragmented memories in a meditative space that inspires one’s own reminiscing. Even if one can’t remember Hirson’s school bully, his memory sparks your own. Elements such as bullies, taunting songs, fear of the opposite sex and things that confused us as kids —”I remember when I thought that G-strings were made of wire, even when women wore them” — strike a public, universal chord despite their personalised incantation.
This form has previously been used by Joe Brainard, in his 1975 book I Remember, and by Georges Perec, in his 1978 book Je me souviens. Hirson has already published a memoir of his Jo’burg youth (The House Next Door to Africa), but was here inspired by Perec’s use of the “I remember …” form, as he discusses in his postscript. Perec’s book celebrated the return to normality after World War II, while pointing to the heavy price of the war by refusing to mention it.
Hirson does not investigate his perceptions of apartheid rigorously in the memoir, rather portraying it as it was probably lived by politically sensitive whites — a permanent state of fear, but coming to confront it quite rarely. The memoir may celebrate a certain level of achievement and balance that Jo’burg has reached since Hirson’s childhood, but it is certainly not a return like Perec’s to Paris. Jo’burg has changed dramatically since Hirson’s childhood and technological innovations predict no foreseeable return.
For those who were alive at the time, this may serve as an entertaining dramatic irony. As a younger reader myself, I am sometimes completely lost by his cultural references, yet at other times given unique insight into where my parents come from — Dr Spock, radio dramas, Eskimo Pies and “Vat hom Fluffy!” There are also memories that haven’t dated at all — “I remember Ripley’s Believe It or Not“; “I remember the ‘brain drain'”.