Mr Chameleon
by Tatamkhulu Afrika
(Jacana)
For all its apparent frankness and passion, the late, acclaimed poet Tatamkhulu Afrika’s autobiography tells an oblique tale. It is a deeply interesting read, threaded throughout with the issues of race, homosexuality and “friendship” — a minefield of marginality, acceptance and one-upmanship, negotiated with the intense awareness of one who was already a writer at 17.
Many women feature in this story, but they are as incidental as the landscape. The important relationships in his life were with men and are recorded in great detail, but only in a couple of them is there any contact of a sexual nature, and even there it is told with an element of ambiguity. Seen through today’s eyes they may have seemed to be full-on homosexual relationships, but he does not freely say so.
This struggle was fundamental to his life, and one wonders why, in his old age and writing this autobiography, he did not just “come out”. This would have been easier said than done in the period of his early manhood — the 1940s and 1950s — which he spent in army barracks, prisoner-of-war camps, the rural backwater of the Groot Marico District, and the mining town of Tsumeb.
From very early on he was aware of a powerful sexuality but soon learned that even his affectionate foster mother would utterly reject that sexuality in him. Whether or not he could accept it himself is a fundamental theme of the book. He remains essentially solitary to the end, and, except for a small section on his political and Islamic struggles in the 1980s, the story ends in his late 40s. There were many who would have loved him, but he stays with the term “friendship”; he explicitly rejects the use of the word “love” in relationships between men, saying it reduces the masculinity of both parties. Of friendship, however, he says it is “the endangered species of the heart”.
He reflects on the writing of this autobiography, saying it should reveal all — but of course, as Tatamkhulu Afrika himself knew, one can only reveal all if one understands all, and is confident that language can transmit that “all” to readers. Despite the often lingering detail, there is much that remains unexplained. Why should he have been adopted, Egyptian- Turkish baby that he was, by such an unlikely set of foster parents? And what was “the psychosis that rowelled [him] for the next twenty years”?
Mr Chameleon reveals a man whose mindset is still trapped in notions of nationalism, who dismisses feminists as “raucous”, and who changes his name, like a much-married woman, several times.
Despite the universal limitations on “revealing all”, this is a finely textured, magnificently written account of a life often dark with anger, anguish and self-doubt, but also brilliantly illuminated in the writing. The descriptions of the reduction works at the Tsumeb mine stand out above even the rest, which is crammed with telling observation and poetic compression. ?
Pick of the new
Homecoming: Vorkamer Stories II
by Herman Charles Bosman
(Human & Rousseau)
The final volume of the 14-book anniversary edition of Bosman’s works. This second set of Voorkamer Stories, written by Bosman in the last 18 months of his life, have been re-edited and are published in their original sequence. Welcome to Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, where Oupa Bekker, Gysbert van Tonder and others gather to tell each other tales.
Rule of Cadence
by Robert Grieg
(University of KZN Press)
In his third collection, the poet addresses a range of South African experiences — from reading today’s politics through Hamlet, to more intimate concerns in a section called The Lover.
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History
by David Attwell
(University of KZN Press)
Attwell traces the development of black literature in South Africa from the 19th century on, mapping its revisionist negotiations with the modernism emerging in Europe. He also examines the way post-colonial theory has articulated this development.