There is an unforgettable image towards the end of Denis Hirson’s 1984 book, The House Next Door to Africa. His father, Baruch Hirson, had just been released from nine years’ imprisonment for his political activities as part of the African Resistance Movement. He had three days to leave the country or face banning and house arrest, and the family was headed for Britain. He packed up the books that lined the Hirson home, the books that were almost its very “walls”: “By the third night my father has packed up all the walls, book by book, and sent them off by boat so that the family will have a place to stay in the next country it gets to.”
Hirson’s new book, White Scars, is also about books — four in particular that, he writes, “I once needed to read over and over, to the point of obsession.” Even if he read these books incompletely the first time, or didn’t understand them, he says, “these books did not simply interest me; they surrounded me” — like, one might say, the “walls” of his father’s house.
There was the banned book about the Sharpeville massacre he pored over as a teenager, ignoring the text but stunned by the shocking pictures, trying to understand some of the reasons why his father did what he did and went to jail.
There was Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet, the first collection of poetry by Breyten Breytenbach, himself an exile from apartheid then jailed in South Africa for his political activities. In what became In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy in 1978, Hirson translated Breytenbach’s poetry, a task that necessitated a new engagement with Afrikaans, which the young Hirson, at school in Sixties South Africa, had barely managed (or tried) to master.
Now, in the mid- to late-1970s, Hirson had found a new place for himself, having in turn left his parents’ home in Britain. He had gone to Paris to work as an actor, and still lives there. Breytenbach’s Afrikaans became a “landguage” that seemed to connect him back to Africa and there is a flavour of it in The House Next Door to Africa.
Then there was Raymond Carver’s poetry, particularly the collection In a Marine Light. Carver’s poetry is the opposite of Breytenbach’s loose-limbed but densely metaphoric work: it is plain-spoken, direct, poetry that is deliberately unpoetic. Carver wrote these poems at the end of a life of alcoholism and loss, a life finally redeemed by a few years of happiness; for Hirson, Carver’s poems provided a way to grieve his father (who died in 1999), and in this section of White Scars is one of its finest moments the beautiful, heartbreaking poem about his father, “Some questions while standing on the banks of love”.
Last, there was George Perec’s odd little book, Je me souviens — which means “I remember”, the phrase with which he starts each of 480 sentences, each of which recall some memory of his childhood and youth. In his 480 recollections, Perec is deliberately as non-personal as possible, as if trying to find what you might call generic memories of his own childhood around World War II, during which he lost his parents to the Nazis (though he never mentions that). Hirson’s response to or rewriting of the “I remember …” idea is, by contrast, highly personal — while also echoing communal memories of the 1960s and early 1970s in South Africa.
Je me souviens, itself inspired by another, English-language book, in turn inspired Hirson’s book I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), which came out in 2004, a kind of a follow-up, nearly two decades later, to The House Next Door to Africa. Perhaps not a direct follow-up, though, so much as a new approach to some of the same territory — the two books interleave in a way, although they are very different. The earlier book is denser, more poetic, often surreal in places; he draws on his grandparents’ memories of the family as well as his own childhood in the years his father was incarcerated; the later book is lighter, airier.
As Hirson puts it, the 1986 book was an attempt, on the part of someone exiled from South Africa to Britain and then further removed, by his own volition, to the foreign culture of Paris in the mid-1970s: “Not to want to cage these books in over-simple ideas, but somehow The House Next Door to Africa was taking possession of Africa again, this country I hadn’t left of my own free choice, but I Remember King Kong was more about letting go.”
That work was swiftly followed by another “I remember” book, We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way, in 2005, and White Scars also works with memory and his own life-story, but through a re-reading of four books that were necessary to him at certain points in his life.
Hirson picks keywords or “wordkeys” that open seams of significance; at points, his musings crystallise into poetry. This form, he says, “developed organically”. He refers back, too, to many of the poems he collected as editor in a volume of South African poetry, The Lava of This Land (1997), to illuminate his own thoughts on the way other South African writers have dealt with similar issues.
In the 18 years between The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), he wrote poetry and prose pieces of his own, though none became a book. The poetry that emerged in White Scars is different from his other poetry, and from his first book.
“I wasn’t surprised to see the poem on the page,” he says, “but I was surprised it was so un-dense. It was a question for me: Is that what a poem is now on this page? It seemed right and I went with that particular voice, which I’m not aware of having had before. I always had more words, more density, perhaps more music …
“I wonder, sometimes,” he muses, “if the density, the music, doesn’t sometimes hide some of the essentials. I wonder about the interplay between what you give and what you withhold. I think of these three books, particularly the last one” — the “I remember” pair and White Scars — “as withholding less.”
He refers to his books, collectively, as “all this unfinished business I had to deal with”. They “contain secrets — things that have been secrets for me, like buried bones. So I wonder if the simplicity isn’t also related to me saying to myself, ‘It’s all right, you can say that now’.”
His father, the child of Jews who emigrated to South Africa at the turn of the last century, escaping pogroms and the like, made nothing of his Jewishness. In common with many of that generation of mid-20th-century Jewish activists, he didn’t choose to see it as an important part of himself, nor an ethnicity, culture or religion to pass on to his children.
Denis Hirson had to rediscover it for himself, and those discoveries generated his first book.
“I owed The House Next Door to Africa,” he says, “to my grandmother, sitting in a kitchen in Jerusalem telling me these stories that I was absolutely famished to hear. I didn’t know anything about the past. I had been told nothing. So she was able to tell me about Russia, about Johannesburg, about my great-grandmother — so that was my mother’s mother witnessing my father’s grandmother. And then my grandfather got a bit jealous and went to get his wartime diary and got some stores out of that.”
Such tales, he says, gave him “the sense that you are having something transmitted to you, something that’s in your blood but you didn’t know it. The sense that you can link up with a current that precedes you.”
For the exile, and for the writer “re-membering” himself through personal and family history, these are the necessary questions. “What is my deeper identity?” Hirson asks himself. “Not that I wish to deny my South Africanness, I don’t ever wish to do that, but what else is there? And why can’t one put them side by side?”
Denis Hirson’s recent works are all published by Jacana. David Philip has just re-issued The House Next Door to Africa