/ 31 August 2007

Non-fiction reviews

Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition

by Meg Samuelson

(UKZN Press)

I don’t know how women can read that book,” declared a Xhosa-speaking friend about Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, “or what they could possibly get out of it.” Meg Samuelson might agree. Samuelson’s examination of the discourse around women in half a dozen contemporary South African novels, including Mda’s, isn’t an easy read. It’s written in that fashionable academic language where a perfectly inoffensive word such as “inscribed” becomes a new word written “(in)scribed” and laden with all kinds of arcane connotations inaccessible to those who haven’t read the foundational texts.

It is, however, worth reading. Samuelson delves below the surface distractions of character and plot into text and language, and painstakingly dissects how even iconic women are admitted to the meta-myth of reclaimed national identity most comfortably when they are silent, domesticated victims; they are the subjects of the books in a passive rather than any active sense.

She identifies counter-currents: outspoken (or should that be (out) spoken?) women such as Zubeida Jaffer in her personal memoir, Winnie Mandela as constructed by Njabulo Ndebele, and more, and those who make silence a loud choice, such as Lucy in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, and explores the discomfort they create.

As a feminist reader and writer, I found parts of Samuelson’s analysis strongly convincing. But some things had me shaking my head.

Mda endows his male lead, Camagu, with a powerful ambivalence that for me subverts the patriarchal values she identifies as core. How the men are written in both Heart of Redness and Disgrace leads me to different conclusions about the gender politics of those books.

And, yes, domestication tames women, and writes them out of history.

But apartheid destroyed — for men and women of colour — the possibility of normal domesticity, and longing for it was not always a longing to repress women. As the lyric from the musical Phiri expressed it: “We move to Denver / Because there’s work in Denver / We move to Vlakfontein/ No more work in Denver /… Mama Oh Mama, you tame the snakes and scorpions and then you are moved again / …We leave our graves behind.”

Yet Samuelson has given us, in her focus on the utterances and silences of female protagonists, a powerful analytical tool.

When A Man Cries

by Siphiwo Mahala

(UKZN Press)

Siphiwo Mahala’s When A Man Cries is a novel that dissects how masculinity is defined in a close-knit township. His main character, teacher Themba Limba, learns from his peers and family how to subject and seduce women. Emotionally frozen, he abuses the already abused student, Nosipho, and others, and gets caught. His wife, Thuli, leaves him.

Only when he learns to articulate his needs and shed tears, is he able to re-domesticate her. Nosipho has her “girlish pleas … closed with a kiss” before the abuse begins (and later goes to a silent grave), and Thuli agrees to take her ex-husband back because he has learned to say sorry. In this story, on the surface a well-written if conventional morality tale, it is still the male utterances that make the world go round.