As the secondary literature on the post-apartheid novel continues to expand (possibly faster than the post-apartheid novel), Cheryl Stobie takes an interesting and hitherto unique line. The figure of the bisexual in South African fiction is a marginal one, yet in Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels (UKZN Press) Stobie places that figure centrally, in the in-between area of sexuality where much is blur and confusion — a figure that escapes the kinds of categories that have haunted South African history.
In this respect, Stobie’s bisexual is something like the “queer” in queer theory, an approach to issues of sexuality and identity that arose in the early 1990s. Queer is the anti-identitarian identity, the space of (sexual) being that refuses neat categorisation, and is perhaps definable only in terms of its resistance to the normative. That would go for the more usual “hetero-normative”, the set of traditionally approved male/female relationships on which our society is ideologically built, as well as the “homonormative” that posits a stable gay/lesbian identity and seeks the recognition of rights on that basis.
For Stobie, bisexuality is not just another category of sexual desire and behaviour but a form that unsettles the firm boundaries of sexuality — which, like most human activity when we look for its underpinning concepts, is structured in a binary way. If it’s not male versus female, it’s heterosexual versus homosexual. The bisexual is not just in-between but in some way transcends such binary oppositions by undermining the very categories themselves.
The bisexual is particularly significant, says Stobie, in the post-apartheid era: “as the binary oppositions of the ‘black or white’ past have given way to the multiple hues of the rainbow (nation), so has a shift occurred in desire”. After 1994, our society and our sexualities alike are “more fluid, less polarised”; bisexuality seems a form of freedom, a singular tint in our national rainbow or a special spiral in the double helix of our social DNA.
Stobie reflects on the “double rainbow” (race and sex), and gives a short history of bisexuality in the West. This shows that if you take the Marjorie Garber approach, which is to say to treat many manifestations of sexuality generally as symptoms of bisexuality, you make of it a very inclusive frame.
Stobie talks about “variant sexualities in Africa and South Africa” (boy wives, female husbands), intending to come out at “a realistic epistemology of bisexuality in South Africa”. That is, one that is inclusive and non-discriminatory, but that also does not collapse multiplicity into yet another category. Laudable, yes, but possible? I don’t know. The tension or dialectic is itself unstable. Certainly, politically, difference is useful up to a point and no further; creating unity from difference is necessary but usually provisional. Unity soon collapses back into difference.
Stobie outlines a “cultural history of bisexuality in South Africa”, and this chapter is very interesting — Stobie can draw a connection between figures as disparate as writer Beatrice Hastings (1879-1943) and pop star Brenda Fassie. I’m not so sure, though, about her neologism “biopia”, meaning a kind of myopia that refuses to see bisexuality or that misrepresents it. When “biopia” becomes an adjective, as in “biopic”, I see in my mind’s eye flashes of Oliver Stone’s dreadful movie about the life of Alexander the Great.
There are great social and political difficulties with bisexualities in action; Stobie is on firmer ground when dealing with literature. Here she has some hard textuality to work with. She looks at post-apartheid novels such as K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, Tatamkhulu Afrika’s Bitter Eden, Sheila Kohler’s Cracks, Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, and Barbara Adair’s In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot. This analytical work seems most fruitful in relation to novels such as Afrika’s, with its hard-bitten honesty and inner contradictions, or Adair’s, which offers a rich slipperiness that suits Stobie’s project admirably. On the other hand, her reading of The House Gun shows that one can still do a lot interpretively with a text of striking paucity, in which the characters are impenetrable ciphers and the narrative is no more than mechanical.
There is much of interest in Somewhere in the Double Rainbow, and Stobie raises issues still pertinent to many lives and ways of thought in South Africa today. One is increasingly doubtful, however, about arguments that posit too definitive an “epistemological break” between apartheid and post-apartheid. I would have liked to see more comparison of literature written under apartheid and that composed after; Stobie writes perceptively about Stephen Gray, for instance, but a fuller reading of his 1988 novel The Time of Our Darkness would perhaps have given us a clearer sense of whether we’ve changed as much as we’d like to believe.