As bluntly titled as one of his stories, Verhale (Human & Rousseau) contains in one volume Koos Prinsloo’s four short-fiction collections, which came out between 1982 and 1993. It’s a pleasure to reread them — but a painful pleasure. Painful because Prinsloo died young (aged 36 in 1994) and because the stories contain so much pain. It has been said that Prinsloo wrote under the sign of death; certainly that seems obvious in the later works when he knew he had Aids, but even in his earlier work there is a lot of darkness.
In the titular story of his second collection, Die Hemel Help Ons (1987), a writer’s work is constantly interrupted by what were then called “unrest reports” that come out of nowhere. His new computer, mysteriously, keeps interpolating these reports on national uprisings and state repression into whatever the writer is writing. They can’t be suppressed or ignored.
Such a work comments both on its context (South Africa in the emergency years) and on a debate about artistic production in the country at the time: to what degree was a writer obliged to reflect the big political events? And how was he or she to do so? In this newspaper around that time, for what felt like aeons, we carried the ongoing debate: “Culture is a weapon of the struggle,” said one. “No it’s not,” said another. “Yes it is!” “No it’s not!” And so on, almost interminably. It may feel odd now to remember that Albie Sachs, then still in exile, gently told the comrades that not every piece of art they produced had to be struggle art; that art needed to incorporate the broadest possible sense of humanity. This seemed heretical to some. As did Njabulo Ndebele arguing for a “rediscovery of the ordinary” as against depictions of the spectacular abuse of power or the heroic resistance of the oppressed.
In Prinsloo’s work these disjunctions in fact came together, but not as a seamless whole. In what is called in shorthand manner a postmodern style, such things are placed in juxtaposition rather than being blended. The jagged edges of fragments rub against one another uncomfortably; there is no integration possible. Yet the juxtapositions are meaningful. The “unrest reports” invade the author’s work, but much of what he (or his author-as-character) was writing about in the first place had to do with other forms of repression, the kinds that happen within families — Calvinist Afrikaans families to be precise. Prinsloo retold family history, revealed family secrets; he told bluntly honest tales about life as a gay Afrikaans man in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.
This got him into a lot of trouble. Die Hemel Help Ons was awarded Rapport‘s annual prize, but the newspaper withdrew it because a story in it contained an insult a character directed at the then state president. Such controversy for one word. (The word was meidenaaier.) A big Afrikaans publisher made smarmy overtures to Prinsloo, then declined to publish in case it offended the powers that were; Prinsloo later detailed this cowardice and chicanery in a story.
His collection, Slagplaas (1992), contained a story about a suicide and its aftermath and that piece got Prinsloo physically attacked by Ralph Rabie (stage name: Johannes Kerkorrel; called “My Sogenaamde Vriend die Pop-Ster” in the book). Yet Prinsloo was just telling the truth, smashing closets as he did so. I knew many of the people concerned, from before the death to after the funeral, and a close friend, who appears in the relevant story, her name changed, attests to its accuracy. It was for its accurate depiction of fact, not its distortions or fictionalisation, that Rabie punched Prinsloo.
Two stories, in different books, relate to a visit and a conversation: in the first an older Afrikaans writer outed himself as a mocked and maligned figure in the story, for those who hadn’t already identified him. And the second, I was told by one of its two “characters”, was a precise transcription of an evening he and Koos spent together. There are many more such examples. Prinsloo was attacked for being indiscreet and putting real people and events into his work; never for exaggerating or lying. In one case he even reproduced a page from his mother’s ID book in a story.
This was labelled postmodernism and was spoken of in terms of a tension between “fact” and “fiction”. What struck me, rereading Prinsloo’s work, was that it’s not so much a matter of fact versus fiction as such, but that Prinsloo was often doing something like documentary writing. Although not presented as “news”, and given the internalised quality of fiction, what he was doing was carefully reconstructing and transcribing exactly what he’d experienced. It was as though he’d said, with Christopher Isherwood, “Why invent, when life is so prodigious?”
The impact of such work, at a time of deep social and political repression in South Africa, was considerable — especially for anyone who came from a similar background to Prinsloo’s, or even for those just watching the Afrikaner-Calvinist monolith crack and crumble. His work simply shattered taboos and it was exciting and scary at the same time. It still has the power to shock and perhaps he sometimes went too far, but each reader will have to decide what, in this context, is “too far”.
Reading these pieces brings back the times in which they were written in an extraordinarily visceral way — and exposes continuities with our post-apartheid reality. In Slagplaas (1992) a man picks up another man for sex; they are referred to in the story as simply “the one” and “the other”. They go to the flat of one of them and try to have sex, but the stench emanating from a nearby abattoir (slagplaas) pervades the space, even the whole urban area, and they cannot continue. Disgust replaces desire. The title of the collection echoed the place that housed the state’s assassination squads — Vlakplaas. The whole country was becoming a slaughterhouse.
As they turn a jaundiced eye on society, Prinsloo’s stories also question the modes and conventions of storytelling. They examine themselves as coolly as they examine everything else; they are self-deconstructing. The author or a writer-figure is often present in the text, reminding us that this is a piece of writing and that the “author” is itself a kind of character. Prinsloo takes nothing for granted; everything is up for interrogation. As in the story of the publisher who messed him around, what happens to one piece of writing can become the subject for another piece of writing. Text becomes context becomes text again; the boundaries between “art” and “life” are shifting and permeable.
This way of writing produces vertiginous moments when suddenly one’s whole perspective as a reader shifts, as though the ground beneath your feet had moved. When you get over the vertigo (or the nausea), the sheer brilliance of the deconstructed composition supplies an aesthetic pleasure that counters the pain in the content — at least to some degree. What can’t be denied is that Prinsloo was one of the most powerful writers South Africa has ever produced — and we must be thankful his work is available once more.