One hundred and twenty-five years ago the ridges and plains of the Witwatersrand were lush with veld grass, thorn trees, birds and bokkies.
That’s hard to imagine now in the city of Johannesburg, and just as difficult to remember the position of women in society then.
For descriptions of the times I must refer you to Charles van Onselen, Olive Schreiner and other such sources, but we know that very few women of any skin colour dared the rough living conditions of the mining camp that grew up around the gold diggings and stamp batteries.
Even when the streets were paved and buildings went up, women’s lives were severely constrained; by both law and custom they were dominated and controlled by men.
Now, 125 years later, our Constitution affords women legal equality and personal freedom, and though in practice women often cannot exercise this freedom, at least it is within their grasp. It has been imagined, debated and codified. This change in our society has percolated through many layers of resistance into our fiction.
In 1927, the inimitable EM Forster published a collection of lectures he had given at Cambridge University, calling it Aspects of the Novel. His categories were: Story, People (two chapters), Plot, Fantasy, Prophecy, Pattern and Rhythm. A more recent publication along the same lines is James Wood’s How Fiction Works and, though he says that Forster’s Aspects is “canonical for good reason”, he does also think it “seems imprecise”.
The changing status of women
Wood’s work is a splendid meander on fiction and its workings, full of subtle observations and references to many novels (he provides a three-page list). He devotes a good chunk of the book specifically to character, stating at the outset that “there is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character”, and further along he adds: “But what is a character? I am thicketed in qualifications.”
While pondering some recent South African fiction, it occurred to me that there are many memorable female characters who happen also to reflect the changing status of women. That they are often created by male authors is a reflection not only on women, a tribute and a salute to them as women, but also to men who have equally made this changed society, as well as some of these fictional characters.
In Revelations (Jacana), Mongane Wally Serote created the character of Teresa, the second wife of Otsile, the protagonist, whose first wife divorced him. Teresa is a lawyer, a reader of newspapers, a mother of two children who know about children’s rights. It is Teresa who initiates changes in their lives when she realises she is being called to be an ngaka (traditional healer). She goes for the training and initiation, moving into the area of traditional knowledge.
In her relations with Otsile, she begins to show concern that he has never paid lobola (bride pride) for her; furthermore, given the demands of her work and her wish not to lose him, she initiates matters with a younger woman, Lindiwe, whom she wants Otsile to marry as a second wife. Teresa is shown as decisive, dignified and loving.
Serote implies that a return to tradition does not disempower or in any way demean her. This is a woman in the new dispensation who can have the best of both old and new worlds. Some will have difficulty with this but one cannot deny the power of Teresa as a character.
Stand-out characters
Ivan Vladislavic won both the University of Johannesburg Prize and the M-Net Award this year for his novel, Double Negative (Umuzi), which reads as a memoir-like pastiche of memories and observations about photography and residents of Johannesburg. Four women stand out in the story, narrated by Neville Lister.
Veronica is the first, immortalised in a photograph of her with two surviving triplets, in a backyard shack. Her silver, high-heeled sandals and her “light summer dress” highlight her tenuous hold on survival. This is a mere sketch but lovely.
Camilla, also an inhabitant of a randomly chosen house in the Kensington-Bertrams glacial valley, is an eccentric and savvy old woman who has taken in a white Mozambican refugee, a Dr Pinheiro. His refugee job as a post sorter, and the postboxes he collects, are described by Camilla.
How much is fabrication is irrelevant as she bewitches the susceptible Lister with her museum of old letters, their boxes and endless stories. She is as ephemeral as a ghost and as tenacious in memory, a woman of Johannesburg invisible to most.
Fizzing with info and enthusiasm
Then there is Janie, a freelance arts journalist with a blog of her own and a rucksack of useful stuff. She is young, fearless and, in her own words, “ahead of the game”. When they go to find a francophone refugee living behind an interesting wall (Lister’s current photographic preoccupation), she’s the one who slips inside with her digicam and comes out fizzing with info and enthusiasm about the 10-shack village behind it. She, like Zinzi December in Zoo City (Jacana) by Lauren Beukes, is the new super-cool, freedom-in-both-hands city girl; intrepid, sassy, opinionated. (Clare Hart and Jade de Jong in the crime novels of Margie Orford and Jassy Mackenzie are of the same breed.)
Michiel Heyns has shown his extraordinary insight in the creation of female characters, most notably in Bodies Politic. In his new novel, Lost Ground (Umuzi), there are at least five vivid male characters, but more women.
A handful of these feminine players include Mrs Rabie(s), an embittered hostel matron now retired, Joy Duvenhage, now hotel receptionist, but previously not so respectable, and Desiree and Chrisna, young married women of the dorp whose apparently bland existences crack open after the murder at the centre of the story.
But it is Nonyameko Mhlabeni who steals the show as a character. Heyns keeps strictly to his narrator’s observations of her and her own self-revelation in dialogue. There she is, also staying in the Queen’s Hotel (which should by rights also be considered a female character, so minutely and lovingly does Heyns describe this grand old lady). Nonyameko, formally dressed and reading JM Coetzee, is first met in the hotel dining room. Though she is resistant to and sceptical of Peter Jacobs’s attempts at conversation, she gradually becomes a friend.
She is there to set up psychological services for pregnant women in the black (more than) half of the dorp. She can and does discuss notions of identity; she is widely read and can talk about the murder with discretion and insight. She also takes him for a Sunday-morning walk through the township — still terra incognita for most white South Africans. She is another kind of new woman: ex-Umkhonto weSiswe, still working for the people, with a sense of irony, a strong support in time of need.
Large as life in a novel
And it is Nonyameko who introduces Jacobs to the “strikingly beautiful” Sarah Augustyn, one of her pregnant clients. In six pages Heyns delivers a tour de force of delineation as she speaks of her predicament, her views on the murder, her vision of her child’s future. Jacobs speculates on who her ancestors were: “And what wanderings brought them to this arid outpost, what couplings, enjoyed or endured, between what fortuitous blend of races, issued at last in this lovely young woman?” To Jacobs’s reassurances, she says: “Do you really think so? I mean like really?”
Sarah gives him a bunch of zinnias. At the hotel “the lush flowers fill the jar of their own accord with a kind of ragged opulence, and the damp peppery smell permeates the room”. She is from the Klein Karoo, but she has arrived wherever one reads the book, large as life in a novel, enriching our lives in the great melting pot that is our society, fictional or “real”.
The Mail & Guardian Johannesburg Literary Festival hopes to be bigger and better this September. To mark the city’s 125th birthday the festival will focus on Jo’burg as both an African city and a world city. Visit our special report here.
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