Abstract
This article examines the representation of time in narratives of childhood experience in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963). These two autobiographies are among the most widely-known works by the group of South African writers who have been loosely associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Originating from the early years of the anti-apartheid struggle and resonating widely with the heightened anticolonial resistance movements across the continent, writings by the so-called Drum writers, many of whom later went into exile, have often been viewed and criticized as “protest literature”, as literary works whose aesthetic merits are somehow compromised by the overt political purposes they appear to serve. This article seeks to revise such a reading by revisiting the politics of the stylistic innovations in these autobiographical narratives. Themes and motifs directly derived from the rhetoric of political protest, as I argue, in fact problematize a developmental logic governing the biographical transition from childhood to adulthood and contribute to a radical critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. While writing from polemical positions and from inside the historical juncture of political resistance, these writers’ narrative reflections on and re-orderings of the relationship between the past and the present also partake of the process of refashioning modern black subjectivity, a significant move of literary intervention that still has profound resonance in our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present.
On the first few pages of Es’kia Mphahlele’s autobiography Down Second Avenue (1959), the author recollects his childhood spent in the rural village of Maupaneng, before he moved to Second Avenue in Marabastad, the township near Pretoria, at the age of 13. His childhood in Maupaneng has been a largely uneventful period, according to Mphahlele’s account, but the retrospective narrative voice of the adult author summarizes it with strangely complex sentiments: Looking back to those first thirteen years of my life — as much of it as I can remember — I cannot help thinking that it was time wasted. I had nobody to shape them into a definite pattern. Searching through the confused threads of that pattern a few things keep imposing themselves on my whole judgment. My grandmother; the mountain; the tropical darkness which glow worms seemed to try in vain to scatter; long black tropical snakes; the Leshoana river carrying on its broad back trees, cattle, boulders; world of torrential rains; the solid shimmering heat beating down on yearning earth; the romantic picture of a woman with a child on her back and an earthen pot on her head, silhouetted against the mirage. But all in all perhaps I led a life shared by all other country boys. Boys who are aware of only one purpose of living; to be. (1959: 8)
1
Written at a moment when the writer has just embarked on an exile that would last for 20 years, this passage expresses the strong impulse to build a meaningful attachment to his past and the country he was just forced to leave — to find the one purpose of living shared by all other country boys who share a similar childhood. The existential yearning for a communal experience of belonging, however, is thwarted by his lack of a means to put such experience “into a definite pattern”. The negation of his childhood as “time wasted” only results in a narrative consisting of an impressionistic array of disconnected and flashing images. This dearth of “a definite pattern” to narrate his past in a meaningful and coherent manner in fact suggests the author’s lack of any adequate literary forms at hand to incorporate his childhood experience in his narrative reinvention of the self. Besides the apparent Western colonialist and romanticist pastoral depiction of Africa often evoked in the reciprocal metaphor of the innocent child and the African landscape, 2 Mphahlele’s text also seems to echo his criticism of the romanticist tendency evinced by the poetry of the Négritude movement. 3 In spite of affirming Négritude as being “a protest and a positive assertion of African values”, Mphahlele (1968: n.p.) was highly critical of its aesthetic practices because, as he put it, “too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa — as a symbol of innocence, purity and artless primitiveness”.
Such romanticism, consolidated in the rhetoric of innocence that Mphahlele rejects in his recollection of childhood in the countryside, is suggestive of its dialogue with another significant literary pattern in South African writing: the narrative of black experience in the process of urban modernity, particularly represented in the “Jim Comes to Joburg” story. 4 The type of fiction based on such a plot usually traces a black protagonist’s journey from the country to the city. Rita Barnard points out that the movement towards modernity in such a plot “never really becomes a movement toward maturity; the African city never becomes a site of emancipation” because “the sociopolitical conditions for closure that pertain in the affirmative Bildungsroman were lacking”, and the black subject is never granted full citizenship in apartheid’s “racist centralized bureaucracy” executed in the cities (2008: 547). Such urban migrant figures remain, therefore, as is articulated in a quotation by Mahmood Mamdani employed by Barnard, “a class in civil society, but not of civil society” (Mamdani, 1996, qtd. in Barnard, 2008: 547; emphasis in original). While this type of story hardly allows its protagonists to acquire their Bildung in the city, their endings are usually projected back onto the country, onto a lost innocence that has been corrupted by city life. In one of the most famous variants of such a story, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), novelistic closure hingeing on liberal conscience and a Christian moral of redemption is cloaked in the plot of a father from the countryside searching for his lost son in the city, which is also a journey to seek and eventually affirm the lost innocence of the child.
For Mphahlele and his fellow writers who were associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s, that the black subject was denied full citizenship within the urban space, which was implied in the “Jim Comes to Joburg” story, was clearly incongruous with their own perception of city life and, for better or for worse, the full embrace of the new “multiculturalism” of urban experience in their writing. Through their effervescent literary expression, this generation of young black writers was creating for themselves a modern subjectivity that resisted the tribal, inferior, “childlike”, and premodern personhood ascribed to them not only by apartheid’s racist ideology but also by the ethos of the paternalistic liberal trusteeship that Paton’s novel epitomized. 5 The logic to be deduced from such discursive subversion is about temporality too. The ideological underpinning of the “Jim Comes to Joburg” story is secured by its linear temporality — a narrative template that constructs the subject in a sequential process of moving from the country to the city, from childhood to adulthood, and from innocence to the loss of such innocence (if not the establishment of a mature sociopolitical identity). It is precisely the type of temporal sequence that Mphahlele repudiates in his autobiographical narrative. In his account of childhood in the passage quoted above, the past is evoked in an ambivalent double gesture of affirmation and rejection. The past’s smooth progression into the present — the transition from the child to the adult — is interrupted by disjointed and fragmentary descriptions of images and sensory impressions. Such a subversion of linear temporality is not unique to Mphahlele’s work. It is constantly enacted structurally and stylistically in the autobiographical writings of the Drum writers and is crucial to our understanding of their work as a form of literary reinvention of modern subjectivity.
The dialectic between choices of aesthetic forms and demands of an imperative political agenda has been one of the crucial issues congregated around scholarship in South African literature, especially in terms of the historiography of black South African writing. While critics have now fully recognized the modernist or postmodernist elements long existing in black writing (see Attwell, 2005: 169–204; Green, 2012), this “experimental line” (Coetzee, qtd. in Attwell, 2005: 171) is more often than not only deemed to have come to full fruition after the 1980s. “Technical” innovations are rarely associated comprehensively with black writing in the 1950s and early 1960s, except for a few scant references to Mphahlele’s early work (see Attwell, 2005: 174). In this article, I am going to revisit the literary merits and critical energies embedded in black literary culture in this period by focusing on the subversion of linear temporality — a significant modernist or “experimental” technique widely adopted by black writers in their long narrative prose works in particular. It is by dint of reorganizing narrative temporality, especially when it is related to their rewriting of the prevalent trope of innocent childhood, as I argue, that the black writers under discussion are able to formulate self-conscious critiques of various locally connected intellectual currents as well as literary traditions and genealogies. It is also through an invigorated conception of time that their writings encapsulate critical sensitivities to the contingencies of their own historical present and therefore offer sophisticated reflections on the nexus between subject-construction and historicity beyond the overt political impetus they tend to pursue. 6
Achille Mbembe, in “African Modes of Self-Writing”, analyses two problematic modes of historicist thinking in defining the African subject. One is Afro-radicalism, which relies on the rhetoric of “autonomy, resistance, and emancipation […] as the sole criterion for determining the legitimacy of an authentic African discourse” (2002: 240–41). The other is the tendency of nativism, which “promoted the idea of a unique African identity founded on membership of the black race” (2002: 241). Writing against these two dominant intellectual currents in defining African identity, Mbembe proposes that one way to step out of such a theoretical quandary would be “to reconceptualize the notion of time in relation to memory and subjectivity” (2002: 272). His own reconceptualization of time, which is elaborated in On the Postcolony, is to understand the African subject through the “time of entanglement”, which may also be called “emerging time” and “time of existence and experience” (2001: 16). Such entangled time of African existence, according to Mbembe’s definition, is not a linear sequence in which history proceeds in a succession of articulable moments, “to the point where a single age exists within society” (2001: 16). Rather, it is “made up of disturbances, of a bundle of unforeseen events, of more or less regular fluctuations and oscillations”, and its “real pattern of ebbs and flows” indicates that this time is malleable to reversion (2001: 16). Mbembe’s proposition to understand the African subject as time provides a useful critical framework here for a rereading of the Drum writers and their autobiographical writing. In their narratives of the self, both tendencies of Afro-radicalism and nativism are complicated and contested, self-reflexively, by the representation of time. Such time of entanglement, manifested in the entanglement of childhood and adulthood, first calls into question the essentialist notion of one’s relationship with tradition and with the past. Second, motifs that have usually been associated with political emancipation and protest, such as the rhetoric of “urgency” and the exhibition of physical violence, all contribute to a critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. In the analysis that follows I thus seek to unravel the ways in which narratives of childhood memory and the entangled temporality they entail have enabled this generation of black writers to negotiate their historical positions and to create new forms of subjectivity amidst this historical moment of intensifying anti-apartheid resistance.
The “fabulous decade” and
Drum
magazine: Literary innovations from short stories to autobiographies
The 1950s witnessed the consolidation of the power of the apartheid state and, consequently, a burgeoning wave of resistance movements (see Dubow, 2014: 38–73). Alongside such fermenting political struggle, this decade also saw a burst of cultural production by urban black artists and writers, best exemplified by the vibrant cultural scene in Sophiatown, a suburb in Johannesburg. Lewis Nkosi, one of the most active participants in this cultural scene, famously recalled this period as “the fabulous decade” because of this sudden yet short flourishing of cultural expression against the backdrop of a grim political situation (1965: 3). With the forced removal of Sophiatown in 1955, as a result of the execution of the Group Areas Act, this short “renaissance” — a term that has often been adopted to describe this period — gradually went into dissolution. Despite its failure to stand against the exacerbating effects of apartheid, the Sophiatown renaissance gave birth to some of the most significant figures in South African literary and cultural history, some of whom later rose to international fame. These included jazz artists like Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim, as well as a group of black writers whose major contributions in that period were to the iconic Drum magazine.
Serving more commercial than political purposes, Drum was in fact “an entertainment-exposé-picture periodical crammed with fiction and muckraking, busty broads and huckster advertising” (Addison, 1978: 5), yet its literary contributors showed serious consideration of the aesthetic forms they were employing and the stylistic innovations they were advancing. Between 1951 and 1958, it published over 90 short stories, the chief literary form for its content. These short stories covered a tremendously wide variety of subjects ranging from marriage, love, and death in everyday lives, street gangster thrillers and the culture of shebeens (pubs and bars in townships, which were illegal under apartheid), to pass laws and prison violence. 7 Although these publications were deplored retrospectively by their own writers as “escapist” (Nkosi, 1965: 10; Modisane, 1963a: 159), it was from Drum that a unified literary aesthetic combining journalistic realism with the rhythmic and sensational jolts and bolts of jazz music began to emerge. The multifarious aspects of urban black life were fashioned into these short narratives of intense and lively drama, presented in an identifiable style described by Nkosi as “alive, go-getting, full of nervous energy, very wry, ironic” (1965: 10), and by Mphahlele, similarly, as “racy, agitated, impressionistic… quiver[ing] with a nervous energy, a caustic wit” (1992: 51).
The creation of an innovative literary style as a form of self-fashioning in those early years of apartheid was directly pitched against two preceding traditions in South African writing: one was published works, in English and in African languages, by the early mission-educated black elites such as Tiyo Soga, A. C. Jordan, Sol Plaatje, Thomas Mofolo, and the Dhlomo Brothers; the other was the “liberal novel” exemplified by Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, which was published in the same year that the National Party acceded to power in 1948. 8 Nkosi, in his half autobiographical, half literary-critical essay recollecting the Drum decade, reprimanded earlier generations of black writers supported by missionary presses as either “purposefully Christian and aggressively crusading” or “simply eccentric or unacceptably romantic” (1965: 4) without even mentioning a single one of their names. 9 In a similarly strident critical tone, Nkosi also repudiated Paton’s hero Stephen Kumalo, the priest who went to the city to search for his lost son and witnessed the moral decay of urban life, as “a cunning expression of white liberal sentiment” (1965: 5). As a result of this, as Nkosi put it, “when we entered the decade of the fifties we had no literary heroes” and “no models who could serve as moral examples for us in our private and public preoccupations” (1965: 7). A crucial message in Nkosi’s critique, which is common for the Drum writers, is that their literary identity is forged primarily in an oppositional stance against literary traditions deriving from the missionary notion of Christianity as well as the paternalistic liberal conscience permeating white writing in their time. Another feature of Nkosi’s criticism worth emphasizing, which is crucial to our rereading of works from the Drum decade for their lessons for the present, is that the polemical positions upheld in their writing are usually rendered in a style that delivers its critical acuity and political agenda through the affective power of literary tropes and figurative expressions.
While the short story was the dominant form in Drum publications, these writers turned their attention to autobiography and literary criticism after they went into exile. Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue was published two years after his exile to Nigeria. Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for my Wife (1961) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963) were published in England shortly after they moved there. Nkosi also started to publish his collection of autobiographical and critical essays after moving to the United States. Nevertheless, in terms of style there is never a clear distinction between autobiographical narrative and critical argumentation in these authors’ work. What we see, instead, is usually a combination of autobiographical elements and critical reflections exhibited in varieties of metaphorical and poetic expressions, whether the works are published under the rubric of “autobiography” or “collections of essays”, such as Nkosi’s Home and Exile (1965), and Mphahlele’s The African Image (1962) and Afrika My Music (1983).
In Nkosi’s critical recollection of the Drum decade, a significant rhetorical device adopted to deliver his opinion of earlier literary patterns was the trope of generational antipathy in which, identifying himself repeatedly with “the young”, he voiced an impassioned diatribe against the elders. In terms of his immediate elders who had failed to break free from white rule (which denoted governments from Smuts’ regime to Malan’s apartheid), the younger generation was not prepared to forgive their “naive credulity” and “incredible stupidity” (1965: 5). About the most conspicuous literary embodiment of that generation of fathers, Paton’s character Stephen Kumalo, Nkosi comments that Kumalo has “all the pieties, trepidations and humilities we the young had begun to despise with such a consuming passion” (1965: 6). For Nkosi, the Drum writers’ self-invention represented a “war between us and Stephen Kumalo”, which was also “a war between two generations — the older generation which looked forward to fruitful changes […] and the young who saw themselves beginning their adult life under a more brutal apartheid regime” (1965: 6). This trope of generational schism encapsulates an aspect of inquiry that is often subsumed under the Drum writers’ typically overt polemical positions expressed in an emotional tone of militant fervour. To speak as the young against the old also represents an attempt to seek voice in history against the linearity of time and against the continuities between the past, present, and future. In Nkosi’s essay, the discontinuity and antagonism between generations of fathers and children are suggestive of such a process of reinventing the self through the critique of a linear narrative of historical totality. This ideological critique is also to be found, as I am about to show, in much more nuanced ways in other Drum writers’ longer autobiographical narratives, in the disruption and subversion of the developmental logic buttressed by the conceptual binary between the child and the adult and by the progressive biographical transition from childhood to adulthood.
Temporality of “urgency”
Besides polemics against earlier black writing and the liberal novel, critical discourse springing from this proliferation of new black writing in the Drum decade also involves questions about the relationship between aesthetic forms and the sociopolitical and material conditions that have nurtured these forms. Here is how Mphahlele describes the rationale behind the impressionistic style dominating this period of literary writing, as well as the favoured form of the short story: Impressionistic, because our writers feel life at the basic levels of sheer survival, because blacks are so close to physical pain, hunger, overcrowded public transport in which bodies chafe and push and pull; overcrowded housing, the choking smell and taste of coal smoke, the smell of garbage, of sewerage, of street litter, of wet clothes and body heat in overcrowded houses on rainy days. […] The writer attempted all the time to record minute-to-minute experience. […] Poetry was almost entirely absent in the fifties. Narrative prose and essays became the most handy and accessible mode of expression to deal with one’s own anger and sense of urgency. (1992: 53)
This is in fact a problematic diagnosis for the politics of black writing, which has been subjected to much debate from Mphahlele’s contemporaries as well as later critics. One major fallacy has to do with the underlying assumption of the dictates of “realism” — to see literature as the unmediated reflection of experience. Nkosi is the critic who perhaps most strongly opposed such adherence to realism in black writing; this, as he observed at the time, had resulted in “journalistic fact parading outrageously as imaginative fiction” (1965: 126). 10 The second problematic implication in Mphalele’s discussion is the instrumentalist view of literary writing as purposefully serving a political end — to see literature as the vehicle to exhibit the experience of “sheer survival” and “physical pain”. Njabulo Ndebele, in “Rediscovery of the Ordinary”, his famous keynote address at the conference on New Writing in Africa: Continuity and Change held at the Commonwealth Institute in November 1984, criticized the widespread exhibitionist and dramatically demonstrative form of literary representation in the history of black South African literature. His polemic against such “representation of the spectacle” included works by the Drum writers — both the entertaining short stories published in Drum and the overt “protest literature” they produced in exile — as they exhibited the same penchant for “spectacular representation” that aimed to reveal the “spectacular ugliness of the South African situation” (1986: 143). If Ndebele’s remark at that time offered a prescient message to a society that was about to be free of the dispensation of apartheid, his critical insight was more extensively echoed in post-apartheid literary criticism. Louise Bethlehem, for example, suggested that there was an “instrumentalist concept of language” widely existing in “the overwhelmingly realist dominant of South African literary culture in English” under apartheid. Such instrumentalism of literature, as she further pointed out (2001: 365), was often masked and justified in the rhetoric of “urgency” as a vital parallel to the imperative demands of political resistance.
While all of the above criticisms are directed towards the “instrumentality” of black writing and, for that matter, its “compulsory” commitments to realism, they tend to overlook certain stylistic features embedded in these works that escape the dictates of political demands and also complicate realism. In many cases, it is not so much that literature is instrumentalized for political objectives as that tropes in political language are incorporated in their writing to create formal and epistemological invigoration. In the passage I have quoted from Mphahlele, a notable feature in his style is the way in which the rhetoric combining a “sense of urgency” and the immediacy of “minute-to-minute experience” has contributed to a narrative representation of nonlinear temporality. Mphahlele’s description of urban experience above uses a juxtaposition of sensory impressions and flickering images in an intense array of quick and short phrases. This narrative technique bears a strong resemblance to the narrative of childhood memory in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this article. “Urgency” here gives rise to an experience of time in which the past and the future are folded and compressed into a present marked by an endless array of short fragments. “Shortness” also seems to be a key attribute in such a rhetoric of urgency. As Modisane commented on the compression of literary forms, describing the boom in short stories in this period of writing, an “urgent, immediate, intense, concentrated form” of writing allowed for a “short term morality” (1963b: 3). The rhetoric of “urgency” and “shortness”, rather than being the necessary result of real life situations as these writers themselves sometimes suggested, have in fact set a pace for phrasing and narrative style that subverts the linearity of time and substantially complicates the aesthetic assumptions of realism.
It is no wonder that the impressionist, episodic, and fragmentary Drum-style representation of the “minute-to-minute experience” of urban black life, as well as the temporalities they engender, remained in these writers’ autobiographies after they had physically left South Africa. Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959), one of the first and most widely celebrated long narrative prose works by any of the exiled Drum writers, represents time in a way that corresponds closely to the aesthetics of urgency developed from Drum. Right from the opening pages of the work, Mphahlele repeatedly adopts the narrative mode in which recollections of childhood are delivered in fragments of disconnected incidents and short episodes, which also bring to the fore the instabilities and slippages of memory: I remember feeling quite lost during the first weeks in that little village […] Things stand out clearly in my mind from those years. […] I cannot remember her [grandmother] as she was those days. I remember Old Modise say at our village fire-place. […] I still remember clearly how stories were told at that fire-place. (1–6)
By repeatedly reminding the reader of what he can or cannot remember, these moments show Mphahlele’s clear awareness of the first-person narrator’s position in the present day, and also make Down Second Avenue a highly self-reflexive text. The urge to reach for the past is constantly intertwined with an awareness of the entanglement of the past and the present. The reiteration of “I remember” indicates that it is always the present adult narrating self that is shaping his childhood experience, as well as leaving gaps and creating discontinuities.
Besides the episodic narrative patterns evinced above, impressionistic lists of short phrases, as I have quoted earlier in Mphahlele’s descriptions of his childhood in Maupaneng and the experiences of urban black life, also recur in Down Second Avenue. This is how he delineates the memory of Marabastad: I was beginning to put into their proper places the scattered experiences of my life in Pretoria. Poverty; my mother’s resignation; Aunt Dora’s toughness; grandmother, whose ways bridged the past with the present, sticking to neither at any one time; police raids; the ten-to-ten curfew bell; encounters with whites; humiliations. But I only succeeded in reconstructing the nightmare which in turn harassed my powers of understanding. (117)
The paradox accompanying the narrator’s memory of Maupaneng reappears here in his memory of Marabastad. The desire to reconstruct the self in coherence, to “put into their proper places the scattered experiences of my life”, is obstructed by the failure of memory and by his inability to narrate and articulate. However, by leaving his past experiences as “scattered” and fragmentary as they are, the narrative draws up an alternative temporal schema, which subverts a linear temporality and, like the memory of his grandmother, “bridged the past with the present, sticking to neither at any one time”. The fragments of memory also seem to obliterate the dichotomy between the country and the city established in a linear narrative of urbanization, which, as I have suggested at the beginning of this paper, underpins a racially discriminatory formulation of black people and is complicit in the logic of apartheid’s territorial control of the black population. Furthermore, the blurred boundary between childhood and adulthood destabilizes a racist developmental logic that undergirds apartheid’s education policies, which tended to discipline and control the black population by denying them opportunities for development and by seeking to keep them permanently in a state of childhood. 11 The nightmare Mphahlele refers to in this passage is as much about political oppression — poverty, police raids, the curfew bell, encounters with whites and consequent humiliations — as about epistemological obstacles, which “harassed” his “powers of understanding”. The self, which is unimaginable in a progressive temporal order that in many ways justifies apartheid ideology and its various legislations, is reinvented in Mphahlele’s autobiographical account as having an existence in an “urgent” present interwoven with a fragmentary past. The instability of childhood memory becomes the exact site where subjectivity reveals itself as contingent, slippery, and prone to change. At the same time, it is also from this alternative nonlinear temporality that a new form of subjectivity can emerge.
The instability of childhood memory, indicating a sense of openness towards the past, seems to be the principle according to which Mphahlele arranges his whole autobiographical narrative in a multilayered temporal schema. One noticeable narrative technique in Down Second Avenue that contributes to this temporality on a structural level is its series of Interludes — the seven short chapters that divide the main narrative into different sections. These compact sections, all consisting of fantastical internal monologues and written in the present tense, constitute an alternative temporal and stylistic dimension in parallel with the progression of realistic biographical time adopted in the main narrative. The following passage is from the first Interlude, which depicts the child, after moving to Second Avenue, imagining the curfew outside one sleepless night: Saturday night and it’s ten to ten, I can hear the big curfew bell at the police station peal ‘ten to ten, ten to ten, ten to ten’ for the black man to be out of the streets to be home to be out of the policeman’s reach. Year after year every night the sound of the bell floats in the air at ten minutes to ten and the Black man must run home and the Black man must sleep or have a night special permit. The whistle is very near now and hunted man must be in Second Avenue but the bell goes on pealing lustily and so Black man you must run wherever you are, run. (45)
This stream of consciousness-like monologue inside a boy’s mind goes on for three pages in a single long paragraph. The sense of urgency triggered by the curfew initiates a highly hybrid narrative in which a child’s consciousness is fused with that of an adult, which not only refers to the adult author himself but also to a collective persona, the Black man with the capital “B”. Such a narrative style creates a temporal dimension existing as a permanently protracted present, in which a specific historical moment of “ten to ten” on a Saturday night when the child is half asleep is replicated into “year after year every night”. This nonlinear temporality thus gathers an ambiguous conflation between the specific experience of the individual author and the collective experience of the black subject. 12
This narrative of the self that obliterates the distinction between “individuality” and “collectivity” in relation to time is also connected with the representation of place, as the recurrence of the “ten to ten” curfew bell ringing on a Saturday night runs parallel with the recurring memory of Marabastad. This is the beginning of the third Interlude: Marabastad is gone but there will always be Marabastads that will be going until the screw of the vice breaks. Too late maybe, but never too soon. And the Black man keeps moving on, as he has always done the last three centuries, moving with baggage and all, for ever tramping with bent backs to give way for the one who says he is stronger. […] I have been moving up and down Second Avenue since I was born and never dreamt I should ever jump out of the nightmare. (165)
The specificity of a place and of individual experience is transformed here again into a collective one belonging to “the Black man”. A permanent present consisting of a repeated past is linked to a repetition of place, which turns a specific “Marabastad” to multiple “Marabastads”. There seems to be a sense of commitment to place as the adult narrator keeps returning in his memory to Second Avenue in Marabastad, but the prolonged and endless replication of Marabastad, together with a sense of the past as a repeated existence in a permanent present, also seem to obscure such commitment. In a frequently quoted article, Mphahlele observes that black South African writers must “come to terms with the tyranny of place, […] because his writing depends on his commitment to territory” (1987: 54). Nevertheless, the way in which his autobiography organizes time, especially through these Interludes, seems to disturb this notion of the tyranny of place. In fact, the negative connotation of the term “tyranny” itself precisely suggests Mphahlele’s critical attitude towards such a commitment to territory, which is not so much a desired as an imposed situation symptomatic of exiled writers’ condition of being driven out of their home country. In Down Second Avenue, the narrative of the self as a continual process of reliving one’s childhood transgresses the “tyranny” of place by mapping the recurring memory of Marabastad onto his ceaselessly shifting locations. Near the end of the autobiography, when the adult narrator is facing his exile after being banned from teaching in the township of Orlando, he describes the township as “a glorified Marabastad. Saturday night is the same as it was twenty-five years ago in Marabastad minus the ten-to-ten bell” (193). It is as if a fragmentary and repeated past also contributes to a shifting heterogeneity of places, in which the narrative of the individual self existing in a specific location in a specific time becomes the expression of a collective destiny where “the Black man keeps moving on, as he has always done the last centuries” (193).
Temporality of Sophiatown and the paradox of masculinity
While Mphahlele’s narrative of childhood memory mobilizes a variety of locations from the countryside to the townships, Modisane’s (1963a) autobiography is devoted to Sophiatown, the monumental township that rose to fame in the 1950s. In spite of its demolition under apartheid bulldozers in 1955, Sophiatown continued to inspire artists and writers afterwards and became a fluid urban fiction and a significant discursive spatial trope in South African cultural history (see Fink, 2015; Goodhew, 2004; Samuelson, 2008). While shifting meanings attached to the place are played out diachronically in varieties of cultural texts written over it, it is also represented within Blame Me on History itself as a spatial trope that reveals the contingencies of history and gives rise to narratives of the black subject against the fixity of linear temporal structures. Written as an elegy to the township in which Modisane has spent his childhood and youth, the autobiography juxtaposes material fragments of the demolished Sophiatown with temporal fragments of his childhood memory. In addition, a reinvention of the self through such fragmentary representation of time and place is especially tied to two recurring motifs: violence upon the black male body, and the experience of death.
Starting from the moment of the narrator watching over the ruins of Sophiatown as an adult, descriptions of the derelict debris of the demolished township in front of his eyes alternate with narratives of his life and flashbacks to his childhood memory. The link between the destroyed place and its residents is established first and foremost in the narrative through visceral depictions of the physical body and of physical violence. “Sophiatown was like one of its own victims”, as Modisane describes it, “a man gored by the knives of Sophiatown, lying in the open gutters, a raisin in the smelling drains, dying of multiple stab wounds, gaping wells gushing forth blood” (1963a: 5). 13 The personification of Sophiatown also suggests an ambiguous slippage between the communal/collective and the individual sense of the self. Embodied by its numerous victims, Sophiatown at the same time also “belonged to me; when we were not shaking hands or chasing the same girl or sharing a bottle of brandy, we were sticking knives into each other’s back” (15).
Serving as the vehicle that yokes together narratives of the place and the self, the revelation of physical violence is also woven into another motif, death, the recurrence of which becomes, paradoxically, the dominant experience of the narrator’s childhood and his growth. “Something in me died”, as he laments on the sight of the demolished Sophiatown, “a piece of me died, with the dying of Sophiatown” (5). Mirroring the death of Sophiatown, the narrative reinvention of the self pivots on the narrator’s fragmentary recollection of his sister’s and his father’s death: “I learned early in life to play games with death, to realize its physical presence in my life, to establish rapport with it” (18). The following narrative then alternates between descriptions of Sophiatown, which is present in front of the narrator’s eyes, and memories of his past experience of his family’s deaths as a child: “Standing over the death of Sophiatown, another death came into my consciousness” (18). After recounting his sister Nancy’s death because of malnutrition, he “switched off the memory machine, but there was another kind of death gaping at me” (19). Again, after witnessing the ruins of the house where he was born along with a funeral train passing by, the narrator then turns to his childhood memory of his father’s death when he was 14. While he remembers his father’s dead body as “the swollen mass of broken flesh and blood, […] there were no eyes nor mouth, nose, only a motionless ball” (26), this experience of death in all its physicality also leaves its mark upon his own body in the present: the horror and the pain of death would focus on the nightmarish sight of my father, and I fall into a state of anxiety and develop an itch all over my body, scratching until my skin bleeds; the pain becomes a reprimand, the physical moment of punishment. (27)
It is as if the physical violence contained in death replaces the linear progression of time and becomes the fulcrum against which the present narrating self and his past experience as a child are drawn together. It is also the coexistence of the physical presence of death and the living physical body that temporalizes the narrative into a fragmentary representation of history, upon which, as the title of the autobiography seems to suggest, the self is engraved.
The association between the rhetoric of physical violence and critique of the kind of historicism based on a linear temporality reminds one of Frantz Fanon’s (1968) seminal text Black Skin, White Masks, in which the Martinican thinker lays out the ambivalent psyche of the black subject through a visceral description of the effects of violence upon the black masculine body: And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. […] I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. […] I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho” good “eatin”. […] What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? (Fanon, 1968: 124).
Sacrifice of the body here evokes the real as well as psychic violence that colonialism enacts on the black subject. More importantly, in Fanon’s compelling prose, the black body figures as a narrative trope to disrupt colonialist forms of knowledge and the Western historicist master narrative based on a linear temporality. In his 1986 foreword to Black Skin, White Masks, Homi K. Bhabha points out that the force of Fanon’s vision comes from “the language of a revolutionary awareness” in which, as Bhabha quotes Walter Benjamin, “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight” (Benjamin, qtd. in Bhabha, 1986: xxiv). It is also by speaking from inside such a state of emergency that a possible voice of critique can truly emerge. The endeavour to fight colonial rule, as Bhabha suggests, “changes not only the direction of Western history” but constantly puts in crisis “its historicist ‘idea’ of time as a progressive, ordered whole” (1986: xxiv). While commenting on Fanon’s rhetoric of the black man’s body, Bhabha argues that “the White man’s eyes break up the Black man’s body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed” (1986: xxv). Confronting the white man’s eyes, the dismemberment of the black man’s body in Fanon’s text not only evokes the real physical violence of colonialism but also bespeaks a trope of critique against the order of Western historicism through which “blackness” is constructed in various forms of deficiency and inferiority.
It is on this epistemological level that Fanon’s writing reverberates with Blame Me on History in terms of the radical postures in both of their work and the ways in which such radicalism, delivered through the rhetoric of physical violence, can be interpreted in relation to our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present. But to appropriate Bhabha’s analytic model in his interpretation of Fanon directly to Modisane’s text would be to ignore the very local specific historical context behind it. As I have shown through Nkosi’s and Mphahlele’s writing, for a black South African writer in the 1950s and the 1960s, narrative constructions of the self hinged not so much on simply the broad categories of opposition between the West and the colonial subject as on more complex local manifestations of racial relationships and power structures both within and beyond South Africa. Nevertheless, Bhabha’s reading is useful here because it offers a way to turn the trope of the black body and violence towards a reconceptualization of time and history — a significant aspect of the subversive power in narratives and theories of black subjectivity produced from within the historical moments of radical political opposition.
Mirroring Fanon’s writing, Modisane’s autobiography also disrupts a causal, fixed relationship between the past and the present and reveals the contingencies of history through childhood recollection. Besides the reciprocal inscription of the urban space and the physical body, Blame Me on History also destabilizes a linear temporality through the paradox of African masculinity. Modisane’s narrative model of the black subject, in a similar manner as Fanon’s theoretical model, is staged in a boy’s growth into manhood and is emphatically masculine. However, by narrating the child’s growth as a process of repeatedly reliving the father’s death, whose physical presence ironically indicates a form of emasculation, Modisane’s narrative also plays out the paradoxes and anxieties embedded in the forms of masculinity it endorses.
The male-dominated literary scene in the Drum decade largely influenced the ways in which ideas about gender were configured around Drum and the Sophiatown renaissance in general. In Dorothy Driver’s study of the representation of women and femininity in Drum magazine, she points out that this literary and cultural renaissance was “constructed at women’s expense” and “negotiated largely by means of belittling and damaging misrepresentations of women” (1996: 231). According to Driver, the imperative issue of racial identity dominating the cultural scene at that time was oblivious to gender difference, resulting in the fact that forms of African feminine subjectivity were almost completely absent. In a similar vein, ideas about masculinity were also constructed problematically due to the prioritized demands of a racial discourse. Lindsay Clowes observes that, while pitching an urban modern black identity as opposed to a rural and traditional one, Drum magazine nevertheless paradoxically “found itself simultaneously reinforcing Western rather than African versions of manhood” (2008: 192). According to both critics, there was an underlying tension between categories of gender and race in this period that largely problematized the reinvention of the black subject in terms of their gender roles. When it came to the representation of masculinity by the male writers I have been discussing in this article, this tension derived, I would argue, not so much from the distinctions between “Western” and “African” versions of manhood, as Clowes seems to suggest, as from a developmental logic which existed simultaneously in discourses of gender formation and in colonial and apartheid ideology, in which the African subject was always cast as the equivalent to the child, the boy, and therefore could never fully attain adult manhood and mature masculinity per se.
Blame Me on History stages fully its deep anxiety about forms of masculinity in which it is implicated by placing its narrative voice in the position of the child whose growth is stuck between an absent, dead father and his own failed fatherhood. Memory of his father’s dead body as “no eyes nor mouth, nose, only a motionless ball” (26) — his death as emasculation — becomes the child’s rite of passage. At his father’s funeral, he sees his own name mistakenly carved on his father’s coffin, which makes him realize that “I was officially dead” (31). It is also at this moment, ironically, that he turns from a boy to a man. In Modisane’s narrative of the self, there is always the entanglement between the process of growing up and dying, and the conflation between the child’s acquisition of masculinity and the father’s emasculation. What is being challenged here is not only a subjugated racial identity implicated in a linear historicist narrative but also a narrative of masculinity modelled upon a patriarchal structure secured by generational continuity from fathers to sons, who in turn become fathers. By configuring time through the entanglement of childhood and adulthood, Blame Me on History addresses the paradox of its own adherence to masculinity while at the same time fundamentally subverting a developmental temporal logic that buttresses the colonial and apartheid’s formulation of the black subject.
Conclusion
The significance of black writing in the 1950s and 1960s in South African literary history, especially writing associated with Drum magazine, is unquestionable. While these works (mostly short stories and autobiographies) fully encapsulate the tension between a dynamic urban modernity and apartheid’s retrogressive policies, they have also generated a somewhat problematic critical discourse about black writing that succumbs to much debate. My close reading of Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue and Modisane’s Blame Me on History reveals the ways in which the stylistic complexities in these two autobiographical works in fact problematize and circumvent the prevalent responses toward this period of black literary culture. These responses include discussions of realism, political instrumentality, and representations of gender and masculinity. The critical energies embedded in their narratives, as I argue, lie precisely in the representation of time as “entanglement”. The reinscription of the racialized and gendered modern subject is therefore also modelled upon an “entanglement” of childhood and adulthood, which resists the polarization of innocence and maturation/corruption — notions that underpin not only Verwoerd’s rhetoric but also the romanticist tendencies of Négritude and Paton’s liberalism.
