QUÆRE. [Latin.] Enquire; seek; a word put when any thing is recommended to enquiry.
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QUEER. adj. [of this word the original is not known: a correspondent supposes a queer man to be one who has a quære to his name in a list.] Odd; strange; original; particular.
Re: orientating
What might it mean to begin to orientate myself, as a critic, towards queerness in contemporary South African English short fiction? What might such an “orientation” make possible, bring to light, cast doubt upon? As both a scholar and a writer of short fiction, how do I identify and query the “controversial orbit” of “queer”, the “‘messiness’ of it all” (Holland, 2005: x) where identity politics, intellectual project, and creative impulses flounder towards finding points of shared expression even while allowing for dissensus? If the short story form has historically been a marginalized genre, what are the implications for its depicting of queer identities considered minor, or on the margins? In glancing at the scene of local stories in English post 2000, I am influenced by Sara Ahmed’s “question of what it means to ‘orientate’ oneself […] towards some others and not other others” (2006: 68), a convoluted prompt which shifts attention from familiar South African historical discourses of racialized otherness towards the wide variety of supposedly non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality that are habitually othered by heterosexist culture. Ahmed’s thinking of “queer” in relation to “orientations” reminds me that if
orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving towards, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray. (2006: 178)
Ahmed’s critical tactic, influenced by an embodied phenomenology, allows me to avoid either facile binaries or insistent linearity when responding to queer impulses in local short fiction. Instead, I am enabled to appreciate wayward entanglements and detours and impasses as excellent opportunities for “thinking through queer” in current South African short stories, giving substance to the uneasy containment of the acronym LGBTQIA+.
The South African short story in English, post 2000, remains a predominantly heterosexual affair, since heterosexuality remains the familiar, the proximate given. However, disorientations have begun. While examples of local queer short fiction are not yet prolific within the dominant heterosexual matrix, stories may perform “queer work” as textual objects which query the assumed narrative experiential field of the South African short story as a structure that has produced the effect of the non-normative in the process of being established. My paper begins to locate “a specific strand of […] literary tradition that has a history — peripatetic and liable to erasure, but a history nonetheless” (Munro, 2017: 190). At the same time, though, “the question is not so much [about] finding a queer line” (Ahmed, 2006: 106) in contemporary South African short fiction, as something distinct and separable. If I am interested in a critical turn towards queer stories with a view to altering the nature, extent, and value of a local literary “inheritance”, my claim is not for queerness as idealized counter-canonical voicing, or “alternative space” of rebuttal (Ahmed, 2006: 106). Rather, I consider moments where queer short fiction uneasily (mis)aligns with heterosexuality’s contouring of what constitutes the “habitable space” of literary output (Ahmed, 2006: 106).
Queer/y/ing the short story
Axel Nissen proposes that there is “something queer about the short story” (2004: 181) as a notoriously otherwise genre, recalcitrant as it is when it comes to categorical fixity, and disruptive of conventional aesthetic norms and proprieties. For Nissen, the value of the short story lies in its radical “perversity”, a creatively disobedient claiming of “deviance” or “abnormality” as both intractably capricious and obdurately unyielding. This is a contradictory intransigence that contributes to the short story’s being widely stigmatized as “the fictional ‘other’ of prose narrative”, burdened with the obligation to “continually justify its existence, worry about the circumstances of its being and becoming, agonize about its value and identity” (Nissen, 2004: 181). “[T]he short story”, he writes, “not unlike homosexuality […] was born into the world as a generic problem, a problem that required a solution, or at least a definition” (Nissen, 2004: 181). While I am uneasy about some of his premises (perversity, for one), I appreciate Nissen’s understanding that the push for categorical certainty in respect of “the” short story, as with “queer”, has proven valuably elusive. As he recognizes, this creates a useful space in which elements of “short storiness” can be re-thought through the faceted lens of queer theory, each cluster finding its oblique relation in sharing “wilfully eccentric modes of being” (Halberstam, 2005: 1) that “cannot be given a priori” (Nissen, 2004: 182). Sara Ahmed similarly endorses a use of “queer” to designate forms and behaviours — like the short story — which are “oblique” (slant, diagonal, out of line) and the practice of non-normative sexualities. She insists on her right to “slid[e] from one sense to the other” (2006: 161). Similarly, I find it “important to make the oblique angle of queer do this work, even if it risks placing different kinds of queer effects alongside each other”, for this brings to light the necessary co-relation and contingency of “sexual disorientation” and “social disorientation” (Ahmed, 2006: 162), unsettling a received repertoire of how people, things, and relations are arranged. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner also counsel against “queer” as “a stable referential content and pragmatic force” (1995: 344), the false coherence of “a single discourse” or “propositional program” (1995: 343). This is inspirational advocacy for my queer thinking around local short fiction in English, thinking that is provisional and welcoming of “unpredictability” (1995: 344).
My queerying of queer in contemporary South African short fiction bears upon the co-elusive notions of short story, queer sexualities, and queer commentary as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning that occur when the constituent elements […] do not signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, 1993: 8). For every short story writer who has favoured “the traditional […] form with its five-part structure of situation, generating circumstance, rising action, climax and denouement”, there are those who have opted for “some queer genre far removed” (Dillingham, 2008: 6). Rough anecdote. Surreal image-scape. Prose poem. Documentary account. Fait divers. Speculative fantasy. Over the years, fixations on genre have relaxed; theorists of short fiction have begun to look askance at passé, inherited categories which insist on oppositions between “tale” and “story”, or “short story” and “sketch”. In this situation, the short story as a genre seems itself to constitute an attractive, consanguine figuration of the diversely queer forms that queerness may take.
Margins and centres
Some aver that if the role of the short story “has primarily been to act as the novel’s other, as the homosexual has been the heterosexual’s other” (Nissen, 2004: 181), this othering has also been enabled to short fiction’s advantage. The short story is not bound to the received timeframes and unfolding chronologies that tend to govern the realist novel, for example — this last being the historically dominant representational mode for imagining South African life. Instead, as Brenna Munro points out in her extensive research into the work done by the category “queer” in South African and African literary–cultural imaginaries, the short story favours “fragments of time over epic historical sweeps”, and avoids “the production of endings that draw all the possibilities of the plot to a close” (2017: 189). For Munro, such formal figurations offer a strategic opportunity to writers of queer African short fiction, for the “as-yet-to-be determined nature of queer African lives suits the temporalities of the short story” (2017: 189). Additionally, Munro argues that the short story “lends itself to trying out ideas” (2017: 189), presenting a valuable opportunity for queer African writers, on a continent of still predominantly homophobic states, to engage with controversial, indeed taboo, issues in an intensely compressed and potentially powerful representational space.
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Importantly, if the short story has often been relegated to a minor, marginal, second-class, non-normative form, overshadowed by the novel’s impressive capacities for narrative sweep and depth, its powerful combination of cultural totality and individual psychology, in cultural and geographical contexts on the margins of mainstream cultures and worldly affairs, the adaptability of the short story as an outsider configuration has served it well, and seen it foray into service for multiple imaginative engagements with marginality. In South Africa, short stories have carried the fractured narration of colonial experience, “marginal with respect to some metropolis” (Pratt, 1981: 187); the particularities of a regionalism or a (sub)cultural identity which exists at a remove from the centre of influence; the marginalized identities of race, class, and gender; and (more recently) the “writing in the margins” entailed by the minority practices of linguistic–narrative experimentalisms that flout stylistic norms. Amenable to such a range of irruptive practices, enabling alternatives to standard historical logic and the doxa of a moral–cultural majority, the short story clearly offers excellent opportunities, in South Africa, as a flexible, capacious genre apposite to the representations of atypical sexualities (see Sheik, 2015; Trengove Jones, 2000). There is a history in this respect, for as Mary-Louise Pratt remarks, “the short story was often the genre used to introduce new subject matter and stigmatized subject matters into the literary arena” (1981: 187); it is a form that “breaks down taboos”, including those “on matters of sexuality” (1981: 187).
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Additionally, there is the entangled question of queerness, story, and nation. In their research on Australian queer fiction, Damien Barlow and Leigh Dale note that queer activism and associated critical scholarship has constructively energized a “set of complex questions about definition, position and canonicity” — and yet challenges remain. For if “‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘writing’ are all contested categories, so too is ‘Australian’” (2007: 445). If the “problem of definition looms large” in respect of “queer” and “short story” (more on that later), it does so too in defining national boundaries in relation to short stories (2007: 445). Sue Marais explains that “[d]espite the fact that the modern short story is frequently viewed in national terms (American, Irish, South African), the genre evinces significant transnational tendencies” which render it alternative, even alternational (2005: 14). Thus, if we’re wanting to imagine that there is “something queer about the short story” (Nissen, 2004: 181), then it’s also necessary to concede “the nation” as a skewed form and category which only ostensibly serves the collective good. “The nation” is often at best suspicious of “aberrant” queer lives and at worst legally proscribes and punishes queerness. Queer identities are troubling anomalies in the duplicitous national discourse, for they are obliged to bear, in their embodiments and orientations, the rhetorical and material violence which latently subtends the normative, systemic authority required to present the coherent face of even democratic nationalism. In terms of boundaries, the very adjective which designates nationhood is invariably imprecise. South African, for example, imputes a geophysical singularity defined by clear boundaries, rather than acknowledging more porous human relation of adjacent countries and cultures. This mistake is then compounded, being taken for the singular, coherent narrative history of nation-based exceptionalism. Brenna Munro cites Maggie Awadulla and Paul March-Russell in arguing that “the short story has provided a literary home for identities and experiences that do not easily belong in the imagined communities” of even postcolonial nationalism (2017: 189). Volumes such as Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas’ Queer African Reader (2013), and David Foster’s Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-critical Sourcebook (1994) imply that queer/ing short fiction from South Africa must work between passport control and inter-nationalism. “South African” is a queer rather than a (de)finite category; a relational entity, composite yet incomplete, a construct that comes into being contingently, across thresholds. Given local writers’ increasing involvement in pan-African and diasporic writing cultures, and in a globalizing world literary system, “South African” is a category in excess of what it self-evidently appears to designate. This becomes clearer when we delve into queer local short fiction.
Possibly the best known and most widely reviewed anthology of queer short fiction in South Africa is Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (Martin and Xaba, 2013). The volume collects queer stories from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. The contents are deliberately in excess of bounded, heterosexist preference and proscription, but also refuse the limits of national defensiveness. Queer Africa is a GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action) activist and advocacy platform, mooting the idea that short fiction “offers an imaginative space that allows for a range of possibilities and ways of seeing and being” because “[i]t bridges gaps” (Salafranca, 2014: n.p.). Among these is not only the focus on queer short fiction which contributes to making queer, specifically, more visible, in all its varied orientations and sexualities, but also the importance of creating links among the queer short fiction being written by South Africans and by writers from the rest of the continent. Such collaborative conceptualizing is generative, both in the context of persistent continental homophobia, and democratic South Africa’s still unrealized need to give material effect to the rights of queer people as discursively affirmed in the Constitution.
Content and discontent
Not unexpectedly, some contemporary South African short fiction takes up queerness as content, subject matter. There are stories which address divergent sexualities, written by writers who identify (though differently) as LGBTQIA. With the liberated possibilities of a constitutional democracy, South Africa has seen more short stories which are “sexually explicit”, and more stories that trace “the painful self-acceptance of gay identities” (Stobie, 2009: 320). In her work on queer texts, Cheryl Stobie observes “a cluster of attributes” associated with a queer inclination in fiction, among them “queer sexuality viewed with interior depth”; the “coming-out narrative, the normalization of queer, progressive engagement with gender issues, and technical innovation” (2009: 320). She tallies the number of queer characters and scenarios, but more astutely goes on to propose that even content-based depictions of queerness may serve an important “speculative” purpose, linking past and present with a future in which queerness is not stamped as stigma. The difficulties of life in South Africa — though the implied chronology of “transition” could prove suspect for a queer commentary — might drive queer writers, like any writers, to depict the troubled shapes of crime, corruption, dreams deferred, and political disillusion. Understood through queer commentary, however, a (queer) short story writer’s emphasis on estrangement and morbidity — “the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility and awkwardness” (Halberstam, 2011: 97) — can also be read as implicated in the normative signifying system which so persistently marks queer identity as abnormal, death-driven, and worthless. At the same time, there is no essential connection of gay, lesbian, and trans identifying people to such forms of privation and distress (Halberstam, 2011: 97).
So, in my queerying of recent local short fiction, if I anticipated examples which illustrate the quotidian precarity of queer life, I was also hoping for stories which boldly re-narrativize abjected desire and ostracized identity, re-casting the more habitual heteronormative figurations which seem to insist on queerness as deviance, deficit, subversion, transgression, trauma, injustice, melancholy, grief, loss, death. I found myself longing for writers who limn “queer” by imagining and writing into being a complementary erotohistoriography of bliss, hope, joy, and gain (Freeman, 2010). I also hoped to find stories of queer ordinariness and companionship, in which a writer shifts the emphasis from “sex or romantic intimacy to the emotional time of being with, time where it is possible to value floundering around with others” (Berlant, 2011: 85; emphasis in original). Additionally, I wanted myself to understand that a queer-inflected reading of the short story form would need to appreciate queer temporality, possibly embodying “the passage” of time as queer — twisted, braided, split; time looked at askance, rather than head on. A short story may have the capacity to carry narrative as a variety of compressions, elisions, expansions, and gaps, rather than masking or marking time as an ostensibly seamless progression towards life’s logical, causal development as pre-determined by the preferred patterns of the status quo.
Such temporal-conceptual ambiguities are a valuable discursive potential of short storiness understood as queer. To adapt Katherine Bond Stockton’s idea: short stories “are fictions that imagine and present what sociology [sic], Law, and History cannot pierce” (2009: 10). In “their inventive forms”, they “are rich stimulators of questions public cultures seem to have” scant “language for encountering” (2009: 10). When placed in relation to queerness as represented in short fiction, such potentials may intensify and diversely ramify, inclining towards the ludic, for example, or the traumatized. Consider Shaun de Waal’s playful story “Private Reserve” (2003), where queerness is not, on the surface, represented as especially deep, or difficult. For the most part, the story presents some easy-going fun, spinning out a narrative of four friends on a bushveld weekend escape. Using a straight couple and a gay couple as narrative devices, the writer strategically sets up camp, then crosses the binaries by establishing alliances across neat “camps”, undermining the polarities of queer and hetero, playing out the very etymology of the word “queer” as “across” or “aslant”. The textual space of an ostensibly easy-read story nudges a reader to understand the “fantasy of a natural orientation” as in fact “an orientation device that organizes worlds around the form of the heterosexual couple, as if it were from this point that the world unfolds” (Ahmed, 2006: 85). Within this frame, the story toys with the triteness and/or truth of received, popular assumptions about what it means to be gay or straight, when one is markedly male or female. While “the boys” (one straight, one homosexual) head out on their manly wilderness adventure, “the girls” (a biological female and a biological male) domesticate the camp site with intimate gossip, food preparation, and shared emotional anxiety about their partners’ increasingly long absence. Where are the men? What are they doing? What disaster has befallen? The story veers between performing a space for accommodating emotional intimacy, even confession, and a sardonic parody on romance and the love relationship as a social requirement of “intelligible subjectivity” (Ahmed, 2006: 85). It manages to be both a droll tale of queer and straight, love and libido, while also casting a melancholy light on the normative linear timeframes of “reproductive futurism” (Edelman, 2004: 4) associated with the pressure to have children. All’s well that ends well, however, and the punch line (“Fucking heterosexuals” (De Waal, 2003: 36)) takes arch pleasure in turning the tables on the normative stigma.
In comparison, Jane Bennett’s (2008) emotionally gruelling story, “Michael”, speaks to the difficult necessity of queer “floundering”, an urgent need in a divided South Africa. The story tentatively creates a space in which entrenched categorical differences can be tested, elided, or suspended, and people gather into an open-minded willingness to share in the unfolding of the unknown, without prejudicial premonition of outcome. Bennett traces queerness mutably as both loss and resilience. “Michael” is a strange, perilous story, striated with unfulfilled longing. Familiar South African truths of gender violence and racial politics are brought into jarring relation with queer sexuality, in an unstable narrative structure that throws a reader off-balance. The story evolves between two female co-workers who, over time, have established a tentative friendship. The evidently wounded Michael offers incidents from her life, revealing the deep formations of “herself”: love of language — and of women; an impatience with the abstractions of literary criticism; and a self violated by the casual brutalities of gang rape. Michael, so vulnerable, voices “the memories of what living in a body could mean” (Bennett, 2008: 93). Her main narration is interspersed with her colleague’s internalized, italicized reflections — sometimes affirming, sometimes dissenting, creating a dialogical expanse of actual conversation and imagined exchange. In the wake of her trauma, Michael (reduced to “a thin hunk of reddened muscle” (Bennett, 2008: 93)), retreats from “the arts” into the university science library, immersed in the pure mathematics of “coefficients and calculus” (Bennett, 2008: 92). Each day she promises herself that “if I could follow […] one new line of calculation, then being skinless didn’t entail losing my mind” (Bennett, 2008: 92). Bennett’s story is a damaged, unpredictable narrative in which the two women and the readers experience the burdens and the possibilities of “coming to know”, of intimacy ventured though not necessarily gained. The story is marked by disjunctive split narration and pronominal shift: a disturbing combination of emotional fragility and calculated control, circling around Michael’s physically and mentally traumatic fracture and the long, surreal “afterwards” in which she reaches towards (re)new(ed) feeling. The secondary narrator struggles to “orientate”, saying, “She has changed back into the third person — Michael has — just as she starts talking about loving women” (Bennett, 2008: 93):
If I am to be the next lover I can see I am going to have to understand this thing about pronouns — where she actually is, how many of her there are, which one is hiding something, which one is the poet.
Or perhaps, I will simply love her.
She, me. (Bennett, 2008: 95; emphasis in original)
Questions of sexuality and (trans)orientation blur, the will to define and fix co-existing precariously with the desired (though elusive) simplicity of something called “love”. The ending — “She, me” — is simultaneously fragile, and assertive. It wills two women together in the hope of some queer futurity, yet remains tenuous, underrealized. If this attests to the challenges of living the conviction of orientation with certainty, it also grants the necessary fluidity of relinquishing an obsessive need to assert boundaries of definition and experience, and to know, ahead of time, what will be. Such a story gives beautiful, risky embodiment to questions of trans and the transitional, as both orientation and as interregnum.
Queerly affective, queerly erotic?
There are several post-2000 South African anthologies that bring queer and straight short stories into shared space, among them Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (Schimke, 2008), featuring some stories of same-sex desire. Here, “the erotic” rubric works as the over-determined signifier of the illicit and the controversial, partly relieving “the queer” of that cultural–political burden, but still the shapes of queer intimacy in contemporary South African queer short fiction are marked by the truism that “what makes some people queasy, others call sexy” (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 343). Such stories have the potential to illustrate the fraught, embodied politics of queer sociality. Two stories make my case. In Dolar Vasani’s “All Covered Up” (2013), we encounter the titillating lesbian sexploits of “Dr Carmen”, a Swiss-resident Tanzanian Asian woman who is on a business trip to Zanzibar. Vasani is an Indian writer with Ugandan roots who has pursued careers in both South and Eastern Africa. She is thus not strictly South African. However, with a growing international market for queer erotica and romance stories, lesbian desire is increasingly worldly and well-travelled in its flights of imagination and transgression of borders, and Vasani’s story makes travel, adventure, and the (inter)national worlding of gay identity integral to the narrative. Yet I am not convinced that Vasani’s narrative is aware “that imagining lesbian desire is bound up with articulating the experience of transnationalism under the shadow of imperial histories” (Munro, 2017: 187). Nor (again adapting Brenna Munro’s ideas from her discussion of lesbian short fiction by contemporary African female writers) do I find that Vasani consciously re-works the “figure of the homosexual [that] has long been deployed to stand for colonial penetration of Africa and cultural inauthenticity” (2017: 187) by focusing on her characters’ lesbian encounter. To my mind, the story does not use lesbianism as a “trope to address the globalized nature of contemporary life, with the woman who desires women as a sympathetic point of identification for the reader and a symbol of human vulnerability, resilience, and complexity” (Munro, 2017: 187). Instead, Vasani’s piece carries the hallmarks of formulaic plotting, with “endless flirting and innuendos” (2013: 74) in a lush island locale conveniently stripped of history, in the service of the erotic. When the narrator meets Fatma, the young local woman tasked as her guide, the “word escort stirs [her] imagination” and she “wonder[s] if this is what Zanzibari hospitality means” (2013: 69). Eventually, after some routine business of narrative foreplay and delay, Fatma “pulls me towards her and whispers, nibbling my ear, ‘I don’t want a drink, Carmen, I want you’” (2013: 75).
Pumla Gqola considers the story “incredibly political in what is disrupted, played around with and teased out”, a “sexy, sensual encounter across religion, where barriers are both as large as a world and as thin as a buibui” (2013: 6). I relish Gqola’s phrasing, and yet I struggle to concede her point. I do appreciate Susanne Juhasz’s reminder that since the gamut of needs, purposes, fantasies, and desires which inform plot “are aspects of psyche”, any narrative, formulaic or otherwise, has the capacity to “render alternative paradigms” (1998: 68), forms of queerness among them. I understand that, in this light, Vasani’s story might be considered a provocative, postcolonial, gender non-conforming narrative that performatively camps the tired clichés of hetero romance: hunter/prey, silky cinnamon body, sexy lingerie, breasts like mangoes, and the hyper-ventilated embodiment of hardening arching squealing swelling gushing pulsating. But I cannot ignore the sobering possibility that such platitudes, even in the context of queer romance or erotica, serve as “a trope for the sex-gender system as a whole” (Blau DuPlessis, 1985: 5). They do not automatically disrupt normative vapidity by dragging it playfully against the antic raunch of queer desire. Yes, a writer may make this attempt, but she or he runs the risk of reprising oppressive hierarchies of power that remain entrenched in the wider structures of social reality, and serve to construct orientalizing margins and marginality in the service of centrist, heteronormative, exoticizing fantasies.
A far more effective, intimately affective mode motivates Wamuwi Mbao’s “The Bath” (2013), a post-2000 South African queer short story that has already proven influential, having been anthologized as one of the top 20 contemporary South African examples of the short story form. Grieving her dead girlfriend, Olivia lies in a full bath and waits for the poisonous vapour from a small gas canister to take effect. It doesn’t. Despite the combination of interracial lesbian love and suicide-attempt-in-progress, the story refuses the spectacular. Nothing dramatic occurs. The device of “the bath” creates an immersive narrative interval, slowly releasing the recollections that help to keep the narrating consciousness conscious, and telling the story, as she dips into her dead girlfriend’s diary, drifting between pained reverie and increasingly bathetic present reality. Throughout, time, cause, and effect waver, leaving a reader uncertainly placed between mawkish love and morbid threat. As it happens, we might process the failed suicide as a queer success, a plotting outcome that endorses queer arts of failure. The cause of the girlfriend’s death is vague — some physiological abnormality of “the heart” and/or body, implied by mention of a pacemaker, visible under her skin, and the suggestion of unusually short stature. Nothing is chronologically laid out, or coherently explained. There is no lyrically affective epiphany. Readers are left to discover an emotional logic in the symbolically-freighted pathology of “a heart defect” and the writer’s delicate queerying, against entrenched assumptions of queerness as taint, of queer questions of “the heart”.
And yet the piece is not sentimental. While the dead girl’s parents have (belatedly) reconciled to their deceased daughter’s orientation, and offer emotional support to her desolate young lover, the narrative intimates that the difficult parental love of fundamentally good people has come at a high, misplaced price: the loss of a child. Would the father, in particular, normative black man that he is, eventually have come around, in time, to paternal tolerance of her queerness? How long would the queer child have had to wait for acceptance? And: is it preferable that the narrative has her die from personal health problems, rather than any social trauma attributable to her queerness? In a curious way the narrative demands her ordinary, unspectacular death precisely in order to purge from the story the long, forbidding shadow of homophobic violence against lesbians in South Africa, especially so-called corrective rape. And in this sense the story subdues a more socially-inflected consciousness of the constant threat, especially to queer women of colour, that living their orientation represents. Mbao traces a difficult line; he is neither in denial, nor in thrall. The surviving girl, Olivia, is a vexatious remainder. She is not sacrificed as an anomaly to society’s inevitable logic of heterosexual desire, which requires the “necessary” demise of the transgressively queer. Still, her girlfriend’s dying — of whatever cause — interrupts the disruptive potential of ongoing queer love; her death secures, enables, the semblance of heteronormative life, normatively continued, that the parents have all along preferred. The difficulties that Mbao risks are part of the story’s queer affect, its explorations of the unsettled, relational nature of queerness, self, and otherness in what Brenna Munro designates the “queer family romance” (2012: 173).
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Most strikingly, “The Bath” is moved by an attentiveness to queer empathy, a wish to shift a queer erotics towards moving human affect and away from hackneyed notions of “queer” understood as scandalously other, non-normative sex.
Indirectly: Queer Q and A
The implication is that local writers of queer short stories sometimes favour an unexceptional ordinary, eschewing the burdens of queerness as strategic political category and the attendant demands of explanation and being “representative”. Queer may be changeably foregrounded when placed in relation to shifting markers of group identity, whether of sexual orientation, or national belonging. This seems apt, given the unhomeliness of queerness even in constitutional democracies such as our own. It also raises a provocative queery: is the exceptionalizing of queer as the subject of short fiction ameliorative, helping to create a sense of imagined community, or at least focus a visibility? And/or can it play into the hands of the homophobic, righteously secured in their conviction that queer stories are irrelevant, even deviant accounts, from which the rightly normative majority has nothing to learn, and which, in the interests of morality, are best sequestered from the rest? It’s not clear, either, that all queer writers will necessarily want a “special” category of short fiction, a sub-sub-genre similar to the black holes which pit South African history, an expedient homeland with all the panoply of a supposedly independent state and status, but little in the way of authority. The editors of Queer Africa admit a perplexing lack of response to their call for submissions: were authors wary of ghettoized marginalization? Sceptical of outing or otherwise aligning their identifications with still pariahed orientations? Or, turning this abruptly aslant: in what sense might straight authors write queer stories? Cheryl Stobie’s preferred phrasing — “authors who are personally invested in queer issues” (2009: 320) — and her examples, imply that such authors are necessarily queer-identifying. But straight short story authors may have more than a passing interest in queer, confounding notions of queer as necessarily attached to an individual’s sexual non-conformity.
“How to Carry On” (Murray, 2015), for example, while written in an apparently non-threatening, easily-assimilable realist mode, performs an expression of mind and empathy, of phenomenological “orientation” (Ahmed, 2006), towards queerness. The story complicates the assumed poles of queerness and normativity via the ordinary battles of a mother who attempts to nurture her disruptively queer child in/to a hostile wider culture, part of which is a residential neighbourhood where narrowness prevails, manifesting as violent intolerance of otherness. (I wrote the piece as part of a fictocritical presentation for a 2015 “Slow Violence Colloquium” held at Stias, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.) In an exploratory gesture of “queer ecology” (Morton, 2010: 173) that seeks to imagine forms of difficult relation among life forms, the narrative blurs the power dynamics of several margins in extremis, as they come under pressure of various assertions of authority: aggressively gender fluid child, conservative suburban neighbourhood, frazzled mother, stigmatized municipal dump, unhomed but ebullient rescue dog, vulnerable masquerading stroller. The emotional landscape and perspective of the narrative is volatile, veering intemperately between descriptions of wounded (and wounding) environments, and paroxysms of internalized rage, fear, love, despair. The narrative arc bends and swerves: projecting outwards, clawing inwards, needing to press ahead, to arrive somewhere unknown, but fearing the shape that this arrival might take, when by all accounts death is the socially designated end of all that is determined to be different. By the end of the story, one grittily defiant life has been irrevocably “resolved”, while a similarly different life continues to struggle into being.
Initially titled “How to Carry On When” the story appeared in the 2015 Short Sharp Stories competition anthology under the more predictable title, “How to Carry On?”. The concessionary edit “normalized” the deviance which had disconcerted some adjudicators, pre-publication. Yet the “when”, as a part of speech, was deliberate: deliberately difficult to classify in the unfinished context of the title, it signalled the skewing of timelines, the emotional muddling of arduous “now” and questionable futurity. In the challenges which queer time locates within normative chronologies, “when” poses an unanswerable provocation. In the story, too, queer sociality crosses categories, without overtly invoking the fixity associated with popular notions of “trans”. It “is precisely in the loving […], conflicted […] ways that” the mother “speaks of and acts alongside her” differently queer child “that we get a sense of queerness as belonging to more people than the queer subject proper” (Martínez, 2011: 236). The narrative voice, characterization, and treatment of setting evidence my writer’s “commitment to […] [the] resocializing of queerness” as “intersubjective” (Martínez, 2011: 244, 236). The story insists on the polymorphous, entangled responses, indeed responsibilities, of vulnerability and resilience, questioning and questionable, in the forms of relation that always exist between “queerness” and “normativity”, however much we may have been schooled to deny such reciprocity.
Queer(y)ing time
Ahmed notes that “[q]ueer orientations might be those that don’t line up, which by seeing the world ‘slantwise’ allow other objects to come into view” (2006: 107). This “object” may be time itself, already peculiar in being evanescent yet relentless, abstruse yet corporealized, a rhizomatic enigmatic which normative chronology tends to straighten out. Many South African queer stories illustrate the writers’ interest in queerying normative time, part of which means deranging, or intersectionally rearranging, the country’s historical emphasis on racial inequality as the most urgent category of address.
In David Medalie’s “Wheel of God” (2010), a white lesbian adoptive mother of a black boy returns to the conservative small town of her dead wife’s girlhood, at the request of this woman’s mother. Her dead partner’s mother, herself ill, has belatedly experienced a change of heart and wishes to bequeath to her dead daughter’s adopted son an inheritance. The relationships are complicated, and the story purposefully disorders time in presenting the claims of several mothers, the figures of various children, some now adults. The distant childhood of the dead woman carries the uncertain knowledge of “before” queer, “already” queer, and “always” queer. Additionally, the black birth mother of the adopted child is a spectral presence in the narrative, subtly cutting across the rights, claims, and family lines on which the story focuses. The narrative deliberately works in between life-stage identities, and also, lightly and briefly, casts an unsettling, queer look upon the long shadow of racial politics, which politics, in turn, stare back, questioningly, creating a textual space of gaps through which the lives at the centre of the story are subtly decentred.
There is a labour “of narrative unsettlement attempted” in this short story (Bystrom, 2016: 129), in respect of received family roles, parental authority, and both biological and social reproduction. Medalie’s depiction of conventional and queer families interrupts the valorized, inherited heteronormative time-frames of “appropriately” sequential life stages associated with heterosexual subject development — childhood, growth, marriage, reproduction, the “logic of achievement, fulfilment and success(ion)” in which heterosexuality “is rooted” (Halberstam, 2011: 94).
In the surviving lesbian mother’s trying sense of frustrated displacement in her lover’s childhood home, the story prompts an understanding that all lives, all loves, all sexualities, are made legible through moments of deviation and adherence, but the narrative does not devolve into a failed imitation of middle-class normality. The financial “trust” that the dead woman’s ailing mother proposes to the boy’s surviving mother for securing the child’s future is also a narratively (re)marked lack of trust, in that her fears see her hoping to stymie what she anticipates will inevitably be his deviant mother’s misappropriating of “‘the’/‘her’/‘his’” money. The grandmother attempts to bestow a financial gift for the child, her future-binding version of the “present”, upon her daughter’s sceptical widow, but she fails to grant the complex claim of the gift as an assuaging of her own guilty conscience. However, the story does not permit the ailing old woman to step over the demands of the present into a reassuring future where her suddenly tolerant generosity enables her to die knowing that she has compensated for having in the past rejected her daughter’s queer, racially intransigent family. Medalie disallows the old woman this comfort. The child is also HIV positive, which further confuses the progressive prognoses of hetero-time: he is depicted as living with the infection, not as dying. These simultaneous times remain contiguous; they do not neatly settle into one or the other, or even another.
Queering the canon
Another version of queering time occurs in queer rewritings of canonical stories. An excellent example here is Makhosazana Xaba’s “The Suit Continued: The Other Side”, a re-casting of Can Themba’s 1963 short story, “The Suit”. Xaba motivates the original story’s psychological drama of desire, where a wife’s adultery provokes perverse result: an instance of the spectacular strain in black South African fiction, the husband insists that his wife serve, every day, the suit her lover in his haste left behind. Under such a preposterous, relentless edict, the traumatized wife kills herself. Xaba interrupts the agonistic matrimonial dyad of heteronormativity, gendered in the familiar, and unequal, dynamic of (cuckolded thus righteous) husband, and (cheating thus punishable) wife. She queers, and ideologically queries, Themba’s disturbing narrative logic, deepening the dissatisfying gaps of the story’s perfunctory emotional landscape into more complex reckoning with a secret psychosocial intimacy.
“The Suit” is a South African perennial, a classic story much-anthologized and much-taught, despite its patent domestic violence and suicidal trauma. When she first encountered “The Suit”, presented as a play, Xaba was so troubled that she sought out Themba’s original story, hoping for less chauvinist aggression. But she was “shocked at the misogyny” (Beautement, 2014),
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and pushed the story out of mind. Then Xaba read Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” (2011), in which the humiliated lover contends that the woman had enticed him, a respected schoolteacher, who had no idea she was married. Such expediently threadbare logic galvanized Xaba’s queer intertext of Themba’s and Mahala’s stories.
Xaba not only aims for depth of female characterization, she also breathes uncanny life into the dead wife, Matilda, as a woman with same-sex desires. Matilda “speak[s] for herself as the narrator from the other world as a powerful spirit/ancestor-voice”. Xaba pointedly complicates Matilda’s “otherness”, channelling spirit form and queer orientation to release otherworldliness and otherness into tense encounter: the ancestral, often accorded positive valence in African cosmologies, and the homosexual, frequently considered negative and “unAfrican”. Via Matilda’s authority as a medium, Xaba “introduce[s] the twist of sexual orientation that the writings of the Sophiatown period are silent on” (Beautement, 2014: n.p.), and perhaps even repress. She disrupts canonicity from within, bending South African literary history away from periodized genealogy (“the Drum decade”) and inviting in queer marginality. Xaba also writes a second re-telling of “The Suit” from the point of view of Philemon’s now octogenarian lover, again conjuring disorientating back stories that hint at the existence of othered lives, and an othered literary archive.
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By queerying, in story form, the archive as always-unfinished potential in formation, Xaba as creative writer performs a version of the interventionist agency more usually associated with queer criticism such as Brenna Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come (2012). Part of Xaba’s skill has been to recognize Themba’s highly successful story as a productive failure. She “make[s] the connection between failure and queerness”, intuiting “a narrative that runs along the mainstream” (Halberstam, 2011: 89). As Carla Freccero might explain: if it seems “odd”, or “at odds”, to read Themba’s story metaleptically — after all, Xaba “turns” on his Drum era narrative an anachronistic queer lens that is a “wilful perversion of notions of temporal propriety” (2006: 2) — she does this in order to out elements of a story that the author did not see, possibly could not see, in the especially gender-hierarchical, heteronormative context of early apartheid.
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Queer forms?
Diverse “members of (ambiguously) non-hegemonic social groups” — black people, women, queers (and intersectional combinations of these) — may, in seeking forms of imaginative representation able to explore relations of subordination and authority, be “driven to use structural, rhetorical and epistemological tactics that run counter to normative ones” (DuPlessis, 2006: 27–28). This leads to the consideration: while technical–linguistic innovation is not synonymous with queer-friendly politics — and nor is realism inherently (hetero)normative — does the post-2000 queer South African short story in English also, at times, take unusual forms, aligning an oblique, experimental style with the invitation to queer hospitality? Cheryl Stobie’s use of the slashed “queer/alternative writing” (2009: 320) implies a tentative “yes”, even if the slash is contentious in associating dissimilar categories. Her awkwardly a/bridged phrasing is undeniably useful in signalling potential relation between queer matrices and other unusual forms of aslant writing.
In contemporary South African fiction, Stobie has found that, “in terms of style, there is a higher degree of experimentation amongst the women authors who raise queer issues than among their male peers” and there is also “a high degree of critical self-reflexivity” (2009: 331). Jane Bennett’s collection Porcupine (2008) is a good example, with its versatile foray across lyrically irreal strategies and graphic realist detail, a combination which carries the writer’s intersecting interests in unsettling language and convention, in depicting queer orientation and also, simultaneously, in queering interrelated race, class, and gender orthodoxies, many of them entailing violence and the exercising of unequal power. Here, the insistence is that form is no indulgence, or an add-on afterthought to the more serious matter of explicitly queer content. Instead, it “offers a way to talk about the patterns that provide the stuff and structure of sexuality”, relationally “documenting how they come together and how they fall apart” (Glavey, 2015: 3).
“Porcupine” is a story of sharp linguistic playfulness, but also of racial anger, brittle cultural impatience, racial ventriloquism, and dissatisfied same-sex physical relation. All of these co-exist in the single narrative body, uncertain impulses that might, or might not, merge, or pull apart; a queer quirkiness that repudiates the desire for clear, uncomplicated stories. “Porcupine” is placed roughly in the middle of Bennett’s collection of the same name, Porcupine (straight/slant; doubling but with difference), and in this approximate “halfwayness”, a reader happens on this strange being, “an enormous porcupine with a mohawk of spines [that] scurries across the floor”. Is this real? Is it a queer conceit, a ludic version of the more commonplace “elephant in the room”? Bennett does not pin this creature down, simply acknowledging that “I have all these stories […] I have other stories” (2008: 72), and they scurry into peculiar life, refusing both the designation “abnormal” and the predictable normality of either this, or that.
Another innovative angle of interest is signalled by the anthology Yes I Am! Writing by South African Gay Men (2010), a book conceptualized as “a collage” of small life stories rather than “short stories” (Junkets Publisher, 2010: n.p.). The brief was not literary genre (“the short story”), but self-expressive need, which led to an apt generic indeterminacy. “[S]tories, poems, letters, diary-entries, SMSes and emails”; monologues, visual essays, blog posts, graphic stories: these are popular, informal, intermediated text types which are not inherently inimical to short story forming, though they do fall outside the habituated framing of “the short story” as understood in literature. However, they might have more quotidian traction with queer communities outside the academy than “the short story” per se. The point is that we cannot pre-emptively know the shapes that queer stories might take, as verbal and visual texts, just as we cannot have predicated how “the short story” has burgeoned into a variety of avatars, modes with protean, vibrantly uncertain designation: sudden fiction, flash fiction, nano fiction, the short-short, micro fiction, postcard, quick fiction, blaster, snapper, mini, fast fiction, skinny fiction.
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You name it. “The short story” willingly expresses non-normative fictional identities, some forms of which have yet to be locally recognized, being still unrecognizable.
Queer stories may also exist where queer is not announced as sexual orientation. Such stories are queer in refusing to bracket off “how oppressions and sublimations around sex and sexuality meet up with other kinds of violence and oppression — with exploitation, racial formation, the production of feminine subjectivity or of national culture” (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 347). Indeed, a question worth asking is whether “the very distinction between the sexual and the nonsexual matter[s] to queer thinking?”; and can literary material “be regarded as queer if it’s not explicitly ‘about’ sexuality?” (Halley and Parker, 2011: 2). A more queerying eye on local short fiction in English than is possible in this paper might find queer relations in unexpected places, since “queer offers new ways of responding to alterity” (Stobie, 2009: 234), even making “alterity” newly visible. (See Bystrom’s [2016] comments on the problematic “symbolic association of ‘migrant’ and ‘queer’ bodies” (2016: 121).) Approached obliquely, many more South African short stories, by many more than queer identified or queer allied writers, might be considered part of an emergent queer archive — this without denying the significance of short fiction that is queer by virtue of expressly engaging variant sexual identities and orientations, and being written by queer writers. Perhaps it is queer reading as a strategy that could find the shifting intersections between previously “separate and distinct” foci in South African criticism? As Donna McCormack argues, for “postcolonialists, the focus tends to be nation and diasporas, with assumed heterosexual and dyadic gender norms. For queer theorists, gender and sexuality tend to dominate and structural racial inequalities are often simplified or ignored” (2014: 7). Instead, she calls on scholars to address interdisciplinary and intersectional analyses, relations and histories, modes variously “complementary and antagonistic” (2014: 7), so as to do queer differently.
Denouement: Still (under)performing queerly?
It could be thought rather late for me to begin thinking queerly about South African short fiction. Has the moment not passed? Already back in 2012, after all, Duke University Press was said to have signalled the death of queer theory by discontinuing its influential “Series Q” imprint. This implies the sense of an ending. However, if “queer” thinking is associated with lateness, with endings, it remains a vital force in South African literary culture, constantly (re)configuring in formations which, as in work by Brenna Munro, carry within them traces of other, previous incarnations, forms of queer afterlife coming into being that disturb chronological time and geographical separateness. In a South African context, it might be that “queer” as critical lens, as representational field, and/or orientation must claim a resilient “unfinishedness” that works constantly to bring to mind the necessity of adapting, and changing as differently queer stories come into being, taking forms that are recognizably aligned to “the short story”, but also decidedly other, whether as experiment or as experience. To adapt Neville Hoad’s remark: there is no comfortable “post-queer”, only “a doing and redoing of queer theory” which entails “the invigorating intransigence of continuing to work on a set of questions” (2011: 138). In drawing on “queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability” (Freccero, 2011: 17), for example, is it feasible to think of “the short story” as a modal cluster of queer narrative performativity which can represent “queer” as expected, but also more queerly? I am not sure. However, this admission of uncertainty seems an imperative, not a weakness. When it comes to discussions of “queernees” and “the short story” in the context of current South Africa, “[I] like to imagine that my work is ‘part of a much smaller project,’ one that asks little questions, settles for less than grandiose answers, speculates without evidence, and finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives” (Halberstam, qtd. in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 182). Finding my affiliation with a range of contemporary queer scholars, I recognize that since “the straight world is already in place, and that queer moments, where things come out of line, are fleeting”, an appropriate critical response to questions of queer/ing short storying “need not be to search for permanence […] but to listen for the sound of ‘the what’ that fleets” (Ahmed, 2006: 106). The what: this is suitably open-ended. That fleets: this encompasses not only the familiar stories of violated queer bodies in flight, but the deft possibilities suggested by fleet of foot, the capacity for inspirational imaginative leaps. And all of these might be orientations that, in time, prompt scholars to make good on the strengths of the important minor literature that is contemporary South African queer short stories.
