Elsa Joubert’s Cul-de-sac : A disability politics reflection

Abstract

Elsa Joubert’s 1978 novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, translated into English and a number of other languages and adapted into a play and a film, is recognized as one of the 100 best African books of the twentieth century, a landmark in South African writing. The work and its reception have drawn heated criticism around the politics of race, gender, privilege, and voice. Critics have expressed discomfort at the popularity of the book with white readers during apartheid, when other books dealing so clearly with racial oppression and dispossession were vilified and even banned.

In 2017, at the age of 95, Joubert published the third volume of her memoirs under the title Spertyd (later translated into English as Cul-de-sac). I suggest that this memoir fits into the categories both of the “Somebody memoir” and the “Some body memoir”, in the typology developed by G. T. Couser. Cul-de-sac is both the memoir of a famous person (a “somebody”) and an account of a life lived in a non-normative body, that of a very old and increasingly frail person. Cul-de-sac deals unflinchingly with highly personal issues to do with experiences related to incarceration and enfeeblement. I suggest that these issues, though personal, are also profoundly political, an issue which has been overlooked in the critical reception of the memoir. Furthermore, Joubert implicitly used the publication of the memoir as the basis for a platform on which to engage politically with South Africa’s leadership regarding the rights of very old people, like herself, during the Covid-19 lockdown.

It is inevitable that in South Africa, issues of race and to some extent gender are predominant in discussions of the politics of writing, but to ignore the age and disability politics of Cul-de-sac is to lose an important aspect of the work’s significance.

On 14 June 2020, Elsa Joubert, a doyenne of South African and, indeed, of African and world literature, died of Covid-19 at the age of 97. Best known for her pathbreaking novel, Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (Joubert, 1978), Joubert wrote prolifically, including other novels, essays and reviews, and three book-length memoirs. The last of these, entitled Spertyd (Joubert, 2017) in Afrikaans and published when Joubert was 95, and translated into English as Cul-de-sac (Joubert, 2019), was an award-winning volume which garnered considerable critical acclaim. In this essay, I discuss Cul-de-sac from a disability politics perspective, a perspective which, as far as I am aware, has not been considered as an approach to reading the text. I do not claim that this approach to Cul-de-sac is the only, or even the dominant, way the book should be read. I do suggest, however, that a text as complex and layered as this one provides an opportunity for new readings and understandings, as a contribution to the literature on the politics of disability, care, and ageing. The book also, I shall suggest, allows a broader understanding of what constitutes a political reading of a South African text than do the usual (and important) readings of South African works as political predominantly through the lens of race, and raced and gendered subjectivities. There is a politics in Cul-de-sac, I submit, which is an embodied politics of the non-normative body, a politics which is often submerged or overlooked.

In suggesting a non-dominant reading of Cul-de-sac, I focus in this essay, to some degree, on the text itself, but I am also (and, to an extent, primarily) interested in how texts are read and received in their social context. I acknowledge the vicissitudes of interpretation as well as the popularity of reception theory, based on the work of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (Thompson, 1993; Thornley, 2011; Dunn, 2014; Martin, 2016), but I wish in this article to focus on a key aspect of the theory. Texts do not exist in isolation, to be interrogated objectively, but become animated, in part, by the ways in which they are read in different contexts. The feminist disability studies literary scholar, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2009), introduces readers to a politics of, in her words, “how we look”, as she puts it in the book title. She is interested both in how we appear to one another and, crucially, in how we look at one another, and how we read other people, or works of art. The politics of looking and of the reception of texts and works of art are especially interesting when we consider the iconic but controversial status of a writer like Joubert. Before considering Cul-de-sac itself, therefore, I sketch some of the history of the political reception of Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena.

The politics of the reception of Poppie Nongena

Published in 1978 and soon translated into English (1980) and a number of other languages, Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena is arguably one of the most successful books written in Afrikaans. Its success has endured, with a feature film based on the book, entitled Poppie Nongena, released in South Africa in early 2020 (Olwagen, 2020). The book received widespread acclaim, won a number of prizes, and has been regarded as one of the 100 best African books of the twentieth century on a number of lists. ¹

Many positive reviews of the book, and of the stage and film adaptations, have appeared. The two most highly cited articles dealing with the book, though, trouble this positive reception (Schalkwyk, 1986; McClintock, 1990). The articles have overlapping concerns, with the later article, by Anne McClintock, favourably citing the former, by David Schalkwyk. The authors of both articles try to understand the widespread critical acclaim for the book amongst white, and white Afrikaner, readerships at a time of great political foment in apartheid South Africa. Both are concerned with the way in which some critics, and Joubert herself, describe the book as “apolitical”, making a distinction between works of “art” and works of politics. Both refer to the critical tradition of F. R. Leavis, infused with the idea that a moral and aesthetic evaluation of a literary work should be separated from the realm of politics. In this tradition, they argue, the idea of “politics” is seen (implicitly or otherwise) as inferior to a more universal moral and aesthetic appreciation of literature. The authors both argue for the book to be understood contextually and politically.

McClintock in particular also considers the complex politics of authorship and voice in the book. According to Joubert, the day after Christmas of 1976, a woman she names as “Poppie Nongena” (later revealed to be Ntombizodumo Eunice Msutwana-Ntsata) arrived at Joubert’s home in considerable distress. Joubert had been looking for a story for a new book, and, as McClintock (1990) tells it, the two women came to an agreement: “Poppie” (or Msutwana-Ntsata) would tell Joubert her story, Joubert would write it down, and they would share the proceeds of the book equally. As McClintock notes, this arrangement raises difficult questions about authorship (why is Joubert listed as the only author?), genre (why is the book marketed as a novel, when it makes claims to be a nonfiction account?), and the politics of voice (what does it mean for a privileged white woman to be taking on and appropriating the voice of a black woman living in deprived circumstances?).

These issues have not been resolved in ensuing discussions of the book, and, indeed, with the 2020 release of the award-winning film, family members of Msutwana-Ntsata (who has since passed away) were cited as saying, after they learned of the film, “The overall feeling is that our mother was exploited. Now for her story is [sic] to be made into a film and her next of kin kept on the sidelines is a continuation of that exploitation” (Bega, 2020: n.p.). It has also recently been alleged that though Joubert had agreed to sharing equally the royalties from Poppie Nongena, Msutwana-Ntsata died a pauper (Selisho, 2020: n.p.). It is beyond the concerns of this article to investigate the claims and counter-claims currently being made in relation to whether Msutwana-Ntsata and, more recently, her family have been exploited by Joubert and her publishers, but one comment in a recent newspaper report does have some resonance with the concerns raised by McClintock (1990) in particular. Nosipho Roto, Msutwana-Ntsata’s daughter, is quoted as saying:

The people who wrote the book did attend her (Msutwana-Ntsata’s) funeral. In an interview, they said that they lost contact with Eunice’s family. Yes, I agree, but she stayed in Khayelitsha and you could go to the municipal office or to the newspapers to find us.

The film’s producers did not look for us. If they wanted to find us, they could have done more. They could have gone to Home Affairs — we all have IDs and they knew she was staying in Khayelitsha. (Bega, 2020: n.p.)

This allegation emphasizes the spatial issues of exclusion which were a key feature of apartheid South Africa and endure to this day. Msutwana-Ntsata, whose story is one of wandering and displacement, found her way in 1976 to the home of Joubert. The thought of Joubert or her publishers or the film producers going to find the relatives of Msutwana-Ntsata in what remains, many years after apartheid, the “black” area of Khayelitsha, seems somewhat far-fetched. ²

In the same article in which Roto is quoted above, the film’s producer, Helena Spring, apologizes for not having made contact with the family earlier, but is quoted as saying that “Joubert is 97 and in poor health” (Bega, 2020: n.p.). How this factors into the politics of the reception of Poppie Nongena is not completely clear to me, though I imagine that Spring, or the writer of the newspaper report, may believe that advanced age and ill health may lessen the burden of responsibility Joubert may have had towards Msutwana-Ntsata and her family.

This mention of Joubert’s age and poor health raises key issues about the politics of Cul-de-sac.

Cul-de-sac: A some body memoir?

In 2017, at the age of 95, Joubert published the third volume of her autobiography, entitled, in Afrikaans, Spertyd (Joubert, 2017). The word “spertyd” translates literally in English as “deadline”, and in a review which concludes, “Read Spertyd: it is an exceptionally honest and poignant record of a life lived to the limit”, ³ Louise Viljoen has this to say about the choice of the title:

Deadline (spertyd) is a word that has an ominous sound to anyone under pressure: it is the absolute limit, the deadline for completing a task, completing an assignment, submitting a manuscript. The 95-year-old author Elsa Joubert imbues the word she chose as the title of her newly published memoir with added nuance. If you look back at the etymology of the word sper (“block”), you read that it can mean both “shut down” and “open wide or stretch open” (as in the expression “oopgesperde oë” (“wide open eyes”). ⁴ (Viljoen, 2017: n.p.)

The English version of the memoir, translated by Michiel Heyns, was published in 2019, with the title Cul-de-sac (Joubert, 2019). This is the same title as that of the opening chapter of the book, with the Afrikaans for this chapter heading being Doodloopstrate (literally, “Dead End Streets”). Clearly, Joubert did not shrink from talking about, and naming directly, the issue of death, and the multiple trials of old age, and the book has been widely praised for its forthrightness and frank discussion of difficult issues (Hambidge, 2017; van der Merwe, 2017; Viljoen, 2017).

But what kind of a memoir is Cul-de-sac? It is the third memoir by Joubert, the first being ‘n Wonderlike Geweld (2005) and the second Reisiger (2009). It is both unremarkable and welcome that through these three books, readers have some insight into the life of one of Africa’s most prominent authors. Cul-de-sac is also, crucially, a memoir written by a person who by virtue of race and class is extremely privileged compared with most other Africans, and who clearly had considerable and deeply appreciated family support throughout her life and into her later years. In addressing the question of the politics of Cul-de-sac, perhaps the most obvious and reasonable direction to explore first would be the race and class privilege of the author. My interests here are somewhat different. Just as Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena crossed boundaries and in some ways, and controversially, defied conventions, Cul-de-sac is a boundary-breaking memoir as well. The boundaries that are broken, I shall suggest, have to do with the politics of ageing and disability, a complex and well-researched field (Biggs et al., 2003; Moreira, 2016; Keller et al., 2019; Carney and Nash, 2020).

In this regard, it is helpful to consider the work of the memoir theorist, Thomas Couser (2004, 2009, 2011). He opens his book on disability in life writing (Couser, 2009) by recalling the Washington Monthly article by Lorraine Adams, entitled “Almost Famous: The Rise of the ‘Nobody’ Memoir” (Adams, 2002). Adams notes the rise of memoirs of people who are not “somebodies” — people who are not famous, and whose lives are not well known. In developing a disability perspective on memoir, Couser suggests, by contrast, that though there is indeed a new genre distinct from what he terms the “somebody memoir”, a substantial proportion of this new genre is formed by what he terms “some body” memoirs. For Couser, what Adams and others have termed the “memoir boom” has been fuelled by greater attention to writing about disability and illness. The process of telling stories from the inside of bodies which are not the norm is both an act of personal self-discovery and a political act — a way of reinscribing into contemporary discourse the lives and experiences of people overlooked and hidden away by society as a whole. Indeed, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2005) suggests that personal insider narratives by women with disabilities do important work as part of both gender and disability activism. The stories themselves may be personal and on a small canvas, but the intervention they make is in disrupting silences and speaking back to power, and especially the power of effacement (Swartz, 2014; Swartz et al., 2018).

In Couser’s terms (2004, 2011), Cul-de-sac is very much a “somebody memoir” — a memoir of a famous person in whose life, it might be expected, the public has an interest. But the book is also, and profoundly so, a “some body” memoir, an account from the inside of inhabiting a body which differs very much from the normative body of healthy society. It is of course true that Joubert is by no means the first writer to write about personal issues of bodily difference, illness, and change. For example, the essayist Anatole Broyard, long the subject of speculation and scandal because of his complex positioning regarding his own racial identity, wrote movingly about illness and impending death in Intoxicated by my Illness, published posthumously (Broyard, 1992). Similarly, in her Memoir of a Debulked Woman, Susan Gubar describes in minute and excruciating detail the rigours of undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer (Gubar, 2012), and the links she makes and implies between this memoir and her groundbreaking early work that is foundational to feminist literary criticism (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979) are instructive and helpful. Oliver Sacks, in more than one work, blurs the lines between his role as a neurologist chronicling the afflictions of his patients, and his identity as a vulnerable person like any other, affected by the frailties of the body (Sacks, 1998, 2009).

One feature which distinguishes Joubert from most other writers, including those I mention above, is her advanced age — there are few books published by people who are 95 years old, as Joubert was at the time of publication of the Afrikaans version of Cul-de-sac. One reason for this, of course, is that relatively few people live to this age, but this may not be the whole story. Joubert falls into what is sometimes called “old old age” or “fourth age” (Zamorano Llena, 2019), a period associated with increasing social exclusion, poverty, and vulnerability to hate crimes. In the words of Makita and colleagues, furthermore, “old age is deemed a problem and ageing is considered something that needs to be resisted, slowed or disguised” (Makita et al., 2019: 1). Drawing on Shildrick’s formulation of the “monstrous” (Shildrick, 2002), Bülow and Holm (2016) suggest that old age is frequently seen as disgusting, something to be avoided, and not to be written or thought about. There are many texts dealing sympathetically with issues that very old people face, with many journals devoted to the therapeutics and social care associated with ageing, but when Joubert writes directly and frankly from the position of an old person, she is engaging with the politics of voice. She is speaking for herself and for aspects of her generational experience as an insider.

The personal politics of Cul-de-sac

In 2009, the philosopher Eva Feder Kittay published the by now highly cited “The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield” (2009). Clearly, the title of the article draws on the oft-quoted slogan of 1960s feminism, “the personal is political” (Hansich, 1970), but Kittay goes much further than to discuss feminist politics. Kittay is the mother of a daughter, Sesha, who has severe cognitive impairments. For example, Sesha, now an adult, does not speak, is not continent, and cannot survive without high levels of care and assistance. As a philosopher, Kittay is in conversation with philosopher peers who ascribe to her daughter a moral status akin to that of a pig or a dog. It is beyond the scope of this article to engage with the full discussion Kittay makes, but for the purposes of this argument, a key statement made by Kittay is apt:

Now what sorts of things are important to the parent qua parent? Foremost is the need that the wider society recognize the worth and worthiness of the child. It is incoherent to grant the special relationship I have with my daughter and then to turn round and say, “But that daughter has no moral hold on anyone but her parent.” Her parent cannot fulfil her role as parent, unless others also have an acknowledged moral responsibility to the child — a moral responsibility on par with the one it has to anyone’s child. (Kittay, 2009: 623)

A similar argument can be made for the position of people who are very old, as Joubert was. As a group, the old old are commonly viewed as less worthy than others, and burdensome to society. Joubert’s text is a personal memoir, written by a privileged and well-loved person. I argue, however, that the text may also demand from the reader a reckoning with the politics of ageism, with the exclusion and the concealment of old people (Alders and Schut, 2019). In this regard, it is not by chance that at times in the memoir Joubert writes in the first-person plural, for example: “We who are very old […] become a stumbling block in our group mentality. We make things difficult for the next generation, we become the dinosaurs of our time” (2019: 101). Here, and elsewhere in the memoir, Joubert demands that the reader not only reckon with the issue of age as described by a person who is herself very old, but also with the old old as a group — a collective to be engaged with as part of the polity. The anger of the book, and its activism, is clear in passages such as this. What should we as readers understand by the words, “we make things difficult for the next generation”? We, as readers, represent that “next generation” who may indeed experience the old old as burdensome and as making things difficult. Joubert writes here as a spokesperson for a generation, giving the reader what amounts to an impossible choice. Either we agree with Joubert that old people are “a stumbling block” or “dinosaurs”, in which case we have to confront our own complicity in an act of social exclusion, or we reject her characterization and become complicit in an act of disavowal of the experience of a generation, on whose behalf she speaks. If Cul-de-sac is nothing else, it is a tale of a shrinking world, and, indeed, of incarceration. Luxurious though the care facility is where Joubert lives, it is also, in Goffman’s terms, a total institution (Goffman, 1968: xiii), a world unto itself. And who or what incarcerates the old old? One factor is the reality of physical infirmity, something which Joubert does not shy away from describing in some detail, but the other factor is the set of social arrangements which segregate Joubert and others like her into places where they do not have to be seen by others. In a sense, we, as younger people, are forced by Joubert to consider our own role as jailers.

The first printing of the English edition of Cul-de-sac has on the back cover a photograph of Joubert, alongside the words, “Full of humour, irony and compassion”, attributed to Jean Meiring, who won the kykNET Rapport prize (a major South African literary prize) for book review of the year (nonfiction) in 2018, for his review of Spertyd. Joubert herself won the prize for nonfiction book of the year, for Spertyd. The blurb on the back of Cul-de-sac concludes with the following sentence: “Interspersing acute insights with dark humour, Cul-de-sac is wise, courageous and deeply moving”. These comments in themselves are unexceptionable, and, indeed, accurate. Meiring’s review of Spertyd, it seems to me, similarly focuses on the humour in the book. Meiring writes the following: ⁵

Yet, although she becomes all the more rickety and two prosthetic hips richer, there is nothing wrong with her senses. She tackles the daily challenges with a steamer trunk full of humour, irony and deep compassion, also for herself. And she notes her and her fellow residents’ ups and downs in the smallest of details in touching paragraphs throughout.

And so, through the writing process it is as if Joubert, with her tongue thoroughly in cheek, turns the genre of boarding school stories upside down […]: or something to that effect. Like that world, life in Berghof has a rhythm, routine and even slang of its own too. (Meiring, 2017: n.p.) ⁶

My reading of this rather jauntily written analysis is that, though accurate about the book, its tone is upbeat and directing the reader to an implicit narrative of triumph over adversity, of the amusing comings and goings of institutionalized old people. The references in Joubert’s memoir to Enid Blyton-style boarding school texts are not just references, in my view, to the similarities across different types of institution, but also to the ways in which this institutionalization is infantilizing (Marson and Powell, 2014; Pickard, 2016; Jongsma and Schweda, 2018). Why should adult lives be so similar to those of the fifth form children at Malory Towers, for example? Joubert does not mention the Enid Blyton books, but the similarity in the reading is there. One key difference between a boarding school and an aged care institution is that children at a school expect to leave the school and to continue with life outside, which is not the case with residents of an aged home. Rather than telling funny stories, Joubert is raising a key question here about the politics of care. For example, Joubert writes as follows about the affective economy of Berghof:

But all the stories one has to listen to: their grandchildren’s stories or their grown-up children’s virtues […] Heavens, for every anecdote I tell about a grandchild, I have to listen to six or seven others. I’m not interested in the eisteddfod achievements of this or that five-year-old poppet. But I want to tell about mine, I must be prepared to listen as well. That is the law of give and take, and I have to tell it, it was so cute. But, say the women, especially the Dutch women: Don’t interfere, don’t offer advice about children or grandchildren, just bring gifts, shut up and put up. I must say, it sounds a bit too austere. (2017: 34–35)

This excerpt is an astonishingly compact account of issues to do with the question of voice in the case of very old people. The anger at the necessity of having to endure endless boring stories as a prerequisite of being allowed to tell one’s own story is clear. The “law of give and take” reads like an edict from on high, a powerful rule constraining certain kinds of speech while enabling others, and forcing a certain kind of listening. It is not a coincidence that in the very same paragraph discussing the laws governing talk within the institution, the topic moves to how old people must talk with their children, in an inversion of the rules of authoritarian parenting. It is now the parents, dependent for a link to the outside world on their children, who must “shut up and put up”. Joubert is succinctly capturing the conditional nature of what (if anything) may or may not be said by an effectively incarcerated group. They have committed no crime, but they have old and frail bodies. Elsewhere, she writes:

Here in Berghof I am conscious of a constant anxiety. As if I am looking for reassurance that I am where I’m not supposed to be, as if I should not be here at all. How did it come about that I could decide so easily to come here? Was I cornered, did I have to decide, was I forced to decide? (2017: 46)

Again, with her characteristic brevity, Joubert discusses here the politics of her captivity. Who incarcerated her? What role did she herself have in reproducing the social relationships which led to the situation where the best and most humane option for a person of her age and frailty may well be institutionalization? What are the social forces which result in a social arrangement where Joubert (and, by implication, others) doubts that she is where she is supposed to be? The deinstitutionalization movement, which led to the deinstitutionalization of many people with disabilities and mental disorders (Turner, 2004; Long, 2017; Appleman, 2018), was a profoundly political movement, focusing not only on the rights to freedom of many of those institutionalized, but also on their agency and abilities. The consequences of deinstitutionalization have proven to be complex and not always positive (Taylor, 2015; Turner, 2004), but the central political arguments about the rights of personhood of those formerly institutionalized are as strong today as ever. Joubert’s formulation, moreover, raises the important issue of internalized oppression, which is a key feature of contemporary discussions of marginalized groups (David, 2013; Watermeyer and Görgens, 2014; Liebow, 2016). Her question, “How did it come about that I could decide so easily to come here?”, is a succinct formulation of the political question of internalized oppression. ⁷

My reading of Cul-de-sac is partial, incomplete, and profoundly shaped by my work in disability studies and disability rights, and I make no claim that this is the only reading. Indeed, there is much in the book which is about grace, adaptation, and camaraderie, especially in later sections of the text. This is not a book only or even, perhaps, centrally about the politics of ageism. Nevertheless, when I read the prize-winning review by Meiring (2017), with its emphasis on humour, I read in part a seemingly well-intentioned reproduction of the very politics of which Joubert is so acerbically critical.

Other critics have been much clearer on the anger and the challenge in the book (see, for example, Hambidge, 2017; van der Merwe, 2017; Viljoen, 2017). Indeed, the front cover blurb for Cul-de-sac, by J. M. Coetzee, states, “seldom have the humiliations of old age been so nakedly laid open”, which suggests an engagement with what I read as a central emotion of the book — that of rage. And it is important to note that the “humiliations” of which Joubert writes are not occasioned only by physical decline and debility but also by the social arrangements which render those physical changes shameful and hidden, only rarely “laid open”, as Coetzee puts it, in this case through Joubert’s authorial courage. A key principle underlying disability politics since the 1970s is that disability is not simply, or perhaps even primarily, an issue of bodily difference — disability resides in the social, political, and physical environments which exclude certain bodies and minds from full social participation (Shakespeare, 2013), and, indeed, as Kittay would have it, from the rights and obligations of personhood itself (2009).

After Cul-de-sac, a political intervention

During the lockdown period in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, on 14 May 2020, the Cape Town-based daily Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, published an article by Marelize Barnard entitled “Legendary writer (97) pleads on behalf of the elderly”. ⁸ The article focuses on an open letter written by Joubert. The second paragraph of this article reads as follows:

This author of Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, and, more recently, at the age of 95, her autobiographical work, Spertyd, lives in an aged home in Cape Town, where she, like thousands of people throughout the country, may receive no visitors at all. (Barnard, 2020: n.p.) ⁹

The article itself is a remarkable cultural artefact. Not only was Joubert’s open letter pleading for visitors by family members to old people in institutions excerpted, but in addition to a photograph of Joubert herself, there is a second illustration. This is an image of the letter itself, written in spidery hand, and, it appears, with some physical difficulty. The first sentence of the letter reads, in translation, “My doctor asked me to write something for him about the Coronavirus and old people.” At the bottom of the letter is text from a business stamp, with the words “Doctors Rooms on Kloof” and contact details and practice number below. The emotive effect of reading this spidery text is considerable. According to the report:

Joubert addressed the letter to her family practice physician, Dr Hans Woermann, as part of a plea to the government, and specifically to President Cyril Ramaphosa, to make it possible for there to be visits to aged homes and retirement villages. (Barnard, 2020: n.p.) ¹⁰

Clearly, with the imprimatur of medical authority, at a time of crisis in South Africa, and at the age of 97, Joubert was making a political statement, part of a campaign addressed to the president of the country. Part of what gave this statement political heft was not only Joubert’s own status as a 97-year-old living in an institution, but also that she published Cul-de-sac. The fact that shortly after this Joubert died under difficult circumstances related to Covid-19 makes the intervention all the more urgent and poignant.

There may be many ways of reading the politics of this intervention. Some may have concerns about the epidemiological implications of acceding to Joubert’s plea, and that of her physician. In terms of handling a deadly pandemic, the more people are isolated from one another, the better. The comments by Joubert are also, certainly in the South African context, highly racialized, as there is an overrepresentation of white South Africans in aged homes. Joubert’s concerns, then, though applicable across the board, may well be read by some as a plea by an old white South African for special treatment for old white South Africans, when the reality is that old South Africans of colour, who generally do not have access to the same material resources as those whites, experience far greater levels of deprivation and hardship. This deprivation includes lack of access to expensive health care resources which most South Africans cannot afford. There is also a complex politics of culture around this issue. For example, in 2014, the then premier of the Mpumalanga province of South Africa, David Mabuza (and current Deputy President of South Africa), was quoted as saying:

Black and white are different in terms of their culture and traditions […]. While whites prefer to take their old to these homes for the aged, black people prefer to live with their children and grandchildren and be taken care of up until they die. (Mabuza, 2014: n.p.)

Mabuza, in his capacity of Deputy President, served on the National Coronavirus Command Council at the time Joubert made her intervention. In engaging in the way she does, implicitly using Cul-de-sac and her continuing status as what Couser (2009) would term a “somebody”, Joubert was drawing on her fame, as well as her status as both white and very old.

Joubert’s letter received considerable attention in the Afrikaans-language media, and continued to be cited during the lockdown and after her passing.

Conclusion: Cul-de-sac and the politics of concealment

I have noted the considerable debate following the publication of Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, which as I have shown continues many years later and has flared up again in 2020 with the distribution of the film based on the book. In South African terms and in global terms, the centrality of race in political debate (with a recognition of gender as an intersectional issue) is understandable. The debate around the politics of Poppie Nongena, and around its reception, was framed in racial and gender terms (Schalkwyk, 1986; McClintock, 1990). Important questions were raised about power, voice, and appropriation, questions which remain. It is certainly true (and correct) that a full reading of Cul-de-sac should take account of the issue of privilege, and specifically racialized privilege, in the institutional and care arrangements about which Joubert wrote. As I have noted elsewhere, in South Africa and throughout the world, care arrangements for privileged old people are profoundly raced and gendered (Swartz, 2012, 2021).

My reading of Cul-de-sac, though, is that its politics goes far beyond its obvious concern with privileged white South African life to focus on distinct yet interlinked questions about power, voice, and appropriation in relation to ageing and debility. In particular, Joubert’s concern is with the social reproduction of the invisibilization of disability, debility, and frailty (Swartz et al., 2018). In our discussion of this process of invisibilization, my co-authors and I suggest that hiding disability may be understood as a form of symbolic violence (Swartz et al., 2018). I worry about using the term “violence” too loosely and casually, especially in a social context in which overt, intentional, and horrific violence is prevalent (Lappeman and Swartz, 2021). So it may be going too far to suggest that the denial of discrimination on the basis of age is a form of violence. Nevertheless, it seems to me that not to recognize the critique of age discrimination in Cul-de-sac is to lose the opportunity for a different kind of reading of what I regard as a profoundly political work. The complexity of Joubert’s contribution through this remarkable last text is not fully captured by the reading I have given. A reading dealing with the politics of ageing does, however, go some way to elucidate the text’s varied contributions.