Thirteen Cents: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series) Read online

  K. SELLO DUIKER

  Thirteen Cents

  Introduction by Shaun Viljoen

  Ohio University Press

  Athens

  Table of Contents

  K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents: An Introduction

  Glossary

  Works Cited

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  K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents: AN INTRODUCTION

  Shaun Viljoen

  ONE BREEZY NIGHT LATE IN NOVEMBER

  One breezy night late in November

  and after the April elections

  Two friends stood outside

  admiring the moon

  ‘charming sky,’ said the one

  to the other

  ‘What’s even more charming is that

  whitey has finally allowed himself

  to be surrounded by darkey and they

  seem to be getting on,’ remarked

  the other, staring into the night

  At that moment a shooting star

  blurred across the sky and both friends

  saw it.

  Wistful silence fell between them

  the one not sure whether the other

  had seen the meteorite. Then the

  other opened: ‘Perhaps it’s not

  about whitey and darkey anymore.’

  The other assented.[1]

  K. Sello Duiker’s poem “One Breezy Night Late in November” imagines what the April 1994 democratic elections, the first in South Africa’s history, meant for social relations that had been racialized since the landing of Dutch settlers in 1652 and hyperracialized since Afrikaner white minority rule took hold in 1948. In a reflective exchange between two friends in the poem, the initial thought of one about the historic turning point six months earlier asserts that the country will see racial reconciliation; the other responds unsurely, saying, “Perhaps it’s not / about whitey and darkey anymore.” In this tentative claim Duiker raises precisely what his astounding contribution to postapartheid literature has been—a provocative unsettling of the black and white, the categorical terms of engagement that marked human relations and writing under apartheid. Instead, as Meg Samuelson says of Duiker’s first two novels, his work “interrogate[s] borders—whether social, national or ontological.”[2]

  The epiphanic moment in the poem occurs after “a shooting star / blurred across the sky” and a strange silence falls between the friends. As in the poem, all three of Duiker’s novels—Thirteen Cents[3] (2000), The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and The Hidden Star (published posthumously in 2006)—are marked by the presence of the supernatural, the surreal, the mythical, which layer and disrupt the real and comment on it. Narrative modes in the novels shift continuously between realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist, shunting the protagonist and the reader between different realms of consciousness and perception.

  As in the poem, protagonists in the novels exist primarily as exceptional individuals, as an “I” rather than, as was the case with much (black) writing under apartheid in which the individual was metonymic of the greater (racial) community, as an “I” who is at the same time the “we.” If anything, the voices in the poem represent themselves and are at a distance from both “whitey” and “darkey,” identifying overtly with neither. There is an intimacy between the two friends, yet at the same time we feel a distance between the two, “the one not sure whether the other / had seen.” All three novels present us with protagonists who are extraordinary individuals, with Azure in Thirteen Cents being the most clearly solitary and relentlessly individual character, who does not belong to any one place or to any social group, and who defies attempts to categorize him.

  Thirteen Cents is a searing, disturbing coming-of-age account of Azure, a twelve-year-old orphan who has traveled from his home near Johannesburg to eke out an existence on the streets of post-1994 Cape Town. Azure lives in an underworld of shack dwellers, drug dealers, and gangsters and is exploited, often in most violent and demeaning ways, by all kinds of adults for their own ends. He survives through prostitution, selling sex to older men. In The Quiet Violence of Dreams Tshepo is a university student who at the start of the novel has been institutionalized for cannabis-induced psychosis and who, like the younger Azure, is an orphan and tries to find a sense of belonging in a hostile, dystopic postapartheid Cape Town. However, violence, exploitation, and bigoted attitudes that prevailed under apartheid continue to resurface in his quest to find a way of being in the world. Tshepo joins a brothel for male-to-male sex to earn money but also to explore his own homosexual impulses and need to create a fraternity or family. In the end, Tshepo leaves Cape Town for Johannesburg to try to find a better life. The Hidden Star, written for younger readers, is set in a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg and employs a child protagonist: the young girl Nolitye, who is invested with special powers by a magical stone, embarks on a quest to battle forces of greed and evil and restore her true family, displaced by these evil impostors. In the final novel the narrative shifts between the modes of African folktale and gritty realism, linking assertions of the ancestral to a strong sense of injustice in the contemporary social order. Duiker reiterates this link when he writes about the meaning of his own name. He dropped his first name, Kabelo, and adopted his second name, Sello, as the first name by which he wished to be known. Sello, his grandfather’s name, is, he says, “a poetic name and it means lament! Someone who always cries out about things he sees—like injustice. It is a name that is very tied to ancestral voices.”[4]

  Thirteen Cents was published a mere six years after the first democratic elections, when Duiker was twenty-six years old, to critical acclaim and wide readership inside South Africa and abroad.[5] Of all the South African novels I have taught at undergraduate level, Thirteen Cents has proved to be the one that engages large numbers of young students. Is this because the novel speaks in such direct, frank, and contemporary terms about sex, sexuality, and addiction? Is it because of the manner in which we as readers are compelled to see the world from the point of view of the marginalized, abused, and exploited street boy narrator Azure, who represents what we see but dismiss every day of our waking life—those who are down and out and living on the far edges of monied, motorized, propertied society? Is it because, despite the horror and seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against him, Azure does not succumb to any of the dehumanizing forces that grind him down and the novel ends on a muted note of hope and the possibility of an alternative way of being in this world? This ability to engage a younger generation of readers seems to hold for places outside South Africa as well. According to Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis, who toured Indonesia in 2003 with Duiker as part of the Winternachten literary festival based in The Hague, Duiker’s “frank and sincere stories about sex and the dark side of city life strongly spoke to the young Indonesians.”[6]

  Azure’s position as a twelve-year-old who turns thirteen in the novel situates him on the threshold of the world of adults and subjects him to the rites of passage that induct him into particular forms of adulthood—in this case a particularly exploitative, destructive social order. He is a critical outsider to this world and continually resists incorporation—“Grown-ups are fucked up,” he asserts
(42). It is this significant turning from boyhood to manhood, this becoming thirteen to which the title alludes, that positions him as a critical commentator moving into and out of the dominant matrix of hierarchies and power. He is often drawn into and subject to this adult world and its values—“Men don’t cry,” he claims, “[a]nd since I’m nearly thirteen I mustn’t cry. I must be strong. I must be a man” (26). This slippage into and out of the dominant social order across its ontological and spacial borderlines subjects the reader, as it does Azure, to experiences and perceptions of this order from both the intimacy of the inside and the estrangement of the outside. This contradictory fluidity is intensified by the first-person narrative Duiker deploys. Azure not only narrates his story himself but often does so in childlike egocentric vocabulary and syntax: the frequency of the narrating pronoun “I,” probably the most frequent word in the text; the short, emotive sentences; and the clipped and spare dialogue. On the other hand, Azure’s experiences are anything but childlike and innocent. The code-switching between languages and between colloquial and taboo registers attests to the child’s harsh and very adult circumstances. The horrific verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse he is subject to stem from a world where self-interest, greed, addiction, and prejudice are rampant. Adults and their values have become the new oppressor, replacing the “whitey” who played that role in protest literature by black writers under apartheid. “[M]oney is everything” (18), Azure tells himself after he has been robbed of forty rands by the gangster pimp Allen, insightfully identifying the commodification and commercialization of social relations that rapidly overlaid race as the dominant line of fracture in postapartheid South Africa. As the title of the novel suggests, the destructive forces in Azure’s worlds continually work to reduce him to near nothing, to a meager thirteen cents, to an object whose value is merely monetary.

  Azure’s physical appearance is as unsettling as is his narrative positioning. His blue eyes, to characters like the gang leader Gerald, are anomalous, given his dark skin, and provoke and interrogate stereotypical ideas of race, identity, and social hierarchy. Azure troubles the main racial categories of apartheid identity, “white,” “coloured,” and “black”—he is none of them and at the same time all of them.[7] Not only do his looks defy inherited racial classification, but his dress sense has no regard for conventions that are racially associated. Azure’s childhood friend from Johannesburg and one of his few protectors, Vincent, warns him that Gerald is out to get him: “He thinks he’s white because he’s got straight hair and a light skin. If you show up with those shoes and your blue eyes, he’ll kill you. He’ll say, Who the fuck do you think you are? Trying to be white?” (39–40).

  Gerald heads a hierarchy of destruction and evil equivalent to the evil witches MaMtonga and Ncitjana in The Hidden Star. His power resides in his control over others through relentless thuggery and brutality combined with his creation of financial, territorial, and emotional dependency that mimics supportive familial relations. After days of protracted physical torture and sexual violence inflicted on Azure by Gerald’s minions like Sealy and Richard, Azure is expected to pay allegiance to Gerald, who takes on the role of father figure and protector, claiming in fact to have killed Azure’s parents himself. The extraordinary power of the gangster is manifest in the manner in which he is able, in the mind of Azure and others, to transmute into the all-powerful dinosaur T-rex on the one hand, and into the form of ubiquitous pigeons on the other. To secure Azure as his own creation, Gerald insists he change his name to “Blue.” But Gerald and his world cannot finally make Azure belong. Gerald’s ignorance of the fact that “Blue” and “Azure” are essentially synonymous signifies his failure to rename the boy, and Gerald’s final destruction marks Azure’s triumph at resisting incorporation into Gerald’s world and its debased values. In this regard, the final assertion of the novel, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” a disturbing refrain throughout the work that emphasizes Azure’s orphaned and dislocated state, becomes a positive and hopeful statement against false belonging and inauthentic values that the impostor father represented. The unambiguously happy ending of The Hidden Star tells of Nolitye’s final victory in casting off her false mother and being reunited with her real mother, whom she has rescued from the evil underworld: “‘At last we’re going home,’ Nolitye says gratefully. ‘Together’” (233).

  Alongside the violence the young Azure experiences at the hands of adults, it is the sexualized nature of his existence on the streets that shocks and unsettles. Many readings of Thirteen Cents emphasize the fact that Azure engages in homosexual encounters with older men in order to earn money and survive on the streets. Azure confirms this reading when on numerous occasions he describes the encounters in graphic detail, but qualifies what is happening by stressing that he does what he does for the money, as a “trick.” However, it is possible to nuance this reading with one that also sees the novel as a bildungsroman of the boy’s sexuality in formation, with the exploration of inchoate sexuality, perhaps even homosexuality, as a subtext. The most protracted description of sex with a man is the one with the rich banker Mr Lebowitz. During this encounter, Azure distances himself and stresses that this is just another of many similar “tricks” he performs: “I know these bastards. I’ve done this a thousand times” (98). As he does on a number of occasions, he asserts a hetero-normativity when he says he gets it up by thinking of Toni Braxton. Yet, on a number of occasions during this encounter, there are, despite the ominous suggestion of being filmed and watched, hints at pleasure-taking, both in the comfort and warmth of domestic space and even sexually. Azure’s descriptions of moments of the encounter can be read as ambiguous and possibly, even subconsciously, taking pleasure. At one point also he feels a sense of pleasure during the encounter, but this is fleeting: “After a while the pleasure turns into sadness” (100). At another point, when they have a second go at it to the accompaniment of the “Winter” movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mr Lebowitz talks of trees without leaves, which takes Azure into a reverie of his own: “Trees, I know trees. I listen to the music. It is too much. . . . This guy is trying to open me up” (107). Azure here briefly reveals that there is something hidden within him that he is reluctant or unable to face but quickly reverts to a defense of this response as his way of protecting himself from exploitative adults like Mr Lebowitz and Joyce.

  The closest we come to the young teenager reflecting more objectively on his sexuality and a possible alternative sexuality is when, toward the end of the novel, before his final ascent up the mountain, he interrogates his contradictory sexual impulses:

  I never dream of doing it with a woman. I’m not a moffie. One of the bastards once asked me if I was a moffie. And I told him that I’m not a moffie. But it’s strange that I never dream of doing it with a woman, not even beautiful Toni Braxton. And the other guys are always saying that it happens to them. I just lie about it and say that it happens to me too even though it never has. (171–72)

  The reiterated denials, “I’m not a moffie,” suggest the young boy’s repression of the disturbing possibility of its opposite—too traumatic a thought for someone his age and in his context to admit. By reading against the grain of the narrator’s own claims, or finding contradictory moments on its surface, this bildungsroman then is as much about survival and a sense of self on the urban edges as it is about marginalized sexuality in formation (rather than an assertion of a particular set sexual identity). Like Azure, Duiker himself discourages reading the novel as being about “gay identity” when, in response to a question with regard to his own sexuality, he responded: “I’m a writer and interested in every aspect of human relations and identity. The whole thing is not an issue for me. My first novel, Thirteen Cents, did not have a gay character and neither will the third. I really don’t want to be pigeon-holed.”[8]

  The explorations of homosexuality in Duiker’s second novel, inflected with an array of other issues about young urban identity and be
longing, makes such a subtextual reading of Thirteen Cents more plausible. He was in fact composing the two novels at the same time. Duiker’s own interrogation in his fiction and poetry of the inherited boundaries of conventional identities and of limiting, categorical thinking, as well as his crisscrossing of languages and narrative modes in his work, would further corroborate such an interpretation. In addition, such a reading queers the dominant interpretation which insists that the homosexual encounters are, on Azure’s side, simply to survive. It also challenges homophobic and moralistic readings of the novel, like that of Osita Ezeliora, whose emphasis on “survivalism” precludes any such exploration of sexuality in Thirteen Cents and condemns its exploration in the subsequent novel: “Duiker’s transition from survivalism as the ideological propellant of homosexuality in Thirteen Cents to its glamorisation in The Quiet Violence of Dreams incites a perception of his narratives as literary sabotage of Africa’s moral sanity, historical memory and cultural development.”[9] The notion of homosexuality as “un-African” implicit in Ezeliora’s view continues to undergird often violent repression of any sexual practice perceived as nonheteronormative in South Africa and on the African continent.[10]

  Thirteen Cents is as much about Azure’s interrogation and exploration of the temporal and spacial dimensions of his urban world as it is about the social and sexual dimensions. In the final third of the novel Azure makes two ascents up Table Mountain, which rises out of the heart of Cape Town and towers above it. These episodes are marked by insistent movement up and out of the cityscape and again down and into its innards as Azure tries to overcome the debilitating forces that engulf and consume him on the streets. Not only does his quest for a life of belonging beyond these destructive forces allow him to literally rise above them, but it also helps him imagine, through intensely sensory, hyperrealist[11] dream sequences, a different genealogy and a new city as the old is being destroyed before his very eyes.