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

  On the mountain he experiences intense sensations and fantastical images, and his graphic and primordial dreams are shot through with elements of his real life. In an extended dream (the whole of chapter 17) he finds Saartjie, “a woman who looks like she lived a very long time ago” (139), whose name and figure invoke the ancestral Southern African Khoisan woman Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman.[12] She is at times maternal and protective of him, defending him against the omnipotent and diabolical T-rex, whom she claims is his father and her husband. She in turn is daughter to the terrifying Mantis who eats the sun, and she also claims Azure is the son of the sun. This private mythology and chain of being the boy dreams up is intermingled with his real past—T-rex is a figure from popular film culture and also a transmogrification of Gerald. In his vision Azure creates a new genealogy for himself to restore his dead mother and father. The imagined alternative is one deeply entangled with real history and African folklore, but also marked by contradiction, terror, and destruction, as is his real life. The destruction of the evil Gerald in the dream is paralleled by the destruction of the real Gerald when Azure descends the mountain. The novel ends on an apocalyptic note; Azure, once again on top of the mountain, either imagines he sees or actually sees a giant explosion in the sky and fire falling to earth, and a tsunami sweeping away the city below. The ending, on the surface, is one of destruction and negation. But the mayhem also holds a moment of reassurance for both Azure and the reader: “I know what fear is . . . I have seen the centre of darkness . . . I know his secrets” (my emphases). The young boy has come through the apocalypse, and has attained greater self-knowledge and knowledge about his world. Azure’s final assertion, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” is no longer merely an ever-present refrain; it is now also an acknowledged fact that the boy begins to grasp. Still completely alone, but with clarity of mind, he can, the ending suggests, begin again on the clean slate emerging beneath his feet.

  * * *

  Sello Duiker’s life (1974–2005) straddled the dying days of apartheid and the post-1994 period. He was born in the iconic Johannesburg black township of Soweto, the place synonymous with the student revolts of 1976 that helped break apartheid’s stranglehold on the country. His father and mother were part of the growing black middle class and both had degrees. His father’s job with an international company relocated the family to England for a while.[13] Duiker credits his mother, an avid reader, with sparking his interest in books.[14] His parents of course wanted their firstborn to be well educated, sending him to a reputable Roman Catholic school in a neighboring “coloured” area. “It was at [this] time,” he says, “[that] I was becoming aware of my race. I discovered that in the coloured community there was a lot of politics around hair, the smoothness and the colour.”[15] As a schoolboy in his teens in the equally turbulent 1980s in Soweto he says he was “witnessing necklacing [and] kangaroo courts.”[16] Duiker, like all South Africans, lived with the legacy of violence resulting from more than three and a half centuries of colonial and apartheid domination and divide-and-rule.

  After school Duiker traveled for two years, first to the United States and then to Europe, working for a while as a dishwasher in Paris and also on a farm in France, and it was during this time that he started writing longer pieces of prose.[17] In Paris he visited many art exhibitions and, he says, was struck by the Made in Heaven exhibition of American artist Jeff Koons, in which explicit and graphic images blurred the borders between art and pornography.[18] When he returned home in 1995 he started a degree in journalism at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, which he felt would enable him to explore his desire to write. It was during his years as a student at Rhodes that he became interested in the lives of children living on the streets and started writing full-length fiction seriously. He tried but was unsuccessful at getting a manuscript published.[19]

  He then moved to Cape Town in 1998, where he studied copywriting. During his two-year stay in the city he continued to explore his curiosity about street children, living, by chance Duiker says, with them for three and a half weeks when he was asked to help find a boy who went missing.[20] As a result of this long absence from his studies he was expelled from his college and in fact institutionalized in a psychiatric institution for two months. On his release he wrote the first draft of Thirteen Cents in less than two months.[21] The experience of living on the streets undoubtedly helped him capture street life in Cape Town with impressive verisimilitude—a hallmark of the novel which, like the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marachera, shocks and provokes. At the same time he was working on the manuscript of The Quiet Violence of Dreams, which had already been accepted by Kwela Books but which his editor there, Annari van der Merwe, insisted he revise.[22] He returned to Johannesburg, where he completed Thirteen Cents and took up work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter, and also as a scriptwriter for the popular television soap operas Backstage and Isidingo.

  While his life straddles the apartheid and postapartheid eras, Duiker’s work has been firmly located by literary scholars as part of the postapartheid period,[23] dated often as starting in 1994 or even a bit earlier, in 1990, with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Much recent scholarship about South African letters has focused on attempts to characterize postapartheid society, literature, and culture and question what is distinctive in comparison to life, literature, and culture under apartheid. For Michael Chapman, this period of transition is marked by “anxieties and confusions about matters of identity in relation to massive socio-political change.”[24] Seminal to the literary debate have been the claims by writer and critic Njabulo S. Ndebele, whose essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” first published in 1986, led the charge against black protest writing under apartheid, which he labeled “spectacular,” with writers taking their cue from the “visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive South African formation.”[25] He characterized fiction by black South African writers as follows:

  The spectacular documents; it indicts implicitly; it is demonstrative, preferring exteriority to interiority; it keeps the larger issues of society in our minds, obliterating the details; it provokes identification through recognition and feeling rather than through observation and analytical thought; it calls for emotion rather than conviction; it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge.[26]

  Postapartheid literature moves away from the exterior binaries and the protesting voice to a preoccupation with the inner, the intimate, the individual, and the intermingled ordinary. It is, Andries Oliphant argues, a move away from “instrumentality” to “explore the new freedoms promised by the transition.”[27] A new generation of novelists like Phaswane Mpe and Sello Duiker took up this newfound freedom and were seen as creative pioneers at the beginning of the new century, not only because of the focus of their fiction on contradictory entanglement of new and old, but also because they were seen to be “more formally innovative.”[28]

  In an attempt to characterize South African writing, both pre- and post-1994, David Attwell discusses the uneasy yet pervasive distinction often made between white writing and black writing, particularly under apartheid, and concludes that “tension, instability, and negotiation across a historical and cross-cultural divide permeate South African writing.”[29] Duiker, speaking in interviews about his literary influences, points to a range of Southern African and international writers across lines of color and gives reasons for these identifications that have more often than not to do with questions of tension and instability. Bessie Head looms large in this regard, and Duiker says of her: “Bessie Head . . . [is] a ‘coloured’ South African writer. She was born from a white woman and rejected by her . . . by her own mother. Her strong identity as a ‘coloured’ woman is reflected in her writing.”[30] He states that Head’s novel A Question of Power inspired him to become a writer because “[h]ere is this person who was rejected by her community and took refuge wherever she cou
ld. I related to that, to her trying to find her feet.”[31] Other literary works Duiker claims were important in shaping him as a youngster were Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the iconoclastic work of Dambudzo Marechera.[32] Duiker’s Azure is remarkably similar to Okri’s exceptional spirit child Azaro in The Famished Road (1991), and the Nigerian’s negotiation of realist and surrealist styles clearly inspired the young South African. Sam Raditlhalo also suggests that Azure/Blue alludes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).

  Duiker epitomizes a new generation of South African writers who succeed more easily in creatively transgressing the old black/white divide that Attwell and others identify and attempt to bridge. The writers he names as making their mark range widely, asserting a cosmopolitanism and nonracialism rather than privileging merely the racial, nationalist, or Pan-Africanist. During Duiker’s years of travel immediately after school he says he discovered the works of J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and Doris Lessing. Duiker’s work also invites wide-ranging comparison. There are striking similarities between Azure and Michael K, the protagonist of Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). A comparative study of the two novels would cut across the racial writing divide, as would, for example, a comparative study of a string of South African boy bildungsromans, from Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) to Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1995), to Thirteen Cents and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002). A comparison between Thirteen Cents and Patricia Schonstein’s Skyline, published in the same year as Duiker’s novel, about a young girl’s encounter with urban dwellers in Long Street, Cape Town, could invite a gendered analysis of postapartheid relations in the inner city. Such comparative, thematic analyses might go some way toward filling the gap identified by Rita Barnard: “There are, to date, surprisingly few critical works . . . that consider South African literature in a broad thematic way, and there are fewer still without the modifiers ‘black’ or ‘white’ inserted in the title.”[33] Duiker’s life, vision, and work certainly invite such nonracial explorations without diminishing the way questions of race still affect our lives.

  Sello Duiker took his own life in January 2005, just about a month after his friend and fellow writer Phaswane Mpe had died.[34] A few days before Duiker’s death, van der Merwe had sent him her edited version of The Hidden Star through the post, but it failed to reach him; his last novel ends by realizing the quest his first protagonist Azure had begun and fleetingly glimpsed from the top of the mountain: “home is never far away when you believe in it” (233).

  A Note on K. Sello Duiker’s Use of Language

  Andries Oliphant outlines the effects of colonial and apartheid rule and ideology in South Africa on the domain of literature:

  Linguistically, Apartheid crystallised the colonial imperatives of segregation and white supremacy into rigid ethnic divisions between English and Afrikaans, on the one hand, as well as between these languages and the indigenous languages, on the other. This, as Msimang (1996:51) states, produced three distinct literary systems consisting of the two literatures in English and Afrikaans, separated from each other and placed at the apex and centre of the system, and the nine literatures in the African languages, located at the periphery and below English and Afrikaans.[35]

  This separation and hierarchy of South African literature along language lines under apartheid begins to be challenged, to a certain extent, in the post-1994 period. Writers still choose one of the numerous languages used in South Africa as the language of their text (English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and isiXhosa as the main ones), but there is now a greater mixing of languages, particularly in dialogue, in many creative works. Duiker continues to write in a tradition of Anglophone African writers, epitomized by Chinua Achebe, who choose to write in English rather than in an African language but at the same time make English serve their local and particular creative purpose. Nationally, Duiker follows in the South African novel tradition of writers like Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma, and J. M. Coetzee. Like these writers, Duiker inflects Standard South African English with other languages; in Thirteen Cents he combines English with regional dialect prevalent in the Cape that mixes English and Afrikaans with Sotho and Xhosa names and words in the narrative. Duiker can be seen as continuing the modern novel tradition in English, as Es’kia Mphahlele sees it, initiated by Peter Abrahams:

  Peter Abrahams . . . had become acquainted with the Negro authors of the Harlem Renaissance in the New York of the 1920s and the new consciousness that was to create a new kind of writing by Blacks. It was a rediscovery of an identity that echoed their African origins. Theirs was a style that captured the immediacy of an experience with vivid and concrete imagery, in all its harshness, in all its resonance of the fact of Black survival.[36]

  Yet Duiker goes much further than any of these writers, crossing three conventional boundaries of fictional representation—he graphically depicts sex between child and adult, he does so specifically in relation to homosexual acts, and he uses expletives and the language of insult in a sustained manner that goes beyond merely inflecting the prose with local color.[37] Dehumanizing language is a violent assault on the human spirit, and Duiker attempts to capture this onslaught and resistance to it in authentic detail. He says: “I don’t go out intentionally to shock. A lot of what I said could have been toned down. But violence is so much a part of our culture that if I had toned it down it wouldn’t have been authentic.”[38]

  Unlike Mark Behr, for example, a South African novelist resident in the United States, who in his recent fiction Kings of the Water (2009) generates simultaneous translations of Afrikaans phrases within the text and a glossary of terms for his international readership, Duiker writes Thirteen Cents in the first instance for a younger, local audience, assuming his readers are familiar with the non-English terms. The absence of authorial mediation between the language of the story and readers also suggests Duiker’s desire to construct an uncompromising, true-to-life account of a harsh reality. It gives his fiction a contemporary and naturalistic quality, much like the linguistic code-switching and cacophony of languages that one finds in popular South African TV soap operas and recent South African film.

  The glossary that follows is intended to help readers decode the meaning and nuances of certain key terms in the novel not in English.

  Glossary

  babelas (isiZulu, slang)—hungover

  ba batla borotho (Sesotho)—they want bread

  baksheesh (Persian, slang)—tips and bribes

  bergies (Afrikaans, slang)—literally mountain people; homeless people who take shelter on the slopes of Table Mountain or on Cape Town city streets

  braai (Afrikaans)—cookout, barbecue

  buttons (informal)—Mandrax, Quaaludes

  cherrie (Afrikaans, slang)—young woman or girlfriend

  daai glad hare (Afrikaans)—that smooth hair

  dankie (Afrikaans)—thank you

  deurmekaar (Afrikaans)—crazy

  eish (slang)—oh dear

  gemors (Afrikaans)—a mess, confusion

  hey voetsek (Afrikaans)—fuck off

  julle fokken (Afrikaans)—your fucking

  kaffir (derogatory)—native, black man/woman

  kak (Afrikaans)—shit

  kwaito (derived from Afrikaans)—South African mix of township hip hop, reggae, house music

  laaitie (Afrikaans, slang)—young boy

  los hom (Afrikaans)—let him go, leave him alone

  maar (Afrikaans)—but

  mageu (isiZulu)—traditional drink made from fermented maize

  mahala (South African slang)—for free, free of charge

  makwerekwere (isiXhosa, derogatory)—foreigners, outsiders, non-South Africans

  mannetjies (Afrikaans)—little men

  meisietjie (Afrikaans)—girl

  mense (Afrikaans)—people

  mnqusho (isiXhosa)—trad
itional meal of hominy-like samp (dried corn kernels that are soaked and coarsely pounded; generally cooked with beans)

  moegoe (Afrikaans slang)—dope, fool, idiot

  moer (Afrikaans, threatening)—to beat up; to fuck up

  moffie (Afrikaans, derogatory)—faggot

  naai (Afrikaans, slang)—one of many words for having sex; screw, poke

  ouens (Afrikaans)—guys

  oupa (Afrikaans)—grandfather

  outie (Afrikaans, slang)—wiseguy

  Pagad mense—PAGAD—People against Gangsterism and Drugs, Islamic vigilante group in Cape Town

  phuza-face (isiZulu, slang)—an alcoholic

  piel (Afrikaans, slang)—dick, penis

  poes (Afrikaans, derogatory)—cunt

  skyf (Afrikaans)—cigarette, puff, joint

  spaza (slang)—small convenience store in township or rural area

  stop / zol / pilletjie (Afrikaans slang)—a joint

  suig (Afrikaans)—suck

  thula (isiZulu)—quiet or hush

  Vaalie mense (Afrikaans slang)—(white) people from the old Transvaal province

  veldskoene—(Afrikaans) usually handmade soft shoes made from untanned leather, field shoes

  wena—(isiXhosa) you

  windgat—(Afrikaans) windbag, someone who talks and boasts too much

  yessus—from Jesus, meaning damn