Title: Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood
Author: Zubeida Jaffer
Publisher: Kwela
Format: Paperback
Pages: 220
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0275-4
Love in the Time of Treason belongs to a still growing body of “Struggle” literature that includes memoirs, biographies, letters, poetry and novels. As the book’s subtitle makes clear, it concerns the “life story” of one Ayesha Dawood, a resident of Worcester, who as a young woman joined the ANC and was subsequently involved in the early stages of the Treason Trial of the late fifties.
The story is constructed around two convergences, the first of which ends with a union, while the second ends with a reunion.
The first half of the book tells the parallel stories of Ayesha’s political activism and intermittent incarceration, and the protracted attempts – over the course of six years – of Yusuf Mukadam to reach South Africa in order to marry the woman he met only briefly while she was on a visit to India. The second half focuses on Ayesha’s married life and grudging withdrawal from politics after the banning of the ANC and, eventually, her exile to India in 1968. But this half of the book is to an important degree about a lack, which is represented by the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the leader to whom she is devoted and with whom she will be reunited only in 1997, when the Blue Train passes through Worcester (the Mukadam family having returned there in the early nineties after his release).
Such neatness of narrative construction exceeds that which we usually find in biographies (which, after all, also impose form upon the heady complexity of life), and ultimately it would be a mistake to classify the book as a biography. On the one hand the text clearly communicates its status as non-fiction: the subtitle (The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood) as well as the inclusion of several photographs on the back cover and the insides of both front and back covers make this clear from the outset, as does the author’s acknowledgement at the end of the book. Like non-fiction in general, it also lacks, for the most part, the linguistic flair of the novel. Nonetheless Jaffer has taken the liberty of representing, and thus granting a certain tangibility to, the emotional and experiential world of her central real-life characters, and as such one’s reading experience frequently does approach that of reading a fictional work.
The genre of the book, then, may be more accurately identified as fictionalised biography; biography, that is, in which the narrative techniques associated with fiction – such as figurative language, structural parallels, interiority, etc – are allowed greater play than is usually the case with biographical works. As such it is appropriate that Jaffer has typified her account of Dawood’s life as a “story”. This approach seems permissible for the simple reason that although Ayesha Dawood was actively involved in the struggle in the 1950s, hers is not finally the life story of a public figure. Rather, it is an intimate, personal story, one that registers the broad impact of socio-historical context on people’s private lives. This is the issue that the title raises overtly.
Wherein the book also diverges from formal biographical writing is its relative eschewal of complexity in favour of a more economical construction; one that is in some ways reminiscent of the fable. The participants in the struggle are exclusively warm and generous individuals, while the representatives of the state are consistently either boorish or villainous (on two occasions is an association made with Nazi Germany and the figure of Hitler specifically). In the case of struggle comrades and family, generosity, enthusiasm and community are insistently foregrounded – hands are shaken “vigorously” (32), smiles are “broad” (33, 36) and hugs are “warm” (42) – and as the page range here suggests, it is more or less at this stage of my reading that I became overly conscious of a formulaic element in the expression of fellow-feeling. At times this highlights the limitations of a style which one might call self-consciously unassuming (although I should point out that I have respect for the restraint shown by Jaffer – a seasoned journalist – in not hijacking the historical data for her own creative purposes).
What finally justifies, and even necessitates, Jaffer’s shift to a more fictional mode is the inescapably subjective nature of its main theme: love. As a rule biographies are not very eloquent on the matter of their subjects’ emotional attachments, but Jaffer shifts this recalcitrant matter to the very centre of her narrative. The life story and love story are shown to be one. The theme of love ties together the public and private aspects – first, there is the mind-boggling account of Yusuf’s worldwide pursuit of Ayesha, who doesn’t even know of his interest in her; then there is Ayesha’s life-long and passionate devotion to Nelson Mandela as the leader of the ANC, someone with whom she has only limited personal contact. In both cases love is characterised by an essentially selfless alignment of personal interest with that of someone distant and inaccessible, of staying true to someone who might not even be consciously aware of you. After meeting Ayesha during her visit to India in 1953, Yusuf, having decided to pursue her, undergoes training as a cook and commits himself to the Merchant Marine, traversing the world in the hope that his ship will one day berth in a South African harbour so that he might jump ship and search her out in Worcester. When things don’t work out the first time, he tries again, until after six years of intermittent sailing he finally makes it to her parents’ home, an illegal immigrant in a strange country, thrown upon the mercy of people who don’t really know him.
The same level of commitment and trust is evident in the political sphere Ayesha enters, and despite my reservations regarding Jaffer’s representations of camaraderie, one cannot help but be affected anew by the people’s willingness to put their personal lives on the line in the name of a just society. It here that the book’s mediation of the historical by the personal is effective – measured in personal terms such as this, the sheer duration of the struggle, and the endurance of those committed to it, is brought into clear relief.
In the case of Ayesha, personal sacrifice is most acutely registered when her two loves are put in direct opposition: after five years of marriage the state ferrets out Yusuf and threatens to deport him unless Ayesha becomes an informer. Despite the uncertainty this will mean for the future of her own family (ailing mother and father, as well as two young children), Ayesha refuses to betray her comrades, and is finally compelled to follow her husband to a new life in India (a move which enables the government to issue her with a permanent exit visa, thereby effectively sending her into exile). The primary cost here is to herself, as someone who has to give up the country of her birth in order to meet the demands of both her political allegiance and her husband and children.
This decision is made by Ayesha herself, and testifies to her agency as an independent woman. Yet it should be noted that the text does register, in a way that is quite intermittent and almost repressed, the problem of gender inequality in both spheres of her life. Quite early on in the novel, Ayesha, while giving a speech, notes that her call to “the women of South Africa to play a greater role in politics” (32) is met with some restraint on the part of the men in the audience. We also catch glimpses of a critical perspective on her own role – in the family – as a Muslim woman.
On this front the text seems to me slightly ambivalent – marked by a degree of vacillation, even – and it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the ambivalence originates with Ayesha Dawood rather than Zubeida Jaffer. On the whole the narration, as focalised through Ayesha, propagates acceptance and dutiful behaviour, a curtailment of independence in the name of community, but at times it seems to do so without conviction. The text tries to remain non-judgemental, but one senses a kind of frustration, both with the ubiquity of patriarchy and with gender roles as defined within Islam. This is a difficult call to make, but one almost has the sense that Jaffer – the author – feels constrained by the fable-like register she has chosen for her narrative, which doesn’t readily grant her the space to openly register doubts regarding Ayesha’s counter-instinctive submission to cultural imperatives.
Doubt is established, in the epigraph by Shabir Banoobhai (“doubt/ burns up/ the oxygen of love”), as the very antithesis of love, but in the course of the narrative it hardly emerges as a serious challenge. In retrospect the epigraph serves less as a thematic marker than as a proscription: there can be no place for doubt in this book about love. Instead, what benignly thrives on the oxygen of love is patience. And patience is finally rewarded: Mandela is released after twenty-three years in prison, and Ayesha gets to return to South Africa and to finally meet him in 1997. Their patience and commitment recall that of Yusuf, in his pursuit of Ayesha, and it is worth noting that the first child born of their union is called “Shabiera, meaning patience” (123).
Jaffer clearly cares about her subject, and has performed a labour of love in capturing this “minor” – and yet exemplary – strand in the history of the struggle. Love in the Time of Treason also registers the historical persistence of ties between South Africa and India (a link which here results in the surprising, if minor, phenomenon of a few Afrikaans expressions finding their way into the speech of the inhabitants of Sarwa), and touches upon the impact of modernity, globalisation and transcultural exchange. But the primary interest of the book lies in its satisfying integration of two parallel tales of love, a story which reminds us that life is neither simply public nor simply private, but somewhere in between.