Nadia Davids: An imperfect blessing (2014)
ISBN: 9781415207697
Nadia Davids is an acclaimed London-based South African playwright, to date the author of the one novel named above. Published by Umuzi, its extended narrative provides a vividly localised image of community life in Walmer Estate, an area of Cape Town that is set on the slopes of Table Mountain, most of whose adult and older occupants have haunting memories of District Six – from where the vibrant and “mixed” occupants were “cleared” in one of the earliest and most brutal acts of expulsion and razing of homes and businesses of the “non-whites” (in Nationalist Party government terminology) who had lived there for decades, in the centre of Cape Town.
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Published by Umuzi, its extended narrative provides a vividly localised image of community life in Walmer Estate, an area of Cape Town that is set on the slopes of Table Mountain, most of whose adult and older occupants have haunting memories of District Six – from where the vibrant and “mixed” occupants were “cleared” in one of the earliest and most brutal acts of expulsion and razing of homes and businesses of the “non-whites” (in Nationalist Party government terminology) who had lived there for decades, in the centre of Cape Town.
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The novel’s time frame (interspersed with multiple flashbacks) is the tense and politically knife-edge period from the time apartheid rule was legally ended to the start of the present constitutional democracy – from early January in 1993 to late May, 1994. Central to the memories of young adults and everyone older in “Walmer” is life as it was lived and as it was ended in “The District” (as it is usually referred to).*
Davids’s novel uses a single family (the Dawoods) out of the predominantly Muslim (still in some older people’s terminology, “Malay”) community to give the story its immediacy and poignancy, vividly bringing to life the various discourses of this crucial time – politically dominated, yet also filled with personal, cultural and communal interchanges and disputes – as these occur within and inform the wider context of familial life. The two central characters are the younger Dawood daughter, Alia (14, a schoolgirl), and her father’s politically active younger brother, Waleed, a doctoral student at UCT and a budding writer. Nevertheless, the narrative gives occasional “starring roles” to numerous other characters, portrayed in the memorable detail that only a deeply localised author can evoke. The characters form an interconnected social constellation centred on the Dawoods and portraying the variousness in personality and affiliation of the people in Walmer Estate and beyond.
The novel opens with a scene dominated by the unwelcome return, after an (unusually) almost windless summer, of the fierce, blustery southeaster. The observing figure is Alia, who thinks of Cape Town as “a city of unease” and “a place of rock and water”, where the landscape appears to have “formed a place out of careful division”, and where the steeply contoured streets run from the slopes of one of the two “side peaks” of Table Mountain, Devil’s Peak. These streets, from Alia’s perspective, contain “little girls in burkas hurrying … to madressa and teenage boys clustered around corner shops smoking” (9). On the walls are huge apartheid-defying slogans, while old ladies sit on stoeps exchanging scurrilous gossip about other neighbours, and well-off middle-aged men drive by in long, coveted Mercedeses or BMWs. Walmer Estate, Alia explains, gets the absolute worst of “the crazed southeaster”, because the angle of the streets in the small and socially mixed community creates natural tunnels, along which the wind barrels on many days, threatening footholds, tearing off branches and toppling trees. She believes that it is the wind that has made Walmer occupants “mad and tough” (10). At its worst, the wind is a terrifying force. Although theirs is a suburban existence, their home is a mere two streets and a highway away from the by-now tinder-dry veld covering the mountain’s upper slopes. An early incident causes a fierce flare-up of a long-standing feud between two close neighbours, both families surnamed Hassan. They are related to one another, but between them the hatred runs deep – they are also, we learn later, connected familially to Alia’s mother. An actual fire flares up on Devil’s Peak, whipped up by the wind and igniting a very old tree between the two Hassan properties. Each family blames the other for the disaster when the tree is blown over, crashing onto the roof of the one home and with its wide base uprooted, causing structural damage to the next-door dwelling. The incident makes the front page of the local newspaper.
That the Dawoods are a privileged family is quickly established; the balconied home has a swimming pool. Further telling details are Alia’s older sister Nasreen’s detestation of and refusal to share the family meal of curried chicken, no doubt delicious and carefully prepared by her mother Zarina, because she claims she has a “texture disorder” (24). Making chicken skin “inedible” contrasts with her father’s mention that at her age, he would have had to wait a month for a savoured chicken meal. On the other hand, there is the revealing nature of Alia’s question in response to a newspaper photo (taken by her uncle Waleed’s closest friend, Rashaad) of a “young child in a squatter camp”: a black boy who stands, barefoot, leaning against a wheelbarrow “piled high with Coca-Cola cans and plastic bottles” gleaned from a nearby rubbish dump. “Is he recycling?” (17) she asks naïvely, before being told that the boy earns a small income for his family by creating ornaments (bouquets) of flowers made from flattened metal bits and wire. “How far is Khayelitsha from here?” she asks her father, followed by the query (when he estimates that it would take just over half an hour to drive there), “[W]hy have you never taken us there?” and Adam’s (the father’s) response that he can see no point in going there when Alia can “see what it looks like from the photos” (18) – indicative of the gaping social (as well as racial) distance between the two communities. While their uncle Waleed has told the sisters that no event could be more “exciting” than the imminent political transition, Alia feels excluded, even “robbed”, by having been born too late, declaring that “the country’s new beginning had been long in the works, a beginning paid for with someone else’s blood” (19). This gives one a glimpse of this young girl’s remarkable moral and emotional maturity, which allows her (in the course of time) to grow beyond the various confines of her sheltered upbringing.
Alia’s desultory chat to two neighbourhood boys, the last weekend before school resumes, ends with a somewhat half-hearted invitation to go together to Hal’s, a nearby club for the young crowd. She goes on her first ever visit in a car driven by the super-cool older cousin of one of the two boys, filled with considerable trepidation as to her get-up, but “armed” with her tough if slightly fragile feminist principles. She is soon left standing alone by her two “escorts”, having refused an invitation from one to join him on the dance floor, and decides that this is the moment to start smoking. She has come forearmed with a packet of Camel Mild. Predictably, she starts coughing and wheezing, worried that her tears will ruin her eye make-up. A boy she hasn’t met has spotted her plight and comes offering her water and a tissue. This is Nick, who soon shows himself a kindred soul and who (as he admits in embarrassment) attends a similarly “larney” school, twin to her own. In the tight-knit community that is Cape Town, most of the club patrons’ parents probably know or know of one another. What soon emerges, though, is that Nick’s parents are Christian, though the information has no detrimental effect on Alia, who is increasingly smitten with him – not only “cool” but extremely good-looking and (crucially) a boy who appears to “get” her. Soon, he takes a “baggie” of dagga from his pocket, and Alia is delighted at the opportunity to smoke marijuana (on the balcony upstairs) for the first time in her life. Up there are five other boys known to Nick and keen to share the dope. The chat among the group becoming gradually stoned moves from a possible Cape Town visit by the band Depeche Mode to the six youngsters’ parents’ various political affiliations and therefore vote casting in the coming elections. One boy admits (initially without embarrassment, until mocked for it) that both his parents are “voting Nat” (as the great majority of the Western Cape’s “coloured” population did); another has “a mother in the UDF”; another still “had a sell-out uncle in the TriCameral” “Parliament” (a creation of the white Nationalist government parallel to the black “homeland governments”). One boy has a “cousin who had been in solitary” (ie was an anti-apartheid political detainee), while Alia is “pretty sure her mother would vote ANC” but is uncertain of her father’s political preferences – he “hated the Nats, but he didn’t like the ANC’s ties to the Communist Party” and considers a new “Muslim Party” a joke. She suspects he might vote for Helen Suzman’s DP – a remark that elicits jeers from the boys on the balcony (56-57). Worried that “she had blown it badly with Nick”, Alia walks downstairs with him when summoned for the drive home by their disapproving older driver, angry about the telltale dagga fumes. Alia is high and unbothered. On impulse, she and Nick (finding themselves alone for a moment on the way down) lean together and kiss – Alia’s first and Nick’s fourth, we are informed – and Alia departs with an airy “I’ll call you” to Nick. This relationship continues to virtually the end of the novel. To Alia, “something she could not yet name had shifted, changed, been made anew” (59).
The two “Alia sections” are separated by the chapter (two) in which the reader is introduced to Waleed. Finding himself in “this place” (the razed District Six) while on an aimless walk, he recalls that “when it happened” he was a bewildered little boy, “not quite seven”, and that it was after months of “talk” about the forced removal of inhabitants from the area – initially rumoured, and later confirmed by official letter. Memories of the time blend with a nightmare of his parents, Adam his brother (his senior by 16 years) and him walking a tightrope over a precipice, carrying treasured household possessions – drum-beating policemen “circl[ing]” below (27) like predatory beasts. Waleed alludes vaguely to his father’s suspected marital infidelities (he was a carpenter who loved tinkering with the old Mercedes he’d saved for years to buy), mentioning that on days when the car was unavailable to take his mother into town for shopping, they took the bus. He especially recalls one trip when his mother sheltered him from discovering the realities of racist laws that prohibited all the “non-white” passengers, even elderly and disabled ones, from occupying any downstairs seats. Waleed is sensitive not only to such personal and familial memories, but to deeper, further, uglier local histories:
What Waleed did know was that somewhere, in some dark century, in a grief that tunnelled down through the ages, that sometimes gripped him by the throat, there once had been a man or a woman, a great-great-great-great grandparent who had sat in the hulls of one of those Dutch ships, sick with vomit and terror, lifted high on the apex of a wave mad with salt and height. That someone who had given him blood and bone once turned, their ankles straining against iron shackling, to speak to another, to ask for water in a language since lost. (32)
Nasreen, Waleed’s older niece, is politically aware and, at 16, is often angry with and condescending towards her parents; she (like Alia) adores their politically left-leaning and socially dissident uncle, who openly cohabits with his white, “originally” Christian “girlfriend”, Anna (a fellow UCT doctoral student). Fozia, Adam and Waleed’s widowed mother who lives in Woodstock, is dead set against both the relationship and especially the woman, whom she has never allowed Waleed to bring into her home or to meet her. When Waleed visits his brother’s family on the evening after Alia’s club outing, he focuses on Nasreen. Vying for his attention, the younger sister babbles on and on about her expensive upper-echelon school activities, entirely unaware of how this makes Waleed’s capitalist-detesting “skin crawl” (66). Waleed and Adam have chosen almost opposite lifestyles in response to the trauma of past and persistent present racist discrimination and humiliation. Adam, who runs and owns a fabric shop, “had chosen the safety of the world of commerce where … he was a (more-or-less) free agent”, whereas Waleed “had chosen the realm of agonised imaginings”: as dissertation topic, his How political trauma limits creative output (on which he has been working desultorily for six years already) is “both his revenge and his uneasy obsession” (67). Waleed’s earlier “dropping out” of law school “had been the source of a bitter fight between him and his brother”, for Adam had never had the opportunity to attend university. When their father died, he, the older, had had to start earning to pay for his younger sibling’s education. For months, they did not even speak to one another. Having enrolled for an arts degree, Waleed “would skulk round their mother’s house smoking rollies and quoting Hegel” (69) – a brilliant thumbnail sketch of pretentious youth. When Waleed decides to grow dreadlocks, Fozia (his mother) is not only scandalised but ashamed: she is horrified at the social consequences (especially for herself) in her conservative neighbourhood, an area where a dreadlocked youth is automatically suspected of dealing drugs. This is how she reports to every available family member and seeks commiseration:
“You will not believe what this child of mine has done this time! He has become a filthy Rasta! … It means he has become a bladdy good-for-nothing skollie! That’s what it blessed well means. My son, the univaristy-high-and-mighty-I-can-quote-Shakespeare is a bladdy skollie.” She stops herself from saying what they all know anyway: that Rasta is code for black, that Waleed has gone native …. (74)
Waleed, according to Fozia, seems to have forgotten the basis of his identity: “[H]e is a Dawood, he is my son and he is a Muslim. Finish and kla” (75). When Waleed objects to her invoking his late father to denounce his lifestyle choice, he demands an apology on the threat of leaving; when she refuses the blackmail, he enacts “the upbeat disregard of [an …] Englishman bidding a formal farewell to his landlady” – a manner which gets Fozia’s goat, to the extent that she flings at him her final reprimand: “Don’t you bladdy come keep yourself white with me!” (78). Waleed, sharing the anecdote with his brother, is warmly welcomed and is given the spare fourth bedroom in their comfortable home.
At her “upperclass” school, Alia soon spots a new classmate who looks interesting – Lizzie, who jokes that she is from “the good part” of Gugulethu: “It’s like the bleck Bevarlee Heels” (84). Beyond Alia’s dismay at Lizzie’s easy use of the term “coloureds”, she “fell in love for the second time that week” (90) when Lizzie (in their English poetry class) refutes Alia’s mortal enemy, the ambitious Angela, who makes an innuendo that black poets are simply not good enough. Lizzie reads out Mongane Wally Serote’s beautiful 1975 poetic appeal to those who “defied death” with “song and dance”, to demonstrate that they might study black South African poets’ work along with those of famous British ones (90). In the meantime, a recurrent lovers’ quarrel is brewing between Waleed and Anna. The previous night, he was up very late helping Fozia with her baking and cooking preparation for an annual event – remembrance prayers for his and Adam’s father, who passed nine years ago. Anna, who as a “nice middle-class girl who grew up in Rondebosch” (96) and is keen to learn more about “Muslim culture”, cannot comprehend why Fozia won’t tolerate her in her home. She is tense and hurt that she is kept from an event that means much to the man she loves. She senses, in this, that “Waleed was ashamed of [her]. Just a little” and occasionally sees her “through the eyes he borrowed from his mother” (96). Even though the quarrel gets nasty, it is (as often) resolved by lovemaking. Nick and Alia’s relationship – even though, similarly, neither’s parents approve of their child’s choice of a relationship with someone from another “group” – proceeds “in a haze of ceaseless talk”, “every hello euphoric, every conversation a chance to find out more about the other, to announce a new reading of an old topic, to be heard, to be heard” (105). Still, after a joint viewing of the “bushman diorama” (106) in Cape Town’s Natural History Museum, Nick makes a painful point, saying: “When I look in those glass cages, I see my family. And you don’t” (108). What he means, basically, is that while Alia knows that her ancestors came to the Cape from beyond the Indian Ocean, Nick’s are (as he knows) local, but unknown – Alia’s Muslim faith and her family’s cultural practices stem from those origins, while Nick’s ancestors’ languages, religion and culture have been “erased” and replaced by habits and practices imposed by “white” European colonists. Almost unforgivably, Alia will on a much later occasion, in a moment of fury, taunt him on this point of “superiority”. Outside the museum, she assents to Nick’s point, saying “Ja. Ja. Everyone in Cape Town’s got an Irish grandmother” (109).
At the Dawoods’ home, some later morning, the family is getting ready to attend the girls’ cousin’s wedding. “Pushing boundaries”, Nasreen (dressed to the point of an effective disguise as a Muslim boy) attempts to persuade her father to allow her to sit with the men in the mosque at the men-only signing of the marriage contract. (Her cousin and other women have been given the imam’s special permission to be present within earshot of the proceedings, but in the cellar, out of sight behind a curtain.) But the parents breezily dismiss her attempt at staging a feminist protest. Instead of grasping her daughter’s intention, Zarina starts worrying that Nasreen is yielding to the “fashion” of “lesbianism” (123), until her best friend’s scornful response (at the wedding) to her confession of this misplaced anxiety, puts her right. To Alia’s surprise, Nick is also at the wedding, among the small and awkwardly half-included Christian group at a single table among the enormous gathering of Muslim attendees – multiple relatives as well as business associates of the extremely wealthy father, who has pulled out all the stops for a truly lavish wedding. It is Nick’s inability to comprehend or see any sense in the strict limitations of Muslim girls’ unchaperoned interaction with boys that causes the quarrel between him and Alia. She is actually more in agreement with Nick in her own feelings than she admits to him; weddings are, for unmarried daughters, occasions where they run the gauntlet of constant critical scrutiny from almost all the adults in attendance, including their own parents, keen for them to prove that they know how to behave “properly” on such public occasions. When Alia asks her sister afterwards, “Why are these events always so stressful?” Nasreen’s reply is cryptic: “Samoosas and mind games …. Samoosas and mind games” (149).
In the next chapter, the narrative shifts back to an afternoon seven years earlier, when Waleed showed up at their home, where the sisters were playing hopscotch, driving his late father’s (their grandfather’s) lovingly restored, ageing Mercedes. The plan was not to take his friends for a spin in the grand old vehicle, but to go (with Rashaad, the photographer; and gregarious, cheerful Georgie; under the leadership and guidance of Yusuf, the most radical of the foursome) on a political mission to Khayelitsha – a venture combining aid to people under attack (from brutal apartheid-supporting forces) and a witnessing role, with a demonstration of opposition to racist state suppression. Their venture ends somewhat ignominiously, and they are advised to flee the dangerous scene after the arrival of an armoured vehicle bearing soldiers and several of the notorious “witdoeke” (black locals bribed by the state to lead attacks on fellow township dwellers), but the horrifying events and sights of this night will change Waleed forever. He seeks advice and guidance from Yusuf in order to join the revolutionary ranks (communist and radical groupings), since he feels obliged to “do more” than snipe verbally from the sidelines to oppose such a grotesquely vicious system. The narrative voice describes what the young men from Cape Town witness as “the country’s deepest shames, its secrets, its deceits” (156). Comparing District Six removals with the demolitions and violent attacks in black areas is wrong, Yusuf tells Waleed, for “they moved us out to actual places, let us pack up our shit and go. You think they do the same thing for the Africans? Please, man. They point and shoot and don’t give a fuck what’s in the way” (159). As Tshepo (Yusuf’s contact) later confirms: “I guess we don’t live in the same country” (163). But, in parallel events, Adam and his cousin, Omar, are summoned by a panicked boy: “Uncle! Uncle! They (the army) shooting there by the mosque!” One person was shot down in the street. “They killed him right there outside the mashid” (165). Omar’s elderly father (Adam’s uncle) is in the mosque, so the two men rush down, tense and anxious. The youth who was shot was attempting to prevent soldiers from entering the madressa – an act of desecration. The background, Omar tells Adam, is that the imam called a meeting for his flock to discuss one of the most notorious apartheid-era atrocities: the ambush by soldiers who, hidden behind crates on a truck, had opened fire and killed three young “coloured” activists, also injuring many others from the same school (it became known as “the Trojan Horse Massacre”). The soldiers threatened to shoot the imam when he emerged from the mosque to try and talk to them, later forcing their way inside. During their occupation of the sacred space, a young soldier, out of his mind with rage and fear, sprayed one wall with bullets, though not hitting anyone attending. The old uncle sees in this the protection of faith, but to Adam there is one terrifying conclusion: “They don’t care anymore how they look to the outside world or to us” (170). He fears for his daughters’ safety if they continue their nearby schooling. In a crisis discussion between him and Zarina, the parents decide to send the girls to one of the very expensive “formerly white” schools, since it is unlikely to be threatened by army action and their schooling will not be interrupted by protest action.
In a later chapter, another flashback section depicts how Waleed – after the Khayelitsha visit and his “vetting” by Yusuf’s communist-affiliated allies – is asked to shelter a fugitive from the police. It turns out to be a boy of scarcely 15, small and frail, but with a steely will to escape imprisonment (and probable torture, as Yusuf, himself a former detainee, has experienced), in order to leave the country and join MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s military “wing”) in exile to fight for liberation. Waleed is horrified that this young boy is being encouraged to risk such danger, but Yusuf (who is, as Waleed is to discover much later, the boy’s cousin) thinks him naïve and reminds him that the boy’s position in South Africa is probably riskier for his life and safety. Waleed, an amateur at such a venture, puts the boy up secretly in Adam and Zarina’s cellar, but the telltale signs soon give away to its owners that there is a “secret guest” in their home. They confront Waleed, absolutely incensed for two main reasons: firstly, that he can endorse the sacrifice of a child to the struggle, and secondly, that he has put their whole family at extreme risk of political persecution. They help the boy (whose name is Firoze) for a few days until he leaves (he will reach his goal, it turns out, but some years later he dies in a military ambush in exile), but the breach with Waleed is severe. He is asked to leave, and returns to Fozia’s home. Waleed never forgets the boy: terrified of sleeping alone in the dark cellar, but with sufficient resolve and courage to join MK and entirely firm in his commitment, unlike Waleed’s wavering, perpetually doubtful self. Yusuf has said: “[T]his is no time for thinking” (200). But even though Waleed, when speaking to Yusuf, calls his brother and sister-in-law “sell-outs” (204) for sending their daughters to a “whitey school” (202), he is privately relieved at their “safety” in that space.
Waleed, who has for years had terrible nightmares about their family’s eviction from District Six, is not making much headway in writing the required further chapters of his thesis. His thoughts on the issue of apartheid discrimination blocking artistic creativity in its victims, are blocked by the thought that the implied questions in the premise will not be “answered” until the system itself ends. Instead, he has begun intermittently writing a series of short stories about life in his community, knowing that this is where his heart lies. Nevertheless, he is plagued by the thought that he is letting his supervisor down – a man who has stuck his neck out to get funding for Waleed’s doctoral studies. Waleed has no qualms sneering at Anna’s American flatmate, Megan, an anthropologist from a working-class US family, calling her “a cultural bounty hunter” for trying to build up an analysis of the South African interregnum. Yet, he himself, in the pretence that he’s making a self-deprecating joke, states, “I always mobilise my oppression for my own ends” (216). Actually, Waleed is fending off possible questions from his supervisor, who has come to the bookshop where Waleed now works to earn a pittance, about the (lack of) progress on his academic endeavour. Anna is present at the time, leaving after the older man does – the awkward encounter having concluded. A moment later, a dishevelled Anna comes rushing back into the shop, bearing terrible news: “It’s (Chris) Hani. … He’s been shot,” and adding “in a wail that came up from her belly and through her throat, ‘He’s dead’” (218). The time is, of course, the Saturday of the Easter weekend, 1993. As South Africans reflect on the assassination of a key figure in the negotiations to try and reach a non-violent political settlement, “there was a question Nasreen could not stop asking. She wanted to know, once he realised what was happening, if he (Hani) regretted sanctioning those hours at the table; she wanted to know if, during those last moments, he hated them, as she did now.” Nasreen “was convinced he must have, even as she hoped he didn’t” (222). On the ensuing Tuesday, she phones her closest ally at school to try and persuade her friend to join her in bunking school the next day in order to attend a commemoration service for Hani at St George’s Cathedral. With political feelings running as high as they do, her friend considers it too risky. Alia, overhearing (or eavesdropping), decides to join her sister instead.
Finding themselves the only two schoolchildren in noticeably smart uniforms among the many who are present in the cathedral, Nasreen and Alia feel increasingly conspicuous. They spot their uncle Waleed and go up to him. He has a role as one of those despatched to keep order at the event. He is with a fierce, struggle-hardened woman (who also has a history of detention and torture) who gives Nasreen quite a brush-off when she attempts to be friendly, misinterpreting the teenager’s would-be jocular remark as disrespectful to the struggle. Crestfallen, the girls need the bit of comforting their uncle tries to give them before shooing them away – he has a job to perform. In the cathedral, “the air … had turned sour from all the bodies” and “the mood was one of mournful anger, but it was tempered by the building itself … the rules of its rituals” (244). The memorial service is ended prematurely to the sound of pounding feet and the fear of an imminent riot – everyone is asked to leave. The sisters do so, and outside the cathedral, “Nasreen inhaled the fear tunnelling through the city” in response to the feeling that “the city had turned in on itself … broken loose” (245) from the usual restraints. Lee-Anne (the woman who showed them such dislike and contempt) now warns them to go back inside, stating that Waleed is looking for them. A “harried” Waleed tells them to go back to their school immediately, walking through the Company Gardens. He has to go and try to talk to a group of young boys, spoiling for a fight, and calm them down if possible. The next moment, the cathedral crowd is overtaken by the marchers, and the merged groups become a roiling mass in which the two schoolgirls get caught up and impelled along, Alia at one point pushed into a fall that bloodies her knee. She is helped up by Nasreen. They hear a girl with legs full of bruises yelling to her friends: “Fazlin! Janine! Pasop! Die boere kom! Hulle kom nou-nou!” (247). Her warning galvanises Nasreen; she makes sure that she and Alia have wet handkerchiefs – the security forces will be sure to fire teargas to subdue the crowd. They see Waleed fall, severely bruising a rib against the kerbstone; the boys he’s been talking to have turned on him, their fury reignited by the laughing of a police car driver as if in fun, as he all but knocks down Waleed and the boys by deliberately driving recklessly to intimidate them. Horrified, the girls rush to Waleed’s aid, but he orders them again to walk away. Unexpectedly, Lee-Anne takes command: “Come. I’ll walk you up the Avenue” (250).
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Driving through the city, late to pick up her daughters, Zarina as always experiences the setting as populated by the “ghosts” (256) of past events and periods, few of them good memories. She sees the debris left in the aftermath of the march and the service, eventually encountering Waleed.
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Driving through the city, late to pick up her daughters, Zarina as always experiences the setting as populated by the “ghosts” (256) of past events and periods, few of them good memories. She sees the debris left in the aftermath of the march and the service, eventually encountering Waleed. He asks her whether she has picked up her daughters from school, where he told them to go. This tells her that the girls sneaked out of school to attend the Hani service. Zarina, noticing that Waleed is injured, orders him into the car. She is not especially sympathetic, assuring him that (as it turns out) the rib is cracked rather than broken, and that he does not require hospitalisation. At the school, Alia is holding forth to her classmates about the service and the march when her mother “hisse[s]” (258) at her daughters to get into the car. Zarina establishes that Lizzie, Alia’s friend from Gugulethu, was warned by her mother against attending the Hani service, calling the situation “unpredictable” (259). At home, Zarina, having more or less kidnapped Waleed to come home with them, informs Adam – who “explode[s]” in shocked fury at hearing this – that their daughters bunked school to attend the service. Soon, she tells her husband (putting Waleed on the spot as the chief scapegoat) that “he saw them at the service and he didn’t have the common decency to walk them back to school when everything went to hell and gone” (263) – television coverage (which Adam has been watching) confirming Zarina’s description. Somewhat unfairly, Waleed is given most of the blame for the girls’ endangerment, creating the worst rift yet between the brothers. Alia does try to defend Waleed, but to no avail, when Nasreen weighs in on the quarrel in a bitter accusation against her parents: “[Y]ou’re all safe here in your big house and other people are dying. Someone important to this country died. He died. Somebody shot him,” adding: “You should have been there [too]” (265). When Waleed hears from Fozia not long afterwards how inconsolable her friend Layma is about the disappearance of her youngest child, Firoze, he finally clicks that this boy (the memory of him haunts Waleed) is actually from their neighbourhood, and he storms off to confront Yusuf, the boy’s second cousin. But they, too, are at cross purposes, Yusuf unable to comprehend Waleed’s indignant fury, saying: “Don’t you understand, Waleed? Some of us are willing to die for this” (270). Waleed’s values are clearly much less unlike his brother’s than he believes.
Waleed and his three closest friends are politically aligned (though with sharpening differences in outlook), and they also share a passion for rugby and get together to watch “big” matches. Anna, though initially very puzzled that they apparently share the favourite sport of a majority of the white male South African cohort, soon learns that they support (eg) the All Blacks – or any team playing against the “white” Springboks. Still, despite beer- and braai-fuelled male camaraderie, Waleed uses the occasion to snipe at Yusuf, usually by far the most radical member of their gathering, and asks him (the taunt is unmistakable): “What’s going on up north (at the ANC-NP dominated negotiations to reach political accommodation), ma broe? You then in the inner circle? What’s with all the compromises (from the ANC’s side)? … Treacherous things are afoot. What’s going to happen when the ANC gets two-thirds?” (282). Anna, too, is not afraid to stick her (political) neck out. With the rugby-watching session having evolved into a come-one-come-all party of Waleed’s large circle of friends, one of the few uninvited, unlikely attendees is a white lecturer (or postgraduate) from Waleed’s department, with whom Alia finds herself in furious opposition. He is standing with her and her flatmate (the only other whites present at the party), and, clearly expecting racial solidarity among them, leans in to tell the two women ”sorrowfully” that he’s going to “make the adult choice” in order to “keep the ANC on their toes” and vote for the NP – getting the following unexpected earful from Anna in response: “[Y]ou aren’t voting in an effective opposition, you’re putting power back into the hands of murderers!” (287). She also tells him he’s “transform[ing his] racism into pragmatism” and asks him to leave the party – literally “seeing him off the premises” with Megan, her flatmate, who is almost as disgusted with this hypocrite as Anna is (288-289). Afterwards, telling Waleed about Ben, Anna reads it as a summons to “whiteness”, “a command from home” – a painful reminder that “she would only ever be in Waleed’s world under sufferance” – but reaffirming that “it was the only place she wanted to be” (290).
As a punishment for bunking school and attending the Hani service without permission, Alia has been banned from seeing Nick. Her school encourages pupils to support their “brother school” down the hill (to which Nick goes) in their rugby match against traditional rivals (the allusion appears to point to a Paarl or Stellenbosch boys’ school). Alia seizes the opportunity to sneak a “visit” with Nick. But the event is not a success. She learns from an awkward boy (who blurts out the shocking news) that Nick’s family is emigrating “to Brisbane next year” (199). Nick has not given Alia any indication of the kind, so although she tries to play it cool, Alia is both devastated and flooded with a feeling of let-down, even betrayal, by Nick. Mixed in with this is her perception of a type of political cowardice: they will not be staying for the elections. Alia labels Nick’s parents (who have apparently “just dumped” the decision on him) “cowards” (299). Nick defends them, saying that the family, since the Hani killing and its consequences, is afraid of endemic violence soon besetting the country. He himself, he says, is doing all he can to be allowed to stay. He does not want to leave, accusing Alia of being so self-centred that she has never considered his feelings. Alia is shocked into revealing, at this moment, that she thinks about him “all the time” and “hardly ever” about herself, adding: “I think it’s because I love you” (302). Nick shows no gratifying delighted surprise at her “revelation”, matter-of-factly saying he knows this, but Alia demands that he declare explicitly that he, too, loves her. Their ensuing comfortable tête-à-tête is ended by Nick’s summons to a school duty serving the players refreshment. Alia comforts him by promising to write to him regularly once he’s left. It is in the safety of her bedroom that a storm of sorrow overtakes Alia. In partly a bit of a performance, Alia’s father soothes her (her mother and sister are out), offering her his coffee along with condolences.
Suddenly, the narrative shifts back to 16 June 1986 – a date ten years precisely after the Soweto youth uprising, violently repressed by the apartheid state. The setting is Alia’s (and Nasreen’s) first school, located close to where District Six used to be. Many pupils of the boys’ school downhill are holding up political protest posters, while a boycott of the girls’ senior classes is in progress. Alia is six years old, understanding little of what is going on, but sensitive to the tension in the atmosphere. Their class is interrupted when another teacher comes to speak to their instructor, the strict but ever reliable Mrs Dean, to deliver some news. As she returns, Mrs Dean instructs the little girls to wet their handkerchiefs before leaving; their school is closing early. Something strange and scary is happening; the teacher is nervous and explains that the handkerchiefs are to be placed over eyes, mouths and noses if the air smells strange and seems “cloudy” as they walk home. The next moment, a fierce and frightening dog comes into their classroom followed by the soldier holding its leash. Mrs Dean tries to order him to leave and take the dog away from the terrified six-year-olds, but the man refuses: he and the other soldiers are “looking for the terrorists” (youngsters from the nearby other school) who ran in this direction. He proceeds (seriously) to search their classroom, even going through paperwork in Mrs Dean’s desk. The brutal shift in the hierarchy of authority is evident even to the little children, their safe space invaded. Outside at last, a bewildered Alia dawdles, until a firmly decisive Nasreen takes her hand and repeats the instruction to cover her face against the floating teargas. They see one older girl being beaten bloody by a sjambok, as they make their way “crying and panting up the hill” (327). Their black domestic worker, Sylvia, washes and soothes the girls when they get home. It is Sylvia who, when Zarina gets back, informs the mother of her young daughters’ ordeal. She “gives her a glass of water, sits her down, rubs her back, lets her cry. Two women standing in a kitchen, each knowing for once just how the other feels” (329).
The shift back to September 1993 is also a move into another setting: Waleed’s place, where Anna, finally having had enough of Waleed’s self-absorption, announces her departure, her resolve having been stiffened by her flatmate Megan’s firmly principled feminist perspective on their relationship.
“Waleed, you want someone who is going to run after you and tell you you’re wonderful and read everything you write and put up with all your moods and be a conduit for all kinds of anger that’s got nothing to do with me, and I just can’t do that anymore. You keep me on some kind of emotional diet. I never feel full. And I’m so tired.” (337)
It is clearly an imbalanced relationship about which Anna has, this time, reached a firm, definite conclusion. Waleed’s usual appeals to her to reconsider fail, and she leaves with her belongings.
More than six weeks later, Waleed and Rashaad have been having a pleasantly convivial afternoon and evening in a pub, when the mood suddenly shifts. Rashaad adds to his admission that he loves his “girlfriend”, Melanie, the fact that a very serious obstacle to their union has come to light. Vain as ever, Waleed wonders whether she is perhaps in love with him. It is far, far worse, for Melanie, Rashaad tells him, is the daughter of the politician who is probably the worst hate figure in the four friends’ world: the man responsible for Yusuf’s detention (in solitary confinement) and torture after he had been beaten so badly by a policeman that he lost his hearing in one ear. Melanie’s father is Oscar Spielman: to the four friends, the ultimate sell-out who betrayed his people for personal profit and power, as the family’s opulent home confirms. “How am I going to face Georgie?” Rashaad wonders – or (seeming to “gear himself up”) Yusuf? (143). Since they know their friend, where he stands and what he has been put through, the question is an agonised one. Waleed’s instinctive, inevitably half-hearted attempt to separate Melanie from her father, fails. They both know that Yusuf will see Rashaad, if he remains linked to Melanie, as a base traitor to him and to their many years of friendship and shared political loyalties, even though Waleed and Georgie might understand his predicament. Waleed gets a little lost in thinking how his own position confirms the sense of how both “family” and “love” complicate lives and crucial choices. He is aware of how isolated he feels in his present exclusion from both his mother’s (who has firmly sided with her older son in his irreconcilable fury at Waleed’s “abandonment” of his nieces at the Hani event) and Adam’s homes, and at Anna’s consistent refusal to take his calls. But he knows he will stand by Rashaad and (deep down) how much he loves and respects this friend. As they walk home, Rashaad says he wishes he could stop seeing “how fucked everything is”, how he can’t even have his tank filled at a petrol station without worrying how the attendant will afford food; he feels “exhausted”, he says. Without expressing his disagreement to his friend, Waleed knows that to him, it is important to keep seeing these heartbreaking things, for to him, noticing, remaining angry at and not getting used to them, is “a way of remembering” (347).
Alia has been plagued by guilt at the fallout from her and Nasreen’s attendance at the Hani service, and blames herself as responsible for all the severances that have ensued – her father and his brother not on speaking terms, Fozia’s blame of Waleed, her uncle’s break-up with Anna, and the loss of familial ease and companionship. Pluckily, she decides that because it is “all her fault”, she must do something about it. She packs leftover food in a carry-pack and, with only a vague idea of where her uncle lives, sets off, taking a taxi for the first time in her life. Surprised, her uncle lets her in, but explains to her that the reconciliation with Adam that she requires of him is so difficult as to be unlikely. Still, this young girl’s generosity of heart moves Waleed deeply. He insists on escorting her home this time and, getting back, surprises himself by yet again attempting to speak to Anna on the phone. Over a month later, Waleed’s overtures prove more successful – perhaps because, in the now three months of their separation, he has at last done the hard work of serious self-scrutiny regarding his conduct in their relationship. And he has acted on what he understood, carefully reading and commenting on the final draft of her thesis, which Anna had for months asked him to do (probably his reluctance stemmed from envy that her PhD work was nearing completion, whereas his own had stalled a while ago). To Anna, who has been secretly longing for Waleed yet remaining convinced that their relationship was imbalanced, this – and his second “offering” of a small, completed collection of short stories – proves that he has made himself change and has done so for her. The couple seals their reconciliation by sharing an impromptu meal at Anna’s kitchen table.
When Fozia, later in the month, hears of a bombing at a popular tavern that is close to Waleed’s home, knowing that he went out to celebrate the new year (it is 31 December), she suffers a bad collapse – an apparent heart attack. Although Zarina is not impressed with how easily the brothers are able to put aside the past months of bitter estrangement at the hospital, Adam and Waleed show their mutual love in the initial shared, terrifying fear of losing their mother and the relief that floods them all when they are told that Fozia will be fine – it was the relapse of a rare kind of angina attack. She will have to give up smoking and rich food, but her feistiness is there in her testy rebuke to her two sons: “What you want to fight for? … There’s enough fighting in this country” (393). She also asks whether Anna, whom she has never previously allowed near her, wouldn’t like to “say hello” (395). The narrative concludes in May of 1994, following one of the last letters between Alia and Nick, in which she describes how the election has unfolded. In the concluding section, Waleed’s short story collection’s launch is depicted, the venue packed with both his and Anna’s friends and all his closest relatives.
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It is a fitting end to this novel in its celebration of community, family and the forgiving, complex love that unites them in the midst of an ugly and terrifying time and its bitter divisions.
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It is a fitting end to this novel in its celebration of community, family and the forgiving, complex love that unites them in the midst of an ugly and terrifying time and its bitter divisions.
*The 1950s Group Areas Act was invoked on 11 February 1966 to declare District Six a “white area”. More than 60 000 mainly “coloured” people (in the resented terminology of apartheid race classification) were “cleared” from the area and “removed” to the drab Cape Flats, destroying generations of communal ties and exposing the government’s ruthlessness.