Grimness of being out of Africa shines through blurred events
GERALD Kraak has been called a “passionate champion of social justice” and a “kind and generous, delightfully irreverent” man who celebrated the subjects of gender, sexuality and human rights. He died in 2014 when was still an incomplete manuscript.
It was intended to be the second part of a trilogy following on the story of Matthew, Oliver, Mandla and Pru, characters in his award-winning
Editor Alison Lowry completed the book posthumously as a stand-alone novel. After the first draft she made minor adjustments after reading so links between some characters wouldn’t jar and to ensure their stories were taken forward authentically.
She aimed to keep the voice of Kraak alive and true to him in the narrative and I think she manages to join all threads, offering a fine work seemingly from “one writer”. Lowry says the title is open to a few interpretations, deliberately, and none of them is the “right” one.
The cover of the book with its shades of grey is fitting, as most of the characters are living their lives in the shadow of their earlier ones. The background to the narrative, physically and emotionally, is grey, often bleak, “a crude world, with its forbidding intimations of irredeemable separation, aloneness, angst”. Living in exile: There are shadow plays throughout, from the laboured protest action by the anti-apartheid movement in countries outside South Africa, to the anarchic activism of the squatter movement in which Matthew finds himself caught at one stage.
Events often are blurred around the edges. It is a compelling story, set mainly in Amsterdam. Many scenes allowed me to step back to living in London in the ’80s with exiles, activists and others.
The narrative is vivid and precise, portraying the grimness of being out of Africa, including the hostility of squatter life.
The dark edges of an oppressive and brutal South Africa. There is a loneliness, a longing. mostly is told from Matthew’s perspective. Although he takes some time to appreciate and kind of enjoy living in Amsterdam, he is never fully resolved with “that most beautiful of cities and sounds of bicycle wheels (which) is as insistently as that of the summer cicadas hidden in trees in the country of our childhood”. He feels rootless and it pervades. Coffees and jenevers do too. Oliver lives and exists “on a strain of apprehensiveness and alienation”.
And on South Africa he is vehement: “I hate the place. I will never go back. It’s brutal. Europe is my home,” while Mandla on a tube in London felt “mildly claustrophobic and I found myself searching the horizon for a break in the clouds, which I never found”. Precisely.
The sky there felt so low. A few striking sexual moments happen and I thought them tastefully expressed and sometimes exquisite, never brazen. “Among the stalls of olives, pickles and Mediterranean vegetables – yellow lemons and glowing red tomatoes stacked high – our breath steamed in front of us. I found this ridiculously endearing. I would have liked to have kissed him then, so the trails of our vapours entwined, but it was too public a place. Turkish women in hijabs embroidered in reds and golds, flashing with sequins…” is one such prequel to a sensual scene. Poetic composition prevails and one illustration is Matthew’s arrival for a job interview at music store, Allegro. You can smell the place, you want to find this place, you want to go there. He says: “I stepped nervously inside and a bell tinkled above me as the door closed. A gasp escaped my tight chest. The vault under the roof was filled by a magnificent chandelier, an extraordinary tracery of crystal and pearl, blazing in the upper reaches of the room’s oak beams and rush ceiling. The floor of the shop was rough, unvarnished, burnished in places into a gleaming ebony patina by the footfalls of the ages – or so I imagined it.”
I loved reading and it’s sad the trilogy won’t be completed. The intention, in the final story, was to bring some of the characters back to South Africa after the Struggle years. But this fine work of literature rests here. –