How to Be a Revolutionary
In How to Be a Revolutionary, her second novel, South African writer C.A. Davids doesn’t shy away from confronting big issues that constitute the human condition today. At its heart is the question of how the specific events and actions that comprise the lives of individuals might speak to, and indeed influence, a shared social consciousness. A question of agency, if you will.
The novel’s scope is global (here defined by the places in which Davids has lived). Tracing the lives and reminiscences of three main characters, it spans the events and consequences of the late-era apartheid regime in Cape Town and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in China and Tiananmen Square, 1989, and the Mccarthy era in the . Within that, issues of racial and cultural dierence and prejudice constitute an underlying theme. ‘When had I started to fear people like a Westerner?’ a Chinese character asks. ‘When I encountered prejudice, I felt I could ignore it or beat it back with brashness, as I’d done elsewhere, and as most black people did everywhere when confronted with micro aggressions,’ a South African muses.
Each strand is narrated by someone who on some level rejects or is rejected (and in some way criminalised) by their respective country, someone who feels atomised within their society, while at the same time yearning, whether consciously or subconsciously, to be part of a whole. The novel develops around an encounter between two fictional characters: Beth, a South African diplomat posted to Shanghai and fleeing a failed marriage in Cape Town; and Zhao, her mysterious upstairs neighbour, a former journalist. Connecting them is their shared love of the works of (real-life) American poet Langston Hughes, the leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, who visited Shanghai in 1934 (and went on, based on his experiences there, to publish his virulently anticolonial poem ‘Roar, China!’, in 1938). Using chapters that alternate between the characters’ three points of view – the first-person narratives of Beth and Zhao, and a series of invented letters from Hughes to a South African protégé – Davids traces each one’s search for the truth of their lives and their attempts to navigate between the interests of the self and of a community. (‘How could anything be yours – say like a city into which you’d been fool enough to be born – intimately yours, and not belong to you at all,’ Beth wonders early on.) Much of it in some ways governed by the Truth and Reconciliation slogans: silence is complicity; speaking is healing. And as the novel progresses, by measuring and assessing the damage that both silence and speaking can do.
Into this mix Davids adds the consequences of violence and action too: both Beth and Zhao are traumatised, haunted indeed, by the death of someone close to them, ultimately at the hands of the state, however indirect its touch may have been. Just as much as their actions in the present are a continual response to their experiences of the past. There are times when Davids’s particular form of interweaving and collaging can feel a little too constructed, when the dierence between the specific experiences of conflict in dierent countries and dierent contexts (her descriptions of Beth’s South Africa have a more vivid, detailed and immediate impact than those of Zhao’s China) seem somewhat lost. And yet her attempt to embody a politics that over time can seem increasingly abstract, and to unearth what is shared in fundamental twentieth-century struggles for existence, have resonances that extend to the issues of atomisation and cohesion that continue to haunt society today. Mark Rappolt