Alex La Guma broadcast



Alex and Blanche La Guma on their wedding day in 1954

[Image source: https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2010-12-09-struggle-widow-blanche-la-guma-now-treated-like-a-leper/]




Alex La Guma was born in 2 Rogers Street, District Six.


Lindsay Johns' tribute to Alex La Guma (1925 - 1985), was broadcast yesterday on Radio 3. It's available to listen to for the next however many days.


Lots on Walk In the Night, and some decent thoughts on The Stone Country and In the Fog of the Season's End. (Time of the Butcherbird doesn't get a mention.)






http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09qcyy0


Kudos to the politically conservative Lindsay Johns for his out-and-out admiration for La Guma, even though La Guma was a communist. It leads to quite an interesting dialogue with Alex's widow Blanche about how the La Gumas squared their own fight for basic freedoms in South Africa with support for regimes elsewhere who eroded individual liberty. And I like the way he includes an interview with another early associate of La Guma's who bluntly dismisses Johns' own notion of La Guma's balancing of aesthetic and political values.






I'm not that crazy about the "black Dickens" tag (surely La Guma is a big enough writer to just be himself?) and it's perhaps an unfortunate necessity of popular broadcasting that the presentation is structured around La Guma's present-day reputation (i.e. Why on earth isn't he better known?) rather than his life and his novels.


(Worldwide I'd say La Guma is pretty well-known. The broadcast does contain some interesting speculations on why La Guma isn't as well known in S. Africa as he might be. One of them being contemporary disparagement of realism. Another that his books were banned in South Africa until the end of apartheid, by which time he was dead.)





If you miss out on the broadcast, you can read my La Guma posts instead  :) , but don't imagine they're any substitute...






A Walk in the Night
http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/apartheid-eyes.html


Time of the Butcherbird
http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/alex-la-guma-time-of-butcherbird-1979.html




Blanche La Guma's autobiography In the Dark with my Dress on Fire (2010, with Martin Klammer) looks well worth a read. ...

Borden Chase: Red River (1949)

John Wayne as Thomas Dunson and Montgomery Clift as Mathew in Howard Hawks' Red River (1948)

[Image source: https://themetropolistimes.com/2011/10/03/john-wayne-in-red-river/]

 

His name was Thomas Dunson, born in Birkenhead across the Mersey from Liverpool, come from England God knows how. A bull of a man. A brute of a man. Thick-necked, low-jowled, with eyes that looked out at you like the rounded grey ends of bullets in a pistol cylinder. … Two mares were in the traces. Quarter mares with broad hips and heavy gaskins. Built to work; built to run. Both had been bred to the sorrel stud that followed the wagon at the end of a tie rope. Foundation stock. Dunson’s eyes watched the slow, rhythmic motions of the younger mare’s rump. Perhaps he was thinking of the colt she would drop in another six months. Perhaps not. Dunson’s thoughts were hidden things.

 

Ahead, the lead wagon dipped its tongue as the team moved down the grade of a dry stream bank.

 

In these opening sentences the book’s methodology is completely contained. Sentences are atomized into cinematic fragments. There are fine expressions which are then recycled so that we recognize them as a new epic diction. For example, we will hear a lot more of the analogy between eyes and bullet-nubs; nearly every time that Dunson reappears, in fact. And the best thing in the prose is its convincing use of what sounds like authentic cattleman’s lingo (like the wagon dipping its tongue); lingo that may, for all I know, be as sheerly invented as the epic diction.

 

Dunson is indeed a brute, a man without pity, a phlegmatic deadshot, a tyrant impervious to reason. He is just about redeemed by some consciousness of his place in history, a vision that is united with a nation’s destiny. Having just killed a Mexican, he muses to his adopted son:

 

Here I am, Mathew, and here I’ll stay. On all these lands north of the river I’ll grow beef. Food for the bellies of every man in our country. They’ll need meat, Mathew. They can’t build their cities without it. 

 

This 1949 copy of Red River, tying in with the release of Howard Hawks’ movie, is I think just re-titled from Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail (1946-47), the novel from which Chase himself wrote the screenplay. But for the movie Chase unwillingly substituted a happier ending that he despised; most movie-goers have agreed with him. There were quite a few other changes. The roles of Cherry Valance and green-eyed Tess are much more developed and make more sense in the book. However, this is not to imply that the book is sensible. The west envisaged in the book is as mad, almost, as the civil war from which Mathew returns. The film feels compelled to supply a shred of excuse for Dunson’s landgrabbing from the Mexicans; in the book, it is not discussed. The man went for his gun, that’s all. So many people subsequently go for their guns that the body-count rises bewilderingly in the course of everyday business; these are not enemies, they are just hired hands who question Dunson’s authority. They are always given names, but we can’t take in the names before they are dead and buried, in one of Dunson’s punitive marshallings or in fatal swirlings of the equally swollen river.

 

The underlying implication is that though the father must in due course give way to his less brutal son, America should reverence such fathers as this. Moralizing is inappropriate to treat the epic appetites of these rough pioneers. Yet sometimes moralizing does cross our path, for example about these sharpers who appear in the west with Clark Donegal’s migrating casino:  

 

Mathew glanced at Donegal’s men. They were hard – hard in a vastly different manner from the trail drivers. Theirs were the eyes of the great vultures that sweep down from the skies to prey on dead things. Each man wore gloves. Each wore a gun.

 

Hard-working western men driven by plain desire for ownership, domination, women, money, self-preservation and sleep are OK. But these alien leeches are another matter. Texas is “Preyed upon by Northern carpetbaggers. Harried by the dreamers in Congress.”

 

Chase (pseudonym of Frank Fowler, 1900-1971) was a leading light of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

 

*

 

By what precise route I don’t know, Chase’s epic simile about the eyes turns up again, transmuted and varied, in the radically different context of Alex La Guma’s amazing Capetown novella A Walk in the Night (1962), a crucial document in anti-apartheid literature. La Guma works his similes intensively, building new constructions out of materials taken from genre literature. Thus with the eyes.

 

“His eyes were small and round and brown and flat and gritty as weathered sandstone..” (Chips, proprietor of the Jolly Boys Social Club, 9)

“Under the lowered lids the eyes were hard and flat and shiny as the ends of cartridge shells...” (Chips, 9).

 

These eyes belong to the brutal Police Constable Raalt:

 

“their irises hard and shiny as plate-glass” (9)

“his grey-as-dust eyes” (9)

“his hard grey eyes” (12)

(officers like Raalt) “these men who wore their guns like appendages of their bodies  and whose faces had the hard metallic look, and whose hearts and guts were merely valves and wires which operated robots.” (12)

“Raalt’s flat grey eyes” (12)

“They saw the flat grey eyes under the gingerish eyebrows, hard and expressionless as the end of pieces of lead pipe” (12)

“his eyes like pieces of grey metal” (12)


[Online Text of A Walk in the Night]

 

Alex La Guma: Time of the Butcherbird (1979)

Original jacket, pulpy fun that blithely (or perhaps carefully) by-passes the novel's racial context

This is the second La Guma novel that I've read. I've gone straight from his first (A Walk in the Night, 1962) to his last, Time of the Butcherbird (1979).

It was a controversial novel, and the implication of its relative inferiority to its predecessors has tended to linger on. (Maybe the original jacket didn't help much.)

South Africa was in crisis, and the novel partakes in that crisis. Violence spills over. (La Guma never pretends that violence is accurately-directed. Murile hits his bull's-eye with Hannes Meulen, but he also takes out Edgar Stopes, a man he's never met.) The novel laments individuality but sees it as dispensible, even unwanted, in present circumstances. For the first time La Guma devoted much of his novel's energy to white characters, but the prose is tense with its struggle to see those white characters as other than empty shells. There are two very different brands of racism in the bigoted Afrikaner and complicit English groups, but both are equally destructive. That of course is a humanist way of looking at it. Time of the Butcherbird could be seen as a novel where the novel's intrinsic humanism is in distress and is tested. Also tested is the noir style that La Guma began from: that too depends on a security of humanist response, on which its hard-bitten manner plays a piquant variation.

Noir, nevertheless, remains an important bedrock of the book. Whether it's Meulen talking to Steen or Mma-Tau talking to Murile, the prose makes no explicit judgments, it merely narrates. The compression and selection still accounts for a large part of the book's power and poetry.

I think it's a fantastic book. It certainly is less perfect than A Walk in the Night but then it's twice as long and much more ambitious.

What might be, and has been, considered thinness in the characterization is really down to a deliberate honing of repeated motifs. These are sparse people in a sparse country. Shilling Murile is nearly always "the one who was called Shilling Murile"*, and his only prop is his pair of boots. Madonele is always thinking about the tobacco. (Both the tobacco and the boots are connected to Murile's ten years in jail.) The unfortunate Timi is excited and innocently drunk: what else do we need to know about him? And characters of whom we see much, such as Edgar Stopes, turn out to be obsessively narrow in their outlook, always thinking and feeling the same things. In the drought (endless, so far as the book is concerned), nature too is composed of the faintest variations on repetition: every day the sun burns and the dust swirls. It's the passing of time, but it's also, as the title says, a time. A static condition. "Our course is set," says Hannes Meulen.

The primary images are of faces, land and sun. La Guma's writing  is unashamedly inventive on these subjects, like a pulp author.

*

'There,' her father said. 'You see you are going to have a wife who will out do you in public activities, so be careful, son.'

Meulen chuckled, 'She can help me with my speeches.'

'What -- about wild flowers?' Rina asked and they laughed.

The rest of the meal was frikadells, yellow rice cooked with raisins, boiled vegetables, beet salad and apricot chutney. They passed dishes among them and Steen called on the servant to bring the peach brandy from the lounge.  (p. 63)

Rina wants to borrow trucks to transport drought-stricken wild flowers to parks where they can be preserved. Meulen is happy to lend her the trucks, once they've been used to take the evicted kaffirs to the railway for transportation into the pitiless Karoo. (La Guma anticipates the "green colonialism" described by Naomi Klein.)

Conversation at dinner is high-toned, about the challenges and duties of preserving God's culture and racial purity in a time of liberalization.

Before dinner, Steen had mildly cajoled Meulen for using the word "kaffir": - "We call them Bantus now." But a few moments later he says:

'I suppose those black things will move?'

Steen inherited money and hasn't needed to farm for a few years, but he's still very interested in making his pile from the minerals concession.

La Guma's book really has some admiration for the principled, orderly lives of the Afrikaners; compared to the shallow, hopeless, unhappy consumerism of the British South Africans Edgar and Maisie.

So he sees the ingrained racism of Steen and Meulen as a tragedy for their own people as well as for the peoples they oppress.

How far the depersonalization of Steen's remark can go, comes out in the account of what happened ten years before, during the wedding night of Meulen's sister.

Such a celebration ought, you would think, to bring reconciliation between people; and that's how the drunk Murile sees it. Actually its effect on Meulen is the opposite: to make him even prouder, even more repulsed by the subject race, and even more punitive. Murile and his baby brother are treated to volleys of "baboon" and "filth" as they're lashed to fence posts with electric flex. But most telling of all is Meulen's reponse to Murile's plea of acquaintance.

'Baas, you know me. This is a bad thing to do, boss. Why, you know me. I carried the buck which you shot, I cleaned your guns, you know me.'

'Know you shit,' Meulen said with contempt. 'Since when do I know a kaffir? One kaffir looks just like another as it concerns me.'

It's important for Meulen's self-respect not to recognize "kaffirs". (Ten years on, there's a careful irony in Meulen not recognizing the man in the hotel garden who's carrying his shotgun.)

*

For Meulen, his fairy-tale beloved and his Dominee the racial hierarchy is imagined to be sustainable. Edgar and Maisie are more consciously troubled. Theirs is no fairy-tale romance, in fact each wishes the other dead most of the time. And their backgrounds are socially precarious; the shop of Maisie's parents has black customers and they live in a dubious neighbourhood. Edgar is conscious of being treated like "a bloody nigger". They aren't attractive people themselves and they achieve no enlightenment but the book shows this as a missed opportunity, that whites on the edge of society may have more in common with the urban blacks than they realize.

Lanius collaris

[Image source: http://www.ispotnature.org/node/764019]


In southern Africa the "butcherbird" is the Southern Fiscal (Lanius collaris), a kind of shrike. (Unrelated to the Australian butcherbirds, which are in the magpie family.)

The bird was named from its habit of impaling insects and other food on thorns. The butcherbird is considered beneficial, especially by farmers whose animals were tormented by ticks. He is "a hunter and a smeller-out of sorcerers", as Shilling Murile says.

So the novel meditates on a time of violent cleansing.


*

The wealthier Afrikaners have stinkwood furniture in their homes. This is Black Stinkwood (Ocotea bullata), formerly prized by cabinet-makers for its beautiful close-grained timber, but no longer commercially available due to over-exploitation.


*

When Meulen arrives Steen is reading "a story by Potgieter". This was the Dutch author Everhardus Johannes Potgieter (1808-1875), romantic, extremely patriotic, a firm believer in trade and a good businessman.

*

*The seminal scandi-noir crime novel Roseanna (1965) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, invariably refers to its murderer as "the man called [first-name surname]"  (1968 English translation by Lois Roth).

*

Extensive essay by Kathleen M. Balutansky (Google Books has nearly all of it) in The Novels of Alex La Guma: The Representation of a Political Conflict (Three Continents Press, 1990). Structured around the symbolisms of the title and the opening and closing paragraphs.

Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, "Sharpeville and its Aftermath: The Novels of Richard Rive, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma and Lauretta Ngcobo" http://ariel.ucalgary.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/viewFile/1886/1843. Argues that Butcherbird suffers from the author's long exile and resorting to a non-South African readership; it is less concretely imagined than his earlier urban works. Says there are minor mistakes "such as putting Sesotho words in the mouths of Xhosa-speaking Africans from the Cape where his novel is set".

Annie Gagiano, '"The Tree Goes on":Reconsidering Alex La Guma's Time of the Butcherbird' in English in Africa Vol 24 No 1 (May 1997).  Available on Jstor: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238836
Troubled by the novel's apparent celebration of Murile's revenge killing.

Louis Tremaine, 'Ironic Convergence in Alex La Guma's Time of the Butcherbird'. http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/29/2/31.extract . In the one-page extract, Tremaine refers to La Guma's observation, a few years earlier, that the colour bar made it impossible for any South African writer to portray both white and black characters with equal inwardness, and points out that Butcherbird is his first book to attempt to portray white characters at length.

Anders Breidlid, "Resistance and Reaction in Alex La Guma's And A Threefold Chord". http://www.soas.ac.uk/soaslit/issue1/BREIDLID.PDF Thinks in depth about Benita Parry's criticism that La Guma's realist fiction isn't an adequate form for a genuine resistance literature or oppositional discourse.

Simon Lewis's review of Nahem Yousaf's Alex La Guma: Politics and Resistance (2001) . Asks the question, how do we read La Guma's Fanonism now, given that the apartheid regime ended without a civil war in 1994? (La Guma died in 1985.) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/44713

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers & Empire has a chapter on La Guma's In the Fog of the Season's End, (Selected pages on Google Books.) He points out that some of the changes disernible in Butcherbird, compared to its predecessor, are down to the  intervening Soweto massacres following the children's uprising in 1976.  Time of the Butcherbird was written when the long-foreseen civil war seemed to be already under way.



*

My earlier piece on Alex La Guma's first novel, A Walk in the Night. http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/apartheid-eyes.html

apartheid eyes

Alex La Guma published A Walk in the Night in 1962, two years after the Sharpeville Massacre and a year after the Treason Trial finally came to an end. (La Guma was himself one of those arrested in 1957, though not one of the final thirty defendants; some, maybe all, of the book was written in jail in 1959.)

A Walk in the Night is a thrilling, grimy novella set in Capetown's District Six. In La Guma's book District Six is presented as an arena characterized by wretched poverty, crushed aspirations and desperate brags in the face of apartheid's brutal suppressions.

Four years later the area was designated Whites Only. Existing residents were relocated (1968-82) - mainly to the bleak Cape Flats - and buildings were bulldozed.

Government officials gave four primary reasons for the removals. In accordance with apartheid philosophy, it stated that interracial interaction bred conflict, necessitating the separation of the races. They deemed District Six a slum, fit only for clearance, not rehabilitation. They also portrayed the area as crime-ridden and dangerous; they claimed that the district was a vice den, full of immoral activities like gambling, drinking, and prostitution. Though these were the official reasons, most residents believed that the government sought the land because of its proximity to the city center, Table Mountain, and the harbor. (Wikipedia)

The government might well have referred to A Walk in the Night to justify their portrait of District Six. They probably didn't, though. It would also have publicized the book's portrayal of ingrained police brutality, corruption and racism.

Perhaps because it was bulldozed, District Six is sometimes remembered in rather a nostalgic spirit, with former residents emphasizing that it was a site for relatively unpoliced mingling of races and cultures, and a meeting-place for musicians, writers and politicians engaged in the struggle.

La Guma writes it differently. He produces a sort of pulp-noir-ish Capetown, but in which the heroes are definitely not the investigators. As with a lot of noir the language is frequently torqued into simile. La Guma's similes often derive from pulp but effloresce in a way that I think of as characteristically African (basing this grossly inadequate idea on Moore's and Beier's Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry).

Here's one of the epic motifs of Borden Chase's 1946-9 Red River (which I wrote more about here)

A bull of a man. A brute of a man. Thick-necked, low-jowled, with eyes that looked out at you like the rounded grey ends of bullets in a pistol cylinder.

It's easy to see connections between Thomas Dunson, brutal hero pioneer, and the brutal white police constables in A Walk in the Night. But the efflorescence of the eye image in La Guma is not limited to Police Constable Raalt. The shape of eyes, and the opacity of the things that eyes are compared to, become important.

They saw the flat grey eyes under the gingerish eyebrows, hard and expressionless as the end of pieces of lead pipe, pointed at them.

These eyes can stare unblinkingly at the monster of injustice that should blind them. For to see is to accept. This makes them, in a terrible sense, strong.

They can also, as the word "pointed" indicates, fire bullets. Early in the book, when Michael Adonis is routinely hassled and searched, it's emphasized that you never look into the eyes of a police officer.

When it comes to Michael and Willieboy, on the other hand, what's emphasized are, not the seeing irises, but the colours of the whites of the eyes; what lies behind; what betrays itself; vulnerability and victimhood - but also a human soul. In their present state of existence the humanity tends to be expressed as sullenness and resentment.

The simile of the lead piping is intellectual and then sensuous. It is not something that instantly evokes eyes, but you can work it out: the collar of lead is the iris, and the hole in the middle is the pupil. The same intellectual element exists in this metaphor:

Night crouched over the city. The glow of street lamps and electric signs formed a yellow haze, giving it a pale underbelly that did not reach far enough upwards to absorb the stars that spotted its purple hide.

A crouching beast does not instantly evoke a clear night, but La Guma does draw out two unexpected resemblances, i.e. the pale underbelly and the spotted hide. It's an intellectual work-out, but the result is an emotion, the sense of feeling crushed by gargantuan forces.

*

Michael Adonis and Willieboy have a great deal in common, intentionally so. (The law makes a mistake, and pursues Willieboy for Michael's crime, but the terms of "crime", "innocence" and "guilt" are all problematic here.) Both are boys in trouble, but Michael at the start of the book is more or less going straight; he has just been dismissed from a legit job. One of the reasons for the dismissal, aside from the bosses being gits and bastards, is that Michael takes exception to being incorrectly called black (as opposed to coloured). It's a distinction he mentions several times. Willieboy is also concerned with his ethnic identity, but it comes out in a different way: he objects to foreigners (white sailors) muscling in on "our girls".

* My copy was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series, to which I owe so many great debts over the years. The series is probably moribund, but it isn't easy to tell. Naturally I supposed that Heinemann might have a web page devoted to celebrating and selling it. But no. http://www.heinemann.com and http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/International/International.aspx are both nearly useless. All distribution is apparently via arcane local offices and trade channels.