Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999
Page 25
It is clear, then, that Pereira and Chapman aim for more in their edition than merely to put back into print, in a handy, inexpensive form, a canonical poet – canonical at least in South African terms – whose work has not for a while been easily available. Their aim is to reclaim for Pringle a status as a writer commensurate with his historical status, and thereby to some extent to redress the balance of South African literary history in favour of historically particular writers of the liberal Left, like Pringle, as against mythically oriented writers of the Right, like Roy Campbell.
Pereira and Chapman conduct their case not only in a solid and capably argued introductory essay, but by means of an extensive editorial apparatus that reprints Pringle’s explanatory notes to his poems as well as illuminating extracts from his Narrative. In addition, following Robert Wahl’s researches of 1970, they supply accounts of the complex textual history of the poems and, in certain key cases, scrutinise Pringle’s revisions.
The question remains, however, whether the category of ‘African poems’ has any substance. Editorially, the question presents itself in a different form: if we are not to have a Collected Poems, is the best alternative to separate the ‘African’ poems from the ‘Scottish’ poems, or should we not instead produce a Selected Poems comprising the best of Pringle’s verse, whatever its provenance?
To some extent, the latter question is answered by the brute fact that the only body of readers Pringle can expect to engage nowadays is in South Africa; and these readers have no reason to be interested in his sub-Romantic Scottish versifying. For Pringle to come alive to anyone but a specialist he must, as his editors say, be read historically, against the background of early-nineteenth-century British colonial penetration of southern Africa.
Nevertheless, there is a certain danger in basing Pringle’s claim to continuing relevance on his fidelity to ‘real concerns’ and ‘actual people’, as against what the editors rather tendentiously call ‘myths and phantoms of the colonial psyche’. (pp. xxiii, xxiv) After the dedicatory verses to Walter Scott, the first and one of the most famous of Pringle’s Poems Illustrative of South Africa is ‘The Bechuana Boy’. This poem, as we learn from Pringle’s notes and correspondence, draws on a real-life person, an orphan named Hinza Marossi who fell under Pringle’s protection, returned with him to England and died there shortly afterwards. Hinza’s life-story tells us a great deal about banditry, slavery and the destruction of communal life on and beyond the nominal frontiers of the Colony in the 1820s. Hinza is an ‘actual person’ in more than a trivial sense. But we derive his actuality more from Pringle’s notes and letters than from the poem itself, which, aside from the frank liberties it takes with facts (Pringle acknowledges, for instance, that, while the boy of the poem wanders the desert with a tame springbok fawn, the real Hinza had no such pet), through its diction draws us away from the specificity of Africa towards a generalised landscape of the Romantic sublime dotted with the more celebrated African mammalian fauna. Here, for instance, is Hinza telling of how the slavers drove their captives across the Gariep [Orange] River:
Hoarse-roaring, dark, the broad Gareep
In turbid streams was sweeping fast,
Huge sea-cows in its eddies deep
Loud snorting as we passed;
But that relentless robber clan
Right through those waters wild and wan
Drove on like sheep our wearied band:
– Some never reached the farther strand. (p. 5)
This is not to deny that stories like Hinza’s, reconceived in the poetic imagination, retold in ballad form, could evoke pathos and awaken outrage in their British readers and thereby enter history as forces for change. It is simply to say that, in turning story into poetry, Pringle rather uninventively assimilates his data under the categories provided for him by the dominant poetic models of his time and place. Hinza is indeed not a ‘myth or phantom of the colonial psyche’, but he does merge into a line of abused European children, and is in this sense a figure already prepared in the European imagination for discovery in Africa (his fawn, exotic equivalent of a lamb, is a giveaway, a merely literary emblem of pastoral innocence).
In other words, in converting experience into poetry Pringle, partly because this was the line of least resistance for his derivative talent but partly also because such was his intention, generalises from the African particular to the universal (in fact the European universal) in the best manner of the country-life poets of the generation before Wordsworth, whom he admired and copied – particularly James Thomson. It is certainly possible, using all the textual sources available to us, to read back into the poem some of its historical fullness; but we must recognise that to read Pringle thus is to some extent to read him against the grain, counter to his own poetic exertions. It is, literally, to miss the poetry, indifferent poetry though it is.
22 Daphne Rooke
I
DAPHNE ROOKE WAS born in 1914 in the then Transvaal province of South Africa. Her mother came from a prominent Afrikaans family; her father, who was English-speaking, died in the First World War. Educated in English-language schools, Daphne, née Pizzey, was also at home in Afrikaans language and culture; an uncle, Leon Maré, still occupies a minor niche in Afrikaans literary history. Through spending part of her childhood in Zululand, she became familiar with the Zulu language and Zulu customs; her novel Wizards’ Country, set in the Zulu kingdom of the 1870s, is one of the more thoroughgoing efforts of empathic identification by a white writer with a black world-view, albeit an imagined one.
In 1946 Rooke won a contest for new writers, for which the prize was publication of her manuscript (ironically by an Afrikaans publishing house – until the 1970s English-language publishing in South Africa tended to wait rather timidly for London’s lead). Retitled A Grove of Fever Trees, her novel came out in 1950 in the United States, and then in Britain. It was soon followed by Mittee (1951), which was widely translated and brought Rooke her first taste of fame and fortune. During the next fifteen years she produced a series of successful novels (Ratoons, 1953; Wizards’ Country, 1957; A Lover for Estelle, 1961; The Greyling, 1962; Diamond Jo, 1965), as well as children’s books. Though widely read, she was not regarded (and perhaps did not regard herself) as a serious writer: her romances of blood and passion set in bygone times or in incestuous settler communities – ‘colonial Gothic’, one critic called them – seemed to have little relevance to the great issues of the day.
Married in 1937 to an Australian, Irvin Rooke, Daphne Rooke left South Africa for Australia definitively in 1965. There she wrote Boy on the Mountain (1969), set in New Zealand, and Margaretha de la Porte (1974), set in nineteenth-century South Africa, as well as more children’s fiction.
Since 1987, when Mittee was republished in South Africa, there has been a rebirth of interest in Rooke in her native land. To a large extent this interest has been generated by feminist readers of a body of literature, colonial and postcolonial, shaped to an unusual extent by women writers. The originating South African novelist was Olive Schreiner (1855–1920); the 1920s and 1930s were dominated by Pauline Smith (1882–1959) and Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889–1968); the pre-eminent figure since the 1950s has been Nadine Gordimer (born 1923); while the formative period spent by Doris Lessing (born 1919) in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa earns her a foothold in the tradition. The first question to ask, then, is whether Rooke belongs in the line of Schreiner, Smith, Gordimer and Lessing, writers engaged with moral and political issues of class, race and gender in South Africa, and with the deeper human problems of colonial and postcolonial southern Africa in general, or with Millin (say) and the exploitation for literary/commercial ends of the more spectacularly violent features of South African life, the more picturesque episodes of South African history.
II
‘Sometimes she forgets I am a coloured girl and calls me Sister. I love her and I hate her.’1
The ‘coloured girl’ who speaks is Selina; the ‘she’ who
sometimes calls her sister is her childhood playmate Mittee, to whom she is now bodyservant, confidante and sexual rival. In a more equal world would Mittee and Selina be true sisters, would there be love and no hatred between them? Sceptically one answers, no: the germ of sexual rivalry lies too deep. What makes Daphne Rooke’s Mittee different, then, from any other story of two girls competing for the same man – a man who in this case happens to be worthy of neither of them?
The answer has to do with the racial caste system of colonial South Africa (Mittee is set in the old Transvaal, but the mores and prejudices of Paul Kruger’s Republic, as Rooke presents them, are no different from those of the Cape Colony). Selina desires Mittee’s beau, the villain Paul du Plessis, because Mittee (in her milk-and-water way) desires him, because Mittee is the object of Selina’s obsessive imitation in all affairs, because to Selina her own desires are by definition inauthentic, the desires of ‘a coloured girl’. The stratifications that set white and black in worlds apart, and leave ‘a coloured girl’ wandering in no girl’s land between them, define the consciousness of Mittee and Selina and of everyone in their society – everyone except the missionary doctor Basil Castledene who, formed not in the colonies but in England, will eventually open Mittee’s eyes to the error of her ways and take her away to civilisation. What makes Rooke’s girl-rivals different, then, is that one of them, the disadvantaged one, acts as a sexual being not out of pride of the body, not to assert her own desire and desirability, but in order to enact the desires, and to have a far-off experience of the desirability, of the rival who obsesses her, yet whom she can no more be than the leopard can change its spots.
This is by no means the whole story, however. It is the story that Selina, as storyteller, allows to emerge. But we would not be attributing excessive subtlety to Daphne Rooke, behind Selina, to wonder whether there is not a degree of self-deception in Selina’s story, perhaps even a degree of willed self-deception. For though Selina tells a story in which the desires of white girls are authentic and the desires of coloured girls mere pathetic imitations, the novel Mittee tells a story in which Selina is the passionate woman whom Paul, once he has had a taste of her, cannot leave alone, while Mittee, confined by propriety as much as by layer after layer of clothing, is barred from fulfilment, moving from the shock and disillusionment of the nuptial bed through a phase of embittered contraception to what one can only imagine as ethereal transports with Castledene. In other words, there is a second story looming behind the first, a story invisible to its teller, in which Selina, by virtue of her colour, is the child of nature to whom pleasure comes naturally, while Mittee remains a frustrated heir of civilisation and its contempt for the body.
It is to be doubted whether Rooke sees through, or even consciously recognises that she is here invoking, a myth of the black man – and even more the black woman – as a creature of nature in instinctive touch with his/her own desires, a myth which the greater colonial enterprise had no difficulty in incorporating into its stock of received ideas, particularly since its obverse side is that the black is slave to his or her own desires, incapable of those sublimations from which higher cultures grow. One is not even sure whether, at this stage of her career, Rooke questions the folklore that the merest touch of ‘black blood’ makes one in essence black, a child of nature, wild.
There are two related episodes in Mittee that are clearly intended by Rooke to reflect on the question of wildness and civilisation. In one episode a half-tamed baboon slips its chain and terrorises the women of the farm until Castledene arrives to calm it and lead it away. Because the farmers are away fighting the British, there is no one to protect their women; the baboon stands for the wildness that conquest has penned up but which may erupt as soon as the iron colonial grip is relaxed. (Shortly after this episode two black men do indeed exploit the absence of the farmers to go on a rampage. To her credit, Rooke does not indulge in the ne plus ultra of colonial horror-fantasies, the rape of a white woman, though she does come close to it. As for the offenders, the colonial grip soon reasserts itself: they are tracked down to the mission station and summarily castrated.)
But there is a second captive ape in the novel, a female with a ‘tragic’ face which sits on its pole, forever staring toward the mountains, where ‘its tribe lived its thrilling life’. Under Castledene’s tutelage, Mittee sets the animal free. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing I ever saw!’ cries Mittee as it races away. (p. 157) Wonderful indeed; but, in the context of Rooke’s parables of captivity, what does it mean? What is Mittee learning should be unchained, and what is the admiring Selina (also half in love with Castledene, though too overwhelmed with awe to do anything about it), telling the story over Mittee’s shoulder, learning too? And what of ourselves, Rooke’s readers: what are we being told?
I will not pursue the point because it is here, more or less, that Rooke loses control of her tale. And not only in Mittee: in other novels as well (most damagingly in A Lover for Estelle) she has recourse, when it takes a certain courage to face the issues she has stirred, to whisking her characters off into the wilds, away from civilisation and its nagging discontents, to face life-and-death adventures instead. It is this habit of evading the implications of her own fables, this rather easy way of bringing novels to an end, that most damagingly backs the charge that Rooke is a mere romancer, out of her depth with larger issues.
Thus far I have treated Selina as playing out the myth of the half-caste (the bastard, in even blunter old-style racist terminology) as a divided self, yearning to be white and civilised, drawn back willy-nilly to the darkness of nature by her never wholly submerged blackness. In South African literature, this is a myth exploited particularly by Sarah Gertrude Millin in her widely read novel God’s Step-Children (1924). God’s step-children are, in Millin’s words (from a preface she wrote to are-issue of the novel in 1951, the year in which Mittee appeared), ‘the mixed breeds of South Africa, those . . . who must [my emphasis] always suffer’. ‘Mixed blood’ is, to Millin, the source of ‘tragedy’: God’s Step-Children tracks, through generation after generation of a single family, the tragic workings of the taint of black blood in the lives of those unfortunate enough to bear it.
Millin inherited from European and American biology of the nineteenth century an entire pseudo-science of degeneration which associated race-mixing with the decline of civilisation. Political discourse in South Africa between the world wars is full of reference to this pseudo-science. While in the West the atrocious extremes to which the prescriptions of racial eugenics were carried under Hitler had the effect of driving the science of degeneration underground, and perhaps even of killing it, the shadow of the Nuremberg trials passed over South Africa too lightly to drive the lesson home: the laws of apartheid passed after 1948 depended heavily on it for their justification.
In line with conventional wisdom about people of mixed race, Rooke portrays Selina as a divided self. The question of what kind of self Selina’s posterity will have is finessed by having her left sterile after an assault by a jealous lover. But, one must add, there is no hint that Selina bears the fatal, protogenetic flaw of degeneracy (her experiment with home-made brandy does not mark the beginning of a slide into alcoholism, for instance), and indeed her end is by no means tragic: sundered from her beloved Mittee, she nevertheless achieves modest happiness with the dutiful, easily pleased Fanie, while the tyrant Paul meets with a well-deserved nasty end.
III
Rooke returned to the triangle of the Mittee-Paul-Selina type twice more in her career, developing different aspects of it.
In 1962 she published The Greyling, an altogether more sombre book than Mittee, written in the shadow of the so-called Immorality Act. A young coloured woman who bears her white lover’s child is murdered by him as he desperately tries to protect himself from exposure. The murderer’s parents, conventional Afrikaners and supporters of the government, undergo a catharsis of pity and terror, adopt the child and leave the country.
&n
bsp; Like Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope (1953), The Greyling records the devastation wrought by a law that sought to police the most intimate acts. (The South African censors struck back at once, banning the book.) It is Rooke’s most overtly political novel, one in which she adopts, not without unease, the mode of naturalistic tragedy practised by Hardy and Dreiser. The tragedy she sees, however, is not Millin’s tragedy of blood, in which misfortune proceeds inexorably from a taint in the blood, but the tragedy that results when a fragile and unequal sexual relationship is placed under threat of public censure and legal prosecution. The coloured woman in Rooke’s story is friendless and socially isolated, the white boy has a streak of sadism (to say nothing of racism) in him; disaster is inevitable.
In 1974 Rooke re-explored the Mittee–Selina rivalry in a novel of failing power, Margaretha de la Porte. The wealthy heiress Margaretha has a Bushman servant and ‘sister’, a vulgar, irreverent shadow of herself, envied and punished for the satisfying and ‘natural’ sex life she seems capable of enjoying. After some highly implausible machinery has been brought in to justify the move, Margaretha, in an act of mercy, strangles her mortally wounded shadow-sister with her bare hands; the book ends with an unhappy Margaretha, thwarted as an artist, baffled in her desires, facing the whispered censure of her community.
Thus far I have treated the tensions with which Rooke deals, and which structure her books, as racial in nature. But the murderous Paul in Mittee and Maarten in The Greyling are not only whites exercising white power, they are men exercising male power in the crudest of ways. Rooke’s novels are full of male violence. A farmer stifles his dying wife’s newborn child, forcing his daughter to bring up her own illegitimate baby in its place (Ratoons). A German baron packs off his gifted but eccentric young bride to a bleak asylum to have the nonsense knocked out of her (Margaretha de la Porte). A teenage boy rapes and kills an insufficiently welcoming girl (Boy on the Mountain). An Indian husband rapes his eight-year-old bride (Ratoons). A miner rapes and casually disposes of a woman (Diamond Jo). An attractive, simple-minded boy turns out to be a murderous psychopath (A Grove of Fever Trees).