Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  ‘What do you think happened to our comrades?’ Nadine keeps on asking.

  But I don’t have any answer. I can offer some cliché like ‘power corrupts’, but it does not provide us with any insight into the specific problem of her comrades in her party, the ANC, who always occupied the moral high ground during the liberation struggle and who sacrificed careers and families in pursuit of justice, fairness and equality, but whose snouts are now buried deep in the troughs of corporate crony capitalism.

  ‘If the domination of business by government is socialism and the domination of government by business is fascism,’ I offer unhelpfully, ‘in South Africa we have these opposites in an unnatural coexistence. This breeds the double-dosage of corruption and patronage we see in our country today.’

  I know that my characterisation of our system and my definition of the ‘-isms’ are simplistic, but they do serve my anger at the damage that our leaders are doing to my country. Nadine thinks I am making the situation sound bleaker than it really is. I think she still has faith in her ANC comrades. I lost it long ago. When I wrote to Nelson Mandela I still thought the situation could be saved. I gradually lost hope with the next administration. Now, of course, there is wholesale plunder.

  Nadine wants to know what I teach in America and when I tell her that I teach creative writing she laughs and says, ‘But you know that creative writing cannot be taught. You and I were not taught.’

  I don’t think she is correct on either count. The craft and techniques of writing can be taught, just as those of painting or acting or singing can be taught. What cannot be taught are the flair and the artistic vision. Raw talent alone is not of much use if it is not refined, polished and channelled in the right direction. When Nadine says we were not taught, she means that we did not go to any formal class or workshop to learn how to write. We are self-taught. But self-taught writers are taught by other writers whose work they read and emulate. They are also taught by friends, family, neighbours and school teachers who read their work and give them feedback. And, by the way, that’s what a workshop does, albeit in a more formal, organised and distilled environment. So, Nadine and I were taught after all.

  The following week Gugu and I go to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown to launch The Plays of Zakes Mda, which have been translated into isiXhosa, isiZulu, Southern Sesotho, isiNdebele, Setswana, Siswati, Xitsonga, Northern Sesotho and Tshivenda. This is where we meet a poet called Natalia Molebatsi who works for my publishers, the University of South Africa Press. We fall in love with her and establish a strong friendship. She encourages us to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. I have always been inclined towards vegetarianism even as I devoured huge chunks of pork. I have always felt bad for the animals I was eating but did not have the courage to do anything about it. Even after Natalia has given us encouragement we don’t do anything about it and continue cannibalising other creatures unabated.

  It is only on a subsequent visit to South Africa that something happens that forces us to think twice about eating meat. Gugu has moved to Twin Oaks, a townhouse complex in Randpark Ridge. I buy a plump duck that I first steam for her. I then bake it after basting it in a mixture of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, white pepper, soy sauce and honey. After I have done the job it looks really good and we are looking forward to eating it. Just as we are preparing to serve the meal we hear some quacking sounds outside. When we open the door there is a mother duck and her ducklings standing on the doorstep looking at us admonishingly. We quickly close the door.

  ‘There’s no way I can eat this meat now,’ I say.

  ‘Nor me,’ says Gugu.

  We dump that whole duck into the dustbin. From that day we stop eating meat altogether. In fact, Gugu had started earlier by giving up pork after she saw on television how pigs were slaughtered. She had kept only to ostrich, chicken and fish. But after the visit of the ducks we decide to stop eating all creatures of the sea or land or air.

  We are committed vegetarians but we don’t proselytise about it. Ours is a live-and-let-live attitude. I, for one, do recognise the fact that for humanity to survive the harsh environment of past eons it was necessary to bludgeon each other to death and to eat other sentient beings. That’s how we evolved to be what we are. But I think now we have reached a stage where some of us have evolved to such a high level that our warrior gene has diminished and we have become squeamish about death. We can therefore survive quite healthily on the non-sentient bounty of the earth, without visiting acts of violence upon each other and on those creatures we deem to be of a lower order.

  After completing my one year contract as Visiting Professor I decide to stay, this time not reluctantly but because this is the place for me. I have nothing to go back to in South Africa because all doors are closed for me there. I was surviving by my writing before I came to America, but I don’t need to be physically there to write. And I can continue to contribute to the development of my people through the beekeeping project, the workshops I hold for writers at the Market Theatre and my work with the HIV-positive people, while living in the quiet and peaceful environment of Athens, Ohio. I handle a lot of the work while I am here, thanks to the Internet, and spend a few months each year working directly with the people in South Africa. I have discovered that here I am able to write undisturbed by the demands on my time in South Africa where people seem misguidedly to think that I am some kind of a celebrity. Here, in rural Ohio, I am a nobody and am able to lead a quiet life. Even those people who may know that there is an international writer of sorts in their midst don’t associate that writer with me.

  The most important reason I decide to stay is that my children have fallen in love with their school and I am going to feel very bad if I uproot them once again and take them back to South Africa. Zenzi actually does ask me not to take them back to South Africa.

  The third reason is that I begin to smell a story after attending a party at Steve Howard’s house. He is the head of African Studies. At his party I find myself being an audience to an argument about the distinction between the Mulengeons and the WIN people. I learn that the Mulengeons are descendants of the Roma people, the so-called Gypsies, whereas the WIN people are tri-racial, descending from Whites, Indians and Negroes. A film professor called Charles Fox tells us stories about his own family which is WIN. I decide there and then that I want to pursue the WIN people. There may be a story there somewhere.

  I apply for a vacant position in African Literature and go through the motions of interviews and job talks. But before I can take up this post, a creative writing professor called Jack Matthews retires and I am offered his position. This, for me, is a much better job than the African Literature one and I take it without hesitation. In South Africa I had thought I was done with academia for the rest of my life, but thanks to Adele I am in Athens, Ohio, as a Full Professor in the English Department.

  But life is not getting any better with her. There is too much strain on us because the divorce is not through yet. There is very little communication between us even though we live under the same roof. I moved out of the main bedroom long since and have confiscated Zenzi’s room. She now sleeps in her mother’s bedroom. Adele and I rarely talk but communicate our frustrations with each other through email. As a result I have a box full of hundreds of emails that will be fodder for researchers one day. I’ll only quote a few lines from some real mild ones in this book, otherwise you’ll think I’m being vindictive or tasteless or both if I blurt out those with X-rated language directed at me and my body parts.

  Out of the blue she writes: I am trying by all means to make our lives easy but you seem to be trying your level best to create a hostile environment around us. I am and shall continue to be nice to you as much as I can for the sake of the children. I am happy that she undertakes to be nice to me for the sake of the children, but in reality I never see the niceness. I respond: Although I don’t know what hostile environment I created lately I apologise. It is obvious that just seeing me around f
ills you with anger. Throughout I have been quiet and keeping very much to myself. I have no intention of creating any hostile environment.

  I finally decide to move out. We reach a verbal agreement that she will have custody of the children and they will visit me every other weekend. That’s all the visitation I need. I leave her with the Nissan while I buy myself a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I will also continue to pay the rent and all their living expenses. I pack my bags and book into a hotel for a few days, until I find a two-bedroom apartment on Pomeroy Road on the same side of town as the Ridges where Adele and the kids live. I furnish every room of my apartment and set up a workstation in my bedroom with a laptop and resume writing The Whale Caller. I teach only two days a week and on the other days I write the novel.

  But when it’s the weekend visitation with the kids I stop all the writing and spend the time with them. I take them to amusement parks and theme parks in neighbouring cities and states. It is like I am making up for the rest of the time I am not with them.

  I finally complete the novel. It is the only one of my novels that doesn’t draw from specific historical events in southern Africa. It was suggested to me by a real-life incident, though; a newspaper story about two kids in the Western Cape who stoned a village drunk to death because they were bored. I created my own Bored Twins who do not in any way share a history with the original killer girls. The novel was also suggested by a story I saw on television about the whale crier of Hermanus. The television story gave me the impression that the guy, in black tails and tricorne, blew his horn and the whales came sailing towards him. On a visit to the University of Cape Town I asked my biographer Dorothy Steele to take me to Hermanus to see the magical whale crier. We spent the whole day in the town, my first visit there. I was disappointed to discover that the whale crier did not call whales at all, but tourists. He blew his kelp horn to inform tourists about the presence and location of the whales and the tourists could interpret the meaning of the staccato of his horn decoded on the sandwich board that he wore. I said to myself: if this whale crier cannot call whales, I am going to create my own who can. My second visit to the town was with Gugu, and here I was consolidating the geography of my novel vis-à-vis that of the town and the surrounding villages.

  The names of the characters in the novel were suggested by Zenzi when I was playing with her in her room in Weltevredenpark. I asked her to think of a name, any name. And without any hesitation she said, ‘Sharisha’. That sounded like the name of a whale to me and therefore I was going to have a specific whale character called Sharisha. If Zenzi had not thought of the name there would have been no such character. My fictional whale crier would be blowing his horn for whales in general. I asked her to think of another name and she said ‘Saluni’. Mind you, these were just names that she invented. There are no such names in our culture, or in any culture that we knew of. I decided that Saluni would be the village drunk.

  Now the novel is complete. It has drained me emotionally to such an extent that when I get to the final period I break down and cry. I cry for a long time.

  At about that time my New York publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publish the American edition of The Madonna of Excelsior. It receives great reviews from all the major papers. Later it wins the second prize of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and is also selected by the American Library Association as one of the twenty-five notable books of 2005. Of course, I am absolutely ecstatic about this. Do you know how many books of all types, not just novels, are published in America every year? Thousands. If your book is chosen by a group of people whose lives are books as one of the best twenty-five out of the thousands, you have no right not to wet yourself with joy.

  The next summer I go to South Africa as usual to work with the Bee People and, of course, to see my mother, Gugu, Neo, Thandi and all of Sonwabo’s children. During this time I also teach my regular playwriting workshops at the Market Theatre and creative writing workshops with HIV-positive people at the Anglican Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown.

  I get a message that my sister Thami is seriously ill and I go to Mafeteng to see her only to find that I am too late. She is dead. It turns out that she died of AIDS. But Gugu and I know that she really died of denial. We have experience enough of working with HIV-positive people to know that they can lead normal lives with the virus for years, as long as they protect and take care of themselves. After her Master’s degree in Forced Migration at the University of the Witwatersrand, Gugu did a postgraduate diploma in the Management of HIV-AIDS at the Workplace at the Medical University of South Africa in Pretoria. Following a stint organising campaigns for Amnesty International, she now works for an organisation called Love Life which aims to educate the youth on HIV-AIDS. I, on the other hand, work with HIV-positive people in the organisation that I founded in Sophiatown. In Lesotho, where my sister lived, HIV-AIDS still carries a lot of stigma, even though it is so prevalent that every weekend in a small town like Mafeteng there are at least five funerals of its victims. We still believe that if my sister had undergone tests early on, and had then taken the necessary treatment, she would be alive today. Gugu and I test quite regularly and we advise our relatives to do so as well. Thami resisted any testing. She said that she would rather not know. When she was forced by the illness to test it was too late. She already had full-blown AIDS and she died.

  At the wake, her son Dumisani, who is a missionary in Germany and the United Kingdom, gives a moving sermon, and at the funeral I take the opportunity to preach about HIV-AIDS. People are impressed that we do not hide the fact that our sister died of AIDS as families usually do. We use her death as a teaching moment. My mother is very distraught. ‘We don’t expect children to die before their parents,’ she keeps on saying.

  Later that summer Gugu and I go for HIV tests at our doctor’s office in Melville. We invite Thandi to come along. We get the results immediately. Gugu and I are both negative but Thandi is positive. She is distressed and flustered. We are there for her, and we are both good counsellors. We assure her that we’ll be there every step of the way. Gugu teaches her how to take care of herself, what kind of food she should eat and what exercises she should do daily. She follows the regimen and she continues to be a very healthy woman taking care of her son to this day.

  Back in America, Adele starts to harass me with telephone calls, accusing me of stealing the documents that prove that I own the beekeeping property in the Eastern Cape. But, strangely, she does not report the theft to the police. She is lying, of course, because there were never such documents in the first place. When I point this out to her, advising her that she can always apply for duplicates of the documents she claims I have stolen, she threatens me with death. She does not say she will kill me herself, but makes some vague prophecies about my impending demise. I take her threats seriously and report the matter to the police. Not the university police this time, since I no longer live on a university property, but to the city police. She claims that all she said was ‘your dirty heart which is full of cruelty and spite will kill you soon’.

  Well, we all leave it at that.

  When I go to fetch the children at the weekend, she refuses to let them come with me. She says that from now on I must give her two weeks’ notice before I can have them for the weekend. She stands at the door and says I cannot come in to pick them up, nor can they come out to join me. I do not want to create a scene. I have no choice but to go back to my apartment without them. I sit down at my computer and write her an email giving her the two-weeks’ notice for the next visitation, and notices for all the subsequent fortnightly visitations for the next six months.

  On the appointed day she does release the children to me but tells me that she rejects all the notices that I have given all at once because they are not two-week notices. I must give one two-week notice at a time.

  When I return the kids on the Sunday evening she is very angry with me because I took them to my office and I walked on campus with them. She warns me neve
r to do that again, otherwise I will not have the children again.

  ‘You have no right to stop me from seeing my children,’ I say. ‘Why should I not see them when they are here in this country because of me and I am their sole support?’

  ‘You are not our sole support,’ she says.

  I don’t know what she means by that. As far as I know she is not working anywhere. I discover only much later that she has propagated a story at the university and elsewhere in town that I have abandoned her and the children and they receive no financial support from me. Apparently I did this after meeting another woman since coming to Athens, Ohio. She, who used to be a staunch Catholic, has now joined a charismatic church which is known for its charitable works among the destitute. She has sold the pastors her woeful story and they begin to collect donations for her. That is why I am no longer their sole support.

  Ours is a small town where gossip travels fast. She gets a lot of sympathy from the townspeople, and even from some of my colleagues in the English Department, because she is supposedly a poor African woman who resigned from a lucrative job in Johannesburg and accompanied her husband to America to support his career, uprooting the children from their school in the process, only to be abandoned by the unscrupulous husband for another woman. Worse still, the husband has allegedly deserted his children as well, leaving them without any means of support. Even East Elementary School buys into this narrative. I discover that my children are getting free lunch at school because their mother is destitute and their father does not provide any financial support.

  No wonder she does not want me to be seen with the children on campus. My frolicking around with happy children messes up her neat narrative.