Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  The land, says Breytenbach, belongs to no one, and the correct relation to the land is the nomad’s: live on it, live off it, move on; find ways of loving it without becoming bound to it. This is the lesson he teaches his French-born daughter, a child clearly drawn to the wildness and freedom of the country, as he takes her around the sacred sites of memory. Do not become too attached, he warns. “We are painted in the colours of disappearance here . . . We are only visiting . . . It must die away.”32

  The elegiac tone that suffuses much of Dog Heart and distinguishes it from the previous memoirs comes in part from Breytenbach’s sense of growing old and needing to begin to make farewells, in part from a Buddhist outlook in which worldly attachments retard the progress of the soul (this is the religious side of his ethics of nomadism), but also in part from a sense that the world into which he was born cannot survive. Dog Heart is the first of his prose works in which Breytenbach allows himself to articulate what emerges with intense feeling in the more private world of his poetry: that he comes out of a rural way of life which, despite being based on a colonial dispensation with all its manifold injustices, had become autochthonously African to a remarkable extent; and that in the same moment that the head condemns this way of life and judges it must perish, the heart must mourn its passing. (In this respect Breytenbach is suddenly and strikingly reminiscent of William Faulkner.)

  In the tentative and ambivalent reconciliation that has taken place between Breytenbach and Afrikaners of the old breed, it is the Afrikaners who have had to make the greater shift. In losing political power, including control over the public media, the people from whom Breytenbach dissociated himself in 1983 have lost their power to dictate what an Afrikaner has to be, namely, a “white” of North-European descent, an ethnic nationalist, a Calvinist, a patriarchalist. Dog Heart speaks for a countercurrent in which fragments of groups in disarray begin to define themselves, and perhaps even to assert themselves, in a new way, cohering this time not around a political philosophy but around a shared language larger and wiser than the sum of its speakers, and a shared history, bitter and divided though that history may be.

  IV

  Sharing a language, a feel for the land, a history, perhaps even blood, with “my people,”33 the people of his Heartland, Breytenbach exchanges words with men and women of all states and conditions. Some of these exchanges disconcert him. The (brown) men who renovate his house treat him (the most celebrated poet in their language!) as a foreigner. Accompanying his brother—who stands as an independent candidate in the 1994 elections—on his canvassing rounds, he hears at first hand the level of brown prejudice against blacks. (His informants may of course be playing games with him: they are as much—or as little—Afrikaner as he, and of the Afrikaner, “stupid but sly,” he himself writes, “my morning prattle and my night tattle are cut from the cloth which suits my interlocutor.”34

  At the dark heart of the memoir lies an event that Breytenbach alludes to several times but never explains. It would appear that at the age of seven he had a choking fit and stopped breathing, that in a sense he died and was reborn as a second Breyten (his very name, he points out, is like an echo; one of his poetic identities is Lazarus). “When I look into the mirror I know that the child born here is dead. It has been devoured by the dog.”35 So returning to the land of the dog is in a sense a search for the grave of the dead child, the child dead within him.

  In the town museum—where the bust of D. F. Malan, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954, has been discreetly relegated to a storeroom—Breytenbach comes upon a photograph of his great-grandmother Rachel Susanna Keet (d. 1915). From the archives he learns that as a midwife she brought most of the children of Montagu, brown and white, into the world; that she lived unconventionally, adopting and raising a brown child who was not her own. He and his wife search for Rachel Susanna’s grave but cannot find it. So they take over one of the old unmarked graves in the graveyard, adopting it, so to speak, in her name. The book ends on this emblematic note, with Breytenbach marking out, in the name of his dead ancestor rather than of his living child, the most humble of family stakes in Africa.

  V

  Citizen of France, most untranslatable of Afrikaans poets, Breytenbach has published this account of his re-exploration of his African roots in English, a language of which his mastery is by now almost complete. In this respect he follows his countryman André Brink and a host of other writers (including black African writers) from small language communities.

  The reason for his step is, one would guess, practical: the market for books in Afrikaans is small and dwindling. Breytenbach certainly does not resort to English as a gesture of fellowship with English-speaking South African whites, for whom he has never had much time. Nevertheless, it is odd to be faced with a book in English that is so much a celebration of the folksy earthiness of Afrikaans nomenclature, that follows with such attention the nuances of Afrikaans social dialect, and that entertains without reserve the notion that there is a sensibility attuned to the South African natural world which is uniquely fostered by the Afrikaans language.

  There is a wider body of what I would call sentimental orthodoxy that Breytenbach seems to accept without much reserve. Much of this orthodoxy relates to what present-day cultural politics calls “first peoples” and South African folk idiom “the old people”: the San and the Khoi. In two widely-read and influential books, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) and The Heart of the Hunter (1961), Laurens van der Post presented the San (“Bushmen”) as the original Africans, bearers of archaic wisdom, on the brink of extinction in a world for which their gentle culture rendered them tragically unfit. Breytenbach records moving twilight utterances of nineteenth-century San, while sometimes lapsing into van der Post-like romanticizing as well (“small sinewy men [with] an inbred knowledge of the drift of clouds and the lay of mountains”). 36 But his main aim is to suggest that the old San and Khoi myths live on today in unconscious re-enactments: a woman who bites off her rapist’s penis, for instance, is repeating the trick of the Khoi mantis-god. Passages of Dog Heart carry a whiff of hand-me-down Latin American magic realism. The case for an unarticulated psychic continuity between old and new brown people is similarly unpersuasive, while the recounting of the myths has an obligatory air about it, as if they are being copied over from other books.

  Breytenbach’s current political beliefs are spelled out in the essays collected in The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (1996). Insofar as he is still a political animal, his program can be summed up as “fighting for revolution against politics.”37 In Dog Heart, however, his politics is implied rather than explained. Quarrels and antipathies emerge in the form of casual side-swipes: at white liberals, at the Communist Party colony within the ANC, at the Coloured middle class that has found a home for itself in the old National Party (rebaptized the New National Party, and still, after the 1999 elections, holding on to power in places like Montagu), at the “dogs of God” (Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the new artistic and academic establishment with its stifling political correctness. A brief brush with Nelson Mandela is recounted, from which Mandela emerges in none too favorable a light. Thus Breytenbach keeps the promise he made in Return to Paradise: to be a maverick, “against the norm.”

  Like Breytenbach’s other memoirs, Dog Heart is loose, almost miscellaneous, in its structure. Part journal, part essay on autobiography, part book of the dead, part what one might call speculative history, it also contains searching meditations on the elusiveness of memory and passages of virtuoso writing—a description of a thunderstorm, for instance—breathtaking in the immediacy of their evocation of Africa.

  YVONNE VERA

  • Zimbabwe •

  DEAD SWIMMERS

  SHE LOOKS UP. Smiles. I reach for her.

  The jacket my grandmother wears is no longer as red as when my mother first bought it. Then, in those days, when my mother was the age I am at now
, we used to stare at my mother as though she was possessed. She would wear it and listen to Bob Marley singing “No Woman No Cry.” Now she says this song is “no longer relevant.” My mother is a school teacher. She uses words like “pedantic.” She can look at Grandmother in the eye and say “pedantic.” At this Gogo just curls her legs further under her and waits for my mother to be sensible. We call my grandmother Gogo. She speaks only one language. Shona. Sometimes, like today, she says “Good morning.” Then she throws her head back and you can see her give you all the luck in the world.

  My mother does not mind listening to a remake of “Furuwa.” This is a song we both liked in 1979. It is the story of two lovers sitting on the crest of a wave. The music of the waves is their music, and they are swallowed by crystal showers and the clearest sand where water meets land. Then a deep foam surrounds them. They disappear, beneath it, in the music of their love. They die a happy death. They die like stars falling from the sky. They have been accepted by the great water spirit which blows upon the shimmering fabric of the sea and makes the water ripple in a violent whiteness, then wave follows wave. Neither my mother nor I have ever been to the sea. However, we have no doubt that “Furuwa” is a good song.

  When we bought “Furuwa” in 1979 there were many copies of it at Anand Brothers along 6th Avenue and Fort Street in Bulawayo. Now there is nothing like it. We think this is due to independence, which arrived in 1980. Instead, the record seller looks at us blankly and offers us the new music called Di Gong. In a fit of maternal love my mother had placed the only copy of the record in an envelope and sent it to me when I was in boarding school. By the time it arrived it was broken in two. I threw it quickly in the bin and wrote to my mother. My mother says “if something hurts you then move quickly from it. It is like the sun. It is foolish to stare at the sun all day with the eyes wide open.” I threw the record away without looking at it a second time. I wrote to her “Thank you for the waves. The waves have been broken.” I could hear my mother’s cry as I wrote that. Her sound was louder than that of the waves. I thought perhaps if I have a child I will call her Furuwa.

  When she wants to pay the greatest tribute to Gogo my mother often says “your grandmother taught me to hate lightning.” My mother will not even answer a telephone when there is rain outside. She goes to her bed at the first sign of lightning and covers her body with a thick blanket. If you talk to her she will not raise her head from the pillow but answer in a muffled voice which tells you not to disturb her peace. We all wait for the lightning to go away.

  Today Gogo has a green clothes peg pinned to her red jacket. She tries to get up when I arrive but fails. She staggers back to the floor, beside the blue door where she has been sitting. I rush through the gate, past the lemons, the pawpaw trees, the guava tree. The guava tree which has never given birth to anything but green leaves. I rush through the tears which are always welling at the bottom of Gogo’s eyes. Gogo calls me a small wind which you can only feel on the tip of your ear. She says I started walking before I could crawl.

  “A woman who cannot forgive her husband’s infidelity can climb the highest tree in her village and drop her infant to the ground,” I hear Gogo say in her old red coat which used to belong to my mother. When it starts raining Gogo removes the coat quickly and hides it in a large black trunk. She pushes the trunk under her bed. “Red must be placed in darkness when it rains. Otherwise the lightning will burn all of us.” So when I see her sitting at her doorway, leaning forward, listening to her past, I know that there is no lightning and her heart is free.

  “How is your mother?” Gogo says. “Now that I have finished wiping all the mucus from your nose your mother says you are her child? Is that so?” I do not answer this invitation for a quarrel with my mother, who is not even here with me. Gogo prefers to quarrel with someone who is absent. When Gogo and my mother are together, they agree on everything. They offer each other innumerable embraces. “Your mother left you with me when you were a week old, then she went to train to be a school teacher. Now you are a woman who wears high heels and she says you belong to her.” My foot hits the cracked cement block that is her stoep. I collapse beside her like a wave.

  The door is wide open. I can see the darkness inside. Gogo has photographs all over her walls. Directly ahead there is a certificate given to my grandfather after he had spent twenty-five years at Lever Brothers, where he worked as a clerk. On it are all my grandfather’s names—Enos Mtambeni Mugadzaweta. He was also given a silver watch. It represents time. Grandfather died in 1986. This was the first certificate ever to be received in my family.

  I like the picture of Gogo and me in front of the Victoria Falls in 1995. We have our back to a large cataract with cascading waters. When we arrived at the Victoria Falls after a bus ride which lasted half a day, Gogo said this was not land she could inhabit. She turned away from the falling river. There was too much flowing water. Where would one build a shelter, she asked accusingly. I tried to explain that she was on “holiday.” I had tried to remove her from the sight of a bed-ridden son whom she had watched dying slowly for over a year. Her voice struggles against the sound of crushing water. There was no place to grow a crop on this river. We turned away from the falls, and, as per our family tradition, left quickly the thing which could hurt us. It is the shortest time I have ever spent at the Victoria Falls.

  On the left, just near the light switch which I could not reach till I was seven, there is a happy picture of us hugging tightly. Behind us are two small wooden elephants. Gogo is laughing and spreading luck to everybody, especially Zanele. On that day, my sister Zanele got married. We were all very happy except Zanele. Her mother-in-law had spent the morning pushing an egg between her thighs to see if she had already slept with a man. Zanele emerged looking furious, her new mother triumphant. Throughout the wedding Gogo is busy trying to give Zanele luck.

  My mother is hugging Zanele, calling her Furuwa and spreading rose petals in her hair. When the official pictures are being taken outside in the small garden with only a single struggling Petrea bush in it Zanele hisses to me that she will never eat an egg again in her life. Her husband Zenzo asks me what Zanele is saying and I say that she says I should move to the end of the row. So I move away even though I would have liked to remain with Zanele. Her new mother stands next to her and holds her by the elbow. Mother apologizes, saying that her garden is drought-stricken. She holds an umbrella over Zanele’s head. The soil beneath us is cracking.

  One girl is enough, my father said, and walked out of the door. I was the first girl and was named the most beautiful one—Ntombehhle. Then Zanele was born and my father cursed again and said two girls are enough. He left and never returned. Since our mother now had no husband it was best to spend time with Gogo, who had a grandfather. By independence my mother had enough money to buy a house in an area where black people had not been allowed to live before. Our country was renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. All of us were Zimbabwe-Rhodesians. She immediately planted a petrea bush which refused to release its petals. She kept saying that the flowers on it could turn out to be purple or white. Now we are Zimbabweans. The petrea bush is still bare.

  “I have come to collect you, Gogo,” I say softly over her shoulder. Gogo never wants to leave her stoep unless there is a death in the family, or a wedding. “You know that Zanele had the twins last week.” Gogo shifts her weight to one arm. “Of course I know Zanele had twins last week. Where did she get the twins? There are no twins from our side of the family,” she says thoughtfully. She is searching through the past she knows so well. “The children are beautiful, Gogo, but Zanele does not want them. She is refusing to look at them. She has not fed them since they were born and the clinic has had to ask other nursing mothers to feed them.”

  Silence. I wonder if she had heard me. She rises, without hesitation or staggering. She walks firmly into the house. She has heard me. I feel two years old to see her walking solidly like that. The past thirty years of my life vanish. I wait
outside where she has left me. She closes the blue door. Another door opens and closes. Another closes. Then a silence in which I can see foam mounting where land meets water. I hear a sound more quiet than waves. I know that Gogo has turned away from the thing which will hurt her, the thing which I have brought to her carried in my mouth.

  Zanele has said she will not touch or see the children. Her husband says that if she continues in this manner he will take his children from her and place Zanele on 23rd Avenue. He says he will leave her “on 23rd” as though he will dump her in the middle of the road. The hospital for mental patients is on 23rd Avenue. It is as old as the country. Africans were sent there in Rhodesia for inciting revolutionary behavior.

  Zanele’s new mother calls her a lunatic who will murder her children like a crocodile which can even chew its young and swallow them. She likens Zanele to a confused hen which can be seen dripping with the yellow yolk from its own eggs as though it has been offered a feast. The mention of eggs makes Zanele resent the children even more. Zanele’s nipples crack with wounds. The milk is trying to escape from her body.

  A door opens. Gogo returns. She has tied a blue scarf over her head, the one I bought for her when I finished my journalism course in Harare and she had asked me what kind of work I was going to do. When I said I was going to write important things down she said, “The things which are not written down are also true.” Gogo walks with me through the gate, past the lemons, the dangling pawpaws, towards the place where land meets water. We walk. We walk on the crest of a wave. We see the beauty of the sea.