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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the implosion of racial and religious harmony in the postapartheid fiction of South African Indian writer Ahmed Essop, who problematizes the accommodation of the Indo-Islamic community within the contours of a secular nation in The King of Hearts (1997) and The Third Prophecy (2004). The minority disaffection described in these texts raises important questions about citizenship in the "new" South Africa. Indian-Muslim alienation from the national norm casts doubts on democratic South Africa's success in the projects of community building, inter-cultural reconciliation, and racial healing thus compelling us to question its very legitimacy as a truly postcolonial nation.
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Ahmed Essop's postapartheid fiction is fueled by a palpable unease at Indian, especially Indian Muslim, disaffection in democratic South Africa. (1) This essay explores Essop's concern over the implosion of racial and religious harmony in the postapartheid period, uncovering in the process what minority alienation tells us not only about national belonging and citizenship in the "new" South Africa, but also about the postcolonial nation itself. (2) Essop's fiction thus takes up what Anthony O'Brien defines as "an opportunity to inquire into the role and the responsibility of the literary intellectual in constructing (establishing or subverting) a discourse of the nation, the new nation" (11).
While Essop's apartheid-era writing is suffused with hope and promise, especially in his celebration of egalitarian racial interaction, his postapartheid fiction takes on a more ominous hue. (3) The King of Hearts (1997) reflects on the fraught relationship between Indians, particularly Indian Muslims, and other races in the postapartheid era while The Third Prophecy (2004) problematizes the accommodation of the Indo-Islamic community within the contours of a secular nation. As power changes hands from white to black, those inhabiting in-between states are assailed for being alien and foreign. The failure of democracy, particularly multicultural democracy, suffuses Essop's later work with a sadness that even the humor and satire that characterize all his fiction cannot eradicate.
Despite the difference between his apartheid and postapartheid fiction, certain similarities run through all of Essop's work. Essop is intensely preoccupied with how Indians fit into South Africa, the different roles they occupy at different political junctures, and the demands that a rapidly changing social milieu makes on Indian selfhood. As Lisa Lowe points out with reference to Asian-American identity, "the processes that produce such identities are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences" (136). Closer to home, Thomas Hansen argues that "with a new freedom, which is also a moment of uncertainty, compounded by changing relations among local, regional, and global forces, everybody in the country was left to rethink themselves beyond that overpowering shadow and structuring power that apartheid had imposed on them for decades" ("Melancholia," 298). Apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement created one set of determinants against which the Indian community developed a sense of self. The transition period (1990-1994) offered more guidelines for communal behavior. Finally, postcoloniality, with what some Indians consider its thwarted promise, is forging yet another aspect of Indian identity.
Although South African Indian identity unfolds across multiple axes, it still exposes the unique nexus between the sociocultural transformation of Indianness in South Africa and political reality. Essop's postapartheid fiction always comes back to the instability of ethnic identity in the time of rapid political change even as it simultaneously foregrounds the theme of alienation and dispossession to expose the falsity of a nation's sense of self. As their foreignness is repeatedly used as a weapon against them, we are reminded that Indians in South Africa remain suspended in a state of migrancy with all the connotations of flux and instability that the term suggests. (4) Indians may have vigorously asserted their belonging in South Africa in the past by claiming solidarity with black Africans, yet they are often made to feel homeless in the postapartheid present. (5)
Smitha Radhakrishnan argues that "South African Indians [now] face the political task of gaining recognition from the newly formed multicultural state as a key minority group" (263). Essop's postapartheid fiction demonstrates the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, in "gaining recognition" as a viable minority. This desire for outside validation also raises further questions about self-empowerment. Is it enough for a disaffected group to acquire composite citizenry in its own eyes or do claims to citizenry need to be authenticated by the majority in order to have social and political effect? (6) Is citizenship a matter of authentication--who validates claims to belonging being more important than who claims belonging--rather than simply due process of law? Essop's sense of displacement speaks to the instability of Indian identity and subcontinental claims to egalitarian citizenship. The break down of racial solidarity also demonstrates how postcolonial states often replicate the behavioral paradigms of their colonial precursors. As scholars of postapartheid South Africa have pointed out, race continues to be a major interpretive lens through which South Africans approach each other (Radhakrishnan 278, Desai 114, Naidoo 39). South African Indian Muslims--the primary focus of Essop's work--are subject to another level of alterity, furthering the neurosis of an identity already fractured by centuries of Otherness. (7)
Essop's dramatic about-turn in the postapartheid period marks a significant shift in his earlier fiction, which rarely engages with Indian-black hostility in such a direct way. Often, deteriorating race relations are blamed on the Indians in order to assert the necessity for "black" solidarity. In a departure from his own prose, Essop also places the blame on the majority community, the black Africans. (8) Yet, Essop's fiction does not simply show and satirize. He also uses Indian disaffection to seek change. Essop best expresses his literary agenda in an untitled essay where he argues that "the work of writers may come to be seen not only as a testimony of the times and a revelation of the human condition with its potentials and possibilities, but as an important contribution to the metamorphosis of society into a rational, humane and compassionate one" (qtd. in Daymond 21). As O'Brien points out, one of the central questions underpinning South African democratic discourse is "how to construct an expressive culture that springs from, responds to, and shapes visions of economic and political democracy deeper than ballot box democracy, parliamentary representation, liberal capitalism, cultural pluralism and the Enlightenment discourse of rights" (3). By questioning the practices of the new nation, Essop participates in an "expressive culture" that attempts to extend democracy, citizenship, and national belonging beyond "just" political freedom. In exposing the failure of postapartheid democracy, Essop's writing strains towards a radical transformation of South Africa into a truly democratic "nation-space" (Bhabha 4).
Although the new South Africa imagined itself as a tessellation of interlocking cultures, the shifting dynamic between Indians and blacks reflects the violence, hostility, and distrust amidst the races after the abolition of apartheid. Freedom might have heralded a better world, but power still remained unequally distributed. Ralph Premdas's comments on the hostility between Indians and blacks in Guyana can also be applied to a South African context: "residential, occupational, customary and racial cleavages together established a deeply divided state. Each group feared the other; each disparaged the other through a complex set of stereotypes [...] the [...] government never succeeded in re-aligning the ethnic vertical cleavages of race, religion, culture etc." (qtd. in Mehta 93).
In South Africa, both Indians and blacks felt that the other community had greater access to the constellations of power. The Indians were thought to be invested with economic authority and the blacks with the political power of the majority. According to Thomas Hansen, this tension is part of a long culture of conflict between Zulus and Indians starting "from the riots in Durban in 1949, the destruction of Gandhi's Phoenix ashram in 1985, to the frequent accusations by Zulu leaders, intellectuals and artists that Indians are unpatriotic and racist" ("Diasporic Dispositions").
It may be surprising that we don't often encounter the hostility between blacks and Indians in Essop's earlier fiction such as The Emperor (1984), Hajji Musa (1988), and Noorjehan (1990). It must be remembered, however, that this conflict has been given less importance, and may even have been glossed over, during the apartheid years because of the urgent need to unite against white sectarianism. Published in 1997, three years after the historic election of 1994, The King of Hearts abandons past representations of interracial solidarity, depicting instead the vexed relationships that emerge when ethnic unity is no longer a pressing compulsion.
The title story, "The King of Hearts," begins on the expectation of a better future. It narrates the story of Alexander King, a white heart surgeon--hence the title The King of Hearts--who successfully performs the world's first heart transplant operation. The story is set in a fictional nation called Saturnia. Originally belonging to the Sircon people, the country has been colonized by the "usurping Saturnians" (2). Dr. King falls in...
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