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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
This article examines the relationship between race, memory and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (2001). Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts' treatment of ambiguity. Kafkas Curse, dealing with the inconsistencies of identity during South Africa's transition to a democracy, highlights the janus-faced nature of race where representation, physicality, and history form a tenuous relationship. What occurs to this uncertainty in a postapartheid context is traced by Dangor in Bitter Fruit where history, memory, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are of central concern. Dangor narrates a complex alternative to a bifurcated logic where South Africa is characterized by black and white, good and bad, past and present. In highlighting the intermixture and ambiguity of cultural formations, he reveals a radical heterogeneity that apartheid failed to destroy. I argue that racial identities in South Africa are complex cultural sites that lie at the interstices between apartheid taxonomies, nonracialism, Black Consciousness, and on-going poverty that is racially marked; this exists alongside postapartheid freedoms within a larger context of global resurgences of ethnic identification and increasingly recognized transnational connectivity.
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Short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2004, Achmat Dangor highlights the ambiguous character of South African culture, where identities and histories are placed and replaced in a state of constant renegotiation. Dangor confounds unitary taxonomies through both his writings and his own identity. In texts that simultaneously unearth sedimented levels of historical understandings, and establish overlapping and contradictory layers of current cultural histories, he reveals the complex cultural formations that undergird contemporary South Africa. Dangor is a writer who is able to jump apartheid taxonomies on the basis of his fiction, as well as his background, through a refusal to maintain the bounded ideas of identity that are often associated with South African cultural formations. He is listed as a South African Indian writer in Rajendra Chetty's collection South African Indian Writings in English (2002) and he appears in An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent (Kempf 1). However, Denis-Constant Martin references Dangor as a "coloured" writer. Characters in his fiction are similarly ambiguously situated; for example Christopher Hope describes the protagonist in Kafka's Curse as both an "Indian boy" and a "richly mixed Asian, Javanese and Dutch boy from the townships" (27). Phil Nel describes the same character as being part of a family that is "both coloured and Muslim with roots that are Indian, Malaysian and Dutch." Issues of racial identity and representation are therefore central to understanding the contradictory nature of South African racial classifications on which this article relies, but also destabilizes. In focusing on the relationship between race, memory, and apartheid constructions in Achmat Dangor's novels Kafka's Curse and Bitter Fruit, I investigate the importance of understanding race making initiatives through exploring the ambiguous nature of identity and history, despite the overdetermination of such formations in South Africa. I argue that Dangor narrates a complex and nuanced alternative to dominant understandings of South Africa, moving away from a bifurcated logic of black and white, good and bad, past and present, into a byzantine and intricate conception of South African culture.
Kafka's Curse (1997), dealing with the uncertainties of identity in the context of South Africa's transition to a democracy, traverses the line between the imagined and the lived reality of racial constructions--an exploration that reflects both the suppression of narratives of ambiguity during apartheid, as well as the emergence of these narratives in a postapartheid context. In Bitter Fruit (2001), Dangor continues his investigation of ambiguity by examining the line between silence and articulation in South African culture through exploring the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Questions of history, identity, sexual transgression, and transformation emerge in both texts. While Kafka's Curse explores these issues around South Africa's first election in 1994 through its focus on the instabilities of race, Bitter Fruit examines similar issues around South Africa's second election in 1999 through its focus on the instabilities of history and memory. I argue that the relationship between race, memory, and the violence of apartheid reveals the ambiguous nature of South African cultural formations that disrupt uniform conceptualizations of identity and history, through asserting a radical heterogeneity that apartheid failed to destroy.
Achmat Dangor describes his own history and identity as follows:
Briefly, I was born in Johannesburg in Newclare. It was a fairly cosmopolitan township in which all the black population groups including Indians and some Chinese and even some white people lived in general harmony during the sixties. It was, however, also a context in which class differences and tensions were evident [...]. This environment was formative for my social attitudes as well as my writing since race was largely irrelevant in interpersonal relationships. I started writing after the character of Newclare was 'colouredized' to conform to the ethnic and race policies of the State. African, Indian and Chinese people were evicted from the area and there was an influx of people classified as coloured [...]. (Dangor, qtd. in Oliphant 31)
Dangor's family, classified as "Malay" (Cape Muslim) despite the Indian signification of their last name, was evicted from Fordsburg in the 1950's after it was declared an Indian group area. The arbitrary and confusing nature of apartheid systems of racial classification is important here in understanding race as both imagined (in terms of its artifice) and real (as it is lived as a real relation). This janus-faced conception of race embodies the salience of racial understandings despite scientific revelations that show its lack of coherence. In an apartheid context, the state instituted strict taxonomies in an attempt to deny the ambiguous nature of race, and to sustain its ideological myth of discrete racial authenticities. The dominant image of South African culture became one of complete racial separation. The numerous amendments to the Population Registration Act highlight the difficulties and irrationalities of this monadic attempt to reify race and ethnicize identity. In a postapartheid context, narratives such as Dangor's, which highlight the ambiguities and the inherent mix of South African identities, are recreating the image of South Africa internally, as well as in the global imaginary, as a place of what Paul Gilroy might term "irrepressible multiculture." The fundamentally unstable nature of race can be traced through Dangor's history and writings where form, content, and speaking position form a dialogic relationship.
The appellation colored was originally imposed on a heterogeneous group of people in the Cape. Slaves formed the initial nucleus of this population, originating from areas as diverse as India, Madagascar, East Africa, West Africa, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Slaves mixed with the indigenous population and the colonialists, resulting in a population whose sole common feature initially was mixed parentage (Martin 251-52). Apartheid policy later reified this population into a rigid category, in an attempt to construct colored as a race. In the present, colored identity is both contested and embraced across class, religion, region and culture. Zimitri Erasmus argues that colored identity today is not based on racial syncreticism but on creolization, which is shaped by South Africa's history of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid, undermining "the common sense view that conceives colouredness as something produced by the mixture of other 'purer' cultures. Instead, it stresses the ambiguity and ceaseless fluidity of coloured identity formations while remaining conscious of the conditions under which they are produced" (14). Colored identity can therefore act as a microcosm for the idea of race in a broader sense in that this construction clearly illustrates how all races are constructed and naturalized over time. The idea of hybridity or syncreticism is problematic in that the concepts rely on a notion of hermetically sealed cultures merging in some fashion. Conversely, the idea that all cultures are mixed may erase as much as it reveals, in terms of homogenizing relations of difference or sameness that are often predicated on various forms of power. Race, then, as an unstable category is contingent on historical...
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