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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
The totalitarian ideology of apartheid proposed an absolute binarism in terms primarily of race, but also in terms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. However, novels such as Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples reveal the taboo, interstitial ground which belies the absolute divides of binarism. Examples of the interstitial in the text include representations of adolescence, bisexuality, and "colored" (mixed-race) identity. The bisexual character embodies deep-rooted cultural anxieties. I employ the notion of the double agent, and explore the implications of techniques used by Behr to expose from within the horrors of the interlinked systems of racial oppression, gender oppression, sexual violence, family violence, fascism, and religious bigotry. These systems are shown to dehumanize both victims and perpetrators. I argue that Behr's representation of the bisexual Afrikaner patriarch reveals the fissures within apartheid's "Eden," the inevitability of its demise, and more hopeful means of reading the future of South Africa, through the lenses of hybridity, the feminine, and the resilience of the natural world.
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In this article I examine a novel by a white author, South African by birth, dealing with rites of passage from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. The space where this shift occurs is the taboo and scandalous domain of adolescence or youth, characterized by developing sexual awareness and socialization into adult roles. The Smell of Apples is set in 1973, with a later time-setting in adulthood providing implicit commentary on the earlier one. In the specific context of apartheid binarism is particularly ideologically evident; however, from a postapartheid perspective it is incumbent on novelist and critic alike to note and respond to binaries of content and technique, as well as their implications for the nation, in the past, present and future.
The allegorical or mythic dimensions of the novel surface most clearly in an ironic reference to Edenic apples--symbols of dangerous knowledge, temptation and a fall from grace--imported to Africa by the colonizers:
While Dad and I stood up there, watching the red sky, Dad said that that was why we can never go back [to Tanzania]. The blacks drove the whites away and all we have left is here, Dad said, sweeping through the air with his arm.
"And this country [South Africa] was empty before our people arrived. Everything, everything you see, we built up from nothing. This is our place, given to us by God and we will look after it. Whatever the cost."
When we got back into the car, you could smell the apples everywhere. I turned round to look at the crates, but it was too dark to see them.
"Dad, do you smell the apples?" I asked in the dark.
"Ja, Marnus," Dad answered as he turned the Volvo back on to the road.
"Even the apples we brought to this country." (124)
Susan Vanzanten Gallagher likens the period when the novel was published (1995) to Frantz Fanon's imagined postcolonial "zone of occult instability" when cultural producers re-examine the past in order to visualize a new national culture beyond the fallacies of previous myths (376-77). The Smell of Apples reveals the texture of everyday life as experienced by adolescent white children, in apartheid South Africa, as they were inducted into the binarist discourse of apartheid and their future roles within the institutions of the school and the family, while faced with the seductive power and rifts within the hegemonic order embodied by an adult, pedophile, bisexual figure. As I shall discuss in more detail later, this bisexual figure, Marnus's father, can be viewed as displaying cultural anxieties which transcend the narrow limits of the individual and psychological.
Changes in perceptions of gender, sexuality and race, both in South Africa and globally, are illustrated in the backward looks at apartheid found in this text. The literary antecedents of this novel can be traced to a number of thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of relatively privileged white girls growing up under apartheid; examples of this group of Bildungsromane, which, fueled by the spread of second-wave feminism, appeared in South Africa from the 1970s on, include The Virgins by Jillian Becker (1976), Home Ground by Lynn Freed (1986), and E. M. Macphail's Phoebe and Nio (1987). These white women novelists' accounts of adolescence in apartheid were complemented by their male counterparts' texts at a somewhat later stage, catalyzed by a changed perspective on militarism after the shift to democracy, as well as an international interest in masculinities studies. Examples of these novels include Antony Sher's Cheap Lives (1995), Embrace by Mark Behr (2000), The Children's Day by Michiel Heyns (2002), and Barry Levy's Burning Bright (2004), all of which employ the trope of bisexuality. The Smell of Apples is emblematic of the issues raised in these novels. These South African authors' compatriots from other ethnic groupings, when writing accounts of apartheid in the form of autobiographies, memoirs or novels, tend to focus on adulthood or the life as a whole, rather than using the shift from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood as a trope of induction into a binarized, racist, sexist culture. This may be partly because of a less binarized and sentimentalized view of childhood, resting less on Romantic idealizations than on pragmatic considerations.
The Smell of Apples reveals profound anxieties around boundaries associated with gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, from an Afrikaner perspective. Author Mark Behr, who was born in Tanzania in 1963, subsequently came to live in South Africa. He was a pupil at the Drakensberg Boys' Choir Music School, performed military duty, partly in Angola, and was a student at the University of Stellenbosch. In the 1990s he worked at the Peace Research Institute in Norway, and wrote the Afrikaans version of his first novel, Die Reuk van Appels (1993), which he translated into English as The Smell of Apples (1995). Behr also studied and taught as a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. After its initial appearance in Afrikaans, the book received little attention, but in its English incarnation it has been awarded prizes: the M-Net Award, the Eugene Marais Prize, and the CNA Literary Debut Award in South Africa, the Betty Trask Award in the United Kingdom, and in the United States the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. The book has also been placed on school and university syllabi, and has generated critical attention by scholars such as Michiel Heyns, David Medalie, and Rita Barnard.
Following the success of The Smell of Apples, Behr was invited to deliver the keynote speech at a writers' conference, Fault Lines: Inquiries around Truth and Reconciliation, in Cape Town in 1996, and in this speech he confessed to having been a spy at Stellenbosch University for the state security apparatus between 1986 and 1990. He further claimed that at the end of this period his handlers grew to believe that instead of furthering their cause he was in fact politically conscientizing students. They informed him that military groups were about to denounce him on political grounds and because of his "history of closeted gay experiences" (14). This reveals the power of the threat of having had same-sex sexual experiences, and the fear of being exposed to a conservative, homophobic family, circle of friends and community. The fear of this threat of personal exposure of variant sexuality would seem to be on a par with the anxiety associated with political exposure as a spy. As a sequel to this attempt at blackmail, and Behr's departure from Stellenbosch, he claims that he decided to inform the ANC of his actions, and for some two years he provided the ANC with "whatever information I gained access to" (13); in other words, he became a double agent, a concept to which I will return later.
Aside from the confessional narrative content of the edited version of the speech, which appeared in Common Sense, a journal of Notre Dame University, three points are worth noting. First, there is a string of signifiers, including the words "shame," "duplicity," "fundamental fault," and "a secret life," which are allied to the notion of confession. These concepts are connected to the power of language in terms of dirt or taint: "Once it [language] has been wilfully abused the hands of the abuser are never again clean" (16), the inversion of the usual English word order at the end of this comment suggesting remorse and the yearning for some degree of absolution. Further, in the paper there is explicit acknowledgement of the need to accept full responsibility for his actions. Second,...
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