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The way he tells it, he was the town’s hero for a day. ‘I spoke straight to their hearts. To the kids I described the horrors of prison. I told them prison does not make you a man, it fucks you up and rapes you and then throws you out. I said that no human being who cares for himself will want to go to prison. To the parents, I said how I had fucked up the task of bringing up my own kids. I said that in some homes, you have three generations sitting around smoking drugs together. I said we had to rebuild some sanity in our communities.
‘They all crowded round me after my speech in the town hall. A woman came up to me and hugged me and burst into tears. She explained that her son was in prison.
‘It was one of the greatest moments of my life. The Uka delegation all had dinner in a restaurant that night. I was served by a waiter for the first time in my life. I ordered chicken livers for starters. It was my first taste of food outside the prison since 1998. I savoured every mouthful. I felt I could learn to eat properly again.
‘I looked round the restaurant, and looked at myself eating in the restaurant. I thought to myself: “I am somebody now. I am a decent human being, someone a waiter takes an order from.”
‘I laughed at myself. I thought: “I have dignity now ...”.’ (332)
This is a significant moment, on several levels. The restitution of dignity via the power of narrative is a high point for Wentzel personally, and it provides an example of postapartheid discourse delivering the tangible, felt benefit of self-reclamation. This is a yield that might come in various ways: in the form of self-storying (richly evident in the passage above); in the repossession of dignity via identity solidarity (for example, as a victim of male abuse; a Xhosa poet; a Rastafarian; an urban, hip-hop spoken-word artist from the townships); or in any of the other positions that were becoming available, both in the public space of liberated political discourse and in the spaces opening up on the internet and in the new media. Anyone could set up a website, start blogging, publish their own writing, post on Facebook and start aggregating an audience. The forms of public expression available to formerly silenced people seemed similar to TRC-style reckonings, potentially freeing the body politic of its psychic horrors, and helping to reconstitute people as full citizens rather than mere ‘subjects’ (see Mamdani).
Wentzel holds out, against the odds, in the story narrated in The Number – and it is important that this is indeed a true story. However, the story outside of Steinberg’s narrative, the story of self-recovery, wears thin as Wentzel’s ‘minor celebrity’ status slowly evaporates after his release from prison and his work with UKA runs aground. Still, Wentzel clings to his story as he gets poorer and more desperate, begrudgingly accepting charity from his hard-up in-laws, in whose backyard ‘Wendy house’ he lives in Manenberg, estranged from his wife, Faranaaz, and increasingly at odds with her family. He manages to hold out, right to the end, when he phones Steinberg to declare that he has found the love he has spent his life searching for (416). Whether this love will hold out or not is less the issue than the fact that the story of it – a redemptive narrative – at one point nourished Wentzel’s sense of self.
Wentzel’s story, folded into a larger discourse of truth reclamation, is individually empowering, speaking to the power of narrative as a means for constructing a truth about oneself, a story that one can live with. Such narrative also functions as a potent social force, as Jane Taylor – who collaborated with William Kentridge in the production of Ubu and the Truth Commission – suggests:
What has engaged me as I have followed the Commission, is the way in which individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative. The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa’s recent past. History and autobiography merge. This marks a significant shift, because in the past decades of popular resistance, personal suffering was eclipsed – subordinated to a larger project of mass liberation. Now, however, we hear in individual testimony the very private patterns of language and thought that structure memory and mourning. Ubu and the Truth Commission uses these circumstances as a starting point. (ii)
Echoing Ndebele and Steinberg, Taylor contends that the merging of ‘history and autobiography’ in the making of ‘the larger national narrative’ speaks directly to a discourse of self. The latter is a means to achieve a level of truth that is potentially redemptive, a means of deliverance from the past. The terms ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ in this book’s subtitle gesture to the strong urge, identified here by Taylor, towards merging stories of self-making and ‘history’, and they also point to the productive tensions between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ with their multiple meanings.
2
From the subject of evil to the evil subject
Cultural difference in postapartheid South African crime fiction
One of the more energetic debates about postapartheid South African literature revolves around the question of why genre fiction, and more particularly crime fiction, so heavily saturates the book market. This debate has often been conducted anecdotally or superficially in reviews and comments on literary websites, despite scattered journal articles and one or two special issues on the topic.1 Particularly contested has been my own suggestion that crime thrillers may have come to stand in for what used to be seen as political or engaged fiction, in response to which some academics have argued that the generic or formulaic nature of detective novels precludes them from a nuanced treatment of sociopolitical issues.2 A common strand has been the contention that it is far-fetched to assume that genre fiction can engage with political themes in the manner of Gordimer, Langa, Mda or Serote. A great deal of this commentary appears in the form of stabs of opinion in the comment threads of digital media, and as such does not penetrate much beyond provisional position-taking.
An exception to this trend is Michael Titlestad and Ashlee Polatinsky’s essay ‘Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback’, in which the authors argue that Nicol’s own turn from serious fiction (as exemplified by his 1998 novel The Ibis Tapestry) to the popular form of crime fiction (as in his 2008 novel Payback) represents an unfortunate withdrawal from more serious literary writing in which matters are, fittingly, in a state of unresolved tension. Instead of keeping faith with the open-form novel, Nicol gives way to the temptation of neat but ultimately superficial gestures of closure. Although Titlestad and Polatinsky do not say so explicitly, there is in their argument a strong sense of disappointment that an outstanding South African author, in the older, more serious vein of South African writing, should ‘sell out’ to the seductions of a popular market where