Liz Clarke
If anything, Johann Jacobs’s intricate delving into the effects of displacement, dislocation and the scattering of people – highlighted in contemporary South African fiction – makes one think long and hard about one’s own identity, history and the true meaning of home.
“Where do I belong?” is the sub-text that seems to echo over and over again.
“Is this my true home, or is it just the place where I live?
“Do I really belong here? Or am I here, just because circumstances brought me here? Do I like being here? Or would I rather be somewhere else?”
It’s a line of personal enquiry summed up by Nobel-winning author, JM Coetzee, and succinctly referred to in Jacobs’s overview.
It reads: “I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.”
It’s a haunting thought, and one you can’t help but contemplate, as you read on, a personal past that might well contain the same sense of disconnect and dislocation.
Jacobs takes as his foundational premise the fact that the “tribes” that make up South Africa, be they African, Afrikaner, “coloured”, English and Indian, can never be regarded as rooted or pure, “whatever essentialist claims members of these various ethnic and cultural communities might want to make for themselves”.
A further thought is that this same sense of dislocation is mirrored throughout the continent.
The author suggests that those who leave their homes to find refuge or opportunity elsewhere, both in a contemporary and historical sense, are for the most part deeply divided.
That goes for colonial, African and Indian diasporas, present-day migrations into and out of South Africa and diasporic dislocations within Africa.
Within this field of argument, he then argues that tensions associated with displacement, migration and relocation are the triggers shaping the African continent, not the quest for peace and harmony.
“All South African identities,” the book suggests, “are fractured and have arisen from diasporic migration. However well intentioned, Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s idea of a ‘rainbow nation’ is, it does not adequately describe the many ethnic and cultural grouping that make up the country.”
As some have cynically observed, where is the colour black in a rainbow?
To illustrate his point, Jacobs has studied 12 contemporary South African novelists – Breyten Breytenbach, Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Aziz Hassim, Michiel Heyns, Elsa Joubert, Zakes Mda, Njabulo S Ndebele, Karel Schoeman, Patricia Schonstein Pinnock, Ivan Vladislaviç and Zoë Wicomb.
“These writings show,” he says, “how diaspora is a dominant theme in contemporary South African fiction, and the diasporic subject its most recognisable figure.”
He begins his exploration with Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, the first novel in English by a black South African, which presents in novel form the coming together of different migrant peoples in the heart of southern Africa.
To him the Great Trek was not the central event in South African history, but merely another episode in the movement of South African tribes.
Plaatje understood that what diasporic refugees all share is a knowledge of the past home that is lost forever, summed up in an old African proverb: “There’s always return to the ruins, only to the womb there is no return.”
Think Syria, think Aleppo, it is happening as we read.
One that also has a universality well beyond our shores is Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline, which takes its name from a run-down block of flats in Cape Town, which like so many in the country “resembles scores of other blocks in deteriorated inner cities” like Durban and Johannesburg and is home to illegal immigrants and refugees from the rest of Africa.
The narrator, a young girl, is moved by their plight: “All of them have stories written on the parchment of their hearts. They are stories, which have crept out of the edges of civil wars and scattered into the fleeing wind. You can read the words in their eyes, stained by despair: in their mouth, silenced and tightened by horror.”
Hostility, on the other hand, is on the other side of the road in the form of garage workers expressing their collective resentment against foreigners.
“The whole of Africa is running into this country. Do they think they can come here and take the people’s jobs?”
An author who epitomises diasporic politics in fiction is Gordimer, says Jacobs. “Her last novel, No Time Like The Present(2012), is her most exhaustive fictional reflection on the immigrant origins of all South Africans and on the diasporic dream – in contrast to the reality.”
The larger part of the narrative, he explains, explores the tensions between the practical wisdom of emigrating to Australia, and the ethnic and cultural claims of their home country.
Tensions, such as this, become the recurring theme in all the novels, he cites.
Coetzee’s character in Youth bemoans his new emigrant situation in London, asking how long he will have to live in England before he becomes the real thing, become English.
Will getting a British passport be enough, or does an odd-sounding foreign name mean he will be shut out forever?
Tensions of a different kind abound in Ndebele’s novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he makes the observation that “South Africans have an intriguing capacity to be disarmingly kind and hospitable at the same time as being capable of the most horrifying brutality and cruelty”.
Jacobs suggests that Ndebele “views his subject from a perspective that corresponds to the chaotic model of diaspora, showing how causality gives way to casualty”.
There is no finite or indeed happy ending to this story of Africa.
Rather, Jacobs suggests, we need to look at an evolving tapestry where division and difference are part of the embroidery.
* Johann Jacobs is emeritus professor of English, senior research associate and fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He has published extensively on South African and post-colonial fiction and autobiography
** Diaspora And Identity in South African Fiction is published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press