Ways of coping in South Africa

There are certain books I don’t read on principle. Either it’s because what I think is between their covers is so much bullshit — The Secret and anything by Dan Brown fit in here — or because I imagine that the experience of reading it will, for whatever reason, be just too painful. Anything by Ayn Rand, for instance. Or this book, Ways of Staying, which I’ve finally got around to reading after more than 18 months of avoiding it because I recently met Kevin Bloom on a ReadSA trip to the Eastern Cape. I find there’s a certain unspoken obligation to read things after meeting their authors.

When it comes to my sense of obligation, something else is at play here also. I know, somehow, that I must read it, and so I have. It is one of the more difficult books I’ve read over the past year, and the only one in which I’ve been struck immediately by a contrapuntal tension involved in the act of simply reading the title and turning to the first page. This is the reason that I did not read this book in the first place. I am not simply reading about events as Bloom relates them; I’m also summoning up and aligning my own experiences at the time. Compare and contrast; my own voice, and my own story, echoes this one.

As the book was launched, I was boarding a plane in Sydney to fly back to Johannesburg. As the xenophobic attacks it describes were reported in the news, I was sitting in the back seat of a taxi crossing the Harbour Bridge on our way back from a meeting with a client; I remember my Australian colleague sitting next to me commenting on the news, and how embarrassed I felt to be South African. As Jamie Paterson’s rape survival story transfixed the viewers of Carte Blanche, (otherwise known as Australia’s weekly emigration recruitment show), administrators in Adelaide were processing my application, the one for the visa that would give me the right to get on the plane and leave forever to go and live in the country that represented the postcolonial prefect with all the trophies, while South Africa, the tik addict, lurked in the alley behind the hall. And when JZ swept through Polokwane in December 2007, my ex-husband and my mother-in-law were undergoing our medical examinations by the friendly Jewish doctor next to the Linksfield Clinic, one of a couple of practitioners listed by the Australian authorities. It was this doctor who picked up my mother-in-law’s arrhythmia and referred her to a heart specialist, who said she’d need to have a pacemaker fitted within the next two years. A little more than a week later she was dead.

The title, when I first read about it, filled me with a mild sort of dread. My ex-husband was very unhappy about my decision to return to South Africa and this book alluded to exactly the sort of fears I wanted to repress. In returning, I had taken a deliberately blinkered view for the sake of survival. Life is like a bicycle: keep moving forward or you fall over (Forrest Gump’s mother was wrong, mostly, about the chocolates). Books like Ways of Staying were dangerous distractions for me then. In some ways, they still are.

But it is an important book and for this reason alone we should read it. In the tradition of Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, it details one journalist’s journey through the psychological underbelly of South Africa, though of course. It has, of course, appeared at a very different historical moment; South Africa is not nearly so fascinating to the rest of the world now as it was in the early 1990s. Since then, a lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t, and if we were working to the Hollywood script as the world so desperately wanted us to, there’d be clarity and progress instead of all the ambiguity of muddling through, as we always seem to do. Bloom’s prose, especially his description of crimes as they unfold, is measured but vivid. Much of the material he covers is, quite frankly, a good reason to leave; I would imagine that it is much easier to read Ways of Staying sitting on a balcony in Mosman than it is tucked up in bed in Bryanston. (My description of the process I went through in wrestling with the decision whether or not to leave Australia can be found in Home Away, Louis Greenberg’s innovative collection of stories from the diaspora.)

I am finalising this review — or non-review, to be more accurate — as I listen to the calls of the Lowveld birds, hoping at the same time that something, an nyala perhaps, will come to drink from the waterhole across the dry riverbed. A Piet-my-vrou broadcasts incessantly from the top of a huge Jakkalsbessie tree in the camp; beneath its branches, a servant (in this land of such huge contrasts, there is always a servant) sweeps the deck. This is Africa at its best, the Africa to which so many — even those who have left — feel such a powerful connection. Sitting here, away from Johannesburg, I found it easier to get through Ways of Staying, because there is distance, some 500km, give or take, and distance is necessary.

So, to return to the question of books we find we cannot read, I am not the only one who has had difficulty reading Ways of Staying. I know of two people (and there may be more) who know the author personally, and still will not read it, obligation or no. One says the experience of reading it will turn him into the next Malcolm X; the other simply cannot because it is too painful. Is it possible that not reading a book implies as powerful a relationship with the words between its covers as reading it? Perhaps. We all need ways of coping, after all.