What's colour to a blind man?

As a UCT student in ’88, I once lived in a commune which included a blind man. His name was Ivan and we often chatted in the kitchen while we made our separate lunches.

Once Ivan said to me, “I went to see a movie the other week in Claremont, it was really interesting”. “Oh, which movie?” I asked, buttering sarmies, then stopped.

Say what?

“What do you mean, you saw a movie?” I asked, without stating the obvious.

“Oh,” Ivan airily said, “I like to listen to the sounds and the action, the people speaking … ”

“You mean,” I asked in astonishment, “you actually understand most of it?”

“Ja, most of it, of course, no problem,” said Ivan, as if I had asked him a stupid question.

I was doing a post-grad degree in English at the time and various literary theories from new historicism to deconstruction were the rage. I had become very interested in hermeneutics, how we interpret things, how we give meaning to events, books, art and so forth. This included authors’ dismay when we find meanings in texts different to her intentions, opening up endless debates on the validity of different “de-codings”. (There was also a blind lecturer in the English department.)

So I became fascinated with Ivan’s lebenswelt, his lived-world. He had been blind since birth. I asked him about his dreams at night. He told me he dreamed in sounds, feels and smells. He became a bit hesitant to answer more questions about that area, and I sensed it was rather private. Then I became most intrigued with how he “saw” words, or how he might “feel” words like colours: red, white, blue … (perhaps passion or violence; innocence; sadness respectively). The visual meaning and the memories we associate with words and phrases was absent or completely different in Ivan’s world.

This led me to write an unpublished, interesting novella called Seeing Darkly. (Before I am accused of arrogance, all readers thought it was interesting, including a professor of English at UCT). Seeing Darkly is set in the apartheid era and is written almost entirely from the point of a view of a blind man, a history lecturer at the University of Cape Town. (Only the last few pages, enticingly, are seen from the viewpoint of another, sighted, main character.) His name is Angus Compton and he is virtually coerced by a member of the Security Branch, Captain Van Niekerk, to re-trace the history of a communist activist, Jenny Oberholzer, whom Angus was in love with and who disappeared.

Angus wants to find her for different reasons to the nasty, fox-like captain. Angus is the only “witness” to various events, was the last person to see her and therefore almost the only person who can help. I asked myself, how does the reader feel about the reliability of the events that the blind man experienced and recalls for the police inspector? These questions and my fascination with how and what we interpret lie at the heart of Seeing Darkly.

There is also another character in the room while Angus is interviewed by Van Niekerk on different occasions whose true, and most surprising, role in the story comes to light, a real twist, I daresay. Thus the “author”, Angus, is not in control of the full story.

The novel is set in Cape Town in 1988. Angus shares a house with a woman called Michelle. He is a history lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Jenny comes to work as his secretary and he has a brief affair with her. I had real fun creating the love scene without the visual reference, and the Peeping Tom reader has to realise he cannot see anything. Sorry to spoil the party. (But of course the reader does “see” something in his mind’s eye, giving a fresh spin to the way we decode what we read.)

Jenny disappears, and Angus is aware something peculiar has happened to her ex-husband, Michael de la Rey. He was, or is, a political activist, and banned under the South African apartheid regime. Angus misses Jenny sorely. One day he comes home to find Captain Van Niekerk waiting for him to ask many questions about Jenny. Angus is reluctant to help him because of political and personal differences. However, he has no choice, as he still loves Jenny, and both he and Van Niekerk start the process of tracking down Jenny through the clues our blind protagonist provides.

Thus we have two characters who want to retain authorship, or control, over how the story unfolds. Angus is a stubborn, irritable chap (a lot like me, says the chook), and is particularly determined to have it his way, the poetical, romantic way, as a pose to Van Niekerk who just wants the cold, hard facts required by a detective.

In a plot twist it is discovered that Michelle, the lady he has been staying with, the other person in the room during the Captain’s interviews with Angus, is actually Jenny’s half-sister though she wants nothing more to do with Jenny. She is arrested for withholding evidence.

Later on, the reader does not get to read Michelle recounting to our blind history lecturer Jenny’s family history and the fact that she was born from an “interracial” marriage and is actually coloured, and therefore not allowed the white privilege she was accustomed to in the apartheid era. But the reader does get to hear Angus recounting (and sightless re-interpretation of ) the same history to Inspector van Niekerk, but Angus puts a different spin to it as he wishes to maintain control of his story.

We explore Jenny’s traumatic and somewhat bizarre history and her love affair with political activist Michael de la Rey. Also, her love-hate relationship with her half-sister, Michelle. Van Niekerk and Angus often argue and fight, but need each other in their quest for the truth or the truths that surely must come to light … I am not going to spoil the rest because I am going to do my damn best to try again to get it published. Just bear in mind Angus is a history lecturer and, literally, there is always a blindness involved in our reconstruction and interpretation of past events, close at hand or remote.

There are various twists in the plot, and the reader has to keep saying: hang on, the viewpoint is a blind man’s; what is really going on?

Seeing Darkly came extremely close to being published twice in the early Nineties. Both were SA publishers. They phoned me and said they had decided to publish, then later changed their minds. After that, I tried about seven times and then just gave up. Silly me. Never give up.

It was written so long ago that I had no PC and typed it out on a typewriter (ping! where’s that darn Tippex? Come on, hurry up and dry!) from endless, hand-written notes and made one photocopy. When I left South Africa I took one copy. To cut the story short, the remaining copy was in New Zealand for two and a half years while I lived in China before the family finally got round to posting it to me.

It is most enthralling to take a type-written manuscript completed in 1990 (and I never read it again) and put it on to my laptop, thoroughly revising and improving the MS as I go, today in 2009. I have forgotten a lot of what I wrote and sometimes feel like a new reader! I am hoping to add an extra twist and have an idea on that. The chook has now read it and also thinks it is a good read. It should be ready in a month’s time so it can run the gauntlet of publishers and agents yet again …