Mail and Guardian, 2009 –  Shaun de Waal 

End by Barbara Adair (Jacana)

Shallow Game by Michael Power (Penguin)

Porcupine by Jane Bennett (Kwela)

If you wanted a quick sense of how far queer literature has come in South Africa in the past 30 years, you could do worse than compare Michael Power’s novel Shadow Game (Penguin), first published in 1972, with two recent queer works, Barbara Adair’s End (Jacana) and Jane Bennett’s Porcupine (Kwela). I say “queer” because it’s worth considering works such as Adair’s that go beyond an easily identifiable “gay” or “lesbian” sensibility and into an area of gender indeterminacy that is the end-point of the emergence of such sexual and gender identities.

Power’s novel was first published under a pseudonym in Britain and promptly banned in South Africa. It has been resurrected by Stephen Gray, himself an important figure in South Africa’s queer literary history, for Penguin’s Modern Classics series (and given a lovely cover). It tells of the love affair between a white man, a publicist for a big corporation called The Organisation, clearly not a million miles distant from Anglo American, and a black radio personality. Of course such liaisons were illegal in South Africa: doubly so, because interracial relationships were restricted under the Immorality Act, and homosexual love was simply out of bounds.

The novel is an affecting account of how such a relationship might develop and then fall foul of state and social sanctions. Inevitably, its conclusions are tragic. The dialogue bears the marks of its historical context and reads as rather brittle to a contemporary ear; the plotting seems to waver between the melodramatic and the banal. But that’s true to life, I suppose, and Shadow Game (as reviewers noted on its first publication) has the clear stamp of lived experience.

Adair’s End, by comparison, leaps into a realm in which fictional realities are up for grabs. It’s almost a textbook case of what has come to be called postmodern literature, even if we’re still working out quite what that entails. A story of love and refugees that forms an intertext with the 1942 film Casablanca, it offers a confusion of narrators and characters, at least one of whom is of endlessly shifting gender. The writing is often fine (marred by a few errors), but it’s a deeply puzzling novel, even for a hardened postmodernist like myself. Each reader will have to decide on what balance of bafflement and fascination makes it worth the effort of getting one’s head around it.

It’s certainly fascinating to put it up against Bennett’s Porcupine, a collection of short fictions that also makes thoroughgoing use of the techniques available to the postmodern writer, including what is now generically referred to as “magic realism” but might better be described as fabulation. Bennett’s book is easier to assimilate (in fact, it’s no trouble at all) than Adair’s, perhaps because the shorter form allows for more concentrated attention to individual pieces, and because Bennett has not allowed the quirky forms she employs to get in the way of the narrative.

Among the pieces is a straightforward account of two women (one black, one white) sharing accommodation, and an amusing take on the business of making a TV show called Extreme Motherhood. The queerness is in the kinds of relationship often delineated here, and also perhaps in the casual way their queerness is taken for granted. The postmodern quality is apparent in the way the narratives are seldom simply themselves, but part of a self-aware process of narrative-making. Stories in Porcupine are often told with framing or embedded commentary. In the case of Michael, we have the interpolations of the person hearing the story, which provides a new layer to our sense of the piece. How is one to “hear” this?

The title story begins so: “‘I hate this stuff,’ said the woman with the oddly soft hair, whose slipperiness caught me, always, off guard. ‘People want stories. They don’t want complicated “How is the story constructed?” and “Let’s make clever remarks about syntax” shit.’” But, as the first-person writer-figure in that story comments, “I knew some people wanted to know everything possible about stories’ architecture.” In the case of stories such as those in Porcupine — wry, witty, sensual, self-conscious, slippery but also direct — it’s worth being one of those people.