A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man: Reading Arthur Nortje

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Notes

¹ Nortje, “Dogsbody Half-Breed”, 345.

² Alvarez-Pereyre, The Poetry of Commitment, 153.

³ Craig McLuckie and Ross Tyner reprint a letter by one of Nortje's Canadian students, which helpfully confirms the proper pronunciation of the poet's last name: “Nortje was particular about his name being pronounced correctly. We all started calling him NORT-GEE, and he would patiently correct us, NOR-KEE” (McLuckie and Tyner, “Arthur Nortje,” 121).

⁴ The following excerpt from one of Nortje's notebooks, formally termed “Notebook A” and housed along with his other documents at the University of South Africa (Unisa), provides haunting confirmation that he had long contemplated suicide by overdosing. The entry was written in 1962, eight years before his death:

• Often I do like tonight I kept thinking—what would it be like to take an overdose of sleeping tablets (barbiturates or soporifics) & end it? Why suicide? Psychologically bec. you have nothing to look forward to—nothing to achieve in life as such. So why not attempt a premature entry into next world? It won't be illegal, since as a bastard I AM here on short shift, as it were. A bit of luck, a chance encounter in popular magazine jargon. And yet suicides are regarded (paradoxically?) as OPTIMISTS. Hope to find something better elsewhere. Or take yourself out of the vicious circle, isn't that an end in itself? But fight, fight, fight. Time & strength are dimensions of here and now. So try, try, try. (Nortje, “Notebook A,” 37)

⁵ At a cursory glance, Nortje's life and death bear an uncanny resemblance to those of legendary American guitarist Jimi Hendrix. The latter, a rock star of black and Cherokee descent, was born three weeks before Nortje and lived a similarly “fast” life, dying three months before Nortje in the same country, at the same age, under identical circumstances. But where Hendrix gained international stardom and lasting fame despite the brevity of his life and career, Nortje remains an obscure South African writer. The comparison between Nortje and Hendrix highlights the limits of segregation in South Africa and the United States—both men left for England largely because they found a measure of freedom lacking in their home countries. But while Jim Crow was already in its death throes in the sixties, apartheid was at its height.

⁶ McLuckie and Tyner, “‘The Raw and the Cooked’,” 1.

⁷ Volk, “What Do You Expect?,” 56.

⁸ Pordzik, “‘No Longer Need I Shout Freedom in the House’,” 35.

⁹ Klopper, “Editor's Preface,” xxiv–xxv.

¹⁰ Nortje, AD, 228. Subsequent page references to this text will be included in parentheses in the body of the article.

¹¹ Sollors, Neither Black Nor White, 222–23.

¹² Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” 196.

¹³ I must acknowledge here that Hedy Davis, the “first” Nortje scholar and the woman who tracked down his acquaintances, friends, and family, collected his papers, and made his work accessible through Unisa, is openly contemptuous of the belief that Nortje committed suicide. She remains critical of those scholars who tout suicide as the perfect ending for a tragic poet, maintaining that Nortje's circumstances before his death were propitious and his death was an accident.

¹⁴ I centralize the white male/“black” female parent dynamic simply because that was the historical paradigm and the model of Nortje's parentage in particular.

¹⁵ For the mulatta character in American fiction, the white father is traditionally a sympathetic and loving figure who privately, if not publicly, acknowledges her but does not live long enough to save her from a tragic fate. In reality, the role of the mixed race daughter incited its own crisis around her desirability and vulnerability to other white men, her father's identity as protector/predator of “black” women, and her mother's chaotic function as sexual victim/concubine/slave/female role model.

¹⁶ Zackodnik, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, 135.

¹⁷ McDowell, “Introduction,” xvii.

¹⁸ Erasmus, “Introduction: Re-Imagining,” 13.

¹⁹ Pfeiffer, Race Passing and American Individualism, 82.

²⁰ Klopper, “In Pursuit,” 875.

²¹ Johnson, The Autobiography, 19.

²² Davis, “The Poetry of Arthur Nortje,” 1.

²³ Johnson, The Autobiography, 19.

²⁴ Plath, Ariel, 50.

²⁵ As a coloured woman, Nortje's mother was also mixed race and a contributor to her son's “white” blood. Under the strict laws of apartheid, however, “white” for Nortje hardly reflected his mother's history or social circumstances. In an American context, “white trash” is also a class reference, but the connection between whiteness and a lower social status did not obtain in apartheid South Africa where white people were automatically upper class. If Nortje is indeed making a class reference, then he is being ironic.

²⁶ Farred, Midfielder's Moment, 68.

²⁷ Scholars often attribute Nortje's “war with women” to a failed love affair with a coloured woman named Joan Cornelius.

²⁸ The pitfalls of universalizing Freudian concepts like the Oedipus complex have been well marked by such theorists as Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Jameson, and, the most famous postcolonial critic of Western psychoanalysis, Fanon. But even Fanon's revolutionary “ethnopsychiatry” leaves little room for the mixed race subject whose authority figure is not only a symbolic white father but also a biological white father. See Bertoldi's “Oedipus in (South) Africa?” for an excellent discussion of how/if Oedipus fits into pre- and post-apartheid South Africa.

²⁹ The reference to tearing flesh also brings to mind Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596) in which the Jewish merchant Shylock famously demands a pound of flesh as collateral.

³⁰ Lacan's argument that the Name-of-the-Father is the fundamental signifier and the absence of the father is a trigger for psychosis is undeniably controversial, especially from a feminist perspective. Strategic use of his theories, however, makes for an interesting reading of Nortje as the child of an absent white father and a single coloured mother under a patriarchal system like apartheid—a system that was itself pathological.

³¹ The nuanced racial implications of Jewishness are beyond the scope of this essay, but those implications merit further discussion. As a Jewish man from the Little Karoo, Nortje's father would not have signified “whiteness” in the same way as an Afrikaner or someone of English descent, nor would he have had the same access to authority. But such details may not have mattered to Nortje, who (in keeping with the nomenclature of apartheid) ultimately read his Jewish father as a white man and a member of the ruling class.

³² The reference to “Praetorian henchman” evokes the special guard employed by emperors in Ancient Rome and the infamous maximum-security prison at Pretoria. Pretoria was known as the unofficial apartheid capital of South Africa.

³³ The image of a colossus vomiting his offspring has echoes of Greek mythology. The supreme Titan Cronus swallows his children at birth to prevent them from overthrowing him. His youngest son Zeus escapes this fate and eventually forces Cronus to regurgitate the devoured offspring like “indigestible autotoxins.”

³⁴ Nortje was not always consistent in claiming “blackness.” He sometimes identified with the black struggle against apartheid and, at other times, held himself apart because of his colouredness. Kwadwo Osei-Nyame argues, however, that, “Although coloured and therefore inhabiting a specific locale within the South African racial imagery, [Nortje] is speaking for the oppressed majority as a whole” (Osei-Nyame, “The Politics of National Identity,” 65).

³⁵ Lacan, Écrits, 321.

³⁶ Ambivalence is a trademark of the tragic mulatto trope; although, Freudian theorists trace ambivalence to the father back to the Oedipus complex.

³⁷ Johnson, The Autobiography, 1.

³⁸ Hughes, “Mulatto,” 533.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Hughes, Mulatto, 549.

⁴² Ibid., 550.

⁴³ McKay, “The Mulatto,” 559.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ South African novelist Achmat Dangor proves in his novel Bitter Fruit (2001) that the theme of a mulatto son murdering a white father is not restricted to tragic mulatto or apartheid fiction. The mixed race protagonist of the novel, figuratively read as “bitter fruit,” learns of his coloured mother's rape by a white policeman during apartheid and the consequent truth of his paternity. Devastated, the young man eventually tracks down his biological white father and shoots him in broad daylight before disappearing, implicitly to be reborn with a new identity as a Muslim scholar.

⁴⁶ Farred, Midfielder's Moment, 63.

⁴⁷ Bunn, “‘Some Alien Native Land’,” 40.

⁴⁸ Interestingly, however, one of Nortje's earliest poems, “Mother Republic,” conflates the brutal image of the symbolic apartheid father with the nation as a “mother republic.” But even as a nation, the mother is an ambiguous site of suffering and the relationship between “mother” and child is symbiotic: “Me, slash with whip, till pain can merge / With dungeon black, I am your property: / Mother, my muscles feel nothing, but temptation / To succumb” (Nortje, AD, 3).

⁴⁹ Klopper, “Arthur Nortje,” 4.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Johnson, The Autobiography, 23.

⁵² Klopper, “Arthur Nortje,” 8. Other universities were categorized as “black” or “Asian.”

⁵³ Ibid., 7.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 9.

⁵⁵ McLuckie and Tyner, “Arthur Nortje,” 112.

⁵⁶ Undoubtedly, the pattern of functional sobriety followed by evening or weekend binge drinking pertains to a “student life” in general and is hardly restrictive to any one social group, especially if pubs and drinking are considered part of a national “culture.” Nonetheless, Nortje's double life does evoke those two so-called options for coloured individuals—shame and respectability—in an exaggerated way.

⁵⁷ Erasmus, “Introduction: Re-Imagining,” 14.

⁵⁸ Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough, 14.

⁵⁹ Klopper, “Arthur Nortje,” 11.

⁶⁰ Larsen, Quicksand, 58.

⁶¹ Johnson, The Autobiography, 39.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Klopper, “Arthur Nortje,” 11.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 12.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 16. Scholars generally present Nortje's time in England and Canada as academically stimulating but only vaguely political. McLuckie and Tyner, the two main researchers on Nortje's Canadian experience, suggest that he rarely mentioned apartheid or South Africa while teaching in Hope, British Colombia, and Toronto, Ontario, and he shared very little of his personal life or background. Neither did Nortje find much of a South African community in Canada. In England he felt more at home, despite claiming that, “wherever I am going to settle… it will be under the blood-curse of the moon” (Nortje, AD, 230). London harbored a significant number of South African exiles, including Nortje's mentor Dennis Brutus. But despite giving poetry readings and maintaining ties with other exiles, Nortje was resistant to being appropriated as a “voice” for the struggle.

⁶⁶ Johnson, The Autobiography, 33.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 53.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 54.

⁷⁰ Johnson, The Autobiography, 1.

⁷¹ Johnson's Ex-Colored Man has repeatedly been read or considered as a subject of homoerotic desire. Similarly, Hughes, McKay, and Toomer have all been (re)claimed as “queer” writers of the Harlem Renaissance. See Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and Somerville, Queering the Color Line.

⁷² Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 136.

⁷³ Davis argues that Nortje's near breakdown at the end of 1966 was precipitated by the strain of a homosexual relationship that had developed in England. Bunn, however, suggests that the reading of homosexual desire in Nortje's work is pure speculation. Klopper, one of Nortje's primary biographers, is notably silent on the subject of Nortje's bi- or homosexuality.

⁷⁴Fincher, Review of Monk Lewis.

⁷⁵ Nortje writes,

• Apollo's man-breasts smooth and gold-blond hold between in the fine-boned cleft the kernel of radiant light. Like wind youth's madness streams through the orifices. The swift vivacious morning shoots along the ripples: in my loins the swelling pearl moves. This growing jewel wants to burst … The joy cry of virility stirs quivers: from your naval I bite the ivory flower. (AD, 125)

⁷⁶ Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 136.

⁷⁷ Ellen Craft, the famous light-skinned mulatta who escaped from slavery by passing as a white man, would be one example of the mixed race woman performing a non-heteronormative role.

⁷⁸ Long, The History of Jamaica, 335. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 47.

⁷⁹ Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 68.

⁸⁰ Young, Colonial Desire, 102.

⁸¹ Harper, Are We Not Men?, 103.

⁸² Hughes, Mulatto, 534. Hughes counterbalances this effeminate character with the different, but also stereotypical protagonist, Robert Lewis, who is “strong and well built; a light mulatto with ivory-yellow skin and proud thin features … of a fiery, impetuous temper—immature and wilful” (Ibid.).

⁸³ Head, A Question of Power, 45.

⁸⁴ A sprawling, poverty-stricken, coloured township in Cape Town, District Six was known for its vibrant street culture, but later became famous as a site of apartheid injustice. In 1966 the suburb was designated whites-only under the Group Areas Act, leading to the eviction of 60,000 residents and the bulldozing of the entire area. Head and Nortje both depict the pre-1966 “slum world” of District Six in their writing.

⁸⁵ Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello's,” 117.

⁸⁶ Lewis and Loots, “‘Moffies en Manvroue’,” 142.

⁸⁷ Chetty's study of 1950s and 1960s Cape moffie life indicates a strong dialogue with American culture. He writes that, “Gay men became ‘Capuccine,’ ‘Doris Day,’ ‘Eartha Kitt,’ and ‘Lena Horne’” (Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello's,” 121). Aside from Capuccine (a name that certainly carries colour connotations) and Day, the other adopted signifiers reflect a telling kinship with actresses who were visibly, if not “officially,” mixed race. The portrait of a thriving homosexual subculture laced with gang violence and alcoholism also resonates with images of gay and lesbian Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. The South African “shebeen” corresponds to the American “speakeasy,” where patrons gathered for a night of “anything goes.” For an excellent discussion of Harlem's homosexual subculture, see Garber, “A Spectacle in Color.”

⁸⁸ Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello's,” 120.

⁸⁹ Erasmus, “Introduction: Re-Imagining,” 17.

⁹⁰ Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough, 14.

⁹¹ Klopper, “Arthur Nortje,” 12.

⁹² Brutus, “In Memorium,” 26.

⁹³ Butler, Undoing Gender, 29.

⁹⁴ Davis, “The Poetry of Arthur Nortje,” 59.

⁹⁵ Quoted. in Davis, “The Poetry of Arthur Nortje,” 18. Rive, an acclaimed queer coloured writer in his own right, was known for his reclamation of “blackness,” his appreciation for Langston Hughes, and his portrayals of District Six. He met his own tragic death in 1989.

⁹⁶ Here we find another connection to Plath, who also used mirror images as a metaphor for a troubled sense of identity.

⁹⁷ Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 272.

⁹⁸ Toomer, “Letter to James Weldon Johnson,” 106. Available at http://lion.chadwyck.com

⁹⁹ Toomer, The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer. Available at http://lion.chadwyck.com

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Gilroy, Against Race, 41.