Tatamkhulu Afrika, Queer Heroism, Triangulated Forms

ABSTRACT

Tatamkhulu Afrika, lauded writer and South African activist, over the course of his life suffered imprisonments under the Nazis and the apartheid state; he also changed his name five times and won almost every literary award in South Africa. Afrika’s lifetime of moving among categories — whether racial, political, sexual, or religious — has garnered the majority of scholarly attention to his work. However, the form and content of Afrika’s poetry, prose, and autobiography reveal yet unchecked assumptions that govern narratives of heroism and sexuality, in post-1994 South Africa. Afrika’s private experience of queerness expresses the superabundance of desire that he refused to pin to his identity, even as he publicly moved through multiple names and political affiliations. How might we think the conjunction of nation, desire, and literary form — the contours of which have been often tied to the novel, or, in South Africa, the prison memoir? My answer arises from a triangulation of literary forms that also revises the queer erotic triangle as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2016). Rather than obscuring desire, triangulating Afrika’s writings — particularly Bitter Eden, Mr. Chameleon, and “War-Mate” — enables us to trace an emerging model of queer heroism that allows affection, or even love, between men.

KEYWORDS:

• Tatamkhulu Afrika
• poetics
• form
• queerness
• South African literature

Notes

1. Afrika uses the language of resurrection when he described the experience of (re)writing the novel about his internment: ‘[W]hilst writing Bitter Eden, I found that vast tracts of the dead novel were resurrecting in me like the fire lily after the flames!’ (Afrika 2005, 115).

2. The notable exception is his poetry: several reviews of Afrika’s poetry collections called his style ‘excessive’ and in need of extensive editing. This critical response is itself notable and reflects contemporary debates about literary style and political content in South African letters. See, for instance, Rustum Kozain (1996), “Over-writing and Sloppy Revision” and Peter Strauss's (1991), “Tatamkhulu, Nine Lives” in response to Afrika's “Nine Lives” (1991).

3. In 1989, soon after his release from prison, Afrika published an open letter in the literary magazine, Contrast (1989), where he addressed the schism between ‘literary’ and ‘political’ writing in South Africa, which had been coded broadly as white or Black Consciousness writing. His letter records aspects of a debate about literary representation, politics, and poetic mode that had been ongoing in South Africa in prior decades—and would continue well into the 1990s and beyond. The bibliography on this topic is long, but Michael Chapman’s Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006) gives an overview of the many arguments and histories.

4. He was a pious Muslim but expressed regret and ambivalence over how his own desires (and those of others) squared with the tenets of Islam. By the end of Mr. Chameleon, he comes to the resolution that he will be ‘nice’ to everyone and let God sort out the rest (2005, 359).

5. See Mad Old Man Under the Morning Star and Turning Points, respectively.

6. Chris Dunton has analysed Afrika’s presentation of relationships between men, including ‘the male self’s distancing from, even revulsion from, other males’ which he argues gives way later in Afrika’s career, especially in Bitter Eden, to a more optimistic view of ‘the possibilities for reciprocal love between males’ (2004, 158). He analyses several poems, including “War-Mate”, as case-studies in understanding Afrika’s ‘notions of identification, counter-identification and alienation’ with or from other men (2004, 154).

7. Space does not permit me to discuss Afrika’s other poems that engage his memories of anti-apartheid activism and comrades. The collection Turning Points is especially saturated with those poems. For more prolonged analysis of Afrika’s sense of the heroic, see Radloff (2002).

8. See José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), especially chapter 4, on the language of silence, gesture, and ephemera in the queer archive. I will discuss Muñoz’s work more fully later in the essay.

9. See Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, Between Men. She describes the erotic triangle as not a fact but a ‘sensitive register for delineating relationships of power and meaning’ (2016, 38).

10. I owe my description of Afrika’s lyrical style, in part, to Kelywn Sole (1996), who fascinatingly describes Afrika’s lyrics as interlocutory narratives rather than meditations of a lone consciousness: ‘his poems are narratives, written from the position of an interlocutor who lives close to and describes the harsh lives of those, marginalized and forgotten, whom political change has affected not at all’ (27).

11. My thinking here about the erotic circuit was inspired by Anne Carson’s work in Eros the Bittersweet (2005), especially the chapter “The Reach.”

12. Silence and gesture are also reconfigured within the South African prison in the last few pages of Mr. Chameleon when Afrika writes about his brief, but poignant relationship with a ‘rent boy’ in Victor Verster Prison. What begins under the terms of rejected eroticism grows into a distant, but kindly paternal relationship. See Stobie (2005; 2007) and Baderoon (2009), who also discuss this incident in Mr. Chameleon.

13. Or, in the case of white writing, a retreat from the public sphere altogether. This is the case of the Afrikaner literary tradition much more than the English South African tradition. Anglophone white writing looks like retreat; Afrikaner and progressive writing looks like a battle. See Coetzee (1988) and Attwell (2006).