Facing Up To Risk

I'll confess to the fact that I mistakenly went to Linda Mannheim's book, Risk, with reservations. I thought it was just another chic-lit novel, but was wonderfully proved wrong. It says something about Mannheim's considerable talents that her first novel, narrated entirely in the first person and addressed as a letter to an ex-boy friend, should, though dipping into the pool of contemporary historical novels, avoid falling into the common failing of carrying its history too heavily.

The first hundred pages of the book are a true example of good story telling, with acute grasp of narrative tension, dazzling lucidity, precise and nimble descriptions of character; convincing artistic effects and catch your breath phrases like: Morning announces itself with pain. You'll say you've heard such phrases before, but that's just the point with Mannheim's writing; she learns depth and pathos to common sayings.

The book is characterised by in-depth digging of journalistic topics and politics of personal confusions coded as expressive search for individual hallowed place of belonging, all told in appealing realism and sporadic humour. I'm a great believer in William Styron saying that “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.” All true this is true with Risk.

Perhaps Risk’s major failing is lack of plot, except for vague sense of propulsion that follows the protagonist's earlier lives, which sometimes reads like high travelogue. You often get the feeling that the book is a memoir turned into literature. At its worst the book suffers from information compulsion—the need to insert, sometimes not integrated, everything that it comes along.

Risk reminds us of lack of fairness and tolerance in our (South African) societies of constitutional equality. The gist of the story is contained in this passage: And here I am, so attracted to and repelled by political violence, so in love with a man whose life has been shaped by it, so in love with a man whose most defining moments took place in a language I don't understand. (No Freud, please. It's gotta be more complicated than that.)

The story is the usual one of complications of love relationship.

Risk’s strength is in cutting through cultural divide and exploring confusing complications of bisexualism. Everything in the story, even intimacy, is shadowed by self-doubt, which I found made for fresh difference to the vacuous specious courage of chick-lit literature.

Mannheim attempts a cross-cultural pollination between a South African and American culture with redeeming moments like: Sometimes I wonder what it's like to live your life in a language that isn't your first. I don't mean to go to another country for a few years and fumble your way around, I mean to lose the tongue in which you first began to understand the world.

Mannheim is of the opinion that English, as the language, is the first weapon to escape the provincialism we've been born into, to enter the global village. One tends to wonder how the likes of Salaman Rushdie or V.S. Naipaul would react to that.

We meet the emotionally withdrawn protagonist, Gerhad Eden Marias (alias Gerrie in home Afrikaner society, and a.k.a Gem in liberal circles) at varsity, living in a Cape Town suburb, sharing a house with a coloured friend named Lamya. Gem has promiscuous homosexual tendencies, but likes to befriend women for emotional needs and almost always end up sleeping with them.

Lamya gets Gem involved in South African liberation politics of the day through UDF (United Democratic Front). The inevitable ensues. It starts by visits from apartheid security forces, which compels Lamay to go underground and is eventually detained without trial. Gem too does not escape the torture of detention. Subsequently his political career introduces tensions of misunderstanding in his family, especially with his father.

Gem has a complicated homosexual relationship with Sipho, an MK (Mkhonto Wesizwe—ANC's underground military wing) commander who comes and goes as he wishes without giving much explanation to Gem. When Sipho is killed by a shower of bullets under suspicious conditions Gem decides to migrate to the US. It is in the US, New York in particular, where he meets, at the book store in a rainy day (sigh), Hannah, the narrator of the story. They fall for each other with Gem's homosexuality and history of political violence causing deep seated psychological complications.

The story is told through in a series of rapid, contrasting scenes, going back and forth in historical perspective. I suspect most readers, especially in the middle section, will find many pages to skip, and many extraneous malformed details that cry out for better handling of research material. That section is full of longueurs. It is tangled up in messy fragments that are more of a festschrift in honour of Gem. This kind of drag is occasionally rescued by Mannheim's wonderful sporadic sentences that contain refreshing ingots: The most intimate thing that happens to us isn't sex; its pain. This paraphrase is accurate to the point of clairvoyance.

Mannheim researched South African contemporary history very well, but one gets the feeling that she has not lived it enough. The book tends to be sentimental where political issues are concerned, and sometimes mawkish in cross racial matters. It is heavily, even sometimes unnaturally, peppered with Afrikaans colloquialism. There's also the heavy influence of American cinematography that works well when Mannheim is describing scenic locations like Cape Town, but get to be too cheesy and lack emotionally honesty in other instances. What the book lacks more than anything is the tone of irony and understatement—always a telling fact on non-lived narrative. People who only study events tend to take them too seriously than those who've lived them.

Mannheim places a great deal of stress on the importance of context. She, rightly so, makes quite a lot of fuss in attempting to place her debate about identity in a social and historical context. Her characters express themselves with consistent uniformity; even minor ones are animated by a flick of novelistic attention. Mannheim's great interest in the warped reality of spoken language is magnificent. The book has a studied ineptitude in the middle section that is compounded by Gem's preppy angst against his parents.

In my humble opinion, Mannheim is on the correct side of current South African political arguments. Take one about the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Committee). Gem's non political father, when he's his opinion—like most white South Africans says: “Past is past,” he reassures me... “Reliving it upsets people. It makes things more tense between blacks and whites is what it does, to remind everyone of the things that happened.”

You'll be hard placed to find anyone who actually supported apartheid in South Africa now, even though it officially existed for more than fifty years. Just like nobody, in the ANC (African National congress), supported Communism. The truth of the matter is that the majority of people are pusillanimous, and will support whatever serves their interests to buy their peace of mind and false sense of security. Mannheim employs the character of Gem's father to explore this typical white South African Zeitgeist.

When asked by Hannah if he knew about what was happening in the black township Gem's father syas: “I am saying people did and did not know. It was both. Did we know the details? For most part, no. And we did not want to. I had a wife and a son to look after. I wanted to have a safe home. I believed that we whites were fighting for our survival. That is what I was born into...This is the situation we came into: to have lived in a place where there are battles, to have lived in a time when such things happened. And, regardless of what Gerrie thinks about such things, about responsibility, I was not responsible for them. A man can't help where he's born.”

Such equivocations are what most black South African find exasperating on some of their white counterparts, especially those who were never part of struggle for freedom before 1994. A man can help how he reacts to the situation he or she's born in. A multitude of white people, the likes of Braham Fischer, Joe Slovo and George Bizos, chose to take off the veil of cultural and race delusion. The question is whether one is willing to pay the price. The Fishcers, Cronins and Slovos of this world paid the price by not choosing the convenience of apartheid security.

To answer the numerous critics of the TRC, if I were Mannheim, I would have narrated the story of Tshidiso Mutasi. Tshidiso's parents were brutally murdered by apartheid security policemen, Jacques Hechter and Paul van Vuuren in front of his eyes when he was four years old. Tshidiso spent that night trying to wake his dead parents. Ten years later, during the TRC process, Tshidiso, then fourteen years old, met the brutal killers of his parents in front of TRC TV cameras. He had one question for his parents killers. “I live with my grandmother and she's very old. She is my only family. You killed my parents. Who will look after me when she dies?” Van Vuuren thought for a while, and then replied with a wry smile; “I suppose you'll have to come and live with me then. I'll have to look after you.”

Risk adds another brick in the growing South African literature that wishes to convince about the impossibility of reconciliation without responsible transformation. Apartheid was not just a political evil but a social catastrophe, as demonstrated by the jungle lawlessness mannerism of today's South African societies, especially in black areas.

I wish I could say Mannheim made plain the terrible things of a South African life, about the time she chose to talk about—I doubt if that was even her purpose. Her story is about love; love complicated by psychological ramifications of a life damaged by a violent culture and racial prejudice. It's urgency is with the body's weakness and the blows of fate. It is more genuine and brilliant when it dwells on the personal. Whatever the book as a whole may lack in purpose or direction, it finds in the starling voice that speaks to the heart.

Somebody at Penguin (South Africa) should have double checked some of Mannheim's Xhosa translations. I assume, for instance, that she got a hand written inscription for the political song below:

Thina iomhlaba sowephendula.
We will transform this land.

Only that would explain the slip since the sentence is supposed to be: Thina lomhlaba sowuphendula. There's not such word as iomhlaba in Xhosa; its lomhlaba, which means this land.

Risk vacillates between longing for the purified undivided self, finding authentic ways to fill the spiritual vacancy of our times, and the belief that the confusion of our identities is no longer important in our fractured, plural modern lives since we've acquired ability to posses multiple identities. I often found myself wishing she would make up her mind on the issue.

The book also tries to conjure up ways to establish a sense of family through political identities that superimpose faith, culture, sexuality and ethnicity. The only problem is that these too keep breaking up, as brilliantly delineated by Linda Mannheim's book Risk.