Cokcraco. Paul Williams

‘Yes, or no, I can’t win that one.’

      ‘You won’t need a deposit, as your job will stand as surety. Our office doubles as the building society. The university will transfer your salary through us, so you need to open an account on your way back. And give us your mobile phone number too, won’t you?’

      ‘I don’t have a mobile.’

      The silence on the way back to the mall is horrible, as if she is waiting for you to confess that you do have a mobile phone after all, or that you will relent and plead to be taken to Strandloper post-haste. But you hold your ground.

      * * *

      Dear M,

      They say the depth of the pain is measured by how many kilometres away you have to travel to stop feeling it. I am now 9,837 kilometres away from you. They also say that you only will stop feeling pain when you stop writing to the person who causes it. I must stop talking to you in my head. I must stop seeing everything through your eyes. Stop doing everything for your approval.

      They say too (who is this they?) that when she stops playing herself as the feature film in your life, you will be cured.

      But for now, a flick of your blonde hair, wide eyes, a hand reaching forward, an old song playing in my head.

      Yours T

      * * *

      You stand in the frame of the front door, savouring the moment. It is a moment of triumph, really, your stand of independence, your rebellion against the past, your dream. For haven’t you imagined this moment, free of sticky pain, the joy returning, yourself emerging as a separate being?

      The cottage stinks of mould and rotten seaweed. You creak across the wooden floors to the bedroom, where you find a bed covered with a pink blanket and pink pillows, a dresser sagging in the corner, a pink rug, blotched with cockroach droppings. Back in the living room, a pile of depressed suitcases draped with a cloth serves as a table; there is also a dusty sofa, a stiff office chair, and a rickety bookshelf eaten away by termites at the back. In the kitchen stands a silent Frigidaire (which you regret opening). A dripping tap has stained the sink. The small stove works on gas—you flick the canister with a fingernail and hear a hollow ring.

      The windows are mostly glass free. Rusty gauze, linted with years of human skin particles, cage each window to protect the house from the monkeys, presumably. Never mind the panga men and AK-wielding thieves. But the security system comes fully equipped with a panic button, and no one, Mrs Steyn reassures you, can get past FREEMAN security.

      And there are boxes everywhere, as if the previous tenant was evicted before he had time to move out his stuff. The boxes are sealed, heavily taped, and labelled BOOKS, CLOTHES AND SHIT, SNORKELLING GEAR.

      You haul your suitcase from the boot of the car into the house, and change into shorts and t-shirt. You store the suit on the wire hanger in the bedroom cupboard, shove the boxes off to the storeroom, and sweep the sand and cockroach droppings out with a straw broom you find in the kitchen closet.

      On the makeshift table, you set up the Sizwe Bantu collection. You arrange the novels, prop up a grainy photograph of the author’s famous quote (Worship yourself: be your own guru) against the books, and place a large varnished rubber cockroach in the centre of the display.

      * * *

      Blurb from the back cover of The Great South African Novel (first edition, 2006, reprinted 12 times; this edition, 2013):

Sizwe Bantu is considered by many to be the greatest living novelist in the English language.2 Spanning five decades, his ambitious narrative project has been consistent in its focus to explore the “nerve centre of being” and “unveil the masks of our … civilization.”3 He has dissected the sexist, racist and speciesist “myths of our time”4 with intellectual courage and honesty, and has pushed the boundaries of the genres his fictions inhabit. He has won so many awards for his writing that it would be tedious to list them all. He is most renowned for his cockroach stories and his use of experimental second-person narratives and wry irony. He has succeeded in being both a popular and a literary writer, ploughing through that distinction with ease, and taking delight in leaving piles of overturned critics writhing on their backs in his wake. Simultaneously, he has attracted a cult following of believers, fervent admirers who live and breathe Bantu, and carry rubber cockroaches in his honour.

      A formidable recluse, Sizwe Bantu has never appeared in public, has never shown up to claim any of his multiple awards, and does not give interviews. No one knows where he lives, and though his novels are invariably set in the urban and rural thickets of KwaZulu-Natal, they have an allegorical, ahistorical air about them, as if he has never lived there.

2 Pantheon (2013), ‘Bantu, a Disembodied No Man’ in New York Times Review.

3 Tom Watt’s comment on the back cover of the 2008 Penguin edition of Seven Invisible Selves: ‘Bantu’s vision goes to the nerve-centre of humanness. His incisive narrative seeks not merely to reflect back to us the horror of our human condition, but to peel off our black and white skins and unveil the masks of our so-called civilisation.’

4 Sizwe Bantu, ‘Sivilization’ in The African Presence, Vol. 2, March/April 2005, pp. 31-34. Bantu, quoting another great South African writer, speaks of two types of literature, one that seeks to reinforce the myths of ‘sivilisation’, and one that dissects these myths.

      * * *

      You find a box of matches and a pack of six white candles in a kitchen drawer. You strike the match and light a candle, melt its rear end and mash it onto the windowsill. You place the placard on which you have hand-written the author’s poem ‘Imbrase kontradikshun’ on the wall.

IMBRASE KONTRADIKSHUN5

      I

      I am

      I am against

      I am against kontradikshun

      I am against those who are against kontradikshun

      I am against those who are against those who are against kontradikshun

      I am against

      I am

      I

5 In this anarchist poem, Sizwe Bantu calls attention to the anarchist poem it parodies, Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘The Bar-Stool Edible Worm,’ in Cemetery of Mind, ed. Flora Veit-Wild, (Harare: Baobab Books, 1992) and Scrapiron Blues, ed. Flora Veit-Wild (Harare: Baobab Books, 1994) and available online at <http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/5862>.

      The sun burns orange through the smeared windowless frame. Sweat pours off your face. The words wash over, through, in you. You begin—finally—to relax. To be yourself, whatever that is.

      All the stores are closed, sealed off like the rest of this town in a heat haze, but Mrs K’s Take-Aways is open, and the smell of stale cooking oil greets you as you enter the doorway—beaded with old rusty bottle tops from glass bottles—yes, they still sell fizzy drinks in chipped bottles here. You order two ‘K Burgers’ and two portions of chips from a young woman dressed in an orange apron who stares at you as if you have just teleported from another planet. Perhaps you have.