I am a leftist of relatively sound intellect, and I believe that Covid-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan. This makes me an anomaly. I’ve been censored and shunned on social media, and accused of being a conspiracy theorist, a quack, and a Trump supporter, by people who have not bothered to investigate the possibility of a laboratory origin for a virus that killed around 30 million people, left even greater numbers severely incapacitated with Long Covid, and all but decimated economies in many countries around the world.
I am therefore setting out the case for Covid-19 coming from a laboratory in Wuhan, with links to the relevant information. I am not a scientist, but I don’t believe that one needs to be a scientist to understand a plausible narrative that is substantiated by facts.
In any case, two United States intelligence agencies (the US Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation) support the lab leak theory, and a number of top scientists believe it’s plausible that Covid-19 came from a laboratory.
It is true that some scientists have argued publicly for a natural or “proximal” origin for Covid-19 – but it has emerged that the most prominent among these scientists were simultaneously stating in private emails and Slack chat messages amongst themselves that it was likely that Covid-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan.
For the record, unlike Donald Trump, I am not a Sinophobe. I am not interested in calling Covid-19 “the China virus”. Indeed, as I argue, if Covid-19 came from a laboratory, the United States is probably as implicated in the origins of Covid-19 as China.
Gain-of-function research, which comprises “the serial passaging of microorganisms to increase their transmissibility, virulence, immunogenicity, and host tropism by applying selective pressure to a culture”, is so dangerous that it was banned in the United States by the Obama government in 2014. Under the Trump administration in late 2017, this ban was lifted, a fact that is omitted in the rhetoric of Republicans on Covid-19 and about the dangers of gain-of-function research.
In late 2019, one of the deadliest viruses ever known to humankind was unleashed, causing untold death and suffering, and severely damaging economies around the world. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China – where Dr Anthony Fauci’s EcoHealth Alliance had invested substantial amounts of US taxpayers’ money, effectively “outsourcing” risky gain-of-function research after the Obama ban on this research within the US. Fauci tried to deny this, but the truth eventually emerged:
“… the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an ‘unexpected result’ of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold.”
Despite the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was performing extremely dangerous gain-of-function research, taking coronaviruses from bats and spiking them to make them more transmissible to humans, by all accounts there were very low safety and security protocols in the laboratory. This led to the United States government writing to China in 2018, expressing concern “that the [Wuhan] lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic”. Around two years later, Covid-19 emerged. In Wuhan.
Ironically, Trump then called it “the China virus”, and Dr Fauci became the golden boy of the centre-left, appearing regularly on screens around the world as the face of “reason” while we all sat hanging on his every word in fear and isolation.
Contrary to the statements of Trump, if Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the culpability for Covid-19 does not just rest with China – it also rests on the shoulders of the United States government, which provided US taxpayers’ funding that was channeled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology by Dr Fauci’s EcoHealth Alliance.
Yet debates on the origins of the virus have become so bizarrely politicised that instead of mainstream news outlets seriously investigating the possibility of a laboratory leak and admonishing the Trump administration for lifting the ban on gain-of-function research, if you mention the lab leak theory in polite leftist society you are immediately pegged as a Trump supporter or part of a lunatic fringe. The only mainstream group of people convinced of the lab leak theory seem to be Republicans in the United States – who of course do not mention that it was under their watch that gain-of-function research was allowed to start up again in the US.
A lab leak is something we need to take seriously, for very important reasons.
Let’s traverse a couple of important points:
1) The virus most closely related to Covid-19 was found in bats in Yunnan province in China. This virus is 96.1% similar to Covid-19, which makes it more similar to Covid-19 than viruses found in bats in Laos, which are 95% similar. The bats in Yunnan come from the very caves where Shi Zhengli (aka “the bat woman”) was collecting bat viruses for her gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There are around 10 000 cities in the world. In only one of these cities was gain-of-function research being conducted on bat coronaviruses from caves in Yunnan, and in only one of these cities did Covid-19 emerge – they happen to be the exact same city.
Notably, Covid-19 did not emerge in Yunnan Province which is 800 miles from Wuhan, and there is no evidence that any bats from Yunnan were in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which has been fingered by natural origins theorists as the source of the pandemic.
Despite some discredited claims about raccoon dogs in this Wuhan wet market being possible intermediary animals, there is no evidence that any animals in the market were infected with any virus similar to Covid-19 before the pandemic started. According to computational virologist Jesse Bloom, who examined the samples from the Wuhan market, “when looked at carefully these data are not sufficient to conclude anything either way about whether there were infected animals.”
Yet there is plenty of evidence that coronaviruses from bats in Yunnan, which are uncomfortably similar to Covid-19, were being hosted, and tinkered with, by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Based on these facts, it’s more than likely not “just a coincidence” that Covid emerged in the only city in the entire world where human beings were doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses from Yunnan, spiking these viruses to make them more transmissible to humans.
As stated by science writer Nicholas Wade, in his evidence submitted 8 March 2023 to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:
“… the epidemic broke out not in some random city in China, nor near the bat-infested caves of southern China where the viruses are most likely to jump to people, but right in Wuhan, home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is China’s leading center for coronavirus research. We know that scientists there were genetically engineering coronaviruses under seriously inadequate safety conditions. And we know that viruses escape from labs all the time. Common sense suggests that lab leak cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand.”
2)In order to become wildly transmissible to humans, the bat coronaviruses that were being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology needed a particular “furin cleavage site”.
Newly obtained documents have revealed that in 2018, the Wuhan researchers stated in a proposal for the Pentagon that they wanted 14 million US dollars for “research”, which included inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus at a specific genetic position known as “the S1/S2 junction.” The US Department of Defence turned the proposal down as being too risky. Two years later, Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, and the furin cleavage site of Covid-19 was found to be situated precisely at the S1/ S2 junction.
As argued by Wade: “Why should evolution produce, at that very moment in time, a virus just like those described in the DEFUSE proposal? It’s surely a lot easier to believe that the Wuhan researchers did exactly what they proposed and generated the SARS2 virus in their lab.”
Wade continues, “All we need for absolute proof is knowledge of the starting virus the Wuhan researchers used – but the Chinese authorities closed down their coronavirus database on 9 September, 2019” and there has been a lack of transparency about the work being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Moreover, according to Emily Kopp, there are also “real questions about whether EcoHealth Alliance has published all of the data it has access to, which is… really scandalous because EcoHealth Alliance…accepts [US] public tax dollars.”
3)Weirdly enough, Covid-19 is the only virus in its family to possess a furin cleavage site at all, which makes it highly unlikely that this evolved naturally. As Wade claims: “SARS2 belongs to a sub-family of coronaviruses called Sarbecoviruses. Of the hundreds of Sarbecoviruses so far known, only one has a furin cleavage site – SARS2. The virus is very unlikely to have acquired its furin cleavage site by recombination [in nature] for the simple reason that no other member of its family possesses one.”
4) Early on in the pandemic, when speculation began to swirl around the possibility of a lab leak, one of the main sources to discredit the lab leak theory was a paper published in Nature, entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” and written by Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry. As recent documents and hearings have shown, however, these scientists had monetary and possibly other conflicts of interest, and notably – at the same time these scientists were (being pressured into) stating publicly that Covid-19 had a natural/ proximal origin, they were stating privately amongst themselves that it was highly plausible that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• On January 31, 2020, Anderson wrote in an email to Dr. Fauci and others: ‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%), so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.’
• On February 2, 2020, Dr. Robert Garry similarly wrote, ‘I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario . . . . I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . . Of course, in the lab it would be easy’
• On February 2, 2020, Dr. Michael Farzan wrote he was ‘bothered by the furin site and ha[d] a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab . . . . I am 70:30 or 60:40 [lab].’
• On February 2, 2020, Dr. Andrew Rambaut stated, ‘From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.’
• On February 4, 2020, Dr. Edward Holmes said he was ‘60-40 lab . . . .’
• On February 4, 2020, Dr. Jeremy Farrar wrote, ‘I am 50-50 [lab].’”
As Kopp points out, whereas “[t]he virologists wrote in ‘Proximal Origin’ that scientists would have never experimented with a novel virus that had not been published in the scientific literature”, “privately the virologists acknowledged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had ‘loads [of novel viruses] in their freezers’ and that they could conduct engineering experiments on novel viruses ‘on a whim.’”
Kopp further notes: “the concept at the core of their paper published in Nature — that a novel virus would never be subject to gain-of-function experiments — was described by the virologists themselves as partially ‘foolhardy’ and ‘crap.’”
Slackchat messages between Garry, Holmes, Rambaut, Andersen, 8 Feb 2020.
And yet these scientists wrote a paper that contradicted their private reservations, stating categorically that Covid-19 had natural origins. This paper – which was not peer-reviewed nor based on any research (in effect making it nothing more than an “op ed”) was then used to discredit and denounce the idea of a lab leak as a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Some questions that emerge:
1)Does it matter where Covid-19 came from?
It matters because 30 million people died and many are still suffering bereavement or Long Covid. Moreover, economies suffered as a result of the pandemic, leaving many countries worse off. In South Africa, the economy contracted by billions of rands, businesses went bust, and youth unemployment rose dramatically. If the pandemic came from a laboratory, which seems highly likely, then we need to start talking about reparations, which will surely be an uncomfortable conversation for the US and China. Moreover, recognising the dangers of gain-of-function research and regulating – or entirely stopping – this type of research is necessary.
It has recently emerged that Fauci has hidden gain-of-function research on the dreaded “monkeypox”/ “mpox”, by his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the past decade. This “research” has attempted make monkeypox more transmissible and deadly: “The new ‘chimeric’ (combined) virus could have retained up to a 15 percent fatality rate and a 2.4 reproductive number, a measure of transmissibility indicating every sick person could infect up to 2.4 people on average, giving it pandemic potential.”
Ask yourself a question: Are you ok with this?
2)But surely gain-of-function research helps protect us from future pandemics?
A prominent scientist, Dr Richard H. Ebright (Board of Governors and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University and Laboratory Director, Waksman Institute of Microbiology), has stated that gain-of-function research has “zero” benefit for civilian populations, and is highly risky and unregulated.
Ebright further stated in evidence during the recent and ongoing US Senate committee hearings on “Origins of COVID-19: An Examination of Available Evidence”: “No – zero – sound evidence has been presented that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin. No natural reservoir host has been identified, no natural intermediate host has been identified, suggestions that SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan are false, and papers widely cited as providing evidence for natural origin are unsound.”
A summary of Ebright’s insights about the origins of Covid can be found in his Twitter/ X posts at the time of his testimony, which concur with what I have stated above.
3)Is gain-of-function research part of an undercover bioweapons programme?
My honest answer is that I don’t know. Initially, I believed that gain-of-function research was intended to anticipate and protect us against future pandemics. I thought the idea that Covid-19 could be part of a bioweapons programme was too far-fetched. Now, however, I am not so sure.
There is some relevant factual information quoted in this text by Robert F. Kennedy, though I disagree with the author’s views on vaccines etc:
“In contrast to Dr. Fauci’s coy reticence, the Chinese are bracingly frank in acknowledging that their gain-of-function dabbling is straight-up weapons development….
In 2015, only two years after Chinese scientists used funding from NIAID and techniques they learned from Ralph Baric to triumphantly facilitate a deadly chimeric bird flu, Chinese military scientists from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and senior Chinese public health officials published a 261-page Chinese-language military manual. The manual’s publisher is the Chinese Military Medical Science Press—a government- owned publishing house managed by the General Logistics Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The book described Chinese success at artificially manipulating animal coronaviruses to infect humans as the herald of a promising ‘new era of genetic weapons.'” (Chapter 33)
Conclusion: What should be done?
Firstly, if Covid-19 came from a laboratory, which seems extremely likely, reparations need to be negotiated and paid.
Secondly, we should all be genuinely concerned about gain-of-function research.
The problem is that if gain-of-function research is linked to bioweapons, there is now an arms race, in which superpowers around the world feel compelled to participate, in order not to be left out of information on dangerous technologies. Nuclear armaments are regulated by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and nowadays most countries have put an end to nuclear research and testing. However, there are no regulations for gain-of-function research – and as with the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, much of this “research” is conducted in secret.
The problem is also that almost no one on the left is paying attention to this problem.
The US Senate hearings on Covid-19 origins, which have presented evidence that Dr Fauci told serious untruths, that the scientists who wrote the Proximal Origins paper had substantial private reservations about what they stated in public, and that Covid-19 was likely concocted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, have been almost completely ignored by the mainstream centre-left and leftist media. It has been up to lone voices on the left – Sam Husseini, Jon Stewart – to make the case for the lab leak theory.
It is possible to believe that Covid-19 likely came from a laboratory in Wuhan, without being anti-vaccine, pro-Trump, or a crackpot.
With the advent of gain-of-function research, there is no doubt that we are in dangerous, uncharted, and largely unregulated terrain. Mary Shelley foresaw the perils of hubristic science in her novel Frankenstein. Even after the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, unpredictable chimeric viruses are still being cooked up by scientists in laboratories around the world.
If we ignore the risky business of unregulated gain-of-function research, who knows what deadly pandemic will be unleashed on humankind next?
Women, education, dance and (anti)fascism in the Jesus novels
Note on the text: DRAFT: This is a chapter drafted for a forthcoming manuscript on J.M. Coetzee, Feminism and Women’s Voices. The ideas herein may not be used without permission from the author and without proper referencing and citation. A draft of the paper was delivered at the Coetzee and the Archive Conference in London in 2017, and a draft of the chapter as a whole was shared with Coetzee scholar David Attwell by email in March 2019.
On the 21st of October 1974, J.M. Coetzee jotted down an idea for a story in the notebook for In the Heart of the Country, the novel he was working on at the time: “the dull and ordinary childhood of someone who by subsequent action (eg. Hitler, saints’ lives) renders the story justifiable”. Apart from the fact that Magda, the narrator of In the Heart of the Country (1977), spins out narratives about her childhood and a schoolroom that may be memories or fantasies, this fragment of an idea for a story seems to have little relevance to In the Heart of the Country. Yet it would evidently bear fruit four decades later, in The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its sequel, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). Both novels are set in a context resembling Latin America, though not in a contemporary temporal setting as there is no technology such as cellphones. And apart from some strange details – such as that the context appears to be an “afterlife” where characters are apparently speaking to one another in Spanish, have new names, and have been “washed clean” of their pasts and memories – both novels are about the “ordinary childhood” of a boy, Davíd, who may or may not be a version of Jesus Christ. Reading from The Childhood of Jesus at the University of Cape Town in 2012, Coetzee stated that his initial hope was for the novel to appear with a blank cover and title page, with the title finally printed on the last page. This endorses his idea of creating a story that is “justified” in retrospect by the unmasking of its protagonist’s identity.
Using the spark of Coetzee’s idea about “Hitler” and “saints’ lives” in the notebook of In the Heart of the Country to read aspects of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, I would like to draw attention to the rhizomatic shape of ideas within the notebooks of Coetzee’s novels, where concepts in the notebook of one particular novel give rise to and become interconnected with ideas and characters in later novels. I would also like to point out that although it seemingly has no reference to In the Heart of the Country, this intention to write about “Hitler, saints’ lives” appears in the notebook of Coetzee’s first novel to feature a woman narrator, and that the name of this narrator, Magda, evokes that of a saint, Mary Magdalene, who is prominent as “the apostle to the apostles” in the Gnostic gospels, and who apparently suffered from fits of madness resembling epilepsy or hysteria before she was healed by Christ and became one of his closest followers. Given the “madness” of Magda in In the Heart of the Country, the story of Mary Magdalene does not seem incidental to this novel. My focus in this chapter, however, is on the relation of Coetzee’s note about “Hitler, saints’ lives” to women in Coetzee’s Jesus novels. I am interested in the quest of the focaliser, Simón, for the mother of the young boy, Davíd, in The Childhood of Jesus, which leads them to Inés, who takes on the role of Davíd’s mother, and in the character of Ana Magdalena Arroyo in The Schooldays of Jesus. Both novels deal with questions about education and mother figures, with some ambiguity emerging around Ana Magdalena and her Academy of Dance.
As I intend to argue, Coetzee has a long-standing interest in the “deforming” aspects of conventional colonial education, and an interest in alternative pedagogies. Whereas he suffered under a particular form of neo-Calvinist colonial education in his boyhood, his Jesus novels display an awareness that at the same time Europe was exporting rigid and mutilating models of education to the colonies, modernist educationists and dance pioneers in Europe were challenging the limitations of conventional pedagogies and even of conventional society. In The Schooldays of Jesus, the Academy of Dance with its woman director has echoes of early twentieth century experiments in alternative education, from Maria Montessori’s emphasis on tactile learning to Rudolf Steiner’s notion of Eurythmy. It also strongly recalls the extremely influential Lebensreform movement that gathered momentum in and around a fluid alternative community based at Monte Verità in Switzerland in the early twentieth century. As opposed to the rigid constraints of early twentieth century society, Lebensreform formulated an alternative version of culture channeled through perceived ideals of ancient Greek art, and focused on the health, vigour, and beauty of the naked human body, moving freely in nature. Steiner himself spent time at Monte Verita, and it became a hub for creative ideas about dance, physical movement and pedagogy. With its esoteric emphasis on dance as a means of training the soul, Ana Magdalena’s Academy evokes the philosophy of one of the most seminal and pioneering proponents of modern dance, namely Mary Wigman, who was trained by dance pioneer Rudolf von Laban at Monte Verità, and ran the Dresden Central School of Dance from 1920 to 1942, with her disciples setting up a dance school in New York in the early 1930s. Wigman’s story is fascinating as it shows the ambiguous potential of the ideas that emerged from the Lebensreform movement. She has been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser because she choreographed a mass youth dance for Hitler’s Olympic games in Berlin, 1936. Yet her school was closed down by the Nazis in 1942, as she was considered a leftist. She continued to teach during the war, however, and was forced to implement the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis. Less ideologically ambiguous was the Nazi-affiliated Dance Academy run by Elizabeth Duncan (sister of the more famous modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan). As such the Academy of Dance in The Schooldays of Jesus reflects on modernist experiments in education, and on the ways in which early twentieth century modernist dance, pioneered by women, played an extremely significant role in reforming education and imagining alternative communities, though many of these imaginings were ideologically ambiguous.
Photograph promoting the early 20th century Lebensreform movement, by Gerhard Riebicke
Through writing about Ana Magdalena, her Academy, and her husband, Juan Sebastián, Coetzee explores ideas about dance, music, alternative education, and fascism, at a time in the world where a turn to the far right is palpable, more than seventy years after the apparent defeat of Nazism and fascism. Significant in this chapter are Coetzee’s attitude towards his own education under apartheid, and his time as a lecturer in the late 1960s at SUNY Buffalo, which was evidently seminal in shaping him as an intellectual and artist. In addition to the early modernist experiments in dance and alternative community mentioned above, Ana Magdalena’s Academy of Dance also alludes to experimental models of liberal arts colleges in the United States such as the Black Mountain College, where dance, among other arts, was incorporated as pedagogy. Coetzee would have been aware of the history of Black Mountain College, given his position at SUNY Buffalo, where Black Mountain figures such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley were working in the 1960s. His awareness of the Lebensreform movement, of academies of dance run by women such as Wigman and Duncan, and of the history of Black Mountain College, shapes his engagement as a writer with the ambivalent potential of arts such as avant-garde dance. Moreover, as I shall argue, The Schooldays of Jesus converses with a little known but ground-breaking film entitled “Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach”/ “Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach”, produced by Jean Luc Godard and directed by French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The date of the film’s release, 1968, coincided with global political upheaval: students were protesting and organizing against institutions and the establishment in France, in South Africa,[1] and in the United States, where Coetzee was then based.
Both of Coetzee’s Jesus novels have produced a certain amount of bafflement among readers and reviewers. A review by Benjamin Markowitz in The Guardian described The Childhood of Jesus as “bewildering” and “puzzling”, and wondered where the novel’s rather cryptic and even dull aspects left the reader. In a review entitled “The Childhood of Jesus shows what happens when a Nobel prize winner gets really weird”, Jason Farago, writing for New Republic, called the novel “an unfathomable metafictional firecracker unlike any of his previous books and indeed unlike any other book I can name”. Duncan White in The Telegraph praised The Schooldays of Jesus as “brilliant” but also as “maddening, obscure”. In a review for The Guardian, Elizabeth Lowry described the scenery of the second novel as “so flimsily assembled that it could come straight from Ikea” and the “socialist utopia” setting of both novels as passionless and tasteless as the “bread and bean paste” consumed by the novel’s protagonists.
Regarding the apparently “socialist” and “third world” setting of the Jesus novels, and the fact that the characters are speaking to one another in a Spanish that is not their mother tongue, the notebooks of Coetzee’s novels reveal that at least as early as the writing of Foe (his fifth novel, published in 1987), he had begun to imagine fiction set in Latin America, or at least alluding to this context. Notably, in In the Heart of the Country, Magda imagines flying machines speaking to her in “the Spanish of pure meanings”. Thereafter, battling with the setting of Foe, Coetzee moves in the notebook of this novel between considering the island of the story to be off the coast of Latin America or off the coast of Africa. In a note dated the 30th of March 1984, he wonders whether to “give [Susan, the protagonist] more time in S. America, which can then stand for S.A.” In the notebook for Age of Iron, battling to resist the pressures of realism, Coetzee wrote that he wanted “a more imaginative feel to the novel… Dump social realism. Set it in Latin America? At least Spanish names.”
Much more recently, almost two decades after his immigration from South Africa to Australia, and after accepting the “J.M. Coetzee Chair” at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Argentina, Coetzee professed in an interview a strong interest in what he called “literatures of the South”, and in “three continents that are far apart in geography and in language but that seem… to have affiliations in their history and their relation to the land, and I refer on the one hand to the vast literature of Latin America… and to the less vast but still considerable literatures of southern Africa and Australia.”[2] He has been spending substantial amounts of time in Latin America, and has frequently visited Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, where at Universidad Nacional de San Martín he has been organizing workshops and visiting residencies for writers from the “three continents” that he mentions.
In this chapter I examine the Jesus novels as anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist reflections on systems of education. In The Childhood of Jesus it becomes clear that the boy, Davíd, does not fit into conventional institutions of education, and that he seems to understand the world vastly differently than the adults around him. His adopted mother, Inés, describes him as an “exceptional child” and blames his educators for his troubles with education. In this novel, images of concentration camps or refugee camps reflect the reformatory that Davíd is sent to, which he claims is surrounded by barbed wire. I argue that the novel not only converses with a poem by Goethe (which Davíd misquotes), but also with a novel by Michel Tournier, translated into English as The Ogre, which ends up being about Nazism and Nazi schools for the Hitler Youth. As I argue, Coetzee, who came of age in apartheid-era South Africa, has had a long and abiding interest in the problems of fascism and authoritarianism, and in the problems posed by education systems that indoctrinate children into rigid ways of thinking. His interest in alternative pedagogies then leads him to create the Academy of Dance in The Schooldays of Jesus, which Davíd attends and which is presided over by the mysterious Ana Magdalena Arroyo. This Academy of Dance is fascinating, not merely because it draws on early twentieth century experiments in dance as pedagogy, but also because of its strangeness. The ideas of Ana Magdalena and her husband are strange and even suspect to the novel’s focaliser, Simon. As I argue, Simon’s suspicion perhaps has some merit philosophically, given that alternative experiments in education served in the interests of liberation from overly rationalist and authoritarian models of education, but that many of these early twentieth century experiments in pedagogy also fed into problematic ideologies including Nazism. Coetzee’s interest in the ways in which non-verbal arts (dance and music) could end up serving liberation or fascism is evident in his naming of the Arroyos: Ana Magdalena’s husband, the musician Juan Sebastián Arroyo, is clearly the Spanish version of Johann Sebastian Bach, a composer much beloved by Coetzee. By foregrounding Ana Magdalena rather than her husband, however, Coetzee draws on a little known film Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Ana Magdalena Bach), directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and released in 1968, which arguably dislocates Bach from the ways in which he was claimed by Nazism. Women figures in the Jesus novels become ways of evading and exploring authoritarian and fascist systems of education, echoing the ways in which Coetzee viewed his own mother, who was a teacher, as providing an antidote to the dominant strain of Kuyperism that shaped colonial and apartheid education.
“The deformations they underwent”: The Jesus novels and apartheid education
The Childhood of Jesus begins with the arrival by ship of a man, called Simón, and a boy, called Davíd, in a strange land. The names of the two characters have been given to them during the sea voyage that precedes the beginning of the novel. Though Simón is not Davíd’s father, he takes on a custodial fatherly role, similar to the character of Dostoevsky in relation to Pavel, in The Master of Petersburg. This evokes the father-son relationship in Coetzee’s own life, namely his relationship with his deceased son, Nicolas, though the name of the child is the Spanish equivalent of the name of Coetzee’s deceased brother.[3] Thus the novel can be read as the author’s deeply personal meditation on mortality, and on the beloved dead who are now in the afterlife. In both The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, characters are apparently speaking to one another in Spanish, which they learn in order to fit into this new world where their pasts and memories have been erased. As pointed out in the previous chapter, this is a place where there is no mother tongue.
In The Childhood of Jesus, after they are processed through a relocation camp, Simón sets out to find Davíd’s mother while they try to settle in the town of Novilla. It is a strange task, as he claims they will know her simply by encountering her: “All will become clear as soon as you lay eyes on her. You will remember her and she will remember you” (21). In an upmarket estate, they see a young woman playing tennis and Simón decides that she must be the mother of Davíd. Inés, whose name is the Spanish equivalent of “Agnes”, meaning “pure” and “holy”, alluding to the chaste saint Agnes of Rome, then takes on the role of Davíd’s mother, and a series of strangely prosaic interludes occur, one of them in which Simón must unblock Inés’s toilet. Davíd is seen by his teachers as rebelling against the conventional schooling system, and is towards the end of the novel sent to a type of reformatory, Punto Arenas, from which he escapes. The novel ends with Inés, Simón, Davíd and their dog Bolívar in a car, fleeing Novilla and Davíd’s imminent re-incarceration in Punto Arenas, set for their “new life”. On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker named Juan, the Spanish version of Coetzee’s first name.
The Schooldays of Jesus has as its epigraph a humorous and self-reflexive quote from the second part of Don Quixote (a sequel published ten years after the first part of Don Quixote): “Algonus dicen: Nunca segundas partes fueron buenas” (“Some say: Sequels are never good”). As in the beginning of The Childhood of Jesus, Simón and Davíd are once again refugees, this time with Inés and Bolivar, having fled Novilla. Seeking to evade the authorities who might be looking for Davíd, Simón and Inés decide to work on a farm near a town called Estrella. The farm compensates them for their labour of picking grapes with daily payment, accommodation, and food, and is owned by “Three Sisters”. Roberta, the farm manager, discusses with Inés the issue of Davíd’s education, claiming that “running around on a farm like a wild thing is no preparation for the future” (23). She mentions two alternative “academies” in Estrella that might “suit a child like him”, the Academy of Music and the Academy of Dance. Simón and Inés seem hesitant about these Academies and so Roberta enlists, on their behalf, a tutor for Davíd named senor Robles. Mathematics lessons with senor Robles do not go well, however, as Davíd stubbornly refuses to perceive quantities of things in the abstract, and Robles eventually drives away in a pique. Finding that their time at the farm must come to an end with waning of the harvest season, Inés and Simón are granted an interview with the “Three Sisters” to discuss their future at the farm and Davíd’s education. Present at the interview are the sisters Consuelo (“Comfort”) and Valentina, who explain that the third sister, Alma (“Soul”) is indisposed and suffering from melancholy. The sisters, who seem like a version of the Three Graces or “Charites” of Greek and Roman mythology, but in old age, state that Inés, Simón and Davíd cannot stay on the farm indefinitely, and propose that they move to Estrella where Davíd should be enrolled at one of the Academies, which the sisters will finance. When Davíd seems resistant, Valentia suggests that he conforms to his parents’ decision “in a spirit of filial obedience.” In response, Davíd “meets her gaze” and queries: “What is filial obedience?” Like many of his statements, his question may be one of innocence or defiance, its meaning is open-ended.
At the Academy of Dance, Simón, Inés and Davíd meet Ana Magdalena Arroyo, who is statuesque and beautiful: “tall, slim, dressed all in black”. In response to their enquiries about the Academy, she answers: “this is not a regular school or a substitute for a regular school. It is an academy devoted to the training of the soul through music and dance” (42-43). Simón is surprised that Davíd seems taken with her, “[raising] his face to her like a flower opening” (44). At the Academy of Dance, Davíd learns to dance numbers, instead of studying them through conventional mathematics lessons. In the middle of the novel, however, a terrible fate befalls Ana Magdalena, as she is apparently raped and murdered by Dmitri, janitor of the art museum at the Academy of Dance – though sexual violence has been overlooked in most reviews of the novel. In committing his crime against Ana Magdalena, Dmitri claims to have been driven by passion. Simón strives to distance himself from Dmitri, but as I have suggested in chapter four, the two men operate in the novel as doubles, not merely as foils for one other. In Disgrace, David Lurie claims similarly to have been driven by “passion” when he rapes his student, Melanie Isaacs, and his doubles are the men who rape his daughter.
Regarding the themes of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, and the connection of these novels to his earlier work, Coetzee has had an abiding interest in fascism and totalitarianism, and in the manifestation of these authoritarian ideologies through the system of education inherited from the colonial era. In an interview with Joanna Scott, published in Salmagundi in 1997, Scott asks Coetzee about his own childhood and schooldays:
Q. Let’s begin with your early impressions of South Africa. What significant things in your education shaped you as a writer of fiction?
A. If you mean my education, strictly speaking, if you mean what I learned in education institutions, the answer must be nothing. All that my schooling taught me was pity for children, or for some of them – for those who could not cope with – what shall we call it? – the educational experience.
Q. Why pity? What did those children lose because of their education?
A. It’s not so much a question of what they lost as the deformations they underwent. The system was authoritarian. It taught obedience. Obedience was, in a sense, its real subject matter. Most it cowed; some it turned into bullies.
The literal meaning of Coetzee’s answer here, that the formal education to which he was subjected in South Africa did not shape him as a writer, is of course not true. Characters submitted to authoritarian schooling systems are a feature of many of his novels, from Life & Times of Michael K (1983) to The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus. The controlling and rigid schooling system of South Africa under apartheid is also central to his first fictionalized autobiography, Boyhood (1997). In Life & Times of Michael K, the protagonist is processed through an inhumane schooling system and ends up in and out of concentration camps, within a militarized society during a civil war. As such, the novel extends Michel Foucault’s idea of schools resembling prisons into the idea of the school as being a premonition of the camp. The Childhood of Jesus also suggests that the school and the concentration camp are mirrored spaces, as the child Davíd is first placed into a relocation camp before he enters the formal education system and is then sent to Punto Arenas, becoming, as Coetzee states in the Salmagundi interview: one of those “who could not cope with – what shall we call it? – the educational experience”. After having been placed into a “relocation camp” at the beginning of the novel, Davíd is by the end of the novel in danger of ending up in a reformatory, which he describes as encircled with barbed wire, in terms resembling a concentration camp, but from which he claims to have escaped.
As explained in chapter three, in the notebook for Age of Iron, Coetzee’s only novel set in apartheid South Africa, Coetzee begins with two questions: “Who shall guard the Guardians? Who shall censor the censors?” The first question, a famous quote and translation from the Roman poet Juvenal’s satirical verses, is usually taken to be about oppressive regimes. Coetzee then in the notebook turns to consider Nazi Germany, which, like apartheid-era South Africa, was one of the great racist states of the twentieth century: “A para-priestly class like the SS (created to perform abominations) has brothels created for it: it is the idea of a domestic life for SS men that offends us most deeply.” Comparisons between apartheid and Nazism, and between contemporary times and past totalitarianism, haunt many of Coetzee’s novels. As the notebook of Age of Iron reveals on its first page, the novel is underpinned by a conceptual comparison between apartheid and Nazism. In Disgrace (1999), the bodies of incinerated dogs “burnt up”, somehow remind us of the word “holocaust”, literally meaning a “sacrifice” that is “burnt completely”. In The Lives of Animals (1999), Coetzee confronts the comparison between the meat industry and the horrors of the concentration camps, by having Elizabeth Costello make this comparison, for which she is bitterly criticized by a Jewish character named Abraham Stern, who walks out of her lecture in protest, and then upbraids her in a handwritten note: “You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept… The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way” (The Lives of Animals 49-50). There is also the non-realist story entitled “At the Gate”, in the first Elizabeth Costello collection, about Costello arriving in a town and being placed into a kind of camp.
Arriving at the relocation camp with Davíd in the beginning of The Childhood of Jesus, Simón claims that they have come from another camp named Belstar, evoking the infamous Nazi concentration camp Belsen, but with the word “star” embedded in the meanings of this camp to which Simón refers. By the end of the novel they are fleeing Novilla for Estrella, which literally means “star” in Spanish. As in the biblical story where wise men are led to the Christ child by following a star, stars are a central motif in both The Childhood and The Schooldays of Jesus. In The Childhood of Jesus, Simón tells Davíd of twin stars, and in response Davíd tells that numbers are stars. This is echoed in The Schooldays of Jesus, where Ana Magdalena explains that: “In the dance we call the numbers down from where they live among the aloof stars” (68). There is a complex dialogue going on here with Plato, who is referenced humorously in The Childhood of Jesus when Davíd mispronounces the name of the Disney dog Pluto on television as Plato. As a way into discussing women, education and fascism in the Jesus novels, I shall discuss one of the novels’ intertexts, and then return to a discussion of women in the Jesus novels.
The star of David: Coetzee’s Jesus novels and Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes
In The Childhood of Jesus there is a direct allusion to Goethe’s tragic poem, “Der Erlkonig”, about a father riding desperately through the forest in an attempt to take his dying child to a place of safety. With Simón as his audience, Davíd demonstrates the singing that he has been taught by Elena, mother of his friend Fidel:
In his clear young voice he chants:
Wer reitet so spät durch Dampf und Wind? Er ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er futtert ihn Zucker, er kusst ihm warm. (The Childhood of Jesus, 67)
A literal translation of this into English would be:
Who rides, so late, through vapour and wind? It is the father with his child. He has the boy well in his arm He feeds him sugar, he kisses him warmly.
Examining this alongside Goethe’s text, it becomes clear that Davíd’s song deviates from the original, which is as follows:
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.
In literal English translation, this would read as follows:
Who rides, so late, through night and wind? It is the father with his child. He has the boy well in his arm He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.
The words Davíd is chanting substitute the father holding the boy “safely” and keeping him “warm”, with German words that sound similar but that mean something different. Goethe’s poem makes no mention of “vapour/ mist/ gas”, “sugar” or “kisses”, and the sugar that the father feeds to the child in Davíd’s version evokes the sugar cube that Simón offers to Davíd as his first “treat” in the relocation camp. To make matters a little stranger, Davíd then claims that the words he has been chanting are in English, though they appear on the page in German. (As I have explained in chapter 6, this can be read as presenting a real challenge to Coetzee’s German translator). But the intertextual conversation here is not only with Goethe. It is also with a novel by Michel Tournier that also cites verses from this poem by Goethe, and that has the same title as Goethe’s poem, though in French: Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl King). Notably, Tournier, like Coetzee, also wrote a Robinsonade, translated into English as Friday, or the Other Island (1967).
In English, Le Roi des Aulnes was published as The Ogre, and translated by Barbara Bray who became the close friend and mistress of Samuel Beckett. Set before and during the Second World War, and published in 1970, Tournier’s novel tells of the childhood, schooldays and adult life of Abel Tiffauges, following his life from the Saint-Christophe boarding school into the devastation of the war. At the outbreak of the war, Abel is captured, deported, and imprisoned in the Moorhof camp, but makes it to the reservation of Rominten, the hunting ground of Goering. Here he finds himself having to recruit children for a “school” that is training the Hitler youth. The novel ends with the end of the war: while the Nazi schools for Hitler youth are being blown to pieces, Abel tries to rescue a starved Jewish child named Ephraim, who has walked out of a disintegrating concentration camp. The novel that began at the Saint Christophe boarding school comes full circle, with the ending, in which Abel carries Ephraim on his back through the swamps, alluding to the story of Saint Christopher, who carried a child unknown to him across a river – before the child was revealed as Christ. The novel in English translation ends with the following sentence: “When Abel lifted his head to gaze at Ephraïm for the last time, all he saw was a six-pointed golden star rotating slowly towards the black sky.” Looking up before they are both swallowed by the swamp, Abel sees the star of David.
The beginning of The Childhood of Jesus, in which a man arrives, apparently “in the afterlife”, at a relocation camp with a child that he does not know personally but whom he is protecting, could actually be read as a sequel to Tournier’s novel. Davíd’s name (though we are told that is not his real name) evokes that of Coetzee’s brother, to whom the first Jesus novel is dedicated, but also the star of David. At the end of The Schooldays of Jesus, Simón finally sees or imagines a star, in a sentence that brings to mind the ending of Tournier’s novel: “Over the horizon the first star starts to rise.” The Childhood of Jesus also ends in a similar vein to Le Roi des Aulnes, with the child Davíd, like Ephraim, having escaped from a place apparently encircled with barbed wire, and with an attempt to save this child by fleeing with him, echoing Goethe’s poem about a father figure riding through the forest trying to save his son. Most significantly, both The Childhood of Jesus and Tournier’s novel contain an echo of Giorgio Agamben’s idea that the camp is the dark side of the polis, Plato’s ideal city. This is a quote from the final pages of Le Roi des Aulnes:
Thus, through Ephraim’s long confessions, Tiffauges, steeped in horror, saw an infernal City remorsely building up which corresponded stone by stone to the phoric City he himself had dreamt of at Kaltenborn. Canada, the weaving of the hair, the rollcalls, the Dobermans, the researches into the phenomenon of twins and atmospheric densities, and above all, the mock shower-rooms – all his inventions, his discoveries were reflects in the horrible mirror, inverted and raised to hellish incandescence. He still had to learn that the two peoples the S.S. persecuted and whose extinction they were working for were the Jews and the gypsies. Here he encountered once more the immemorial hatred of the sedentary races for the nomads, now carried to its paroxysm. Jews and gypsies, wanderers, sons of Abel, the brothers he felt so close to in heart and soul, were falling in their thousands at Auschwitz beneath the blows of a Cain who was booted, helmeted and scientifically organized.
The insight that the concentration camp, rather than the city, could present the archetypal space of modernity, thus predates Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, as in Tournier’s novel the camp is portrayed as the mirror image of the city. A similar insight emerges in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, and in Coetzee’s two recent Jesus novels. Notably, as revealed in Boyhood and in a new exhibition of Coetzee’s childhood photographs curated by Hermann Wittenberg, the children Coetzee identified with while growing up were mostly Jewish and Greek, both marginalized within the “white” apartheid-era schooling system. Also notably, in The Schooldays of Jesus, the child Davíd says that he wants to run away and live with the gypsies. Although commentators have recognised a debate with Plato in the Jesus novels, they have tended to ignore the relevance of these images of camps and allusions to fascism in the two novels. In her article, “Ideas and embodied souls: Platonic and Christian intertexts in Elizabeth Costello and The Childhood of Jesus”, Valeria Mosca claims that the setting of The Childhood of Jesus, namely “an ideal town governed by good sense and goodwill… evokes [Plato’s] The Republic”, and that “philosophical disputes take up space in nearly every chapter, and almost word-for-word references to a number of Socratic dialogues are easily detected throughout the book.” Mosca also claims that “echoes of Plato have also been discussed by most reviewers, many of whom remarked on the similarities between Novilla… and the ideal city Plato describes in The Republic.” Yet neither she nor any reviewers extend exploration of the Jesus novels’ “intertextuality” with Plato, into discussion of the active critique of Plato that is taking place in the Coetzee’s Jesus novels, through images of camps and allusions to fascism and totalitarianism.
In The Childhood of Jesus the protagonists arrive into the story as refugees, with the two Jesus novels thus being about hospitality to the xenos (refugee/ stranger). It should not be forgotten that Jesus Christ and his earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, also arrive into the Bible story of Christ’s birth as refugees. In The Childhood of Jesus, on their first night after arriving at the relocation centre, Simón and Davíd cannot access a room because of a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and must erect rudimentary shelter for themselves in the backyard of a woman working for the centre. Simón’s question to her “Why do you treat us like this… like dirt?” (The Childhood of Jesus, 8) can be read of an indictment of the ways in which refugees (and homeless persons) are treated by the modern state. The fascism lurking behind the apparently benign face of state bureaucracy in its responses to refugees is an issue highly relevant to the times in which we live – and particularly to the country Coetzee has now adopted as “home”. Australia has placed refugees into concentration camps so inhumane that children incarcerated in the camps have sewn up their own lips in protest. Moreover, the various brands of right-wing fascism that are currently resurfacing in various parts of the world, from Europe to the United States of America, have one major aspect in common: whipping up hatred of refugees and immigrants.
Coming back to Plato, through Davíd’s refusal to perceive numbers in an abstract sense, some of the ideas of this philosopher are questioned and critiqued. For Plato in The Republic, arithmetic is important not only to merchants for buying and selling, but also to “the military” and to philosophers. Specifically, he argues for the ability to conceptualise quantities in an abstract manner: “arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the mind to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into the argument.” In The Schooldays of Jesus, however, Davíd does exactly the opposite and “rebels” against the idea of abstract numbers, insisting on the “visible or tangible” in his mathematics lessons with senor Robles.
Elizabeth Costello had already criticized Plato on similar grounds to those of Karl Popper, whose charge is that Plato’s “holism” – seeing the abstract whole (the polis) as more important than the individuals who resided in it – is dangerous. “Justice for [Plato],” Popper wrote, “is nothing but health, unity and stability of the collective body” (OSE I, 106). Popper claimed that this belief was a central tenet of all totalitarian systems, including Nazism, which valued above all the health and purity of the Aryan race. Similarly, Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals criticises the elevation of “ecology” and “ecosystems” over individual animal lives as a form of Platonic idealism (The Lives of Animals, 54-54).
As opposed to the abstractions of Plato, Davíd in the Jesus novels sees things according to their individual qualities. Shown two different pens by his mathematics tutor, senor Robles, in The Schooldays of Jesus, and asked to count the number of pens, Davíd obstinately refuses to see the pens as part of the same set. Rather he sees them for what they are, a blue pen and a red pen, a view that annoys Senor Robles so much that he tells Simón that Davíd has a “cognitive disorder” and “difficulty with mathematics and with abstract language in general” (31). Also opposed to the abstractions advocated by Plato is the concept of “dancing the numbers” – embodying them forth in a sensory manner – a seemingly peculiar idea that Davíd learns at the Academy of Dance through his teacher Ana Magdalena Arroyo, in The Schooldays of Jesus.
Mothers, education, and Ana Magdalena’s Academy of Dance
In “Notebooks: undated fragments” at the end of Coetzee’s third fictionalized autobiography, Summertime (2009), after women’s voices have taken centre stage in interviews about the deceased author “John Coetzee”, Coetzee presents fragments of notes apparently written by this “John Coetzee”. In one “Undated Fragment”, “Coetzee” explains an incident in which he was triggered to remember “his damaged childhood” by hearing on the radio, under apartheid, fascist denunciations of “the communist terror”. The “worst damage” of this type of fascism, he acknowledges, “was done not in the seclusion of the home but out in the open, at school.” These notes also claim that “Coetzee” has been reading “here and there in educational theory, and in the writings of the Dutch Calvinist school he begins to recognize the form of schooling that was administered to him.” In the model of education advocated by Dutch neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, he notes, the goal was “to form the child as congregant, as citizen, and as parent to be”. This model was colonial as well as fascist, exposing the link between the two. Kuyper is well known to have influenced the Christian Nationalist movement in South Africa that built the power of Afrikaner nationalism around the Dutch Reformed Church, and that contributed to apartheid. Looking back, “Coetzee” observes how he, “using what pathetic, inarticulate means he had at his disposal, had been resisting” the type of schooling instilled by Dutch neo-Calvinism in South Africa. Asking himself why he became so “doggedly” resistant, he realizes “[t]here can only be one answer: the kernel of his resistance, his counter theory to their Kuyperism, must have come from his mother.”
He remembers her attitude: “The task of the educator, according to his mother, should be to identify and foster the natural talents of the child, the talents with which the child is born and which make the child unique” (253). Wondering whether his mother took this approach because she “had grown up savage” on a farm in the Eastern Cape (echoing Roberta’s comment about Davíd in The Schooldays of Jesus: “running around on a farm like a wild thing is no preparation for the future”), he then remembers that she must have been informed in her approach by theories of alternative education such as “Montessori; Rudolph Steiner… the Montessori Method”, words he remembers from his childhood, realising the reason he was given blocks to play with as a child was because of his mother’s immersion in these teaching methods. From her upbringing by a missionary, from her childhood on a farm on the Eastern Cape, and from a year at the University of Cape Town that trained her in an education faculty apparently infused with progressive ideas to become a primary school teacher,[4] she must have, he concludes, “picked up an alternative ideal of the educator and the educator’s task, and then somehow impressed that ideal on her children” (253).
Coetzee’s mother, Vera, in her primary school classroom. Photograph by John Coetzee.[5]
He realizes that had it not been for his mother, the Kuyperians might have succeeded in moulding him into a model Calvinist citizen, with “a Kuyperian family of his own to go home to, a well-formed, obedient wife and well-formed obedient children.” As in Age of Iron, here one has an image of the mother disrupting authoritarian, fascist, patriarchal discourse, but this time with a specific focus on education.
This is continued in The Childhood of Jesus, through the figure of Inés, who takes on the role of Davíd’s mother, while actively supporting Davíd’s resistance to “normal” schooling and his deadpan challenges to “obedience”. After the school psychologist explains that senor Leon refuses to teach Davíd on account of his “continual challenges to his authority” and his “refusal to accept direction” (209), and recommends that he is sent to Punto Arenas, Inés says to Davíd: “you are not going to Punto Arenas… Not as long as I am alive” (213). The authorities telephone Inés, and in response she states that they will be home-schooling Davíd. When asked if she is accredited to do home schooling, she hangs up the telephone. Inés and Simón are then summoned to attend a “tribunal” to discuss the official decision to send Davíd to Punto Arenas. Before the date of the tribunal, Simón discovers that Davíd is indeed exceptional, he has taught himself to read a children’s version of Don Quixote. They then take him to senor Leon, to demonstrate that he can indeed read. During the first part of the meeting, the teacher is astonished, asking Davíd: “How did you learn to read in two weeks?” However, when Leon asks Davíd to write on the chalkboard “I must tell the truth”, Davíd writes the words of Christ: “I am the truth”. At this point senor Leon refuses to teach Davíd further, citing his lack of respect for authority as the reason. In response, Inés asks: “What kind of school are you running where you cannot cope with a single exceptional child?” Telling him, “her eyes blazing”, that over her dead body will Davíd be sent to Punto Arenas, she takes Davíd and leaves, hurling a last insult at Leon over her shoulder: “You are not fit to teach children!”
Desperate to protect Davíd from Punto Arenas, Inés starts planning to flee with Davíd beyond the reach of the authorities. She and Simón attend the tribunal, where the official decision is made that Davíd will be sent to Punto Arenas. Inés becomes even more determined to escape with Davíd, with the help of her brother. When Simón asks her how she is going to live, she replies, “Like gypsies, I suppose”, echoing Abel’s comments about gypsies in Le Roi des Aulnes. When Davíd asks “What are gypsies?”, Simón answers that gypsies are nomads, like refugees: “Living like gypsies is just a way of speaking… You and I were gypsies of a kind while we lived in the camp at Belstar. Being a gypsy means that you don’t have a proper home, a place to lay your head”. When Davíd asks if he would have to go to school if he lived like a gypsy, Simón answers, “Gypsy children don’t go to school.” Davíd then says that he would then like to be a gypsy.
When Simón is injured in an accident on the docks where he works as a stevedore, Davíd is forcibly taken from Inés and placed into Punto Arenas. He is apparently found by Inés’s neighbour, wandering the streets, naked and cold, and claims that he has escaped from Punto Arenas “through the barbed wire” (240-241). This leads to a discussion between Simón and his co-worker Eugenio, in which Simón summarises the difference between two styles of education, with his summary echoing the difference between a Kuyperist style of education and the one advocated by “Coetzee’s” mother in Summertime: There are two schools of thought, Eugenio, on the upbringing of children. One says that we should shape them like clay, forming them as virtous citizens. The other says that we are only children once, and that a happy childhood is the foundation of a happy later life. Inés belongs to the latter school; and because she is his mother, because the bonds between a child and his mother are sacred, I follow her. Therefore no, I do not believe that more discipline of the schoolroom would be good for Davíd. (251)
Two officials arrive at Inés and Davíd’s home threatening to take him back to Punto Arenas, claiming that Davíd’s account of “barbed wire” is a fallacy, and threatening Inés and Simón that they will use “the law” against them. At the end of the novel, Inés, Simón, and Davíd are escaping Novilla in a car belonging to Inés’s brother, with Bolivar their dog and a copy of Don Quixote. They are driving north, “Looking for somewhere to stay, to start [their] new life” (277).
In the sequel, The Schooldays of Jesus, Davíd is soon enrolled at the Academy of Dance, where he excels. In fact he enjoys the Academy so much that he elects to become a weekly boarder. As a mother figure, Inés recedes somewhat into the background in this novel, as Davíd comes under the spell of Ana Magdalena Arroyo, who runs the Academy of Dance. Similar to the Montessori method of teaching children numbers through tactile and sensory experience, rather than by asking them to recite and grasp abstract concepts, the Academy of Dance teaches Davíd and the other children to dance numbers. Ana Magdalena’s unorthodox pedagogy is unveiled when the parents of the children at the Academy are invited to a lecture and dance performance. In her opening lecture, Ana Magdalena refers to “the numbers we use when we buy and sell” as “not true numbers but simulacra”. She calls such numbers “ant” numbers that perform “the ant operations that we call the lower arithmetic, the arithmetic we use in household accounts and so forth”. Like ants, that are “law biding creatures”, these numbers “obey the laws of addition and subtraction” (69). This is a direct critique of Plato’s idea of arithmetic as expressed in The Republic, where he claims that arithmetic should enable one to see “the natures of numbers with the mind only” and that arithmetic compels the mind to abstract thought. As opposed to such an approach, Ana Madgalena she states that her Academy teaches students to bring “the numbers down from where they reside”, and that this is done through the visible and tangible expressions of dance: “As music enters us and moves us in dance, so the numbers cease to be mere ideas, mere phantoms, and become real” (68). The first child on stage, who dances the number Two, is “wearing golden slippers and a white toga that leaves one shoulder bare” (70). In his attire and performance, he seems to have stepped straight out of the history of avant-garde, early twentieth-century dance.
Coetzee’s interest in dance as a bodily form of expression in his fiction can be traced at least as far back as Foe, in the dancing of Friday, the mute slave whose tongue has been cut out. Conceptualising this dancing in the notebook of Foe, Coetzee writes: “The answer to the question of how you talk with Friday is of course that you and he dance.” He then references an essay on someone called “Olson”, and Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre”. The reference to the Kleist essay is fascinating for anyone interested in Coetzee and dance – there are references to marionettes in The Schooldays of Jesus, and in Summertime a woman remembering the author “J.M. Coetzee” after his death talks of his inability to dance, referring to him as a “man of wood”. But I became more interested in the reference to “Olson”. Who was this Olson in the notebook of Foe? Some research led me to Charles Olson, the American modernist poet who studied ballet in the 1930s with the Russian choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine. Olson also composed dance plays, and ultimately viewed collaborative dance as a potential pedagogy and an ecological meditation[6] when he became Rector of the Black Mountain College, an avant-garde, experimental liberal arts college in North Carolina that was founded in 1933 but closed in the mid 50s under financial pressures. Coetzee would have been aware of the Black Mountain College, as Olson was an inspirational figure in the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo, where Coetzee arrived to teach in 1968. Olson had served as a distinguished professor in the department from 1963 to 1965, and at the time Coetzee arrived, the Department included famous Black Mountain poet, Robert Creeley, who had joined the department in 1966, and who was, like Coetzee, highly critical of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
In the late 1960s the English Department at SUNY Buffalo was a hotbed of lively, alternative, leftist debate and arts practice. It was at SUNY Buffalo that Coetzee, his visa to remain in the USA already at risk because he was a Fulbright scholar expected to return to his home country, performed an act of defiance against authoritarianism within the university that led to his arrest, a lengthy trial, and the eventual abandonment of his hope to remain in America. Together with forty-four other faculty members, he was part of a “sit in” outside the office of the acting university president Peter Regan to protest against police presence on campus. The police had been brought in by the acting president to suppress student protests against the Vietnam War, protests that were widespread on campuses at that time. In an interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee describes his experience as follows:
I took part in a protest against the way our university – SUNY Buffalo – was being led, that is to say, by a President who quartered hundreds of police on campus and retreated from his office to a secret bunker. This was not, in our view, a responsible way in which to run a university: it created a highly charged atmosphere in which teaching and learning were impossible. My colleagues and I went to the President’s office one Sunday morning and refused to leave until he agreed to come and meet with us. He didn’t come. Instead, he sent the police. We were arrested, charged with trespassing, and convicted. A year later, on appeal, the conviction was overturned.
Notably, though his first novel, Dusklands, would critique the Vietnam War, during this “sit in” Coetzee was not protesting against the war per se, he was protesting against authoritarian and arguably fascist strategies within an educational institution. He kept a copy of the students’ demands at the university at the time, and this may be found in his papers at the Harry Ransom Centre, along with material about the protest in which he was arrested. Among students’ demands was a call for “the complete and immediate abolition of the Themis project and all other military related research on campus”.
As these demands reveal, student protests against the Vietnam War were not just about male students refusing to be “drafted” into a war they did not support and rejection of military service for individuals, they were also against the complicity of university research with the military, and in the War. Early drafts of “the Vietnam project” show that this first part of Dusklands was originally directly about the enmeshment of university research with military intervention in Vietnam. Indeed, “the Vietnam project” finds a real life equivalent in “the Themis project”: “a scientific study that was being conducted by several colleges (not just [SUNY Buffalo]) that was funded by the Department of Defense. According to a report from the Committee on Armed Services, in 1970, Themis touched on several research areas: selection, surveillance, navigation, and control; energy and power; information processing systems; technology of military vehicles; materials; environment; medical; behavioral and social sciences.”[7] As is now somewhat well known, Coetzee was denied a visa to remain in the United States after taking part in this staff sit-in outside the office of the President of SUNY Buffalo. Notably, in his formal appeals to retain a US visa and remain in the US, Coetzee claimed he did not want his children subjected to the deforming system of apartheid education. As is now also known through the biography of Coetzee written by John Kannemeyer, Coetzee’s son Nicolas was sent to a Waldorf school when the family were forced to return to South Africa.
Though relatively unexplored outside of biographies of the author, Coetzee’s three years at SUNY Buffalo were extremely formative to his intellectual views and perspectives. In an interview with Shauna Westcott, he explained:
I had three very interesting years lecturing at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I was teaching in the Department of English, which at the time (late 60s) had the reputation of being one of the most interesting (and way-out) departments in the country. I came into contact with some remarkable people, both teachers and students who taught me a great deal, opened new vistas for me, particularly in contemporary philosophy and criticism. I think everyone who had been connected with that department at that time afterwards recognised how extraordinarily lucky he/she had been.
Olson’s presence in the department at SUNY Buffalo earlier in the 60s likely played a role in setting the tone for the “way-out” aspects of the department in the late 1960s. As stated above, Olson had in the 1950s been Rector of the experimental Black Mountain College, which placed the arts at the centre of learning. Many of those who attended the Black Mountain College as faculty or students had fled from fascism and Nazism in Europe. Among the arts taught at the school were painting, poetry, music, and dance.
Dance at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1933-1957
But in order to trace the history of alternative communities and models of education that centred on dance, one needs to examine the Lebensreform movement that gathered momentum in the early twentieth century at Ascona, which was renamed Monte Verità, in Switzerland. A 1926 film, Wege zu Kraft und Schonheid (Ways to Strength and Beauty), promoting this movement shows the banality, ill health and general misery of industrialised modern life, where men and women must conform to constricting clothing (in the film, animated images of the corset show the damage it does to a woman’s internal organs) and to the rules of modern society. In contrast to this apparently miserable existence, the film offers an alternative lifestyle – based on the sculptures and images of Ancient Greece – of outdoor nudism, gymnastics, and dancing, with the main focus on dance. One of the most amusing moments in the film is where a straight-laced modern audience is viewing a naked statue seemingly of ancient Greek origin, when the statue begins to move. As the film shows with remarkable ethnographic coverage, every culture in the world has forms of dance. Movement and dance were at the heart of the alternative culture of Monte Verità, which saw itself as a remedy for the ills of modern, industrialised society, and advocated nudist gambolling in nature, vegetarianism, and equal rights for women. At Monte Verità, women dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman studied with Rudolph von Laban, at the very frontiers of modern dance. Residents at Monte Verite included Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Rudolph Steiner, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Hugo Ball, Max Weber and Hermann Hesse. The community at Monte Verità attracted anarchists, psychologists, social reformers, philosophers of the occult, as well as writers, poets, artists and dancers. Some of these were fleeing the militarization of the society and the horrors of the First World War, such that the Jewish anti-militarist anarchist, Erich Mühsam, declared Monte Verità “the Republic of the Homeless”. A great deal of the movement focused on pacifism, as a reaction against militarization and the horrors of the First World War. Iconic photographs by Gerhard Riebicke promoted the idealized model of health and physical beauty, and some of the pacificism, advocated by the Lebensreform movement:
The Lebensreform movement was ideologically ambiguous however. Whereas some trace the hippie movement of the 1960s to cultural experiments at Monte Verite in the early twentieth century, there is no doubt that Lebensreform also fed into the volkish Romanticism of Nazi Germany. Mary Wigman (born Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegmann in Hanover 1886), the pioneer of avant-garde dance whose legacy would be continued by the likes of Pina Bausch, in 1920 established an expressionist dance school in Dresden, and in 1936 created a dance piece for the Berlin Olympic Games, over which Hitler presided, though she subsequently fell out of step with the Nazis. In contrast to the Nazi injunction to showcase the feminine form in an idealized, healthful and beautiful manner, Wigman was determined to explore and embrace all the aspects of the feminine, including the ways in which women had been demonized and scapegoated as witches. This is evident from her groundbreaking 1914 performance Hexentanz (Witch Dance), influenced by Japanese dance performances and by masks of African origin.
More problematic in her association with Nazism was Elizabeth Duncan (sister of the more famous Isadora Duncan), who set up a dance academy in Germany where eugenics or “racial hygiene” was on the curriculum. According to the book, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (2003), by Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, both of the Duncan sisters had problematic associations with Nazi ideology. Isadora had a “devotion to all things Greek” which was joined with “an almost manic fascination with, and admiration for, Germanic mythologies and ‘Nordic’ rites”. Elizabeth’s “Duncan School”, set up in 1911, was supported by her husband, Max Merz, who “became a fanatical anti-Semite and Nazi.” It should also not be forgotten that Leni Riefenstahl was an ardent dancer, attending schools of dance and performing across Europe, before she injured herself and turned to a career in cinema, where she infamously made the Nazi propagandist film Triumph of the Will (1935), which glorified the Nuremberg Rally.
Elizabeth Duncan and her students at her dance academy in Germany.
Even pioneers of alternative education such as Maria Montessori were not free of ambiguity: her methods were endorsed by Mussolini, until her lectures on “peace and education” caused her to fall out of favour with Italy’s fascist state. Avant-garde academies of arts have included the Black Mountain College, but also the “academies of dance” run by the likes of Mary Wigman and Elizabeth Duncan – both women, like Ana Magdalena in The Schooldays of Jesus. Like Elizabeth Duncan, Ana Magdalena has a husband, Juan Sebastian Arroyo, who supports her ideas and is even part of her Academy.
Rudolf Steiner had an idea, though his association with Monte Verità, of dancing musical notes, such that each musical note would have an equivalent dance movement. This is remarkably similar to Ana Magdalena Arroya’s idea of dancing the numbers, in The Schooldays of Jesus. Wigman’s philosophy, which was closer to a religion of dance than a methodology, also seems to echo the approach of Ana Magdalena Arroyo in The Schooldays of Jesus, who regards her academy as “training of the soul”. The scene in The Schooldays of Jesus where Simón and Inés drive out to check on Davíd during a weekend, only to find that he has been taken on a nudist outing to a lake with the Arroyos, doubles back on the ideals of the Lebensreform movement, by referencing its focus on an alternative community and nudism within nature:
They drive out to Lake Calderón with Bolivar snoozing on the back seat. The sky is cloudless, the day promises to be hot…
El centre recreativo is a low, sprawling building giving onto a sandy beach. Disporting themselves on the beach are scores of people, men and women, adults and children, all in the nude. (The Schooldays of Jesus, 91-92)
The scene, with it’s “low, sprawling building” also evokes the setting of the Black Mountain College, which was built near a lake where students disported themselves in various states of undress.
Students at Lake Eden Campus of the Black Mountain College
Coetzee was likely thinking of the Lebensreform movement and its connection with the history of avant-garde dance when he used Lacan and Satre to present an alternative to MacKinnon’s view of pornography. In the essay “The Harms of Pornography”, Coetzee explains “the possibility of aesthetic redemption from the objecthood of being filmed naked”, by considering that “the looked-at body has an aesthetic dimension [that] is attained when the body moves in a state of freedom, it’s every next movement unpredictable yet immediately in retrospect recognised as aesthetically necessary” (71). What is interesting about the Arroyo’s Academy of Dance in The Schooldays of Jesus is that it seems like an alternative model of education that could be beneficial for Davíd, but it also has some ideologically ambiguous and even sinister aspects. Does it evoke Montessori and Steiner teaching methods, the liberal arts tradition sparked by the Black Mountain College, the dance philosophy of Mary Wigman, or does it gesture towards the dance academies endorsed by Nazism and run by women such as Elizabeth Duncan? Does it point perhaps to the ambiguity of modernist experiments in education and dance in the first half of the twentieth century, most of which were presided over by women? The novel seems to leave the question open, though Davíd thrives at the Academy of Dance whereas he had been stifled by conventional education.
Ana Magdalena’s husband, Juan Sebastian, is a musician, with the names of the Arroyos translating into Spanish the names of the musical composer Johann Sebastian Bach and his second wife, Anna Magdalena. In German, Bach’s name means a small river or “creek”, and “Arroyo” is the equivalent of “stream”, in Spanish.[8] One may well ask what is the significance of foregrounding Bach and his wife in a novel that reflects on experiments in modernist education and dance, and their relationship to fascism and totalitarianism. Part of the answer is that through the transposition or translation of Bach and his second wife into The Schooldays of Jesus, Coetzee doubles back on the meaning of his own admiration for the music of Bach. Moreover, through foregrounding Bach’s second wife, rather than the composer himself, through the prominent figure of Ana Magdalena Arroyo, Coetzee weaves into the intertextuality of the novel a reference to a little known but iconic film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), which was conceptualised and directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and produced by Jean Luc Godard.
Regarding Coetzee’s relationship to the music of Bach, its formative effect on him is detailed in his essay “What is a Classic?” In this essay, which was initially delivered as a lecture in Graz, Austria, in 1991, Coetzee begins by returning to T.S. Eliot’s lecture of the same title, which was delivered to the Virgil Society in London in 1944. Coetzee starts by noting that apart from a brief reference to “accidents of the present time”, Eliot does not mention “wartime circumstances”. He then claims that there are two ways of reading Eliot’s praise for Virgil: firstly, as taking seriously the call from Virgil that seems to come to Eliot from across the centuries” (8); and secondly, on a more “socio-cultural level”, as “an attempt to give a certain historical backing to a radically conservative political programme for Europe… in which national cultures would be encouraged and an overall Christian character maintained” (6). In this second approach, the reader would be “treating [Eliot’s] efforts as the essentially magical enterprise of a man trying to redefine the world around himself – America Europe – rather than confronting the reality of his not-so-grand position as a man whose narrowly academic, Eurocentric education had prepared him for little else but life as a mandarin in one of the New England ivory towers” (8-9). With these “alternative readings” in mind, in the second half of his lecture, Coetzee goes on to examine his own relationship to the music of Bach. As Coetzee remembers it in this lecture, he was first struck by the music of Bach “in the summer of 1955, when [he] was fifteen years old”. In the back garden of his home in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, he heard music that made him “frozen”, daring not to breathe. He claims, “I was spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before” (9), and that the piece of music he heard was “a recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, played on the harpsichord” (9). Stating that he did not “come from a musical family”, but that “[t]he revelation in the garden was a key event in [his] formation” (9-10), he continues to pose a question to himself: “is there some non-vacuous way in which I can say that the spirit of Bach was speaking to me across the ages, across the seas, putting before me certain ideals; or was what was really going on at that moment that I was symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society…?” Examining the first option, Coetzee turns to various accounts of Bach’s legacy. In one of these accounts, Bach “dropped entirely out of public consciousness after his death” until he “was resurrected… through the enthusiasm of Felix Mendelssohn”. In this account, later “[t]he figure of Bach became one of the instruments through which German nationalism and Protestantism were promoted; reciprocally, in the name of Germany and Protestantism Bach was promoted as a classic; the whole enterprise being aided by the Romantic swing against rationalism, and by enthusiasm for music as the one art privileged to speak directly from soul to soul” (13). Born into a society that had its own deeply rooted forms of nationalism and ideologies of racial supremacy, Coetzee’s discomfort with Bach’s appropriation by German nationalism and Romanticism, which would feed into Nazism, is ingrained in the following words:
The first book on Bach, published in 1802, tells much of the story. It was entitled The Life, Art and Works of J.S. Bach: For the Patriotic Admirers of Genuine Musical Art. In his introduction the author writes, “This great man… was a German. Be proud of him, German fatherland… his works are an invaluable national patrimony with which no other nation has anything to compared.” We find the same emphasis on the Germanness and even the Nordicness of Bach in later tributes. The figure and the music of Bach became part of the construction of Germany and even of the so-called Germanic race. (“What is a classic?”, 14)
Although Coetzee goes on to argue against this interpretation of the legacy of Bach by narrating an alternative account in which Bach was not an obscure composer until he was popularized by Mendelssohn and by German nationalists, the fact that Bach, the composer who had so affected him in his teenage years, was also appreciated by the Nazis clearly struck Coetzee deeply.
In The Schooldays of Jesus, at times, Simón is transported by the music played by the enigmatic Juan Sebastian, but one should be aware of the complexities of this when reading of this in a novel that subtly converses with the history and legacy of totalitarianism and fascism. According to certain sources Bach was more popular in Nazi Germany even than Wagner. Unlike the work of Mendelssohn, which the Nazis regarded as “unbearable for a cultural movement based on race,” and which they tried to Aryanise (through the efforts of Carl Orff), Bach’s pieces were regularly performed by members of the Hitler Youth and played almost daily on the radio after Hitler assumed power. In 1935, festivals were organized in several cities across Germany to mark the composer’s 250th birthday, culminating in the “Reich Bach Festival”, attended by Goebbels and Hitler. A newspaper reported from the festival: “The Fuehrer followed the austere music of Bach seriously … It is a music in harmony with his spirit: austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through.”[9]
The Schooldays of Jesus does not simply reference the music and person of Bach, however. By foregrounding the character of Ana Magdelena, it can also be read as conversing with the film Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), directed by Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, which premiered in 1968, a year known for political upheavals, student uprisings, and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968, dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Eschewing the tradition of the musical biopic, which tended towards romanticized, dramatic interpretations of a composer’s life, the film baffled audiences with its slow pace, uneventful plot, and its long and somewhat tedious performances of Bach’s music. Even Godard was apparently bewildered by the film and told Straub that “politically” maybe it was “missing something”. Laughing, Straub asked Godard, “Surely you didn’t expect me to put at the end ‘Everything is political?’” (Quoted in Rubinoff, 2011). Notably, Straub and Huillet were anti-fascist leftists and Straub dedicated the film to the Viet Cong.
As Kailan Rubinoff points out in a 2011 essay on the film: “the purpose of Straub-Huillet’s historical contextualization is not only to demythologize Bach’s image. It is also to remove Bach from the sphere of Romanticism itself, which Straub suggests has more ominous implications”. Straub claimed in an interview:
Bach is. . . one of the last figures in the history of German culture for whom there is not yet a divorce between what one might call the artist and the intellectual; with him, one does not see a trace of Romanticism—[and] we know what in part developed out of German Romanticism. . . For me, Bach is the opposite of Goethe.
Straub insinuates here that out of German Romanticism came zealous German nationalism and, by extension, Nazism. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is thus about the legacy of Bach, but it is also a post-Holocaust, anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist film that rejects the German Romanticist assimilation of Bach. Most importantly for my purposes, it also foregrounds a woman, Bach’s second wife, as the film is held together by the voice-over narration of Ana Magdalena who is speaking of her husband in the past tense, presumably after his death. Notably, the figure of Ana Magdalena Arroyo in The Schooldays of Jesus has a similar statuesque poise, and face, to the actress Christiane Lang in her role as Anna Magdalena Bach. According to Simón, Ana Magdalena has something “disquieting” about her appearance: “Now he recognizes what it is. She has no eyebrows… Below her fair, rather sparse hair pulled back tightly on her scalp, is an expanse of naked forehead as broad as his hand” (44).
The gendered and general dangers of Romanticism are explored in Coetzee’s Nobel-prize-winning novel Disgrace, through the figure of David Lurie, teacher and reader of Wordsworth and Byron, and through Lurie’s relationship with women. Lurie imagining Melanie Isaacs as “goddess of the foaming waves” while he forces himself on her without her consent, is mirrored in The Schooldays of Jesus, where the janitor of the Academy of Dance, Dmitri, elevates Ana Magdalena to the status of goddess, before apparently raping and killing her. As both novels show, the result of such Romantic idealization is the obliteration of the “real” other, in each case, the woman. In Disgrace, Lurie’s abuse of Melanie is prefigured when he shows her a film that is likely Norman McLaren’s “Pas de Deux” (1968): “Sitting side by side they watch. Two dancers on a bare stage move through their steps. Recorded by a stroboscopic camera their images, ghosts of their movements, fan out behind them like wingbeats. It is a film he first saw a quarter of a century ago but is still captivated by” (Disgrace 14-15). “Pas de deux” is stripped down to bare narrative elements, emphasising the form rather than the narrative of the dance. Yet it does foreground the male gaze: before the man and woman dance together, a woman dances alone, twinned with the mirrored “ghost” of her movements, and there is a long moment when the man appears on screen, watching. As I have argued elsewhere, although focalised by David Lurie, Disgrace in fact encourages counter-focalisation, from the perspective of the women in the text.
Still image from Norman McLaren’s “Pas de Deux”, 1968
Exploring themes of totalitarianism and alternative models of education, and demonstrating the damage to living, breathing others, and particularly women, that can take place in the name of abstract ideals, The Childhood and The Schooldays of Jesus – which are prefigured in an archival note by Coetzee four decades previously – are more than esoteric tracts about bland socialist utopias and arcane dancing. They are richly intertextual novels that are surely relevant to the times in which we live, where fascism once again rears its head, and where pedagogies inherited from patriarchal colonialism persist, but are under interrogation, with alternative models of education once again being imagined.
[1] Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness student movement SASO was founded in 1968 as an alternative to student organisations in South Africa that were effectively run by “white liberals”.
[3] If Davíd is a version of the Christ child, then Simón’s name evokes the disciple Simon-Peter, who according to the New Testament thrice denied an association with Christ, in order to safeguard himself.
[4] At the time Coetzee’s mother, Vera, attended UCT, the education faculty would have come under the influence of famous educational reformer Fred Clarke, Chair of Education at UCT from 1911-1929.
[5] Thanks to Hermann Wittenberg for this photograph, taken by Coetzee during his boyhood.
[6] Karlien van den Beukel, “Why Olson did ballet: the pedagogical avant-gardism of Massine” in Contemporary Olson, ed.
I came of age as someone who flew abroad in the era immediately before and after 9/11.
2001 seems long ago now, but I’ve made an effort to remember important details. I was at Edinburgh University, looking through the papers of Arthur Koestler for his correspondence with my mother before she killed herself. Koestler was a weirdo and a misogynist, though Darkness at Noon is quite a good novel, and his ideas about a basic human right to euthanasia have merit. Perhaps his fantasies about parapsychology speak to currents of perception that are beyond what can be quantified by “science”, not that I have much respect for what is deemed “science.” Neither did Hamlet, who said “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” not that I have much respect for Shakespeare either these days. Anyway, I digress.
My mother corresponded with Koestler in the 1970s. When I found her letters, they were not in the folder he had labelled “loony mail”, though I did find a trove of amazing materials in that folder. Among these is a letter dated 1970, from a woman in New Orleans. Copied to Koestler, but addressed to a medical doctor, “Karl”, whom she calls a “Prussian Pecksniff”, her letter begins:
I occasionally grieve that dear little Mrs. Packard’s horrid husband didn’t wait until 1861 to railroad her into a snakepit, so we two articulate victims could be exactly 100 years apart. It took her only 3 years to escape, and it took me 4 1/2 : it was the tranquilizers that made the difference, without them, you couldn’t have held me even three weeks.
The reference is to the story of Elizabeth Packard, who was sent to an insane asylum by her husband in Illinois in 1861, because she disagreed with his religious and moral views. The author is spookily aware of fascism as an undertow in the US. Mentioning the ways “the poor are incarcerated”, she states: “That is why Communism is bad, but Fascism worse; I’d rather be killed by a mistaken person with ideals, than by a selfish monster.” The letter details some of the clever tricks she imagines devising to subvert FBI “finks”, who have obviously placed bugs in her home.
(I feel that I can quote from this letter, out of respect for the author. Koestler cannot own the rights to her writing, and anyway, he relegated it to the snakepit of “loony mail”.)
My mother’s letters to Koestler were in the general correspondence, and mentioned something terrible that she was experiencing. She did not go into detail. Mostly, she engaged in a lucid exploration of the relationship between criminality and society. In a nutshell, my mother was arguing against capital punishment and the carceral model, stating that society should take responsibility for the criminals it creates, rather than trying to annihilate them or lock them up, as if they are not related to that society. Koestler seemed to think highly of her reasoning, for what that is worth.
I walked out of the archive saddened that I could never talk with my mother as a fellow adult in this life. The staff in the library seemed agitated, but I was in a cocoon of my thoughts.
Leaving the library, I could sense that something was amiss in the outside world. The streets were emptier than before. I walked past a pub full of people, but they were silent, watching televisions mounted on the walls. Normally people in pubs are noisy, watching sports – a throwback to the good old days of the Colosseum maybe. These are some of the reasons why I don’t usually go into pubs. But I went in.
And that was when I saw the planes flying into the World Trade Centre buildings. On repeat.
Obviously it looked like a movie, a simulacrum. But my fellow spectators were too somber to be watching a movie.
When I began to understand what had happened, I started to wonder if a nation should take responsibility for the criminals it creates.
In the case of the United States, the answer is likely “yes”, and I don’t think Harold Pinter necessarily has to explain why, though his Nobel Prize acceptance speech is of course worth reading on this topic.
I had only been travelling internationally for about a year before this event called 9/11 occurred. After 9/11, flying became different, more difficult.
Normally a person cannot lay hands on you without your consent. If this happens, it can be termed assault. But not in the zone of suspended human rights that is an airport, where someone can “pat you down”, with or without gloves, touching intimate places with impunity. No one objects, or calls upon their right to physical integrity.
This is where my memory becomes hazy, probably on account of trauma, but I witnessed, and to my detriment tried to intervene in, countless incidents of racial profiling in airports and on airplanes. I attended a summer school of theory and criticism in the US where an Indian friend living in the US stated that she would not under any circumstances travel by airplane anywhere because of the racial profiling and trauma involved.
I began to think that flying, particularly internationally, was a zone where basic human rights were suspended, where anything could happen to you.
The first time I flew to the UK from South Africa, my fellow travellers and I were sprayed with some kind of insecticide. This was before 9/11. The crew said the aerosol was safe, but I’m sure the people sprayed with DDT were told the same thing. It was also kind of offensive, as if we were likely to bring parasites to soggy Albion, simply because we were from Africa.
Heathrow had already become Deathrow. Any number of asylum seekers had died there by 1) slipping on bars of soap, 2) not being able to breathe due to an unfortunate accident with duct tape, etcetera.
But this intensified after 9/11.
The sleep deprivation that came with international travel seemed to be part of the torture.
One morning I arrived at JFK airport after a very long flight and was waiting at a terminal in a seemingly interminable line for those who needed to pass through immigration.
Bristling security officers policed the corral of huddled masses. It felt like a goddamn concentration camp – though I know I should not say that, as it’s considered a privilege to be a “cosmopolitan” who travels overseas. One of the officers had a slavering Alsatian, the whites of its eyes showing and its teeth embedded in his baton.
At passport control the passport-stamping person went through a few perfunctory questions before asking for my cellphone number. He wanted to meet up after hours. I told him I didn’t have a US number yet, and promised to call this sexual harasser as soon as I did. Obviously I never did call him.
I saw enough airports to know that such spaces are among the circles of hell.
The Covid-19 pandemic added another layer of securitization and insanity to the experience. After much performance of adherence to health regulations, people’s masks slipped off mid-flight and they coughed all over each other. In horror, I watched animated videos showing how far virus particles can travel in an airplane interior from just one human cough or sneeze.
Before embarking on a flight anywhere now, I plaster the insides of my nostrils with Vix Vaporub and spray colloidal silver into my eyes, nose, and mouth.
Airports still fill me with anxiety and a kind of gloomy loneliness. I try to arrive almost late for my flight, so I can spend as little time as possible subjected to the surveillance carried out under fluorescent lights.
Leading up to a trip to Italy in 2017, I felt resentful – I would have to deal with airports and the whole flying experience, just to attend a conference. Arriving in Rome, I witnessed three policemen with fancy fascist pants chasing a Black man through the airport. I started to follow them but they disappeared.
This made me more exhausted. But I must confess that when I reached Prato by train, it was beautiful. It felt unreal. I could not believe that people lived in this town, with its ancient stone walls, castle, and town squares. It felt like something good from a Cavafy poem.
It soon started to annoy me, however. The locals took siestas, and everything would close in the afternoons. This may seem charming, but after ten days it was not and I was ready to come home.
Sometimes I wonder if my childhood of some rootlessness is why I prefer to stay at home, rather than engage in excessive wandering.
When my grandmother died in the year before 9/11, she had a cabinet full of mementos from her trips around the world with my grandfather: hand-blown glass ornaments from Venice, a miniature of London Bridge, souvenirs from “The Holy Land” (she was a Christian). She loved travelling. After my grandfather died, she took herself, aged almost 90, on a bus trip to see the flowers of Namaqualand. I spent a substantial amount of my childhood living with her and my grandfather, but never learned to love travel as she did.
Dating apps, which I treat as an anthropological experiment in an era of femicide, frequently show profile photographs of people in holiday destinations (think “standing on a mountain”, or “by the sea”, or both), and almost everyone on there says that they “love travelling” and are looking for a soul mate to travel the world with them. Travelling overseas to exotic destinations is a mark of status, I suppose, and they probably think their travels make them more attractive.
For me flying is traumatic. Sleeping in a strange bed is traumatic. But try explaining that on your profile on a dating app.
In New York, I once pitched the idea of an academic project on the poetics and politics of international flight.
My mentor, who heard me out, said it sounded great, but he definitely had more faith in me than I deserved.
That project is a trip upon which I have not embarked, because I’m often unreliable that way. But the idea still half intrigues me, partly because the era of middle-class civilian access to air travel was the beginning of a serious shift in time-space compression that created the neoliberal world in which we now live.
A long time ago I was fortunate enough to conduct an interview with the great, now late, Lewis Nkosi (1936-2010), via a series of emails. Below is that correspondence. It is forthcoming in a Festschrift for Lewis Nkosi, edited by Astrid Starck.
E-mail correspondence: Lewis Nkosi and Lucy Graham, March – April 2002.
Lewis Nkosi to Lucy Graham, 25 March 2002
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lucy Graham,
I have your message via Janice Harris. Needless to say, I am delighted you plan to present a paper on MATING BIRDS. I would be happy to answer questions about my work but if possible would appreciate knowing in advance the questions you have in mind so that I can do a bit of reflection before the interview. The reason is that I am not a very articulate person.
Then we also need to discuss the kind of set-up you have in mind, date and time, etc.
My personal interest includes a consideration of the ways in which MATING BIRDS was received in South Africa in contrast to reviews outside the country, the social and political circumstances which framed these receptions. I am also in possession of leading reviews, from The New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, to British and Continental newspaper reviews.
Last week, Mating Birds was reissued in France by Muse Dapper in Paris and a German Publisher is to reprint the German translation in September.
Kwela Books is preparing publication of the second novel, UNDERGROUND PEOPLE in October. Let me know what help you may require.
Sincerely, LEWIS NKOSI.
Lucy Graham to Lewis Nkosi, 26 March 2002.
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lewis Nkosi,
Thank you for getting in touch! I was thrilled to hear from you, and was very pleased to hear that you agree to an interview.
I would suggest a series of emails, to which you can respond at your leisure. If you have any other ideas (e.g. emails and a telephone conversation or two) then please let me know. If you are coming to the UK for any reason, it would be great to meet up.
I am considering a doctorate, with the provisional title of my thesis: “Rape in South African Literature: Segregation, Apartheid and After”. Partly, I am examining the ways in which certain narratives were produced, circulated, used for political purposes, banned, legitimised, ignored or criticised in South African history.
I find Mating Birds to be a fascinating book, and particularly subversive when it comes to the so-called “black peril” theme. And your personal interest – the different responses to Mating Birds inside SA and abroad – happens to be my interest too. Andre Brink’s critique of Mating Birds is particularly problematic and amusing (in what it reveals about a white male SA critic).
The reviews you mention would be of great interest to me, perhaps you could list references, indicating where they may be found?
I am interested in correspondence you may have with the publishers of Mating Birds, in SA and abroad (esp. St Martin’s Press and Ravan). If you no longer have the correspondence, could you remember whether they suggested any changes to the original manuscript, before it was published? These changes may have been suggested in the name of prospective readers, and with the market for certain types of narratives in mind. I know for instance, that Doris Lessing’s publishers Alfred Knopf in New York tried to force her to make major changes to The Grass is Singing, which she refused.
I suspect that the subversive nature of the novel accounts for attempts by certain white critics in SA to dismiss aspects of it. Did the apartheid censors have anything to say about Mating Birds, before or after it was published in SA?
I look forward to hearing from you.
And of course I do not believe for one second that you are an inarticulate person (!).
Sincerely,
Lucy Graham.
Lewis Nkosi to Lucy Graham, 4 April 2002
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lucy Graham,
I wanted to reply to you sooner, but alas for the past three weeks and all through (appropriately if you believe that Christian story) Easter holy days, I have been undergoing a crucifixion of a kind rewriting passages of UNDERGROUND PEOPLE. I am bleeding, I am exhausted, with only Kafka’s DIARIES for consolation: “Headache, slept badly. Incapable of sustained, concentrated work.” Et tu Kafka! Again: “Wrote a little today and yesterday. Just now read the beginning. It is ugly and gives me a headache…wicked, pedantic, mechanical, a fish barely breathing on a sandbank.”
Your message is delightful in so far as it uncannily captures some of my many reflections on the plight of MATING BIRDS. The reception of the novel is a subject that deserves a paper by itself! Outside South Africa the novel was almost unanimously perceived as one of the best pieces of writing to emerge from South Africa. The novel was the Thursday’s weekly choice of the best new fiction by THE NEW YORK TIMES influential critic Michiko Kakutani (March 22, 1986); a lead review in THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW by Henry Louis Gates,Jr, (Sunday 18 May 1986); Critics’ Choice of the WASHINGTON POST and reviewed by Alan Ryan on June 8, 1986 who called it “very possibly the finest novel by a South African, black or white, about the terrible distortion of love in South Africa since Alan Paton’s “TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE”; Gabrielle Daniels of Stanford University, then teaching black women’s literature, in a review in the EXAMINER-CHRONICLE of San Francisco on May 4, 1986; Norman Shrapnel for the LONDON GUARDIAN 1.8. 1986, who after summarising the novel reported: “So stark an outline can give no account of the subtlety and skill that have gone into the structure of this searching – and remarkably, given its dire theme, undepressing – first novel.” From Hugh Barnes in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (7 August 1986) to Margaret Walters in THE LONDON OBSERVER (27.7.86) and Paul Pickering in NEW SOCIETY who thought “the moral implications of MATING BIRDS are as disturbing as the writing is brilliant.” And then was Channel 4 Book’s Choice reviewed by Andrew Hislop. In Holland was a best-seller that went into two printings; was chosen one of the best 100 books published in 1986 by the NEW YORK TIMES at the end of that year. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Italy and Germany got similar reception. Was not reviewed in France for peculiarly French reasons when it comes to foreign books by “Third World Writers” but got a review in CANARD ENCHAINE. To crown it all, finally an International Pen Prize.
I mention all the above not out of vanity. In fact, I find it unfortunate that the views of foreign reviewers should play such a decisive role in the shaping of our literature. All the same, there is something disturbing, to say the least, about the hostility shown toward MATING BIRDS by South African, almost all of them white, and surprisingly, most of them people of the left. Rob Nixon who has since tried to make amends by his favourable mentions of me in his book about Sophiatown and Hollywood tried to destroy the book in THE VILLAGE VOICE, calling it an exercise in nostalgia, etc., etc. Josephine Dodd’s dismissal of the novel as rehearsing “some more old scripts from the patriarchal stockroom” is the kind of critical and “intellectual” disgrace that gives a bad name to South African “feminism”.
Jacqueline Rose, one of the editors of LACAN AND FEMINISM has been teaching the novel in seminar after seminar. This past year it has been taught in a Postcolonial Literature course at the Universities of Zurich and Basel by the feminist scholar Prof. Therese Steffen and author of a book on Rita Dove. Admittedly I am not a neutral reader of the novel but even so one is bound to ask why MATING BIRDS created so much animosity among WHITE South African “feminists”. Something smells here!
As for dear Andre Brink, my guess is that it was a revenge review. In the past I had given A DRY WHITE SEASON a bad review and a collection of his essays in THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. What annoyed Brink even more was that in Sweden the big Sunday newspaper DAGENS NYHETER paired in a picture and interview in a rather mischievous way that suggested a struggle over literary representation was going on between black and white. In any case, Brink’s revenge tactics were so transparent and farcical he was reduced to attacking MATING BIRDS for having a scene of joyous mating while flying! No such birds exist in South Africa! As if it matters. This is SUPER-REALISM gone crazy! There is an interesting book I have recently come across in the University of Basel Library called BIRDS IN LITERATURE by Prof. Leonard Lutwack (University of Florida Press) which cites the use of bird symbolism in literary texts around the world and mentions MATING BIRDS among others. Brink got so silly while scraping together my juvenilia he even thought my story in CONTRAST was set in South Africa and involved an interracial couple when in fact I had deliberately written a story of a white couple, one of whom is a writer, holidaying in the Caribbean. It was a light exercise in Jamesian irony about the possibilities of being undone by one’s assumed worldliness when it comes to chance encounters. But what is eating Brink about interracial sex since he deals in it all the time?! Suddenly he was behaving not like a literary critic but like a white BAAS protecting his women folk from the black menace! Your theory about the “Black Peril” seems to me dead on!
As for the interference with the text by St. Martin’s Press or Ravan Press I can truly say there was absolutely none. It so happens that MATING BIRDS was actually bought by a woman at St. Martin’s Press, Victoria Skurnik, who adored the book and was very proud of having acquired it. A senior editor, Skurnik was so careful with the manuscript that once or twice when she had occasion to break up a sentence that she said was over-long she had the changes sent over to me in Lusaka for approval.
Along with other writers like Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, etc., I donated the original manuscript to the Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa for the Anti-Apartheid Campaign. Ethel de Keyser was the person in charge of the sales. I mention these facts because it would have been very useful for you to compare the original manuscript with the published texts. I am extremely annoyed with myself. What I ought to have done is photocopy the typescript for preservation for future inspection. I don’t even know who the buyer was. If you are interested you could track it down.
I could fax some of the items mentioned if you are unable to track them down (interviews, etc) I have one or two letters from Victoria Skurnik somewhere but am too busy to look before sending this e-mail off!
Needless to say, I do not see MATING BIRDS as being about RAPE but certainly about the difficulties of policing desire where language was not allowed to act as a channel of communication between the sexes of different races. Without being able to ask “is it Yes or No” how are you supposed to know until it is too late? Surely, the scene in the tobacco shop on the beach is an attempt to spell out the mutuality of that desire and how it got to be perverted by the system of apartheid.
Thank you for the sympathetic things you say about MATING BIRDS.
With best wishes, LEWIS NKOSI.
Lucy Graham to Lewis Nkosi, 6 April 2002.
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lewis Nkosi,
Thank you for your wonderful response!
I agree with all your observations regarding the schism in responses to Mating Birds. I’m going to try and track down that manuscript, but in the meantime have a few more questions, though I must add that I’m reluctant to distract you from Underground People.
Anyway if you have the time:
1) from what you say – I gather that Mating Birds was not called into question by SA censors? why do you think this was not so?
2) I read somewhere that you were either present at Sharpeville or that you covered the story as a journalist. Could you clarify this, and comment on your reactions to Sharpeville? Was the massacre one of the reasons for your departure from SA?
3) If you have the inclination to answer this – I am also interested in your opinion/ comments regarding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Have you been back to SA since your visit to Cape Town in 1994?
Though I agree that Mating Birds is not about rape (although the protagonist has been accused of rape), I am interested in Mating Birds as a subversion of “Black Peril” narrative. So, as well as responses to the novel, I would like to explore the ways in which it circles back upon a history in which a black man who had sex with a white woman would have been accused of rape.
I came across some articles written by you in the Southern African Review of Books and very much enjoyed your description of a visit to Cape Town and your encounter with (among others) John Coetzee:
“J.M. Coetzee, the novelist, looking skeptical, is mutely contemplating the dancers on the floor.” (!)
I wish you well with the rewriting of Underground People, in my experience writing is mainly rewriting.
Funnily enough I’ve also been reading Kafka’s diaries, and recently recommended these to a friend.
All the best,
Lucy.
Lewis Nkosi to Lucy Graham, 13 April 2002.
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lucy,
As for answers to your questions:
(1) The end of the 1980s was very nearly the end of censorship as we knew it in South Africa. Although I was on the list of proscribed writers (I think about 90-odd) some were already being taken off that list. The rest, like myself, required a special permission from the Censorship Board for a specified time or for a specific publication. I think Ravan Press asked and received permission to publish. I also think – but I am not sure – that some some laws like the infamous Immorality Act were being taken off the Statute Book or being inflicted on the victims with a fair amount of discretion! For some of these reasons I think MATING BIRDS slipped through the net relatively more easily than would have been the case before. After all Gordimer’s books, including A Sport Of Nature, were being sold openly.
(2) Yes, I experienced the anguish of being a witness to the Sharpeville Massacre and the public funeral later. Nat Nakasa and I were there on what we thought was going to be a routine journalistic coverage for our newspapers and ended up carrying bodies to nearby houses on stretchers improvised from blankets. I narrated all that for a short film shown on Channel 4. No, I did not leave as a result of Sharpeville. Interestingly enough I had no particular desire to leave the country just then; I was invited to forward samples of my writings to the Nieman Foundation at Harvard which had fellowships for journalists and once you got there you were allowed to pursue any line of study that suited you. The Government refused me the passport and Harold Wolpe who was later to escape from prison with Joe Slovo thought he would test South Afrcan law to determine if the Government could hold people in the country against their will if they wished to leave. As my lawyer he gave Pretoria a week to respond. The rest is history. I think I wrote about this in the special issue of the Times Literary Supplement in 1994.
I have been back in South Africa three times since 1994 when I wrote about my encounters with John Coetzee and others: for the Arts Biennale in 1997 when I was on the panel at the University of Cape Town named after my book Home and Exile; I taught a semester on African Modernism in the early part of 2001 at UCT and returned again for two months, this time to the University of Durban-Westville to participate on a CD-Rom project with Dennis Brutus to bring together our published works for the university archive.
(3) It’s hard to take an unequivocal position on the TRC. While I consider it important bringing to light what happened, I find obscene the way some of the perpetrators of torture can sound almost boastful when recounting these crimes with the certainty that they will not be prosecuted. Gillian Slovo gave me her book about the way her mother died, with pieces of her flesh spattered on the ceiling of her office in Maputo, and wondered if Ruth would have approved her murderers being allowed to go free and boast about it. Former Nazis are still being pursued and being brought to justice for their crimes. So it is with the war criminals in former Yugoslavia.
To circle back to your theme of the black peril, you are right, of course, according to racist lore (law) no white woman in her right mind could consent to having sex with a black man; if sex did take place her body or her mind must have been “raped” anyway. The cocktail of race and sex is so powerful that William Faulkner was able to put an interesting gloss on it in LIGHT IN AUGUST when Joe Christmas (whose white/black identity remains indeterminate) travels across the country sleeping or being kept by women; in Southern brothels if the women are white, to avoid paying them he tells them “I’m a negro!” Usually all he risked was a cursing from the woman and the matron of the house, though now and then he was beaten unconscious by other patrons, to waken later in the street or in the jail. That was in the South. But one night it did not work. He rose from the bed and told the woman that he was a negro. “You are?” she said. “I thought maybe you were just another wop or something.” She looked at him, without particular interest; then she evidently saw something in his face: she said, “What about it? You look all right. You ought to seen the shine I turned out just before your turn came.”
In 1991 during a visit to South Africa I suggested in one interview that for some white critics it was all right for white male writers to narrate on black bodies but for black male writers to narrate on white bodies was a bit too much even for some progressive white critics; when you described a white woman’s body too intimately in fiction you were actually fondling her body. Instead of being physically beaten unconscious like Joe Christmas you were critically ambushed and beaten unconscious by white critics.
But good novels are also about so many other things besides the themes that loll too readily on the surface. When I was writing MATING BIRDS (which actually started as a short story) I was thinking a great deal about the effects of the weather on human conduct, perhaps encouraged by a reading of Camus’ L’Etranger; then about the sea in Durban which always obsessed me both for itself as well as a route of symbolic escape from apartheid South Africa; all those ships coming and going on the blue waters of the Indian Ocean! Sexual desire and escape to freedom seem on reflection so intimately bound up. The sea, love and death in Venice! And rewriting Gordimer’s love bungalows!
With best wishes, LEWIS NKOSI.
Lucy Graham to Lewis Nkosi, 15 April 2002.
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lewis Nkosi,
Thank-you so much for all your comments, they are extremely helpful and insightful.
What you say about the morbid fascination of white male critics (and, for that matter, white women such as Pippa Skotnes in her “Miscast” exhibit) with the “black body” strikes me as entirely true. Have you read Brink’s T’kama Adamastor, and heard of Cyril Coetzee’s painting based on Brink’s book, now hanging in the Cullen library at the University of Witwatersrand?
In Brink’s rewriting of the Adamastor story, “T’kama Adamastor” is a black male with a penis so long it has to be wrapped around his waist twice! So it’s very ironic that Brink criticises Mating Birds for exploiting “one the crudest myths of sexist racism, the size of the black penis”. In Coetzee’s painting, the size of the black penis is slyly suggested through the positioning of an ostrich’s neck, which juts out from behind the black male body.
Mating Birds seems to deal with the complex enmeshment between race and sex (or, as you put it, “the cocktail of race-sex”) in a more humanely ironic manner. And as you say, one of the central encounters is where Sibiya and Veronica exchange a glance that acknowledges, rather than denies, the other’s humanity.
Rereading Mating Birds in preparation for my paper of course reminds me that academic criticism can only clumsily approach and seek to apprehend the plenitude that is a good novel.
In particular, I am struck by the image of Sibiya remembering a view of the sea – watching the oceanliners on their way from foreign exotic shores, “in a mood of profound despondency”: “… I was thinking, planning, and dreaming of escape from South Africa, from the life of oppression and wretched exploitation. The girl, too, who appeared so unexpectantly on this strand of beach was perhaps part of this dream to escape. Life plays us so many jokes.”
I also agree with your view of the TRC. Behind the discourse of forgiveness lies the betrayal of justice. The obscenity of amnesty. This abomination of “grace” is well elaborated by Jacques Derrida in “On Forgiveness”. Did you hear that Wouter Basson’s TRC files “went missing” before his trial, and that he has just been acquitted?
About the weather, I’ve just read your essays in Home and Exile, and the account of the biting cold in New York. I’ve also just read the essay on Sheila Jordan – I saw her at Ronnie Scott’s in London in July last year, she was fantastic.
All the best,
Lucy.
Lewis Nkosi to Lucy Graham, 22 April 2002
Subject: Mating Birds
Dear Lucy,
It’s a disgrace I took so long to respond to your last message! The past week or so has been quite mad in Basel. The lITERAHAUS was hosting readings by African writers and private correspondence seems to come to a halt for a while.
I am so thrilled MATING BIRDS has you as its reader.
I was signing copies of the new French edition of MATING BIRDS across the border in France last week and we will be in Paris for more of that from Thursday.
No, I hadn’t read or seen Brink’s T’kama Adamastor; but the real shock was the news that Wouter Basson was acquitted. I had just read in the local papers that two members of the Secret Intelligence had secretly visited South Africa without informing their superiors and it was revealed that Basson had worked with Swiss Intelligence. So that caused quite a scandal.
What good news you provide! It’s really wonderful you were able to hear Sheila Jordan and it made me quite nostalgic about nights in New York!
Way back I think I was more than responsible for Sheila coming to sing at Ronnie Scott’s for the first time. Armed with a proof copies of MATING BIRDS I used to badger Ronnie everytime we went to the club until he brought her over to London.
I hope your work is coming on fine. Keep in touch. I am hoping Durban-Westville is able to arrange for two visits for which they have applied for funding. Lindy Stiebel at Durban-Westville is (was) preparing an article with photographs in connection with my visit to Durban last year with a view to retracing the itinerary of the two main characters on the Durban beach. So we went back to the sand dunes of that fatal beach and got reenchanted by the armada of cargo ships queueing up to enter or leave the harbour but no sign of harassed Veronica or Ndi Sibiya except young people of many colours disporting themselves in the blue ocean!
It’s a long time since I have been as fascinated by a theoretical concept as I have by the idea of “linguistic citizenship”. Developed by researchers at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), “linguistic citizenship” reveals the faultlines of “linguistic human rights” by drawing attention to non-standardised versions of languages, and to the significance of language crossing, in formulating human voice, agency, belonging, resistance, disjunction, dislocation, and migration. While the Constitution of South Africa in theory guarantees “language rights” by recognising eleven official languages, “linguistic citizenship” offers a more fluid conceptualization of language, incorporating unofficial languages and language crossing, and drawing on utopian ideas in connecting language to citizenship and belonging. There is a danger that citizenship can harden into rigid and exclusive formulations of identity – if we lose sight of the promises of participation in political life, and of agency, insurgency and demands for a more inclusive socio-political sphere, that are part of the meaning of citizenship in its ideal or utopian form.
Based, as I have been, at UWC as an extraordinary senior lecturer since 2013 and as a Research Fellow since 2016, I understand why this university was a strategic site for the development of “linguistic citizenship” as a concept. The relationship, or rather disjunction, between standardized Afrikaans and the linguistic community around the university is stark. In this context, cultural forms such as rap and “conscious” hip-hop claim voice, agency and identity through a non-standardized version of Afrikaans known as “Kaaps”, which incorporates language crossing and multilingualism. These cultural forms, and the scholarly work done on them by commentators such as Adam Haupt, Chris Stroud, Quentin Williams and Warrick Moses, have drawn attention to the previously erased history of a complex and creolized language, created and spoken by “coloured” people in the Western Cape, that was captured and standardized (read: whitewashed) by Afrikaner ethnonationalists in the early twentieth century.
This disjunction between Kaaps and Afrikaans as a standardized language is vividly explored in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977), the first edition of which is a multilingual novel with first person narration in English and dialogue in Afrikaans. Published in the wake of the Soweto uprisings, which protested against standardized Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, the novel exposes the emergence of Afrikaans as an authoritarian and ossified patriarchal language, out of the flexible and hybrid “language of nuances, of supple word order and delicate particles” that the narrator, Magda, hears spoken by the “brown” workers in the kitchen. As opposed to this “nuanced” language, Magda has been inducted into an Afrikaans that is aligned in the novel with the authoritarian “law-of-the-father” defined by Jacques Lacan. Describing the language she speaks, Magda claims that “a law” has taken up residence inside her, subjugating her body to its “war of sounds”. She claims: “I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective. It was my father tongue”.
Standardised versions of languages will always be profoundly melancholic. Contrary to the ways in which they appear to us, these languages are not discrete and pure systems, and globally dominant languages such as English and French are not exceptions. As Derrida states of French in Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of Origin: “ – We only ever speak one language. (yes, but) – We never speak only one language.”
Chris Stroud and Quentin Williams of the CMDR have argued that although multilingualism has “served to silence, invisibilize, and sort speakers and languages hierarchically” (this was certainly the case under colonialism and apartheid), multilingualism can also interrupt and trouble the residue of colonial relationships, allowing for “new empowering linguistic mediations” where “the mutualities of our common humanity with different others” can be worked out.
Literary and cultural texts often reference and reflect multilingual realities, and fragments in interpenetrated or unofficial languages within these texts can contribute to scenarios of mutual exchange, or resistance. Zoe Wicomb’s “When the train comes”, published in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), has the narrator giving a multilingual retort to the sexual harassment that she and other girls are forced to endure from boys while waiting for the train. After being targeted and treated with contempt by “a tall boy”, the young “coloured” narrator finally finds her voice and the story ends with her defiant, language-crossing question, that firstly sounds like rap or poetry, and secondly disrupts and mocks the male gaze:
“Why do you look and kyk gelyk/ Am I miskien of gold gemake?”
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2000), arguably one of the most profound post-apartheid novels, is a metafictional text about languages that have been sorted hierarchically by an indelible history of colonialism and apartheid. One character, Refentse, writes in English “the story of a fictitious scarecrow heroine in an attempt to grapple with these profound questions of euphemism, xenophobia, prejudice and AIDs”, because he “knew the limitations of writing in Sepedi”. Another character, Refilwe, “did not know that writing in an African language in South Africa could be such a curse…. Calling shit and genitalia by their correct names in Sepedi was apparently regarded as vulgar by these reviewers, who had for a long time been reviewing works of fiction for education publishers, and who were determined to ensure that such works did not offend the systems they served.” Notably, the first epigraph of the novel is a quote by OK Matsepe, who changed the direction of Sepedi literature from “suitable” educational tales to epic narratives.
Also notably, Welcome to our Hillbrow uses an English inflected by local idiom, and interpenetrated by Sepedi words and phrases, which the author explains in English, creating the effect that this is a text in and of translation.
Despite the dominance of colonial languages, I believe that translation is a space where multilingualism and linguistic citizenship can become activated in an exploratory and pedagogical interface that disrupts the ghettoization of African languages in the education system generally, and in the academy.
In 2016-2017 I was initiator and project manager of the Mendi Centenary Project, hosted by the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. The project included a multidisciplinary exhibition, a choral tribute in isiXhosa by the Fezeka school choir, and a multilingual and diverse conference with a range of presentations by academics, archivists, descendants of the Mendi tragedy, military historians, autodidacts, and Fallist students. Papers were delivered in English but included contributions in indigenous languages such as seSotho, and presentations and discussions often switched between English and African languages. Around this time I also worked collaboratively with UWC students, who are like myself from the rural Eastern Cape, on translations of S.E.K. Mqhayi’s poems about the Mendi in which we found very deep meanings about land and nation that are still relevant today. This is an ongoing project.
I believe that engaging students and researchers in collaborative translation (an under-theorised field in translation studies) can further a critical rethinking of the questions we should be asking, enabling imaginings of the reconstitution of a post-apartheid humanities.
Unexpectedly, my commitment to ending spatial apartheid in Cape Town led to my being adopted (or perhaps coopted) in the role of “translator”, by a grassroots movement called Umhla Wethu Development. Since 1994, English has become the dominant official and bureaucratic language, and this presents real problems for the majority of people who speak many languages but are not confident to write proposals and other documents in English. I was thus approached by Umhlaba Wethu to translate their visions and requests into official English. What I found interesting, however, was that after formal meetings (with, for instance, government departments) had been arranged through the use of official English, these meetings often shifted into isiXhosa, though they were then minuted in English.
In my academic work, I have felt increasingly confined by the limits of separate academic disciplines, and by the limits of English literature as a field of research. Just as English is not a discrete language, English literature is not a discrete tradition, but rather is influenced by and often has intertextual references to literature written in a range of languages. Moreover, literature often references other arts and media.
My work has shifted from a narrow focus on literary texts to consideration of cultural production more broadly: Visual texts, cinema, music and aural effects. Issues of language, multilingualism and linguistic citizenship are an integral part of the second major project I am working on, namely “Post-apartheid dissonance: the cultural politics of post-‘rainbow nation’ South Africa”.
As the title suggests, this project seeks to identity key fissures in the “rainbow nation” myth of multi-racial harmony that emerged in the 1990s, around the TRC. I am proposing that the idea of dissonance provides a way through the post-apartheid landscape that cannot easily be incorporated into narratives of redemption, forgiveness, closure, or even accounts where “the misery of blackness” can be readily fetishised. In this study I track cultural forms that converse with the way Cornel West describes jazz as “riding on the dissonance”. The study uses the idea of auditory discord and a multitude of competing voices, languages and sounds to engage with the complexities of “post-rainbow nation” South Africa.
A chapter on HIV / AIDS, Afrophobia and queerphobia shows how a discourse of “contamination of the rainbow nation” stigmatized and targeted supposed threats to the health of the collective, and how literary and cultural texts have addressed these issues.
There is also a chapter on the Jacob Zuma rape trial which discusses the ethnochauvinism that attached to the trial, and to Zuma’s use of Zulu during the trial. The chapter juxtaposes the judge’s bizarre rescripting of Kipling’s “If” poem in his judgment, with a poem by Khwezi, “I am Kanga”, that reclaims this word of East African origin, for an item of clothing associated with African women, from the misogynist meanings it acquired during her rape trial. Though written in English in Europe (effectively translating for her audience the meanings of “Kanga”), the poem bears witness to a history of exile and migration, but it is also an assertion of Khwezi’s belief in a world where “no one is above the law[and] where sex is pleasurable not painful”. The gesture of the poem is one that claims voice, agency, and linguistic citizenship. Shortly after delivering the poem, Khwezi returned to South Africa, claiming on social media: “This is also my home.”
A focus on cultural texts about the Marikana massacre comprises another chapter, examining a range of texts alongside the history of migrant labour on the mines. The isiXhosa or siPondo word “intaba”, meaning mountain, which recurs in documentary footage of the miners’ conversations with black police that take place otherwise in Fanakalo or in elementary Zulu, accrues particular significance. As I argue, the use of the word “intaba” for what was essentially a small koppie, was a means of integrating, into the miners struggle with Lonmin and the state, a long history of rural resistance that includes the Pondoland Revolt against the Bantu Authorities. As visual artists have suggested, this history also includes the story known as the “Cattle killing” of 1856-7.
The post-apartheid dissonance project also includes a chapter on Fallism; a chapter entitled “Mother City Blues”, about resistance to the continuing legacy of spatial apartheid in Cape Town; and a chapter on South African Jazz, entitled “Over the Rainbow”. The title of the latter chapter comes from Mandla Mlangeni. After hearing a set that he played with his Tune and Recreation Committee at Cape Town’s Slave Church Museum in 2016, I asked Mandla whether he had played a riff of “over the rainbow”. His answer: “Ja Lucy…. [long drag of a hand rolled cigarette] , we are so over the rainbow.”
I am also currently putting together a proposal for a project entitled “Debates on Decoloniality”, which aims to examine: local and global debates on the term “decoloniality” and implications for education/ pedagogy; Fallism as morphing in and out of being a “leaderless movement” under pressures of intersectionality; the role of white “allies” in the South African student movements; the relationship of Fallism to Soweto 1976 but also to much earlier protests in the black schools of the Eastern Cape dating back at least to the 1920s; and the Eastern Cape as a key historical area in debates on decolonization, language and education.
I am interested in the fact that many of UWC’s students are from areas such as the Eastern Cape. The Cape, broadly speaking, is a large and diverse area, rich in languages and local knowledge. In the face of divisive racial tensions, I would like to connect the Western and Eastern Capes – by reaching out to the community immediately around the university, and also to the histories, local knowledges and communities of other areas where our students, and I, have roots.
At the end of the Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James, Anastasia Steele has succeeded in transforming a controlling, physically-abusive entrepreneur into a doting husband, father of her two children. Miraculously (for a married couple with children) their sex life is still smoking hot and they enjoy BDSM sex. Though not regarded as a great literary feat, the series has been compared to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), in which the heroine’s love reforms a stormy, melancholy Romantic bluebeard – replete with a mad wife secreted in the attic – into a somewhat domesticated chap with whom Jane can have a cosy and equal married relationship.
Considering that the Fifty Shades series has sold more copies on Amazon than the entire Harry Potter series combined, and that Jane Eyre is a well-loved text that has been prescribed in school and university curricula around the world for decades, it’s worth pointing out that the myths these works are purveying may not be too helpful for women trapped in abusive relationships. It’s also worth asking whether there are alternatives to the narratives they offer.
Enter gender relations in the novels of South African author Daphne Rooke.
All of Rooke’s major novels present male characters who are mad, bad, and seriously dangerous to know. But for women readers these novels offer a very different message than Jane Eyre and Fifty Shades of Grey.
I am going to focus here on Rooke’s Mittee (1950), mainly because it is a rewriting of Jane Eyre, and also because it is one of my favourite novels. You have likely not heard of Mittee before, though you may have heard of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, which is also a subversive retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s famous story.
In a similar vein to Wide SargassoSea, Mittee is about a love triangle, from the perspective of a “Creole” woman. The novel is set in the Transvaal in the lead up to and during the South African War of 1899-1902, and told by Selina, the young and beautiful “coloured” servant of a young and beautiful white woman, Mittee. Selina begins by describing her peaceful life with her husband Fanie, before telling the story of her youth with Mittee in an extended flashback that comprises most of the novel. She describes how she was having an affair with Mittee’s fiancé, Paul, and it seems that she was in love with him, though he treats her dismissively and even hatefully at times. Her relationship with Paul must be kept as secret as Bertha Rochester locked away in the attic. Though she loves Mittee “as a sister”, Selina is often overcome by jealousy, and on one occasion rips up the silk for Mittee’s wedding dress, recalling the incident in Jane Eyre where Bertha enters Jane’s room and tears her wedding veil in half.
Like Bronte’s Rochester, Paul in Mittee is a dark and powerful Byronic character who first appears in the narrative on horseback. His demonic intensity and intertwined sadism and appetite for dark-skinned or ethnically-ambiguous women have much in common with Rhys’s Rochester.
On finding out that Selina is pregnant with his child, Paul seeks to marry her off to the brutal farm hand Jansie, who terrifies Selina. One evening Jansie comes around to Selina’s room, expecting her to submit to him. When she refuses him and he sees that she is pregnant, he attacks her, jumping on her stomach and causing her to lose her child. This attack becomes an excuse for Paul to kill Jansie, who was the only witness to the pregnancy. After Jansie’s death, Paul, already vicious and nasty, becomes even worse. During his marriage to Mittee they have a crippled child whom he smothers to death, as he cannot stand to see weakness in something that he evidently wants to view as a narcissistic projection of himself. When he begins beating Mittee, Selina stops him and he turns on her and rapes her instead.
While some of the brutal men in Rooke’s novels are seductive in the beginning of the narratives in which they appear, they deteriorate very quickly into violent doubles of one another. The horror is that these men are family: husbands, or potential husbands, and fathers.
When in an interview I asked Rooke about this, she responded that these men are based on stories she heard from her mother Marie (to whom Mittee is dedicated), about her mother’s first husband, Knevitt, a hard-drinking Welshman who was extremely violent to Rooke’s half-brothers and her mother. One night Marie and her three sons ran away. They heard Knevitt coming after them on horseback, with his two colt revolvers firing, and hid behind a waterfall, an incident that became the inspiration for the final major scene in Mittee.
Rooke claims that she grew up on these stories, but presumably there were other stories, and one may question the significance of her investment in tales of frighteningly violent men. After all, Rooke never knew Knevitt, and her own father, by her account a loving and benevolent man, was killed in the First World War, soon after she was born.
In The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, Slavoj Žižek argues that fictions of “enraged paternal figures,” excessively phallic figures with their “wild outbursts of violent rage,” are essentially a fantasy, such that even the most obscene Urvater, “the rapist father,” is an invented defense against the suffocating and protective figure of parental benevolence. Following Žižek, it could be argued that Rooke’s childhood, growing up without a father in a household of women, may have perversely shaped her obsession with the fiery and violent men that she returns to again and again in her novels.
An interpretation of these excessively evil male figures as “fantasies”, however, would overlook their relation to the actual violence of the patriarchal order that Rooke was describing. In her memoir Rooke not only remembers growing up in a house of women, but also makes a link between apartheid and male “aggression.” As Zoë Wicomb notes: “Rooke is resolute in her exposure of the bullying male. The consoling words of an Afrikaner matron—‘Don’t be upset by the boys. All girls have to put up with it, Selina, probably he meant no harm’ reveal to what extent sexual harassment is institutionalized in that society.”
Through the portrayal of brutal husband-fathers, Rooke reflects on the patriarchal violence that was endemic at every level in colonial society and under apartheid. Her novels are poignant as we have inherited the legacy of these toxic masculinities today.
In Jane Eyre, the heroine chooses the fiery and arguably abusive Rochester, over St John Rivers, the kindly missionary. In Mittee, Mittee rejects Paul, choosing instead to live with her missionary, Doctor Besil, and Selina eventually lives a life of peace with her compassionate husband, Fanie.
It’s not my intention to claim that “nice guys” are incapable of being trash. Such is the nature of toxic masculinities that “nice guys” can transform into demonic versions of themselves in the blink of an eye.
But unlike Jane Eyre and the Fifty Shades trilogy, Mittee demonstrates that women cannot reform narcissistic men who are overtly “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. Such men don’t get better. They only get worse.
lucyvaleriepomes 