The great thirst for honest representation
This is a response to the really lovely review of Michael Gastrow’s Road To Absolom in Monday’s Argus that claimed some really nasty things about me. (Scan above.)
Dear Books Editor,
It was sad to see such a fantastic review of Michael Gastrow’s Road To Absolom undermined by a gross misrepresentation of me.
In her review yesterday, Beverley Roos Muller claimed I “dissed” struggle literature, a position which, she says, “conveniently ignores the deep sacrifice that many of those same struggalistas made without which Beukes would not be sturdily sitting where she is today.”
Wow.
There’s the use of that dodgy word “struggalistas” which seems to suggest that it was just the trendy thing to do at the time (ideally while wearing a fetching Che Guevera-style beret) instead of a devastating war against an evil regime willing to stoop to surveillance, oppression, intimidation, exile, character assassination, torture and outright murder.
Then there’s the way Muller completely misheard or misinterpreted what I was at careful pains to spell out – that I was very cheekily referring to a cliché about the Post-1994 emerging young South African literature scene which saw a glut of white middle class memoirs about growing up under apartheid and coming to the startling realisation through a memorable encounter with a gardener or maid wronged by the state, that [heavy dose of irony] “black people are people too”. I also pointed out that there was a lot more to SA lit at the time than that.
(And, in fact, there have been some superb books in exactly that mould, including Richard Poplak’s Ja, No, Man and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs’ Tonight about Zimbabwe)
I don’t know how Muller got the impression that I was “dissing” the struggle or struggle literature, particularly when books like Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season were an influence on my novel Moxyland, which is fundamentally ABOUT a re-imagined struggle against a neo-apartheid state in South Africa ten years from now.
I’m no denialist. The trees may have been cut down, but apartheid’s roots run deep and will be tripping us up for years to come.
I know exactly how I got to where I’m sitting today; through hard work and luck and an unfair privilege granted me by a racist state, through feminism which allowed me to actually have an education and a career (thanks suffragettes!), and absolutely through the efforts of everyone who opposed apartheid and made this country a tolerable place to live.
Finally, if you absolutely have to compare me to a flower, at least make it a scrappy Leonitis.
- Lauren Beukes
