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Peter Abrahams at 70 |
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Peter Abrahams at 70 by Michael Wade, Southern African Review of Books, June/July 1989
On my parent's bookshelves in our comfortable home in the East Rand white suburbia of the late 1940s was Richard Wright's masterpiece, Native Son . I must have been nine years old when I read it. Those shelves were well stocked with the progressive writing of the period and I was a precocious reader, but Wright's book had for me the power of an intimate revelation. Black people were all around me; they lived with us in total proximity and total remoteness, at the same time. Of course, I knew that 'we' -- my family -- did not allow ourselves the freedoms of verbal and physical abuse that constituted the audible and visible norms of the relationship between white and black even, often enough, in the respectable ambience of our suburb. But the realness of the lives of the blacks around me was a mystery, and Wright's book suddenly made that real quality almost accessible, certainly recognisable. In a way, it must have confirmed things that I had suspected. Thus when Tell Freedom was published (and found its way with due celerity to our shelves) perhaps two years after I had reduced the family copy of Native Son to a food-stained, limp-leafed, ear-folded transitional object, I was ripe for its impact. From the first word I knew that here was the truth, that this was the real happening all around me every day, that this was the real childhood of South Africa. Even the dorp of Elsburg in which the young Abrahams was fostered might have been the village of that name that sprawled unbeautifully across the hills just east of our town (though of course, there were many other Elsburgs in South Africa). The book changed my life. But there was more to come. Soon after, Return to Goli was there, and though its descriptions of life in Europe and England both mystified and attracted me, and Abrahams' own ringing declaration of ideological fealty to liberal humanism in the opening pages had no meaning for me at that stage, the descriptions of his return to South Africa, beginning with the archetypal conversation on the aeroplane with the white South African who wouldn't believe that the author was also South African, told it like (I already knew) it was. (When it was banned in South Africa, some years later, I put a different dust-jacket around it; of course, its presence in those life-determining shelves merely became more insistent -- to me, at any rate). What could Abrahams' autobiographical essays have to say to a sheltered middle-class pre-adolescent white boy? Years later, in the second half of the 1960s, when I began (in England, myself an exile from South Africa by that time) to write my book on Abrahams' work, I discovered the intense emotion those books aroused in the white South African English-speaking literary establishment, the paucity of whose achievement had to be concealed and defended before the emotional power and truth of Abrahams' statement in a slither of patronising and belittling reviews. Abrahams wrote his first stories and poems for publication when he was still at high school (Grace Dieu in Pietersburg and then St Peter's Rosettenville -- the religious roots of his Marxist and later liberal agnosticism go deep and begin early); and these works made their impact on the tiny community of black writers in the late 1930s. But his work as novelist (which is how he will be remembered) began in England, with an essentially Romantic attempt to tackle a Wordsworth theme -- life in the city, or urbanisation. Song of the City (1945) is uncertain in plot and in narrative style, but it reveals at the outset of his novelistic career the intensity and tenacity with which he deals with the role of ideas in the lives of human beings -- two qualities which remain consistent throughout his writing life. Abrahams himself must have felt the inadequacies of this early attempt, and his next novel, Mine Boy (1946), was a reinscription of the urban reality he had tried to convey in his first effort. Note the date of publication. Incredibly, two full years before the appearance of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country ! Urbanisation was already a powerfully established subject in the South African novel, with a full set of conventions, strongly resistant to modification and all functioning to reinforce the white South African mythology -- even when the writer was black. Plomer, Scully, R.R.R. Dhlomo and others had inscribed the meaning of urban life for blacks along deterministic lines. Nothing good could come out of the disaster they described. Then Abrahams wrote Mine Boy -- and in a characteristic injustice of history, its force was never felt in the South African reality it described. Instead, the inferior melodrama of Cry, the Beloved Country came to constitute the benchmark for literary and cinematic portrayal of black urbanisation, and to reinforce, to recast in concrete, the stereotypes on which its presentation depended. This is easy to understand: Paton's was a 'white' version, and it invoked white Christian ideology to dominate its field. But one has to understand the negative force of those stereotypes to see the real nature of Paton's project. His black characters, apart from their failure to live on the page, literally carry the curse of Ham. Only disaster befalls them, and this seems to issue from a source in the black character itself. They are childlike, uncaring of consequences, incapable of controlling their surroundings, feckless, unrestrained. The worst, most destructive and most distorted of these stereotypes is the character of John Kumalo, the urban black politician and brother of the saintly Reverend Steven. He is gross, cowardly, concupiscent and in the end betrays his own brother. His evil comes from within, and was at the time it appeared only the latest of a multitude of examples of the inevitable stereotyping of the black politician in white writing. Contrast this with Abrahams' treatment of Xuma, the hero of Mine Boy . Xuma's story is the story of a politicisation, of a man coming to terms with the nature of his material surroundings and concluding that he owes it to his humanity to challenge and try to change the shortcomings he finds there. Within this story Abrahams presents a wide range of the realities and possibilities of black life in the industrial city. School teachers, doctors, domestic servants, mineworkers, fops and pansies, the exotica of street life, black, coloured and white all come into sharp focus. Abrahams is immensely -- sometimes extravagantly -- fair in his treatment of them. Inevitably, he often works from stereotype -- but he always works away from it, in the direction of a fuller realisation of his character's possibilities. Thus Maisie, the domestic servant, develops in the course of the narrative from an unremarkable, though pretty, presence in the entourage of the magnificent shebeen queen, Leah, into a source of folk wisdom and political support, and a symbol for the stamina of the masses. But there is more than this to the achievement of Mine Boy . The novel is informed with ideas: perhaps the most powerful dramatic action in the narrative is in the clash between ideas, most centrally, between the initially simple responses of Xuma, as a black man, to the economic exploitation and political oppression of city life, and the ultimate complexity of his realisation that against the evidence of his senses, he is involved in a struggle of all exploited human beings, regardless of colour, against their exploiters. In Mine Boy Abrahams presents a class analysis of South African society, which although not new in itself, contains much that is original, not least the presentation of the destructive effects of urban exploitation on blacks from within . By contrast, Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country does not express a single original idea. I have written elsewhere of the excellence of the description of work (the major pitfall for novelists of proletarian life, from Dickens on), the masterly dramatisation in the action of the Marxist concept of alienation, and the sensitive and entirely credible account of the beautiful schoolteacher Liza's disintegration under the pressures and conflicts of the life of a member of the tiny black urban elite. But Abrahams' major achievement is his challenge to a whole white-dominated genre within South African fiction: he flings the gauntlet in the face of the keeper of the mighty fortress of inevitability, of black inferiority, of the white man's 'civilised' mission, of the blacks' inability to withstand the traumas of social change, that guards the white self-image in its fictive enactment of the saga of the migrant labourer. And in his next novel The Path of Thunder he did the same again! This time it was the intensely sensitive area of miscegenation, that great white whale of a literary and living obsession, and again Abrahams inscribed an alternative version, which included the memorable image of the black man armed and defiant, firing back at his white oppressors. The book has its weaknesses, particularly in the failure to realise minor but important characters, but this theme has always thrown white writers into a panicked reliance on the crudest stereotypes, and Abrahams may be forgiven his vulnerability to the intense emotional pressures of his theme. But he created an entirely new world of possibility for South African fiction in the sensitivity and sincerity of his treatment of the love between Lanny and Sarie, and (I come back to it in admiration and amazement, because of the historical context in which it was written) that final scene in which the black man and the white woman, guns blazing, fight and die for their love. This is a revolutionary moment in the history of South African literature. And in his next work Abrahams did it yet again. Wild Conquest challenged the centrality of the white pioneering myth of the Great Trek, enshrined in scores of novels, both Afrikaans and English, which fulfilled an essential task of reassurance and reinforcement to both language groups in the white community. Wild Conquest is a rather strained narrative, over-dependent on the very cliches it is challenging, and too derivative to throw of f the magnificent showers of sparks of originality in its two immediate predecessors; the lesser success of the enterprise perhaps reflected two developments, one inevitable and the other a tribute, in its way, to Abrahams' ability. He was drawing further away in time from his personal South African experience, and at the same time closer to the main stream of metropolitan literary life and thought. Thus the historical judgement is less decisive, and the creative impulse is a little jaded; the message of reconciliation and warning lacks ideological clarity. Abrahams was ripe for a decisive reassessment of his identity. The opportunity came with the Observer's commission to go home and report, the magnificent immediate literary results of which we have already considered. Autobiography was a sign of liberation; Abrahams was free to move on from South Africa in his fiction, to consider the urgent problems of the end of the colonial era and the realities of the dawn of independence in other parts of the continent. Ngugi wa Th'iongo told me in an interview more than twenty years ago, when I asked him about his literary influences: 'Peter Abrahams. I first read him at university, when I was an undergraduate. I read almost all his novels. He inspired us because, as Ekwensi has pointed out, he suggested the possibility of an African living by writing'. Thus Abrahams was a central factor, without, perhaps, knowing it, in the development of the new Anglophone African literature. Cyprian Ekwensi began publishing novels and stories in Nigeria in the early 1950s; he and Ngugi became two of the most important writers in contemporary Africa. Abrahams' example clearly inspired many others as well! Abrahams visited West Africa in the 1950s, and in 1956 he published A Wreath for Udomo , a novel about the struggle for freedom from colonial rule and the problems of independence itself. Was A Wreath for Udomo a retreat into the reactionary positions that Abrahams had attacked with such intellectual subtlety in his earlier fiction? For today's reader the book has the force of prophecy. Its description of the pitfalls and failures of the post-independence era (it was published a year before Ghana became independent!!) may be over-Manichaean, and the polarities of tradition and modernisation over-simplified; but the course of events reveals an uncanny prescience. The treatment of the themes of power and betrayal are as powerful as in any novel in English of the post-war period; the ideological commitment to liberalism is, if anything, extreme. Over the intense clash of ideas and emotions broods the giant figure of Udomo, ruthless, charismatic and utterly vulnerable. The only comparable character in modern African fiction is Achebe's Okonkwo. This isn't a blow-by-blow account of Peter Abrahams' career as novelist, so the falling-off of quality in his writing of the 1960s may no doubt be accounted for briefly by two factors: his relocation from an entrenched position within the English literary-cultural establishment to a new country, Jamaica, which must have posed an entirely new set of challenges, personal, artistic and political; and prior to that, the trauma of 1956, the Notting Hill race riots and the uncomfortable truths they told about Abrahams' beloved liberal England. Some of the pessimism and not altogether consciously-expressed conservatism of the two novels of the 1960s (A Night of their Own [1965] and This Island Now [1966], the first a response to the crushing defeat inflicted on the South African liberation movement in the early part of the decade and the second set in the immediacy the Jamaican politics) may be debited to Notting Hill. His use of a quotation from Auden in the title of the Jamaican novel was entirely in character: by evoking the genius, born to privilege, whose quest for belief so resembled his own, though their life paths were so dissimilar, Abrahams acknowledged the changes in his own ideological position, changes in which scepticism and pessimism over the individual's capacity to play a morally meaningful role in the political life of his society loomed large.
Then silence. Not real silence, of course; more like the silence of a leviathan which has submerged for an awfully long time. Actually, there were plenty of rumblings on the non-leviathan scale: gifted travel journalism, political writing in the Jamaican press, radio work, intense and politicised involvement in Jamaican cultural life. But Abrahams the novelist submerged himself for nineteen long years. Books and articles were written about him and his work, but not a novel did he produce. And then the waters broke, and his longest, most complex and most powerful work of fiction shook itself free from the depths of his creative mind.
The View from Coyaba (Faber, 1985) combines the strands of a lifetime's (the biblical span) thinking about people as individuals and in groups do and should behave towards one another. The span of the novel is amazing, and was duly commented on by reviewers when it appeared, though it can only be appreciated properly against the context of Abrahams' relentless concentration on a particular case in each of his previous works. In The View from Coyaba he goes for the big time. His aim is nothing less than the reinscription of the history of black folk. He reviews the entire history of the relationship between whites and blacks in the old and new worlds form the beginnings of black slavery. He provides a multidimensional analysis of this review. He sets long sections of the novel in Jamaica, in the American South, in Liberia, and in Uganda. He explores with the painful precision of a skilled surgeon the negative potential of the relationship between fathers and sons; and he celebrates the positive, the triumph of maturity and reconciliation in the same frame, with a happiness that glows from the page. In this he resolves triumphantly a lifetime's search for his own father, which reverberated through the pages of his previous fiction. He sets out to create a black historic identity. And -- on first reading at least the biggest surprise to the adult version of the little boy from the East Rand whose life was changed by reading Return to Goli and Tell Freedom -- he introduces a new theme of major importance: the incorporation into black life of the message of the Christian gospel as a lived ethical system. In fact, the potential for every one of these themes exists in his earliest work; this is not the place to go into the details, but the fact must be recorded. The View from Coyaba weaves influences from the Old and New Testaments, Marx, Fanon, Du Bois, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism into a rich and deeply satisfying chromatic pattern. So if The View from Coyaba turns out to be a summation, it will be a magnificently consistent final movement to the symphony of a lifetime's thought and writing. If there is still more to come, we the readers will be that much more rewarded. I end an a caveat. There is a tendency in some quarters to appropriation, to make Abrahams the particularistic spokesman of a specific group, and to insist that his message should be understood only through a sort of authorised (not by Abrahams himself, of course!) refraction through sectional-ideological lenses. Abrahams belongs to everyone. His personal history, his work and his message ensure this. Any attempt to claim him in the name of ideological or sectional interests merely constitutes an injustice to his achievement |