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LEWIS NKOSI

901tiling hirds

KWELA BOOKS

Preface 9ft the birth of every novd is an enigma. Reviewers, some very in-

Kwela Books 40 Heerengracht, Cape Town 8001; P.O. Box 6525, Roggebaai 8012 [email protected] htt;p:llwww.kwela.com First published by St Martin's Press 1982 Copyright © 2004 Lewis Nkosi All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or . by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher Cover design by Alexander Kononov Text design and typography by NazliJacobs Set in Janson Printed and bound by Paarl Print Oosterland Street, Paarl, South Africa First Kwela edition, first printing 2004 ISBN 0-7957-0171-3

telligent, some not so inteHigent but merely stupidly clever or cleverly stupid, even those readers and reviewers who whole-heartedly embrace the work, often have no idea of the complex anatomy of what they are holding in their hands; they can never fully comprehend the mood, place, circumstance :md psychological motive which combined to create the enigma. If it i~: any consolation to the reader/reviewer, I can only say that neither does the author fully understand what magic transformed the disparate elements into the final work that moves readers to give applause, dlsplay grief or rage. As soon as the writer thinks he or she has been able to trace the strands of motive and influence to their source, another possible source presents itself. And then another. And yet another. So it was with Mating Birds. I was doing research intcl the fiction ofJoseph Conrad at the University of Sussex when in order to relieve the occasional boredom, I began toying with the idea of a story approximating what finally became the plot of Mating Birds. I wanted to write the story of an obsession in which the sea, the sun and bodies on the beach combine to form an image. Ever since reading Albert Camus' The Outsider, then Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, I had become obsessed with the idea of a fateful obsession in which even the weather plays its part; how for example a ray of sunlight striking the eye's retina can produce unforeseen resuIts: provoke a murder, cause a suicide, set loose unbounded passions. At Harvard I had taken a course on the short novel with Professor Rosenberg and was forever haunted by the image of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, smouldering in the relentless summer heat of Rhode Island, and Henry .James's Daisy Miller running berserk in Rome; Conrad's Heart ofDtwkness suggested a method. Compression. So: sea, passion - and compassion! Memories of Durban and the Indian Ocean. Veronica Slater and Ndi Sibiya on their knees in a beach5

fr~nt t-oba-cco shOp, in ddfia~ce of apartheid scrambling to gather up the scattered contents of her handbag, and suddenly, as at the beginning of the novel, the eye of one fixed on the Other's in an accumulated desire sickened by interdiction. Now I see of course that Mating Birds is also the story of a reading. As Martin Kreiswirth puts it, writing of WIlliam Faulkner: "Every serious writer comes to literature from literature and is therefore caught, as soon as he picks up his pen, in what has been aptly called the 'originality paradox'." More precisely, I had been reading Hegel's "master and slave" discourse and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. I wanted to write about the gaze, about the ple~~.~L!Ee risks of l~ng and belllg looked at and the complicity between the s~l~-;t -~d--~bTect--oftfiat gaze. whatIdid~t~ant to -;;rit~-;-;;J~t another township or protest novel shrilly pronouncing the execrations of apartheid. I wanted the critique of the accursed doctrine to emerge automatically out of the objective social relations between two individuals. To say that to the very end ~re are no social relations to speak of between Ndi Sibiya and Veronica Slater is precisely to con,~ firm what the novel set out to show: that apartheid was an unnatural ~Y;e~, dillbolicallycrue-hmtlinhuman, t:nataSsoclaI belllgs we make love in,-ancfby·using language and the abrogation of speech results in a- dlsto'rtion"olilieserelationsfups. For lllstance, the reason we can n~~~~-kii-m;-;rhetlier the coupIlllg "between N di and Veronica was rape or the consummation of mutual desire is precisely because Ndi could never openly ask Veronica, in which case she could have erther .given her assent or speak her refusal in the normal way these things are done in a normal community. ~ r As I said, I didn't want to write another "township novel". In fact, I have an aversion to township novels and their predictable plots. I know of no township novel which is able to reflect on its own method, on what it is doing while telling its story. That is why Njabulo Ndebele's parables about township lives were so refreshing, and that is why Zakes Mda's Heart seems so full of healthy Redness and Zoe WIcomb's David's Story so stunningly "post-, post-" in its inquiry into the project

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of nationalism and nation-building. In the end it was not of course that the township was not capable of supporting the growth of a rich literature; on the contrary, it was the neglect of this honeycomb dripping with stories in pursuit of the arid agenda of "protest literatu~e" which ~elkcted..ouLwl:it~J~~_,frgE?:_~~!.~i_~$_~~~_~~~~,!'?!~.~~~je~fore falling down as a rainstorm. Alwaystoo-sudaen~t1ie-ralnstorms catch everyone unawares. In the mor~ing an_____ angry sun may be blazing , __ ··• __ . ____ .M. ___ _ _ _ _.. _ . _ _ _ ~_,

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from a sky quite cloudless and e~mpo/ ()f rain, a sky held in torment like a clay pot above a scorching fire; in the afte:rnQ2!l, smelling damp from the ocean, the intsingizi will sob its mystery. Thedark~~lJds w2!!.J~ile Up_~!~0~ top of ~;¥zimba mountain~Ha~d E~~~dr~~s larg~as theJll~~~s~ of a young-Zuru-Virg1ii)vill,ro~L~2~fl~om !lIe ~. A man might have crossed the Tugela in the morning; in the evening he is unable to return home, for the river is swollen and turbulent, carrying before it uprooted trees, drowned animals and, occJ!.siQl1l!lly~en the dead body of some unlucky individual. (These are~y_!!:~~~0?fM~i,QL?:ulula~d) ,When I was growing up, life at Mzimba was slow and easy-going. As children, we were prot;;tecl from: the-·kD.~;;f;Jg;;··;;f-thelarger cruelties !hat were visited up~n black:peopie-Yn the rest of the counland was fer~le, we-hadc~tt1e~wegiew'~i;ough .to eat and to . spare. As for our white rulers, I dId not see my first whIte ma.n - or, shallI say, my first white woman - until f~ourteen years old, a boy looking much older than his age but as yet to undergo the thomba initiation ceremony. The European settlement at Mzimba was about forty miles away, and white people rarely came to our part of the world unless obliged to do so by the nature of their special duties and responsibilities. Very often I am asked - and who asks this question oftener than my friend, the great Doctor Dufre how my parents got along together. My answer is simple enough. They got on well. They got on fine. Indeed, if I can venture to put a name to so obscure an emotion as that w,lIleh binds a woman to a man, I would say my father and my ~e(l~~ach other, though as a g:;;d !!!an and a gQ-Q~.tt~~~ my j;ther~~~Jl~eJ;l ~,!Ilba,gassed by a