Cokcraco. Paul Williams
all over the bookcase. He now loved cockroaches—their form, their slender shape, their nestling together. A dozen new projects spun from his mind onto paper in the middle of the night—a cockroach-paste sculpture, a cockroach doorway, a cockroach carpet, a cockroach Azanian flag.
Ironically, as the months passed, he ran out of cockroaches. Either there were no more in the dark spaces behind the walls of his flat, or they had got wind of his intentions, and had migrated to better homelands, where there was more to eat, and where macabre, varnished corpses of their brothers and sisters did not stare at them from walls and bookshelves and headboards.
But the Modern Afrikanist was still bubbling with inspiration; and so he went out in search of raw material. He scoured the rubbish containers at the end of the street and collected roaches in plastic bags lined with white powder. He frequented the back end of The Star of India restaurant, the stench of a make-shift toilet behind the shish-kebab stall on the corner, and the stair wells of his apartment building. He arrived home every evening with his bag full, sorted them out by shape and breed (Asian, Smoky-Brown, Parktown-Prawn black), glued broken feelers on the big ones, repaired broken wings, legs, and carapaces, then set to work.
The paintings were beautiful: here is one of the Indian Ocean he couldn’t quite see from the kitchen window, clear skies, zero humidity, the brown smog that skulked over Durban vanquished; here’s another of the street below, devoid of prostitutes and taxis and street gangs, replaced by a post-Apartheid rainbow community of people; and here is a self-portrait of a clear-faced, hopeful Modern Afrikanist, looking out onto the horizon of the Afrikan Renaissance. Each painting breathed hope into the world.
The heat is hellish.
The car is protesting as you drive onto campus. Its needle strains way into the red, its fan whines, its engine stutters.
And you’re late.
You follow Alice-in-Wonderland signs that coax you around roundabouts to Building D: HUMANITIES. The English Department is on the second floor.
You park in an empty lot, adjust your tie, gather your belongings and walk smartly towards Building D. You hunt first for a toilet. You need to rearrange yourself, compose yourself, straighten the crumpled suit, splash the fear off your face.
Here’s one on the first floor. GENTLEMEN: STAFF ONLY. But the sign has been mutilated with a knife, and a palimpsest has been scrawled over it in black pen: THE DOORS OF ABLUTION BLOCKS SHALL BE OPEN TO ALL.
You hunt in vain for a mirror but find instead four screw holes on the wall and a dark patch where a mirror has been removed. The water from the cold tap comes out scalding hot, and the hot water tap produces cold water.
The sweat has dried on you to a lacquer finish, a thin varnish of fear glazed onto your soul.
Your body always betrays you. Every time. But stick it in a suit and tie, itchy grey socks and black leather shoes, crisp shirt and collar, and you can disguise its animal nature well enough.
The long English Department corridor smells of smoke and burnt rubber. Half way down the passage, you pass a gutted office—and stop to peer in through a dark black hole where the door has been beaten in with an axe. The gold plaque on the door, blackened but still legible, reads DR THAMI MPOFU, ENGLISH.
You take out the printed copy of the email you have folded tightly in your pocket and squint at it in the bad light.
Hi Timothy
Shall we say, ten am on the 15th? Let’s meet in my office.
Building D, second floor, left along D corridor.
You can’t miss it.
Thami Mpofu.
Yellow tape criss-crosses the yawning cavity, and inside, the entire office is burnt out. What were once plastic blinds on the windows are now curled molten blobs of black dripping down the wall onto what was once a desk. Empty bookshelves stand charred against the wall. Just your luck. Come all this way and the guy’s been burnt to death in his own office. You walk past many shut doors, heavy oak stout doors with sombre signs labelling them as Professor, Doctor, Lecturer, Adjunct Temporary Tutor and so on. At the far end of the corridor, you spot the door you have been looking for: Professor J. Zimmerlie, Acting Chair.
In any other universe, you would wonder what the hell an ‘Acting Chair’ is.
You get the impression that they are watching you on CCTV, though you have seen no cameras, for even before you knock, the door opens.
‘Professor Zimmerlie. Dr Turner is it? Glad you made it.’ The man offers a limp yellow hand for you to shake.
The umlungu is dressed in a tight dark suit, white shirt, tie, cufflinks, shiny leather shoes. He is the whitest man you have ever seen. And you mean that literally. He is so white, he looks geckoish. And good god, you stare—try not to stare—at the stitches on his head, scars now, faded pink Frankenstein stitches about two centimetres long, neatly caterpillared across his left temple.
Behind him, another man thrusts out his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Mpofu. Thami Mpofu.’
He is the opposite of Zimmerlie, if people can be opposites. He exudes a healthy dark glow, and grins with a self-confidence that you see can never be shaken.
‘Ah, Professor Mpofu. I … your … office … ?’
‘My office is temporarily indisposed,’ says Mpofu.
‘There was an accident,’ says Zimmerlie. ‘A fire.’
You detect a flicker of embarrassment between them. No, more than embarrassment: a lie.
‘We Zulus have a saying,’ says Mpofu. ‘Khotha eyikhothayo … The cow licks the one that licks her. John has kindly let me use his office and facilities.’
Zimmerlie presses his fingers together. ‘Thami has an apropos proverb for every calamity.’
They speak like one creature, a two-headed monster. Opposites, but twinned, symbiotic opposites.
‘Come in, come in.’
The walls of the office ceiling are plumped with books, framed certificates, photos. The Journal of Southern African Literature. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, Harold Bloom, Kristeva, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Saussure, Structuralist Poetics. The books speak for themselves. You are now entering the world of Literary Criticism, another world, another language. And there are shelves of literature, too, with a capital L: The Collected Works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Donne, The Romantic Poets, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence. Be warned: this is the world of Literary Criticism, and these are Literary Critics.
A LITERARY KRITIK
KritiK: a person who rubs his or her legs together to make a noise. Not to be confused with a KriKit, the singular of the game played with a bat and a ball by humans dressed in white. Not to be confused with a KoKroach, another hardy insect that has outlived the dinosaur, and doesn’t Kriticise anybody.
KritiK: Arch enemy of writer.
A strange thing, a literary KritiK. Always seKondary. Though KritiX themselves do not think like this. KritiX always trail behind writers, mopping their words, examining their faeces for meaning, signifiKance, signifers and signifiers. Would it not be better to be the writer yourself? Maybe that’s what KritiX are, failed writers, wanna-be writers, and this whole industry of literary aKademia is a green pool of envy and failure. The right brain telling the wrong brain what to do.
But we shouldn’t disparage them: they’re a dying race, and no longer have anything to feed off. XtinKt. Once they bred in the sewers of universities all over the world, and now all we have are their empty KarKasses. No one reads anymore.
— Sizwe Bantu, Seven Invisible Selves,