Thirteen Cents. K. Sello Duiker
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K. SELLO DUIKER
Thirteen Cents
Introduction by Shaun Viljoen
Ohio University Press
Athens
K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents: An Introduction
Shaun Viljoen
One Breezy Night Late in November
One breezy night late in November
and after the April elections
Two friends stood outside
admiring the moon
‘charming sky,’ said the one
to the other
‘What’s even more charming is that
whitey has finally allowed himself
to be surrounded by darkey and they
seem to be getting on,’ remarked
the other, staring into the night
At that moment a shooting star
blurred across the sky and both friends
saw it.
Wistful silence fell between them
the one not sure whether the other
had seen the meteorite. Then the
other opened: ‘Perhaps it’s not
about whitey and darkey anymore.’
The other assented.1
K. Sello Duiker’s poem “One Breezy Night Late in November” imagines what the April 1994 democratic elections, the first in South Africa’s history, meant for social relations that had been racialized since the landing of Dutch settlers in 1652 and hyperracialized since Afrikaner white minority rule took hold in 1948. In a reflective exchange between two friends in the poem, the initial thought of one about the historic turning point six months earlier asserts that the country will see racial reconciliation; the other responds unsurely, saying, “Perhaps it’s not / about whitey and darkey anymore.” In this tentative claim Duiker raises precisely what his astounding contribution to postapartheid literature has been—a provocative unsettling of the black and white, the categorical terms of engagement that marked human relations and writing under apartheid. Instead, as Meg Samuelson says of Duiker’s first two novels, his work “interrogate[s] borders—whether social, national or ontological.”2
The epiphanic moment in the poem occurs after “a shooting star / blurred across the sky” and a strange silence falls between the friends. As in the poem, all three of Duiker’s novels—Thirteen Cents3 (2000), The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), and The Hidden Star (published posthumously in 2006)—are marked by the presence of the supernatural, the surreal, the mythical, which layer and disrupt the real and comment on it. Narrative modes in the novels shift continuously between realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist, shunting the protagonist and the reader between different realms of consciousness and perception.
As in the poem, protagonists in the novels exist primarily as exceptional individuals, as an “I” rather than, as was the case with much (black) writing under apartheid in which the individual was metonymic of the greater (racial) community, as an “I” who is at the same time the “we.” If anything, the voices in the poem represent themselves and are at a distance from both “whitey” and “darkey,” identifying overtly with neither. There is an intimacy between the two friends, yet at the same time we feel a distance between the two, “the one not sure whether the other / had seen.” All three novels present us with protagonists who are extraordinary individuals, with Azure in Thirteen Cents being the most clearly solitary and relentlessly individual character, who does not belong to any one place or to any social group, and who defies attempts to categorize him.
Thirteen Cents is a searing, disturbing coming-of-age account of Azure, a twelve-year-old orphan who has traveled from his home near Johannesburg to eke out an existence on the streets of post-1994 Cape Town. Azure lives in an underworld of shack dwellers, drug dealers, and gangsters and is exploited, often in most violent and demeaning ways, by all kinds of adults for their own ends. He survives through prostitution, selling sex to older men. In The Quiet Violence of Dreams Tshepo is a university student who at the start of the novel has been institutionalized for cannabis-induced psychosis and who, like the younger Azure, is an orphan and tries to find a sense of belonging in a hostile, dystopic postapartheid Cape Town. However, violence, exploitation, and bigoted attitudes that prevailed under apartheid continue to resurface in his quest to find a way of being in the world. Tshepo joins a brothel for male-to-male sex to earn money but also to explore his own homosexual impulses and need to create a fraternity or family. In the end, Tshepo leaves Cape Town for Johannesburg to try to find a better life. The Hidden Star, written for younger readers, is set in a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg and employs a child protagonist: the young girl Nolitye, who is invested with special powers by a magical stone, embarks on a quest to battle forces of greed and evil and restore her true family, displaced by these evil impostors. In the final novel the narrative shifts between the modes of African folktale and gritty realism, linking assertions of the ancestral to a strong sense of injustice in the contemporary social order. Duiker reiterates this link when he writes about the meaning of his own name. He dropped his first name, Kabelo, and adopted his second name, Sello, as the first name by which he wished to be known. Sello, his grandfather’s name, is, he says, “a poetic name and it means lament! Someone who always cries out about things he sees—like injustice. It is a name that is very tied to ancestral voices.”4
Thirteen Cents was published a mere six years after the first democratic elections, when Duiker was twenty-six years old, to critical acclaim and wide readership inside South Africa and abroad.5 Of all the South African novels I have taught at undergraduate level, Thirteen Cents has proved to be the one that engages large numbers of young students. Is this because the novel speaks in such direct, frank, and contemporary terms about sex, sexuality, and addiction? Is it because of the manner in which we as readers are compelled to see the world from the point of view of the marginalized, abused, and exploited street boy narrator Azure, who represents what we see but dismiss every day of our waking life—those who are down and out and living on the far edges of monied, motorized, propertied society? Is it because, despite the horror and seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against him, Azure does not succumb to any of the dehumanizing forces that grind him down and the novel ends on a muted note of hope and the possibility of an alternative way of being in this world? This ability to engage a younger generation of readers seems to hold for places outside South Africa as well. According to Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis, who toured Indonesia in 2003 with Duiker as part of the Winternachten literary festival based in The Hague, Duiker’s “frank and sincere stories about sex and the dark side of city life strongly spoke to the young Indonesians.”6
Azure’s position as a twelve-year-old who turns thirteen in the novel situates him on the threshold of the world of adults and subjects him to the rites of passage that induct him into particular forms of adulthood—in this case a particularly exploitative, destructive social order. He is a critical outsider to this world and continually resists incorporation—“Grown-ups are fucked up,” he asserts (42). It is this significant turning from boyhood to manhood, this becoming thirteen to which the title alludes, that positions him as a critical commentator moving into and out of the dominant matrix of hierarchies and power. He is often drawn into and subject to this adult world and its values—“Men don’t cry,” he claims, “[a]nd since I’m nearly thirteen I mustn’t cry. I must be strong. I must be a man” (26). This slippage into and out of the dominant social order across its ontological and spacial borderlines subjects the reader, as it does Azure, to experiences and perceptions of this order from both the intimacy of the inside and the estrangement of the outside. This contradictory fluidity is intensified by the first-person narrative Duiker deploys. Azure not only narrates his story himself but often does so in childlike egocentric vocabulary and syntax: the frequency of the narrating pronoun “I,”