Thirteen Cents. K. Sello Duiker
innocent. The code-switching between languages and between colloquial and taboo registers attests to the child’s harsh and very adult circumstances. The horrific verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse he is subject to stem from a world where self-interest, greed, addiction, and prejudice are rampant. Adults and their values have become the new oppressor, replacing the “whitey” who played that role in protest literature by black writers under apartheid. “[M]oney is everything” (18), Azure tells himself after he has been robbed of forty rands by the gangster pimp Allen, insightfully identifying the commodification and commercialization of social relations that rapidly overlaid race as the dominant line of fracture in postapartheid South Africa. As the title of the novel suggests, the destructive forces in Azure’s worlds continually work to reduce him to near nothing, to a meager thirteen cents, to an object whose value is merely monetary.
Azure’s physical appearance is as unsettling as is his narrative positioning. His blue eyes, to characters like the gang leader Gerald, are anomalous, given his dark skin, and provoke and interrogate stereotypical ideas of race, identity, and social hierarchy. Azure troubles the main racial categories of apartheid identity, “white,” “coloured,” and “black”—he is none of them and at the same time all of them.7 Not only do his looks defy inherited racial classification, but his dress sense has no regard for conventions that are racially associated. Azure’s childhood friend from Johannesburg and one of his few protectors, Vincent, warns him that Gerald is out to get him: “He thinks he’s white because he’s got straight hair and a light skin. If you show up with those shoes and your blue eyes, he’ll kill you. He’ll say, Who the fuck do you think you are? Trying to be white?” (39–40).
Gerald heads a hierarchy of destruction and evil equivalent to the evil witches MaMtonga and Ncitjana in The Hidden Star. His power resides in his control over others through relentless thuggery and brutality combined with his creation of financial, territorial, and emotional dependency that mimics supportive familial relations. After days of protracted physical torture and sexual violence inflicted on Azure by Gerald’s minions like Sealy and Richard, Azure is expected to pay allegiance to Gerald, who takes on the role of father figure and protector, claiming in fact to have killed Azure’s parents himself. The extraordinary power of the gangster is manifest in the manner in which he is able, in the mind of Azure and others, to transmute into the all-powerful dinosaur T-rex on the one hand, and into the form of ubiquitous pigeons on the other. To secure Azure as his own creation, Gerald insists he change his name to “Blue.” But Gerald and his world cannot finally make Azure belong. Gerald’s ignorance of the fact that “Blue” and “Azure” are essentially synonymous signifies his failure to rename the boy, and Gerald’s final destruction marks Azure’s triumph at resisting incorporation into Gerald’s world and its debased values. In this regard, the final assertion of the novel, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” a disturbing refrain throughout the work that emphasizes Azure’s orphaned and dislocated state, becomes a positive and hopeful statement against false belonging and inauthentic values that the impostor father represented. The unambiguously happy ending of The Hidden Star tells of Nolitye’s final victory in casting off her false mother and being reunited with her real mother, whom she has rescued from the evil underworld: “‘At last we’re going home,’ Nolitye says gratefully. ‘Together’” (233).
Alongside the violence the young Azure experiences at the hands of adults, it is the sexualized nature of his existence on the streets that shocks and unsettles. Many readings of Thirteen Cents emphasize the fact that Azure engages in homosexual encounters with older men in order to earn money and survive on the streets. Azure confirms this reading when on numerous occasions he describes the encounters in graphic detail, but qualifies what is happening by stressing that he does what he does for the money, as a “trick.” However, it is possible to nuance this reading with one that also sees the novel as a bildungsroman of the boy’s sexuality in formation, with the exploration of inchoate sexuality, perhaps even homosexuality, as a subtext. The most protracted description of sex with a man is the one with the rich banker Mr Lebowitz. During this encounter, Azure distances himself and stresses that this is just another of many similar “tricks” he performs: “I know these bastards. I’ve done this a thousand times” (98). As he does on a number of occasions, he asserts a hetero-normativity when he says he gets it up by thinking of Toni Braxton. Yet, on a number of occasions during this encounter, there are, despite the ominous suggestion of being filmed and watched, hints at pleasure-taking, both in the comfort and warmth of domestic space and even sexually. Azure’s descriptions of moments of the encounter can be read as ambiguous and possibly, even subconsciously, taking pleasure. At one point also he feels a sense of pleasure during the encounter, but this is fleeting: “After a while the pleasure turns into sadness” (100). At another point, when they have a second go at it to the accompaniment of the “Winter” movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mr Lebowitz talks of trees without leaves, which takes Azure into a reverie of his own: “Trees, I know trees. I listen to the music. It is too much. . . . This guy is trying to open me up” (107). Azure here briefly reveals that there is something hidden within him that he is reluctant or unable to face but quickly reverts to a defense of this response as his way of protecting himself from exploitative adults like Mr Lebowitz and Joyce.
The closest we come to the young teenager reflecting more objectively on his sexuality and a possible alternative sexuality is when, toward the end of the novel, before his final ascent up the mountain, he interrogates his contradictory sexual impulses:
I never dream of doing it with a woman. I’m not a moffie. One of the bastards once asked me if I was a moffie. And I told him that I’m not a moffie. But it’s strange that I never dream of doing it with a woman, not even beautiful Toni Braxton. And the other guys are always saying that it happens to them. I just lie about it and say that it happens to me too even though it never has. (171–72)
The reiterated denials, “I’m not a moffie,” suggest the young boy’s repression of the disturbing possibility of its opposite—too traumatic a thought for someone his age and in his context to admit. By reading against the grain of the narrator’s own claims, or finding contradictory moments on its surface, this bildungsroman then is as much about survival and a sense of self on the urban edges as it is about marginalized sexuality in formation (rather than an assertion of a particular set sexual identity). Like Azure, Duiker himself discourages reading the novel as being about “gay identity” when, in response to a question with regard to his own sexuality, he responded: “I’m a writer and interested in every aspect of human relations and identity. The whole thing is not an issue for me. My first novel, Thirteen Cents, did not have a gay character and neither will the third. I really don’t want to be pigeon-holed.”8
The explorations of homosexuality in Duiker’s second novel, inflected with an array of other issues about young urban identity and belonging, makes such a subtextual reading of Thirteen Cents more plausible. He was in fact composing the two novels at the same time. Duiker’s own interrogation in his fiction and poetry of the inherited boundaries of conventional identities and of limiting, categorical thinking, as well as his crisscrossing of languages and narrative modes in his work, would further corroborate such an interpretation. In addition, such a reading queers the dominant interpretation which insists that the homosexual encounters are, on Azure’s side, simply to survive. It also challenges homophobic and moralistic readings of the novel, like that of Osita Ezeliora, whose emphasis on “survivalism” precludes any such exploration of sexuality in Thirteen Cents and condemns its exploration in the subsequent novel: “Duiker’s transition from survivalism as the ideological propellant of homosexuality in Thirteen Cents to its glamorisation in The Quiet Violence of Dreams incites a perception of his narratives as literary sabotage of Africa’s moral sanity, historical memory and cultural development.”9 The notion of homosexuality as “un-African” implicit in Ezeliora’s view continues to undergird often violent repression of any sexual practice perceived as nonheteronormative in South Africa and on the African continent.10
Thirteen Cents is as much about Azure’s interrogation and exploration of the temporal and spacial dimensions of his urban world as it is about the social and sexual dimensions. In the final third of the novel Azure makes two ascents up Table Mountain, which rises out of the heart of Cape Town and towers above it. These episodes are marked by insistent movement