Thirteen Cents. K. Sello Duiker
forces that engulf and consume him on the streets. Not only does his quest for a life of belonging beyond these destructive forces allow him to literally rise above them, but it also helps him imagine, through intensely sensory, hyperrealist11 dream sequences, a different genealogy and a new city as the old is being destroyed before his very eyes.
On the mountain he experiences intense sensations and fantastical images, and his graphic and primordial dreams are shot through with elements of his real life. In an extended dream (the whole of chapter 17) he finds Saartjie, “a woman who looks like she lived a very long time ago” (139), whose name and figure invoke the ancestral Southern African Khoisan woman Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman.12 She is at times maternal and protective of him, defending him against the omnipotent and diabolical T-rex, whom she claims is his father and her husband. She in turn is daughter to the terrifying Mantis who eats the sun, and she also claims Azure is the son of the sun. This private mythology and chain of being the boy dreams up is intermingled with his real past—T-rex is a figure from popular film culture and also a transmogrification of Gerald. In his vision Azure creates a new genealogy for himself to restore his dead mother and father. The imagined alternative is one deeply entangled with real history and African folklore, but also marked by contradiction, terror, and destruction, as is his real life. The destruction of the evil Gerald in the dream is paralleled by the destruction of the real Gerald when Azure descends the mountain. The novel ends on an apocalyptic note; Azure, once again on top of the mountain, either imagines he sees or actually sees a giant explosion in the sky and fire falling to earth, and a tsunami sweeping away the city below. The ending, on the surface, is one of destruction and negation. But the mayhem also holds a moment of reassurance for both Azure and the reader: “I know what fear is . . . I have seen the centre of darkness . . . I know his secrets” (my emphases). The young boy has come through the apocalypse, and has attained greater self-knowledge and knowledge about his world. Azure’s final assertion, “My mother is dead. My father is dead,” is no longer merely an ever-present refrain; it is now also an acknowledged fact that the boy begins to grasp. Still completely alone, but with clarity of mind, he can, the ending suggests, begin again on the clean slate emerging beneath his feet.
* * *
Sello Duiker’s life (1974–2005) straddled the dying days of apartheid and the post-1994 period. He was born in the iconic Johannesburg black township of Soweto, the place synonymous with the student revolts of 1976 that helped break apartheid’s stranglehold on the country. His father and mother were part of the growing black middle class and both had degrees. His father’s job with an international company relocated the family to England for a while.13 Duiker credits his mother, an avid reader, with sparking his interest in books.14 His parents of course wanted their firstborn to be well educated, sending him to a reputable Roman Catholic school in a neighboring “coloured” area. “It was at [this] time,” he says, “[that] I was becoming aware of my race. I discovered that in the coloured community there was a lot of politics around hair, the smoothness and the colour.”15 As a schoolboy in his teens in the equally turbulent 1980s in Soweto he says he was “witnessing necklacing [and] kangaroo courts.”16 Duiker, like all South Africans, lived with the legacy of violence resulting from more than three and a half centuries of colonial and apartheid domination and divide-and-rule.
After school Duiker traveled for two years, first to the United States and then to Europe, working for a while as a dishwasher in Paris and also on a farm in France, and it was during this time that he started writing longer pieces of prose.17 In Paris he visited many art exhibitions and, he says, was struck by the Made in Heaven exhibition of American artist Jeff Koons, in which explicit and graphic images blurred the borders between art and pornography.18 When he returned home in 1995 he started a degree in journalism at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, which he felt would enable him to explore his desire to write. It was during his years as a student at Rhodes that he became interested in the lives of children living on the streets and started writing full-length fiction seriously. He tried but was unsuccessful at getting a manuscript published.19
He then moved to Cape Town in 1998, where he studied copywriting. During his two-year stay in the city he continued to explore his curiosity about street children, living, by chance Duiker says, with them for three and a half weeks when he was asked to help find a boy who went missing.20 As a result of this long absence from his studies he was expelled from his college and in fact institutionalized in a psychiatric institution for two months. On his release he wrote the first draft of Thirteen Cents in less than two months.21 The experience of living on the streets undoubtedly helped him capture street life in Cape Town with impressive verisimilitude—a hallmark of the novel which, like the work of Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marachera, shocks and provokes. At the same time he was working on the manuscript of The Quiet Violence of Dreams, which had already been accepted by Kwela Books but which his editor there, Annari van der Merwe, insisted he revise.22 He returned to Johannesburg, where he completed Thirteen Cents and took up work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter, and also as a scriptwriter for the popular television soap operas Backstage and Isidingo.
While his life straddles the apartheid and postapartheid eras, Duiker’s work has been firmly located by literary scholars as part of the postapartheid period,23 dated often as starting in 1994 or even a bit earlier, in 1990, with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Much recent scholarship about South African letters has focused on attempts to characterize postapartheid society, literature, and culture and question what is distinctive in comparison to life, literature, and culture under apartheid. For Michael Chapman, this period of transition is marked by “anxieties and confusions about matters of identity in relation to massive socio-political change.”24 Seminal to the literary debate have been the claims by writer and critic Njabulo S. Ndebele, whose essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” first published in 1986, led the charge against black protest writing under apartheid, which he labeled “spectacular,” with writers taking their cue from the “visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive South African formation.”25 He characterized fiction by black South African writers as follows:
The spectacular documents; it indicts implicitly; it is demonstrative, preferring exteriority to interiority; it keeps the larger issues of society in our minds, obliterating the details; it provokes identification through recognition and feeling rather than through observation and analytical thought; it calls for emotion rather than conviction; it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge.26
Postapartheid literature moves away from the exterior binaries and the protesting voice to a preoccupation with the inner, the intimate, the individual, and the intermingled ordinary. It is, Andries Oliphant argues, a move away from “instrumentality” to “explore the new freedoms promised by the transition.”27 A new generation of novelists like Phaswane Mpe and Sello Duiker took up this newfound freedom and were seen as creative pioneers at the beginning of the new century, not only because of the focus of their fiction on contradictory entanglement of new and old, but also because they were seen to be “more formally innovative.”28
In an attempt to characterize South African writing, both pre- and post-1994, David Attwell discusses the uneasy yet pervasive distinction often made between white writing and black writing, particularly under apartheid, and concludes that “tension, instability, and negotiation across a historical and cross-cultural divide permeate South African writing.”29 Duiker, speaking in interviews about his literary influences, points to a range of Southern African and international writers across lines of color and gives reasons for these identifications that have more often than not to do with questions of tension and instability. Bessie Head looms large in this regard, and Duiker says of her: “Bessie Head . . . [is] a ‘coloured’ South African writer. She was born from a white woman and rejected by her . . . by her own mother. Her strong identity as a ‘coloured’ woman is reflected in her writing.”30 He states that Head’s novel A Question of Power inspired him to become a writer because “[h]ere is this person who was rejected by her community and took refuge wherever she could. I related to that, to her trying to find her feet.”31 Other literary works Duiker claims were important in shaping him as a youngster were Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the iconoclastic work of Dambudzo Marechera.32 Duiker’s Azure is remarkably similar to Okri’s