Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  Up to that point I had written all my papers and plays in longhand, and then typed them later or gave them to someone else to type for me. I could never compose on the typewriter. It was necessary to draft something first and then type it. I had never used a computer either, although it was 1992 and the whole world was already computer literate. I decided that it was high time I got into the technological age. Actually, this decision was brought about by the fact that I saw in a student newspaper an advertisement for a used computer that a student was selling. I immediately phoned and asked her to deliver it to my apartment.

  It was an old IBM computer that took up all the space on my desk. But it still had its manual which would be helpful in my learning how to use that monster of a machine.

  On Christmas Day that year my wife went to church about two streets from our apartment. I was home with four-month-old Zukile. Dini was visiting friends. Since the baby was not giving me any problems, I thought perhaps I could fiddle about with my computer and learn how it worked. With the baby on my lap, I read the manual for a program called WordPerfect and then pecked at the keys with my two middle fingers. It was easy enough. The first sentence I wrote was: There are many ways of dying. I didn’t know where it came from but I liked it. Since it was about death it brought to my mind the character I had created when I was a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral in Durham – Toloki, the Professional Mourner. I had initially planned to use him in a future play, but what the heck, whatever it was that I was writing demanded his presence. But whose death would he be mourning? Duh! The deaths that were prevalent at that time in South Africa.

  It was during the period of transition and we read in the papers of senseless killings that were happening all over the country: gunmen would walk on to trains and mow down everyone with AK47s; in the townships hostel dwellers supporting the predominantly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party marched down the streets beating up people and killing those suspected of being Xhosas, and by implication ANC supporters; and many other incidents of what was termed black-on-black violence. Later, it was discovered that most of the violence was instigated and supported by the apartheid state to derail the changes that were sweeping the country. Those were deaths that were ready-made for Toloki the Professional Mourner.

  By the time Adele came back from church I had the first two pages of what became my first novel, Ways of Dying. I was amazed at myself because I never thought I could write sustained prose and be descriptive. As a playwright I was a dialogue person. I had written a PhD thesis (that’s what it’s called at South African universities, not a dissertation) that was mostly descriptive, but it had not been easy going. Actually, it had been agony writing that thesis in hotel rooms in Cape Town. I never thought I would want to write anything akin to prose ever again. But there they were: my first two pages of creative prose! And all those sentences had come in such a playful manner, with Zukile in his baby talk taking part in the conversation I was having with the IBM monster, and with the words as they flowed so easily. Even the bells that were ringing, presumably at Adele’s church, found their way into those first two pages. The events of the fiction were happening on Christmas Day because I was writing them on Christmas Day. And, wonder of wonders, for the first time in my life I had composed something directly on a keyboard without drafting it first!

  As I continued writing what I had then decided was going to be a novel, I was surprised by the fact that I enjoyed the actual process of writing prose. I looked forward to waking up in the morning and sitting at the computer interacting with my characters. When I was writing plays I never enjoyed the writing process. It used to be agony, and then there would be relief and fulfilment when I got to the final period. But in that basement apartment writing Ways of Dying was sheer ecstasy.

  I went to the library at the university to peruse South African newspapers – the City Press and the Sunday Times. I read about the horrendous deaths that were happening in my country. It seemed South Africa was slowly killing itself. Then I went back to my basement apartment and recreated those deaths. Every death Toloki mourns in my novel was a real death that I read about or I knew about personally because it affected family or friends. The very first death in the novel was based on an incident when my Cousin Nobantu, Uncle Owen’s daughter, went in search of the corpse of her brother who had met a violent death, and she finally found him being buried by another family elsewhere.

  After I had written the first chapter I mailed it to my mother in Lesotho and gave another copy to Adele. I watched her read it expressionlessly and I waited anxiously for her feedback. She shook her head as she gave me back the copy.

  ‘This is useless,’ she said.

  ‘What exactly is useless?’ I asked.

  ‘This whole chapter.’

  ‘Everything about it?’

  ‘It has too many characters. No one will want to read this stuff. If only you wrote like Mbulelo Mzamane.’

  Mbulelo Mzamane was her favourite writer. She had read his short story collections, Mzala and My Cousin Comes to Jo’burg, over and over again.

  I continued to write, but I did not try to write like Mbulelo Mzamane. I could only be myself. And I didn’t give my chapters to Adele again. A few weeks later I got a response from my mother. She enjoyed the chapter. She particularly loved the character I had invented, Toloki the Professional Mourner. She also felt affection for Noria and hoped that I would foreground her more. I sent her every chapter I wrote and she sent me her feedback. I felt as if I was writing this novel for her. When I created an event or a character I caught myself saying: I think my mother will like this, or Let me use this or that expression because it will make my mother laugh.

  I had never written a novel before, so feedback was crucial. Perhaps that is why workshops serve such an important function. I had no workshop to resort to. In fact I had never been to a single workshop all my life – except the one I have told you about that was conducted by Rutgers Professor Marc Crawford in Lesotho. That was why I took the first three chapters with me when I went to France to speak and read at the Grand Amphitheatre at the Sorbonne University with a number of South African writers such as Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Zoë Wicomb, Wally Serote, Peter Horn and Malcolm Purkey. Afterwards, Mike Nicol and I went on a train journey to Grenoble where Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre had invited us to attend some events.

  In the train I gave the manuscript to Mike Nicol who showed so much enthusiasm for it that he asked if he could publish the first chapter in a journal called New Contrast which he was editing. He also advised me to go easy on the adjectives and rather use adverbs if I needed modifiers at all. That was my first lesson in creative writing.

  In Grenoble, Jacques read the manuscript and dismissed it outright, saying, ‘It’s a pity because you are such a wonderful playwright.’

  My first attempt at novel-writing was getting mixed reviews. But I had faith in what I was doing. I was going to go with my mother and with Mike Nicol.

  I completed the novel on April 1, 1993. All Fools Day!

  The completion of my first novel, and its positive reception by my colleagues at the Yale weekly seminars, seemed to me to be cause for celebration.

  And then I heard on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS that Chris Hani was dead. He had been assassinated by two right-wingers, Polish immigrant Janusz Walus and Conservative Party Member of Parliament Clive Derby-Lewis. I saw Tokyo Sexwale in a tracksuit in front of Hani’s house. He was crying like a child. I wailed like a child too. Adele rushed in to find out what was happening.

  ‘Those motherfuckers have killed Bhut’ Thembi,’ I cried.

  I feared there were going to be riots in South Africa. The whole country was going to be in flames. I followed news reports closely and phoned home. My brothers told me that the ANC leaders were able to calm the situation. I was impressed by their restraint and that of the people. If I were a believer, I would have thanked God for their maturity. You see, that’s the problem when you are an atheist; you don’t kn
ow who to thank.

  I embarked on a campaign to get the novel published. Mike Nicol had given me the contact details of his agent in New York, but she told me she was not interested in African literature. Yet she represented Mike Nicol who wrote African literature. Or perhaps to her because Mike Nicol was a white South African his work was not African literature. My best bet was Heinemann Books, African Writers Series. A person called Adewale Maja-Pearce wrote back to say the work was feminist diatribe. I must admit, I was offended that a publisher who had published so much rubbish in much of the later African Writers Series novels was dismissive of my book in those terms. I sent the manuscript to Skotaville Press in Johannesburg but they did not respond. I put it away and worked on a play, The Dying Screams of the Moon, set in the period of transition in South Africa; a story of a woman who was demanding back her family’s land that had been confiscated during apartheid.

  I had forgotten about the manuscript when I received a letter from Oxford University Press in Cape Town. They were compiling an anthology of plays for schools and were enquiring whether I had any unpublished play that I wanted to submit. I wrote back to say I didn’t have any new play but I had a novel. They asked me to send them the novel, and a few weeks later I signed a contract with them. Mary Reynolds, the commissioning editor, thought we had treasure in our hands.

  That same year, 1993, Zed Books in London published my PhD thesis as a monograph titled When People Play People: Development Communication Through Theatre. The Swedish International Development Agency in Stockholm came across it and decided it was so useful they wanted to buy hundreds of copies and send them free of charge to scholars, universities and theatre practitioners throughout Africa. They asked me to compile a list of anyone I thought deserved a copy.

  One day I came back from the university and found a fuming Adele waiting for me at the door. She was waving some papers. We had been so happy since she arrived, without a single quarrel; I hoped I had not done something stupid to take us back to where we used to be in Lesotho.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s a list of names and addresses of people who will receive my book from SIDA,’ I said innocently.

  ‘So, it’s you and Gugu again?’ she said, tapping her finger on the list.

  Oh, gosh! I had put Gugu’s name and address on the list. The book was free and I had thought, what the heck, she might enjoy it. There was nothing more to it than that. But Adele was not convinced. She started yelling that I was a rotten cheat and nothing in the world would save me. I told her that there had been no communication between me and Gugu since we broke up. I was not even sure if the address I had for her was still current. This was true. There had been no contact between us. I heard from a Zimbabwean colleague before I left Roma that Gugu was married to some guy in Swaziland. But Adele didn’t want to hear any of that. She was yelling for the entire world to hear. Zukile didn’t understand what was happening and was crying on the bed. I thought she would stop when Dini returned from school, but she continued to call me names in his presence.

  That was the beginning of the end of our marriage.

  The tension continued throughout our stay in New Haven. We went for counselling and the first thing she told the marriage counsellor was: ‘This man likes women too much!’

  Without getting my side of the story or asking for details of what happened, the marriage counsellor said, ‘Maybe he can’t help it. Maybe he has a problem. Some men are addicted to sex.’

  Did she think she was helping me? There was nothing more I could say there. I just sat and listened to them as they analysed me and my addiction. The marriage counsellor never even got to know that the whole thing started with my placing Gugu’s name on a list.

  The Basotho people say: ditsietsi di latela ditshotleho. When troubles come, they come in legions. The English also have a similar expression: it never rains but it pours. I was attacked by a sickness that the doctors didn’t understand. They thought it was arthritis because all my joints, especially at the waist and the knees, were sore. But they didn’t know why it had attacked so suddenly and so severely when there had not been even a hint that I had arthritis. I suffered searing pain when I walked, but because I didn’t have a car I had to slog by foot to the doctor and to the Wednesday seminars. When I walked in the street with Adele she would be impatient with my snail’s pace and would leave me behind. After a few hundred yards she would stop and wait, clearly annoyed. When I finally caught up to her she would tell me that I was wasting time.

  Another trouble in the legions of troubles: a letter from my mother that my father was ill and had been taken to a hospital in Bloemfontein. This was his first trip to South Africa since he had gone into exile in 1963. He was going there to die; a few days later I received a telegram saying that he had passed away on June 22, 1993.

  I couldn’t go to the funeral. Not only was I flat broke, but my waist and my legs were killing me. I wouldn’t have survived the eighteen-hour flight.

  With the end of the academic year my contract with Yale had also come to an end. I was looking forward to returning to South Africa, but Adele wanted to do a master’s degree in America. Mbulelo Mzamane came to our rescue. He was resigning from the University of Vermont to take up the position of Rector and Principal of Fort Hare University. I was pleasantly surprised when I received a letter from the English Department at the University of Vermont, offering me a position as Visiting Professor for one academic year to replace him.

  The family moved to Burlington, Vermont, towards the end of that summer. I was grateful for my time at Yale which had been very productive: I had completed a novel and a full-length play. And I had not even known that I could write a novel!

  I taught African Literature, African Theatre and Pan African Literature at undergraduate level at the University of Vermont. The Pan African Literature course had been devised by Mbulelo and it consisted of literatures from Africa and the diaspora – mainly the Caribbean, African-America and Latin America. I thought it was a brilliant course and I taught it lock-stock-and-barrel including the prescribed texts, just as Mbulelo had designed it. Since I was not familiar with some of the texts I spent the remaining part of the summer reading them.

  I had not received my salary cheque, so Dini and I took to the streets of Burlington hawking my paintings. We didn’t have a permit to do this, and I am sure if we had applied for one it wouldn’t have been granted. Hawkers and peddlers were not allowed in the streets or in the town centre. But we sat defiantly on a bench and displayed my paintings. It was either that or my baby would die of hunger.

  Some people looked at us curiously, but others were fascinated by the art. We did this on two occasions, each time displaying the paintings on the sidewalk and on the bench for an hour or two and then removing them quickly before they caught the attention of the authorities. On both occasions we sold a painting a few minutes after spreading them out and got enough money to last us until the end of the month.

  Adele enrolled at St Michael’s College for a Master of Education degree. She got a job at a local IGA Food Store. Dini enrolled at a local middle school and got a job at McDonald’s. They had not been able to work in New Haven because they didn’t have employment authorisation from the immigration people.

  Alas, the bickering between me and Adele continued unabated. Gugu continued to be the subject, even though she was thousands of miles away in Swaziland raising her family. Another subject was ’Maseabata whose letters to me Adele was intercepting. And all these letters were about theatre and her studies in the United Kingdom. There was not an inkling in them that there was a romantic relationship between us. Yet Adele yelled into my ears, accusing me of having an affair with her. She even wrote her a letter ordering her to stop writing to me. She wrote back to say that the person she could order around was me not her.

  The third subject was Gcina Mhlophe. Now, this is new to you because I have not mentioned her before. She was an actress and a playwright from J
ohannesburg and I was compiling a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine articles about her. I first met Gcina in 1986, long before I met Adele, when I was invited by the African Writers Association in Johannesburg to hold playwriting workshops. Gcina was one of the participants, together with such playwrights as Matsemela Manaka, Gamakhulu Diniso and Maishe Maponya. She was involved in a group called Thakaneng with Gamakhulu. We began to date at that time, but our relationship did not go anywhere because of distance and the fact that I was having problems entering South Africa on some occasions despite the temporary indemnity I had received from the apartheid government through Lesotho’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs, Chief Sekhonyana ’Maseribane. The Johannesburg newspaper, The Weekly Mail (later to become the present-day Mail & Guardian), reported:

  Lesotho playwright Zakes Mda was barred last week from entering South Africa by South African police at three different posts. Travelling to Johannesburg from Lesotho to see actress Gcina Mhlophe, Mda first went to Peka bridge, where he was searched and kept waiting for the whole day. The same thing happened at Maputsoe and Maseru border posts. At Maputsoe his passport was defaced by the police.

  Because of police action the course of true love did not run smooth. But Gcina did come to Maseru once to spend some time with me and perform Have you Seen Zandile?, her autobiographical play, with Thembi Mtshali at the Maseru Sun Cabanas. After that it became impossible to see each other again. Our relationship just fizzled out in the long run. I did write to her when I got engaged to Adele informing her that I was getting married.