by Naomi Holoch
13 Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Thabo Mbeki, Joe Slovo, and many others had recently been sentenced at the Rivonia Trial
Karen Williams
Karen Williams, who describes herself as a nomadic black South African dyke, is the author of the second selection representing South Africa in this collection. “They Came at Dawn,” published in The Invisible Ghetto (1993), the first anthology of lesbian and gay writing to emerge from South Africa, takes us into the heart of the battle against apartheid and its terrifying consequences. Williams’s story powerfully underlines the intensity and dangers of a liberation struggle that impacted on all battles for survival, including the freedom of self-expression.
THEY CAME AT DAWN
THE air was rancid with tear gas that morning. Empty bullet cartridges mingled with dust, blood, and the fog and winter rain. Shadows of what a few moments ago were living, marching people now stalked over the flats and shantytowns with the industrial smog blown by the southeaster. The Mountain was rallying her children. Propaganda pages blew ahead, paving the way for the shadows, and dust to follow. Soon the pages too had to succumb to the fate of lying wet, stuck to the road, with the Casspir and Buffel tracks erasing The Word.
It was all revolution: all war.
The banging on the door that set the windows rattling was neither unfamiliar nor unexpected. Yet they were afraid. Sara and Michael looked at each other alarmed, before Michael scurried to the back door hoping to get away. There was no time for good-byes. Petrified, Sara waited for the jackboot that would bolt out the door to shock her to her senses. She wondered whether they would use handcuffs or just beat her senseless and drag her limp body to the gaping van. Where would she wake up?
“Sara. Fuckin’ hell! Open the door!” It was Kherry’s hoarse, insistently urgent whisper.
It wasn’t the police. She’d better go and call Michael back inside.
“Sara!”
“Coming, wait!” Sara jumped from one foot to another, unsure whether to go and get Michael first, but instead she rushed to the door. With her fingers slipping and missing the lock, she clumsily opened the door and bundled a wet and frustrated Kherry in.
“Wait,” Sara ordered and ran to the backyard to get Michael, her steps thudding over the ghastly pause that cloaked the neighborhood. The round rattle of machine-gun fire was heard in the far distance.
Sara didn’t know whether to burst out laughing at the pitifully comical picture Michael cut, stuck there in the wire fence, trying to vault out of the backyard. (When had he become so worn and haggard, so spindly?)
“Michael …” The soft whisper froze him, and his frightened, beady eyes seemed shocked in their sockets as they looked at Sara, as if to say: It’s all right if you told. There was no chance for me to run anyway.
“It’s okay, Michael—it’s only Kherry.”
His body went limp and he fell to the ground as the tension snapped. “Shot by a sniper,” thought Sara, looking at him closely. No—only nerves.
“Michael!” Kherry exclaimed in disbelief when he and Sara walked through the door. “I thought the police had …”
“No, they haven’t got me. They’ve got a fat chance too. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I heard that they picked up all the leaders and just about everyone they could think of, last night,” Sara said. “Then shot like hell again this morning. Ai, this fuckin’ state.” She shook her head and sighed.
“They looking for you too?” Michael asked Kherry. And then his head jerked, for somewhere there was a slight sound.
“No.” Michael and Sara stood looking at her expectantly, so she felt compelled to add: “My mother kicked me out.”
“God, today of all days,” Sara muttered to herself.
“Politics?”
“Yes. No,” Kherry added immediately. She paused and looked at them directly. “I’m lesbian,” she announced as boldly as she had to her mother earlier that morning. She had said it with much pride to counter the revulsion in her mother’s mind. But now she closed her eyes and waited for the bullets her friends would aim at her to rain down.
“This is all we need! Jesus, Kherry!” The irritability in Michael’s voice couldn’t disguise the minefield of nerves triggered at the mere sound of the automatic kettle switching itself off.
“Have you got other clothes and things with you?” Sara asked, as if all this was nothing new to her.
Michael got up, loudly scraping the chair along the floor as he stormed out. Then he strode to the toilet, entered it, and banged the door behind him. He flushed the toilet immediately, out of anger at another of Kherry’s “little problems.”
“All I have is this money,” Kherry said to Sara, digging her hands into her anorak and presenting a crumpled five-rand note between her fingers.
Marta, Kherry’s grandmother, had thrust the note into her granddaughter’s hand as Kherry stormed out of the house. Her eyes brimming with tears. Marta said, “Djy’s altyd in my gebede, Poplap. Ko ienige tyd dat djy iets nodig het. Ek sallie djou ma se ie.” (“You are always in my prayers, my darling. Come any time that you need something—I won’t tell your mother.”)
And with that she squeezed Kherry’s hand as if to seal her promise. That was probably the last of her grandmother’s rent money, Kherry realized as the bus stopped at the roadblock to be searched by the police.
“Don’t worry, you can stay here as long as you like,” Sara reassured her later that night as they all sat in the dark huddled over their coffee mugs.
“Michael,” Kherry said. She was waiting for him to comment, for he had been ignoring her all day.
“Kherry,” he spat out. “Just pull yourself together.” His hand was sharply cutting the air in an attempt to emphasize his words. “Just …” He paused, now in the passageway, searching for words. “Just—come—right.”
Kherry and Sara looked down at their coffee, embarrassed, just as they did even later when Michael suddenly jumped up in the middle of listening to Coltrane and bellowed “Fuck you!” at Kherry. Then he frogmarched himself back to the toilet and again flushed the toilet after banging the door behind him.
Kherry sat there, listening to Coltrane, remembering her discoveries with Michelle—love, and the denial of a truth. In the end not even the promise of togetherness could save them.
Sometimes it was easy outside, in the days when they got long, friendly stares and conspiratorial smiles from the white women in the road. The ones with short hair. But the outside also crept in, making it difficult to swallow. For it was as if they had thought all the letters of the alphabet could compensate for the not-enoughs of elsewhere. Not enough rent money; not enough to eat; not enough love to stop two young black girls from feeling so blindly, and so very alone.
Then word got around and it got around fast. Michelle was given two days to vacate her apartment. The landlady had classified her as “funny people.”
“Perhaps it’s because you’re single,” Kherry tried to explain as Michelle threw the contents of her cupboard into boxes.
“They’re always suspicious of young women—they think that all we do is have loud parties and bring men home!” This was Michelle, no longer able to hide the remnants of the last city she had fled from.
“Perhaps it’s because you’re always asking her to repair that leak in the bathroom,” Kherry said, trying to sound jovial.
“Perhaps it’s because I’m a dyke,” said Michelle, her voice restrained, as she tried to control herself.
And then she was gone, to another city.
The police came at dawn all beefy and sweaty. And Michael was found and taken away. The women were beaten up and then warned.
Nobody knows what they’ve done with Michael—but it’s rumored, these days, that tenth floors are not the safest places to be.
Cynthia Price
The third and final selection from South Africa, “Lesbian Bedrooms” (1996) by Cynthia Price, offers the reader a brief literary moment of respite as Pr
ice creates a space of everyday lesbian living. With the constitutional end of apartheid has come a critical step toward curtailing another oppression: South Africa today stands as the first country in the world to have as part of its constitution the guarantee of equality before the law for its lesbian and gay citizens. Price, who lives with her two children and her partner of fourteen years in the coastal town of Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa, presents in this first-time published story a vision of “normalcy,” embodying the hope of a new national vision.
LESBIAN BEDROOMS
WHAT do lesbians do in their bedrooms? They wake in the morning and stretch. They say nasty words to their alarm clocks and curse about having to go to work again. On weekend mornings they lie in with their cats and dogs and children, trying not to spill their tea when the family get restless.
They glance disappointedly at the mirror, which shows another gray hair, the lines starting to creep beneath the eyes, and the disappearing waistline. They put on makeup, mutter over a laddered stocking, and scratch under the bed for a missing shoe.
They dispense aspirin and warm soup when one of them is feverish with flu and tiptoe around the bedroom when someone has a sore head from too much wine the night before. They offer sympathy and a shoulder to cry on when the day has been rough. They collapse onto the bed at the end of the day and fall asleep without taking off their shoes.
They vacuum fluff from under the bed, fluff the duvet covers, and stack newly ironed, warm-smelling clothes in the cupboards. They sort the underwear into separate shelves so there will be no mixups in the hurried rush of mornings’ dressings. They sort the shoes into pairs and know that they won’t stay that way for long. They discuss what color the new curtains will be and when they will be able to fit them into the already tightly squeezed budget.
They relax on a Sunday afternoon with the sun sifting through the curtains, listening to the sounds of a neighbor mowing his lawn in the distance, and feel guilty that their own grass needs a cut. They argue about whose turn it is to get up and make the tea—“I made the lunch, it’s your turn to put the kettle on!” They both offer to cook the supper tonight.
They talk about future plans and they dream together. They read books, play cards, do crosswords, listen to music. They keep each other warm in winter and fight over the blankets. In summer they swat mosquitoes and ask each other if the window is open and “Are you sure you switched the stove off at the wall?” They nudge each other to roll over and “Stop that damn snoring! How the hell am I supposed to sleep?” They lie awake at night and wonder why it’s so damned quiet—“Is she still breathing?”
Then there are those private intimate moments shared only between the two of them, not for public viewing, discussion, or curiosity. Moments that will always remain intimate and private.
Alifa Rifaat
In “My World of the Unknown” (1983), the Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat explores the realm of female passion using themes and imagery that remind the reader of how culturally bound our “universal” symbols may be. Born in 1930 into a conservative middle-class Egyptian family, Rifaat received little formal education. Paralleling the narrator in this story, she married at an early age and accompanied her husband in assignments as a provincial government worker. Drawing attention because of their subject matter, her short stories break the long silence surrounding middle-class Egyptian women who live according to traditional roles while harboring other selves. Independent of western feminism, Rifaat finds a way to portray the complexity and mystery of female desire.
MY WORLD OF THE UNKNOWN
THERE are many mysteries in life, unseen powers in the universe, worlds other than our own, hidden links and radiations that draw creatures together and whose effect is interacting. They may merge or be incompatible, and perhaps the day will come when science will find a method for connecting up these worlds in the same way as it has made it possible to voyage to other planets. Who knows?
Yet one of these other worlds I have explored; I have lived in it and been linked with its creatures through the bond of love. I used to pass with amazing speed between this tangible world of ours and another invisible earth, mixing in the two worlds, on one and the same day, as though living it twice over.
When entering into the world of my love and being summoned and yielding to its call, no one around me would be aware of what was happening to me. All that occurred was that I would be overcome by something resembling a state of languor and would go off into a semi-sleep. Nothing about me would change except that I would become very silent and withdrawn, though I am normally a person who is talkative and eager to go out into the world of people. I would yearn to be on my own, would long for the moment of surrender as I prepared myself for answering the call.
Love had its beginning when an order came through for my husband to be transferred to a quiet country town and, being too busy with his work, delegated to me the task of going to this town to choose suitable accommodation prior to his taking up the new appointment. He cabled one of his subordinates named Kamil and asked him to meet me at the station and to assist me.
I took the early morning train. The images of a dream I had had that night came to me as I looked out at the vast fields and gauged the distances between the towns through which the train passed and reckoned how far it was between the new town in which we were fated to live and beloved Cairo.
The images of the dream kept reappearing to me, forcing themselves upon my mind: images of a small white house surrounded by a garden with bushes bearing yellow flowers, a house lying on the edge of a broad canal in which were swans and tall sailing boats. I kept on wondering at my dream and trying to analyze it. Perhaps it was some secret wish I had had, or maybe the echo of some image that my unconscious had stored up and was chewing over.
As the train arrived at its destination, I awoke from my thoughts. I found Kamil awaiting me. We set out in his car, passing through the local souk. I gazed at the mounds of fruit with delight, chatting away happily with Kamil. When we emerged from the souk we found ourselves on the bank of the Mansûra canal, a canal on which swans swam and sailing boats moved to and fro. I kept staring at them with uneasy longing. Kamil directed the driver to the residential buildings the governorate had put up for housing government employees. While gazing at the opposite bank a large boat with a great fluttering sail glided past. Behind it could be seen a white house that had a garden with trees with yellow flowers and that lay on its own amidst vast fields. I shouted out in confusion, overcome by the feeling that I had been here before.
“Go to that house,” I called to the driver. Kamil leapt up, objecting vehemently: “No, no—no one lives in that house. The best thing is to go to the employees’ buildings.”
I shouted insistently, like someone hypnotized: “I must have a look at that house.” “All right,” he said. “You won’t like it, though—it’s old and needs repairing.” Giving in to my wish, he ordered the driver to make his way there.
At the garden door we found a young woman, spare and of fair complexion. A fat child with ragged clothes encircled her neck with his burly legs. In a strange silence, she stood as though nailed to the ground, barring the door with her hands and looking at us with doltish inquiry.
I took a sweet from my bag and handed it to the boy. He snatched it eagerly, tightening his grip on her neck with his pudgy, mud-bespattered feet so that her face became flushed from his high-spirited embrace. A half smile showed on her tightly closed lips. Taking courage, I addressed her in a friendly tone: “I’d like to see over this house.” She braced her hands resolutely against the door. “No,” she said quite simply. I turned helplessly to Kamil, who went up to her and pushed her violently in the chest so that she staggered back. “Don’t you realize,” he shouted at her, “that this is the director’s wife? Off with you!”
Lowering her head so that the child all but slipped from her, she walked off dejectedly to the canal bank, where she lay down on the ground, put the child on her lap, and rest
ed her head in her hands in silent submission.
Moved by pity, I remonstrated: “There’s no reason to be so rough, Mr. Kamil. Who is the woman?” “Some madwoman,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “who’s a stranger to the town. Out of kindness the owner of this house put her in charge of it until someone should come along to live in it.”
With increased interest I said: “Will he be asking a high rent for it?” “Not at all,” he said with an enigmatic smile. “He’d welcome anyone taking it over. There are no restrictions and the rent is modest—no more than four pounds.”
I was beside myself with joy. Who in these days can find somewhere to live for such an amount? I rushed through the door into the house with Kamil behind me and went over the rooms: five spacious rooms with wooden floors, with a pleasant hall, modern lavatory, and a beautifully roomy kitchen with a large veranda overlooking vast pistachio-green fields of generously watered rice. A breeze, limpid and cool, blew, playing with the tips of the crop and making the delicate leaves move in continuous dancing waves.
I went back to the first room with its spacious veranda overlooking the road and revealing the other bank of the canal where, along its strand, extended the houses of the town. Kamil pointed out to me a building facing the house on the other side. “That’s where we work,” he said, “and behind it is where the children’s schools are.”
“Thanks be to God,” I said joyfully. “It means that everything is within easy reach of this house—and the souk’s nearby too.” “Yes,” he said, “and the fishermen will knock at your door to show you the fresh fish they’ve caught in their nets. But the house needs painting and redoing, also there are all sorts of rumors about it—the people around here believe in djinn and spirits.”