by Norman Rush
I wandered out to the kraal. The odd thing about the fait accompli Nelson was covertly presenting me with was that I hadn’t noticed it assembling itself chunk by chunk before my eyes. A case in point was his recent recurrence to the theme of development projects always seemingly being good enough only for the locals to live in and never for the founders and donors, for long. Then there had been the conjunction of his murmurings about how rapidly the surplus was accumulating in Tsau—notwithstanding that it could be accumulating even faster if people would only be a little more ascetic—and the bleak general evolution of Africa over all. Then there had been Nelson’s reversal on the subject of my thesis. Before, he had been saying I should go for something new. But now he was thinking it was salvageable. What did this mean? One thing it meant was that if I stuck with my carcass thesis I wouldn’t have to go back to Palo Alto to negotiate a new one, do new fieldwork, be away from him for a long time and dot dot dot who knows? possibly get interested in someone else. All I had seen, up until now, in those discussions was his flattering interest in my academic tsuris.
Then, irrationally, it was the graveyard, everything about it plus the prospect of ending up there, that chilled me. I knew what I would hear from Nelson if I alluded to it: If you don’t like a particular custom or usage here, you can change it, or try to, you can propose your own. That was the central virtue of Tsau, supposedly. The same applied to culture. Tsau was Paris compared to ninety-eight percent of the villages of the world. I would hear again how deeply he believed in the village qua village. Any book or periodical in the world could be brought into Tsau. There were villages in Austria today less culturally open and advanced than Tsau. I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care. These were not lies.
I did something infantile: I let the wind blow into my mouth. I did that and then in the same vein, and feeling like a Chekhov character, I said to Baph My question to you is Who is composing this life for me? I hated being emotionally disheveled so suddenly. I hated my volatility. Was this a form of premature retirement I was being summoned to join Nelson in? How could it be? He was still in his forties, however barely. But of course everyone reaches that point, some sooner than others. Was he that tired? And what was the name for the madmen who crouched on top of pillars in the Libyan desert in the name of purity, some going blind in the process, and whose name I knew I knew. The name Monachists came to me. Then I put my face against Baph’s neck and stopped talking.
What upset you? Nelson asked when I came back in. Nothing, maybe my mother, I said, evading, when what I really wanted was to shout at him about the gigantic quid pro quo he was presenting, as in We can be together forever but only on the head of a pin, in Tsau. I was tired of the good news and the bad news always linking up. You win a honeymoon but in Beirut, you win a retirement chalet but on top of Kanchenjunga. I wanted to stride around and kick his sacks of rare sand. And I felt I absolutely must avoid getting into discussing the merits of Tsau as a venue according to its position on the depressing spectrum of where the poor have to live worldwide. Or into discussing futures suggesting that his place was anywhere but with the poor forever: that was definitional of him and in any case I respected it, although I reserved the right to adumbrate ways you could be with the poor without necessarily being at their elbow year in and year out. I had a retrograde gust of feeling or yearning toward being religious, so that I would be able to believe that my suffering in itself, separate from anything else I might do, metaphysically lightened the sufferings of the poor. But religion was beyond me anyway and I had been dragged farther away from any berserk clutching at it I might be reduced to, by Denoon’s on and off stream of aperçus and imprecations on the subject. He was fuel to the flame. And his most recent recensions on religion, to the effect that the taproot of religion is perennial irrational individual self-hatred, had been especially trenchant to me. Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, Nelson had been saying, but once it gets rolling it’s about self-hatred, which is why religions crossculturally always exalt and beatify people who continually hurt themselves or allow others to hurt them. I think this had been touched off by a pope recently blessing a devout bathing beauty who had crossed the Alps on hands and knees to see him. Another tack never to take was that Tsau was effectively, by African standards, middleclass, so was his continued presence being justified as necessary to its remaining so? his white presence? mine included.
I thought I was being superbly contained, considering what I was feeling, until Nelson said So this is what one hand clapping sounds like, which was an evident reference to the lukewarmness over staying forever in Tsau I thought I’d been masking so well. The proposition was serious for both of us, which I could tell in various ways, from the primary to the trivial. Among the trivial was an onset of rather sharp itching in my escutcheon, an established accompaniment to moments of major foreboding. At the same level was Denoon using the amalgam GodJesus in connection with swearing one thing or another. He would never coerce me or anyone, if that was how I was feeling. He was sorry if I thought that. He loved me. I shouldn’t be upset. Then he confessed for the second time he regretted giving me the impression when we were discussing Middlemarch that he’d finished it. Before I could remind him that he’d already confessed this he was going further, saying he’d never even begun it, that he knew what was in it only from what he’d picked up from women discussing it. But now he was going to read it, he swore. Here a blur ensues. We went on to other things.
STRIFE
In Retrospect, Where Was I?
In retrospect, where was I when strife came to Tsau, and what was I doing? I keep asking this. How inert was I? Could I have done more to deflect the future? I think so. I have no excuse other than my inner absorption with the prospect of staying on in Tsau, wrestling with it, trying to look clearly and deeply at it, find the right and true referents for it, and not keep recurrently seeing it as sheer exile.
I had battles of my own to fight. Statistics such as that in the United States a colgrad needs to be in a city of at least a million in order to be able to count on having five close friends would assail me and have to be countered with reminders that in Tsau I would have one perfect friend, for a start. What city in America could guarantee me that? And repeatedly I had to push back value reversals: things about Tsau that had been giving me pleasure, like the oceanic skies or the quintessence of solitude you attained on the summit of the koppie, were suddenly malign and frightening. Or I had to fight back moments of conviction that this was all coldhearted and a test. And always there was the struggle not to be sordid, not to will myself to be engulfed by blinder love, slave love so strong nothing spatial would matter.
At moments everything seemed like a conspiracy against me, to force a choice, like Denoon’s theory of the characterological collapse of the male in the Western world, America in particular. As women get stronger and more defined, men get more silly, violent, and erratic overall. I more than agreed. I was a walking contribution to the statistics the idea reposed on. But why go on about this more than once, if the inner point was not to get me to feel panic about who else I could get if I abandoned Nelson, the clearsighted man, obviously one in a million, exempt from this piece of sociology? Then, was it only happenstance that he was dropping aperçus about the superiority of small and powerless countries like Botswana or Ireland morally as places to live? However oppositional you are in a superpower, you partake in the routine misery being inflicted through its CIA or equivalents, secret wars, arms sales driving the third world mad and sowing dragons’ teeth unto the last generation. I felt like saying Ireland, yay! But in the nick of time I remembered the priestocracy.
I knew what I needed was exactly what I couldn’t have here: a woman friend I could discuss Nelson with, confide
in. There was the political barrier of my identification with him. That would always exist. Also standing in the way was the Tswana institutionalized madness about secrets. Secrets are for the family only. Outside the family, secrets confer dangerous power to the hearer over the divulger. When I say the Batswana are opaque I mean things like the young woman at the national bank, high level, whose husband had been in England for four years straight getting a doctorate in biology: she was perfectly cheerful, was famous for it and for not having boyfriends. Of course in time every culture will yield to someone saintly enough, supposedly. Of course I had recently been driven to talking to my donkey, and what did that mean? There were two women in the United States and one, possibly, in Sweden I could conceive of making an emergency life and death confessional help-me phonecall to. But there were no phones in Tsau and never would be until I was in cronehood, if then. Would life in Tsau be me forever wandering up and down the interface between the main two races I would never understand, Bantus and the male? This was when I was at my lowest.
I tried America has taught me to overestimate my importance in the scheme of things. I tried this often. I fought off image seizures of newlywed wives in movies confronting more than humble apartments and putting their fists on their hips and saying This place has possibilities, which would lead into surreal fantasies of how I would revise and redecorate Tsau to my own individual taste, long and involved fantasies. Mostly I tried to find some equilibrium around the feeling that Nelson had in fact been talking more exploratorily than conclusively. But then he would unhorse me by reminding himself of dead undertakings he was going to revive—promoting sauerkraut and croquet were two of them. And during all this he was being especially perfect and solicitous.
I think I must have known there was a hump in the arras. Dineo seemed stricken over something private once or twice. Possibly I could have picked something up if I’d lingered in the robing room after a hunt for a rock python, which I joined. But I didn’t stay to socialize. I was in too great a hurry to resume observing Denoon and brooding on the results. And writing my broodings down. And reading what I’d written, back and forth, back and forth.
The Night Men
An epitome of both how conflicted I became and how perfect Nelson was being toward me: I woke up one night at three a.m. and woke him up to tell him he had to stop reading poetry to me as a nightcap for the time being because it was unfair. It was unfair because having poetry read to me is the equivalent of manna and he knew it. We had done it a lot during our first weeks together, then there had been a caesura when it became sporadic, and now he was reading Whitman to me every night, beautifully. He agreed instantly. Anything I could in any way, shape, or form consider coercive on his part was out. In the midst of this I was seized with guilt and wonder over having a man I could safely wake up in the middle of the night with a particular concern and get an agreement or get calmed down and never hear a murmur of objection out of. Every other man I had regularly spent nights with was like a wild animal over his sacred sleep, because—had I conceivably forgotten?—he had to work the next day, in caps, as if I didn’t. I lay there. In Nelson I had someone who would not merely tell me my nightmare was only a dream, which I tended to know, but would to the best of his ability trudge through my attempts at analysis with me. Where was I ever going to find that quality in someone again in my life if I gave him up? He was already asleep again and so crazed was I that I woke him again to apologize and take it back, and even that was all right with him. I told him I felt like pure shit. It was no help reminding myself that men sleep better than women in every culture known. In the morning I apologized again and let him make love to me standing up, my least favorite position, as a treat for him and a penance for me.
I went to a menarche party for Golepe Setlhabi, a girl of twelve. I had been to one before. These were more musicales than anything else, for women only. There was kadi to drink, which was new. I sang By the Rivers of Babylon when my turn came. We gave Golepe a collective gift, a sheepskin. She was overwhelmed, genuinely. So I was overwhelmed. The sheepskin had been my idea. Real gratitude in others for something you do for them or give them is tonic. I was exhilarated. Of course I’d had some kadi. Here was an unmixed good, it seemed to me. Adolescents in America are so jaded a reaction like Golepe’s would be impossible. Why would I leave a place like Tsau? What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I more sensitive to the simple pleasures? Was I more jaded than I wanted to admit, and could Tsau be a cure?
I was glad when my inner maundering was interrupted by the summarist’s putting in an appearance. She reminded everyone to be sure to attend the coming great discussion as to god, to see who would gain the prize. This was the first I had heard of this event. Tsau struck me then as very precious and various. I went home to ask Nelson what this event was, very positive for a change, almost hyper.
Now I realize that the first bruitings about the night men occurred at that party. It seemed like nothing to me. Certain men, part of Raboupi’s entourage but not Hector himself, were in effect being prostitutes, spending the night with some of the younger women for gifts. I think I asked if they used contraception, which was the only serious social point of concern that I could see, and was told Yes. Someone claimed the batlodi had conceived the enterprise, although I doubted that. Given the demographics of Tsau, it was not a surprising development. It had started with token gifts from competing girlfriends and escalated. I believe the discussion was truncated when it became clear I was following it despite its being in rapid sotto voce Setswana.
If I thought anything about this it must have been that it made Tsau seem like a slightly more interesting place. I don’t remember thinking anything in particular, nor would the idea that this was a development I or anyone could conceivably intervene in have occurred to me. I remember the brilliance of the stars, my optimism.
Parlamente
I asked Denoon what this function I’d heard about was. It sounded like a debate.
No, it was different. It was syncretic. These were periodic mass free-form meetings, which he would interlocute. Each one was on a single large subject. Colliding presentations were given, there would be heavy questioning and intervention from the floor, then a prizewinner would be chosen in a novel way: people would shift physically to the side they favored. Another feature was that the entire proceeding had to unfurl with everyone remaining seated on the ground, no matter how heated things got, until the very end, when it was time to shift permanently for the headcount. Staying seated had been taken from the Zulu indaba format. If you got to your feet in anger your side was dishonored, disgraced. Nelson called these things moots. I told him moot was wrong unless an adjudication was going on, which happened to be the one item sticking in my memory from Ancient Law. He was impressed. The Tswana term for these meetings was either parlamente, the loan word for assembly of talkers, or phutego, meaning public meeting. They were apparently leisurely and drawn-out affairs, with people bringing mats and even napping a little at times. Food was provided by Sekopololo seriatim, to encourage people to stay till the end, Nelson finally admitted. He said These things are looked forward to immensely. As to past topics, he mentioned Master and Slave and What Is Work? or How Should We Work? You should have one on Whither the Local Bushmen? I said, thinking of the growing ambiguity of their relationship to Tsau. There were more of them. More and more they were coming to the infirmary. His reply was to groan at me. I’d missed the point about the scale of the questions the parlamente was for.
I was a little puzzled over the choice of the existence of god as a topic for the parlamente. Tsau was average for Botswana with respect to religious attitudes. So far as I could see, there was no problem with excessive religion, with sect competition getting out of hand, no manias breaking out. In fact there was more mild agnosticism in Tsau than anywhere except the largest towns in the country. There were three or four informal Bible-reading congregations. The Botswana Social Front sympathizers could be scathing toward the few devo
utly Christian women, especially the Zed CC women, but the logic of their own position was odd: for image reasons they were what they called protraditionalist, by which they meant they were for the herbalist part of the traditional witchcraft belief system but somehow not for its essential element, to wit, the belief that the source of the maladies everyone suffers is hurt feelings or ill will among dead ancestors. There were no religious classes in the schools other than a hair-raising history of religions course put together by Denoon and emphasizing massacres and anathematizations. Tsau seemed to be secularizing in a trendless way, very gently. Popular science was popular.
All was well. There was no mediumship being practiced. There were no processions. And overarching everything was this diffuse cultus around the wonderfulness of women. Everyone deferred to this. Even the batlodi and Dorcas Raboupi and the other sour cultural reversionaries or dialectical materialists, depending on which camp they were in, partook. The one thing I would have assumed was potentially problematical was something nobody in fact complained about—that is, the prohibition of religious edifices. It had been gotten into the charter, somehow. Any congregation could operate informally but could never have fulltime paid pastors or leaders, nor could it ever have a permanent building devoted exclusively to it. The argument for this had something to do with the notion that churches remained benign when they were informal and in the hearts of their adherents but became aggressive and divisive once they possessed property and officers. This was put in the context of a general prohibition against all clubs and political groups having buildings, for the same reasons. I understood the hubristic but nobly hubristic impulse behind the prohibition. My feeling was that in the heat of the miraculous escape from destitution Tsau represented, women arriving would naturally agree to something like this, barely noticing, but that over time resentment ought to be simmering madly. Yet there was absolutely no trace of it. So to me this particular parlamente sounded either supernumerary or like a deliberate quest for sleeping dogs to annoy.