But, alongside Eily’s past, it is Stephen’s shocking story of his repeated seduction as a young boy by a violent mother which takes up the most space (shocking not as in worse but less familiar or less often told). Although pretty much out of her head most of the time, the mother knew exactly what she was doing: ‘I think she thought once she did that I’d never leave.’ He nearly goes mad: ‘And she hadn’t counted on that that there, in the fucked-up body getting fucked, was a person starting to come to life, starting to want to hurt her and do all the things to her body that she’d done to his. Do worse. Wanting to fucking fling her on the floor and stamp on her face and I could tell I was starting to go off my head.’43 Eventually he escapes only to destroy first himself (almost) and then his relationship to the mother of his daughter, from whom, when he first meets Eily, he is completely estranged (the mother takes the daughter to Canada to get her out of his reach). But the way this story erupts in the middle of the novel so unexpectedly and for so long is, as I read it, a way of asking: can this story be told, and, like the incest it narrates, once told, will it ever stop?
There is a formal problem – shades of Prospero telling Miranda the story of their past at the opening of The Tempest, stretching the reader’s belief that Stephen never got round to telling Eily before. But in a stroke of genius, McBride transposes this age-old difficulty into a device for conveying the mind’s resistance to horror: ‘He dry retches again. Are you alright? He nods but the grey eyes black and the wall they stare through into that past has gone so eerily thin I can almost see her too.’ ‘So far so horrible. But not you I say It.’ ‘Sorry it’s turned into an epic night. I’m not, I say.’44 Critics who dismiss or gloss over Stephen’s story are therefore, as I see it, complicit with a time-worn silence which makes the abuse of boys inaudible. The problem is global. In 2019, a study which examined rape laws in forty countries found that just under half of jurisdictions lacked legal protections for boys, and in many cases, laws specific to girls did not recognise boys as victims.45 McBride has not only lifted an abused girl out of monologue into conversation. She also seems to be saying that the world will continue to run to its end if women only tell the stories of their own damage and refuse to listen to the tale of traumas lived by men. Mothers, it should be said, do not come out so well in The Lesser Bohemians. The second remarkable story Stephen has to tell is of the lengths Marianne, the mother of their daughter, has gone to make the daughter hate him, including, in a final bid for cruelty, telling her of the incest he was subjected to as a boy. It backfires as these things tend to do, turning the daughter’s anger against the mother, and only making her pity, love and long for her lost father more.
There is therefore a type of redemption, although the novel studiously avoids any piety of the cure. ‘I hate a moral,’ McBride has stated, ‘and I’m not much keener on an inspirational tale of survival against the odds.’46 After Stephen tells his story, things get better between them, then worse – ‘This is the start of the strange for us, of that long night’s story doing its work in ways I now can see’; ‘All the past now collating instead of forgotten. I suddenly misplace the best of myself, allowing a far worse in’ – before getting better again.47 We seem then to be living in cyclical time. To evoke the title of Freud’s famous article ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, The Lesser Bohemians messes with the order of play (‘working through’ is usually evoked clinically to suggest the completion of the psychic process, as if matters move psychically to their resolution along a more or less straight line). Despite the euphoric ending, the debris and detritus of these stories will, one feels sure, track the lives of those who will continue to struggle against them. Like all novels with a happy ending, The Lesser Bohemians leaves you asking whether the finale is any match for the sheer magnitude of what has gone before.
Before she was a novelist, McBride was an aspiring actress, close to the one she portrays in her novel. Both of her novels are streaked with autobiography (in relation to Girl, she has described the death of her brother as the most devastating event in her life). The Lesser Bohemians of the title refers to the life of the jobbing actor, the artistic life less celebrated, those who never get to be stars and who struggle to pay the bills, carrying on simply because they love the work. But acting is also a pathway out of fear, providing an exit route from one life into another: ‘Converting the self into flecks of form and re-form. Her. Into Her. Into someone else.’ ‘Excused of myself by the in out of words.’48 In acting, you bring the other to life. It is, one might say, the perfect context and frame for a novel whose main drive is to get two people, finally, to talk to each other. We might note in passing how far this is from one current Hollywood ethos: ‘I don’t think that, as a creative person, you have that much to contribute when your life experiences are limited to those you have while you’re emulating someone else,’49 Renée Zellweger explained in a recent interview. In fairness she was trying to shed the idea that she is Bridget Jones, but the casual dismissal of the idea of emulating, entering into the body and soul of, someone else is striking.
Such is McBride’s commitment to this project that at moments it drives the writing into a hallucinatory dimension which, as we saw in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, intensifies mental space beyond endurance. As if to match the violence of the modern world, McBride has to force the screw of modernism’s linguistic disorientation one more turn. It is no coincidence that for Morrison in relation to slavery, and McBride in relation to sexual violence, language goes off the rails. For example, in one of the most formally eccentric moments in the novel (there is nothing quite like it in Girl), Stephen’s daughter, known only from a photograph in the room, starts addressing Eily when she is in the middle of sex: ‘This is my father.’ ‘He made me doing this, what he’ll do with you.’ ‘But he is my father. And your father taught me this, showed me how until I love to and know him like you never can. This is my father. Taking my knickers down.’ In relation to those last two sentences, it is only by doing a double take and distinguishing the voices beyond what the writing quite permits – they are speaking in turn – that the reader can save the daughter from incest (although the form surely also invites the other reading). And only if we halt the flow will we recognise that Eily, rivalrous to the limit, is also trying to deflect the daughter from harm: ‘And good to be hurt by him in ways you never will’ (the fantasy seeming to be that submitting herself to sexual pain is a way of saving a child).50 The punctuation gives you minimal guidance. You have to work it out for yourself; along with the suspended blank spaces, this is another repeated stylistic peculiarity of the book. Then, when Stephen tells Eily of meeting up with Marianne, the voice starts splintering to infinity: in Marianne’s words – although it is Stephen speaking – we are given Stephen’s stepfather’s account, as told to Marianne, of Stephen’s mother confessing as she lay dying what she had done to her son. Faced with all this, any reader would be forgiven for thinking they were going crazy but that, I would suggest, is the point. Formal decorum is hardly appropriate, or has its limits, in a tale of how people find and force themselves into each other’s bodies and heads. In a world of such rampant licence, why on earth would you expect to know who or where you are?
McBride has said that her aim in her novels is ‘to go in as close as the reader would reasonably permit’ – a perfect aesthetic formula for the sexual problem that haunts her book. In a rare distancing from Joyce, she describes Finnegans Wake, alongside Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, as ‘obscure’ and ‘obtuse’ for the non-specialist reader (‘kamikaze missions’). Instead, she uses the simplest vocabulary in the hope that this will allow readers to make the complexities of the syntax their own, as if the narrative was running inside their minds: ‘from the inside out rather than the outside in.’51 It is, then, hardly surprising that abuse, incest, passion have been her themes to date. In each case, closeness is the burning issue: whether desired, killing, too little or too much. Aesthetic form and story are t
winned. ‘Fright’, Eily says when things are going badly, ‘goes everywhere like losing blood.’ Sometimes it feels that, as a writer, McBride is chasing her own fear. Without ever passing judgement, The Lesser Bohemians situates itself at that point of moral, sexual and grammatical uncertainty where, in Eily’s words again, ‘pure is indivisible from its reverse.’52 If we are to face down the reality of violence in our times, violence thrust deep into the life of the mind, this is, I suggest, the only place to begin.
6
THE KILLING OF REEVA STEENKAMP, THE TRIAL OF OSCAR PISTORIUS
Sex and Race in the Courtroom
On 3 March 2014, the first day in the trial of Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius for the killing of law graduate and model Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa entered Courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, the courtroom used for high-profile cases involving intense security because it is closest to the exit. Riddled with severe arthritis, although this received little attention at the time, she sat on an orthopaedic chair during the trial, much smaller than the vast leather chairs of the two assessors on either side. Judge Masipa made her way across the courtroom slowly and haltingly, with greater difficulty than the defendant she was there to judge.1 According to one observer, Pistorius ‘strode’ up to the dock.2
Depending on your opinion of her final judgement, Judge Masipa was either uniquely qualified or unsuited to her task. She found Pistorius not guilty of murder, guilty of culpable homicide – the equivalent of manslaughter in Anglo-American law. When the judgement was overturned on appeal by the South African Supreme Court, she increased his sentence by one year, a decision which, like her original judgement, was described by the prosecutors as ‘shockingly lenient’ and greeted with widespread dismay (after a subsequent appeal by the prosecutors in November 2017, the sentence was doubled to thirteen years and five months, i.e. fifteen years minus time already served).3 Following her original verdict, Masipa had been the target of misogynistic and patronising vitriol; she was called ‘an incompetent black woman’, taunted with being ‘blind and deaf’ and required round-the-clock house protection from the court.4 Many of those accusing her spoke in the name of justice for women.
Judge Masipa was a latecomer to the law, undertaking her pupillage in her forties. Admitted as an advocate in 1991 as one of only three black women at the Johannesburg bar, she was appointed judge in the Transvaal Provincial Division of the High Court of South Africa in 1998, the second black woman to be appointed to the bench. Despite her rulings in the Pistorius case, Judge Masipa is known for the harsh maximum sentences she metes out in cases involving violence against women. In 2009, she gave a life sentence to a police officer who shot and killed his wife: ‘You deserve to go to prison for life,’ she said in her sentencing, ‘because you are not a protector, you are a killer.’5 In May 2013, she sentenced a serial rapist to 252 years – fifteen years on each of eleven counts of robbery, twelve years for attempted murder and life sentences for each of three rape charges. Judge Masipa knows about violence. Born in Soweto, she is from a family of ten children, four of whom died young, one of them stabbed to death by unknown perpetrators when he was twenty-one.
As with many characters in this tale, Judge Masipa’s life tracks violence from apartheid to its aftermath, uncovering the reality of South Africa’s hidden and unhidden crimes. She has, as one could say, done her time. She knows what it means to be on the wrong side of the law (even if the law itself in apartheid South Africa was wrong). In the 1970s she was a crime reporter for the World, a paper banned in 1977 by Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger with its staff detained. Before releasing the prisoners for a court appearance, four white court wardens demanded they clean out their toilets (they refused). In 1964, she had marched in protest with several female colleagues against the arrest of black male reporters from the white-owned newspaper the Post. When five of the women, including Masipa, were detained, locked in a cell and taken to court, they refused to enter a plea on the grounds that they did not recognise the authority of the apartheid state. At the Post, she had launched and headed a supplement on women.6
Judge Masipa is ‘compassionate’ – her word. She brings her history, the racial history of South Africa, into the court. You look at the law, she says in one interview, ‘with different eyes’, ‘because you’re compassionate.’ Faced with a black woman on trial, she continued, ‘you might make things easier for her by explaining things and not being too hard on her. But not everyone understands that.’7 Not everyone understands the racially inflected care which, as one of South Africa’s first black women judges, Masipa brings to the law. In another of her judgements she found in favour of a group of Johannesburg squatters on the grounds that the city had failed in its duty of care: the city, she said, was trying to ‘distance itself’ from the occupiers.8 ‘I sort of can identify with what these youngsters are going through,’ she has commented on young offenders who pass through her court, ‘because this is where I come from.’9 Just how remarkable this is can be gauged by comparison with the instruction given by Susan Shabangu, minister of mines at the time of the 2012 police massacre of thirty-four workers who were part of a strike for an increase in pay at the Marikana platinum mine. As deputy minister for security, she had said to a meeting of police officers the previous year on how to deal with offenders: ‘You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or your community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility.’10
Some have argued that Masipa’s compassion clouded her judgement: that she empathised too closely with Pistorius and his disability. Like a psychoanalyst, she should have put her feelings and preferences, even her own history, to one side (although it is arguable whether this is what a psychoanalyst can, or should, do). Throughout the trial, Masipa’s voice was steady, unlike that of the defendant, who fell apart and broke down at every turn. But what does it mean to talk of the still, calm voice of the law in conditions of rampant racial and sexual violence and inequality?
* * *
Every four minutes in South Africa a woman or girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – is reported raped and every three hours a woman is killed by her partner (the second figure, from a report of 2019, shows how fast this violence is accelerating, as it was every eight hours according to reports from the time of the Pistorius trial).11 The phenomenon has a name in South Africa: ‘intimate femicide’, or, as Margie Orford calls the repeated killing of women across the country, ‘serial femicide’. According to Cyril Ramaphosa, elected president in 2018, South Africa is ‘one of the most unsafe places in the world to be a woman’.12 On 2 February 2013, less than two weeks before Reeva Steenkamp was killed, Anene Booysen was raped and murdered in the Western Cape. If the two deaths are mentioned together it is mostly in terms of the cruel disparity between the neglected black woman’s body and that of her glamorous white counterpart (graveyard racism, we might say). Steenkamp saw things rather differently. For her, violence against women knew no racial bounds. A week after Booysen’s murder, she tweeted a report of her funeral, and posted on her Instagram feed a graphic of a man’s hand silencing a screaming woman with the words: ‘I woke up in a happy safe home this morning. Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals.’13
In the final year of her law degree, Steenkamp broke her back in a riding accident. On recovery, she returned to complete her degree and resolved to pursue her dream of becoming a model in the big city. ‘I believe’, she said in a blogsite interview, ‘I have the ability to fall back into my legal mind under the pressure of my will to succeed.’14 Her legal mind would always be there, even if on the surface she would start to look like and then be treated as a model and nothing else. The law would become the backdrop or invisible companion of her ambition, the joint riposte to a life that could have been – was nearly – spent in a wheelchair. This was not her first brush with brokenness. According to her cousin Kim Martin, at the sentencing of Pistorius (the only time during the whole tri
al that the Steenkamp family got to speak), when Reeva was a young girl, the family’s pet poodle became paralysed and was going to have to be put down. Reeva saved the dog, ‘became its legs’, as Martin put it, carrying the animal with her everywhere.15 Was Steenkamp prey to a fatal identification? Did her compassion for the underdog – ‘underdog’ literally in this case – play its part in what killed her? One of the most striking things about this trial is that wherever you look, you see bodies that are broken. Near the end of the trial, before the closing arguments, Pistorius’s elder brother, Carl, was involved in a head-on car collision which crushed both his legs below the knees – the link to his brother surely as glaring as it appeared to remain unspoken – leaving it unclear whether he would live or ever walk again. In fact, he recovered speedily enough to make it into the courtroom in a wheelchair in time for the verdict.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 22