THIRD WORLD LITERATURES:

A READER

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 The Third World: The Literature of Refusal
Dolores S. Feria

If a poet from another galaxy were suddenly to burst in on our planet, and if he has a well
developed sense of humor, he would find many things about our life and culture very
droll. Prominent among them would be the feverishness with which our literati codify the
writing of five or six cultural “mother” countries involving less than one third of humanity
and draw from them all the premises about fine writing without ever having the slightest
doubt that they are quite universal. It is this excluded two-thirds, many of whom cannot
read at all, which less read rules about writing, that we call the Third World.

Why Third World? For two thousand years the crude division of man into the civilized and
the barbarian seemed sufficient, and still is in certain quarters; although the more socially
aware have always seen through this fiction and would regard terms like the exploiters
and their numerous victims as a more accurate subdivision. That the term, Third World, is
largely a linguistic convenience, and a very fluid one at that, most would be forced to
agree. We are reminded of how obsolete anthologies of literature put on the shelves of
libraries about thirty years ago entitled, New World Writing. Today such a title might call
to mind Asia, Alaska, the South Pole, or even Australia, but certainly not the United States
or Latin America. Even today there are three basically divergent concepts about what the
Third World is and none of them centers around pure geography. Each of these views is a
different reaction to new forces which are changing old structures and attitudes, often
with cyclonic impact. While the term, Third World, may be a verbalism still in transit, the
spirit, like a fresh wind blowing across the literary threshold, is not.

The first framework, which appeared by the early 50’s, was a direct outgrowth of the first
successful socialist revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power
and the threat of new socialist states in Asia.
Its most articulate promoter was Joseph McCarthy during the heyday of the cold war
between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. with the CIA close at his heels. In a grouping system
which saw the world no longer in terms of regions but in terms of ideologies, the first or
“Free” World, was Senator McCarthy’s own domain, of course, where “Democracy” still
prevailed. The Second World was the communist world—and here again the term was quite
loaded, for no socialist state anywhere in the world feels that it is anywhere near the
communist goal. The Third World was the world of the uncommitted nations who could
still be rescued from the headlong plunge that the Soviet Union had taken or at best
neutralized in the now raging game of international dominoes. The term third force was
often used in conversation and it often meant regimes like India, which had proclaimed a
strict neutrality from both worlds. The literature of the Third World was the literature of
the Cold War and included such surprising items as poetry from Taiwan or short stories
which testified that American Negroes were head and shoulders above their tattered black
African brothers under American free enterprise system.

This Third World framework was the reaction of a First World on the defensive and was
frankly out to redivert entire regions back into the old order. The Cold War conception of
three worlds was soon replaced by a second view which was much more objective and
descriptive in its studies of the Third World.

The second grouping is a classification based largely on economic structures and political
economy, with capital investments, GNP, and types of economic parasitism determining

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the division between each world. Here the First World is the capitalist world, including the
former big powers, Japan, and members of the European Economic Community. The
Second, or the socialist world is one for whom GNP is not a meaningful statistics, and one
for whom dependency is no longer a major factor. China, Cuba, the USSR and newer small
socialist countries belong to the Second World. The Third World then consists of the
remaining poor nations who may have achieved political independence from former
colonial masters, but not economic autonomy and are among the most impoverished
nations in the world, and invariably the victims of domination in the cultural, economic
and political sphere.

The third grouping, which is the most heterogeneous, is on the basis of power capability
and similar national and cultural aspirations. This newest index places both the United
States and the Soviet Union, who together have masterminded space programs, achieved
undreamed of scientific advances, and together control the bulk of the world’s military
hardware, into the First World. Following them in the Second World power grouping would
be all the former European powers, the Eastern socialist countries, Canada, Japan, and
Australia. The Third World in this grouping includes the poor socialist countries who are
still in the belt tightening stage like China, Vietnam, Cuba, and all of Asia except Japan,
most of Africa, and all of Latin America.

Admittedly, I find this division of the three worlds the only cogent one as far as
understanding the directions in Third World literature is concerned; for the poet, the
vagaries of power have always been the stuff of the poetic vision. The unique thing about
this Third World is their growing sense of uniqueness. They do not wish to be absorbed
into the other two worlds and their sense of cohesiveness is constantly growing.
Multinational problems for them required multinational solutions and regional solidarity.

Included in this view of the Third World on the literary level would certainly be the
victims of what a group of Mexican sociologists call internal colonialism, or the
exploitation of natives by natives, like the American Negro, the Chicano, the Pinoy, and
what is left of the American Indian. Formal systems of political economy may find internal
colonialism a contradiction which is unacceptable, but not on the cultural and literary
level: not to the writer.

If there are Third World pockets in Harlem and Wounded Knee, there are also First World
pockets in every Third World urban center. In recognizing this we must make a distinction
between regional writing, a national literature, and Third World writing.

Consider, for example these excerpts from the two Filipino poets who were both born in
the same generation and were once geographically identical:

GHAZAL ON THE DEATH OF MY MAIDEN AUNT

Her green thumb conjured a garden without

lovers
And moonlight never stirred her unfermenting
blood.

All she knew of male spoor was a bumble of bees

Diving into a bed of prim and proper roses.

Yet little footfalls crossed turf like birds

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 And she gave amply, communicating love like
leaves.

Now as oils, attars, essences anoint the ghostly

air,
Her nephews gather ‘round — long and lean like
candles.

ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL

Because I found him giving his eyes away

To a dying relative who might have been my
father
He opened doors I had almost forgotten
And I explored obediently to my own sorrow.

He came with the face of my brother who died

In his private honor believing in words
Or promises of words that haunted me
And I took the face because it was mine too
But the passage was small for my sorrow
And the rooms were full of guns.

I rushed to the light and called for my comrades

I called for the saints and for one who was
beautiful
In the world where war was unknown and not
lonely
But he led me to the door of departure
And raised a hooked hand to take the eyes from
me
Those eyes that might have been mine or father’s
And surely I wanted to stay in that darkness
Where beauty of things is not the silence of
death.

Both of these writers come from the second poorest country in Asia, the Philippines, and
both have contributed to its national literature. But only the second writer interprets the
Third World with any awareness in either language or imagery. Another disparity is that
the first one remained physically in his Asian Third World society and should,
geographically, have truer insight. The second writer was a Pinoy who died on the West
Coast after twenty years in the United States as an expatriate, yet his consciousness is
consistently Third World.

In the following excerpt, language identity is asserted by the manipulation of Taglish:

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 SA POETRY

Sa poetry, you let things take shape,

Para bang nagpapatulo ng isperma sa tubig.

You start siempre with memories.

‘Yung medyo malagkit, kahit mais na mais: love
lost, dead dreams,
Rotten silences, and all
Manner of mourning basta’t murder.
Papatak yan sa papel, ano. Parang pait,
Kakagat ang typewriter keys.
You sit up like the mother of anxieities,
Worried na worried hanggang magsalakip
And oddas and ends ng inamag mong pag-ibig.
Pero sige and pasada ng images
Hanggang makuha perfectly ang trick...

Now let us contrast this kind of regional cuteness with the imagery of repression:

THE MASSACRE

Nine nights after the massacre

A man riding on a flaming horse
Galloped on the bull path,
Followed by naked, wounded men waving brown
banners
Of dried blood and muddy cloth
Woven by their patient no wake-weakened
women,
Now lashing themselves with novena of lament.

Nine nights before, the black men came,

the men in black uniform,
the imperious visitors
calling names,
Casting their commands from door to door,
Pulling down the fallen, from sleep, from bamboo
floor.
Gathering the strong like sheep
By the bayonet at the dead street
Fenced in with orderly figures eager for fame....

Again, the first writer may be physically in the Third World, but his poetic awareness in no
ways reflects it. So at the outset we must concede that there cannot be a road map to
chart the sojourns of the Third World writer. For above all, the Third World in literature
has ceased to be place. It is a point in the writer’s consciousness.

This is not to deny the socio-economic base for that consciousness or to negate the fact
that certain regions dominate Third World literature, but to stress that we are confronted
with a decolonizing world within a world and a polarized society. From Lagos to Manila,
the Third World has at least one over-congested city in which teeming urban slums are
realities which take second place to the chic districts where boutiques and shopping malls

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are exactly like those in New York or London and where cultural life is chiefly on
exhibition for the stranded denizens of the First and Second Worlds, both foreign and
native. Yet only a few kilometers away are the vast regions of the peasantry, where men
still haul their firewood in oxcarts and the women wash their clothes in the river. These
are the people of the Third World, not their sophisticated city cousins, or for that matter
the writer who repudiates this commonwealth of poverty. These two worlds can barely
communicate with each other, and when they do so it is most often on the terms of the
First World city pocket.

Pigmentation is not the decisive factor in Third World writing either. The black writer who
speaks to the First and Second Worlds always with visions of Nobel accolades dancing
through his head and succeeds in identifying himself only with the extensions of the First
and Second Worlds in his own society may be at the best be a national writer who speaks
about the Third World but never to the Third Worlds.

Humanistic Ferment

If consciousness is the primary index to the Third World writing and if we must be more
concerned with content than with form, consciousness of what, then, do we exactly mean?

In speaking for African writers after two years of lecturing at the University of the
Philippines, poet Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone calls it “a new humanism... the total
expression of those human and spiritual values of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin
America.” Cheney-Coker, like Leopold Senghor and Nkrumah, both heads of new African
states as well as writers, proclaim the humanism of a new symbiosis.
But this new humanism is less of an analysis of the merging society than a battlecry, as
Frantz Fanon first sounded it in 1961, when he urged the blanket repudiation of the
solutions of the First and Second Worlds: “It is a question of the Third World starting a
new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses
which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which
the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological
tearing apart of his functions and crumbling away of his unity.”

It is this humanistic ferment which I would term the literature of refusal which above all
characterizes the best writing of the Third World. Epifanio San Juan, a Third World writer
in exile, sees the problem metaphorically as the womb of the old dying system in which
the writer has a choice: he may be either the midwife of the new order, or its
executioner. The strangler of the Third World foetal possibility is rarely an intentional
criminal. In fact his sensibilities are shocked by violence, so he simply focuses his poetic
lens on the male spoor and scrupulously avoids the Maliwalu massacre or the long term
rape of his culture.

This is not to say that such executioners are bad poets. Indeed they are often talented,
bemedalled, and invariably recognized abroad. But their vision has a Third World blind
spot.

In point of time, Third World literature follows the October Revolution of 1917, although
the reader with a passion for thoroughness may go back centuries, for imperialism is not a
totally new phenomena. The anti-colonial writing of novels like the Noli or the bitter
appeals of poets like Ruben Dario, the Nicaraguan expatriate, who excoriated Theodore
Roosevelt’s view of progress as “wherever your bullet strikes,” are part of the process. But
historically, the factors that make the Third World a specific contemporary phenomenon
did not exist until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century.

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The father of Third World literature who also first sounded to its central theme, the new
humanism born of struggle, was Lu Hsun in “A Madman’s Diary” published in 1918. This
story, which also marks the beginning of modern literature in China, takes a somewhat
surrealist approach. It traces the crumbling of the writer’s sanity in discovering that his
brother had, in fact, eaten up his sister after she died, and would undoubtedly do the
same with him in the event of his death, and that for four thousand years cannibalism had
been a normal state for mankind, only by tacit consent was there a universal cover up.

How can a man like myself, after four thousand

years of man-eating history — even though I knew
nothing about it at first — ever hope to face real
men?
Perhaps there are still children who haven’t
eaten men. Save the children. . .

The appeal, “save the children!” incorporates not only the new humanism, but the central
Third World ingredient: that in fact mankind had consented to a gruesome choice either
outright or unwitting cannibalism. That the wealth and culture which distinguished the
modern concept of progress was the progress of vultures and cannibals, paid for by the
chronic misery and humiliation of two-thirds of the human species.

Shortly, Lu Hsun himself, a scholar in the old cannibalistic tradition, which in America is
called the Protestant Ethic, would continue the literature of refusal by teaming up with
the students outside the walls of Peking University with his own character poster: “Down
with the Old Literature! Up with the New!” Throughout his life he preferred to describe
himself as a rickshaw-puller. Shortly before Lu Hsun was murdered by the Kuomintang in
1936 along with other progressive Chinese writers he wrote the epitaph for a Third World
writer:

Fierce-browed I coolly defy a thousand pointing

fingers,
Head bowed, like a willing ox, I serve the
children.

Lu Hsun’s celebration of the four thousand year old lie is certainly the initial salvo in the
Third World literary sensibility, the first phase came to light only during the 60’s because
of the obscurantism of the Cold War, and when it did, surprisingly, it did not consist of
either Lin Yutang or Pearl Buck, both of whom are purely regionalists.

That Third World literary consciousness is not hereditary or easily acquired; it is traced
with some minuteness in the four volume autobiographical history of revolutionary change
in China by Han Suyin, beginning with The Crippled Tree. Her story is the story of the
development of the average Third World writer and that world of feudal, back breaking
labor which underwrites all her privileges. Han Suyin posits herself as the symbol of the
blunted vision of her generation, the smart set with their scrupulously colonial education
in foreign schools followed by long years of geographical exile away from the
backwardness of the homeland, completely unaware that only a few hours away from
Yenching University, millions of Chinese peasants had already risen in outright rebellion to
destroy the old order that consigned millions to death by famine every year while the
wealth of China was siphoned off to the far corners of the earth—some of it to finance
professorial chairs in foreign universities. This was China, a blind spot in the
consciousness of the world in the educated prejudices of Han Suyin who herself had to

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undergo decades of a painful and divisive process of rediscovery before she could move
easily into the Third World.

A second priority in the consciousness of the Third World writer is this perception of the
factors that have produced and prolonged this estrangement from the real people of the
Third World. Its initial phase is one of cultural reassertion on the racial and ethic level,
and often of aggressive nationalism. This phase shifted in the 30’s to the Carribean where
the Afro-Cuban rhythm of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen penetrated even into the harlem
Renaissance and in Martinique, the term “negritude” coined by the landmark of this
period, Aimee Cesaire’s magnificent Return to My Native Land, was to persist in centers in
Senegal and Nigeria for almost two decades.

Negritude is a blanked refusal to accept the values of the white man and to celebrate that
for which the white man has in the past shown contempt. The writer must first rip apart
all the historic half-truths of the First World historian, who could distort Egypt into a mere
Hellenic colony and debase the ancient empires of West Africa into mere points in the
triangle slave trade. The subjects of Negritude are often a joyous celebration of the
primitive, exotic natures, religious, and tribal rituals. At its best, Negritude reaffirms its
identity with the martyrs of the slave revolts as in Aimee Cesaires’ heroic apostrophe to
Toussaint Louverture:

This man is mine

a man alone, imprisoned by
whiteness
a man alone defying the white
cries of a white death
(Toussaint, Toussaint Louverture)
A man who fascinates the white
sparrow hawk of white death
a man alone in the sterile sea
of white sand
an old nigger standing upright against
the waters of the sky.
Death describes a shining circle above the man
death is a gentle star above his head
death, driven man, blowing in the ripe can
plantation of his arms
death, galloping through the prison like a white
horse...

At its worst Negritude becomes an innocuous “Black is Beautiful” sloganeering, as in the

works of surrealist Afro-American poets like Ted Joans:

So remember that JAZZ is my religion

but it can be your religion too but JAZZ is a truth
that is always black and blue
Hallelujah I love JAZZ
So Hallelujah I dig JAZZ
Yeah JAZZ IS MY RELIGION

Today contemporary Black African writers seem to have found Negritude as the
celebration of ancient cultural norms as something of a dead end. Perhaps because
Negritude is the one phase of Third World writing which the post colonial world could
always endorse most joyously. The racial celebration of man’s past identity, that twilight

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world of ancient poetry with its aura of mystery and exoticism never rocks the boat or
threatens any system. In fact it is often expropriated by the First and Second worlds as a
campy and exotic fad.

The Filipino writer has from time to time toyed with this phase in poems like R. Zulueta de
Costa’s Like the Molave or Romulo’s I Am A Filipino. This assertion of national identity still
occupies a large place in the USIS financed anthology where it can produce a charming,
but utter stalemate for the more mature ferment at work in the Third World. For it is
seldom polemical.

The third stage of Third World writing is the partisan stage. Here the solitary search is
abandoned once and for all, if it was ever taken seriously, for the writer has been swept
along with the gigantic new insight of the Third World citizen in the 70’s: he is huge. He
has power. This same discovery rocked the United Nations only a few years ago when 120
new countries proved that they could effectively out-vote any move of the former big
powers at the United Nations through a show of solidarity. Out of this sense of human
solidarity in suffering and deprivation has grown the literature of liberation. Even what is
left of Negritude ceases to be the mere celebration of non-whiteness. No more, as Frantz
Fanon points out—would the black slave lament be offered up for the admiration of the
oppressors.

Fighting Phase

The central theme moves decidedly left of center to the literature of liberation, where
decolonization is now seen as national liberation in an explicitly revolutionary sense. The
literature of refusal now ignites as a consciously contrived tinder.

This is an inevitable consequence of the factors that make up the Third World, for we
must not forget that the resurgence of Third World literature after 1917 was, in fact,
spawned by two historic national liberation struggles, one which succeeded and another
which failed: the October Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. The collapse of the
Republican armies in Spain in 1939 sent a flurry of literary exiles fleeing back to new
centers in Latin America like Buenos Aires, rather than Madrid or Barcelona. Among them
was Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poetic giant who testifies that the Spanish Civil war was
the turning point not only in his life but in his literary style. That powerful Peruvian Indian
sensibility that was Cesar Vallejo also left Europe for a time.

Gone now was the exoticism, the native rhythms, the Cuban jazz and the “pure” poetry
which people of all persuasions will read without prodding as the partisan literature of
political struggle emerged. Neruda was now completely preoccupied with writing Odes to
Washerwomen, to Dead Millionaires and a switchbladed bit of verse called The United
Fruit Company. Walt Whitman was his acknowledged idol and his poetry became defiantly
political as in:

THE DICTATORS
An odor has remained among the sugarcane;
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating petal
that brings nausea
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
Of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch

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 and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried
the weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
Whose seeds fall endless only the earth,
Whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
With snout full of ooze and silence.

In Los Angeles, Carlos Bulosan, from a hospital bed, was also deeply moved by the same
sense of solidarity with the bedraggled Spanish republicans and their lost cause. In
“Biography Between Wars” he speaks of those who are left to articulate and to defy
oppression:

. . .My husband died

in Teruel, she said, looking at the tenements.
I remember his laughter, I said, touching the
child.
He has his father’s dream to live, she said.
So long as the dream lives the death is dead, I
said...

The fighting phase of Third World literature which seldom equates Third World countries
with their governments, has proliferated since the 40’s. Pablo Neruda himself wrote some
of his best political poetry while fleeing on horseback across the Andes after being
charged with treason by the right-wing Chilean dictator, Gonzalez Vidala. From this
decade on we are less likely to find the Third World writer in exile in New York or Paris;
more often they are in prison or in hiding.

Somewhere in Asia, Ho Chi Minh scratches out his Prison Diary on frayed notes to be
hidden with cunning for a later time:

In front of the gate, the guard stands with his

rifle.
Above, untidy clouds are carrying away the moon.
The bedbugs are swarming round like army tanks on maneuvers,
While the mosquitoes form squadrons attacking
like fighter planes.
My heart travels a thousand Li toward my native
land.
My dream intertwines with sadness like skein of a
thousand threads.
Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in
prison.
Using my tears for ink, I turn my thought into
verses.

About the same time, emaciated, tattered Mao Tse Tung writes of Loushan Pass during the
historic Long March:
Fierce the west wind,
Wild geese cry under the frosty morning moon.
Under the frosty morning moon
Horses hooves clattering,

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 bugles sobbing low.

Idle boast the strong pass is a wall of iron,

With firm strides we are crossing its summit.
We are crossing its summit.
The rolling hills sea-blue,
The dying sun blood-red.

Somewhere in a Portuguese jail, Agostinho Neto was writing of Angola and home:

We the naked children of the bush sansalas

Unschooled urchins who play with balls of rags
On the noonday plains
ourselves
hired to burn out our lives in coffee fields
ignorant black men
who must respect the whites
and fear the rich
we are you children of the native quarters
which the electricity never reaches
men dying drunk
abandoned to the rhythm of death’s tom-tom
Your children
who hunger
who thirst
who are ashamed to call you mother
who are afraid to cross the streets
who are afraid of men.

It is ourselves
The hope of life recovered.

In Muntinglupa, Amado Hernandez was recording his testament for a new generation who
no longer remembered the fifties:

I was imprisoned in a cruel fort

of stone, steel, bullet, fierceness of the guard;
completely removed from the moving world
and, though still alive, considered dead . . .

In South Africa, novelist Doris Lessing had already been deported from Rhodesia. While in
Johannesburg, two novels of Nadine Gordimer had been banned from publication along
with 8,000 other titles which included Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom, Congo, My Country
by Patrice Lamumba, Jean Paul Sartre’s On Cuba, and even Gorky’s Mother.

In the Philippines, an article “The Peasant War in the Philippines” and another, “Homage
to Lamumba” triggered a red witch hunt at the University of the Philippines in the 60’s.

In Nigeria, playwright Wole Soyinka, who had defended the Ibos in the violent civil war of
1967 was in solitary a stinking cell in Kaduna where he constructed his powerful prison
opus, The Man Died; within a few hours of his release, Soyinka enplaned to London into
permanent exile.

In Seoul today, poet Kim Chi Ha waits for the execution of his death sentence for violating
the national security law and writes:

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 Following the vivid blood, blood on the yellow
road
I am going, Father, where you died.
Now it’s pitch dark, only the sun scorches.
Hands are barbed-wired.
The hot sun burns sweet and tears and rice
paddies
Under the bayonets through the summer heat.
I am going, Father, where you died,
Where you died wrapped in a rice-sack
When the trouts were jumping along the Pujun
brookside...

Participator and Interpreter

That the third phase in the consciousness of the Third World writer is embodied in
these new myths, the new objective correlative for Third World writing in our time which
sees the writer as participator as well as interpreter is now apparent.

The Philippines has as yet few writers who have consistently opted for the recognizable
point in consciousness that we recognize as Third World. We find a poem here, a play
there, a few short stories, S.P. Lopez’s Literature and Society, but on the whole most
writing is dictated by the values of the First and Second Worlds and voiced for their
consumption. Exceptions would be Amado Hernandez, Carlos Bulosan and many of the new
breed writers in Pilipino.

Indeed the Third World writer now functions as the midwife of the new humanism, but it
is the humanism of the dispossessed. Lu Hsun’s vehement “save the children!” still
motivates the fighting literature which the last phase of Third World writing must logically
become. The writer has become the collective unconscious of the two thirds of mankind
who live in deprived villages and ghettos and have seen the spectre of liberation
throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. While the writer begins with his own national
mold, it soon becomes too cramped for him. When he is black, he is black from Harlem to
Johannesburg; he is brown from Palestine to Bontoc; he is both Bantu and Afrikaner; he is
Chinese and New Zealander; he is Peruvian Indian and Creole. This diverse blend of race,
culture, language, scientific acumen and literary insight merge into one overwhelming
passion. By the late 70’s the third World has achieved a sense of its own identity; its
dream is no longer diffusion into the First and Second Worlds, if it ever was. For, like its
writing, the Third World has now evolved into the polemical sphere of outright refusal: the
refusal to take seriously the solutions of the First and Second Worlds; the refusal to take
seriously the aesthetics of the privileged where poems and novels are for people who read
them with full stomachs; and who dismiss the Third World writer’s confrontation with the
hard facts of his world as “propaganda”; and above all the refusal to accept the freaked
out cynicism of the over-developed world. For the literature of refusal is the testament of
a new faith.

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 Karma
Khushwant Singh

Sir Mohan Lal looked at himself in the mirror of a first-class waiting room at the railway
station. The mirror was obviously made in India. The red oxide at its back had come off at
several places and long lines of translucent glass cut across its surface. Sir Mohan smiled
at the mirror with an air of pity and patronage.

“You are so very much like everything else in this country — inefficient, dirty,
indifferent,” he murmured.

The mirror smiled back at Sir Mohan.

“You are a bit of all right, old chap,” it said. “Distinguished, efficient — even
handsome. That neatly trimmed mustache, the suit from Saville Row with the carnation in
the button hole, the aroma of eau de cologne, talcum powder, and scented soap all about
you! Yes, old fellow, you are a bit of all right.”
Sir Mohan threw out his chest, smoothed his Balliol tie for the umpteenth time, and
waved a goodbye to the mirror.
He glanced at his watched. There was still time for a quick one.

“Koi hai?”

A bearer in white livery appeared through a wire-gauze door.

“Ek chota,” ordered Sir Mohan, and sank into a large cane to drink and ruminate.
Outside the waiting room Sir Mohan Lal’s luggage lay piled along the wall. On a small
gray steel trunk, Lachmi, Lady Mohan Lal, sat chewing a betel leaf and fanning herself
with a newspaper. She was short and fat and in her middle forties. She wore a dirty white
sari with a red border. On one side of her nose glistened a diamond nose ring, and she had
several gold bangles on her arms. She had been talking to the bearer until Sir Mohan had
summoned him inside. As soon as he had gone, she hailed a passing railway coolie.
“Where does the zenana stop?”

“Right at the end of the platform.”

The coolie flattened his turban to make a cushion, hoisted the steel trunk on his head, and
moved down the platform. Lady Lal picked up her brass tiffin carrier and ambled along
behind him. On the way she stopped by a hawker’s stall to replenish her silver betel-leaf
case, and then joined the coolie. She sat down on her steel trunk (which the coolie had
put down) and started talking to him.

“Are the trains very crowded on these lines?”

“These days all trains are crowded, but you’ll find room in the zenana.”
“Then I might as well get over the bother of eating.”

Lady Lal opened the brass carrier and took out a bundle of cramped chapattis and some
mango pickle. While she ate, the coolie sat opposite her on his haunches, drawing lines in
the gravel with his finger.

13
 “Are you traveling alone, sister?”

“No, I am with my master, brother. He is in the waiting room. He travels first class. He
is a vizier and a barrister, and meets so many officers and Englishmen in the trains — and I
am only a native woman. I can’t understand English and don’t know their ways, so I keep
to my zenana interclass.”

Lachmi chatted away merrily. She was fond of a little gossip and had no one to talk to
at home. Her husband never had any time to spare for her. She lived in the upper story of
the house and he on the ground floor. He did not like her poor, illiterate relatives hanging
about his bungalow, so they never came. He came up to her once in a while at night and
stayed for a few minutes. He just ordered her about in anglicized Hindustani, and she
obeyed passively. These nocturnal visits had, however, borne no fruit.

The signal came down and the clanging of the bell announced the approaching train.
Lady Lal hurriedly finished off her meal. She got up, still licking the stone of the pickled
mango. She emitted a long, loud belch as she went to the public tap to rinse her mouth
and wash her hands. After washing, she dried her mouth and hands with the loose end of
the sari, and walked back to her steel trunk, belching and thanking the gods for the favor
of a filling meal.

The train steamed in. Lachmi found herself facing an almost empty interclass zenana
compartment next to the guard’s van: at the tail end of the train. The rest of the train
was packed. She heaved her squat, bulky frame through the door and found a seat by the
window. She produced a two-anna bit from a knot in her sari and dismissed the coolie. She
then opened her betel case and made herself two betel leaves charged with a red-and-
white paste, minced betel-nuts, and cardamoms. These she thrust into her mouth till her
cheeks bulged on both sides. Then she rested her chin on her hands and sat gazing idly at
the jostling crown on the platform.

The arrival of the train did not disturb Sir Mohan Lal’s sangfroid. He continued to sip his
Scotch and ordered the bearer to tell him when he had moved the luggage to a firstclass
compartment. Excitement, bustle, and hurry were exhibitions of bad breeding, and Sir
Mohan was eminently well-bred. He wanted everything “tickety-boo” and orderly. In his
five years abroad, Sir Mohan had acquired the manners and attitudes of the upper classes.
He rarely spoke Hindustani. When he did, it was like an Englishman’s — only the very
necessary words and properly anglicized. But he fancied his English, finished and refined
at no less a place than the University of Oxford. He was fond of conversation, and like a
cultured Englishman, he could talk on almost any subject — books, politics, people. How
frequently had he heard English people say that he spoke like an Englishman!

Sir Mohan wondered if he would be traveling alone. It was a cantonment and some
English officers might be on the train. His heart warmed at the prospect of an impressive
conversation. He never showed any sign of eagerness to talk to the English, as most
Indians did. Nor was he loud, aggressive, and opinionated like them. He went about his
business with an expressionless matter-of-factness. He would retire to his corner by the
window and get out a copy of The Times. He would fold it in a way in which the name of
the paper was visible to others while he did the crossword puzzle. The Times always
attracted attention. Someone would like to borrow it when he put it aside with a gesture
signifying “I’ve finished with it.” Perhaps someone would recognize his Balliol tie, which
he always wore while traveling. That would open a vista leading to a fairyland of Oxford
colleges, masters, dons, tutors, boat races, and Rugger matches. If both The Times and
the tie failed, Sir Mohan would “Koi hai” his bearer to get the Scotch out. Whisky never

14
failed with Englishmen. Then followed Sir Mohan’s handsome gold cigarette case filled
with English cigarettes. English cigarettes in India? How on earth did he get them? Sure he
didn’t mind? And Sir Mohan’s understanding smile — of course he didn’t. But could he use
the Englishmen as a medium to commune with his dear old England? Those five years of
gray bags and gowns, of sports blazers and mixed doubles, of dinners at the Inns of Court
and nights with Picadilly prostitutes. Five years in India with his dirty, vulgar countrymen,
with sordid details of the road to success, of nocturnal visits to the upper story and all-
too-brief sexual acts with obese old Lachmi, smelling of sweat and raw onions.

Sir Mohan’s thoughts were disturbed by the bearer’s announcing the installation of the
sahib’s luggage in a firstclass coupe next to the engine. Sir Mohan walked to his coupe
with a studied gait. He was dismayed. The compartment was empty. With a sigh, he sat
down in a corner and opened the copy of The Times he had read several times before.

Sir Mohan looked out of the window down the crowded platform. His face lit up as he
saw two English soldiers trudging haver-sacks slung behind their backs, and walked
unsteadily. Sir Mohan decided to welcome them, even though they were entitled to travel
only second class. He would speak to the guard.

One of the soldiers came up to the last compartment and stuck his face through the
window. He surveyed the compartment and noticed the unoccupied berth.

“’Ere Bill” he shouted. “One ‘ere.”

His companion came up, also looked in, and looked at Sir Mohan.

“Get the nigger out,” he muttered to his companion.

They opened the door, and turned to the half-smiling, half-protesting Sir Mohan.

“Reserved!” yelled Bill.

“Jan’a — reserved. Army — fauji,” exclaimed Jim, pointing to his khaki shirt.
“Ek dum jao — get out!”

“I say, I say, surely,” protested Sir Mohan in his Oxford accent.

The soldiers paused. It almost sounded like English, but they knew better than to trust
their inebriated ears. The engine whistled and the guard waved his green flag.
They picked up Sir Mohan’s suitcase and flung it onto the platform. Then followed his
thermos flask, bedding, and The Times. Sir Mohan was livid with rage.

“Preposterous, preposterous,” he shouted, hoarse with anger. “I’ll have you arrested.
Guard, guard!”

Bill and Jim paused again. It did sound like English, but it was too much of the King’s
for them.

“Keep yer ruddy mouth shut!” And Jim struck Sir Mohan flat on the face.

The engine gave another short whistle and the train began to move. The soldiers caught
Sir Mohan by the arms and flung him out of the train. He reeled backward, tripped on his
bedding, and landed on the suitcase.

“Toodle-oo!”

15
 Sir Mohan’s feet were glued to the earth and he lost his speech. He stared at the
lighted windows of the train going past him in quickening tempo. The tailend of the train
appeared with a red light and the guard, standing in the open doorway with flags in his
hands.

In the interclass zenana compartment was Lachmi, fair and fat, on whose nose the
diamond ring glistened against the station lights. Her mouth was bloated with betel saliva
that she had been storing up to spit as soon as the train had cleared the station. As the
train sped past the lighted part of the platform, Lady Lal spat and send a jet of red
dribble flying across like a dart.

16
 And We Sold the Rain
Carmen Naranjo

“This is a royal fuck-up,” was all the treasury minister could say a few days ago as he got
out of the jeep after seventy kilometers of jouncing over dusty rutted roads and muddy
trails. His advisor agreed: there wasn’t a cent in the treasury, the line for foreign
exchange was wound four times around the capital, and the IMF was stubbornly insisting
the country could expect no more loans until the interest had been paid up, public
spending curtailed, salaries frozen, domestic production increased, imports reduced, and
social programs cut.

The poor were complaining. “We can’t even buy beans—they’ve got us living on radish
tops, bananas and garbage; they raise our water bills but don’t give us any water even
though it rains every day, and on top of that they add on a charge for excess consumption
for last year, even though there wasn’t any water in the pipes then either.”

“Doesn’t anyone in this whole goddamned country have an idea that could get us out of
this?” asked the president of the republic, who shortly before the elections, surrounded by
a toothily smiling, impeccably tailored meritocracy, had boasted that by virtue of his
university-trained mind (Ph.D. in developmental economics) he was the best candidate.
Someone proposed to him that he pray to La Negrita; he did and nothing happened.
Somebody else suggested that he reinstate the Virgin of Ujarrás. But after so many years
of neglect, the pretty little virgin had gone deaf and ignored the pleas for help, even
though the entire cabinet implored her, at the top of their lungs, to light the way to a
better future and happier tomorrow.

The hunger and poverty could no longer be concealed: the homeless, pockets empty, were
squatting in the Parque Central, the Parque Nacional, and the Plaza de la Cultura. They
were camping along Central and Second Avenues and in a shantytown springing up on the
plains outside the city. Gangs were the threatening to invade the national theater, the
Banco Central, and all nationalized banking headquarters. The Public Welfare Agency was
rationing rice and bans as if they were medicine. In the marketplace, robberies increased
to one per second, and homes were burgled at the rate of one per half hour. Business and
government were sinking in sleaze; drug lords operated uncontrolled, and gambling was
institutionalized in order to launder dollars and attract tourists. Strangely enough, the
prices of a few items went down: whiskey, caviar and other such articles of conspicuous
consumption.

The sea of poverty that was engulfing cities and villages contrasted with the growing
number of Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and a whole alphabet of trade names of gleaming new
cars.

The minister announced to the press that the country was on the verge of bankruptcy.
The airlines were no longer issuing tickets because so much money was owed them, and
travel became impossible; even official junkets were eliminated. There was untold
suffering of civil servants suddenly unable to travel even once a month to the great cities
of the world! A special budget might be the solution, but tax revenues were nowhere to be
found, unless a compliant public were to go along with the president’s brilliant idea of
levying a tax on air—a minimal tax, to be sure, but after all, the air was a part of the
government’s patrimony. Ten colones per breath would be a small price to pay.

17
July arrived, and one afternoon a minister without portfolio and without umbrella,
noticing that it had started to rain, stood watching people run for cover. “Yes,” he
thought, “here it rains like it rains in Comam like it rains in Macondo. It rains day and
night, rain after rain, like a theater with the same movie, sheets of water. Poor people
without umbrellas, without a change of clothes, they get drenched, people living in leaky
houses, without a change of shoes for when they’re shipwrecked. And here, all my poor
colleagues with colds, all the poor deputies with laryngitis, the president with that
worrisome cough, all this on top of the catastrophe itself. No TV station is broadcasting;
all of them are flooded, along with the newspaper plants and the radio stations. A people
without news is a lost people, because they don’t know that everywhere else or almost
everywhere else, things are even worse. I few could only export the rain,” thought the
minister.

Meanwhile, the people, depressed by the heavy rains, the dampness, the lack of news, the
cold, and their hunger and despair without their sitcoms and soap operas, began to rain
iside and to increase the baby population—that is, to try to increase the odds that one of
their progeny might survive. A mass of hungry, naked babies began to cry in concert every
time it rained.

When one of the radio transmitters was finally repaired, the president was able to
broadcast a message: He had inherited a country so deeply in debt that I could no longer
obtain credit and could no longer afford to pay either the interest or the amortization on
loans. He had to dismiss civil servants, suspend public works, cut off services, close
offices, and spread his legs somewhat to transnationals. Now even these lean cows were
dying; the fat ones were on the way, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund, the
AID and the IDB, not to mention the EEC. The great danger was that the fat cows had to
cross over the neighboring country on their way, and it was possible that they would be
eaten up—even though they came by air, at nine thousand feet above the ground, in a first
class stable in a pressurized, air-conditioned cabin. Those neighbors were simply not to be
trusted.

The fact was that the government had faded in the people’s memory. By now no one
remembered the names of the president or his ministers; people remembered them as
“the one with glasses who thinks he’s Tarzan’s mother,” or “the one who looks like the
baby hog someone gave me when times were good, maybe a little uglier.”

The solution came from the most unexpected source. The country had organized the Third
World contest to choose “Miss Underdeveloped,” to be elected, naturally, from the
multitudes of skinny, dusky, round-shouldered, short-legged, half-bald girls with cavity-
pocked smiles, girls suffering from parasites and God knows what else. The prosperous
Emirate of the Emirs sent its designee, who in sheer amazement at how it rained and
rained, widened her enormous eyes—fabulous eyes of harem and Koran delights—and was
unanimously elected reigning Queen of Underdevelopment. Lacking neither eyeteeth nor
molars, she was indeed the fairest of the fair. She returned in a rush to the Emirate of the
Emirs, for she had acquired with unusual speed, a number of fungal colonies that were
taking over the territory under her toenails and fingernails, behind her ears, and on her
left cheek.

“Oh, Father Sultan, my lord, lord of the moons and of the suns, if your Arabian highness
could see how it rains and rains in that country, you would not believe it. It rains day and
night. Everything is green, even the people; they are green people, innocent and trusting,
who probably have never even thought about selling their most important resource, the
rain. The poor fools think about coffee, rice, sugar, vegetables, and lumber, and they hold

18
Ali Baba’s treasure in their hands without even knowing it. What we would give to have
such abundance!”

Sultan Abun dal Tol let her speak and made her repeat the part about the rain from
dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, for months on end. He wanted to hear over and over about
that greenness that was forever turning greener. He loved to think of it raining and
raining, of singing in the rain, of showers bringing forth flowers.

A long distance phone call was made to the office of the export minister wasn’t in. The
trade minister grew radiant when Sultan Abun dal Tol, warming to his subject, instructed
him to buy up rain and construct an aqueduct between their countries to fertilize the
desert. Another call. Hello, am I speaking with the country of rain, not the rain of
marijuana or cocaine, not that of laundered dollars, but the rain that falls naturally from
the sky and makes the sandy desert green? Yes, yes, you are speaking with the export
minister and we are willing to sell you our rain. Of course, its production costs us nothing;
it is a resource as natural to us as your petroleum. We will make you a fair and just
agreement.

The news filled five columns during the dry season, when obstacles like floods and
dampness could be overcome. The president himself made the announcement: We will sell
rain at ten dollars per cc. The price will be reviewed every ten years. Sales will be
unlimited. With the earnings we will regain our independence an our self-respect.

The people smiled. A little less rain would be agreeable to everyone, and the best part
was not having to deal with the six fat cows, who were more than a little oppressive, the
IMF, the World Bank, the AID. The Embassy, the International Development Bank and
perhaps the EEc would stop pushing the cows on them, given the danger that they might
be stolen in the neighboring country, air-conditioned cabin, first class stable and all.
Moreover one couldn’t count on those cows really being fat, since accepting them meant
increasing all kinds of taxes, especially those on consumer goods, lifting import
restrictions, spreading one’s legs completely open to the transnationals, paying the
interest, which was now a little higher, and amortizing the debt that was increasing at a
rate that was only comparable to the spread of an epidemic. And as if this were not
enough, it would be necessary to structure the cabinet a certain way, as some ministers
were viewed by some legislators as potentially dangerous, as extremists.

The president added with demented glee, his face garlanded in sappy smiles, that French
technicians, those guardians of European meritocracy, would build the rain funnels and
the aqueduct, a guarantee of honesty, efficiency, and effective transfer of technology.

By then we had already sold, to our great disadvantage, the tuna, the dolphins, the
thermal dome, along with the forests and all Indian artifacts. Also our talent, dignity,
sovereignty, and the right to traffic in anything and everything illicit.

The first funnel was located on the Atlantic coast, which in a few months looked worse
than the dry Pacific. The first payment from the emir arrived—in dollars!—and the country
celebrated with a week’s vacation. A little more effort was needed… Another funnel was
added in the north and one more in the south. Both zones immediately dried up like
raisins. The checks did not arrive. What happened? The IMF garnished them for interest
payments. Another effort: a funnel was installed in the center of the country; where
formerly it had rained and rained. It now stopped raining forever, which paralyzed brains,
altered behavior, changed the climate, defoliated the corn, destroyed the coffee,
poisoned aromas, devastated canefields, dessicated palm trees, ruined orchards, razed

19
truck gardens, and narrowed faces, making people look like rats, ants, and cockroaches,
the only animals left alive in large numbers.

To remember what we once had been, people circulated photographs of an enormous oasis
with great plantations, parks, and animal sanctuaries fullmof butterflies and flockes of
birds, at the bottom of which was printed, “Come and visit us. The Emirate of Emirs is a
paradise.”

The first one to attempt it was a good awimmer who took the precaution of carrying
food and medicine. Then a whole family left, then whole villages, large and small. The
population dropped considerably. One fine day there was nobody left, with the exception
of the president and his cabinet. Everyone else, even the deputies, followed the rest by
opening the coverof the aqueduct and floating all the way to the cover at the other end,
doorway to the Emirate of the emirs.

In that country we were second class citizens, something we were already accustomed to.
We lived in a ghetto. We got work because we knew about coffee, sugar cane, cotton,
fruit trees, and truck gardens. In a short time we were happy and felt as if these things
too were ours, or at the very least, that the rain still belonged to us.

A few years passed; the price of oil began to plunge and plunge. The emir asked for a
loan, then another, then many; eventually he had to beg and beg for money to service the
loans. The story sounds all too familiar. Now the IMF has taken possession of the
aqueducts. They have cut off the water because of a default in payments because the
sultan had the bright idea of receiving as a guest of honor a representative of that country
that is the neighbor of ours.

Translated by Jo Anne Engelbert

20
 Resurrection
Richard Rive

And still the people sang. And one by one,the voices joined in and the volume rose.
Tremulously at first, thin and tenuous, and ten swelling till it filled the tiny dining room,
pulsated into the two bedrooms, stacked high ith hts and overcoats, and spent itself in the

Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee…

they began the second verse. The fat woman had sufficiently recovered to attempt to add
a tremulous contralto. The boy in the Eton collar laboriously followed the line with his
finger. Mavis vaguely recognized Rosie as she fussily hurried in with a tray of fresh flowers,
passed a brief word with an overdressed woman nearest the door, and busily hurried out
again. Mavis sensed things happening but saw without seeing and felt without feeling.
Nothing registered, but she could feel the old woman’s presence, could feel the room
becoming her dead mother, becoming full of Ma, swirling with Ma. Ma of the gnarled hands
and frightened eyes.

Those eyes that had asked questioningly, “Mavis, why do they treat me so? Please,
Mavis, why do they treat me so?”

And Mavis had known the answer and had felt the anger well up inside her, till her
mouth felt hot and raw. And she had spat out at the Old-Woman, “Because you’re
coloured! You’re coloured, Ma, but you gave birth to white children. White children, Ma,
white children!

Mavis felt dimly aware that the room was overcrowded, overbearingly overcrowded,
hot, stuffy, crammed, overflowing. And of course, Ma, Squezzed in. Occupying a tiny place
in the centre. Pride of place in a coffin of pinewood which bore the economical legend,

Maria Loupser
1889-1961
R.I.P.

Rest in peace. With people crowding around and sharing seats and filling the doorway. And
Ma had been that Maria Loupser who must now rest in peace. Maria Loupser. Maria
Wilhelmina Loupser. Mavis looked up quickly, to see if the plaque was really there, then
automatically shifted her gaze to her broken nail.No one noticed her self-absorption, and
the singing continued uninterruptedly:

Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee…

Flowers. Hot oppressive, oppressive smell of flowers. Flowers, death and the people
singing. A florid, red-faced man in the doorway singing so that his veins stood out purple
against the temples. People bustling in and out. Fussily. Coming to have a look at Ma. A
last look at Ma. To put a flower in the coffin for Ma. Then opening hymn books and singing
a dirge for Ma. Poor deceived Ma of the tragic eyesa and twisted hands who had given
birth to White children, and Mavis. Now they have raised their voices and sang for Ma.

21
 Leave, ah leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me…

And it had only been a month earlier when Mavis had looked into those bewildered eyes.

“Mavis, why do they treat me so?”

And Mavis had become angry so that her saliva had turned hot in her mouth.

“Please, Mavis, why do they treat me so?”

And then she had driven the words into the Old-Woman with a skewer.
“Because you are old and black, and your children want you out of the way.”

And yet what Mavis wanted to add was:

“They want me out of the way too, Ma, because you made me black like you. I am also
your child, Ma. I belong to you. They also want me to stay in the kitchen and use the back
door. We must not be seen, Ma, their friends must not see us. We embarrass them, Ma, so
they hate us. They hate us because we’re black. You and me, Ma.”

But she had not said so, and had only stared cruelly into the eye of the Old-Woman.
“You’re no longer useful, Ma. You’re a nuisance, a bloody nuisance, a bloody black
nuisance. You might come out of your kitchen and shock the white scum they bring here.
You’re a bloody nuisance, Ma.”

But still the Old-Woman could not understand, and looked helplessly at Mavis.
“But I don’t want to go in the dining room. It’s true, Mavis, I don’t want to go in the
dining room.” And as she spoke the tears flooded her eyes and she whimpered like a child
who had lost a toy. “It’s my dining room, Mavis, it’s true. It’s my dining room.”

And Mavis had felt a dark and hideous pleasure overwhelming her so that she screamed
hysterically at the Old-Woman, “You’re black and your bloody children’s white. Jim and
Rosie and Sonny are white, white, white! And you made me. You made me black!”

Then Mavis had broken down exhausted at her self-revealing and her cried like a baby.
“Ma, why did you make me black?”

And then only had a vague understanding strayed into those milky eyes, and Ma had
taken her youngest into her arms and rocked and soothed her. And crooned to her in a
cracked, broken voice the songs she had sung years before she had come to Cape Town.

Slaap, my kindjie, slap sag,

Onder engele vannag…

And the voice of the Old-Woman had become stronger and more perceptive as her dull
eyes saw her childhood, and the stream running through Wolfgat, and the broken-down
church, and the moon rising in the direction of Solitaire.

And Ma had understood and rocked Mavis in her arms like years before. And now Ma was
back in the dining room as shadows crept across the wall…

22
 Abide with me , fast falls the eventide…

Shadows creeping across the room. Shadows grey and deep. As deep as Ma’s ignorance.

The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide…

Shadows filtering through the drawn blind. Rosie tight-lipped and officious. Sonny. Jim
who had left his white wife at home. Pointedly ignoring Mavis: speaking in hushed tones to
the florid man in the doorway. Mavis, a small inconspicupus brown figure in the corner.
The only other brown face in the crowded dining room besides Ma. Even the Old-Woman
was paler in death. Ma’s friends in the kitchen. A huddled, frightened group around the
stove.

“Mavis, why do they tell my friends not to visit me?”

And Mavis had shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

“Please, Mavis, why do they tell my friends not to visit me?”

And Mavis had turned on her. “Do you want Soufie with her black skin to sit in the
dining room? Or Oukaar with his kroeskop? Or Eva or Leuntjie? Do you want Sonny’s wife to
see them? Or the white dirt Rosie picks up? Do you want to shame your children? Humiliate
them? Expose their black blood?”

And the Old-Woman had blubbered, “I only want my friends to visit me. They can sit in
the kitchen.”

And Mavis had sighed helplessly at the simplicity of the doddering Old-Woman and felt
like saying, “And what of my friends, my coloured friends? Must they also sit in the
kitchen?”

And tears had shot into those milky eyes and the mother had even looked older.
“Mavis, I want my friends to visit me, even if they sit in the kitchen. Please, Mavis,
they’re all I got.”

And now Ma’s friends sat in the kitchen, a cowed timid group round the fire, speaking
the raw guttural Afrikaans of the Caledon district. They spoke of Ma and their childhood
together. Ou Kaar and Leuntjie and Eva and Ma. Of the Caledon district, cutoff from
bustling Capetown. Where the Moravian Mission Church was crumbling, and the sweet
water ran past Wolfgat, and past Karwyderskraal, and lost itself near Grootkop. And the
moon rose rich and yellow from the hills behind Solitaire. And now they sat frightened and
huddled round the stove, speaking of Ma. Tant Soufie ina new kopdoek , and Ou Kaaar
conspicuous in borrowed yellow shoes, sizes too small. And Leuntjie and Eva.

And in the dining room sat Dadda’s relations, singing. Dadda’s friends who had ignored
Ma when she had lived. Dadda’s white friends and relations, and a glossy-eyed Mavis, a
Mavis who scratched meaninglessly at her broken thumbnail. And now the singing rose in
volume as still more people filed in.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me…

they sang to the dead woman.

23
 Mavis could have helped Ma, could have given the understanding she needed, could
have protected Ma, have tried to stop the petty tyranny. But she had never tried to reason
with them. Rosie, Sonny, and Jim. She had never pleaded with them, explained to them
that the Old-Woman was dying. Her own soul ate her up. Gnawed her inside. She was
afraid of their reactions should they notice her. Preferred to play a shadow, seen but
never heard. A vague entity, part of the furniture. If only they could somehow be aware of
her emotions. The feelings bottled up inside her, the bubbling volcano below. She was
afraid they might openly say, “Why don’t you both clear out and leave us in peace, you
bloody black bastards?” She could then have cleared out, should then have cleared out,
sought a room in Woodstock or Salt River and forgotten her frustration. But there was Ma.
There was the Old-Woman. Mavis had never spoken to them, but had vented her spleen on
her helpless mother.

“You sent them to a white school. You were proud of your white brats and hated e
didn’t you?”

And the mother had stared with ox-like dumbness.

“You encouraged them to bring their friends to the house, to your house, and told me
to stay in the kitchen. And you had a black skin yourself. You hated me, Ma, hated me!
And now they’ve pushed you into the kitchen. There’s no one to blame but you. You’re
the cause of all this.”

And she had tormented the Old-Woman who could not retaliate. Who could not
understand. Now she sat tortured with memories as they sang hymns for Ma.

The room assumed a sepulchral atmosphere. Shadows deepening, grey then darker.
Tears, flowers, handkerchiefs, and, dominating everything, the simple bewildered eyes of
Ma, bewildered even in death. So Mavis had covered them with two pennies, that others
might not see.

I need Thy presence every passing hour…

sang Dadda’s eldest brother , who sat with eyes tightly shut near the head of the coffin.
He had bitterly resented Dadda’s marriage to a coloured woman. Living in sin! A Loupser
married to a Hottentot! He had boasted of his refusal to greet Ma socially while she lived,
and he had attended the funeral only because his brother’s wife had died. This was the
second time he had been in the dining room. The first time was Dada’s funeral. And now
this. A coloured girl, his niece he believed, sitting completely out of place and saying
nothing. Annoying, most annoying.

What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power…

Sang the boy in the Eton collar, whose mother had not yet quite recovered from the shock
that Mr. Loupser had had a coloured wife. All sang, except Mavis, torturing herself with
memories.

“I am going to die, Mavis,” those milky eyes had told her a week before, “I think I am
going to die.”

“Ask your white brats to bury you. You slaved for them.”

“They are my children but they do not treat me right.”

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 “Do you know why? Shall I tell you why?” And she had driven home every word with an
ugly ferocity. “Because they are ashamed of you. Afraid of you, afraid the world might
know of their coloured mother.”

“But I did my best for them.”

“You did more than your best, you encouraged them, but you were ashamed of me,
weren’t you? So now we share a room at the back where we can’t be seen. And you are
going to die, and your white children will thank God that you’re out of the way.”

“They are your brothers and sisters, Mavis.”

“What’s that you’re saying?” Mavis gasped, amazed at the hypocrisy. “What’s that? I
hate them and I hate you!”

And the Old-Woman had whispered, “But you are my children, you are all my
children. Please, Mavis, don’t let me die so.”

“You will die in the backroom and will be buried from the kitchen.”

But they had not buried her from the kitchen. They had removed the table from the
dining room and had borrowed chairs from the neighbours. And now while they waited for
the priest from Dadda’s church, they sang hymns.

Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee…

sang the boy in the Eton collar.

In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

The florid man sang loudly to end the verse. There was an expectant bustle at the
door, and then the priest from Dadda’s church, St. John the divine, appeared. All now
crowded into the dining room, those who were making wreaths, and Tant Soufie holding
Ou Kaar’s trembling hand.

“Please, Mavis, ask Father Josephs at the Mission to bury me.”

“Ask your brats to fetch him themselves. See them ask a black man to bury you!”

“Please, Mavis, see that Father Josephs buries me!”

“It’s not my business, you fool! You did nothing for me!”

“I am your mother, my girl,” the Old-Woman had sobbed, “I raised you.”

“Yes, you raised me, and you taught me my place! You took me to the Mission with
you, because we are too black to go to St. John’s. Let them see Father Josephs for a
change. Let them enter our Mission and see our God.”

And Ma had not understood but whimpered, “Please, Mavis, let Father Josephs bury
me.”
So now the Priest from Dadda’s church stood at the head of her coffin, sharp and thin,
clutching his cassock with the left hand, while his right held and open prayer-book.

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 I said I will take heed to my ways:
that I offend not in my tongue.
I will keep my mouth as it were with
a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight.

Mavis felt the cruel irony of the words.

I held my tongue and spake nothing.

I kept silent, yea even from good words
But it was pain and grief to me…

The fat lady stroked her son’s head and sniffed loudly.

My heart was hot within me, and while I

Was thus musing the fire kindled, and at
The last I spake with my tongue…

Mavis now stared entranced at her broken thumbnail. The words seared and filling,
dominated the room.

It was true. Rosie had consulted her about going to the Mission and asking for Father
Josephs, but she had turned on her heel without a word and walked out into the streets,
and walked and walked. Through the cobbled streets of older Cape Town, up beyond the
Mosque in the Malay Quarter on the slopes of Signal Hill. Thinking of the dead woman in
the room.

A mother married to a white man and dying in a back room. Walking the streets, the
Old-Woman with her, followed by the Old-Woman’s eyes. Eating out her soul. Let them go
to the Mission and see our God. Meet Father Josephs. But they had gone for Dadda’s priest
who now prayed at the coffin of a broken coloured woman. And the back room was empty.

“I heard a voice from heaven, Saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the
dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the spirit; for they rest from their labours…

“Lord, take Thy servant, Maria Wilhelmina Loupser, into Thy eternal care. Grant her
Thy eternal peace and understanding. Thou art our refuge and our rock. Look kindly upon
her children who even in this time of trial and suffering look up to Thee for solace. Send
thy eternal blessing upon them, for they have heeded thy commandment which is Honour
thy father and mother, that thy days may be long…”

Mavis felt hot, strangely, unbearably hot. Her saliva turned to white heat into her
mouth and her head rolled drunkenly. The room was filled with her mother’s presence,
her mother’s eyes, body, soul. Flowing into her, filling every pore, becoming one with her,
becoming a living condemnation.

“Misbelievers!she screeched hoarsely. “Liars! You killed me! You murdered me! Don’t
you know your God?”

Notes
Koppies : low hills
Kroeskop : curly-headed, tufted hair
Kopdoek : head scarf

26
 The Girl With the Twisted Future
Mia Couto

Joseldo Bastante, the village mechanic, used his ears to seek an answer to his life’s
problems. When a traveler passed by, when a car stopped, he would come near and
capture conversations. It was in this way that he managed to hear of some prospects for
his eldest daughter, Filomeninha. For one whole week, news kept coming from the city of
a young man who was achieving great success twisting and truning his body like a snake.
The lad had been engaged by an impresario to show off his skill at turning his rear into his
front. He roamed the country and everyone ran to see him. And so the young man earned
enough money to fill boxes, suitcases, and cooking pots. All these, thanks to his being able
to fold and rotate his spine along with other regions. The contortionist was mentioned
time and again by lorry drivers and each one added a twist to the elastic talent of the boy.
They even went as far as to tell how, in one show, he had tied himself up with his own
body, as if it were a strap. The impresario had helped to untie the knot; if he hadn’t, then
the lad would have been belted up to this day.

Joseldo thought about his life, his children. Where would he find a future to share
among them? Twelve futures, where? And so he took the decision. Filomeninha would be a
contortionist, displayed and advertised along the highways and byways of afar. He ordered
his daughter:
“From this moment on, you’re going to practice bending yourself, to get your head as
far as the floor, and vice-versa.”

The girl began her gymnastics. She progressed too slowly for her father. In order to
hasten his preparations, Joseldo Bastante brought from the workshop one of those
enormous petrol drums. At night he would tie his daughter to the drums so that her back
and the curve of the recipient would cling to each other like a courting couple. In the
morning, he would pour hot water over her before she had woken up properly:
“This water is for your bones, to be soft, to be flexible.”

When they unbound her, the girl was bent over backwards, her blood flow irregular,
and her joints disjointed. She complained of pains and suffered from dizziness.

“You can’t wish for riches without sacrifices,” was her father’s reaction.
Filomeninha was crumpling up for all to see. She looked like a hook without any more
use, an abandoned rag.

“Father I can feel a lot of pain inside me. Let me sleep on the mat.”

“No, little daughter. When you are rich you will surely sleep even on a mattress. Here
at home we shall all lie in comfort, each one on his own mattress. You’ll see, we’ll only
wake up in the evening, after the bats have stirred.”

Time passed and Joseldo was still waiting for the impresario to pass through the town.
At the garage, his ears hunted for clues as to the whereabouts of his savior. In vain. The
impresario was amassing riches in some unknown location.

Meanwhile, Filomeninha was getting worse. She was almost unable to walk. She began
to suffer from bouts of vomiting. She seemed to want to cast her body out through her
mouth. Her father warned her not to succumb to such weaknesses:

27
 “If the impresario turns up, he must not find you in this state. You’re supposed to be a
contortionist, not a vomitist.”

The weeks went by, heightened by Joseldo Bastante’s anguish. In such a small place,
what happens is just whatever passes through. An event is never native. It always comes
from outside, it shakes souls, inflames time and then beats a retreat. It goes away so
quickly that it doesn’t even leave embers with which the residents might rekindle the fire
if they so wished. The world possesses places where its timeless rotation stops and rests.
This was such a place.

Time went filling up with nothingness. Until one evening Joseldo heard form a lorry
driver news of the appearance of his lucky star: the impresario was in the city preparing a
show.

The mechanic left his work and rushed home. He told his wife:
“Make Filomeninha put on a new dress!”

His wife replied, puzzled. “But the girl hasn’t got a new dress.”

“I’m thinking of your new dress. Yours, woman.”

They stood the girl on her feet and clothed her in her mother’s dress. It was big and
long, and it was obvious that their sizes were not the same.

“Take off your scarf. Artists don’t cover their heads. Wife, put her hair in plaits while I
go get the money for the train fare.”

“Where are you going to get the money from?”

“That’s none of your business/”

“Joseldo?”

“Don’t keep on at me, woman.”

Some hours later, they left for the city. On the train the mechanic gloated over his
thoughts: a fruit is not harvested in a hurry. It takes its time, between passing from sour-
green to ripe-sweet. If he had looked for an answer, as others wanted, he would have lost
this opportunity. To those in a hurry, he replied proudly: to wait for is not the same as to
sit around waiting.

Lulled by the rhythm of the carriages, Joseldo Bastante continued to surrender his
little daughter to the fate of the stars, the fortune of those who are immortal. He looked
at the girl and he saw that she was trembling. He asked her the matter. Filomeninha
complained of the cold.

“What cold? With all this heat, where’s the cold?” And he searched for the cold as if
temperature had a body which might come and touch him in the twinkle of an eye.
“Don’t worry, little girl. When we get some smoke in here, it will get warmer.”

But the girl’s shivers became even more extreme, until they were even stronger than
the rocking of the train. Nor did the oversized dress hide her shuddering. Her father took
off his coat and placed it around Filomeninha’s shoulders.

28
 “Now try and stop trembling or you’ll make my coat burst in stitches.”

They arrived in the city and began to look for the impresario’s office. They walked
down endless streets. “Hell, daughter, so many street corners! And all the same.”
The mechanic dragged his daughter along, stumbling into her.
“Filomeninha, stand up straight. They’ll surely think I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Finally, they came across the house. They went in and they were told to wait in a small
room. Filomeninha fell asleep in her chair, while her father entertained himself in a
dream of wealth. The impresario received them only at the end of the day. He did not
beat about the bush.
“I’m not interested.”

“But, sir…”

“There’s no point in wasting my time. Contortionism is out, it’s no longer a sensation.”

“It isn’t? Just look at what my daughter can do with her head…”

“I’ve already told you. I’m not interested. This girl is sick, that’s what she is.”

“The girl’s what? This girl’s got an iron constitution, or rather a rubber one. She’s just
tired from the journey, that’s all.”

“The only ones I’m interested in now are guys with steel teeth. Those sets of teeth you
people sometimes have, strong enough to gnaw wood and to chew nails.”

Joseldo smiled humbly and said he was sorry that he couldn’t be of service. “I’m a
mechanic, that’s all. I use my hands to fiddle about with screws, not my teeth.”

They left. The impresario remained sitting in his big chair, amused by that girl, so
skinny in her borrowed dress.

On the way back, Joseldo bemoaned his fate. Teeth, now it’s teeth they want! Beside
him Filomeninha dragged herself along, shuffling her steps. They boarded the train and
waited for it to pull out. Her father gradually became calmer. He appeared to be watching
the bustle of the station, but his gaze did not reach beyond the murky glass of the
window. Suddenly, his face lit up. Taking his daughter by the hand, he asked, without
looking at her:

“It’s true, Filomeninha, you have strong teeth! Isn’t that what your mother says?”
And as he didn’t get an answer, he shook the child’s arm. It was then that Filomeninha’s
body fell, twisted and weightless, onto her father’s lap.

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30