The Help – by Kathryn Stockett , Penguin/Fig Tree, London, 2009

I have to admit, when I first started this book – many months ago – I had my doubts. (I have to also admit that most of my reading takes place, these days, on aeroplanes, or at airports waiting for them). The doubts were about the voices which are used throughout the book, predominantly of Southern black (African-American) women.

It takes some getting used to. But after not too long, I found it starts to read perfectly naturally. We have all, after all, been thoroughly attuned to that voice through the medium of television and movies. It is nothing unfamiliar. It is just that one doesn’t see it written very often. The first time I did encounter it was in The Colour Purple. (I have to admit it took me one hell of a long time to work out what “Shug” might be!)

But it really is a voice we know, albeit in this unfamiliar form. And once you start getting into the book, it becomes a really exciting and different experience. Through the device, you are suddenly projected into this unfamiliar world.

The author herself, (she reveals in her afterword) had doubts about this decision. Of course she did! The chances of sounding patronising, or of sliding into some really offensive “white” take on African-Americans, were pretty good. But she doesn’t – well not from my perspective anyway. African-Americans will obviously have their own opinions on the matter.

I tried to imagine what the effect would be, if a white person in South African were to write a novel in the black voice – recording the details and mannerisms of accent. The likelihood of misunderstanding and/or real offense would be very high indeed. Does anyone remember that ghastly programme which used to run on Springbok radio called the “Pip Freedman Show”? He had a number of personae – all of whom were racially defined. A “Cape Coloured” man called Ghatipi (I am not sure of the spelling here) sticks in my mind. It was demeaning and offensive – though of course, no-one white thought so for a moment.

When I was writing my novel, “Remittance Man” (UKZN Press, Pietermaritzburg,1997) I started by putting one of the characters in accent. But it really did come across forced and painful – so I dropped it.

But there is none of that here. The voices seem to be to be as clear as a bell and as practised and authentic as you can get. It is beautiful. I read the book in awe of her art and her ability. It is quite spectacular.

The stories she tells, of the relationship between maids and their employers, is by no means an unfamiliar one to any South African. The assumptions are all the same. The fear is kept firmly in check. Some of the conditions are indeed vicious and uncaring. But there are a number of vital differences.

Firstly, the African- American “Helps” drive their own cars. They talk on the telephone to each other and there seems to be very little restriction on them doing so by their employers. They own their own houses. Their children go to school and sometimes to University. They seem to be poor, but they are not living in the kind of abject poverty that we have all around us. The same insane racial sense of superiority pervades the parallel world which the whites are living in. They talk about “Nigras” to each other, in the presence of the Help, as if they are not there. To be human is, nonetheless, to be white.

The story is about several of the people living in Jackson, Mississippi (only one white amongst them) who start making the journey to find each other. It is a truly inspiring and magnificent tale. What is so remarkable about it, is that it gives the reader a glimpse into the world as it was then – on the brink of irrevocable change.
Read through the eyes of a 50 year old South African, it is so easy to simply flip the switch of translation and to remember one’s own youth, with “the Maid” and the kind of complex relationships which developed. The story made me think about a woman who looked after me when I was a child of 6 or7. Her name was Bertha. She taught me my first words in Sesotho. She loved me and looked after me.

One day, she was gone. I was told that she had gone home and wasn’t coming back. S few days later, she appeared, nervously at the gate with a gift for me. It was a vest, wrapped in giftwrap. She said I should take it, and not tell my mother she had given it to me. And when I wore it, I should think of her.

I found out many years later, that our lodger, a certain “Mr Page” had raped Bertha, while we all on holiday. Bertha had laid a change – and that is what got her fired.
My mother and father were good people. Simple people. They were also deeply racist. That was all they really could be, with relatively little education and exposure and living in a system designed to make them so. When the chips were down they would protect their own, no matter what the morality of the issue, no matter consequences.

That is what this book is about. The many consequences.

Death, be not proud

As a teenager, I used to earn a couple of Rand during school holidays, by playing the organ at the local crematorium. Yes, I admit, on the scale of things, it was a somewhat odd thing to do. I mean, after all,most of my friends were working as packers in the local Checkers. One or two of them had holiday jobs at the local movie house. Me? I played the organ for funerals.

It was pretty good money, for doing relatively little. I could virtually play “Abide with me” in my sleep. Handel’s Largo I could have done blindfolded and with someone tickling my feet. There were relatively few surprises. The Priest or Minister would usually be the only person singing along and the services were relatively short – never more than half an hour. So I could usually end up with six or seven services a day and pay was for each individual funeral – so I was pretty much in clover.

I took a book along to read during the sermons. I wore a sad expression on my face. That was all I needed to do. Except on one day.

On this day, the undertaker asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping carry one of the bodies into the chapel, because the trolley had broken, or something. I was sixteen. I was happy playing the organ and ignoring the coffin. I was not used to schlepping bodies around. But I agreed. He made it sound as though it was the most normal thing in the whole world – which, of course, for him, it was!

I was surprised by the weight of the body. How four of us battled to carry the coffin. And I was completely overwhelmed by something else, which I had really not been prepared for – the smell of death. Even with the overpowering scent of flowers on the coffin, it was there. It was unmistakeable.

The undertaker noticed my reaction. “Oh, sorry!” he said, “This one isn’t too fresh”. I reeled. I had not expected such a casual approach to the issue. “Yes!” sniggered one of the others, “Maybe we need to get an air freshener or something. They are going to notice, for sure!”

Last Good Friday, I attended the service at my local parish church, St Michael’s Observatory. It was my first experience of a really high Catholic Good Friday service. My upbringing has been much more in the tradition of preaching on the seven last words from the cross – which, both when I was preaching on them and when I was listening to someone else doing the preaching, almost always left me feeling a little like it was me that was being crucified. So, the service at St Michael’s was, in some aspects, completely new.

It began on entry into the church. From the doorway to the High Altar was a completely unexpected riot of colour! Rose petals had been scattered thickly in the aisle. (I subsequently discovered that this is normal practise where there is a procession of the Blessed Sacrament – it is nothing I had ever seen before!)

But the effect was astonishing. This rampant shock of colour against the stark bleakness of the undressed stone church. And it is not only the sense of sight which is assaulted. It is also the sense of smell. The perfume of roses - heady, overwhelming, intoxicating. Almost too much to take in.

And the silence. Heavy. Solemn. Profound.

Suffice to say, it was one of the most moving and profound services I have ever experienced, in my life. The music, the words of the liturgy, the readings and the solemnity had me, at one point, in tears. (Now, believe me, that is no great feat – I cry in “Bambi” - but still… ).

I was moved, profoundly. And one of the memories which those scattered rose petals brought back to me was my first experience of carrying a coffin. Of flowers used to mask the smell of death. Of my first realization that one day, undertakers would, most likely, be carrying my body, in a coffin, too.

Good Friday brings us all, if we will let it do so, to that profound moment. The moment when our world goes dark and our senses are no more and our bodies are carried to their place of decay. At that point, we can if we choose to, smell the roses. Smell the roses.

The conundrum that is Winnie Mandela

The Federal Theological Seminary, in Imbali, Pietermaritzburg, was an interesting institution. All the churches which sent students there saw it as a hotbed of political activism and theological radicalism and students which emerged from it, were regarded by their churches, routinely, with huge amounts of suspicion at best. Or awe, at worst.

The fact is, it was fairly middle-of-the-road. It had some theological greats in its history, but it also had dreadful bigots and dreary, self-seeking conservatives. The really radical figures which had passed through its portals, had long since left, by the time I got there. The seminary continued in their glory, while demonstrating very little of their courage and intellectual acumen. It was, in many ways, a fairly sad place. A place which pretended to be progressive, but acted out all the petty divisions of the mainline churches and where even the mildest excursions into progressive theology was shown a fair amount of disapproval.

But at the same time, some of the students were committed struggle people. They worked hard in the underground structures. They were sometimes arrested – causing panic in the rest of the student population, who would then resort to fervent prayer and concern, furrowed brows and occasional baskets of food delivered to the local jail.

One year, the Seminary did what everyone thought was a really radical thing. We invited Winnie Mandela to speak at the graduation. Now let me say immediately, that in the scope of things, at the time, it WAS a big thing. Immediately the security police became more interested than usual. The students got so worked up about it, that it seemed to me that some of them might need medication. The lecturers started positioning themselves, either as to who would be introducing her, or who would be welcoming her. The conservatives, and the would be radicals alike were swept up in the excitement of the event.

She kept us all waiting for about three hours. But did we mind? Not at all. Because the Mother of the Nation was visiting the Seminary. Did we mind that she looked either drugged or drunk when she eventually did appear? Not at all! She was the Mother of the Nation, after all. Did we even comment on the fact that she talked the biggest load of unprepared twaddle when she got up to speak? Why would we? The Mother of the Nation was speaking. And many of the students themselves were steadfastly resisting theological education because of the havoc they knew it would play with their prejudices.

In her speech, she revealed all the prejudices, all the conservatism and all the bigotry of someone who is not theologically educated (and I am talking in a theological context here). The students, most of them also bigoted, prejudiced and conservative, loved and adored her.

I was reminded of this, because a short time ago, our newspapers were filled with outrage at some of the things which Winnie has been saying (apparently a very long time ago – like August last year!). Mostly, the papers have been flabbergasted by her saying that Nelson Mandela, her former husband and soon to be Saint, had sold the poorest, (who are almost always black) – down the river. (Shock and horror!). The blogs, the newspapers, the twits and the airwaves all played in concert a symphony of disgust and reprobation. She was unhinged, resentful, way off-the-mark and easily dismissed as a loony tune. More than anything she was disrespectful to her former husband. And that is a sin of huge proportions. There is probably no forgiveness to be found. This time she has gone too far. Oh yes, she also called Desmond Tutu a cretin for forcing her to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation commission, which he headed.

I saw also, using Fatima Meer’s funeral as her stage, she has lashed out at the press, claiming that she never gave the Evening Standard any interview at all and spent a huge amount of time doing damage control from it.

Well, I suppose that is what happens when you have two personae – one for public consumption and the other for private. Because everything she seems to have said in the non-interview was for apparently only for private consumption. Just a pity the person to whom it was said was partially involved in a newspaper

Whatever the real reason, it looks as though she did actually say those things, not imagining that they were going to appear down the track in a newspaper. And for that reason, I think we should look at them a little more carefully.

Is it true, we need to ask ourselves, that her former husband, Nelson Mandela sold the poor down the river? What message did he think he was giving when he received his Nobel Peace Prize with his former captor? Is it not the case that the riches of the country have circulated in a very controlled, very small pond?

I don’t see anything particularly off-the-wall about that. It is what most of the people I mix with say all the time. They just don’t say it in print or in an interview.

The question is, are the things she said true or not?

Much as one may not like her, Winnie Mandela is far from stupid. She may be pig-headed. She may even be profoundly unwise to say the things she says - but she has never given a ten cent piece for public opinion. She may be a liar and she may even be guilty of most of the things she has been accused of. But one thing is for certain. No-one in the country is able to articulate, as she can, the general mood of the people. (And by “the people”, I mean those who are mostly excised from the general sway of political decision-making and power.)

And the reason for this is that wherever people are suffering, Winnie Mandela is there. And this is something they remember. And this is the reason they take her into their confidence. It doesn’t matter about her dubious history. It doesn’t matter that she was convicted of various crimes. The fact is, she cares about the poor – or at the very least – appears to care about them.

Did things change fundamentally for the poor when Mandela took over the reins of state? It is perfectly obvious that the nature of the political settlement required that virtually nothing would change in relation to the ownership of wealth. That was the point of Mandela accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his former captor, FW de Klerk.

The effects of that settlement, on the poor, is that their economic situation remains dire, 16 years into democratic government. That, I am afraid, is the truth. It is a pity Winnie Mandela appears as unable to admit to telling it, as she was to her deeds before the courts and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a pity, because it appears to be the truth, nonetheless.

Precious - a really difficult experience

Mo'Nique as the Mother in "Precious"

I could not help wondering, while watching this movie, about the story behind Gabourey Sidibe herself - the person who plays “Precious” in the film. Because, I suppose, that is the point behind this rather harrowing film.

Our society looks at a fat person, and judges them fairly mono-chromatically, against the backdrop of acceptably thin people. They are almost never judged on their own terms.

The film is about Precious’ “own terms”. About the fact that she was raped repeatedly by her father. It is about the extreme and extraordinary violence of her mother. About the shocking realities of the kind of circumstances in which she grew up. And about the titanic struggles she engaged in to take herself out of those horrific circumstances. It is about the fact that there was no-one to protect her when she most needed it.

To see her in the street, she would present as only one thing, in the kind of society which we term “normal”. You would see her as fat. Perhaps, you might also see her as “black” and fat. (Let me not disengage here. Let me not say “you”. Let me say me. I would see her thus).

And to do so would be to radically miss the person she is – or the person she has become, by being the person she is. Her size, like her colour, is at once her defining characteristic and the most irrelevant thing about her.

It was a difficult movie, not only because of its content. It was difficult because of the fact that Precious mumbles a lot, in an accent so strong that it is sometimes incomprehensible to a non-American. Her acting is fairly indifferent and she is, both willingly and unwillingly, completely overshadowed by her Oscar winning “mother” – who goes in real life by the curious name of Mo’Nique (no surname – like the author of the book on which the film is based - Sapphire. The book is called “Push” – also one word – and I would be grateful if someone would explain its relevance to me – along with Mo’Nique and Sapphire!)

The bleakness of the social setting is something extremely difficult to relate to, if that is not something you already know. It is a bit like watching Martians going about their Martian daily business. But I realized, while I was watching, that the fact that I have not experienced that kind of life doesn’t mean for a second that it is not commonplace. The grinding poverty. The collusion of silence. The unspeakable perennial horror of child abuse within the family. These are commonplace realities of our society, just as much, if not more so than in America.

What is surprising, is the generosity and tolerance of the middle-class teacher in the film. And that is a harsh criticism of the rest of us, who are not tolerant – who can’t (or don’t, or won’t) see through the fat and the illiteracy. The fact that the tolerant and sacrificial teacher also happens to be a Lesbian, was, to my mind, slightly gratuitous – besides the fact that it showed up how Precious’ mother could hold both moralistic positions on others, while deftly ignoring her own morally abandoned circumstances.

Mo’Nique’s acting in this role was quite extraordinary, both in her rage and in her silences. The horror, for me was that I could see some of her anger mirrored in some of my own performances on the home front. I could hear snatches of myself, bits and pieces in her dismissive sarcasm, in the way she sneered. It wasn’t in the overt stuff. Not in the “get yer Muthafuking fat arse down here” stuff. No, it was in the kind of harassment of accusatory questions, which a parent will pile up, one on top of the other, reducing the child to silence. And suddenly, there it is, spewing from your mouth. There you recognise the echo of words and phrases your parents used, and which were used on them, presumably by their parents. But even worse, I really battled to see anything of myself in the kind, understanding, yet highly focussed teacher that was set in counterposition to the brutal mother. That is who I would have liked to identify with. But sadly, not.

Much as one may not like it and much as one may want to act out a different parental role, the truth is, your parents rise from the dead in you. Both for her mother (and for me) that kind of thing lies waiting in your synapses. What is extraordinary beyond measure, if that it did not rise up in her.

I could identify with Mariah Carey, who played the social worker. Ever so slightly prissy, trying not to be judgemental, deeply professional. She managed to be professional, yes, but she was also completely ineffective. It was the school mates. It was the children of the incest. It was sheer character and courage that got Precious through it all. The social worker had only one thing to offer – the threat or the withdrawal of the welfare cheque. If that were to be removed from her arsenal, she had nothing to offer. And all the cover-up games, the wigs, the children bouncing on the knee to appease her and her cohorts, were paper-thin in the face of what was really there and what she and the system managed to miss completely.

So, it is a difficult movie for me. Not least, because of the extraordinary levels of violence, but more because or the recognition in myself, of my own prejudices; my own “violence”; my own lack of care for others. That is not the kind of movie one can easily recommend.

Suicide - 11 years on

Every year, around this sort of time, I start to get jittery. When I take in the date, it all starts to become clear as to what the cause is. The 2nd of March is the day my former lover, Brian, killed himself.

It was a gruesome business. And his death was as dramatic as his life. At the time, we were, curiously, living apart. Me in East London, acting as Land Claim’s Commissioner for a while; he in Pietermaritzurg. We would meet, every now and again, as schedules allowed, at our home in Johannesburg.

Previously Brian had worked for Rentokil, but now he had grand designs of running his own business. I subsequently found that this business wasn’t working at all. But despite this, he had delusions of grandeur. He lived in a dreary little garden flatlet near the university in Pietermaritzburg, and to pay for his staff and his own lifestyle, he started pimping himself out through adverts in the newspapers, going under the name “Steve”.

This shocked me, a little, when I found out about it after his death, but it didn’t surprise me. I was a bit concerned about the HIV factor and when I heard about rumours to that effect after his death, I went around to all the local pharmacies, to try to discover whether or not he had been on anti-retrovirals or not. It was a fruitless task, which led me nowhere.

Brian, in a fit of madness really, had set up the suicide event, so that I would be the first person to find him. He was hanging from one of the gum tree rafters of our thatch, on a dog lead. And I suppose it is as he would have wanted it - that I would never get that image out of my head.

I went into immediate therapy, firmly resolved that I was not going to give up my house because of the spectre which his death presented. It was his choice, I rationalised, not mine. So I refused to leave my house, where we had lived for the past 7 years and where he had chosen to hang himself. His last message to me, which out of some kind of embarrassment, or projectile judgement on my part, I hid from the police for a while. It read something like this: “Now you can have all the things you have always wanted - the house, the car etc”. and that was that! No “And I really love you” or “I’m sorry it has to end like this’. But there it was.

These are the raw memories to the event. As I said, I went into trauma therapy immediately. My therapist was an Afrikaner woman, who was married to a Chinese man. In the days when she must have married him, when Apartheid was rampant, this must have been an extremely radical thing to do. She was mild mannered, but extremely clear and forthright. She was also a person who could show a genuine sense of understanding and compassion.

Her major work was with perpetrators of violence. With the people who had tortured and killed people during the apartheid era, in particular. I once asked her how she managed to cope psychologically with this. How did she deal, day after day with these most vile criminals, who had, through their actions, inflicted the most terrible pain on others. Her answer was startling. She said, “I just keep on thinking, that person could be me”.

For a long time, from that moment on, that thought haunted me. I wondered if it was possible for me to also be a perpetrator of violence. I felt myself, in my partner’s death, to be a victim of the violence of his death. I felt angry with him, shocked by what he had done to me. Could it possibly be that I too could be capable of the same thing?

Over the months of counselling which I had, I came to realise that it was certainly possible. Not because I am a particularly violent person, or a vengeful one, or a bad one. But simply because I am an ordinary one, who does, on occasion, make bad decisions.

One of the most interesting things which I discovered on my journey to calm, after the storm that was his death was that many suicides think that they will somehow “live” to extract the vengeance they seek. “I will kill myself, and then…”. They are incapable of seeing that there is no “…and then”.

Then I started with serious, uncontrollable and surprising flashbacks. The therapist started the fairly new and as yet untested EMDR (Eye Movement Desentsitization and Reprocessing therapy). It was a very strange process, involving you thinking about the things you were troubled by. And while you were doing that, she would wave her finger, or hand slowly backwards and forwards in front of your face.

I wept, I howled, I railed, I sat silently bubbling. But, my heavens, did it work! The terror had its sting drawn from it. I could face it again. I could walk away from it, momentarily. (It would be back, but some of the terror would be gone). And so it would lessen and grow weak. It would never disappear completely, but it would grow weaker.

It certainly worked. Within three months, I had no more terror attacks. Brian had closed all the curtains in the house and consequently,I could not allow curtains to b e closed, under any circumstances – for many months. But eventually, this too faded.All of the strange effects that violence and that shock had on me, have passed. What is left behind is a whisper and a trace. And fond memories of the man.

So, if you have had a trauma, of some kind – don’t get spooked by the idea of EMDR. It really works. Even for those with a serious attempt to keep their minds operating, without resort to what could so easily look like hocus-pocus. Because, as we all know, "There are more things on heaven and earth than you have ever dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio”. This is one of them.