A Puzzle About Apartheid Tragedy

There is a curse at work in Achmat Dangor’s brief, fragrantly disquieting novel about South Africa’s racial ghosts. This is evident from the start. After all, its initial protagonist, Omar Khan, a sweet-tempered, sweet- breathed Colored architect, turns into a tree and dies by the end of the first chapter.

Why it is Kafka’s curse, though, is not entirely clear. One may try to guess. Guessing can be an enhancement in literature. It incites the reader, forcing him or her to hunt instead of waiting to be served. The writer, though, must be able to scatter a clue here, a whiff of scent there, and above all to sustain the mysterious compulsion of the chase.

There is much that is alluring and suggestive about Dangor’s novel; a sense above all that what is being obscurely signaled is the tragedy of a brutally divided nation. But between the reader and this sense lies the puzzlement of getting there. The author spreads his clues and scents too confusingly, too seemingly at random, to maintain the elan of the search. Instead of inciting they intrigue for a while, but end up enervating.

“Kafka’s Curse” is set in a quadrant of South African apartheid relatively unregarded by the world. It is not the oppression of the black population, which has been fought out however cruelly by daylight and, however roughly, is being overcome, at least in political terms. It is the situation of the Colored, a population of East Indian and Arab descent.

Apartheid hit them a dreadful but more glancing blow: Their choice was not squarely between submission and confrontation. Accommodation in dozens of different degrees--read dozens of degrees of guilt, humiliation, anger and self-anger--was also possible. It was less horrendous, no doubt; on the other hand, with apartheid’s end it has been harder for the Colored to say, “We’ve won.”

Dangor’s vision (he himself is Colored) is of deflected nighttime anguish and dreamlike disconnections. He expresses these in a tangle of interrupted and contradictory story fragments, woven together by myth, hallucination and magical realism.

“Kafka’s Curse” begins with three family trees. There is Omar Khan (he changed his name to Oscar Kahn, since Jews were racially OK under apartheid whereas Indian Muslims were not) and his brother, Malik, and their parents and grandparents. Katije, the grandmother, was Afrikaner white; the breaches and barriers in the race lines are one of several themes.

There is the English-descended family of Oscar’s wife, Anna; notably Martin, her incestuous, pedophile brother. (Incest is another theme: Apartheid carried to its logical conclusion means breeding only with your own.)

There is the mixed Muslim-Afrikaner family of Amina, a mysterious young therapist who treated Omar before his death, married a paraplegic Jew (injured in an Arab car-bombing in Israel) and became Malik’s lover. In some quite unaccountable way--even symbolically unaccountable; an example of the book’s vaguenesses--she may be responsible for the deaths of all three, and of one or two others.

Everything is told in a jumble of fragments. Bits of realism emerge: a portrait of Omar’s and Malik’s redoubtable father Sallam, who adopted guerrilla tactics to fight apartheid’s efforts to choke his flourishing business, and killed himself when he could fight no more. His own father also killed himself; perhaps in shame over the success with which his wife--white Katije--used her body to build up their business.

In magic-realist contrast is the opening chapter about Oscar/Omar, whose talent and sweetness--his breath was sheer perfume--could not overcome the fatal damage he did himself by becoming a Jew in order to marry Anglo Anna. Paired with his vegetable metamorphosis is the legend of a gardener who loved a caliph’s daughter and, after vainly waiting for her, turned into a tree.

Anna, the caliph’s (Englishman’s) daughter, takes up her own bleak story: a revolt against her family. Malik, an upcoming politician at the start, declines after Omar’s felling. Amina consumes him somehow (another vagueness) and a man murders him. That Amina is later said to have murdered him is never explained.

A story overfurnished with puzzles is like an overfurnished room. It is hard to get about in. The disconnections in “Kafka’s Curse” clog things, but at least they are congruent with Dangor’s theme of a nation’s self-alienation. Worse, sometimes, are the connections: What are we to make of the detail that old, incestuous Katije and young (murderous?) Amina each have a tiny scar on one of their breasts? The connection connects nothing; the magical-realist magician has pulled a rabbit out of his hat--but where is the rabbit?