Impaired vision. Portraits of black women in the Afrikaans novel 1948-1988

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Chapter 5
A man for all seasons: the ongoing voice of André P. Brink

It would appear inconsistent with the pattern followed in the previous two chapters to devote an entire chapter to the ‘phenomenon “André P. Brink”’ who, ‘next to Breyten Breytenbach is the single Afrikaans author who elicits the most a-rational (and irrational) response from the public and academics’ (Malan 1986:12). If Rabie can be regarded as the forerunner of the Movement of Sixty, Brink is undoubtedly its key-figure. His work spans more than three decades of literary production, includes a remarkable variety of literary genres and can be divided into three broad categories: creative work, literary criticism and literary theory. In addition to Brink's image of polemist, Charles Malan mentions his ‘conglomerate-image of writer/critic/academic/thinker/reformer/demonstrator’ (Malan 1986:12).

More consistently than any other Afrikaans author before or after him, Brink creates women characters - black and white - who demand to be analysed, despite the claim by several critics that his female characters are largely ‘stereotyped’ (e.g. Van Zyl 1988:30), undoubtedly referring to his white women characters only. His black female characters are rather peripheral to his stories and even when they occupy a position central to the events, they are seldom central characters and do not take precedence over the central male characters.

In the first part of this chapter, I am deviating somewhat from the pattern followed in the previous two chapters by isolating certain ‘trends’ which can be identified in Brink's work with particular reference to women, trends from which images of the black woman can be extracted from the perspective of a black South African woman.

It is not the purpose of this chapter to go into detail about the reception of Brink's novels by South African critics.^1. It is sufficient to say that in many respects he is a controversial figure in literature, especially in his native country where he is the man many conservative Afrikaners love to hate; the man who put Afrikaans literature on the international literary map but who at the same time exposed

1. The most comprehensive work to date on André P. Brink is the anthology compiled by Jan Senekal (ed.) 1988.

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many of the injustices perpetrated by his own people against black South Africans; the man who popularised in his novels the struggles of the oppressed to liberate themselves but who simultaneously found himself caught in the crossfire between black and white extremists. D.J. Hugo sums up the general Afrikaner attitude to Brink:

It has already become accepted currency in Afrikaner circles to be suspicious of André Brink's literary-political motives or at least to doubt them. He would write politically committed novels solely for the purpose of capturing the attention of the outside world, and with that attention to make money and hopefully win the Nobel Prize. He would thus exploit his own propounded theory of the injustice of Apartheid for personal gain. And abroad - where he can depend on applause - he would make more radical statements than he would in South Africa where he cannot summon the courage to do so (Hugo 1984:34).

What is important, though, is that no matter how Brink as a writer is perceived, no matter how much some critics would like to dismiss his work as ‘a political little sauce over mediocre story-telling’^2., the fact remains that his contributions to literature cannot be ignored.

I shall refer in this chapter to three novels by the author, viz. Kennis van die aand (1973), Houd-den-Bek (1982) and Die muur van die pes (1984), with incidental references to some of his other works. These novels have been translated into English by the author himself as Looking on darkness, A chain of voices and The wall of the plague respectively. Of the three novels, I have selected one, A chain of voices, and in particular the figure of Ma-Rose as an example of Brink's portrayal of the black woman for reasons that will become clear in the course of the chapter.

2. This was said to me in 1989 in Amsterdam by an Afrikaner academic and critic, Helize van Vuuren.

5.1 Brink in the 1970s and 1980s

Brink's prolificacy as a creative artist is best illustrated by his literary products during the 1970s and early 1980s; but these products also illustrate the growth of the artist since his metaphorical ‘birth’ on a park-bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in 1960 (Brink 1983). In addition to all his other work, Brink has written and published no less than six novels during the period 1973 - 1984: Looking on darkness (1973), An instant in the wind (1975), Rumours of rain (1978), A dry white season (1979), A chain of voices (1982) and The wall of the plague (1984), all of them romans engagés^3. and four out of the six dealing with love across the colour-line, which can be regarded as the ultimate emotional and moral emancipation in a country where love between black and white has been forbidden by law.

3. Brink's novel States of Emergency (1988) is left out of contention for the simple reason that it is not written or even translated into Afrikaans, whereas my primary concern is the Afrikaans novel.

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All three novels selected for inclusion in this study, to a greater or lesser degree, deal with blacks, more precisely the ‘coloureds’ or their part-ancestors, the Khoikhoi; the black woman character in these novels develops towards a formidable presence in the unfolding events and progresses from an extremely peripheral character (Looking on darkness) to the near-centre (A chain of voices) to the centre (The wall of the plague). They are representative of Brink's work in the 1970s and 1980s, especially representative of his commitment to Africa and his pronouncements on littérature engagée; in these novels he consolidates his worldview and pronouncements regarding racism and sexism as the ultimate forms of oppression. The novels also represent a past-present dichotomy and similarity - while one of them (A chain of voices) invokes the South African past, the other two deal with contemporary issues but the problems remain fundamentally the same; in all of them the past, present and future are integrated to show that the present is a legacy from the past and the future shall be the legacy of another past, that the contemporary South African situation can never be divorced from past tendencies. At the same time, this irrevocable past does not mean that change cannot and does not take place but that change can only realise itself within the individual. While it is true that these novels deal with sex across the colour-line - as has repeatedly been pointed out by several Afrikaner critics^4. - this was not the main reason for their selection, although this aspect forms a relevant part of my study.

Admittedly, an analysis of An instant in the wind would have been a real challenge from a black female perspective but while this novel is another example of Brink's littérature engagée, it is excluded from this study for the reason that the female character is white. Likewise, the other two novels are excluded because the black woman does either not feature at all (Rumours of rain) or her role is so negligible that there is very little to say about her (A dry white season).

4. See for example the essays on Brink's work in Donker Weerlig.

5.2 Brink on women and sex

Although Brink has since rejected his own ‘romantic chauvinism in respect of women’ as revealed in his article ‘Oor religie en seks’ (‘On religion and sex’ - 1964), it is nevertheless important to include here a brief account of his views as expounded in that article, mainly as an attempt to understand how he portrays women, especially in his earlier novels, to understand the erotic element in his work and also to show his development from ‘chauvinism’ to non-sexist narrative.

He acknowledges the central role of woman in creation myths. She is primordial being who gives birth to the human race but at the same time she brings misery to humankind by unleashing the destructive forces of creation. In most religions this

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is the case, for example, in Christianity it is through woman that man comes to a fall but in the shape of the heaven-graced Mary it is again woman who creates the possibility of redemption. Creation, destruction and redemption through resurrection are the primary roles of woman, and in them Brink sees the coalescence of religion and sex.

According to Brink, the creative-destructive role of woman is specifically confirmed on the terrain of the sexual: the sex act implies compassion as well as violence; it is a moment of tenderness but also of fierce struggle. For man it is both conquest and defeat, because woman is his conquered possession but he becomes her victim as well. She is weaker than he and looks to him for protection but at the same time she is the all-mother from whom he is born. This diminishes her in his eyes but at the same time it elevates her: to him she is saint and whore - she has to be both for the sexual moment to be fully ecstatic.

For Brink, woman is a key-figure in both religion and sex, which he relates to one another. Man (read man and woman), entrapped in himself, has a constant need to reach out to something/Something or someone/Someone external to himself and, according to Brink, both religion and sex represent man's attempt to do so. Man has the need for identifying with another, especially in a hypercivilised society where the individual feels himself threatened by the nameless and amorphous masses. Through the sex act in which his entire personality is involved, he can repeal his temporality. Confession of sin and literal denudation are, according to Brink, the indispensible conditions for the religious and sexual experiences, for each in itself is an act of revealing oneself for and to the Other, an act of making oneself vulnerable in complete honesty. Both religion and sex are forms of communication and contact - one communicates and makes contact with God through prayer; likewise in sex one communicates and makes contact with another person.

5.3 ‘Tendencies’ in Brink's writing with regard to women

In view of the above pronouncements as well as in view of the already mentioned fact that Brink consistently creates female characters who demand analysis, attention should be given to some ‘tendencies’ in his writing with regard to women and, for the purpose of this study, with regard to black women. What follows here results from the premise that every reading is a gendered experience as well as a rewriting of the original text. Against this background, the following selection of identifiable tendencies pertaining to women in Brink's novels will now be examined.

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5.3.1 The systematic ‘breast’ metaphor

When reading Brink's novels - also depending upon who the reader is - one is immediately struck by the numerous references to breasts. When a woman character appears on the scene or in the head of the narrator-focalizer, there is invariably at least one reference to her breasts. Brink seldom describes a woman's external appearance in detail, we seldom know what exactly she looks like but we are left in no doubt as to the size and shape of her breasts. However, the number of times these female protuberances is mentioned or described does not pose a problem for me and I am sure neither does it for other readers of Brink's novels, unless they happen to be members of the Kappiekommando.^5. Since time immemorial the female anatomy - especially the breasts - has been the subject of artistic expression. Simone de Beauvoir (1949/87:190) points out that even in civilisations where sensuality is more subtle than in Western civilisation and ideas of form and harmony are entertained, the breasts remain favoured objects to arouse desire because of their gratuitous developing. Breasts are inextricably female. Are breasts then not organs and symbols of femininity, motherhood, female sensuality and eroticism? I reiterate: I have no problem with the number of explicit and implicit references to and descriptions of breasts in Brink's novels.

I do however have problems with the perception of breasts and the distinction made between white breasts and black breasts. The white heroines of Brink's novels who incidentally are seldom if ever Afrikaner women (his reverence for the Afrikaner ‘civil religion’?), invariably have small, firm breasts, an almost prepubescent flatness. A few examples will suffice: Jessica Thomson in Looking on darkness has the ‘small, definite, round breasts of a portrait from the innocent age preceding Raphael’ (p. 7) and Joseph remembers ‘the sunlight on her small white breasts’ (p. 22). Another of Joseph's white lovers, Janet, has ‘unusually small breasts with elongated brownish nipples’ (p. 153) and yet another, Beverley, has ‘small breasts with pale nipples’ (p. 163). For such an extremely talented and intelligent writer, Brink displays a remarkably limited vocabulary when describing this part of the female anatomy. In contrast to white women, Brink's black female characters have ‘full breasts’ (Ursula, pp. 125, 128, 129); Joseph's mother, Sophie, is a ‘full-breasted woman’ (p. 76) who ironically has her left breast amputated and subsequently dies of breast cancer; in A chain of voices Ma-Rose's breasts are equated to the udders of cows (see 2.2.3).

In addition to the difference in shape and size of white and black breasts, the very language used makes a further distinction. White women have breasts; black women have ‘pramme’^6. and young black girls have ‘prammetjies’. Several times Ma-Rose refers to her own breasts as ‘pramme’, ‘tette’ (teats) or even ‘uiers’ (udders). In the author's own English translation they are called ‘dugs’, ‘paps’ or ‘teats’, with definite bestial and contemptuous connotations (see Oxford Dictionary). We know today that the shape and size of a woman's breasts have

5. See Chapter 2.1.2

6. ‘Pramme’, according to the Afrikaans Verklarende Woordeboek and the Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT), is the ‘vulgar’ term for breasts; according to Van Dale's Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal, a ‘pram’ is defined as ‘elk der borsten van een zogende vrouw’.

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nothing to do with her sexuality. And Brink knows it, his characters know it. We have the classic example in Looking on darkness. Joseph as a young boy idolised the young white girl Hermien. She was the Virgin Mary, a goddess, the ultimate of his wildest dreams all rolled into one. Until he saw her in a near-naked state:

It struck me like a blow in the solar plexus: there was Hermien, and underneath that floral dress she was naked on the rock, and there - look - through the damp material clinging to her, her young nipples were darkly visible. The holy Hermien I used to worship was, suddenly, not different in any way from all the little brown girls whose tits and slits I'd fondled behind the muddy bank of the dam (p. 97).

So why this almost systematic distinction between white breasts and black breasts? Stereotypes about the black woman dating from the days of slavery and even prior to that are obviously difficult to dispel, because consciously or unconsciously they find expression in the works of even progressive authors such as Brink. The following meanings can be inferred from the particular way the black woman's breasts are depicted:

1.	If the black woman's breasts are described as ‘large’, ‘full’, ‘heavy’, ‘long’, etc. and are called ‘pramme’, then that can only mean one thing: these are the breasts of a mother, more specifically a mother who has given birth to several children, the black woman as the consummate breeder. In spite of Brink's anti-racist vision, it would seem that he goes back to a tradition established centuries ago with regard to the black woman. For example, as early as 1447 the Italian, Antonio Malfante, wrote about the black women of Africa: ‘They breed greatly, for a woman bears up to five at a birth’ (cited by Davidson 1963:23). During the time of slavery, it was expected of the slave woman/girl to give birth as often as is biologically possible in order to increase the slave population without the slave-owner having to incur the cost of purchasing new slaves (cf. Davis 1981:8). Perceptions like Malfante's and coercive practices during slavery are responsible for the tenacious persistence of the stereotype of black women as breeders. It is no wonder that Afrikaans authors like Mikro, Rabie and Venter use collective nouns such as ‘spul’ (caboodle), ‘trop’ (herd or troop, as in ‘a troop of monkeys’), ‘tros’ (bunch), ‘kasarm’ (ragtag and bobtail) and ‘sleepsel’ (trail) when referring to a black woman's children.
2.	If the impression is created that the black woman's only function upon earth is to breed, then it must follow that her only activity is to mate. She is explicitly portrayed as the copulating, fornicating, lascivious woman in Brink's novels. Joseph Malan remembers that his widowed mother had a different lover in her bed almost every night, ‘the whispering behind (her) floral folding-screen, and the creaking of the brass bed, and the muffled moaning of her joy’ (p. 30);

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	he recalls her explanation for her ‘open and frequent transgressions’ of the Commandments: ‘“The Commandments only say thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, it says nothing about wanting a man”’ (p. 88). He also remembers the insatiable, nymphomanic lust of Ursula, who was ‘too demanding’, who wanted ‘to devour and possess’ him, whose ‘excessiveness (was) a form of hunger’ which he could not satisfy, for it was ‘too voracious, too blatant, too uncompromising’ (p. 123). Ma-Rose reminisces about her younger days when she could ‘milk’ any number of men at any given time, in fact, she admits to ‘having had all the men of these parts and from far away’ who came ‘to have their marrow drained’ (p. 27). Andrea in The wall of the plague has had several white lovers before she met Mandla, and so it goes on. In the early 1970s, Brink published a play based on J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World under the title Bobaas van die Boendoe. The setting is a fishing village somewhere along the West Coast of the Cape Province and the characters are so-called coloureds. Already then Brink, employing one of the oldest techniques of characterisation, viz. analogous naming, named one of the female characters Sêra Fyndraai.^7. Another eloquent example from The wall of the plague: Andrea has an altercation with a dirty old clochard on the beach in France when she remembers one of her father's favourite invectives in which the black woman's only function (breeding) and her only activity (copulation) are combined: she shouts at him: ‘“Jou ou droëdrol wat uit jou ma se poephol gebore is oor haar doos te besig was”’ (‘“You old turd who have been born from your mother's arse because her cunt was too busy at the time”’ - p. 72, my translation). In fairness to Brink one must concede that, in addition to popularising the black people's struggle to liberate themselves and exposing the injustices perpetrated by his own people in his work, he makes a serious indictment against society and the powers that force women into prostitution. Joseph's mother sells her only asset, her body, ‘her safeguard for the future, her key to the present’ (p. 110), so that he can have a proper education. But to suggest that the black woman has neither the mental faculties nor the physical skills (even without a formal education!) to earn a living other than being prone on her back with splayed legs, is grossly insulting to womanhood and to humankind alike. The black woman in South African literature cannot and does not even exercise ‘pussy power’ (Eldridge Cleaver, 1968), for the impression is created that she is merely the object to serve the needs of men, the infernal seductress - not in an ameliorative sense - but as a demonic force let loose to demolish Afrikaner values and white hegemony.
3.	Jakes Gerwel points out in his study Literatuur en apartheid (1988) that the black man is symbolically castrated in the early Afrikaans novel. If the black male is thus emasculated, the black woman is degraded by the images projected

7. ‘Fyndraai’ is an Afrikaans colloquial word for ‘orgasm’.

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of her and by the contemptuous language used to describe her anatomy and her motherhood. Sherry B. Ortner (1974:87) cautions:

Efforts directed solely at changing the social institutions - through setting quotas on hiring, for example, or through passing equal-pay-for-equal-work laws - cannot have far-reaching effects if cultural language and imagery continue to purvey a relatively devalued view of women.

5.3.2 The theme of ‘freedom’

The theme of freedom, or rather the search for freedom, runs continuously through Brink's fictional work, novels and dramas alike, establishing itself anew in each and every subsequent work. Especially his novels deal with the same problem, viz. the struggle for freedom, justice and a ‘liberal humanism’. Given the numerous existing barriers in his native country, it is no wonder that the artist displays a kind of ‘magnificent obsession’ with freedom - chiefly the freedom of the individual which will remain an unattainable myth while artificial barriers remain or are maintained or are newly created. Brink himself points out in Mapmakers (1983) that the struggle for freedom has been an Afrikaner enterprise since the early days of South African history and cites among the examples the first stock farmers' rebellion against the stringent rules of the VOC, the Voortrekkers' search for freedom from oppressive British rule, individuals in that history who have sacrificed their lives in their search for freedom.

Among Brink's many statements is the contention that art can be used as a weapon against ‘verkramptheid’ (ultra-conservatism) as a means of leading the ‘volk’ to liberation. For the individual to attain personal freedom, s/he has to become first of all morally emancipated since it is one of the first signs of the liberation of the individual and which often coincides with his/her political emancipation. Thus, the depiction of the erotic in his literature becomes one of the primary means to emotional and ideological emancipation. It is therefore no coincidence that four out of his six novels of the 1970s and early 1980s deal with sex across the colour-line at a time when it was forbidden by law in South Africa.

However, the quest for freedom in Brink's novels remains a predominantly male aspiration and enterprise, which is not surprising as his main characters are almost invariably male. If the central character happens to be white, his search for freedom is essentially a search for personal freedom; if black, the character has to go through various stages and overcome various barriers before he can even attempt to go in search of personal freedom. Cf. in this regard Joseph Malan (Looking on Darkness), Adam Mantoor (An Instanst in the Wind) and Galant (A Chain of Voices), all of whom must either find freedom from racial oppression and servitude, have to reach the top of Langston Hughes' ‘racial mountain’

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(Hughes 1926/1976:309), or from slavery before they can aspire to freedom in other forms. Ultimately, in each case, white or black, it becomes a search for freedom within themselves. This quest for freedom is seldom if ever accomplished, since the human condition is of such a nature that various new barriers - in many instances created by the individual himself - present themselves time and again.

If the searching self happens to be female, she is more likely to be white, for example Jessica Thomson in Looking on darkness who, despite her upper middle-class upbringing in England, is held to ransom by a text found on one of those Victorian plates in her home, ‘Thou God seest me’, and which has ever since put a strain on her relationships with other people; Elisabeth Larsson in An instant in the wind whose search for freedom from the constraints of patriarchy and eighteenth-century Cape society and politics is to some extent realised in her unrestricted physical identification with the slave Adam Mantoor and her complete transformation through the sex act but who nevertheless returns from idyllic circumstances to the Cape and to a different kind of bondage. Hester van der Merwe in A chain of voices similarly finds her freedom of spirit severely curtailed by ‘the corruptions of both power and suffering’ (p. 505) but vows that nobody would ever possess her again (p. 103); she is acutely aware that ‘there are always new thresholds to cross’ (p. 253) in her search for freedom and recognises that ‘not past or future was freedom’ (p. 260). She sums up her concept of freedom: ‘one always thinks of freedom as of something “out there”, remote and separate, a territory to be reached ... But is there, ever, anything “out there”: freedom? truth? Can it ever be anywhere, or otherwise, than here, in here, inseparable from who you are, what you are, what you were, what you alone allow yourself to become?’ (pp. 260/1). It is only when she and Galant consummate their love and desire for one another that Hester finally, though only for a few fleeting moments, realises her quest for freedom, this very act ‘giving (her) being, a name, an inseparable existence, a loneliness, excruciating fulfilment ... setting (her) free forever’ (pp. 504/5).

However, the concern here is how Brink applies the concept of freedom to his black women characters in the three selected novels. In respect of the peripheral black women characters in Looking on darkness the points can be debated at length as to whether these women in their sexual freedom have indeed achieved emotional, ideological and political emancipation according to Brink's argument, or whether they are seen as simply promiscuous women whose only objective is to satisfy their seemingly insatiable sexual hunger, or whether the only freedom they dare possess in a constrictive apartheid society is the freedom of their bodies. Be that as it may, it is never articulated by any of them that they are in search of anything, let alone freedom. The closest any of them comes to articulating a dissatisfaction with her existence and therefore implying a ‘search’ for a better dispensation, is when Sophie tells her son: ‘“Joseph, look, inne daytime I work my blerry arse off fo' the white people, but when it gets dark it's our turn. The Lawd

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give us the night to have a bit of happiness, for the days are hell”’ (p. 88); so one must either accept that these women have already achieved emancipation or that freedom is a concept alien to them and that they therefore have nothing to pursue.

However, as evidence of Brink's own evolution, the characters of Ma-Rose in A chain of voices and Andrea Malgas in The wall of the plague - though different in almost all respects - have ‘evolved’ from the purely physical black women in Brink's earlier work to women possessing (nearly) all the properties of a full human being. Ma-Rose's forceful and explicit claim to being ‘the only free person on this farm’ (p. 84) encompasses many implicit manifestations of freedom. As was government policy of the early nineteenth century, the Khoikhoin were ‘free’ persons who could come and go as they pleased and could indenture themselves to white employers if they so wished. In this respect Ma-Rose as a Khoi woman is ‘free’ but not necessarily free from the rules and regulations governing slaves. With regard to other Khoi figures and also with regard to the white masters and mistresses whose freedom is a ‘right’, she cannot possibly be the only free person on the farm. Her statement therefore appears to be not only contradictory but also incorrect. So what exactly does she mean by this statement?

Ma-Rose herself supplies part of the answer when she tells Nicolaas: ‘“My heart is my own”’ (p. 84). And indeed it is. As a labourer on Piet van der Merwe's farm it is required of her together with all the other labourers and slaves to attend house-prayers and to listen to the master reading from the Bible as part of the white people's ‘civilising mission’. She is therefore able to claim: ‘“I know that book (the Bible) backwards, Nicolaas. Every night of my life I got to listen to your father reading from it and praying”’ (p. 83). But in spite of this persistent indoctrination, she remains firmly rooted in her belief to Tsui-Goab and Heitsi-Eibib and even threats of the wrath of God coming down upon her unless she repents her ‘ungodly’ and ‘heathen’ ways, fail to impress her. In his futile attempts to convert her, Nicolaas threatens that God will send fire from heaven to destroy her, to which she defiantly retorts: ‘“Let him send it then. Let him try”’ (p. 84). Ma-Rose's religion, as is indicated in her humble submission and incantation to Tsui-Goab (cf. pp. 175, 440), is one of reverence and sincerity in contrast to Piet's challenging and rebellious communication with God (cf. pp. 32/3, 497).

Her freedom is manifest in yet another way. When Galant is transferred to the farm Houd-den-Bek as part of Nicolaas's possessions, Ma-Rose follows him but insists on having her hut built at half an hour's distance from those of the other labourers where she wants to live alone. No amount of persuasion by Galant can make her change her mind, brushing aside his protests that it is too far away, too isolated and too exposed with the words: ‘“I won't be tied to another man's yard, Galant ... I don't ask favours from any man. I'm free”’ (p. 129). By these very words and concomitant actions she confirms her independent nature and freedom from fear and coercion.

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Ma-Rose's freedom also lies in her unrestrained love for people and a resultant compassion for everyone who happens to cross her path. She is never judgmental in her attitude, is fair in her assessment of the other characters, is the conciliatory medium between the two opposing forces and is prepared at all times to listen to the various points of view. Those making her the custodian of their confidences are assured in the knowledge that their secrets are safe. It is therefore not surprising that Ma-Rose, reflecting upon the trial at which Galant and the others would surely be sentenced to death, knows that there would be ‘one man's word against another's, master against slave ... Liars all’ for ‘only a free man can tell the truth’ (p. 23). This implies that only she, being the only free person on the farm, is able to give an unbiased account of the events leading up to and including the revolt and, when examining her monologues together with those of the other personages, there is nothing in them that would refute her claim.

The laws, rules and regulations brought into the country by the colonisers could never succeed in inhibiting or curtailing Ma-Rose's freedom of spirit: ‘... we, the Khoikhoin, had been coming and going for innumerable winters and summers. We'd come and gone as free as the swallows that arrive in the first warmth and depart in the first frost - here one evening and gone the next morning, and who could stop them?’ (p. 25). While this freedom of the Khoikhoin had been interpreted by the European settlers as ‘work-shyness’ or ‘lack of stability’ or ‘inability to sustain any effort’ (see Chapter 2.3.3), Ma-Rose gives the opposite view, from the perspective of one who knows. Unlike those of her race who easily succumbed to the new laws and rules and were soon indoctrinated with new ideas, Ma-Rose has singularly and unflinchingly retained that freedom of spirit which was an inherent part of her forebears and which became her legacy. It is for this reason that she represents her people's past, their culture and traditions which she passes on to Galant in the hope that he would pass it on to his descendents. Galant's search for freedom is perhaps influenced by her very insistence on her own personal freedom, so that one can say without fear of contradiction that Galant's quest, even though it results in failure, is a legacy from Ma-Rose which he in turn passes on to future generations.

With Andrea Malgas (The wall of the plague) the situation is vastly different. In search of freedom all her life - from a precarious working-class existence first in District Six and later in Bonteheuwel, from poverty and a comfortless environment - her efforts to accomplish it are misguided since it appears she was under the impression that freedom could come to her through her association with white men (cf. Galant's elation at the thought that a white woman might be the mother of his child and therefore it would be born free). Shulamith Firestone (1979:109) applies a political interpretation of the Electra Complex to the psychology of the black woman (she similarly applies a political interpretation of the Oedipus Complex to the black male).^8. Irrespective of how controversial or even ludicrous Firestone's argument is, when applied to Andrea Malgas one can almost believe

8. According to Firestone, if the black man is the Son to the Family of Man (white man and white woman being the Parents), then the black woman is Daughter. The black woman's initial sympathy with the white woman (mother), her bond of oppression with her against the white male (father) is complicated by her later relationship with the white male (father). When she discovers that the white male owns ‘that world of travel and adventure’, she, in the subservient position of child, identifies with him, to reject the female within herself. In the effort to reject the womanly (powerless) element in herself, she develops contempt for the Mother (white woman). Like the young girl, she may react to her powerlessness in one of two ways: she may attempt to gain power directly by imitating white men (the black female achiever), thus becoming a woman of strong character, or she may attempt to gain power indirectly by seducing the Father (the black sex-pot), thus putting herself in sexual competition with the white woman for the Father's favour - causing her to hate and be jealous of the white woman, whom she now must attempt to imitate.

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in its validity, for how else is one to explain her ‘identification’ with one white man after another - all of them, with the exception of the expatriot South African Paul Joubert, significantly foreigners, emphasising Andrea's misconception that freedom is something ‘out there’ - in her search for freedom?

When Andrea is confronted with the inhuman effects of the Immorality Act, she flees with her lover Brian first to France where they journey through Provence and then to England, one of the many journeys she undertakes in her search for freedom. The journey motif in this novel is of utmost importance, for a physical journey implies enforced travel (as in Andrea's case), escape from someone or something, a political quest, an inner journey in the psyche of the travelling self, a quest for (self-)knowledge. In addition, it also implies a flight from stereotypes, from the confines of a racist, patriarchal society and ultimately from the bonds of being a woman. It is therefore no coincidence that her last name is ‘Malgas’ = the Cape gannet (cf. Andrea: ‘We Malgases are sea-birds’ - p. 21), a large white sea-bird with black-tipped wings, signifying not only flight/freedom but also ‘coloured’, a kind of marred ‘purity’/whiteness; that all her efforts to live with and like a white can never succeed because her final identification - which is inherent but which she failed to recognise - is with the black Africa she has always denied. Likewise, the map provided in the book to indicate the different French localities which appear in the text - although primarily meant as a guide to the reader - conjures up expectations of a journey or a journey motif which functions on different levels in the novel.

Already the title of the novel, in fact the title of any novel, is ‘the threshold to the narrative text’ (Brink 1987:124) and although it refers on the first level to a historically real wall that had been erected in the Middle Ages in an attempt to stave off the plague, it also suggests the different walls/barriers which especially Andrea has to scale or break down in order to achieve that freedom which she pursues but which persistently eludes her. The title refers not only to walls within South African society (although this is the main aspect) but also to other kinds of barriers and other kinds of plagues which continually threaten and haunt her. The title is very explicitly marked in the text: ‘Any wall which separates one person from another, is a Wall of the Plague. If you want to break it down, you have to start at the very beginning. At a man and a woman. A father and his son. A brother and his brother’. But it is ironically by implication also something that has to be erected against the oppressor: ‘There is only óne possible barrier against the oppressor, and that is the staying-power of the oppressed’.

From the very first paragraph of the story text the journey motif and by implication the search for freedom establishes itself: ‘So many journeys are undertaken in one journey ... one never really arrives anywhere, nor does one ever become free. Journeying. In search. In flight?’ (p. 13). In one of the many shifts in narration and focalization Paul remembers Andrea telling him of her recurring dream that

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she is flying: ‘Whole nights long she is flying, inaccessible to those who pursue or threaten her’. The freedom of this ephemeral yet unreal experience is reflected in her real yet equally ephemeral freedom while scuba-diving in the waters of the Cape, an ‘entrance into an entire world organised differently to your own ... the quiet ecstacy of a completely new kind of existence’ (p. 21).

The five-day journey Andrea undertakes to (a) find suitable locations for Paul's proposed film on the Black Death and (b) find clarity about her relationship with Paul and to decide whether she should marry him, is indicated in the text as ‘Day One’, ‘Day Two’, etc. Each of these days coincides with one or more flashbacks to a ‘journey’ in one sense or another and each of these ‘journeys’ was in essence a search. The flashbacks themselves are journeys back into time in an attempt to assess her past experiences in a clinically cool manner; in addition, they are recollections of physical journeys: her first journey through Provence with Paul; her last journey through South Africa with Brian; her very first journey through Provence with Brian; her journeys through parts of South Africa with her father; an increasing awareness of the terrible journeys Mandla had to undertake in his search for freedom, not for himself but for his country and his people; and finally her journey back to South Africa.

Unlike Ma-Rose who is free, Andrea is in constant search for freedom and only when, in those brief, ecstatic, excruciating moments, she makes love to Mandla, does she experience the freedom she so desperately sought, significantly initiated by a man. This new-found freedom also gives her the courage to return to her country, ‘to forfeit (her) aloofness, to relinquish (her) security, to turn (her) back on comfort, and to choose the hell because it is (hers)’.

5.3.3 A ‘feminist’ perspective

The women's movement which has put equality of the sexes firmly on the world agenda certainly has had a profound influence on Brink's writing and, when bearing in mind the strong patriarchal nature of both black and white/Afrikaner society, it is no mean achievement for a male author in the South African context to identify himself with women's equality. Referring to his article, ‘Oor religie en seks’ (1964), Brink states twenty years later that for a long time he no longer subscribed to ‘the romantic chauvinism with regard to women’ and that he would not write on this topic today without emphasising the identification of the two in mysticism (Brink 1985:12).

As far as Brink's female characters are concerned, the ‘feminist’ perspective is inextricably linked to the ‘freedom’ theme and much of what has already been said in 5.3.2 may be of relevance here. The rejection of the ‘traditional’ role and image of women, of their devalued status in society, of their ‘expected’ submission to the

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will of the male, of the idea that women are merely nubile females, are fundamental to feminist thought, and the aspiration to the transcendent female is in essence a search for freedom.

It is perhaps necessary to explain what I understand ‘feminism’ to be. Neither the term ‘feminism’ nor the term ‘womanism’ is acceptable in its totality, for both have implicit in their meaning another kind of sexism. I do concede, however, that male chauvinism has been with us since time immemorial and that male sexism is largely responsible for the devalued status of women even in the most democratic societies. I prefer the term ‘humanism’, since all kinds of discrimination - sexual, racial, in the area of social class, elitism in human activities, etc. - are equally abhorrent. If ‘feminism’ is defined as ‘the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women ... Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement’ (Barbara Smith, quoted in Minh-ha 1989:86 - original emphasis), then I have to agree that the struggle for freedom is political, that freedom is the natural right of all women. But can women really be free when their brothers, fathers, husbands and sons are still in bondage through racist or other ideologies? If all forms of discrimination, except that against women, by some magic formula disappear overnight, then, of course, I shall subscribe to the view quoted above. In the meantime, the struggle to free women must be fought alongside the struggle to free all oppressed people, for only then, in my opinion, shall women and men recognise and accept equality of the sexes. And, even if that equality is achieved by some miracle, I do foresee a situation of the Orwellian philosophy of all people being equal but some being more equal than others, for our world has been defined in terms of hierarchy ever since we can remember. That, however, does not mean that we have to give up the fight for freedom which some appropriate for themselves. In short, I believe that every human being must have the opportunities in all spheres of life - health, living standards, education, etc. - for self-fulfillment, achievement and betterment. (See also 6.3.2.5 for black South African women's views on ‘feminism’.)

The first evidence of an unmistakable ‘feminist’ perspective in Brink's novels is provided in An instant in the wind (1975). One of the two main characters, Elisabeth Larsson, is described by Anita Lindenberg (1982:689) as ‘surely the strongest feminist figure in the Afrikaans prose’ and Laura Milton (1988:259) echoes this view when she writes that Elisabeth is ‘indeed a very strong feminist figure’. From the perspective of white, middle-class women such as Lindenberg and Milton, these views cannot be contradicted, but one wonders whether Elisabeth would have been such a ‘strong feminist figure’ and as assertive if the opposition between the two main characters had not been as great as it is. Let us not forget that Adam Mantoor is first of all a fugitive slave which already puts him in a vulnerable position and at a disadvantage, while Elisabeth is free, in all probability mistress of slaves before her ‘defection’; secondly, that Adam is black with surely all the dehumanising connotations of black attached to him in the

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South African historical context, while Elisabeth is white with all the privileges of being white her ‘inalienable right’; thirdly, that Adam, already emasculated by Western influence, depends for his ultimate fate entirely upon Elisabeth's goodwill or otherwise. The subjunctive mood in which the story of Adam and Elisabeth is told inspires one to ask: What could have happened if the situation were reversed, if Elisabeth were black and Adam white? She the slave and he free? If both the main characters were white? Nevertheless, the fact remains that a male author, possibly with as strong a patriarchal background as most people in his native country, has created a strong feminist figure who reflects the implicit author's ideology.

Returning to the three selected novels and the ‘feminist’ perspective in respect of black women, Looking on darkness can immediately be excluded from this discussion for there are not even brief flickers of feminist rhetoric on the part of the black women figures, let alone a ‘feminist’ perspective. If ‘freedom’ is an alien concept to them, then surely the message which is being brought across is that ‘feminism’ has not yet arrived on the socio-political scene in District Six or on the Cape Flats. Once again it can be argued that these figures in their sexual liberation are either in no need of a Western-style bourgeois feminism or that the constraints of a sexist-racist-class-conscious society make it impossible for them to pursue personal freedom.

Though still seminal, explicit feminist thinking reveals itself in the figure of the white woman, Hester, in A chain of voices but in the case of the black woman, Ma-Rose, her feminism is implicit in everything she says or does. It would be an interesting exercise to compare these two women in detail: the one white, free, yet in bondage; the other black, in bondage to all intents and purposes, yet free. Hester's aversion to ‘stifling’, her resolve to ‘belong only to (herself), separate and intact’ and her quest to ‘confirm (her) own identity’ (p. 103) establish themselves in different ways, and are indications of unmistakable feminist thinking.

As already stated in 5.3.2, Ma-Rose reveals a singular freedom within herself despite the artificial constraints of the political system of the time. Her feminism does not reside in empty rhetoric - she acts it out in every deed. The only time she explicitly articulates her independence, one of the main tenets of feminism, is when she tells Galant that she would not be tied to any man's yard, that she does not ask favours from any man (p. 129), for in her wide experience and knowledge of men across the entire spectrum of the microcosmic Cold Bokkeveld society, she knows that receiving favours results in another kind of bondage, is another way of holding the receiver hostage. Ironically, she never waits to be asked for favours; she gives them freely and voluntarily in the only way she can and it is her freedom, her independence, that makes it possible for her not to expect reciprocation.

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Several other characters bear testimony to Ma-Rose's strong personality and independent spirit, albeit sometimes in a negative sense. The white woman, Alida, for example, grudgingly acknowledges that Ma-Rose asserts a ‘subversive hold’ on Piet (p. 65), even though she exudes an air of ‘humble dignity’ (p. 67); Nicolaas soon discovers that ‘invariably it was she (Ma-Rose) who got in the last word’ (p. 84) in any argument and that even his book-bound knowledge cannot refute her arguments; like his mother, he too is conscious of ‘the strong hold’ Ma-Rose has on people (p. 85).

What is of particular interest with regard to A chain of voices, is that no white South African critic thus far has acknowledged the embedded feminist perspective in respect of black women in this novel, while several agree about the feminist ‘code’ in An instant in the wind. Could it be that they too regard feminism as a white prerogative, as the exclusive domain of the white woman? Or could it be that the white, Western-style, middle-class feminism to which they subscribe trivializes ‘feminism’ as interpreted by black women?

Until now, there have been only scant references to The wall of the plague as a ‘feminist’ novel and to Andrea's ‘feminism’, for example by Heinrich Ohlhoff (1988:40). In a fairly recent interview, Brink has this to say about his novel: ‘I have written the book from the perspective of a coloured, Andrea, Paul's friend. I believe that a racist system is linked to male chauvinism. In South Africa there are two kinds of oppressed: blacks and women. I want to examine this double discrimination’ (Brink 1989:33). Although Brink significantly does not mention the third kind of oppression, i.e. class oppression which is responsible for the severest exploitation of especially women in the labour market, this statement is a far cry from the ‘old’ Brink of the 1960s and early 1970s whose black women figures constituted only the physical.

Andrea's feminism reacts to an inherent sexism in South African society. While her father is known for his libidinous exploits, also by his wife and children, he nevertheless expects Andrea to keep her body pure, warning her that he would be the first to know if her body had been violated for, according to him, a man can see from the way a young woman walks whether or not she had been devirginised. Another reality Andrea has to contend with is continual sexual harassment, not only in South Africa but also in Europe, and her absolute powerlessness to deal with it.

A further reason for Andrea to establish her independence originates from the limited choices that characterised her life in South Africa. It therefore becomes imperative for her to have freedom of choice, especially concerning her relationship with Paul. She has no desire to return to the country of her birth, she never wanted to after her enforced departure, the circumstances of which were of such a nature that the country had become to her ‘the name of a bad conscience,

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a threat in (her) sleep’ (p. 20). When Paul asks her to marry him, she needs time to consider it. If she accepts, she knows that a choice in her future life would once again be excluded. While still unattached she has the choice to go back if she wants to but once married to Paul - he white, she black - they will not be allowed to return together, and that would finally destroy their relationship. She has to decide whether she has the courage to go through with it, to face that ‘slow erosion, the undermining of a relationship which is (her) most important defence against life, the nagging suspicion or reproach’. Her journey through the south of France, initially with no pre-planned destination or no fixed route, is therefore symbolic not only of the conflict within her, but also of her search for herself, for freedom and for truth.

When considering the above tendencies in Brink's novels, it is clear that a progression in his portrayal of black women is taking place, from the purely physical female to women with dreams, hopes, aspirations and emotions like every human being.

5.4 Houd-den-bek/A chain of voices (1982)

Some may argue that The wall of the plague would have been a more appropriate choice for inclusion in this particular study, especially because of its obviously feminist tone and content and the fact that for the first time in Brink's oeuvre we have a black woman as central character, as main focalizing subject but also as main focalized object of the fictitious writer Paul Joubert. Perhaps my own subjective non-identification with the main character has influenced my choice, for example her initial preference for white men, the denial of her roots and of the Africa within herself, her rejection of the people's struggles, etc. - although I concede that her ‘awakening’ becomes all the more significant and her change all the more radical because of her former prejudice and bias.

Instead, I have chosen A chain of voices, mainly because of its multiperspectivity which gives it a ring of ‘truth’, the strongly defined characters, the convincing historical situation and especially the fact that the discredited and almost erased history of one of Southern Africa's original peoples is given a new relevance and significance, the novel itself being a testimony that they had always been there. It is almost as if the author says on behalf on these ‘extinct’ people: ‘It's not that we haven't always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingerprints upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds’ (Audre Lorde 1990:xi). Most of all, my choice of A chain of voices has been influenced by my fascination with the figure of Ma-Rose who, in my opinion, is the most memorable of all the female characters Brink has ever created, for

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reasons that will become clear in the ensuing pages. I can endorse Steenberg's view of this novel: ‘Already on the level of mythical-religious material and its intertextual integration, A chain of voices reveals a particular richness. Add to that the greater nuance of personages and the use of narrators, and one comes to the conclusion that one is probably dealing with the best novel by Brink to date ...’ (Steenberg 1984:266).

5.4.1 Focalization and narration

The English title of this novel already suggests a narrative process whereby different voices articulate the events and where different focalizers are present. It is interesting to note that the Afrikaans title, which can be translated as ‘Shut-your-trap’, is the name of the farm, the spatial location where most of the events take place, but at the same time suggests a silence, a non-articulation of thoughts, feelings, experiences, questions, etc. as was expected of slaves. This becomes clear when Piet, one of the ‘voices’, reminisces about his ancestors, one of whom told a detachment of dragoons who came to arrest him: ‘In this place your word counts for nothing. No one but I have the right to speak here’ (p. 33). The author himself stated in an interview: ‘The relationship between people is based on the possibility of communication. If one can no longer communicate through language, if “shut-your-trap” is all that still can be said, then one form of articulation is still possible, and that is the language of violence which destroys on both sides’ (interview in Die Transvaler, 06.05.82). This succinctly sums up the story in this novel and the story in present-day South Africa. Through ‘all these voices in the great silence’ (p. 441) the author wants to establish conversation with the readers (white?) to help them understand, but not only that. The insights to which Ma-Rose comes after all the bitterness are essentially here: ‘Is it enough to understand unless you also try to change it?’ (p. 441).

In a narrative text where different narrators speak the implicit author is clearly identifiable as an active agent. Different focalizations and different narrating perspectives appear but no one other than the implicit author can make such a distinction possible, can organise it and can present it in such a manner that the readers ‘know’ how to read the text. In this novel the different voices do not speak consecutively in a haphazard manner but it is the implicit author who organises them as links in a chain, who manipulates the readers by making them listen to a chain of voices which he selects and causes to reverberate in a particular sequence.

This novel is an excellent example of what Genette terms ‘multiple internal focalization ... where the same event may be evoked several times according to the point of view of several ... characters’ (Genette 1980:189). There are some 30 ‘voices’ (characters) with 84 ‘speaking turns’ who, to a greater or lesser extent,

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focalize the events leading up to the slave revolt in the Cold Bokkeveld of the Cape Colony in 1824/5, as well as the revolt itself. The main narrator/focalizer is Galant, the slave who initiated and led the revolt but he becomes the focalized object of almost all the other focalizers. My interest, however, is mainly the black female characters, Ma-Rose, Bet, Pamela and Lydia and, to a lesser degree, the white female characters, Alida, Cecilia and Hester. In a novel where there are two clearly opposing camps, where mutual prejudices are the great stumbling blocks on the road to harmonious race relations, it is Ma-Rose, the black woman, and Hester, the white woman, who act as important links between cultures or as conciliators between opponents.

Brink uses this multiperspective as a narrative technique to create a great dramatic multiplicity of voices for the sake of greater objectivity without the intervention of an external narrator. In this way he has indeed created a series of fictional situations with which he constructs a dialectic of ‘truths’: each necessarily subjective rendition of particular facts gives another vision of the events, so that a former or following character's vision is again relativised or put in a different light. The question with regard to truth can therefore never be answered because each speaker's perception of his/her fellow humans is naturally limited and limiting. The reader is therefore compelled to arrive at his/her own conclusions and ultimately to act as judge in this labyrinth of equivalent views.

The multiperspectivity - surely the most salient feature of this novel - must be linked to the polarisation of spaces. It has often enough been indicated that a clear link exists between space and perspective. Weisgerber (1972:161/2), for example, formulates it thus: ‘In essence the space of the novel is the complex relation between the places where the action takes place and the people who are involved in it, i.e. the individual who narrates and the people of whom s/he narrates’. Van Luxemburg (1985:188) endorses this view: ‘The image of the space presented to the reader, the places where the history is taking place, are equally determined by focalization’.

In a discussion of space in a text, a distinction is usually made between (narrated) story space, (narrative) story space and (discursive) narrator space. Narrated story space is the topographical details or place or topological position of the events. In A chain of voices this would be the Cold Bokkeveld, Cape Town, the different farms, Tulbagh, etc. It is therefore the elements which can largely be geographically determined and which form the ‘world’, including the socio-cultural and historically conditioned sphere, of the acting personages. Then there is the narrative story space, called ‘narrative space’ by Bal (1985:93) and which, according to her, is a place ‘seen in relation to its perception’ by story personages. The discursive narrator space refers to the agent from whose spatial consciousness it is perceived or focalized. In this approach, it does not concern only the literal or physical view from which the narrator looks at something or someone, but also

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the ideological perspective with which s/he looks and registers. This can be related to what Rimmon-Kenan (1983:81) terms the ‘ideological facet’ of focalization.

When we consider the narrated story space or topographical details, we ascertain that there are two places of action: the Bokkeveld and nineteenth-century Cape Town. These two places are in the eyes of the story characters geographically and spiritually irreconcilably far apart with nothing in common. Cape Town is mainly the city from where it is ‘ruled at a distance’ (p. 229) and where a totally different mentality exists from that in the interior of the country. Nicolaas sums it up from the white perspective:

What did they know about our lives out there beyond the mountains, a sprinkling of people devoted to taming a wild land so that others might live in safety? (p. 230).

But already in the first ‘speaking turn’ of the novel, that of Ma-Rose, this distance and irreconcilability are implicit:

If you go towards Tulbagh and climb the highest peak, you can see a long way in all directions. You can see fully seven days far, for that's how long it takes to Cape Town by wagon. You can see the Table Mountain of the Cape, even though it's so far you can't really be sure it's there, but it is; and you know that's where the Gentlemen live and where the ships come and go and where the cannon booms from the Lion's Rump ... (p. 23).

Nicolaas can be considered a typical representative of the white community of the Bokkeveld who, with the view quoted above, makes his people and his slaves in his own space special but which at the same time isolates them. As he situates himself and his relatives in the passage above in space and time and as he justifies his slave-ownership, we are not dealing exclusively with story space but also with narrator space: his view, representative of the view of his fellow-whites, of an isolated space where his interpretation of the Scriptures and faith is the only valid one, is being disclosed. Cape Town and surely England but even Waveren (pp. 229-231) are regarded as basically hostile places or as a kind of threat where ‘they’ live and do not think and live and believe like ‘us’. From the very outset, the world for him - one of the most important focalizing personages in the novel - consists of opposing spaces inhabited by people who have completely different mentalities. Nicolaas's ‘us’ obviously does not include the slave population on his farm.

Ma-Rose, the main internal focalizer among the black women (and perhaps even among all the women characters in this novel), is also the most important narrator/focalizer in respect of the differences between white and black mainly because of her intermediate position - in more ways than one. Since she is also the

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focalized object of all the main characters, black and white, male and female, her status and role in the story demands attention (see 5.4.3 - 5.4.3.6).

Ma-Rose focalizes the space and the proud history of her people, the Khoikhoin, but at the same time she focalizes the contrast between her people and the ‘white people, the Honkhoikwa, the Smooth-haired ones’ who ‘are still strangers to these parts’ (p. 25). She observes:

They still bear in them the fear of their fathers who died on the plains or in the forbidding mountains. They do not understand yet. They have not yet become stone and rock embedded in the earth and born from it again and again like the Khoikhoin. One doesn't belong before one's body is shaped from the dust of one's ancestors (p. 25).

She not only focalizes the whites but also narrates how the whites perceive the Khoikhoin, thus a form of embedded focalization:

And here they found us, the White men did, when they came to tame the land as they called it, digging themselves in, and building their stone walls. But it's no use. They know nothing of these parts yet and already death has come in among their walls. We of the Khoin, we never thought of these mountains and plains, these long grasslands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed. It was the Whites who called it wild and saw it filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always been friendly and tame. It has given us food and drink and shelter, even in the worst of droughts. It was only when the Whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really became wild (p. 25).

Ma-Rose not only focalizes the space, the history of her people, the slaves, the white slave-owners, the differences between black and white, but she also focalizes herself, her role in the slave community, in the white community, her intermediate position. She is therefore the subject and object of her own focalization. Likewise, most of the other characters focalize Ma-Rose. It is interesting to observe the divergent perceptions the other characters have of Ma-Rose, depending upon who the focalizer is: black or white, female or male, free person or slave. This criss-cross focalization, on both the horizontal and vertical axes, requires further analysis for our understanding of how Ma-Rose and the other black female characters are portrayed, particularly with regard to entrenched stereotypes about black women (see 5.4.2 and 5.4.3).

Another aspect with regard to A chain of voices should be emphasised, which may influence the reader's perception of the events and characters. As previously stated, this novel has a historical framework - the slave revolt in the Cold Bokkeveld in 1824/5 - and the literary text itself has a concrete historical framework by beginning with an ‘Act of Accusation’ and ending with the ‘Verdict’,

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two historical documents to be found in the Cape Deeds Office. Brink has of course ‘doctored’ these documents somewhat, as pointed out by Van Coller (1988:166-199) in order to ‘serve the fiction system’. The perceptions of ‘His Majesty's Fiscal’ in the ‘Act of Accusation’ and those of the ‘members of the court’ in the ‘Verdict’, are the perceptions of superior, authoritative ‘voices’, superior in the dichotomy of white and black but also superior in the dichotomy of a foreign colonial power and local colonists. It is therefore necessary for the other voices to articulate their perceptions to counteract the bias found in these two documents, and to refute or negate or confirm their contents.

5.4.2 Black women characters in the novel: an overview

The black women's ‘voices’ in the novel cannot be dismissed as inconsequential even though they are peripheral to the events. Their inclusion in the chain of voices functions as a means to give more objectivity to the complexity of views and counter-views, to give an indication of the socio-political milieu of the time and especially of Houd-den-Bek but more importantly, to reflect how they as women are perceived by the male characters and significantly by white women characters.

Although not one of the ‘voices’ in the novel, we are nevertheless informed entirely through Ma-Rose's narration and focalization of the helpless plight of the young slave girl, Lys, in the Houd-den-Bek situation. Lys was the mother of the main character Galant, and it is through Ma-Rose's narration that we are informed of the circumstances of Galant's birth and the circumstances which led to her becoming his foster-mother. Lys, ‘a mere child with apricot breasts’ (p. 27), apparently came from Batavia as a slave and soon became the object of several men's desires. To Ma-Rose it appeared that Lys had something about her which seemed to lure men: ‘That is how it was with Lys, Lys of the apricot tits; and all the men from far and wide came to pluck her’, one of whom was the master of the farm, Piet van der Merwe (p. 27). Yet, unlike Ma-Rose, Lys neither welcomed nor enjoyed these attentions and after the difficult birth of her child of an unknown father, she remained ill for a long time, ‘scared of getting well, scared the men would start again’ (p. 28). In this state she was sold by Piet to a passing farmer as she was no longer of any use to him, and because Lys herself showed no interest in the child, Ma-Rose who happened to be ‘in milk’ at the time, fed him and cared for him from the moment of his birth.

The mentally deranged Lydia's two speaking turns in the novel can hardly be considered elucidating with regard to events on Houd-den-Bek and we have to rely on the information supplied by other characters about this abused and brutalised woman. In her state she is the easy victim of men and also of the white woman, Cecilia. It is mainly through Galant's and Bet's narration and focalization that we learn anything about Lydia's situation. From Galant's perspective she is

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‘a good woman, a generous body’ and she is ‘better than nothing’ when he and another slave, Ontong, take turns with her (p. 128). But it is also Galant who informs us that ‘she's not right in the head’ when he describes her strange behaviour.

However, it is not only the slaves who exploit this most vulnerable of the female figures. When Nicolaas, owner of Houd-den-Bek, comes to Ma-Rose for advice and help against his impotence when he is with his wife, she advises him to ‘soak (his) root in a black woman’ (p. 178) for it to grow and be given life. Being the boss, master and owner of slaves, his choice falls upon the defenceless Lydia, saying much about his own character. This is where Bet's narration and focalization become important, because together with Lydia she is employed by Nicolaas's wife, Cecilia, a big, strong woman who bases her entire philosophy of life on her interpretation of the Scriptures. Much more than her mother-in-law Alida, she could and would not tolerate her husband's adultery, with a black woman at that. Being altogether in no position to bring an end to Nicolaas's adventure, she can only vent her fury on Lydia.

From Bet's narration we learn that ‘the Nooi’ (Cecilia) could not control herself with Lydia, she simply could not stand her. Whenever Nicolaas had paid his nocturnal visit to Lydia's hut ‘there would be trouble the next day’ (p. 147) and male slaves would be called to tie up Lydia in the stable for a flogging by Cecilia herself, an uncontrolled, sadistic act which would only stop ‘after Lydia's screams had changed from the sound of a woman in labour to the whimpering of a dying puppy’ (p. 147). As if that was not enough, Lydia would be shoved out of the stable without ‘a stitch of clothing on her body’, her clothes either beaten to shreds or mostly torn from her body in rage. In this naked state Lydia would be forced to go to the veld to collect wood and dung-cakes, even in winter when the ground was covered with snow. Bet observes that, despite this literal and figurative divestment of human dignity, Lydia still manages to ‘hold herself straight, tall and gaunt as the aloes of Bruintjieshoogte’ (p. 148).

But it is especially Bet's observation of ‘the Nooi’ which is important. The first time she was witness to this flogging it made her feel sick - it was not just the beating; it was Cecilia's way of talking while she went on flogging the woman: ‘A strange moaning tone of voice, almost sobbing ... I couldn't make out anything she was saying, except that it sounded like the Bible’ (pp. 147/8). After venting her fury in this manner, Cecilia's face would be ‘flushed a deep red, her hair all dishevelled and damp with sweat, her cheeks streaked with tears; and she was panting. It might have been of tiredness, it was enough to wear anyone out, even a woman as strong as the Nooi. But it was something else that upset me ... my first thought when I saw her was that she looked like a woman who'd been with a man all night’ (p. 148).

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While Cecilia's actions may perhaps be understood and justified, Nicolaas's are certainly incomprehensible. On one occasion when Lydia returned from the veld with her load of dung-cakes after such a flogging, stark-naked, her body ‘black-and-blue ... her face smeared with tears and snot ... covered in bruises, not only her back but everywhere, even her belly and her breasts’ (p. 148), Cecilia orders Nicolaas to ‘do something’ about Lydia's insolence, ‘shamelessness and cheekiness’. He orders Lydia to lie down and then flogs her with his sjambok, only to return to her hut that very night. Lydia is the victim of two sexually unfulfilled human beings: Nicolaas, impotent when with his wife because he was robbed by his own brother of the woman he loved; and Cecilia, insatiable, yet frustrated in the fulfilment of her sexual needs.

Interesting to note is Nicolaas's perception of Lydia. Torn by guilt and viewing his copulation with her as ‘the ultimate blasphemy’ against God or God's punishment of him residing ‘in the very beastliness of the act’ (p. 184), he nevertheless acknowledges her unprotesting submission to him as a ‘submission to the whims and idiosyncrasies of the master’ (p. 185). Yet he does not acknowledge that he is abusing not only a slave from whom it is expected to ‘unquestioningly submit’ to whatever he desired, but also a demented woman who does not understand what is happening to her. The only way he can think about her, is in derogatory terms, coupling with her being ‘laborious hours ... in the stench of her dark hut’ (p. 184), her body ‘sticky’ and all he feels for her after the act is ‘abhorrence’ and ‘disgust’ (p. 185).

Even in her deranged state Lydia, in a stream of consciousness, wishes to be free from everything that is happening to her. Her obsession with birds and feathers can only symbolise her desire to escape from her situation, to fly away like the birds: ‘I can fly. Look, I can fly. Why don't you believe me? No one will ever force me down again to ride me. No more beatings that cut me to bits’ (p. 377).

Bet, a Khoi woman and therefore a ‘free’ person, has three speaking turns, one each in Parts II, III and IV. Her narration brings the troubled history of the Eastern frontier of the Cape Colony at that time in relation to the status of the Khoikhoin who were by no means slaves in the true sense of the word but who nevertheless were (‘unofficially’) subjected to the same treatment. It was the trouble on the Eastern frontier that forced the few remaining Khoi to trek back to the Cape. After much hardship, losing her baby in the process, she finally reached Houd-den-Bek where she was taken into employment as cook. It emerges from her narration that she is a lascivious woman, for she informs the reader in a stream of consciousness: ‘They [the slaves and labourers] were easy people to be with and I soon took a liking to Galant ... I'd been without a man for a long time then, not counting the few encounters on the farms where I'd been doing odd jobs on the way, and that makes one ruttish and moody. If the root isn't planted the furrow goes to waste.

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So I was relieved when Galant took me... And I'll say this for him, that he was a rider second to none, of horses and women alike’ (pp. 146/7).

Already sickened by Cecilia's and especially Nicolaas's treatment of Lydia, Bet is further struck dumb when her and Galant's child is beaten and kicked by Nicolaas on two occasions, the child succumbing to his injuries the second time, and at a time when Galant is away from the farm. It transpires from both Nicolaas's and Cecilia's narration that the real cause of this act is envy: Nicolaas's envy that his great antagonist, Galant, could sire a son while he is unable to do so; Cecilia's envy that ‘even slaves have sons!’ (p. 186) while she has only daughters. For this reason she cannot tolerate the child's presence while Bet goes about her duties in the house, and continually nags Nicolaas to take action.

The child's death leaves Bet numb with shock and fear and the certain knowledge that Galant would never forgive her or take her back - the only way she could fill her empty body once again is to submit herself unconditionally to the ‘Baas’, to be like Lydia whom Nicolaas could order at any time to ‘lie down’. She follows him slavishly, begging him with her eyes and body to take her. Ironically, Nicolaas interprets Bet's actions as an attempt to take revenge; although he feels tempted ‘to make use’ of her (p. 185) and admits to ‘a peculiar fascination’ she had for him after the death of her child, he is restrained by fear: ‘... what would be easier than for her to get at me when in the spasms of lust I was most vulnerable?’ (p. 185).

Bet's main role, as can be extracted from her narration, is to illustrate how those slaves and labourers who were initially on the side of the white masters or completely neutral, eventually became so antagonised by the treatment meted out to them that they were forced into siding with the rebels. Rejected and despised by Galant and equally rejected and despised by Nicolaas to whom she offers her body unreservedly, Bet feels herself an outcast, ‘ridiculed and abused ... everybody's mongrel bitch’ (p. 462) when she tries to warn her master and mistress about the trouble brewing on the farm. In an interior monologue in which she articulates her bitterness and resentment, she addresses Nicolaas: ‘When I followed you begging you with my body to put out the fire you'd kindled with the killing of my child, you rejected me. But you don't mind taking her (Pamela), to plant your white children in her womb. Then, for all I care, you can die like the scavenging dog you are!’ (p. 463).

Bet is focalized by Galant too. When she arrives on the farm, he immediately takes a fancy to her, ‘the young woman from the distant Eastern Border who turns my limbs to water. An easy woman, Bet. Difficult when she's difficult, but easy with her body. Usually, when there's a new woman in the neighbourhood we all go to her like horses to a trough, for a woman's cunt is a precious thing in these parts and a man is in need of wetness’ (p. 129 - cf. how Galant's words almost verbatim

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echo those of Ma-Rose on page 27 when she refers to the scarcity of women in the Cold Bokkeveld). The horse symbol, so important in the entire narrative, is often associated with copulation, e.g. Ma-Rose: ‘When the stallion approaches, quivering with stiffness, I open up’ (p. 27); Ma-Rose tells Nicolaas to ‘ride (his wife) like a man’ (p. 177); Bet admires Galant's skill of riding horses and women alike (p. 147); Galant informs us how he rides Bet ‘so she won't forget she's been ridden’ (p. 133) and a little later: ‘All I can do, that night, is to ride Bet bareback, to ride her hard. I ride her well, and now she is with child’ (p. 137). Amongst all its other meanings, the horse is in this novel a symbol of male virility, especially when applied to the black woman.

The other black woman character, with the exception of Ma-Rose, is Pamela, also with three speaking turns, one each in Parts II, III and IV. She too is a slave owned by Nicolaas after she and her mother had been sold separately on the slave-market at Worcester to pay for their previous master's debts. Her role in the novel is to illustrate the growing chasm between Galant and Nicolaas and the part she played in the slave revolt, leading to her becoming one of the accused in the subsequent trial. In the ‘Act of Accusation’ she is described as Galant's ‘concubine’, this document ironically not mentioning that she was Nicolaas's concubine as well.

What we learn from Pamela's own narration is that she had given herself willingly to only one man before, the slave Louis, but then he was sold, leaving her behind with a child who later died of an inflammation. She had made up her mind after pining so much for Louis ‘that no other man would claim me for himself again’ (p. 268) but when she meets Galant, she desires him yet she is scared, ‘knowing that if ever something were to happen between us it would be like a river coming down and taking us with it...’ (p. 268).

Whereas the relationship between Galant and Bet was wild and passionate, the blossoming relationship between Pamela and Galant is one of tenderness, caring and sincere affection/love, the physical side being secondary. She reveals this love which came to fruition the night after Galant had been flogged almost to death by Nicolaas:

... we were together to comfort one another with the warmth of our bodies which was all we had. In such a night one aches with the awareness of death ... and it brings suffering and soothing of suffering, and a tenderness, a willingness to share whatever is available of love and caring, to make the pain more bearable for one another, against the terrors of the coming day. So I opened myself to him, not just my body but myself, for him to flow into me and flood me and sweep me along with him like a tree uprooted by a swollen river, wherever he might wish to take me, beyond all darkness (p. 271).

It is at this point, when Pamela and Galant have discovered their love for one another, that Nicolaas finds out about it and, being the master and owner of slaves,

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orders Pamela to henceforth sleep in his kitchen at night, with the filmsy excuse that she serves tea too late in the morning when she sleeps in her own hut. In the same manner he begrudged Galant his son he begrudges Galant Pamela and with little ceremony takes Pamela. Again it is she who focalizes Nicolaas's action:

That night, on the kitchen floor ... Nicolaas took me for the first time with the violence of someone who's scared of what he's doing, but who feels himself provoked and will not let anyone stop him, for the very reason that he knows it to be wrong (p. 278).

In this passage all the conflicting emotions Nicolaas experiences towards Galant are summarised while at the same time transferring his violence, fear, provocation and guilt to Pamela, for in his weakness to challenge Galant, all he can do is vent whatever he feels on someone who is even weaker and more vulnerable than he.

When Pamela falls pregnant, Galant is once again elated at the thought of having a child but whereas his elation in the child Bet gave birth to was at the thought of the child being born free and not in bondage like himself, in this case it is the genuine love he feels for Pamela and the knowledge that she will be the child's mother that brings him so much happiness:

Pamela: from her nothing can set me free, because of the child who will rise from her ... The woman, the child. The child ... I give myself up in order to return to the child ... I am back with the woman in whose belly life is blindly stirring, like a fish ... In the night the waters break. The child struggles to swim free. Pamela heaves and sobs and moans to rid herself of the terrible burden. At sunrise the child lies sleeping in her arm. A child with white hair and blue eyes (p. 328).

This, together with all the other factors not mentioned in the ‘Act of Accusation’, serves as a further exacerbating feature in Galant's growing resentment against his childhood friend, Nicolaas. It is not surprising that when the revolt finally breaks out, Galant bludgeons this blue-eyed child to death with the butt of his rifle.

Lys, Lydia, Bet, Pamela: all of them in one way or another act as a catalyst in the polarisation of master and slave as well as in the fermenting hatred which culminates in the murder of Nicolaas and the execution of Galant, in addition to and in spite of their role as mere sex objects.

5.4.3 Ma-Rose

My choice of Ma-Rose as an example of Brink's portrayal of black women rather than Andrea Malgas (The wall of the plague) who is much more of a central character, has been influenced by several factors. Ma-Rose is perhaps the

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character black women can identify with more fully; she is the most remarkable female character Brink has ever created; she remains in the mind long after Andrea Malgas or Nicolette Alford or Jessica Thomson or Elisabeth Larsson have faded from memory. Her intercessionary role between black and white, women and men, past and present, freedom and bondage, makes her an unforgettable personage.

Ma-Rose's role is mythologised into that of all-mother, primordial mother-being who transcends the boundaries imposed on her by her race, gender and class. For the first time in an Afrikaans novel where black and white are juxtaposed, it is a black character, and a woman at that, who emerges as the strongest and most memorable. While Brink's heroes/main characters are invariably male, here he has created a woman character who makes these male characters fade into insignificance.

But Ma-Rose as a character is much more than all this: she is, in the final analysis, the product of a creative artist firmly implanted on the ‘other side’ of the racial divide but who himself transcends the boundaries imposed upon him by the tight little laager of Afrikaner exclusivity, to see the ‘other’ not merely as labour units or dehumanised creatures.

5.4.3.1 Naming

One of the commonest strategies, viz. analogous naming, is being employed to partly characterise Ma-Rose. Names can parallel character-traits in different ways, inter alia semantic connection or semantic parallelism between name and trait (see Rimmon-Kenan 1983:68). The name ‘Rose’ is by no means unusual but the hyphenated name is intriguing. Several factors indicate that this name says much more than it does on face-value. Despite Brink's contention that the proper name is ‘an empty sign’ (Brink 1987:71), a kind of semantic space or openness in the text, a signifier which has not yet found a signified, the name ‘Ma-Rose’ generates certain questions, expectations and more importantly, conjures up certain meanings.

The rose has often been associated with female sexuality. For Sigmund Freud, for example, all flowers and blossoms had the meaning of female sexual organs, but especially the vulva-shaped rose (see De Vries 1974:392). The rosary was an instrument of worship of the Rose, which ancient Rome knew as the Flower of Venus, and the badge of her sacred prostitutes. Things spoken ‘under the rose’ (sub rosa) were part of Venus's sexual mysteries, not to be revealed to the uninitiated. The red rose represented full-blown maternal sexuality (see Walker 1983:866-869). In an indirect manner its five petals became the corresponding symbol of motherhood, fruition, regeneration and eternal life. In India, the Great Mother, whose body was the temple, was first addressed as Holy Rose. Even in

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Biblical terms, the Gospel of Luke is said to represent the Holy Rose as a sign of the vulva. The rose was obviously a sexual symbol of goddess-worship.

Among the many meanings attached to the rose, already the two described above are combined in the name of Ma-Rose: female sexuality and motherhood, two inseparable elements made even more inseparable by the use of the hyphen. In a contradictory fashion, the hyphen also separates (like a broken hymen or Ma-Rose's perennially distended body?) these two functions as Ma-Rose's sexuality does not necessarily lead to motherhood (see 5.5.3.3). Unlike in appellations such as ‘Mother Goose’, ‘Mother Hen’, etc., the name of Ma-Rose does not only signify a mother; by the use of the hyphen it may signify ‘the mother of the rose/vulva’, i.e. the supreme vulva. Also, unlike in ‘Mother Earth’ where the earth is equated with a providing, nurturing mother, the hyphen in Ma-Rose's name abolishes that function in favour of engendering the meaning of and cementing together two primordial functions of women: copulation and procreation.

Another facet of naming as a method of characterisation can be applied to Ma-Rose. Rimmon-Kenan (1983:82) points out that both the presence of a focalizer other than the narrator and the shift from one focalizer to another may be signalled by language, of which naming is an interesting example of such signalling. The use of various names for Ma-Rose betrays differences as well as changes in attitude towards her. All the black characters, with the exception of Ontong who is her contemporary, call her ‘Ma-Rose’; the younger white characters, with the exception of Cecilia who is perhaps the prototype of white/Afrikaner women, call her ‘Ma-Rose’; Piet calls her ‘Rose’ or ‘old Rose’; Alida calls her ‘old wench Rose’ (in the Afrikaans version); Nicolaas who of the young white people was closest to her, later relinquishes the ‘Ma’ and calls her simply ‘Rose’, as does his cantankerous wife, Cecilia. In the following pages the reasons for these various names will be made clear.

5.4.3.2 Function in the novel

The four parts of the main text have as continuous motifs the life elements earth, water, wind and fire, in that order. The traditional hierarchical order of the elements is wind, fire, water and earth - in other words, deriving from the igniferous or aerial state comes the liquid and finally the solid (see Cirlot 1962:91). Brink has turned this order upside-down by starting with the solid, followed by the liquid, the aerial and finally the igniferous, and for good reason, as becomes clear when analysing the novel.

Jung stresses the active nature of the first two (air and fire) and the passive nature of the last two (water and earth). Hence, according to Jung, the masculine, creative

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character of the first two and the feminine, receptive and submissive nature of the second pair. (N.B.: This philosophy is refuted in the novel by the slave, Klaas, whose male ego and chauvinism were severely dented when a woman, Hester, interfered to stop the flogging: ‘Man is stone [read earth]: you can see him clearly, you can walk round him and touch him, he's right there. But woman is water, you cannot stop it. That was what I couldn't bear’ - p. 309).

In Brink's novel the solidness of the earth, of a by-gone existence, of values in the lives of both the white and black personages is destroyed by all-engulfing flames, but with a clear message: while destructive, fire is a symbol of purgation, transformation and regeneration, as so succinctly depicted by the recurring image of the Lightning Bird. Between these two are the elements of water and wind/air. The projection of the mother-imago into the waters endows them with various numinous properties characteristic of a mother. Water, like earth, is a female principle and symbolises fertility. Of all the elements, water is the most clearly transitional between fire and air (the ethereal elements) and earth (the solid element). By analogy, water stands as a mediator between life and death, with a two-way positive and negative flow of creation and destruction. Wind/air is an aerial, ethereal element which is both destructive and life-giving but at the same time cleansing and separating - also in a symbolic sense - the chaff from the grain (cf. Ma-Rose: ‘Tsui-Goab will send his wind to sort the grain from the chaff’ - p. 359).

Ma-Rose fulfils an extremely important function in this discourse. In each of her four ‘speaking turns’, one in each part of the novel, she time and again situates the narrative space in the sign of a different prominent spatial element. All these elements acquire a literal and figurative interpretation in her narration, which also reappear in the narrations of the other characters.

In Part I she is the first ‘speaker’, almost like an omniscient, all-wise narrator who, with the power of her word, as it were, creates from earth, and especially stone, the space of the following events, a space which she mythologically models from her perspective: ‘And from the stones the great god Tsui-Goab made us, the people...’ (p. 23). As in any creation myth, spatial elements naturally play a major role. Significant in Ma-Rose's narration is the contrast between her own group, the Khoikhoin, and the whites who ‘have not yet become stone and rock embedded in the earth and born from it again and again like the Khoikhoin’ (p. 25). Stone and earth obviously have symbolic value and refer to that which is solid, established and constant; it can also be seen in relation to the settlement of black and white communities, the attachment to the soil, earthiness and a conservative or fossilised mentality, as pointed out by Jonckheere (1988:85).

Ma-Rose is ‘rooted in rock’ (p. 30) and her people have been ‘as numerous as the stones of the mountains’ (p. 25) before smallpox wiped them out. It is no

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wonder that she reveals in her narration a deep reverence for the ‘pure solid stone’ which ‘grows old just like a tree’ (p. 24) and the rocky mountains which ‘shelter (them) from the sun and ward off the wind from the narrowvalleys’ (p.24) in contrast to the whites who ‘build their stone walls’ but which nevertheless cannot protect them from peril, for ‘already death has come in among their walls’ (p. 25).

In direct opposition to Ma-Rose, Alida, Piet's wife, could never reconcile herself to living in the Cold Bokkeveld, still having ‘the sea in her blood’ (p. 37), with memories of and longings to her younger days in Cape Town, with feelings of ‘being abandoned in this hostile land’ (p. 64). It is only with the death of her son Nicolaas that she feels she ‘had acquired a responsibility towards this place’, that her ‘extraneity has been strangely and solemnly resolved’, for in Nicolaas her ‘flesh lies interred in this earth, and (she is) growing towards it’ (p. 66). With these words she ironically and unwittingly substantiates the words of her great adversary, Ma-Rose, who alleges that white people will become established only when they ‘become stone and rock embedded in the earth’ (p. 25). It is also Alida who focalizes the slaves and associates them with stone, ‘dull placid faces hewn from dark stone’ (p. 66), but the solid and constant qualities of stone are not applicable to them, rather its unfeeling, dead nature, contrary to Ma-Rose's assertion that stone is alive.

It is especially in the main character, the slave Galant, that the connotations of stone are epitomised, mainly in the image of a man's footprint stamped in solid rock which he discovered high up in the mountains. Again it is Ma-Rose who provides an explanation for this phenomenon: ‘The mark of Bushman or Khoikhoin ..., imprinted in the sunrise of the world when stone was soft; perhaps the mark of Heitsi-Eibib himself, the Great Hunter ... or Tsui-Goab's, when he came down to shape man from stones’ (p. 40). Galant dreams about that footprint, about leaving his mark in stone forever. His dream is realised, but not in the manner he visualised. Having initiated the slave revolt in the Bokkeveld, his name shall remain in the annals of white and black South African history, in ‘the mountains ... where my footprint remains forever proudly trodden in the stone’ (p. 509).

Part II stands in the sign of water which now becomes the central concept in Ma-Rose's narration. With that she does not only mean the water of fertility, the rain which Tsui-Goab gives, but also ‘the water she [a woman] has inside her’, so necessary for a man's root (p. 178) and, on a more symbolic level, ‘the flood I felt swelling below the surface of our farms long before the storm broke out’ (p. 179) - thus water of life and of death and destruction. Water in Ma-Rose's narration also signifies the body fluids: amniotic fluid (‘the inside of a woman is water; her children swim from her into the world’ - p. 175; ‘men don't know patience; they don't know what it means to wait for the breaking of the water’ - p. 176);

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semen (she advises the impotent Nicolaas how to make his root ‘spurt’ - p. 178); vaginal fluid (a man's moodiness can ‘be treated with the wetness of women’ - p. 179); breastmilk (she reminisces how she suckled Galant - p. 180 and how he and Nicolaas ‘both tugged at my teats’ - p. 182); sweat (Galant, in his frustration, throwing stones until the sweat dripped from his face - p. 179); tears (Ma-Rose could hear in the dark that Galant was crying in his frustration - p. 180); blood (she allowed Galant to get the anger ‘out of his blood’ X 2 - p. 179) and sputum (Galant spits at the mention of Nicolaas' gift to him after the latter had kicked his child to death - p. 180), and all of them once again linked to life and death.

In Part III Ma-Rose's words, like those of a prophetess, establish relationships between the real spatial elements and the spiritual sphere of the novel. She speaks about ‘a dry year and windy’ and of ‘a real threshing wind’ (p. 351). Shortly afterwards about ‘another wind (that) was rising’, which she relates to the fermenting revolt by the slaves, after rumours of their emancipation turned out to be ‘just wind’ (p. 272 - Afrikaans version). For that reason the ‘dust-devil far away in the wagon-road’ (p. 356) is being interpreted by her as an awesome omen which brings death to the farm. Significantly, soon after driving the whirlwind (‘dust-devil’) away with water, she experiences ‘a whirlwind of anger’ sweeping up inside of her after being rebuffed by Nicolaas (p. 358), and warns him that his roof will not keep out the wind: ‘“When the storm comes up it'll blow all of this right away”’ (p. 359). She knows Tsui-Goab will not allow his people to be humiliated and will therefore ‘send his great wind’ to cleanse the earth (of slaveowners?).

She introduces the images of threshing and the threshing-floor which, in combination with the wind, are very important symbols of revolt in Part III: ‘They turning this land into a threshing-floor where they themselves are to be threshed’ (p. 359). Her words reverberate in those of Galant: ‘“What's begun on this floor today will go on till the whole land has been threshed and winnowed”’ (p. 387) and a little further he attaches the revolt motif to the blowing wind and also to the horse motif: ‘“... we'll gallop through the land like the wind itself”’ (p. 387).

Finally, there is the imagery of fire used by Ma-Rose when she introduces Part IV and talks about her people's fires dying, her heart growing cold inside her, ‘another kind of lightning, invisible, and inside you, leaving its mark on your heart’ (p. 439) and ‘the fire that broke out ... that night’ (p. 440). As in the other three parts of the novel the imagery is echoed in Galant's words, to suggest the particular bond between him and Ma-Rose. This becomes especially apparent from his reference to the Lightning Bird whose eggs are hatched from time to time to cleanse everything. Despite the destructive fire of hatred, there is also the fire of (illicit) love between Galant and Hester which at last comes to fruition in the chaos of the abortive revolt and which may signal Galant's perpetuation after his death.

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Ma-Rose, then, has the function of explaining the action, expressing sympathy with characters and drawing morals, almost like the chorus in an Attic tragedy or like a personage in a Shakespearean drama who speaks the prologue and explains or comments on events, in addition to her predictions of imminent disaster. The fact that her four “speaking turns” coincide with the four life elements, progressing from creation (stone) to life (water) to foreboding (wind) to destruction but also regeneration (fire), is not accidental, for she is primordial being, ‘nobody's mother’ (p. 83) and yet ‘the mother of all’ (p. 441), all-wise and omniscient.

5.4.3.3 Mother Supreme

When attempting to define Ma-Rose as natural, biological mother, the words of one of Gayl Jones' characters, Great Gram in the novel Corregidora (1975), immediately come to mind: ‘“And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That's why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn't be no evidence to hold up against them”’.^9.

From Ma-Rose's own narration we learn that she had been ‘in milk’ (p. 28) at least twice, i.e. had given birth to at least two children, one of whom died at birth (p. 28). Of the first (?) child we know nothing, save that Ma-Rose was also ‘in milk’ when Barend was born and therefore able to nurse him. If one can surmise that the first child died as well, one sombre datum emerges: Brink's black women characters, despite their stereotyped considerable procreative powers, cannot perpetuate themselves or bring continuity to their existence through their offspring.

In Looking on darkness, Sophie's ancestral history is wiped out because she is a foundling with no knowledge of her ancestry; neither does she have descendants as her only child who himself has no offspring in spite of his libertine adroitness and numerous ejaculations, is to be executed. In his death-cell, Joseph carefully documents his history and that of his paternal forebears as related to him by his mother but he symbolically destroys that history by flushing his written testament down the toilet.

In A chain of voices the outlook is even bleaker: Bet, the Khoi woman, loses her first child while trekking to the Cape and her second child is kicked to death by Nicolaas; the slave woman, Pamela, loses her first child through an inflammation while her second, with ‘white hair and blue eyes’ (p. 328), is bludgeoned to death by Galant; the young slave girl Lys is dead and her only child who has no descendants either, is to be executed; the slave woman Lydia, we are told, has children, but in her demented state she cannot possibly create the circumstances

9. The ‘burning of the papers’ to which Great Gram refers, was the practice by slave-owners to destroy by burning all records pertaining to punishment (including rape of slave-women) meted out to slaves.

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for their future development; Ma-Rose's children are either dead or nothing is said about them, while she herself is past child-bearing age.

It would appear that this annihilation of the black woman is also the abject denial of her history, the rejection of her ability to ‘bear witness’ or to ‘leave evidence’ of her past and her existence, the abrogation of her ability to make generations. She is being made symbolically barren, her links with the past eradicated and her links with the future broken and ultimately obliterated. The black woman/mother as repository of culture and tradition in the absence of a written history is, in the final analysis, denied an existence, or so it would appear.

In respect of motherhood and by way of comparison, the consummation of the love between Hester and Galant needs to be mentioned. As stated above, Galant leaves no descendants, or does he? By Hester's own admission, ‘it was the time of the month when desire sears (her) womb like a flame’ (p. 453) when this consummation takes place, and her conceiving Galant's child a real possibility and the ultimate irony. What this implies, among other things, is that while the black woman is viewed as an unfit mother (cf. for example Galant's rejection of Bet after their child had been murdered by Nicolaas), the white woman Hester is an ideal person to bear and rear Galant's child. Not only shall this child be free because of its mother's race (Galant, p. 509-N.B. Bet was also a “free” woman but nevertheless black), but the mere fact that in the end Hester would/could/should perpetuate Galant's line and neither Bet nor Pamela, suggests that Hester will be more suitable to ensure Galant's posterity than any of the black women, his ‘footprint stamped in solid rock’ (p. 40).

It is in the sense of the black woman's inability to ‘bear witness’ that Brink fulfils an important function: the disparaged and erased history of the black woman (and man), so often a salient feature of societies where colonizer and colonized encountered each other, is reconstructed, albeit fictionalised, to re-establish the fact that s/he had always been ‘there’, despite claims often made by colonizers of finding uninhabited lands. As Ma Rose puts it:

There is nothing more I can do about it. I cannot change the world. When the fire broke out here that night, blown up high by Galant and the others, I could neither stop them nor encourage them. I couldn't join in with them; but I couldn't stay out of it either. All that was left for me to do was to be there: to see what was happening; to look with my old eyes and listen with my old ears - so that it wouldn't just pass like a summer storm on the horizon of which you remember nothing when you wake up in the morning. I did not sleep. I was there. I was among them. I was too old to do anything, but one thing I could do and that I did: to be there ... And all I can say about what has happened is that I was there ... To be there: that is what's important... I was there (pp. 440/1 - my emphasis).

[p. 161]

For the black woman, as for the rest of the world's population, there had always been a ‘there’ and a ‘then’; there had always been an ancestral history and there shall always be descendants to ‘go on talking and talking, an endless chain of voices, all together yet all apart, all different yet all the same; and the separate links might lie but the chain is the truth’ (Ma-Rose, p. 441). The black women's history in Brink's stories has been erased. Yet, in a contradictory manner, the ‘death’ of these characters and the symbolic ‘burning of the papers’ have been repealed ironically by a descendant of colonizers who restructures that which had been denied.

The only way for Ma-Rose to experience motherhood is to be a surrogate mother on different levels. First of all, she is wet-nurse for other people's children. Several characters bear testimony to the fact that her breasts and milk were always available when needed. She in fact is the first narrator to point this out: ‘At first I lived on Lagenvlei, seeing Piet's sons grow up in front of me, Barend and Nicolaas both; and suckling them when they were small’ (p. 26). Alida, Piet's wife, throws more light on the circumstances which necessitated her first-born Barend to be nursed by Ma-Rose: ‘There were the children, of course; the only future I dared presume. The first was Barend, a large, strong baby torn from me and leaving me helpless; if Rose hadn't intervened he may not have survived. I could never reconcile myself with the thought that she'd suckled him, precisely because it had saved his life’ (p. 71). Grudgingly she admits: ‘All these years she (Ma-Rose) had been in the background, suckling our children...’ (p. 67). Even the envious and abrasive Barend, in voicing his resentment to the friendship between his brother Nicolaas and the slave Galant, remembers how Ma-Rose suckled the two boys: ‘For most of the day he (Nicolaas) and Galant would lie side by side on a kaross beside the house, and often I saw Ma-Rose suckling them, one to each breast’ (p. 107).

Ma-Rose performs a second mothering function. Her ex-master and ‘lover’, Piet van der Merwe, is struck down by a massive stroke, leaving him as helpless as a baby. It is she who focalizes Piet in his present state but also compares it with his former virility while she reveals her mothering role. Leaving her hut at Houd-den-Bek, she returned to Lagenvlei to ‘nurse him, to feed him and to turn him over and wash him’ (p. 26). She had known him since he was a young man and she knew his needs and likes. Piet corroborates this when, in a stream of consciousness he curses his family for looking at him as if he were senile and dumb in his stricken condition: ‘In the beginning I cursed them as I lay here. Shouting in silence, in fumes of sulphur. They didn't even know. Old Rose, maybe. She'd always had a way of looking at me and understanding’ (p. 31).

Alida, too, confirms Ma-Rose's mothering role in respect of Piet: ‘... in stark uncool shade Piet lay breathing and staring, tended I presume by Rose who was

[p. 162]

taking the chance in my absence to reassert her old subversive hold on him’ (p. 65). After the funeral of Nicolaas and the others, Alida reminisces, she and Ma-Rose together washed Piet, changed his sheets and made him as comfortable as they could, ‘lavishing on him the care of our common motherhood’ (p. 68). This was the last time Ma-Rose saw Piet and she reinforces but also refutes Alida's account of their ‘common motherhood’: ‘Now he was finished, wasted away. For the last time I washed him too; and to my surprise Nooi Alida did nothing to prevent me. He was still alive, but I washed him the way one washes a body for burial; the way a mother washes her child’ (p. 440).

Whenever there was illness, a difficult birth, death, a body broken by flogging or whatever trauma, Ma-Rose would be there, not only to bring comfort with her reassuring presence but also to minister to and nurse the sick and wounded. She helped with the birth of Alida's three children and nursed her throughout the second pregnancy when she was ‘constantly ill’; in fact, Alida admits that ‘without the ministration of herbs and horrible concoctions devised by Rose’ she might have died (p. 71); she was midwife to Lys, Bet and Pamela; she nursed Galant's wounds after he was flogged almost to death by Nicolaas; in short, Ma-Rose truly fulfilled the role of a mother in many lives, especially those of the slaves who were either torn away from their own mothers by the practice of selling slave-mother and slave-child separately or saw their mothers dying horrendous deaths.

On a third level, Ma-Rose is much more than just someone who cares for the physical needs of others. She effectively sums up her position on the farm when she states: ‘We're all of us human, and I pity us all, for I'm the mother of all’ (p. 441 - my emphasis). Her compassion, wisdom and discretion attracts all and sundry to her hut: ‘...I might be living apart from the rest, but all the world came past my hut, and there was nothing I didn't know... Each with his own story to tell: and I listened to them all, for I was old and what they wouldn't dare tell anybody else they confided to me, and why shouldn't they? I was mother of them all’ (pp. 351/2 - my emphasis). Bet confirms Ma-Rose's assertions when, torn by inner conflict when the revolt broke out, she needs someone to confide in: ‘I set out on the footpath to Ma-Rose's hut. Through the years we'd all trodden that path to ask her help when everything else had failed’ (p. 463 - N.B.: In the Afrikaans version Bet says: ‘Through the years we'd all trodden that footpath to Ma-Rose's hut; she was mother of all’ - p. 363 - my emphasis).

It is especially Ma-Rose's compassion for both Nicolaas and Galant that confirms her ‘mother of all’ status if one bears in mind the wide divergence in their situation. These two characters leave us in no doubt about the crucial role she plays in their lives. In the case of Nicolaas it would appear incongruous that a white child of that period would develop such an affinity for a black woman, even to the extent of calling her ‘Ma-Rose’, but when assessing the circumstances of Nicolaas's birth and life, it becomes quite logical: when he was born, his mother

[p. 163]

‘hated him for forcing (her) first-born Barend finally beyond (her) reach’ (p. 71) and to his father he was ‘an embarrassment’ (p. 73) because of his interest in books rather than in farming. Sensing this rejection, Nicolaas would spend more and more time with Ma-Rose and Galant and succinctly sums up her role in his life: ‘Once upon a time there was a woman who was nobody's mother but whom we all called Ma, Ma-Rose, who dried our tears and laughed with us, and who used to tell stories better than anyone else in the world’ (p. 83); he calls her ‘something as large and safe as a mountain’ (p. 84). And yet it is his own mother - who had reason enough to dislike Ma-Rose - who initiates the growing chasm between Nicolaas and Ma-Rose. Nicolaas remembers: ‘They (his parents) never approved of Ma-Rose. Pa didn't mind much, but Ma was suspicious and annoyed. “For Heaven's sake stop calling her “Ma-Rose”. She isn't your mother. She's a Hottentot woman. And all this visiting with her must stop too. I won't have my children growing up in huts like slaves”’ (p. 83).

But the main focalizer of Ma-Rose is Galant, the child that became hers from the moment of his birth and who she ‘spoiled ... from the first’ (p. 28). The close bond between the two is time and again revealed, not only by themselves but also by other characters. It is therefore no wonder that it is especially Galant who confirms Ma-Rose's all-mother status. His tracks ‘cover the length and breadth of the Bokkeveld’ (p. 40),

always coming back to Ma-Rose. Ma-Rose ... warm as a kaross protecting you against the world, surrounding you like an attic filled with smells. Ma-Rose with her cure for every ill ... And stories for all occasions ... And whenever I cannot sleep she holds me close to her, uttering the sounds of a mother-hen as she caresses me, taking my small member in her hand and rubbing it, ever so gently, until my feet leave the ground and I begin to drift away like a cloud over the mountains ... Always Ma-Rose ... she is always there to return to (pp. 41/2).

Even aspects of the Houd-den-Bek space remind him of Ma-Rose: ‘The dam has its own way of soothing grief; it is as motherly as Ma-Rose’ (p. 49). Catastrophe and grief which dominate his life from beginning to end, continually drive him back to the warm, reassuring presence of Ma-Rose. In his childish innocence and naiveté he cannot understand why white children wear shoes while he has to go barefoot among the rocks and thorns, why they live in a house while he has to live in a hut, why they would not teach him to read and write, why he cannot swim with them when the white girl Hester is present, etc. In his adult life, the questions become even more urgent and serious: why his only child is kicked to death by Nicolaas, why Nicolaas takes Pamela away from him, why he is a slave, why rumours of the slaves' emancipation are not revealed to the slaves by the slave-owners, etc. To these questions Ma-Rose can only reply: ‘“That's how it is”’ (p. 40) or ‘“It's not for you to ask”’ (pp. 54, 61) or ‘“Galant, you got to get this into your head. No matter what he (Nicolaas) does, he got the right to do it because

[p. 164]

he's baas. Stop asking questions or you'll land in big trouble. Nicolaas is baas on Houd-den-Bek”’ (p. 181). Galant interprets Ma-Rose's evasive answers as her having no answers either or that ‘she has no remedy for this ache’ (p. 62).

Ma-Rose's answers seem to reflect the quiet acquiescence of the fate of slaves, but her actions prove differently. Knowing Galant better than he knows himself (‘he's always had a streak of the devil in him’ - p. 27), her answers are her way of protecting him from the consequences of too rash actions. As a slave he has to remain ‘unquestioning’ but she, as ‘the only free person on this farm’ (p. 84), often on Galant's behalf sets out to find answers to his questions, for example her efforts to find confirmation of the rumours about the slaves' emancipation.

5.4.3.4 ‘Vulva’ Supreme

When considering the implications of the second part of Ma-Rose's name, i.e. rose = vulva, one's first impulse is to characterise her as ambivalent in her attitude to men and sex. Being ‘the only free person on this farm’ but given the circumstances of her existence, she displays a remarkable independence and freedom within herself and could be - if such a description can be applied to a black woman, not much more than a slave, of the early nineteenth century - termed a ‘feminist’ in the contemporary sense of the word.

Yet, despite Ma-Rose's assertions of her freedom as well as her actions to corroborate her statements, it would appear that she sees herself as a someone who is destined to serve the needs of men, in fact, whose main function is to serve those needs. On several occasions she reiterates this position, especially when referring to her copulation with Piet, whose ‘poor little limp thing...stood up like the pole of a stallion’ in his youth (p. 26) and: ‘... whenever he got into me, neighing like a wild horse, I could feel the spasm coming right from the bottom of my spine all the way to my throat, and my eyes would turn up. He could pump away, all right’ (p. 26). She further claims to have had ‘all the men of these parts and from far away; for when I was young they all heard about me and came to have their marrow drained’ (p. 27). Whether she finds her sexual activities enjoyable is never expressed. What we have here, is obviously a male perspective which manipulates Ma-Rose into looking at herself mainly in relation to the needs of men.

From her statements one can infer that she sees herself in the service of humankind, also as far as sex is concerned, for example when she focalizes the space in which the events take place, she adds: ‘This is a hard land and women are scarce, and the men are lustful. And who am I to turn away from life? When the stallion approaches, quivering with stiffness, I open up’ (p. 27). Her sexual activities, it would seem, are of a philanthropic, humanitarian nature, as is so clearly

[p. 165]

illustrated by her protection of the young slave girl Lys. In order to keep Piet and other men away from Lys' body, she would seduce them - ‘I have a way of holding a man’ (p. 28) - for her body is ‘deep and I am marsh enough for herds to wallow in’ (p. 29). Already analogising lecherous men with stallions and herds confirms the idea that sex for her is mere mating, a necessary activity of life with no question of deeper feelings.

Ma-Rose also has definite opinions about black and white women's sexuality and ability to satisfy men, which is perhaps the reflection of another of the entrenched stereotypes about black and white women, and reinforced in this novel. She advises the impotent Nicolaas to ‘soak (his) root in a black woman. That'll let it grow and give it life’ (p. 178) because, according to her, some white men suffer from ‘a sort of blight’ since their women ‘aren't deep enough. A man's root needs the water she has inside her; and some white women don't seem to have it’ (p. 178). She shocks Nicolaas with her revelation that she had made his father the man he is, since he had ‘soaked his root’ in her.

It is not only Ma-Rose who describes her own sexual experiences. From Piet's narration we learn that he had known her since she was a young girl; in fact, she was called ‘to dance her wild reels’ at his wedding feast which lasted a full week. Piet describes what transpired:

What a body she had in those days. Strange race, the Hottentots: smooth and beautiful until they're twenty or thirty; then they grow old overnight. Less than ten years later Rose was an old hag. But at the time of the wedding she was still shining with smoothness, a half-wild female creature wearing only the briefest of karosses around her parts. And even that was soon shed as she danced naked among the men, breasts bouncing. Trembling with every move. The brandy was flowing in torrents, and the men taking turns with Rose, some of them on all fours (p. 36).

Ironically, nowhere in Piet's two ‘speaking turns’ does he make mention of his nocturnal visits to Ma-Rose's hut, except to say that he had never committed adultery after taking his wife Alida: ‘Adultery? Ever since I took Alida I've never been with another woman. At least not a white one and God said nothing about others. They were made to give us a bit of sport in a hard land, otherwise it would all be labour and sorrow’ (p. 33).

It is left to Alida and Galant to confirm Ma-Rose's allegations that Piet had known her body. All these years her adversary (Ma-Rose: ‘Alida ... had always been jealous of me, and with reason. She knew only too well that I'd known his body even before she had’ - p. 26), Alida admits that Ma-Rose had taken ‘to her deep body my husband and others, abundant and accessible as any cow, fertile as earth, threatening my small decent authority with her voluptuous presence’ (p. 67).

[p. 166]

In Galant's narration about his childhood, he remembers how he dragged his tired, aching body at the end of the working day back to Ma-Rose's hut, how all he wanted to do was to lie down and sleep but how he found ‘more often than not there's no room for me because a man has taken my place on the mattress beside her... Some nights it's the Oubaas (Piet) who's visiting her...’ (pp. 42/3).

The above evidence seems sufficient to conclude that Ma-Rose is portrayed as a sex object but also as a magnanimous all-mother. Abdul R. JanMohamed (1985:91) states with reference to A Chain of Voices:

[T]he novel remains rooted in racial stereotypes/archetypes...the only distinction between the two racial groups, other than the obvious one between masters and slaves, is that the whites experience severe sexual repression,, while the nonwhites are obsessed with sex; indeed, some of the nonwhites can perceive themselves only in terms of sexual pleasure and fecundity. The undiscriminating sexuality of Ma-Rose, the slave earth mother, is endowed with an ill-defined liberatory quality.

But is Ma-Rose a mere sex object? When assessing her from a perspective opposite to that of the masculine point of view, it emerges that her ‘freedom’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the dichotomy master/slave, man/woman or black/white. Her freedom is within herself; in a remarkable way she succeeds in divesting herself of the limitations brought to bear upon the colonized by the colonizer; she succeeds in keeping her gregarious spirit free from prejudice, racial or otherwise, and she succeeds in transcending the impositions of race, gender and class. She surrenders herself with complete abandon to whatever venture, whether it be nursing the sick and disabled, story-telling in her inimitable style or sex. If men have the notion of ‘using’ her body, it would not matter to Ma-Rose because in her generous love for people she is not only humanitarian who, in her particular way, sees her main task as caring for those who need care, but who is also prepared to sacrifice her body in the interest of others (for example, the way she sacrificed her body to keep men away from the defenceless Lys).

In characterising Ma-Rose as ‘supreme vulva’ and the other black women characters as ‘lesser vulvas’, cognisance has to be taken of Brink's pronouncements regarding women and sex. In equating the experiences of religion and sex with one another, he stresses the importance of serious experiences, and not the casual association with these two components of human life. In order to experience them both in a meaningful way, a three-fold process has to execute itself: (i) self-exploration, self-discovery and denudation which leads to (ii) a kind of ‘sacrificial’ deed or denouncement of ‘the old self’ which finally leads to (iii) a form of rebirth and surrender to faith. In sex this means first establishing who you are and, when knowing who you are, shedding your clothes in order to perform the sacrificial deed of giving yourself unreservedly to your partner so that you can finally become a new person through the very act.

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The question is: does this ‘religious’ experience of sex apply to black women too in Brink's novels? The significant fact is that this process executes itself time and again where the female character is white and the male black or white (cf. for example Nicolette Alford and Paul van Heerden in The Ambassador, Jessica Thomson and Joseph Malan in Looking on darkness; Elisabeth Larsson and Adam Mantoor in An instant in the wind; Beatrice Fiorini and Martin Mynhardt in Rumours of rain; Melanie Bruwer and Ben du Toit in A dry white season and Hester van der Merwe and Galant in A chain of voices).^10. It would appear that in the implied author's perception black women have not yet reached the stage in human evolution where sex can be experienced as elevated and spiritual; that love or what passes for love is confined to a purely physical nature; that they lag behind their white sisters to the extent that sex is a mere instinctive and impulsive copulation with no question of ‘self-exploration’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘denouncement of the old self’ and ‘rebirth’ (again the example of the lovemaking of Hester and Galant in contrast to Ma-Rose's purely physical experiences can be cited).

10. This process executes itself to a certain extent in Andrea's and Mandla's lovemaking (The Wall of the Plague) and, interesting enough, they are both black.

5.4.3.5 ‘Milk’

The two images of Ma-Rose described above, i.e. Mother Supreme and Vulva Supreme, are closely linked to the concept of milk in the novel. Milk denotes nutrition, nurturing, nursing, nourishment; it is motherhood and a female principle since it is a body fluid associated with the element of water. In the most common sense, milk is what is derived from mammals for consumption by humans and other animals. It is no wonder that Alida thinks of Ma-Rose's body as ‘abundant and accessible as any cow’ (p. 67), imagery which finds close association with Ma-Rose's own description of her body as being ‘deep and marsh enough for herds to wallow in’.^11. Ma-Rose refers to her own breasts as ‘dugs’, ‘paps’ or ‘teats’ (N.B.: in the Afrikaans version she refers to her breasts as ‘uiers’ = udders - p. 18).

In Ma-Rose's case one can truly speak of hers as ‘the milk of human kindness’, for not only is she ‘mother of all’ but her humane nature places her in a position far above the rest. As wet-nurse she is milked, significantly by male babies: Barend, Nicolaas and Galant. It is not simply a case of her suckling them in the literal sense - she is milked in other respects as well, becoming the giver of kindness but seldom the receiver. But, like an ‘abundant (milch) cow’ (Alida about Ma-Rose, p. 67), she never dries up and gives of her unlimited resources whenever called upon to do so.

More importantly, Ma-Rose is the one who ‘milks’ men. Ad de Vries (1974:321) points out that milk is not only a symbol of regeneration, abundance and fertility but also of semen. Ma-Rose says of herself: ‘...I've had all the men of these parts and from far away; for when I was young they all heard about me and came to have

11. The Khoi woman's ‘voluptuousness’, i.e. her buttocks and genitalia, was commonly associated with lascivity by nineteenth-century European scientists [see for example Sander L. Gilman 1986:223-261. Is it coincidence that the white woman Alida describes Ma-Rose's body as ‘voluptuous’ when referring to her sexuality (p. 67)?

[p. 168]

their marrow drained. Now I'm old and they think I'm useless, but I swear I can still milk the lot of them’ (p. 27 - my emphasis) and a little later she tells us how she ‘milked’ Piet twice in one night to make sure he would not bother Lys.

The question arises whether, if milk = semen, Ma-Rose is regenerated and fertilised by the semen of the many men she has had. To what extent is she nurtured by the semen of all those men? Does she, like a baby fed on mother's milk, flourish and bloom? These questions cannot be answered by a simple yes or no. She is childless - deep down she must have felt the emptiness of losing her babies; her fertility and the fertilizing function of semen are thus nullified. In a certain kind of naïveté she believes she has ‘milked’ men and ‘drained their marrow’ which would have regenerated her but the opposite is true, since she contends that a man's root needs the wetness of women for it to grow and flourish. Although she is by no means a slave but a ‘free’ Khoi woman in the employ of white masters, she is nevertheless subjected to most of the rules and regulations applicable to slaves, not least voicelessness and submission to the will of the overlords. She admits to the submission of slaves and particularly slave-women for she asserts that it was Piet's ‘good right of course’ (p. 28) to copulate with his slave-women. She has had men from all sectors of the community but when seen in relation to the dichotomies of freedom and bondage, white and black, she is simply the exploited labour-unit and sex object in more than one sense. ‘Milk’ and ‘milking’, then, signifying regeneration, abundance and fertility are used here in an ironic sense when applied to Ma-Rose, for black women ‘were made to give us [white men] a bit of sport in this hard land’ (Piet, p. 33).

5.4.3.6 The ancestral presence

Whether by accident or design, Brink has created in A chain of voices an ancestral presence which has become a salient feature of Afro-American and African women's writing during the last few decades.^12. I find it important to include into this study a discussion of this ‘ancestral presence’ in the figure of Ma-Rose for the following reasons: (i) Trends in black women's writing have filtered through to Brink, which is another indication of his preparedness to acknowledge and accept the literary merits of groups other than his own. It is especially noteworthy that it is the black woman 's literary products which Brink acknowledges and emulates, given the fact that both ‘black’ and ‘woman’ have been absent entities in the literature of Afrikaans. (ii) An anomalous situation arises from the creation of a black ancestral presence: the black woman's and the white male's ancestry which to all intents and purposes are in direct conflict with one another, but which some time in the South African past - as indeed in the novel itself - became intertwined. How does Brink blend the two and how does he associate the ancestors, black and white, with the characters?

12. Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison are examples of Afro-American women writers who incorporate this ancestral presence in their novels.

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Joanne M. Braxton (1990:300) describes the ancestral presence in Afro-American women's writing as follows:

The ancestral figure most common in the work of contemporary Black women writers is an outraged mother. She speaks in and through the narrator of the text to ‘bear witness’ and to break down artificial barriers between the artist and the audience. Not only does this ancestral figure lend a ‘benevolent, instructive, and protective’ presence to the text, she also lends her benign influence to the very act of creation, for the Black woman artist works in the presence of this female ancestor, who passes on her feminine wisdom for the good of the ‘tribe’ and the survival of Black people...

Ma-Rose is by no means the female ancestor of the artist in this case; neither does she speak ‘in and through the narrator’ since she herself is narrator even though her narration/monologues are ascribed to her from outside the story (Brink 1987:136). Brink himself states: ‘Sometimes it is necessary for the reader to make a clear distinction between the actual monologue of a character and an ‘interpretation’ by a commentator (narrator). I have often been surprised that the different ‘statements’ by characters in A Chain of Voices are so readily read as monologues while numerous narrative signs are planted in the text to indicate that these parts are ‘ascribed’ to the characters from outside the story - Brink's emphasis, my translation). But what is of cardinal importance here is the fact that the underexposed and even erased history, traditions and culture of a people who ‘had once roamed free’ (p. 183), who for many centuries ruled over the vast plains and valleys of South Africa are (re)created through the ancestral figure of Ma-Rose and by an (implicit) author who feels himself bound to that history, tradition and culture by his very South Africanness and ancestry.

As already stated, the figure of Ma-Rose is a binding factor in the novel and in the entire saga of the events leading up to and including the slave revolt. With her ‘old eyes and old ears’ she sees and listens to everything and everybody and, in her feminine wisdom, sees and hears beyond what she sees and hears, for she interprets, concludes and extracts meanings to which the other characters are oblivious.

The novel attempts to blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world - in the same way Brink ‘doctors’ historical documents to blend truth and fiction - with neither taking precedence over the other. To blend superstition and magic - which is another way of knowing things - with the real world at the same time, cannot be assessed as limiting; on the contrary, it is an enhancing feature of the novel. It is important to note how different characters respond to Ma-Rose's acceptance of the supernatural and her superstition, her peculiar knowledge of things: for Alida, Cecilia and eventually Nicolaas her

[p. 170]

knowledge is discredited knowledge. When Alida forbids Nicolaas to visit Ma-Rose's hut as often as he does, he pleads with her, saying Ma-Rose tells them stories, to which Alida retorts: ‘“Heathen nonsense. She'll land you all in hell”’ (p. 83). Cecilia, prototype of the white (Afrikaner) woman, almost exactly echoes her mother-in-law's words when Ma-Rose drives Gaunab, the Dark One, away with water: ‘“What ungodly stories are you telling again?... How often have I told you to stop scaring the children with all this heathen nonsense? I won't have it, do you hear me? God will punish you for your evil ways, Rose”’ (pp. 356/7). Ma-Rose's stories ‘both scared and angered’ Nicolaas (p. 84) who tried his best to ‘convert’ her. When he fails to blend Ma-Rose's belief in the supernatural with his book-bound knowledge, he mistakenly thinks that she is ‘receding’ from his life.

Ma-Rose keeps her history and that of her people alive in oral literature. Among several functions of opening formulae for oral literature, Mineke Schipper (1990:22) mentions one in which fixed passages or formulae remain recognisable even in different variants. She states: ‘Sometimes it happens that totally different stories are combined in a new story at a later stage. This regularly happens when the narrator, in beginning his narration, refers to his “sources”, for example, “My father told me and his father told him ...”’ (my translation). Cf. for example the invocation of Ma-Rose's female ancestors when she starts relating a particular part of her history: ‘The world is very old hereabouts. It was like this in my mother's time, and in her mother's, and I suppose in her mother's too ...’ (p. 23); ‘My mother used to tell me how our people had been as numerous as the stones of the mountains ... but then, she said, there came a disease among us, in the time of my mother's mother's mother ...’ (p. 26); ‘my mother had told me long ago ...’ (p. 356); ‘I was told by my mother, and she by hers, and she I should think by hers again ...’ (p. 439). Ma-Rose's job is to ‘make generations’ and ‘to bear witness’ to the rights and wrongs of the past, as well as to her culture and traditions. By incorporating her narratives into the text (N.B. the whole novel is an adventure in orality, from the title onwards), Brink achieves ‘orality’, the sense that the narrative is as much told as written. However, as stated before, the loss of her own children as well as the loss of Galant who would most definitely have passed down to his children what had been told to him by Ma-Rose, is also the loss of future ability to make generations. Thus, where in some sense Ma-Rose and the other black women characters have no beginning and no end and are what might be called ‘the woman suspended’,^13. she is in another very real sense a woman rooted in culture and history. She is being portrayed as someone who in her belief is firmly anchored to the Khoi creator and raingod, Tsui-Goab, and to the ancestral spirit, Heitsi-Eibib.

The inclusion of an ancestral presence in the person of Ma-Rose could be interpreted as ‘a deliberate effort on the part of the artist to get a visceral, emotional response as well as an intellectual response as s/he communicates with

13. Mary Helen Washington, cited by Braxton, Joanne M. 1990.

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the audience’ (Morrison 1983:341). The mother/ancestral figure of Ma-Rose embodies the values of sacrifice, nurturance and personal courage - values necessary to an endangered group - while at the same time employing reserves of spiritual strength derived from her rootedness in Tsui-Goab and Heitsi-Eibib.

In addition to that, Brink also succeeds in creating a historically authentic image by using the ‘voice’ of Ma-Rose to establish the historical setting of the early 1800s when the Khoikhoin's group and family relations were already disintegrating and by referring to the smallpox epidemics which practically wiped out this indigenous group of people. With the portrayal of the Khoi personages as survivors in whom the myths as handed-down treasure have been preserved, he uses Ma-Rose's stories to form an integrated chain of motifs with which the reader is led to new insights. While the mythical data give the characters a grip on their reality (especially Ma-Rose and Galant), they also contribute to give the world of the novel an illusion of reality to the reader (cf. Steenberg 1984:260).

Galant reflects upon the stories Ma-Rose told him, stories into which she incorporates the origins of certain beliefs of her people but which at the same time inculcate reverence for the forces of nature and for life and death; in short, she had ‘stories for all occasions’ (p. 41). The catastrophic events on Houd-den-Bek and the tragedy which permeates the life of almost every character are closely related to the ominous signs and figures of evil from Ma-Rose's stories, for each of which she also has an exorcising ritual. The most important of these signs, with their uncanny relationship to the four life elements but then more ominous and threatening, are:

1.

The thas-jackal which ‘no one has ever seen... but it's out there; and it wanders about when somebody has trodden on a fresh grave. It's the spirit of the dead that turns into a jackal to haunt the living’ (p. 182). Very significantly, the thas-jackal is heard deep in the night by both Ma-Rose and Galant shortly after Galant's child had been murdered by Nicolaas and he comes to Ma-Rose in his grief and bitterness to find out the truth. She cannot (or would not?) supply answers to his questions, save to say: ‘“Stop asking questions or you'll land in big trouble. Nicolaas is baas on Houd-den-Bek”’ (p. 181). Houd-den-Bek, then, is not only the name of the farm but a very clear injunction from master to slave not to question, not to retaliate; in fact, it encompasses the entire attitude of the period and thereafter. In Parts III and IV Ma-Rose invokes the image of the thas-jackal once more when she focalizes Galant: ‘Without looking at me, his eyes still far away in that distance where the thas-jackal roams ...’ (p. 352). In her last monologue she states: ‘There is another kind of death, a deeper one, the death of the heart ... only the wail of the jackal is heard...’ (p. 439). To comfort Galant, she offers to perform a typical Khoi exorcising ritual by strewing buchu leaves on Dawidjie's grave to ‘set him to rest’ (p. 182), but for the ‘death of the heart’ even Ma-Rose has no remedy or exorcising ritual.

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2.	The hammerhead bird is similarly an omen of death and again it is especially Galant, with ‘Ma-Rose's hold on him’ (Nicolaas, p. 85), who firmly believes in its ominous presence. When the planning of the revolt is in its final stages, Galant and the other workers go to the vlei to wash themselves before returning home after a long day's threshing. There they encounter a couple of hammerhead birds standing unmoving in the muddy water, ‘like weird-shaped brown stones, staring at the fish. In silence we hold back, paralysed, too numb to interfere. For we know it's not fish they see in the dark water, but the face of a man marked for death’ (p. 387). Ma-Rose's thoughts on death and the Khoi explanation of ‘how death came into the world’ include the hammerhead bird as death symbol, ‘... the cry of the hammerhead bird treading the waters of death’ (p. 439).
3.	Gaunab, the diametrical opposite of Tsui-Goab, can be equated to the Christian concept of Satan and Hell. Already at the beginning of the main text his presence gives an indication of the tragedy and ill-fortune which would execute themselves on Houd-den-Bek. In true oral tradition Ma-Rose relates the creation myth of the Khoikhoin: ‘And from the stones the great god Tsui-Goab made us, the people, the Khoikhoin, the People-of-people. And here in the Bokkeveld you can see it very clearly, for we live surrounded by stone’ (p. 23). It is once again not Ma-Rose but Galant who explicitly invokes the presence of Gaunab for the first time in the text: ‘There's Tsui-Goab who made the world and all the people, the rain and sun and wind and fire; and Gaunab who lives in the night and rules over all that happens in the dark’ (p. 41). In contrast to Tsui-Goab who lives in a beautiful heaven, Gaunab lives in a dark, black heaven. For this reason Ma-Rose's first observation and ‘prophecy’ implying the presence of a force of darkness is described as follows: ‘Now I suppose it's easy to say I've seen it coming a long way, as one sees the clouds coming from far off... growing darker as they come closer, darker and darker all the way, until they break out in a storm that beats you down and strips you to the bone’ (p. 23). For the Khoikhoin, Gaunab the evil destructor, is also linked to evil spirits and death and is one and the same force as the whirlwind or ‘dust-devil’ or sâres, as Ma-Rose explains a whirlwind: ‘... I couldn't help shivering. I knew it was Gaunab, the Dark One, taking on the shape of a whirlwind. In that form his name was sâres, my mother had told me a long time ago; and it was a bad omen. I could see it coming towards us... and I was frightened, for I saw it heading straight for the house’ (p. 356). For that reason she does the only thing a Khoi can do to prevent the evil a whirlwind brings, using one of her exorcising rituals: she throws water right in the way of sâres, which made it change course and die down. When Cecilia scolds her for her ‘ungodly’ ways, she replies: ‘“The dust-devil means danger, Nooi. If I hadn't stopped him in time there would have been death on this farm’ (p. 356).

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4.

The Lightning Bird is undoubtedly the most significant and most recurring of the omens of death and destruction. Ill-fortune is linked to the personification of the forces of nature in the Lightning Bird which, according to Schapera (1930:194), is seen by the Northwestern San as the child of Khauna who in turn is the origin of ill-fortune. Galant reports fairly comprehensively his knowledge of the Lightning Bird from the stories of Ma-Rose, the Lightning Bird ‘that scorches the grass where it settles to lay its egg which burrows into the earth in search of moisture. There it lies abiding its time, swelling and growing, until the clouds start thundering overhead again; then a new Lightning Bird is hatched. The lightning is its spittle, and the clouds its dark wings spread out over the world’ (p. 41). Ma-Rose herself transposes the bad connotations of the Lightning Bird onto the liberation struggle which appears like a fire: ‘There is a kind of lightning that one sees with one's eyes, the lightning that announces the storm which lays waste the wheat but which also brings new life to the earth for next year's harvest. But there is another kind of lightning, invisible, and inside you, leaving its mark on your heart; it lies there waiting for years, curled up, as patient as the egg of the Lightning Bird in the darkness of the earth, and suddenly one day it breaks out to burn and scorch you inside... (pp. 439/40). In this way, she recognises the fire that broke out that night, ‘blown up high by Galant and the others’ (p. 440). Ma-Rose has a ritual too for exorcising the destructive power of the Lightning Bird. When Nicolaas married, his wedding ‘gift’ from his father was inter alia the slave Galant, which meant that he had to move to Houd-den-Bek with Nicolaas, leaving Ma-Rose behind at Lagenvlei. But being a ‘free’ woman, she soon decides to follow Galant. In exasperation Galant tries to scare her by saying lightning will strike her down, her hut is too exposed on the hill, but she is not scared of lightning, and Galant knows why: ‘I've seen her in storms before: if the lightning grows too wild or comes too close to her liking she goes out in the rain and bends over with her backside to the storm, and raises the back flap of her kaross. Nothing scares off the Lightning Bird so effectively as the sight of Ma-Rose's bare behind’ (p. 129). On another occasion when Galant again comes to Ma-Rose in a state of deep depression, he begs her to tell him a story: ‘“Tell me about the Great Hunter Heitsi-Eibib. Tell me about the Water Woman. Tell me about the Lightning Bird that lays its egg in the ground”’ (p. 134). Indeed, the ancestral presence in this novel is a comforting and consoling one, especially for Galant. However, the Lightning Bird is not only a symbol of destruction - it is also a symbol of new life and hope, the age-old Khoi version of the Phoenix, especially in Galant's case. He analogises the seed he may have planted in Hester with the egg of the Lightning Bird and with the purifying properties of fire: ‘In its own way the lightning is as everlasting as the mountains. Deep in

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the earth the Lightning Bird lays its egg; and when its time comes it hatches in the dark and fire returns to the world: a fire that burns and scorches and strips away all that is superfluous, so that life can sprout anew in red-grass and shrub, in small yellow flowers, in everything that grows. Like life in the womb of a woman the egg of the Lightning Bird lies waiting in the darkness to be born’ (p. 499). At the end of his last monologue which is also the end of the main text, he again invokes the image of the Lightning Bird but now it is no longer a single egg but eggs, suggesting the different forms of potential destruction and of potential hope/new life for his country and his people: ‘The eggs of the Lightning Bird remain in the earth for a long, long time: but one day they'll hatch and bring the fire back...’ (p. 509).

Finally, the ancestral presence in this novel in the figure of Ma-Rose must also be seen in relation to her function as prophetess/seer. In the very first paragraph of her first monologue, i.e. the first paragraph of the main text, this function is foreshadowed when she says: ‘Now I suppose it's easy to say I've seen it coming a long way’ (p.23). Referring to the slave revolt, she equates it with a brewing storm which ‘beats you down and strips you to the bone’. In her last monologue she reiterates what she said in the first but then she is more definite: ‘I can say that I'd seen it coming from far off, through years and seasons of sun and snow and wind. Indeed, I saw it all’ (p. 441 - my emphasis).

These are not the empty boastings of an old woman. Her increasing unease about Galant's justified troubled state of mind, her observation of the wrongs perpetrated by both masters and slaves, the growing antagonism between the two men ‘who were suckled on (her) paps’ (p. 439), Nicolaas's change of attitude towards her, all these factors and more enable her to know that the storm has to break out in one way or another. Added to this, is her prophecy to Nicolaas that ‘when the storm comes up it'll blow all of this (his possessions) right away’ (p. 359).

As the ancestral presence, it is also her function to share her wisdom and insights with her descendants, to act as seer/prophetess in order to guide them on their future paths. Indeed, the figure of Ma-Rose succeeds in breaking down ‘artificial barriers between the artist and the audience’ (Braxton 1990:300), for this novel not only communicates in a meaningful way to contemporary South African society but it also establishes the fact, albeit in a fictionalised account, that Ma-Rose and her ancestors ‘had always been there’.

5.5 Concluding remarks

The above chapter only skims the surface of André P. Brink's narrative art and the last word on his portrayal of black women has yet to be said. The depth which

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characterises his novels cannot possibly be explored in a mere chapter, nor can the various contradictions in his work be fully exposed in so short a space.

Brink's one-dimensional figures of black women in Looking on darkness have as their one and only dimension the sexual aspect of womanhood. Admittedly, Joseph's mother, Sophie, shows seminal traces of being an ‘ancestral presence’ in the text but even Joseph doubts the veracity of her stories about his ancestors. Is it perhaps another attempt to discredit or erase black people's history? Alternatively, what does it say about Joseph?

Ma-Rose together with Lys, Lydia, Bet and Pamela, are first and foremost portrayed as sex objects with very little else to justify their human existence. The mere fact that parts of their anatomy and their sexual activities are often bestialised by themselves makes one wonder whether this is a further attempt to entrench the images of them the early explorers of and settlers at the Cape formed and perpetuated. In the case of Andrea too, her main role in the scheme of things, despite her Western-style ‘feminism’, appears to be that of sex-object. On the surface it would seem that she had forgotten and forsaken Africa but deep-down her identification with the continent remains manifest. Apparently the purpose is to show that, although she had been taken out of District Six and Bonteheuwel, District Six and Bonteheuwel - or rather the implicit author's perception of these ‘coloured’ townships - had not been taken out of her, as is so clearly illustrated in the previously mentioned episode with the clochard. In the final analysis, it would appear that Andrea's long sojourn in ‘civilised’ Europe, her association with white men, a materially comfortable life with Paul Joubert have had no effect on her life, have not succeeded in mobilising her upward. Or does it show that she is finally true to her roots? Does the implicit author want to show that no amount of ‘civilising’ influences can overcome the ‘inherent’ crudeness of primitive people or their descendants?

Somehow, Brink redeems himself somewhat in respect of his black female characters in A chain of voices, especially with regard to Ma-Rose. While she is portrayed as the quintessential sex object in her own narration, by other characters and by the implicit author who is in the final analysis the most important ‘voice’ in the chain of voices, she also supplies the missing link in the chain of black people's being. Her anomalous situation is no doubt brought about by the fact that the author finds it difficult to divorce himself from his own ancestry as far as perception of the black woman is concerned. Whatever laudable qualities she may have are often obfuscated by her sexual excesses.

Nevertheless, I have attempted, from the perspective of a black South African woman, to assess Brink's perception of the black woman. What has emerged, is that his perception is not that of a static, fossilised mentality but of someone who squarely faces the challenge of change. It is true that the white writer cannot be

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blamed for his whiteness, nor can he deny it, as Brink (1973:9) himself asserts; it is true that artificial barriers have made it virtually impossible for black and white to really know each other; it is especially true that black men and white women or white men and black women, in their lack of knowledge about each other, often have misconceptions about the other; it is also true that stereotypes attached to a particular group are hard to dispel. But if an artist accepts these ‘truths’ unquestioningly, there is simply no hope of conciliation, even if s/he tries to understand. To conclude, one can use one of Brink's own ‘truths’ to illustrate how difficult it is for black and white but especially for white authors to give a fair assessment of the oppressed's psyche: ‘What is important is not just to understand with mind, but to live through it all’ (Ma-Rose, p. 441).