Sometimes There Is a Void (55 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

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Bethany invited me to her elegant home in Manhattan, New York, and introduced me to her father, Peter Yarrow. I remembered him from the days of Peter, Paul and Mary, and he was amused when I told him that ‘Puff the Magic Dragon' was one of my all-time favourite songs. There is something beautifully sentimental about it. He reached for his guitar and played the song for me. But of course without Mary and Paul it was different. But I was happy to have had a command performance just for me by one of the three greatest folk music heroes of all time. Well, at least in my estimation!
Sometimes Bethany would have screenings of her films in her father's living room. After she completed editing a documentary she had shot in Cape Town titled
Umama Awethu
she invited me to one such screening. I in turn invited Steve Kalamazoo Mokone thinking that he would enjoy seeing some aspects of South Africa on the screen since he had not been in the country for decades. The movie was set in some informal settlements in Cape Town and looked at how women coped despite the problems of poverty and apartheid oppression.
As we walked to the subway after the screening Kalamazoo expressed his unhappiness with the film. Not the quality or the production. It was quite good, he said. But he despaired at the fact that portrayals of South Africa in the West, even by such liberal and radical film-makers
as Bethany, had prevarications. All they ever showed were ‘squatter camps', poverty and suffering. No other aspects of South Africa were ever shown. One wouldn't know that there were clean and beautiful cities in South Africa that compared with any in the Western world, and middle-class black folks who drove luxury cars and lived in posh houses in such townships as Dube Village and Diepkloof Extension. Even in the ordinary townships and villages of South Africa people lived, laughed, sang and danced. Kalamazoo told me that he was done with watching such films because they reinforced the American stereotype of South Africa. You see one of them, you have seen them all. The message was a simple one: the whole of South Africa was one massive squatter camp.
I apologised for having invited him. I could see his point, though in Bethany's defence she made a film about a subject that touched her most – women's resilience in the face of adversity.
I met Kalamazoo a few more times during my stay in New Haven. I was writing a film script about his life and I visited him and his wife Louise at their New Jersey home to get more material, especially the documents pertaining to his court case and prison term. I had interested some folks at 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Spike Lee's production company in New York, in taking a look at it. A soccer movie, they thought, might sell well to investors since the FIFA World Cup was going to be held in the USA in three years' time, in 1994. Alas, Kalamazoo read the first draft and was very unhappy with the manner in which I portrayed him. I was interested in a story of a fall from grace and then redemption; he wanted me to paint him as a hero through and through who was a victim of the system and didn't have any flaws of his own. I gave up on the project, and our relationship soured.
Every time I went to New York I had to return to New Haven the same night because I had left Dini alone. Although he was fifteen years old I didn't think he could cope on his own.
I had rented a piano and enrolled him for piano lessons. He was doing well at school, although he was struggling with spoken and written English. He had spent all his life attending schools where Sesotho was the language of instruction in the early grades. But unfortunately I couldn't afford to get him a tutor. With the measly stipend Yale was
giving me I could barely survive. As was always the case when finances were tight, I fell back on my paintings. I found a gallery in a sombre part of New Haven that was willing to exhibit them and sell them on my behalf for a percentage of the price.
After I had taken the paintings to the gallery I didn't hear from them for a few weeks. I took a bus to the suburb where the gallery was located and found that it was closed. Through the window I could see my paintings displayed all over the shop. I went there many times, but the gallery was still closed. I was not going to give up, however, because my valuable paintings were in that shop. One day a passer-by told me that the owner of the gallery had gone bankrupt and it would not open again.
How the hell was I going to get my pictures? I had no contact information other than the physical address of the gallery and the telephone number. I didn't even know the name of the owner. I stood there for a long time looking longingly at my paintings. Some of them were intaglio that I had done almost ten years before when I was a student at Ohio University. I would never be able to create those again.
I was sitting on a bench at the bus stop waiting for the bus and brooding about my paintings when a well-dressed and well-groomed African American gentleman sat down next to me.
‘You are not from here,' he said.
Normally people could tell from my accent but I had not uttered a word. And my manner of dress was not different from that of the natives.
‘How did you know?' I asked.
‘You smiled,' he said. ‘You looked at me and smiled. Black folks here don't smile. They carry a big chip on their shoulder. They think smiling is a sign of weakness.'
I had been so deep in the doldrums I had not been aware that I had smiled at him.
 
Letters from home were always a source of great joy, especially those from my mother and my children. My daughter Thandi was at Bereng High School in Mafeteng, still staying with my parents. She was seventeen
years old. My son Neo was at FUBA Academy in Johannesburg studying visual arts. He was nineteen. He was staying with my sister Thami in her flat in Hillbrow. Thami was working for the mining company Anglo American at the time. I was getting letters from her that the boy was giving her many problems and that I was not sending enough money for his support. And this was true. Some months I didn't send any money because I didn't have any. She couldn't understand how it was possible not to have money when I was working in America. I couldn't understand it either, but there it was, long before the end of the month the Yale stipend was gone. People who knew said I should have negotiated a better deal for myself before accepting their offer. I was so dumb I didn't know one could negotiate about these things.
One question I dreaded in my mother's letters:
Have you found Sonwabo yet?
I had not found him. You will remember that he left almost ten years before for Ohio University, and never returned. None of us, including his wife and four beautiful children, had heard from him for years. I contacted people I knew in Athens, Ohio, and they told me that he was indeed once there but he left before completing his degree. They had no idea where he had gone. Cosmo Pieterse, the Namibian/ South African playwright teaching in the English Department at Ohio University, told me that to his knowledge Sonwabo had been an ANC activist in America and after the release of Nelson Mandela and the return of exiles he was recalled to South Africa by the ANC. I contacted Lindiwe Mabuza, who was the ANC's United States representative, but she knew nothing about him. Thobeka Mda, one of the lovely daughters of the highly esteemed lawyer Mda Mda, had met him when she was doing her PhD at Ohio State University. At least that gave me some idea that he was somewhere in the Columbus area. I used the missing persons bureau of the Salvation Army who tried their best but came back with the response that they were able to find only those people who wanted to be found. I informed my mother of all these attempts. In one of her letters she pleaded:
Please, Zani, try very hard to find my son. I must see him before I die
. I wrote back to say:
Come on, mama, you're not going to die any day soon. You will see your son before then
.
I enjoyed letters from my friend 'Maseabata. I had left her in
Lesotho managing Gonzalez Scout in our one-hander,
In Celebration of Our National Arrogance
. Now Gonzalez was at Durham to complete my residency there. He was rehearsing my Durham play,
By Way of the Rock
, which he was going to perform in the Cathedral as part of the nine hundredth anniversary celebrations of that majestic Norman building. Scout was bombarding me with letters about the lousy time he was having. 'Maseabata on the other hand had also moved to Britain, not for theatre this time but to study for a master's degree in pharmacy. She wrote about her experiences in England and how she missed theatre.
The greatest source of joy, however, was the arrival of Adele and Zukile. I couldn't contain myself when I took a train from New Haven to meet them at JFK Airport. The boy was only two months old and looked very much like me in pictures when I was that age. I made up my mind that with this kid and any other kids I had with Adele I would never again be an absentee father. I would make up for all the sins I committed in bringing up my older kids, who had very little of my guidance. I would be a hands-on father. I would also be a loving and faithful husband.
Although this was the first time she had been in the United States, it didn't take much time for Adele to adjust and settle. I had made it clear to her even before she came that our living conditions would not be the same as in Lesotho where I had a big four-bedroom house provided by the university and servants who cleaned and cooked – though even in Lesotho I preferred to do my own cooking. She therefore didn't complain about the basement apartment. Though it was small it was like a love nest for us. We were happy. I told her once that I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. Not only did I have a beautiful family, but I was also having a fulfilling time at Yale, writing and presenting papers that were critiqued by my peers at the weekly seminars. I had just presented a paper titled ‘Politics and the Theatre: Current Trends in South Africa' and
Theater
, the prestigious journal of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre, was keen to publish it. The seminars inspired more creativity in me.
Up to that point I had written all my papers and plays in longhand, and then typed them later or gave them to someone else to type for me. I could never compose on the typewriter. It was necessary to draft
something first and then type it. I had never used a computer either, although it was 1992 and the whole world was already computer literate. I decided that it was high time I got into the technological age. Actually, this decision was brought about by the fact that I saw in a student newspaper an advertisement for a used computer that a student was selling. I immediately phoned and asked her to deliver it to my apartment.
It was an old IBM computer that took up all the space on my desk. But it still had its manual which would be helpful in my learning how to use that monster of a machine.
On Christmas Day that year my wife went to church about two streets from our apartment. I was home with four-month-old Zukile. Dini was visiting friends. Since the baby was not giving me any problems, I thought perhaps I could fiddle about with my computer and learn how it worked. With the baby on my lap, I read the manual for a program called WordPerfect and then pecked at the keys with my two middle fingers. It was easy enough. The first sentence I wrote was:
There are many ways of dying
. I didn't know where it came from but I liked it. Since it was about death it brought to my mind the character I had created when I was a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral in Durham – Toloki, the Professional Mourner. I had initially planned to use him in a future play, but what the heck, whatever it was that I was writing demanded his presence. But whose death would he be mourning? Duh! The deaths that were prevalent at that time in South Africa.
It was during the period of transition and we read in the papers of senseless killings that were happening all over the country: gunmen would walk on to trains and mow down everyone with AK47s; in the townships hostel dwellers supporting the predominantly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party marched down the streets beating up people and killing those suspected of being Xhosas, and by implication ANC supporters; and many other incidents of what was termed black-on-black violence. Later, it was discovered that most of the violence was instigated and supported by the apartheid state to derail the changes that were sweeping the country. Those were deaths that were ready-made for Toloki the Professional Mourner.
By the time Adele came back from church I had the first two pages
of what became my first novel,
Ways of Dying
. I was amazed at myself because I never thought I could write sustained prose and be descriptive. As a playwright I was a dialogue person. I had written a PhD thesis (that's what it's called at South African universities, not a dissertation) that was mostly descriptive, but it had not been easy going. Actually, it had been agony writing that thesis in hotel rooms in Cape Town. I never thought I would want to write anything akin to prose ever again. But there they were: my first two pages of creative prose! And all those sentences had come in such a playful manner, with Zukile in his baby talk taking part in the conversation I was having with the IBM monster, and with the words as they flowed so easily. Even the bells that were ringing, presumably at Adele's church, found their way into those first two pages. The events of the fiction were happening on Christmas Day because I was writing them on Christmas Day. And, wonder of wonders, for the first time in my life I had composed something directly on a keyboard without drafting it first!

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