behaviour, was in fact ‘epidemic’ by comparison with most other emerging economies.11 Paradoxically, then, this also means that although, from a critical or scholarly point of view, one should not give undue credence to the exaggerations of white discourse about crime, this discourse nevertheless provides evidence of a state of being that is itself noteworthy. Steinberg, who goes so far as to call this a ‘white phenomenology of crime’(28), continues:
For a milieu in which the idea of mortality has always been hitched exclusively to the elderly and the frail, the constant threat of lethal violence is akin to an earthquake. The profundity of the fear of crime is deep enough to go all the way down, to the existential itself, to the cornerstones of one’s relation to the world ... ‘Crime’ has nestled inside the most exquisitely intimate and private domains of white experience. It has taken its place among the categories through which people experience the fundamentals of their existence. (28)
If one adds to this amped-up sense of existential fragility the fact that white South Africans in general inhabit the country on the ‘shakiest of pretexts’ (Steinberg citing JM Coetzee in Youth), then one gets a sense of the abysmal dislocation that is integral to the experience of such South Africans. Coetzee’s young Cape Town protagonist in Youth implicitly knows that he ‘must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagines he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger’ (Youth 17).
In the discussion that follows, I deal with three nonfiction narratives of postapartheid conditions by white writers (Bloom, Krog and Steinberg) as a way of investigating changing modes of address in the broad category of ‘postapartheid’ writing. In making claims on this basis, I look at one of several seams – white creative nonfiction in what I call detection mode – in the greater patchwork of postapartheid literary culture. While one is loath to reintroduce categorisation in terms of race, the latter remains a stubbornly persistent feature, both implicit and explicit, in postapartheid modes of expression. The critic should be aware, however, that, as with literary culture during apartheid, totalising claims on the basis of a limited number of writers – especially in terms of race – are sure to founder. At best, the critic details diverse and divergent acts of writing under a nominal but ultimately (and necessarily) obscure totality in which particular renderings are both distinctive as parts, and also definitive in their own right. In this case, I am particularly interested in Steinberg’s notion of a ‘white phenomenology of crime’, and how white writers of the generation after Gordimer and Coetzee may be said to express this. It is a state of affairs that has loomed large since 1994, and it seems appropriate to ask whether and how it reconnects with or disconnects from the longue durée of the colonial, neocolonial-segregationist, and apartheid past. Naturally, a view of black writing in which crime and corruption emerge as major themes12 inevitably results in a differently inflected version of postapartheid writing that disrupts any coherent sense of literary totality. Part and whole – and indeed the relationship between the two – remain as vexed a conjunction as ever in South African writing.
Ways of Staying
It is precisely the white ‘soft spot’ in the postapartheid imaginary described above – an accelerating sense of personal threat over and above an abiding sense of not belonging – that both Bloom’s and Steinberg’s texts deal with. It is a sore area that Bloom targets in his 2009 nonfiction work, Ways of Staying – the title being a play on Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel, Ways of Dying.13 Bloom’s book is noteworthy not only because it homes in on the condition of existential fragility identified by Coetzee and Steinberg, but also because it eludes the category of ‘white whinger’. The book grew out of an event that shook Bloom’s life to its core – the apparently senseless murder of his cousin, fashion designer Richard Bloom, aged twenty-seven, along with his partner Brett Goldin, who was twenty-eight at the time. According to the account by Antony Sher, who researched the incident for a documentary, Goldin and Bloom were carjacked as they approached their vehicles after a party on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard. The year was 2006, a good twelve years into democracy. Their abducters were a band of young men high on crystal meth (or ‘tik’, as it is known in the Cape) looking for a car to steal. Sher takes up the story:
The group held them up at gunpoint, stole one of their cars, stripped and bound them, and forced them into the boot. They then drove to a motorway a few miles away, and onto a traffic island. Perhaps they were intending to abandon Brett and Richard alive and make their getaway, but the car got stuck in sand. After a long, frenzied struggle to free it, during which their naked victims were forced to help, they shot them dead. Either the mixture of frustration and intoxication led to the murderous act, or – as the men later claimed in their confessions – their victims cried out and had to be silenced. (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.)
Sher’s subsequent comment distinguishes his sense of horror from the more routine kind of white discourse about crime. The story is chilling, Sher continues, ‘because it isn’t about racism or sex, or anything other than chance’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.). The timing of Goldin and Bloom’s departure from the party ‘just happened to coincide with the group driving past’. The targets could have been ‘[a]ny of the other guests ... someone in the next street, it could have been you or me’. The renowned Shakespearean-actor-turned-writer concludes that his ‘birthplace seemed changed in a way that I didn’t like. Nowhere felt safe anymore’ (‘Tidal Wave’ n.p.).
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