permeate South African writing.”29 Duiker, speaking in interviews about his literary influences, points to a range of Southern African and international writers across lines of color and gives reasons for these identifications that have more often than not to do with questions of tension and instability. Bessie Head looms large in this regard, and Duiker says of her: “Bessie Head . . . [is] a ‘coloured’ South African writer. She was born from a white woman and rejected by her . . . by her own mother. Her strong identity as a ‘coloured’ woman is reflected in her writing.”30 He states that Head’s novel A Question of Power inspired him to become a writer because “[h]ere is this person who was rejected by her community and took refuge wherever she could. I related to that, to her trying to find her feet.”31 Other literary works Duiker claims were important in shaping him as a youngster were Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the iconoclastic work of Dambudzo Marechera.32 Duiker’s Azure is remarkably similar to Okri’s exceptional spirit child Azaro in The Famished Road (1991), and the Nigerian’s negotiation of realist and surrealist styles clearly inspired the young South African. Sam Raditlhalo also suggests that Azure/Blue alludes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).
Duiker epitomizes a new generation of South African writers who succeed more easily in creatively transgressing the old black/white divide that Attwell and others identify and attempt to bridge. The writers he names as making their mark range widely, asserting a cosmopolitanism and nonracialism rather than privileging merely the racial, nationalist, or Pan-Africanist. During Duiker’s years of travel immediately after school he says he discovered the works of J. M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and Doris Lessing. Duiker’s work also invites wide-ranging comparison. There are striking similarities between Azure and Michael K, the protagonist of Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). A comparative study of the two novels would cut across the racial writing divide, as would, for example, a comparative study of a string of South African boy bildungsromans, from Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) to Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1995), to Thirteen Cents and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002). A comparison between Thirteen Cents and Patricia Schonstein’s Skyline, published in the same year as Duiker’s novel, about a young girl’s encounter with urban dwellers in Long Street, Cape Town, could invite a gendered analysis of postapartheid relations in the inner city. Such comparative, thematic analyses might go some way toward filling the gap identified by Rita Barnard: “There are, to date, surprisingly few critical works . . . that consider South African literature in a broad thematic way, and there are fewer still without the modifiers ‘black’ or ‘white’ inserted in the title.”33 Duiker’s life, vision, and work certainly invite such nonracial explorations without diminishing the way questions of race still affect our lives.
Sello Duiker took his own life in January 2005, just about a month after his friend and fellow writer Phaswane Mpe had died.34 A few days before Duiker’s death, van der Merwe had sent him her edited version of The Hidden Star through the post, but it failed to reach him; his last novel ends by realizing the quest his first protagonist Azure had begun and fleetingly glimpsed from the top of the mountain: “home is never far away when you believe in it” (233).
A Note on K. Sello Duiker’s Use of Language
Andries Oliphant outlines the effects of colonial and apartheid rule and ideology in South Africa on the domain of literature:
Linguistically, Apartheid crystallised the colonial imperatives of segregation and white supremacy into rigid ethnic divisions between English and Afrikaans, on the one hand, as well as between these languages and the indigenous languages, on the other. This, as Msimang (1996:51) states, produced three distinct literary systems consisting of the two literatures in English and Afrikaans, separated from each other and placed at the apex and centre of the system, and the nine literatures in the African languages, located at the periphery and below English and Afrikaans.35
This separation and hierarchy of South African literature along language lines under apartheid begins to be challenged, to a certain extent, in the post-1994 period. Writers still choose one of the numerous languages used in South Africa as the language of their text (English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and isiXhosa as the main ones), but there is now a greater mixing of languages, particularly in dialogue, in many creative works. Duiker continues to write in a tradition of Anglophone African writers, epitomized by Chinua Achebe, who choose to write in English rather than in an African language but at the same time make English serve their local and particular creative purpose. Nationally, Duiker follows in the South African novel tradition of writers like Peter Abrahams, Es’kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma, and J. M. Coetzee. Like these writers, Duiker inflects Standard South African English with other languages; in Thirteen Cents he combines English with regional dialect prevalent in the Cape that mixes English and Afrikaans with Sotho and Xhosa names and words in the narrative. Duiker can be seen as continuing the modern novel tradition in English, as Es’kia Mphahlele sees it, initiated by Peter Abrahams:
Peter Abrahams . . . had become acquainted with the Negro authors of the Harlem Renaissance in the New York of the 1920s and the new consciousness that was to create a new kind of writing by Blacks. It was a rediscovery of an identity that echoed their African origins. Theirs was a style that captured the immediacy of an experience with vivid and concrete imagery, in all its harshness, in all its resonance of the fact of Black survival.36
Yet Duiker goes much further than any of these writers, crossing three conventional boundaries of fictional representation—he graphically depicts sex between child and adult, he does so specifically in relation to homosexual acts, and he uses expletives and the language of insult in a sustained manner that goes beyond merely inflecting the prose with local color.37 Dehumanizing language is a violent assault on the human spirit, and Duiker attempts to capture this onslaught and resistance to it in authentic detail. He says: “I don’t go out intentionally to shock. A lot of what I said could have been toned down. But violence is so much a part of our culture that if I had toned it down it wouldn’t have been authentic.”38
Unlike Mark Behr, for example, a South African novelist resident in the United States, who in his recent fiction Kings of the Water (2009) generates simultaneous translations of Afrikaans phrases within the text and a glossary of terms for his international readership, Duiker writes Thirteen Cents in the first instance for a younger, local audience, assuming his readers are familiar with the non-English terms. The absence of authorial mediation between the language of the story and readers also suggests Duiker’s desire to construct an uncompromising, true-to-life account of a harsh reality. It gives his fiction a contemporary and naturalistic quality, much like the linguistic code-switching and cacophony of languages that one finds in popular South African TV soap operas and recent South African film.
The glossary that follows is intended to help readers decode the meaning and nuances of certain key terms in the novel not in English.
Glossary
babelas (isiZulu, slang)—hungover
ba batla borotho (Sesotho)—they want bread
baksheesh (Persian, slang)—tips and bribes
bergies (Afrikaans, slang)—literally mountain people; homeless people who take shelter on the slopes of Table Mountain or on Cape Town city streets
braai (Afrikaans)—cookout, barbecue
buttons (informal)—Mandrax, Quaaludes
cherrie (Afrikaans, slang)—young woman or girlfriend
daai glad hare (Afrikaans)—that smooth hair
dankie (Afrikaans)—thank you
deurmekaar (Afrikaans)—crazy
eish (slang)—oh
