try to ignore it, but it is obvious you are uncomfortable. You cannot help wondering: Zimmerlie’s scar, the mutilated kitten, and now this.
They notice, of course. ‘Hey, ushomi,’ calls Kaliban, ‘don’t worry about him. He was in the struggle, and they chopped him.’
‘The struggle?’
‘The Old Struggle,’ explains Eric. ‘Against Apartheid. In detention, they chopped him.’
They are having you on, you are sure. He is far too young to have been involved in any struggle. Apartheid ended in 1994 and this man can be no older than nineteen or twenty. But who are you to argue? He carries his scar like a veteran’s medal.
‘Tell us about yourself, sir,’ says Caesar Langa. ‘What are you doing in eSikamanga? How did you end up here?’
You loosen your tie. ‘Well, let’s say I didn’t really “end up” here, since this is hardly the end … I applied for the job on the internet.’
When Tracey speaks, her voice is husky. ‘Where you from, Dr Turner?’
A year ago you would have been attracted to her, smitten even. You watch her with dissociated fascination. You’ve been here before, and you know it’s treacherous territory, so you just watch yourself watching her. Thank god for scar tissue.
‘From Australia. Melbourne, Victoria. My Ph.D. is in African Literature … well, Postcolonial, Post-Apartheid, Post-Struggle Literature. I studied the great writer Sizwe Bantu … and focused on the African Subject in the novels of Sizwe Bantu.’
‘Who’s Sizwe Bantu?’
‘You’re kidding me? Sizwe Bantu, you know, the great South African writer!’
‘Sizwe Bantu?’ She closes her eyes and taps the pencil on her teeth as if to evoke the vast catalogue of African writers she knows in her mind. ‘Never heard of him.’
Now she is pulling your leg. Surely. ‘That’s funny. He’s in the book that is set for you this semester …’
She shrugs her left shoulder and the shells, bells and bric-a-brac in her hair jangle and tinkle. ‘We didn’t use that book.’
‘Which one did you use, then?’
She taps her forehead with her pencil. ‘This one.’
You cannot help staring at the green eyes. ‘That’s not a textbook.’
Her smile is bewitching, seductive. But you shake your head.
Eric Phala indicates the books piled up on the end desk—ten copies of Modern African Stories, neatly spider-webbed and covered with what looks like a semester of dust. ‘We must create our own African traditions, not passively receive those which have been imposed upon us.’ It sounds as if he is quoting somebody.
‘You didn’t use any books at all in this class?’
Tracey pulls out a pink A5 book from her bag. You read CREATIVE WRITING JOURNAL printed in neat handwriting on the front cover. ‘We’re not naïve consumers of multinational corporate products. We wrote our own textbook. Wrote our own play.’ Her words are spiky, her body language defensive.
Eric Phala concurs: ‘Creative Writing gives power back to the people. Creative Writing breaks down the elitist idea of a literary canon.’
‘And what’s in there?’
‘Our own authentic experience of the world. The real text. We wrote about …’
You reach out to take her journal, which she is holding up in the air as if to pass to you. A hiss of disapproval snakes across the back row and she hastily plunges it back into her backpack. ‘It’s nothing really,’ she says, ‘just a way to make us write honestly.’ A mobile phone prods her back and she arches in annoyance.
‘I see.’
You stare at her a little too long. ‘What?’ she says.
‘Nothing.’
You remind me of someone I know, you want to say. Someone ten thousand kilometres away whose name begins with M. Someone I am trying to shut out of my heart. Someone familiar, someone unstable.
You sense that her bravado is a mask for her vulnerability. But you are also aware of how you project your own psychological defects onto others.
Time is ticking by on the large clock on the wall. You only have a few minutes until the end of the lecture. You distribute the ten copies of Modern African Stories to the ten students, and take your place at the podium.
They fidget and whisper.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ says Eric.
‘All right then. Will you please open your texts at page 343 and read the poem you find there: Bantu’s ‘The Bloody Horse’. Please read for me, Mr Phala, the poem you find before you.’
Mr Phala opens the book, and then slams it shut again. Smiles.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t have it.’
‘What?’
‘That page is missing in my book.’
‘Okay, Caesar, you read it.’
‘That page is missing in my book too.’ He holds it up.
You walk across and examine the book, check Eric Phala’s too, and find the same careful tearing along the centre spine of the book. ‘Did you tear this page out, Mr Phala?’
He frowns, as if trying to remember.
‘Does anyone have that page?’
All open their books to the same empty space. No, of course not. ‘Okay, what happened?’
The class ripples with grins and nudges.
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