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A review by mishlist
A Dry White Season by André Brink
5.0
"From a very early age one accepts, or believes, or is told, that certain things exist in a certain manner. For example: that society is based on order, on reason, on justice. And that, whenever anything goes wrong, one can appeal to an innate decency, or commonsense, or a notion of legality in people to rectify the error and offer redress. Then, without warning, there occurs what Melanie said and what I refused to believe: you discover that what you accepted as premises and basic conditions - what you had no choice but to accept if you wanted to survive at all - simply does not exist.
Where you expected something solid there turns out to be just nothing....Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?...The problem is: one you've caught a glimpse of it, once you've merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it's different....the only question that matters is the one she asked: What now?
It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened - I reacted - something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let's try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn't the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?
Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be "reasonable", in finding "practical" arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might "achieve" in a practical sense I couldn't even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you're you, because you're there. I am Ben Du Toit. I'm here. There's no one else but myself right here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it's "important" or "effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it because I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.
And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people? Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I've always taken "my own people" so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. "My own people" have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Kurgersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls "the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control - and who are now threatened with extinction.
"My people". And then there were the "others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us Baas and Mtestes . We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of "us" and "them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn't mix...that was the way it had always been.
But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father searching for his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by "my people".
But who are "my people" today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?"
Where you expected something solid there turns out to be just nothing....Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?...The problem is: one you've caught a glimpse of it, once you've merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it's different....the only question that matters is the one she asked: What now?
It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened - I reacted - something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let's try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn't the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?
Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be "reasonable", in finding "practical" arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might "achieve" in a practical sense I couldn't even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you're you, because you're there. I am Ben Du Toit. I'm here. There's no one else but myself right here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it's "important" or "effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it because I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.
And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people? Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I've always taken "my own people" so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. "My own people" have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Kurgersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls "the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control - and who are now threatened with extinction.
"My people". And then there were the "others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us Baas and Mtestes . We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of "us" and "them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn't mix...that was the way it had always been.
But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father searching for his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by "my people".
But who are "my people" today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?"