Send Him My Love, Page 2

student activists. In the mean time I was trying to escape my military call up for a 3 month army camp on the border, the ultimate destination being the bush war on the Angolan border or even Angola itself. Beautiful haunting lyrics like Phamba Madiba (The Big River) played by the Malombo Jazz Men and the jazz of Dollar Brand were filling my brain and soul. In fact I played Phamba Madiba over and over. I knew the words by heart and I could sing them as well. And then I got this job as a temporary lecturer at the University of Cape Town in the philosophy department. I managed to escape the army, but only for a brief moment, they were on my trail and they would catch up with me eventually. And then I found myself on De Waal drive with a beautiful Coloured woman hitchhiker in the passenger seat of my car saying that she was QUEER, if she was a Lesbian it was fine with me. I had no ulterior motives with regard to her. I had picked her up on second thoughts with no ulterior designs in my heart. It was an act of pure kindness. She was not a prostitute. She was not behaving like a prostitute.

  Anyway she must have realized that I did not fully grasp the real situation. She then said: ' I am a man!' I realized that my hitchhiker was a gay transvestite and he had realized that I was as straight as a plank and completely absent minded. But I kept on saying that we are all queer. And in the dark the VW beetle was hurtling down De Waal drive, and now it was close to midnight ....and the whole world seemed queer to me. I told 'her' that I had nothing against queers or transvestites, and she asked if I wanted to go clubbing with her on the foreshore of Cape Town's dockland in nightclubs frequented by transvestites and cross-dressers. I realized that maybe my deceased father who was arrested at the Tugela Ferry location as the only white man in a black shebeen had discovered the true meaning of the universe in the sense that it was indeed a queer place to find oneself in as a conscious being. And the mind-body relation or the problem of consciousness happened to be my philosophical research interest. I did not answer her straight away, so she asked me again if I would like to go clubbing with her in the Cape Town dockland. I replied that the night was still young and I told her that I had already spent three nights in Phoenix. I actually don’t know why I said that. But had I actually written a novel called ‘Three Nights in Phoenix’ and I suppose at the moment I was beginning to re-experience the feeling of the surreality that gripped my imagination while I was writing ‘Three Nights in Phoenix’.

  She asked: Where is Phoenix?

  I replied that Phoenix was an Indian Township just outside Durban.

  She asked: What was a white man doing in Phoenix?

  I replied with a question: What was a white man doing in a black shebeen in Tugela Ferry?

  She replied: I don't know, but I like white men.

  Anyway we drove to the foreshore in the Cape Town harbour district. The club only opened after 12.00 and at one-o-clock in the morning I joined a bevy of white, Coloured and Black transvestite hookers in a club frequented by foreign sailors from every country in the world. In the 1970s in spite of apartheid, racial and gender transgression was alive and well. Back in the docklands on the foreshore of Cape Town after midnight, I was only a temporary lecturer teaching philosophy to first year students at UCT, but I was also the only white South African straight male ever to venture into a multi-racial dockland nightclub that was frequented by people who lived at the very margins of society, but I also had hard cash in my wallet. I was beginning to understand Jean Genet and Henry Miller, my world had become transformed into a profound psychedelic epiphany. I felt privileged to have experienced in a fleeting glimpse the possibilities of another life, or another world if you like. And I had also become the man of the moment. I wanted to order drinks for everyone. I discovered that you could only buy spirits by the bottle, and I had money to spend, even though I was a temporary lecturer teaching philosophy. I ordered bottles of whiskey and boxes of cigars. We danced until dawn. Just before sunrise I drove my Coloured transvestite home to some Coloured township close to where Dr Alan Boesak lived. I never saw her again. After dropping her off I did not go straight home to my flat in Rondebosch. Instead I went for a walk along the Sea Point promenade and watched the sun rise. In was then that I thought that I could live the life of a writer like Henry Miller in Paris. I thought to myself that maybe I will actually just do that one day.

  That is such an amazing story! And your other novels, how were they inspired?

  All kinds of situations and experiences can play a formative role in the creation of a fictional narrative. For example, as a kid I had grown up living on the margins of Locations, I grew up in the 1960s when Indian, Coloured and Black people were been moved around from one place to the next because of the group areas act, it was a time of massive social engineering and violent social dislocation of people. I personally experienced the destruction of Kalamazoo and Stirtonville Locations which existed almost in my backyard. The Barracuda Night Club trilogy starting with The Girl from Reiger Park bears witness to those social upheavals.

  The mentioning of Vosloorus in my novella Waterlandsridge also bears testimony to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Waterlandsridge is actually the story of the attempted escape by a white family from the unbearable whiteness of being in the world of apartheid South Africa. In Waterslandridge there are no black people working for a white rural family who happen to be the focus of the story....there is a reason for this. It is to demonstrate how lazy white people were under apartheid in South Africa, and also how hard life becomes if you no longer depend on cheap black labour. Waterlandsridge also affirms the richness of a life of manual labour. In the 1970s some of us were living in a world without boundaries in spite of the walls of apartheid. In the shadows we were involved in transgressions that ignored racial and gender barriers.

  We were the ‘white ghosts’ during that time. In 2013 I started writing fiction based on my experiences of the 1960s and 1970s in South Africa. Out of these experiences emerged a number of novels such as Segomotso and the Dress Maker and The Girl from Germiston....plus all the others.

  Looks like they want us to put on our seat belts. Our departure for Paris is about to commence. We better put our seats in the upright position as the flight attendant has commanded. Look she is actually coming down the aisle to check if we have carried out her instructions.

  Are you currently working on any new novels?

  Yes I am. I am currently working on a story that revolves around the fraughtful and tragic intricacies involved in the birth, life and death of a romantic liaison.

  The fraughtful and tragic intricacies involved in the birth, life and death of a romantic liaison. That sounds like the overall or gross anatomy of the plot. Is that the plot of your novel?

  What is the overall or gross anatomy of the plot of my novel? That is actually a very good question. It is also a very technical question. It sounds like you have studied literature.

  I did a BA in speech and drama at UCT.

  OK that explains everything. To be honest I was not actually sure about the plot. It seems like the gross or overall anatomy of the novel’s plot does revolve around all those fraughtful and tragic intricacies which often end up shipwrecking a romance that seemed on the surface to be too good to be true. The task now is to give substance to what is entailed in those fraughtful and tragic intricacies. I have been working with a few ideas that revolve around relationship triangles, misunderstanding, betrayal and insecurity, and all that kind of stuff. Somehow the plot now seems to have already taken care of itself.

  Sounds like the material for the story comes from your own personal life experiences?

  Indeed it does in a way, now that I think about it. Writing a novel often does involve the fictionalization of real life experiences. The fictional narrative or story is rarely a de novo creation, it does seem that humans are not really capable of the act of creatio ex nihilo which means that we are not really created in the actual form of the imago dei. We may indeed live in a Universe that is causally over-determined ultimately by God but that is another philosophical
issue which can be set aside for the time being.

  Do you feel up to sharing your personal and possibly secret experiences that have played a role in your writing of this novel with a complete stranger who you may never see again?

  Well why not? I have nothing to hide. Let me see how I can begin the story that I have mentioned with respect to the tragic fate of a romantic liaison that seemed on the surface to be too good to be true. OK this is how the story starts. A long time ago a mutual acquaintance bumped into someone, a young woman, who said: ‘Send him my love’.

  Do you mean she sent her love to you via a mutual friend?

  Yes. But remember that this a fictionalized account of something that could have happened to anybody. The message was actually sent to someone personally via a mutual friend, that is, someone who also knew the young woman. The someone or the somebody, who was the person, who happened to be the recipient of the message delivered verbally by the mutual friend does not have to necessarily be me, who also happens in this instance to be the writer or teller of the story, and the story is not an autobiography.

  So you implying that the young woman does not exist and no one sent their love to you