Vladislavić and Ali Take 2011 UJ Prizes

Craig MacKenzie

Ivan Vladislavić has won the UJ Prize for the second time. Double Negative (Umuzi, 2010) is
Vladislavić’s fictional accompaniment to David Goldblatt’s striking set of photographs of Johannesburg,
aptly titled TJ. The two volumes appear in an elegant box-set, released in association with the Italian
publisher of fine art books Contrasto Due.
Double Negative is a three-part novel featuring a first-person narrator, and Vladislavić is once
again on familiar ground in sampling Johannesburg through the eyes of drop-out student and aspirant
photographer Neville Lister.
Like 2007 UJ Prize-winner Portrait with Keys: Joburg and What-What (Umuzi, 2006), Double
Negative constantly wrongfoots the reader. In a memorable scene from the first part of the novel, the
photographer Saul Auerbach, a visiting British photographer and the young Neville, tagging along in
what would nowadays be called a stint of ‘work experience’, sit on a koppie overlooking Bez Valley and
randomly pick out a house each from the maze below, which they then visit and whose inhabitants they
photograph. This is something David Goldblatt actually did (and Vladislavić recalled reading in a book of
his), but the event is recast with Auerbach in the role and Neville as witness. The effect of this cluster of
devices in the book is to make the real unfamiliar, and to invest the fantastical with the grit and texture of
the real.
The three parts of the novel offer Vladislavić a set of historically ranged prisms through which to
view his protagonist’s oblique and unheroic engagement with South African history. The first part,
“Available Light”, is set in the late 1970s / early 1980s, when foreign travellers would still book into
hotels on Joubert Park, and when a young white man would walk Hillbrow from end to end, before sitting
down for a beer at the Chelsea Hotel and visiting the nearby Exclusive Books.
In the narrow frame of his insignificant life the narrator sees South Africa’s multiform history
staged. The larger currents of history brush against the threads of this life, shaping them inexorably, while
they in turn make their own miniscule reciprocal contribution to history itself.
Vladislavić’s gift is to make the everyday remarkable, and, equally, to render the complex
accessible. Take this mini-portrait of youthful experience: “Young people learn things intensely. They’re
impressionable, we say. The proper image is not a tabula rasa, we are not written upon or etched or
branded, but moulded from a substance already dense with thought and feeling. Our teachers reach into
us, skilfully or clumsily, it’s the luck of the draw, and shape this substance, they make ridges there,
hollows and curves, and perception runs over them, bending to the contours, breaking against the sharp
edges repeatedly, until they are as familiar as the roof of your mouth to your tongue.”
In “Dead Letters”, set in the mid-90s, we see a version of the truculent and contrary Aubrey
Tearle (of Restless Supermarket fame) abroad again: “The end of apartheid put my nose out of joint, I
must confess. Suddenly the South Africans were talking to one another. They wouldn’t shut up . . . . After
a decade of wilfully excluding myself, I felt left out of the club.”
Yielding to an impulse to revisit the house he had picked out in Auerbach’s company, but had not
then had the courage to enter, Neville rings the bell and introduces himself as a historian who is
researching the life of boxer who once lived there. This spontaneous lie soon becomes the proverbial
albatross, but not before Mrs Pinheiro, the occupant of the house, weaves a few of her own fabrications.
But the centrepiece of this part of the novel is the collection of dead letters she has – undeliverable letters
that were dumped in the postal depot where her former tenant (and lover, it turns out) worked.
This is fertile Vladislavić ground: the odd, the piquant, the bizarre, the all-too-believable surreal.
Mrs Pinheiro (not really her name) opens one of these long-dead letters “and a prison cell folded out of
the silence, a small bare room with walls of the same pale green as the envelope. A man lay on his side in
the far corner with his back turn to us. She folded him into an upright position against the wall and
pressed a fingertip to his brow. He was shivering. With a sweep of her hand, she smoothed his damp,
bloodied body out against the table and raised him to his feet.” With such hopeless acts of restitution this
obscure redeeming angel of Bez Valley attempts to right distant and fading wrongs.
Set in the near-present, “Small Talk” is the novel’s third section, and Neville is now the subject of
journalistic interest. But this is the multimedia moment, and the interviewer inevitably asks Neville to
restage their meeting (re-open his door and re-greet her) for her digicam – all, of course, in the interests of
spontaneous realism. “Shit”, Neville muses disconsolately: “Five minutes and I’m already being asked to
play myself.”
Double Negative tells a compelling enough story, but carries in its narrative fabric oddments and
fascinations that rival the main storyline for the reader’s attention. More deft, effortless and funny than
my sketches here perhaps suggest, the novel shows one of South Africa’s foremost writers in full flow.

Shaida Kazie Ali takes the debut prize for her haunting Not a Fairytale (Umuzi, 2010). Set chiefly in
Cape Town, the two-part novel tells the story of two sisters: the fair-skinned Salena and the darker Zuhra.
It reaches back into the colour-conscious 1960s and 70s, and the familiar themes of racial humiliation,
enforced group areas and ‘passing for white’ emerge.
The real terror, however, is the physically violent father figure, who routinely beats Salena for,
among other things, consorting with dark-skinned boys. Salena retreats deeper into herself: “Salena learnt
early that neglect was preferable to being beaten, and that submission ensured neglect, so as a little girl
she bit her tongue and cut her flesh until her body became perfectly silent.”
The uneasy feeling the reader has from the start of this dreamlike but disturbing bildungsroman is
that things will go awry. Salena is forced into an arranged marriage with a lawyer, and falls asleep on the
night before her marriage incanting “I don’t want to marry him, I don’t want to marry him.” The less-
favoured Zuhra becomes a bookworm, and studies her way into a future very different from the one
inflicted on her fair sister.
The novel is constructed in short narrative fragments – vivid glimpses of the two girls’ lives –
which, for all their brevity, paint a coherent and absorbing portrait. Ali splices recipes, culturally adapted
fairy tales and short, seemingly unrelated, narrative fragments into her novel. The effect is to create a
multilayered narrative, with Western folklore adulterated in rich and interesting ways by Muslim culture,
all reinterpreted in Ali’s highly idiosyncratic way.
Its title notwithstanding, this is a fairy tale, albeit one with hard edges and some shocking
revelations. In the end the beautiful but unprized princess Salena smashes the mirror into which she
numbly looked on her wedding day. A shard buries itself in her toad-like husband’s neck, and this heralds
the beginning of a new life for her.
Immaculately written, rich and varied, this debut promises much from Shaida Kazie Ali.

Craig MacKenzie is professor of English at the University of Johannesburg and a UJ Prize panellist