When J.M. Coetzee published Disgrace, quite arguably his most disturbing and powerful (and one hardly uses these words sparingly when speaking of Coetzee) novel, people criticized him for contributing to the rape and crime paranoia that already hung around post-apartheid South Africa like the electricity crouching in the air before a Veldt lightening storm.  The criticism implied that Coetzee, a writer who had been at the vanguard of anti-apartheid literature, a writer who had said at a 1987 writer’s conference in Cape Town that “in times of intense ideological pressure like the present… the novel… has only two options, supplementary or rivalry” and had advocated rivalry, was merely supplementing the paranoid paradigms – the barbarian terror, the savage rapist, the black menace – that had bolstered apartheid.  The criticism leveled at Coetzee was also one which he himself, in his Stranger Shores collection of literary essays, levels at another white, liberal writer, Breyten Breytenbach, for “gruesome reports… of attacks made on whites in the countryside of the new South Africa” which make “disturbing reading not only because of the psychopathic violence of the attacks themselves, but because they are being repeated at all… the circulation of such horror stories is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia.”  However, if the writer has a responsibility to break with representational paradigms that supplement unethical politics, he also has an ethical responsibility to challenge, to provoke, to rival.  It is just this rivalry, this refusal to sail along on easy ethical condemnations of apartheid or hopeful patience with the new South Africa that makes the air the wafts from Coetzee’s pages tense.  And, in the new South Africa that is desperately trying to prove to the world and itself that it is approaching a bright, rainbow-colored future, disturbances that linger uncomfortably are unwelcome. People want to know that 1994 changed everything, that the two worlds, kept apart for so long, are finally (if very slowly) becoming one, want, one sometimes thinks, reconciliation more than truth.  Because the truth is that there are two worlds spreading ever farther apart.  The truth is that Mbeki’s government considers it negative to talk about the real crime rates.  The truth is that soft-spoken, white men with PhD’s in economics tisk-tisk on business radio programs about how “one wonders what they [Mbeki’s security minister] are smoking, if not their socks.”  The truth is something that can’t be talked about, not because those who talk about it will be put in wet sacks and repeatedly beaten, but because it is just bad form.  Like an inappropriate comment at a well-choreographed social event, it defies avoidance.  It does nothing, but changes everything and it will not go away.
So we write about it, which is much the more dangerous thing to do.   Dangerous because whenever we write about crime or rape we add another supporting text to a problematic history of oppression, dangerous because we are left naked, bereft of explanations and interpretations that might eschew the white mythology.  And I wonder, when people ask me “what it’s like to live in Africa” and I speak of the crime that I cannot banish from my conscious, if I am contributing to the myth making.  My audience wants ear candy, to hear and not interpret; they want what seems like fiction because it tells nothing of the everyday, tells nothing of living. Am I in my refusal to reaffirm the exotic African fiction of comfortable safari narratives and requisite third-world hand wringing, just adding another, more sinister form of African fiction – a horror story – to the cadre of colonial fantasy?  I’d like to believe that supplementing something controversial is akin to assuming a rival stance.  I’d like to think that when I write about Africa, speak about Africa, I raise eyebrows that yearn for quaint characterizations.  But even speaking the word, Africa, seems dangerous.  I can no more untangle the African web, or weave a generalizing magic that explains this exotic other world, for others than I can for myself.  And I doubt Coetzee can either.  The reason his works are so incredibly troubling is because they are a moral entanglement.  With rape, the ideological pressure is on and, as Coetzee so aptly put it, there are only two options.  But he chooses neither.  Coetzee rebuilds the old fortress of colonial paranoia while he unlocks the door to the barbarian army, and leaves readers vulnerable to both the racist terror and the moral vacuum.  Still, I take a perverse comfort in this literary violation.  I’d rather be there, confused and alone, than trying to tell people about Africa, trying to show them the barbaric world they unknowingly ask to see.