Achmat Dangor’s Fiction: Characters and Stories from Times of Dislocation

Abstract

Achmat Dangor is an important voice on the SA literary scene. He is widely known as a writer, but his full literary impact is not properly acknowledged and recognized. Dangor's literary journey spans several decades, and his literary interventions have on occasion received high praise from his peers. Dangor's novels show him to be an inventive writer, skillfully working with form, tropes and language. His storytelling is located within a focus on the dynamics of social change and how characters handle themselves in times of transition of social dislocation.

Full text

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Frank Meintjies
Achmat Dangor is an important voice in the SA literary scene. He is widely known as a writer but I
suspect not as many realize the full significance of his cultural contribuon. Thus Hein Willemse, in a
literary obituary (2020), has noted that Dangor’s body of work is worthy of greater aenon.
Dangor’s literary journey covered several decades. And although – due to other dues – he was not
as prolific as he wanted to be (somemes with a gap of eight years between release of novels), he
has le his mark. Some of his literary intervenons have received high praise from his peers. For
example, commenng in the Times Literary Supplement on one of his books released in the later 90s,
Gordimer lauded the “lyrical energy” and “freshness” of Dangor’s wring.
In this arcle, I undertake a poed scan of Dangor’s literary work, followed by some general points
about his prose. Dangor’s prose wring is about transion in society, it is rooted in community and it
reflects shis over me as he adeptly experiments with form. Although he emphasizes the “social
basis” of his wring, he seeks to go beyond merely reflecng what is known, seeking to shake up the
reader.
Bulldozer (1983), a poetry anthology that was produced when he was part of the Black
Consciousness movement, is nged with the sensibility of the black Afrikaans speaker. It focuses on
the human cost and social devastaon of forced removals. In a poem on District Six, which skillfully
deploys personificaon, Dangor writes:
Your history is an array
of armpit odours,
the dankness of dark alleys,
salt and sweat
and the reek of silence
in an unwashed mouth.
But soon you will lie
in the arms of a gentleman,
a rich man dressed in white,
or a white man himself,
and he too will snk
of your irrevocable death.
The novella, Waing for Leila (1981), has been described as “a phenomenal portrait of a man falling
apart but also a city falling apart, as District Six in Cape Town is being knocked down.”
(hps://www.themodernnovel.org/africa/other-africa/south-africa/dangor/leila/). In it, the device of
presence through absence is powerfully deployed – the character Leila only makes her presence felt
in passing. Meanme, Samad, the man who yearns to be married to her, is cast as a social outsider.
But he is a spunky outsider, raising quesons about society. Here we see the trope of inclusion-
exclusion, something that will crop up again and again as Dangor lines up his characters over the
years.
Achmat Dangor’s Ficon: Characters and Stories
from Times of Dislocaon

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In Z-Town Trilogy (1990), Dangor showed that he was leaning further into subtler and deeper themes
(this at a me when or just before progressive South African writers – inspired by thinkers like Albie
Sachs and Njabulo Ndebele – were debang how the arts should reposion itself ‘aer apartheid’).
Z-Town is a reference to Riverlea, also called Zombie Town. Two things stand out in this work. At the
centre of this novel is Janey (daughter of Meraai Muriel) and her journey of discovering her voice. So,
firstly, it contains a powerful feminist theme. Then, secondly, there is its magic realism. Here Dangor
superimposes the mythical and the fantascal on the township and inner-city seng. According to
Sarah Pe, this novel pays tribute to and echoes Zorah Neale Hurston’s work, Their Eyes Were
Watching God, which also features a Janey. According to Sarah Ple, this signalled a further break
with black-wring consciousness – in the way Dangor centred the experience of a black woman. Ple
sees Z Town Trilogy as a signal departure from “extreme masculine rhetoric” and silencing of the
voice(s) of black women that she sees in much of black consciousness wring. This novel didn’t have
an easy birth; Dangor states that lack of “me to write” precluded stching it all together more
seamlessly. Hence the deal with the publisher to use the word ‘trilogy’ in the tle. In hindsight, the
triple structure works superbly and the novel is an important and successful work.
In Kaa’s Curse (1998), the issue of identy again surged to the fore. The protagonist Khan changes
his name to Kahn and succeeds in passing himself off as Jewish. In this novella, we see Dangor again
experimenng with magic realism. His protagonist transforms into a tree. Apart from further igning
the reader’s imaginaon in a different way, this use of the willow tree allows Dangor to foreground
centuries-old contestaons over space and place.
Dangor’s Bier Fruit (2001), shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, is a towering work. In this text,
he shows that angels can possess horns and devils can wear halos, very likely surprising readers who
expect a simplisc squaring off of blacks and Afrikaans-speaking white men. In an unrelenng way,
he shows the choices people make under pressure. The story features three main characters, Silas,
Lydia and their son Mikey. The issue of rape comes up in direct ways – apartheid brutality against
women – and symbolic ways. Referring to Bier Fruit, reviewer Louise Viljoen notes that “(t)he
reader is …. shown how sexual betrayal and rape finds echo in diverse forms of betrayal in the novel”.
In the end, Lidya – a central character in the story – ends the novel driving into the Karoo – to
seeming uncertainty and the unknown, but which Dangor sees as liberatory move.
The novel is suffused with issues of memory, wrenching social change, unprocessed trauma and a
new spiral of transion within ‘the transion’. There are deeply painful family dynamics and a
resurfacing of betrayals. In Bier Fruit, Dangor grapples with the reality that, in ‘grand’ transions,
many layers of oppression are oen le untouched. The three secons of Bier Fruit – Forgiveness,
Confession and Retribuon – give a clue to the raw issues that come to the fore.
In the earlier stages of his wring, Dangor zoomed in on identy and family sengs as he went
about exploring the impact of a brutal apartheid system on people. Later, in a second phase –and
constantly alert to the limitaons of crude and banal protest wring as opposed to great storytelling
that speaks truth to its context – he employed magic realism to take the stories to new levels. In a
third phase, he looks at what has become of Mandela’s rainbow naon, and what this period has
brought out in ‘all of us.’ A key underpinning focus appears to be the disappointments of transion
and, as he told Aghogho Akpome, the connuies of deprivaon and suffering.
Several features come to the fore in his ficon, usually working together in a parcular text. For
example:
 In much of his work, he features the family and pressures on the family; the family as a
seng is a container and also a place of combusble tension and woundedness.

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 Throughout, he features unusual characters, ones who were bent, ones who unsele readers
and ones who suffered deep trauma in different ways.
 He gave parcular aenon to the meaning of names of his characters. The names oen give
a community reference but are oen also suggesve and symbolic in other ways. There is
Silas (with its Biblical reference), Khan who becomes Kahn, Janey, Leila (also a deliberate
reference to a figure in literature) and Jobman.
 He consciously and cleverly makes reference to wider themes in literature and uses magic
realism. In a 1990 interview with Andries Oliphant, he talks of how Camus’s The Outsider and
Homer’s Odyssey informed plot and imagery in his work.
 He deploys local idiom (or what he has called the language of the community) and a fair
sprinkling of community-based Afrikaans alongside the lyrical use of English.
Many who write about Achmat Dangor’s ficon place the emphasis on identy issues in his wring.
This is well and good – these issues come up when wring ‘from below’, in oppressive contexts.
However, his wring – albeit character-driven and heavily invested in story – is also about social
change and polical context. The ‘polics’ in his work is consistent with how many literature greats
approached it; of course, he adds his own spicing: generous doses of irreverence, transgressive
characters and a skepcism of polical consensus. In his work, his characters are well-rounded,
avoiding stereotyped characterizaon. It's the kind of astute polically-engaged wring we see in the
works of many “African-Series” writers – and in this regard, Dangor commends the work of Ayi Kwei
Armah, writer of The Beauful Ones Are Not Yet Been. It is also seen in the works of Bessie Head,
who focuses her work at the village-level and deals with subtlees and layers of human experience.
Affirmaon for this wring also comes, inversely, from, for example, Terry Eagleton when he
challenges its opposite – middle-class liberalism in literature, which claims not to be ideological but
oen hides an ardent defence of the status quo and a squalid sense of morality.
Dangor’s wring is about the ripples and flows of change in society – contexts of inequality – and
how characters, marginalized in one way or another, handle themselves in mes of transion and
amid social dislocaon. At the same me, Dangor places emphasis (in the Oliphant interview) on
“the intrinsic arsc responsibilies of the writer” In addion, Dangor adeptly uses imaginaon to
help reposion the subject or subjects in posive ways in the sengs they live and operate in. This
imaginave work feeds into the collecve consciousness as subaltern subjects respond to condions
of marginalizaon and oppression.
References
Akpome, Aghogho. "'Human beings are far more layered than you see' – on complexity, idenes
and otherness in the creave wring of Achmat Dangor." Africa Insight, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 165-
174.
Eagleton, Terry. "The Liberal Complacency of Marn Amis." Unheard Magazine, May 2003, London.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. London, Virago, 1986.
Oliphant, AW. "Achmat Dangor: Wring and Change." Staffrider, vol. 9, no. 2, 1990, pp. 30-35.
Pe, Sarah. "(Re)wring the black feminist text: a comparave study of Zora Neale Hurston's Their
Eyes Were Watching God and Achmat Dangor's The Z Town Trilogy." Scruny 2, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007.
Viljoen, Louise. "Review: Achmat Dangor - Bier Fruit (2001)." Die Burger, 24 December 2001.
Willemse, Hein. "Achmat Dangor (1948-2020)." Tydskrif vir Leerkunde, 7 September 2020.

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List of works by Dangor
Waing for Leila (novella), Ravan Press, (Johannesburg) 1981.
Voices from Within (poems), A.D. Danker (Johannesburg), 1982.
Bulldozer (poems), Ravan Press (Johannesburg), 1983.
Majiet (a play), Open School, (Johannesburg), 1986
The Z-Town Trilogy (novella) Ravan Press (Johannesburg), 1990.
Private Voices (poems), Cosaw Publishers (Johannesburg), 1992.
(With Marlene Winberg) Back to the Land, Porcupine Press (Johannesburg), 1996.
Kaa's Curse (novella and stories), Kwela Books (Cape Town), 1997, Pantheon (New York, NY) 1999.
Bier Fruit: A Novel, Kwela Books (Cape Town), 2001, Black Cat (New York, NY), 2005.
Strange Pilgrimages: Short Stories, Pan Macmillan Voices from Within (poems), A.D. Danker
(Johannesburg), 1982.
Dikeledi: Child of Tears, No More. Pan Macmillan (Johannesburg), 2017.
4 June 2023