This article first appeared in The CAPE TIMES

15th June 2007

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Having read Denis Hirson’s White Scars: On Reading and Rites of Passage, I almost feel that I don’t need to interview him. After all, the book (which has been nominated for the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award) is heavily autobiographical, and in it the author constantly reflects on his own writing process. Nevertheless, when I phone him at his Paris home a few days before he flies out to South Africa – he will be in Cape Town for the awards ceremony at the Book Fair this weekend, but returns on Sunday – I discover a different voice to those I have encountered in White Scars.

Or perhaps I should say that Hirson’s measured, assured tone is a composite of the various different ‘voices’ in the book. One of the outstanding features of the text is the way in which it switches between and, at times, straddles genres (literary criticism, confessional writing, accounts of South Africa’s political history) and modes (moving from the raw impressions of an ‘experiencing’ narrator to the ruminations of the ‘experienced’ author). Indeed, Hirson’s introduction foregrounds the “fragmentary” nature of the text, and I ask him if he was conscious of the need to reconcile these elements, to combine them into a unified whole. “I delight in breaking generic boundaries,” he insists, by finding the “pressure points” where one mode of writing crosses with another. Often the transition is made through a poem. Hirson notes that “poetry was a necessity at certain points in the text”: “My first acts as a writer were as a poet, so it’s natural that what is achieved in a poem – the framed perception of a moment – extends throughout my writing.”

Earlier works such The House Next Door to Africa (1986) and the 2004 volume I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) are also written in a fragmentary style; the aim, for Hirson, is to achieve “the wholeness of something small within a larger patchwork or mosaic”. But there is also a sense, I suggest, in which he resists neat, chronological narrative when writing memoirs because it would be inappropriate to a life-story that has been disjointed and constantly uprooted, geographically and otherwise. Hirson agrees, citing Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue, Mike Cope’s Intricacy and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys (which has also been shortlisted for the Paton prize) as other examples of texts that depend on fragments of memory: “You can see the correspondence with what we lived through in SA.”

White Scars is divided into four sections, each of which centres on a book that preoccupied Hirson at a critical juncture in his life – in some cases, to the exclusion of all other texts. There is, firstly, Shooting at Sharpeville by Bishop Ambrose Reeves, which Hirson pored over as a teenager, more for the ghastly images of the massacre than for the prose account. At the time, Hirson’s father Baruch was serving a prison sentence for his involvement in acts of sabotage against the apartheid state; this traumatic period left the young Hirson feeling isolated and caused him to retreat from a society he knew was iniquitous but that he “barely understood”: the photographs in the book “were part of another kind of secret, outside of my family, greater than anything I could find words for, joined somehow to the silence I kept concerning my father”.

The second section, dealing with Breyten Breytenbach’s Die Ysterkoei Moet Sweet, introduces the linguistic trifecta that has defined Hirson’s literary activity: English, Afrikaans and French. As a boy, he found Afrikaans largely incomprehensible; simultaneously, it was tainted with the trappings of Apartheid as he experienced them – prison guards supervising his meetings with his father, policemen interrogating ‘non-whites’ on the streets, a “baas” barking orders to his subordinates. It was only when he went to France in the 1970s and engaged with Breytenbach’s poetry through his literary acquaintances in Paris that “French gave me a backdoor entry into the Afrikaans language, when the front door seemed to be bolted and double-barred.”

Hirson subsequently became one of Breytenbach’s translators, bringing out a selection of poems in translation under the title In Africa Even the Flies are Happy (1978). Yet his attitude to Afrikaans in White Scars appears to be a dichotomous one; it is either cast in the “straight-laced Puritan mould” of the apartheid state and its constraints, or it is a “natural” language that is “rooted in the land” with a vocabulary of “dust-caked, pungent, blood-burdened words” and “the earth of their vowels”. For Hirson, this is a sympathetic description – he writes elsewhere that “My element is earth” – but it is also a function of his formative years: although he couldn’t understand what was being said during Afrikaans lessons at school, the sounds of the language impressed themselves upon him.

Interestingly, Hirson finds connections between Afrikaans and Yiddish, branches of the “hybrid language tree” inside him. Hirson’s status as a Jewish person is an important aspect of the book; even though the course of his early life was defined primarily by the effects of his father’s opposition to apartheid and not the cultural-religious-ethnic identity of Judaism (he suggests to me that “my father sublimated his Jewishness to find a deeper sense of self in SA”), in some ways their experiences of exile can be framed within a diasporic Jewish history.

The third part of the book focuses on In a Marine Light, the collection of poems by Raymond Carver that Hirson read obsessively during the months following his father’s death in 1999. This is the shortest section of the book and, although it provides additional details about Baruch Hirson’s imprisonment, touching on his exile in England and his death after a steady physical decline, their relationship remains veiled behind Hirson’s poetry. Moreover, although this section offers a sustained reading of Carver’s work, it contains very little discussion of Hirson’s actual experience of reading In a Marine Light – the kind of discussion that forms the core of White Scars, which is, after all, a meditation “on reading and rites of passage”. Ultimately, everything in the book apart from Hirson’s response to his father’s death can be related to wider social phenomena; but mourning (even though he describes it as “a form of pregnancy” – “one body big with the shape of another, with the absence of another who gave shape to love”) is unavoidably an inward, lonely experience. Hirson concurs with this, acknowledging that certain private thoughts and emotions defy the act of communicating with others through writing. Our conversation falls silent momentarily.

We turn to the final part of the book, which considers George Perec’s Je me Souviens (I Remember). Through a series of 480 sentences, each beginning with the hypnotic incantation “I remember ...”, the work documents the collective ‘surface memory’ of post-war France in an associative, stream-of-consciousness style. Hirson attempted something similar from a South African perspective in I Remember King Kong, but in White Scars the fragment under the heading of “I remember” contains memories of his first five years in Paris. He hasn’t lived in South Africa for over thirty years; yet, as he says, “I’m not French and I won’t be French” (there is a touching scene at the end of White Scars where his daughter corrects his French grammar – she “will always know that I am not entirely at home”).

How, then, does he define his identity? One way is through deconstructing the language we use to talk about nationality. After each section in the book, Hirson provides “Wordkeys”, inventories of words that he has “invested with a fairly heavy but not necessarily explicit freight of meaning”. One of the most affecting entries is ‘expat’; the reader can imagine the effect that this “airless, flat and mouldy” word has on Hirson. He tells me that he wanted to create “a much looser, wider and contradictory” understanding of identity than words like ‘expat’ offer. “The cause of my leaving South Africa was also the cause of my returning in writing. My books go back in time, back to the boy I’d been – writing with him – he who was silenced, but still had a lot to say. That’s what writing can do for us; it can free us.”