My Mother's Lovers
Christopher Hope

Maria Borland
posted 5 February 2008

Hunter, boxer, aviator, mother…Kathleen Healey’s impact on Africa is undeniable – she has killed many of its larger animals and enticed or taken under her wing (that of a Stinson Voyager) several of its inhabitants. She flies over Africa leaving a mark as vivid as the red dots on Livingstone’s map, now hanging in her living room, which trace the doctor’s own path across the continent over a century earlier. Kathleen is not overcome by Africa like Harry Huntley, one of her early lovers, a white witchdoctor whose life is a farcical and ultimately futile search for ‘spiritual union with A-fri-ca!’. Kathleen flies high above the land, at once revelling in and distancing herself from its epic scope, enjoying a freedom that is more an act of will than a birthright, as she says herself: ‘freedom’s something you have to work to get and fight to keep’.

Alexander, Kathleen’s son and narrator of the story, does not share his mother’s sense of adventure; he is more concerned with the mechanics of air circulation and how to cool air that is too hot. Alex’s pedantry is in part a direct response to the theatricality he encounters in his daily life. The prose is measured and self-conscious, an unapologetic defence mechanism – ‘I learnt not to buckle under [Africa’s] manipulative pressure’. Much of the humour in the novel derives from Alex’s unflinching and cynical reaction to the grotesquery around him, from the white witchdoctor Huntley - ‘he seemed to me a wanker from the start’, through to his final précis of Cindy, his mother’s final (posthumous) ‘lover’, a woman who unsuccessfully attempts to mimic a woman who’s shoes she is, both literally and metaphorically, unable to fill.

Hope is preoccupied with the notion of identity, as it exists in the context of a colonised land. His skill as a novelist lies in his ability to play around with archetypes and exploit some fairly overt symbolism whilst also allowing his story, or stories, and the colourful characters that inhabit them, credibility. This credibility is obtained by the persuasive assertion, echoed throughout the text, that such self-conscious playing out of roles is simply the effect of Africa. The role played is often directly related to a person’s relationship with the land, particularly if, as a white settler or displaced person, there is no intrinsic connection to be had in the first place. Hope successfully threads this notion through a narrative that is largely anecdotal in style and where if it wasn’t for such thematic continuity, one could lament the lack of forward momentum and clear temporal structure.

Kathleen’s death two thirds of the way through the novel coincides with the death of old South Africa and its Apartheid regime in the mid-1990s. However, the new South Africa is not new enough for us to achieve any kind of moral clarity. The same tribal instincts are in play, with wealth and race competing for superiority. Koosie, Alex’s black foster brother, a marginalised character in the old South Africa is now a major player and member of the establishment. Schevitz, also a revolutionary, but this time a white and distinguished member of the old South Africa, finds himself completely redundant in a society he has helped to create. Hope’s focus is less the moral or even racial implications of such situations and more the repetitive pattern of behaviour that is the history of Africa since early colonisation. The revolution and end of Apartheid, however necessary, are in the end, simply a footnote in the enduring story of (South) Africa; a story of conflict (essentially tribal), and of trying to negotiate one’s position in an environment where the only certainties are hostility and change. The narrator takes every opportunity to remind us that in Africa one is doomed always to repeat the past, albeit it in different and more innovative guises.

As the body count rachets up, Hope’s prose reads like a Jo-burg headline, mixing the commonplace with the grotesque, ‘Uncle rapes 6-yr-old/SA Tops Travel Poll’. The show becomes glitzier: prostitutes in cowboy boots, gated communities with silver sewage pipes, hijackers working for commission. Alex becomes romantically involved with Cindy, a Jo-burg princess and former friend of his mother’s. Cindy typifies much of the ‘newness’ Alex discovers on his return to South Africa from a period travelling. She is acutely aware of the farcical nature of the role she plays, living her life almost ironically, peppering her speech with a frequent ‘Hey, this is Jo-burg’. One might expect the sudden death of her disabled son to puncture this outlook, inducing a moment of epiphany. In a sense it does. However, the new Cindy that emerges, the one who adopts the surprising role of rehabilitating her son’s murderers, the selfless, socially responsible Cindy, appears if anything, less ‘true’ than the old. Like the new South Africa, she is simply a different version, rendered necessary by certain (frequently tragic) events. Hope evokes this sense of inertia with nauseating effectiveness.

We are left with the impression that black or white, pioneer, tribesman or political activist, Africa is not so much a defined place as an unhealthy obsession. This may reveal more about the narrator than the characters. It is also telling of an author who professes an inability to distance himself from the country that once exiled him:

It’s a hopeless, helpless love affair, like Alexander’s love for his mother. It’s rather like outbreaks of malaria. I go back because I can’t stay away. The absurditites of the place, often cruel absurdities, fascinate me. It is both loveable and appalling, and it is also home.