SERGIO HENRY BEN

i

ONE WRITER giving a critique of another writer’s work is not the straight-forward arithmetic it appears to be on a page in the textbook, Life. The Book of Life is a heavy tome, filled with thick weighty pages. We thumb through the Genesis Principle, the petite lives of billions swaying on the Great Abacus, ever-dying-and-ever-reborn. As mortals progress in years we become accustomed to the low-level terror stemming from our fight or flight metaphysics built into the dense labyrinth of mind-body-and-that-sullen-thing-called-soul-anima-animus. What fresh horror is to leap at us when we turn the page?

Run away? Stay, ignore its very existence and indulge even deeper into our most-holy indolence? Or invite it to sit down, eat, drink and simply talk? Make friends with the curveballs Life pitches with wicked precision, landing with unerring accuracy?

Life is an experiment left unattended and very little in Life’s grand expanse makes sense. Such as reviewing Herman Lategan’s book, Hoerkind: Die memoires van ‘n randeier’, a freelance commission with unyielding terms, enough to vex and act as catalyst for My Beautiful Outrage.
One – poor impulse control.
Two – book crashes against a wall. Book is bent, pages fucked. 
Three – ignore for a week  and embrace a studied and relished indifference.

Petty behaviour can be a positive influence on us mortals given enough time for sullen reflection.

Herman’s book is in Afrikaans. My Afrikaans is utter rubbish. Werkword kom laaste, neh? (Self-pity deepens. The Beautiful Outrage gets her second wind). More importantly, my primary gripe is simply that I loathe Herman Lategan. Punt.

**

Kykhieso, I said what I said.
Oh. Apologies. Mea culpa.
Yes, rewrite is in order.
Past tense.
Got it.

**

ii

I loathed Herman Lategan.
I’ve said worse to his face.
Prudence will always caution to avoid close proximity to two bickering queens, misguided homosexuals who merely yearn to revel in the freedom and power of living openly gay, doing gay things listed on their secret gay agenda; this, particularly in the lamentably tired and suffocating, stuffy and stultifyingly drab light South Africa’s two-star accommodation rating offers; this years after the 1994’s comedown.

I’m speaking about the why-wont-you-just-die-you-undying-malignant-multidrug-resistant-stuk-phlegm-gop-fuck-ups, Racism and his husband, Smug-as-Shit-White-Privilege and their Jurassic Park zoo of deformed, morally repugnant offspring …  all the prejudice-rot humans enshrine, the empty thrones worshipped in cultish (read: kotz) devotion.

To call out and sneer at unreconstructed white people in a country repairing itself after a centuries-long beating at the hands of colonial imperialism, was an aphrodisiac cascading over me… erect, wading flawed notions of social justice, activism, what is right versus what is wrong.

I was content to despise Herman’s white skin, always flushed a cheeky cherry-red from the ease and access, the dearth of employment opportunities and the attendant wealth that followed.

Herman made me see red.
My gevreet ‘n jas tamatie as Herman net hallo sê.
A Medusa visage hides a seething “He’s so ungrateful!”
“Yes, but can he write a front page like I can?” exhaled in dismissal, desperate to save face while hip-deep in nausea courtesy of Herman’s social pleasantries.

Eventually, nobody wears Envy well. We all end up looking sallow and deeply ill. Anemic.

I wore Envy like couture. My career was going nowhere and Herman had access to people, opportunity, the wealth that followed, His prolific career signaled greed to me.
“He’s white. Why does he need all that money? International magazines won’t even fucking look at me … at us.”
“Fucking white people always sitting pretty after an upheaval.”
“Urgh, save me Jesus. It’s distasteful. Do you realise that’s actually a person? Not just some black cock, an appendage … it’s attached to an actual person, you fucking racist bitch!”

Herman would describe me as mocha-something-something-colonial-fetish-object; I would cattle brand him as something worse, snarl-smile a razor whip of words dredged from a swamp of career envy, insecurities about my skill and talent as a writer, programmed Apartheid mindspeak and the meaningless and equally mindless hauteur of a newly minted gay occupying the same space as a Senior Homosexual … hurt, insult, demean, scorn at one lesser than you.

Sergio Henry Ben and Herman Lategan are as much a product of a country lacerated by livid scars still photosenstive to the light of kindness and love and the softer parts victimised and exiled by our inner Group Areas Act.

Men act as they believe. What mortals hold as belief, a deification of principles and values superior to the quaint superstitions of the lesser, is what propels us armoured in conviction and cruelty.

Hoerkind opened paths once considered beneath me. Reading Afrikaans printed on dented and creased pages suited the grim view of a typhoon conjured to destroy Cape Town in a ceasless deluge of rain. Serves me right.

A week of violent storms was privy to comfort eating hearty meals, Hoerkind had me thinking along exotic tangents, routes carrying heavy traffic such as allegory, analogues, four pairs of near-identical twin oxymorons, and fresher visions in a grim-worry city as heavy, dark and menancing as the rumbling and unforgiving shroud of clouds.

“Who are you?” the World asks the minute you came screaming into Life until your last gasp.

This lonely planet, Earth, is the World of Forms, of Shape and Being, whether it lives as man or animal or a chunk of mountain. Here Form finds Function. Here most humans fail Life’s query.

Herman Lategan braved looking at Life and answered as Form finding a Function. Hoerkind speaks of Herman Lategan. Hoerkind speaks AS Herman Lategan. Hoerkind IS Herman Lategan. What we find between the book’s covers is a series of consecutive events thought of as his Life, cascading then pooling to form a Voice. Voice learns to kneel in adoration before Voice’s beauty and Voice’s power.
“Who are you?” is Life finding out who they are.
“Who are you?” is Life making conversation.
Don’t be rude. Answer.
Are you not curious?

iii

Cape Times training kicks in when needed, sometimes as a reminder to not transgress arcane journalism skills. A few book review training rules are straight forward.
1 – Read, read and read some more.
2 – A book review does not and will certainly never include a linear outline of plot and character development, leaving very little for any imagination to be of use.
3 – A book review (and by extention any creative piece) should be an account of the Why. Illustrate how a book or text occupies so much meaning, literally, in your eyes. Give the Why of it all. What propels this book in your life. If a car was being discussed, I’d ask “What makes it go?”

**

A book like Hoerkind is powerful in prose and purpose, and dangerously swift as a flooded Nile. Unlike a powerful elemental force like a continent-long river, Hoerkind does not have one wellspring as its source. The book is a synthesis of Herman’s intellect and emotion. A book like Hoerkind first exists as an abstraction, an idea stronger than a whispy suggestion, the shape slowly forming an outline. Boundaries.
Skin, if you look at it from another angle.
Contouring gives the concept a “face” … in other words, identity.

Hoerkind tells multiple stories. We see, and more importantly feel, the warm intimacy between Herman and his mother. A deeper dimension to this complex and perplexing human is a staggered unveiling done in tandem with milestone moments treasured by a curious young boy and later, a maniacally inquisitive young man. The heft of Hoerkind allows it to convey a set of eyes to witness the spectrum of what it means to be human, what it means to be Herman Lategan.

The prose illustrating the freedom of visiting District 6 with his mother is a point of transcendence for Herman. This is where Herman found himself as an Artist, a being who dwells at the exact co-ordinates where his talent and skill connect. His x and y axis.

Herman shows us how close Passion and Grief stand in each other’s hearts. It beggars belief. This book is not a social worker’s report. This book wants you to feel. Nobody can shame you as hard as you’ve been on yourself.
Herman wants you to do the ugly cry.
Nobody cares if you resemble a racoon afterwards.

This book is more than a compedium of adventures about a man traipsing though Life’s unstable terrain. It is Herman’s mayhem, his magnificence and misery arranged in an unhurried elegance. It’s a promise that exalts him as a man who will answer Life’s question at the start of every morning. Herman Lategan is sharing something precious with you. Consider yourself fortunate.

I am Sergio Henry Ben. I write. Mostly for a rands and cents, sometimes for the sheer fun. I like the sound and sight of my own name. The safest place for me is inside my own head. Fantasy is healthy. In fact, it’s necessary. We need Far Far Away. We need to see ourselves in the light of a dawn and dusk not found on Earth. We must adventure away from our lives, conduct ourselves in fantasy lands of our own making and we must make sure we make morals and ethics appropriate to our desires when we land in the middle of jewel heist, or when we inhabit the sordid, robust desires of an orc Sith Lord.

Writing outside of what is known, what we find safe, is a gluttonous pleasure. To write is to create. To write, truly write, is to submit to what a story has to say. To write is to leave a mark of Relevance on the world. I write to make sense of the who I am, the what I am, the where I am, the why I am, the when I am … and of course, the how I am. Sometimes the words get in the way.

I am working on my book, Notes from the quiet corner. It is a collection of short stories, essays, poems and a few observations. Consider this fair warning.