ARYAN KAGANOF

Dear Masixole,

I read your article On Fatherhood in South Africa a number of times before this mail and it’s because each time I wanted to write back I felt I needed to hold back because each time there was a level of superficiality in my response that your person and your article did not call for.

This sentence of yours is, I believe, very important: “Furthermore, I’m acutely aware of the limitation of speaking about experiences of an individual self in a world that constantly groups black people as collective.”

Harshly put – have you yourself done enough in this article to escape precisely being an agent of this forced collectivisation of black individuals, have you not by way of your analysis subjected your father to being nothing more than a fungible object in an impossible world?

There is one thing in recognizing the impossibilty of the world, there is another in succumbing to it.

I always remember that line in Godfrey Moloi’s wonderful My Life (my favourite South African book) where he mentions Nelson Mandela in passing, a character that was there, known about, obliquely, but on the periphery, not central to his (Moloi’s) own life in Soweto.

What I’m trying to get at is that millions of individual human beings don’t experience themselves as “fungible”. One task of a “writer” (if one accepts that writer’s has a “task” – Marechera would violently reject the notion) might be to do all s/he can with words, with sentences, with grammar, to resist the possibility that any human subject be fungibilized. The act of narrating a black human, a black protagonist, is an act of defiance against the notion of fungibility. If a writer merely accedes to the notion of “black fungibility” and, indeed, replicates it as “theory”, as dogma, then I would suggest there is more introspection to be done.

In short. You have not allowed your father the possibillity that he was indeed, perhaps, an unethical, unpleasant, deeply flawed human. Such a possibility would not serve your analysis I suspect. But in that possibility lies the truth of humanity. We are not merely pawns stuck in a structural web of forces.

Let me share with you a moment of my life. I am sitting opposite my father. I am 35 years old. He is 69. We have been talking for an hour or two. Laughing, you know, being superficial, shooting the breeze. Not awkwardly but not deep. This is, after all, our first time of meeting each other. So it is time. I say to him, But Dad, when you found out that I was born, when you knew that she had had the baby, didn’t that change your feelings? Didn’t you think twice about not wanting to be with her? He looked at me with ice and steel in his eyes and he said, “Look, I never wanted to be with her and I never wanted to have a child. It was her decision to have the baby. To have you. I gave her money for the abortion. She lied and took the money and went to a farm and gave birth. I wanted you dead. I wanted you out the way. I did not want to pay maintenance. I did not want to have limitations on my life. Everything you are today is because of your mother. She wanted you. She made the decision to keep you. I never visited you because I never wanted to see you.”

And in that moment all my fears, all my doubts, all my self-pity, all my lying to myself about my life just disappeared. I got up from my chair and embraced him. I said “Thank you.”

For the first time in my life I felt like a man. I had just heard the truth. No lies, No excuses. No bullshit. He looked me in the eyes and told me why I grew up without a father. He was entirely selfish and entirely unrepentant. He did not want me and I wanted him. My problem, not his. I lived with him day and night for one year after that day and when he died he was holding my hand. When the spirit lifted from his body the nurse came in with his breakfast. I ate it up for him, two slices of toast, fried egg, orange juice and coffee. He did not believe in wasting food. Neither did I.

There is a father in your story that is not fungible. That is not a black victim. That human being is who you need to discover in yourself in order to become whole.

God bless you.

Aryan