Tag: coming of age

A deep and abiding melancholy: Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa

There is a moment in our earliest years, if we are lucky, when the outside world with all its attendant ills and hardships cannot yet touch us, but it is simultaneously a vulnerable space, fleeting, ephemeral—even more so when we look back and remember how quickly it passed:

It was the middle of the dry season but each time her lips parted I found myself in an oasis in which I wanted for nothing; I had no need to look to the horizon but if I did, it would have gone on and on, a hungerlessness that might well be called paradise. The wind was blowing from the coast, a salt wind from the Atlantic which I would feel against me as a phantom presence even when it was not there any more. The sun was not shining and its not shining was neither here nor there; I was not waiting for the sun to reveal itself to me . . . Although I was old enough – three years, perhaps four – I seldom spoke at this time. No one really remarked on this fact nor how I hung off every one of my mother’s words. Indeed, I could have continued in this same vein for an aeon or more, unaware of the peril of what might lie ahead.

Set in Angola during the years leading up to Independence from Portugal in 1975, Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa, an Australian author of Goan heritage, is a young woman’s account of childhood and youth during a time of increasing political unrest and instability. As she remembers the magic of her early, loving bond with her mother, in an idyllic setting secure in the comforts wealth affords, the truths she is not yet able to understand linger in the air. From the beginning, a tentativeness, a sense of an impending ending runs through the narrative, beneath the protection of a child’s innocence and an adolescent self-absorption, until it becomes evident that the last remnants of the colonial social structure must either face unfortunate dissolution or exile.

Named for the Portuguese expression meaning an unbearable longing or melancholy, Saudade is a novella of displacement. Narrator Maria-Christina’s parents, Indians from Brahmin backgrounds, their marriage arranged, had immigrated to Angola in the dying days of Portuguese rule in Goa. Africa was seen as a place of promise and hope for the future. At first they settled into a comfortable existence, and started a family. But their colonial experience, as such, has two sides. They have a certain status, hire African servants, and yet, to many Portuguese they are still bound to the reality that Portugal had once subdued and ruled their homeland. When, at school, Maria-Christina refers to explorer Bartolomeu Dias as an “invader,” her indignant teacher reminds her of her place:

Her voice tremulous, she declared that Bartolomeu Dias had been commissioned by João II and Isabel; she said that he had battled storm and shipwreck and cannibalism to claim Angola for Portugal. Bartolomeu Dias, she said, was responsible for civilising the people of Angola and was part of that long line of fidalgos who had cultivated my own loinclothed and mud-thatched and blue-godded people! When she had made this speech, the teacher from Coimbra was standing close to me and yet it seemed I could not see her; her face was blur. When she spoke, her breath smelt stale – as of onions and salt pork sitting in a pot too long. Not a day went by without one girl or other being humiliated by her, so I tried not to take the humiliation to heart.

After an initial period of prosperity, unrest begins to grow and threaten the security of the non-Angolan residents. As the fight for independence escalates, Maria Christina’s father is caught up secretive, risky activities, while her mother becomes increasingly stressed and homesick. Meanwhile, their daughter must navigate the mysteries and challenges of childhood and adolescence against a shifting social, political and domestic landscape.

The success of any Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, for me, depends on a certain recognizable authenticity of voice. Here the spare, wistful melancholy of the protagonist’s early memories, filtered through the lens of acquired understanding, carries just the right tone. Trusting and deeply attached to her mother when she is young, she gradually gains a more defiant edge as puberty arrives and the tensions at home and in the country intensify. Her relationships with her parents become strained as friendships and her first romance start to define her move toward an independent engagement with the world. That is, until political upheaval begins to draw her friends away from Angola, often to places and relatives they barely know. Yet, as much as this is a story of a family living through the final years of colonial power and privilege, the nostalgia for India is deep and  abiding—a loss that haunts the mother and leaves the daughter rootless.  Independence exacts huge costs for all and, of course, for the Angolans themselves, there will be many bloody years yet to come.

Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa is published by Giramondo in Australia and Transit Books in the US.

Coming of age in the 60’s: The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns

Small town South Africa. The 1960’s. Rules govern social engagement. Black and white, Afrikaner and English, richer and poorer. Even in the smallest of towns a hierarchy of social stratification evolves and is reinforced with a blend of gossip and charity. And then there are those most ineffable mysteries of life: love, sex and death.

childrensSuch is the context of The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns. At the heart of this Bildungsroman is Simon, a sensitive, intelligent boy charting his way through the machinations of childhood in the dusty environs of Verkeerdespruit. He is keenly aware that he is living in the heart of nowhere. But the books that are such a vital companion to this only child cannot even begin to answer the questions that his interactions with classmates and the curious behaviour of the adults around him continually raise. Simon is left with the impression that he is trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces.

The novel opens in the modest, relatively speaking, metropolis of Bloemfontein, where Simon, now 15, is attending Wesley College, a “second-rate” Methodist private school. The occasion of a tennis match between the boys of Wesley College and a nearby technical high school on a stifling hot December day in 1968 unspools a series of flashbacks that reach six years into the past and gradually move forward. Simon’s reflections are triggered by the unexpected, unwelcome appearance of a former classmate on the visiting school’s team – the awkward, epilectic Afrikaner Fanie van den Bergh.

From the time he first arrives in Verkeerdespruit, Fanie is a curiousity. His fits alarm his classmates and teachers, while his inarticulate, easy-going nature sets Simon off balance. He regards Fanie with a measure of contempt to which the latter appears oblivious. Yet  Fanie is a constant source of surprise. When Steve, in his tight jeans and white t-shirt, roars into town astride the magnificent Matchless G8 bringing a touch of heroic glamour to streets of the sleepy village, attracting the adoration of the boys,and the fluttering of female hearts, it is Fanie who disappears on the back of his bike. The fallout resulting from Steve’s arrival marks the advent of Simon’s awareness that the world is full of joys and dangers that the adults around him allude to with the most cryptic references. Frustratingly alert to the innuendos around him, Simon is delightfully naive as only a child of the pre-internet era can be. I remember it well myself. As Simon admits:

“Though I was probably quicker than my contemporaries at fitting together apparently unrelated observations, I was hampered in my deductions by an almost complete ignorance of sexual matters. I had arrived, for instance, at the conclusion that kissing was both a much sought-after pleasure for oneself and a much-ridiculed weakness in others, and that adults were too old for it and children too young.”

By observing the parade of adults that passes through his home town, Simon’s glimpses of the outside world become broader, if not necessarily clearer. A teacher who takes harsh discipline in the classroom a step too far is sent away, a pretty young girl he assumes is a special friend abandons him for the school jock, a woman with a shocking past appears and breaks the heart of one of his favourite teachers. And then there is Trevor with his dyed hair and pink shirts who shocks everyone by shaking up the life of the stuttering shy bachelor postmaster and his mother, briefly redesigning the beehived heads of the local women before being run out of town once speculations about the true nature of his friendship with the postmaster spread. Again Simon is perplexed, though it is Trevor who first implies that he sees in the boy a likely kindred spirit. The only outlet he has for the really “big” questions that trouble him are his Saturday afternoons at the local soda fountain with Betty “The Exchange”. The cynical, unfortunately chinless, telephone operator entertains Simon’s queries but confuses him as much as she informs him – children, after all, are only allowed so much enlightenment in this era.

It is Fanie who, in the end, stands to call attention to the missing puzzle piece that Simon has been holding in his hand all along.

I have an affection for strong coming of age/coming out stories. This is one. Sexually Simon is a slow learner, a boy who is less in touch with his body than the more viscerally grounded if intellectually dimmer Fanie. He over thinks the world even though he encounters more than one adult male who recognizes in him an inclination that he has, at an early age, no context for. Today with the ubiquity of queer conversation, imagery, access to internet, resources and young adult novels that explore queer themes, it may be hard to imagine how isolated a child could be growing up in earlier decades. Some claim this is an argument for censorship or against realistic sex education in the school system. But that is a spurious argument. One could still grow up LGBT in a vacuum. Or worse in denial. Many of us did.

I grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s in conservative rural Alberta. My parents, like Simon’s were liberal, but, like my peers, there were so many facts of life we did not understand and would not have dared to ask. Especially if there was any inclination that our own sense of self was off the norm. Long before one could retreat to the wisdom of Wikipedia, our resources were limited. I will never forget when the word “faggot” started to appear on our radar, probably as 10 or 11 year-olds. We would scurry to our dictionaries to find only “A bundle of sticks or an unpleasant woman”. Somehow we knew that couldn’t be right!

With The Children’s Day Heyns captures all of the curious confusion of growing up smart, bookish and not quite fitting in. And he does so with a warm, understated humour. Through his perceptive, yet naive, narrator the wonder and mystification, shame and humiliation of adolescence are evoked with remarkable resonance. Like many coming of age tales this was also a debut novel. But first published in 2002 when the author was in his late 50s, this novel also marked the debut of second career as a writer and translator – one that is still going strong – an inspiration to the rest of us in mid-life with writerly aspirations.