Andre Brink's Magical History Tour: Posbnodern and Postcolonial Influences in

The First Life of Adamastor

Jochen Petzold

An interest in the re-examination of history informs a large body of texts around the world, since it is at the heart of postcolonial and postmodern writing practices. In his essay "Reinventing a Continent," Andre Brink draws attention to the preoccupation with history current in South African fiction. He explains the urge to re-examine the past as being a conse­quence of South Africa's current political situation, since "the need to revisit history has both accompanied and characterised the literature of most of the great thresholds of change" (17) - and the transition from the apartheid system to democracy clearly provides such a 'threshold of change.' Examining recent novels by South African authors - written in or .translated into English - one has to agree that over the last few years there has been a proliferation oftexts (re)imagining South African history. Thee recent novels by Andre Brink all fall into this category: On the Con­trary (1993) focuses on the historical character Ernest Barbier, Quma gives her female interpretation of South African history in Imaginings of Sand (1996), and Devils Valley (1998) examines the past of a secluded Mrikaner community. Examples of a preoccupation with history in other authors include the historical romances by Rayda Jacobs, Eyes of the Sky (1996) and The Slave Book (1998), Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1995), Mike Nicol's This Day and Age (1992) and Horseman (1994), John Conyngham's The Desecration of the Graves (1990), Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996) and Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney (1997).

Brink is clearly right in emphasizing the importance of history in con­temporary South African fiction. However, this paper sets out to demon­strate that literary reworkings of South African history were not

English in Africa 27 No.2 (October 2000)

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necessarily dependent on the prior dismantling of apartheid as a political system (although the new pOlitical situation has clearly increased the pressure to re-examine older concepts of South Africa's past for their complicity in apartheid rule). In fact, Brink himself has examined aspects of South Africa's past in a number of his earlier texts: An Instant in the Wind (1977) pretends to tell a true interracial love story set in the eighteenth century; A Chain of Voices (1982) is based on the historical Bokkeveld uprising of slaves; and An Act of Terror (1991) includes a lengthy family history of the main character. The focus of my attention in this essay is Andre Brink's The First Life of Adamastor (1993), which I propose to read as a novel located at the crossroads of postmodern and postcolonial influences, influences which place the text between uncertainty and revisionism and which combine the playfulness often attributed to postmodernism with the political agenda of much postcolonial writing. While the publication date of the English text seems to suggest that it belongs to Brink's post­apartheid CEuvre; it was in fact conceived and written much earlier and published in Afrikaans, as Die Eerste Lewe van Adamastor, in 1988.2

Thus, Brink's text is not postcolonial in the temporal sense of being post­apartheid (if one wants to equate colonialism and apartheid), but my analysis will show that it is influenced by postcolonial theory, and the text is postcolonial in the sense that it engages in the criticism of colonial dis­course.lThis essay will first give a rough outline of what is here under­stood by 'postmodernism' and 'postcolonialism' and their respective interests in rewriting history, before examining Brink's text.

Postmodernism, as Hans Bertens has remarked, "is not a monolithic phenomenon" (10), but what seems to me to be at the centre of the post­modem project is the loss of a direct, unquestioning access to reality: our perception of the world is possible only through the epistemological sys­tems that generate meaning, and these systems are cultural and provisional (cf. Engler), and dependent on language. Thus, Erhard Reckwitz notes the tendency of postmodern authors "to view 'the real' as nothing but a con­struct of intra-linguistic processes" (28). Questions of epistemology and the accessibility of truth informing postmodeJ:11 writing coincide, within the field of historical studies, with questions concerning the 'creation' of historical data and the fictionality of the historical narrative. Hayden White's claim that "viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another" ("Fictions" 122) is frequently cited as proof for the subjectivity of history.4 As Koselleck puts it, histo­rians try to produce valid historiography under two paradoxically exclu-

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sive demands: "making true statements about history while acknow­ledging their provisionalness and incorporating that knowledge into their studies" (17). This is basically the same counteracting strategy - claiming factuality while exposing its own fictionality - which Linda Hutcheon calls the "metafictional paradox" of postmodem texts; a strategy which Patricia Waugh describes as u a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion" (6). Hence the affinity of postmodemism and the re­examination of history: the textuality and narrativity of history can serve as an analogy for the postulated constructedness and subjectivity of reality.

The concept of postcolonial reading and writing practices is probably even more vague than that of literary postmodemism, as it usually includes both literary production in former colonies as well as the critical rereading of old European master-texts of colonisation and imperialism. I intend to use the term postcolonial in a wide sense, as Peter Hulme does, aC) the "process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome" (120), which affects both colonizer and colonized. In this context, the affinity of postcolonial writing and history is, again, not surprising. Bill Ashcroft points out that colonialism "found in history a prominent, if not the promi­nent instrument for the control of subject peoples" (] 94). The European colonizers had control over the writing of the history of their colonies, either denying the very existence of a history previous to European 'dis­covery,' or actively using their version of history as a means of suppres­sion. For example, as Steve Biko explained in 1973, black history in South Africa "is presented merely as a long succession of defeats" (44).

Given the distortions of colonial histories, a re-examination of colonial and pre-colonial history seems a natural strategy for postcolonial writing if it wants to overcome "the whole colonial syndrome." This strategy would share with postmodem historical fiction a tendency to rewrite his­tory from the peripheries. But rather than decentring the subject, as much postmodem fiction does, postcolonial writing will often try to construct those peoples objectified in colonial encounters and marginalized by colo­nial histories as subjects in the stories of their own past. Nonetheless, it is not surprising that postcolonial and postmodern texts use similar approaches to the re-examination of the past; for example, each can ques­tion received historiography through the introduction of new historical evidence, be it real or imaginary; or they can deconstruct official histori­ography, exposing its instrumentalization in colonial exploitation.

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However, a number of critics have argued that there is a difference as far as emphasizing political implication and agency is concerned. For example, in Diana Brydon's analysis, the main difference between postmodem and postcolonial literature is that the former is interested in the textuality of history, and the latter in the actual role history plays or has played in the politics of colonization and decolonization. While postmodemism ques­tions the very concept of truth, in many postcolonial texts "lies may be distinguished from truths; false values from valid ones" (Brydon 201). And Erhard Reckwitz also insists that "postcolonial literature cannot afford to indulge in the playful parody cum indeterminacy that we have come to expect of postmodem literature" (31).

As these critics would have it, the methods of questioning history may overlap, but there tends to be a stronger interest in the actual workings of the political at a given time in a given place in postcolonial texts. How­ever, I do not follow this simple separation into merely playful postmod­emism and purely political postcolonialism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to make a theoretical statement on the nature of either movement. I see the opposition (if indeed it is one) as a difference of degree rather than kind, which I intend to emphasize as an analytical tool. My analysis of Brink's The First Life of Adamastor (FLA) will show that both modes of writing can be combined, creating a text that is both playful and political.

In The First Life of Adamastor, Brink employs a Khoikhoi narrator who is given the opportunity to relate a sequence of events that features prominently in many European texts of colonisation: the first contact between European 'discoverers' and the colonial 'other.' This narrator of the main story is none other than Adamastor himself, the mythical giant described by Camoens. In Camoens's Lusiads (1572), Adamastor guards the Cape of Good Hope, falls in love with a nymph, is tricked and later turns into the cape rock itself. In Brink's text, Adamastor becomes a crea­ture of many lives, and the first incarnation is that of T'kama, the leader of a Khoikhoi community at the time of European 'discovery.' Through the persona of this T'kama, Adamastor tells his story, but his voice is clearly marked as fictitious by a second voice, which I will call authorial, which in the introductory chapter "proposes the terms of his contract with the reader" (FLA 1). This authorial voice ponders the literary history of the mythical Adamastor, especially the role he plays in Camoens's Lusiads. Wondering if Camoens could have had an earlier source, this voice plans to imagine the possible Urtext: "suppose there were an Adamastor, a model for the giant of Camoens's fanciful history; [ ... ] how

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would he look back, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, on that original experience?" (FLA 7). Of course, this Urtext, Adamastor's account, is the story we are about to read.

The postmodern influence in The First Life of Adamastor is particu­larly striking in these opening pages. The "Introduction" by the 'author' establishes a strong current of metafictional self-reflexivity, which marks the following narrative as fictional, while claiming its possible reality. The very first sentence underscores this double aspect: "Once upon a time there was and there wasn't" (FLA 1). The fairy tale-tag marks the story as imaginary, but the expansion "there was and there wasn't" disrupts the reader's expectation. It immediately highlights the question of truth by turning the traditional opening on its head, in a paradoxical double move­ment that both asserts and denies reality. And the authorial voice intensi­fies the uncertainty by insisting that "distinctions between was and wasn't are rather blurred" (1).

Authors' notes that either claim factuality or emphasize fictional license are common, and are not restricted to a postmodern mode of writing. However, in this case the question of narrative truth is again raised within the story, when Adamastor emphasizes that he cannot be cer­tain about events: for example, he does not remember who the Europeans were - Dias or Da Gama (FLA 13) - he has to admit that "[I]ooking back across five centuries it is hard to recall one particular morning" (43), and he cannot "for the life of me remember" (87) which European lan­guage the woman taught him. Thus, the issue of narrative truth, first raised in the introduction, is repeatedly pushed to the foreground in a move that destabilizes a naiVe reading of the text, by constantly thematizing the act of telling the story.

The metafictional strategy of emphasizing the narrative process by exposing the distinction between the authorial voice of the introduction and the narrator of the main story is carried over into the narrative pre­sentation of Adamastor's story: at first, for about two pages, we read the collective perceptions of a group of Khoikhoi, only identified as "we." Then, suddenly, the personal pronouns change to the first person, but the narrator remains unnamed. Only through the reference to "my lives" - and trusting the hints given by the authorial voice in the introduction - can we identify this voice as belonging to Adamastor, looking back from the twentieth century at events taking place in the fifteenth. The focalizing consciousness then changes back to the plural, before, in a final shift, Adamastor identifies himself (or rather his first incarnation) as the leader

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of the group of Khoikhoi, T'kama. The shifts between different forms of focalization that mark the first chapter remind us that we are reading an imaginary voice, and that control over that voice rests outside it, on a dif­ferent level of the novel.

The metafictional element is further strengthened when the reader is directly addressed on a level outside the story, in a number of the summarizing chapter headings, by - presumably - the authorial voice of the introduction. In fact, there is one chapter which does not include text that can be attributed to T'kama at all. Chapter eight consists of only a chapter heading and a modem map of South Africa (including some place names), showing "the route presumably followed by the narrator and his tribe" (FLA 53). And, finally, there is interaction between the two levels, the authorial paraphernalia of footnotes and chapter headings and the space reserved for the story as told by Adamastor.5 Chapter four is introduced by a comparatively long heading, which is not a summary but an anticipation of the reader's reaction:

In which an answer is given to a question which must have been smouldering in the reader's mind for some time now, to wit: Given the anxious circumstances in which they spent that night, the emotional condition of the woman from the sea, the nature of the narrator s wound and the size of his member, did he have intercourse with her?

No. (FLA 38; italics in original)

Typeface and positioning on the page make it clear that the "No" has to be attributed to Adamastor - which for a realist reading would be an obvious inconsistency, since the "No" only makes sense as an answer to the chapter heading, not as part of the narrator's story. Thus, the dialogue between the two voices reminds us that Adamastorrr'kama is purely imaginary, and meant to be decoded as such.

In addition, the unusual proportions of an introductory paragraph and a one-word chapter play with the reader's notions of what constitutes a chapter, of how a story should look when written down as a book. A number of footnotes that have to be attributed to the authorial voice of the introduction also draw attention to the physical reality of the book, by referring to other chapters (FLA 13,99), or warning the reader "not to tum the page before the time" since "in a story everything has its appointed

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place" (103). Focusing on the story's form as printed text and its organi­zation as narrative, Brink also exposes its textuality.

'Once upon a time there was and there wasn't': the narrative under­mines itself, constantly creating illusions and destroying them by empha­sizing its own status as fiction. On the content level of the story told by Adamastor, this is repeated through the introduction of the magical into a fairly realistic rendering of a journey. For example, thorn bushes surround the camp over night (FLA 54f), ghosts appear (89), a lion brings food to people (84 and 99), and T'kama's penis grows to an enormous size until it is bitten off by a crocodile and replaced by a clay substitute that mirac­ulously turns into flesh (110-15). While the mixture of magical and real­istic elements is familiar from 'magic realism' made famous in recent years by Latin American authors, the emphasis is distinctly different in Brink's text. Following the typology by Spindler, magic realism can take on three different forms: either, as "Metaphysical Magic Realism," it exposes the unexpected (magical) in everyday reality "by the technique of Veifremdung" (79); or it inserts the supernatural into reality, either, as "Anthropological Magic Realism," explaining it with reference to "myths or cultural background" (80), or, as "Ontological Magic Realism," not explaining it at all, simply taking the supernatural for granted (81). At first sight, Brink's text seems to fall into Spindler's category of Anthropolog­ical Magic Realism, since the ghosts are identified as the "sobo khoin" or "shadow people" of Khoi mythology (FLA 89); T'kama explains Khusab's story that a lion brought him food as "Heitsi-Eibib's handiwork" (84) (Heitsi-Eibib being a godlike hero figure of Khoi mythology fre­quently referred to by T'kama); and T'kama's clay penis is made by Khamab, the "t' gai aob" or "medicine man" (35) of the group, who is also the teller of mythical stories.

However, while T'kama offers these explanations, the magical does not blend easily into the relative realism of the journey. On the contrary, it is frequently exposed as unlikely, unusual or unbelievable by the narrator. For example, after the camp had been surrounded by thorn bushes for three consecutive nights, the group is at a loss:

The path to the drinking-place, where we had been moving freely to and fro a matter of hours before, was now invisible through the undergrowth { ... J.

"What's this?" I asked old Khamab, knowing that he was the only one among us likely to come up with an explanation.

"Never seen such a thing," he mumbled angrily. "Perhaps we didn't look properly yesterday."

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Obviously, the magical is not simply accepted as the norm and thus the reader's 'willing suspension of disbelief' is rendered problematical as well, especially when T'kama explicitly questions the validity of an expla­nation. Confronted with another lion said to have brought food, he thinks back to the earlier incident (84) but rejects the reference to mythologies, since "lions simply do not do this kind of thing" (99). As the magical elements remain clearly marked as such, they are a constant reminder of the fictionality of T'kama's account.

Thus, fictionality and textuality are repeatedly pushed to the fore­ground in a text which also acknowledges and subverts the order of inter­textual dependency. The story, we are told by the authorial voice, is inspired by Camoens's treatment of Adamastor, and yet it is supposed to represent a possible precursor, an Urtext (FLA 6). Within the story told by Adamastor, memory is aided by historical sources, and the narrative is anchored within known facts of European history in a web of cross-refer­ences - only to be cut loose by the admittance of uncertainty. The text is thus an imaginary source, inspired by its interpretation, a cause inspired by the effect, that is both within known history and outside it. In the fictional universe created, in which the boundaries between was and wasn't are unstable, history and imagination coincide.

While these elements would clearly connect the text to the postmodem preoccupation with uncertainty and the textuality and intertextuality of lit­erature and history, The First Life of Adamastor also lends itself to a post­colonial reading, as it clearly engages in the project of rewriting South African history from a marginalized point of view, directed against an established master-narrative valorizing the European 'discovery' of Africa. And the narrative is influenced by postcolonial theory and writing practices not only in terms of providing an alternative history: the story also engages in a criticism of colonial discourse that exposes and subverts its strategies of othering.

To this end, Brink employs in T'kama a quasi-naIve narrator who describes the first encounter with Europeans in a way that exposes cultural differences and satirizes European behaviour. This device itself is not new: in 1721, de Montesquieu published the Lettres Persanes, a series of some 160 satirical letters written from the point of view of two travelling noblemen from Persia; the book was an instant success and established a literary fashion (cf. Henschen). In England, Horace Walpole used a Chinese 'noble savage' as focalizer in his satirical Letter from XO 80 (1757), and others repeated this formula. 6 While the setting - and the aim

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THE FIRST LIFE OF ADAMASTOR 53

of the criticism - is different, the basic method is similar in Brink's Adamastor: the quasi-naive focalizer defamiliarizes conventions of Euro­pean 'civilization' - or in this case, colonial subjugation - thereby exposing their ludicrousness.

To some extent, this perspective is used simply to create riddles that have to be decoded by the reader. For example, T'kama's story opens in this defamiliarizing mode:

From the sea, from the nesting-place of the sun, we. could see two objects swimming towards us, looking for all the world like two enormous sea-birds with white feathers fluttering in a breeze that had newly sprung up. Not far from the beach [ ... ] the two birds came to rest and appeared to draw in their feathers. [ ... ] Then a strange thing happened. While we were still standing there staring, the two birds in front began to lay eggs of a curious roundish shape, and brown in colour.

(FLA 11 t)

• Words and phrases like "objects," "looking like" or "appeared to," com-bined with the reference to the strangeness of the situation make the reader aware that she or he is not to take T'kama's words literally. And when people are said to hatch from the eggs (cf. FLA 12), it becomes obvious that the sea-birds are European ships, and the eggs their longboats.

Besides defamiliarizing the Eurocentric perspective of (Western) readers, T'kama's reactions and comments mirror the strategies of oth­ering employed in colonial discourse. As Homi Bhabha explains, the "objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised as a popula­tion of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction" (198). Consequently, negative portrayal of the non-European other is the norm in colonial discourse,' but in Brink's text this strategy is reversed. Hence, the European explorers strike T'kama as exceptionably ugly, and, reversing the European stereotype, indistinguishable:

their heads [were] so overgrown with beards and moustaches you couId hardly see their faces. Just as well, for they didn't seem to have much in the line of skin, all pale and white like grass that had grown under a rock for too long. [ ... ] Moreover, all those people looked alike to us; if you've seen one you've seen them all.

(FLA 12f.)

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Verbal contact is difficult, but this time the Europeans know "nothing resembling a language," which makes T'kama question their humanity: "perhaps they were birds after all" (18). Again, the subject / object positions of colonial discourses are reversed.

Despite the jocular tone, we soon realize that the arrival of the "Beard­men" (16) has serious consequences for the Khoikhoi community. The introduction of strong spirits leads to open revolt against T'kama; and the misunderstanding over the white woman leads to violence between Khoikhoi and Europeans which drives T'kama's group away from the beach. Returning to the bay after a long time of wandering, the group is restless, and the unease is soon justified by the arrival of a new group of Europeans. When the white woman either flees or is rescued or abducted by them (this remains uncertain), T'kama contacts the Europeans - it is he who is able to speak their language - in order to pay the bride price and legalize the marriage to the woman. The Europeans, well aware of his intentions, take the offered animals, but then break the contract and beat T'kama to death.

Thus, The First Life of Adamastor clearly has a political point to make. T'kama's first reactions to the European explorers expose the workings of colonial discourse, reversing its subject / object positions. However, this realization can only work on the level of the reader. It is not an empow­ering tool for the Khoikhoi within the story, since they are just as caught up in their perception of a binary self / other distinction as European col­onizers would be: only the perspective is changed, the strategy of othering remains the same. More importantly for the postcolonial project, Brink's text rewrites pre-colonial history from the margins. The Khoikhoi have an existence - and history - prior to their 'discovery': T'kama makes frequent references to Heitsi-Eibib, the mythical ancestor of the Khoikhoi. And the explorers are not described as adventurous heroes, but as hypo­critical, immoral and violent exploiters. Their appearance in Africa is seen as a rape of the land: "now they were here; others would come after them. Our shore was exposed and open, like a woman already taken" (FLA 120). This link between the female body and Africa is not new, and neither is it fortuitous - the implied devaluation of the raped woman is in particu­larly bad taste. However, the image is here presented as the fictional utter­ance of an African bewailing the violation of his ancestral land, not as that of a European celebrating conquest.

Brink's The First Life of Adamastor clearly invites a postcolonial reading that focuses on its decentring of colonial discourse and the rewrit-

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ing of the story of exploration and first contact. However, a naiVely realist reading of the novel as 'factual' historical revisionism is counteracted by those elements that draw on postmodern uncertainty. The insistence on the unreliability of memory and the constant reminders of the imaginary nature of the text and its very textuality make it impossible to read the alternative history as the true history of the 'discovery' of South Africa. It is, as it were, only a suggestion - but a suggestion that insists on its own unreliability, while simultaneously appealing to the readers for their approval. We know - and are constantly being told - that this is 'just' imagination, that the story told by T'kama is not 'historical fact.' Nonetheless, we are made to feel that his interpretation of the first contact between Europeans and Mricans at the southern tip of Africa is somehow more truthful than contemporary European renderings. In a fictional uni­verse that is clearly informed by postmodern scepticism of Truth, Brink cannot offer the true alternative account of the past. But he does offer an account that can make the reader rethink accepted notions of Africa's 'dis­covery' by Europeans. In his essay "Reinventing a Continent," Brink emphasizes the importance of this form of intertextuaIity which creates "a polylogue [ ... J through which versions of the past are drawn into the pre­sent, confronting the reader with the need - and above all the responsi­bility - to choose" (23). I would argue that Brink's The First Life of Adamastor does not seriously offer its readers a choice for their concep­tion of South Africa's history, in the sense that T'kama's narrative is the ultimate Truth. However, Brink urges his readers to reconsider the polit­ical and moral implications of European exploration in Africa. To this end, the text establishes a fictional reality in which politics of exploitation play a major role, and simultaneously debunks this reality; it offers an alterna­tive history, simultaneously exposing its own fictionality. In The First Life of Adamastor, Brink combines postmodern and postcolonial interests to create a text that is playfully political, overtly fictional but nonetheless inviting empathy and moral evaluation.

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was presented at AUETSA 1999 in Pretoria (12-15 July 1999). Some of the research was conducted at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa, with the financial aid of a study grant from the Gennan Academic Exchange Service (HSP Ul).

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I. The dismantling of apartheid is an ongoing process, and various dates for the beginning of apartheid's demise can be proposed. For my purposes here, I would argue that the implementation of the provisional constitution - which granted equal rights to all South Africans - in 1992 can be used as a marker to structure Brink's Cl?uvre.

2. In an interview, Brink recalls the genesis of Adamastor: "in the very midst of the apartheid years, there was this need to explore the fantastical again, and I planned something called The Lives of Adamastor, which would have had thir­teen parts. I wrote the first two, and then I was simply overwhelmed by everything that was happening in the 1980s, and I never continued that. [ ... J But as for The First Life of Adamastor, which was originally the first part of that thirteen-part novel, I suddenly discovered that it could stand more or less on its own" (De Waal, 1).

3. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and 'TIffin explain, the 'post' in postcolonial is not to be read temporally, as in post-independence: "Post-colonialism [ ... J begins from the very first moment of colonial contact" (117).

4. White's far-reaching claims, and his narrow definition of fictionality, are clearly an oversimplification and have been refuted by a number of critics (for a detailed analysis of White's arguments and criticism on White see Niinning). However, White is not the 'fundamentalist' of historical relativism some post­modern critics take him to be. For example, his insistence that it is very well pos­sible to distinguish "between good and bad historiography" ("Historical Text" 97) is usually ignored.

5. Not all the footnotes can be attributed to the authorial voice, though. Adamastorff'kama also makes annotations to his narrative (cf. FLA 12,68,87).

6. Another recent text by a South African author using a 'noble savage' to satirize contemporary British society is Christopher Hope's Darkest England (1996).

7. For example, Joel Kovel explains othering as negative projection: "What­ever a white man experiences as bad in himself [ ... J whatever is forbidden and horrifying in human nature, may be designated as black and projected onto a man whose dark skin and oppressed past fit him to receive the symbol" (65f.).

WORKSCI1ED

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. "Postmodernism and Post­Colonialism: Introduction." The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 1995. London: Routledge, 1997. 117-18.

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