Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night and Other Stories: A Review

 

The South African writer and political activist Alex La Guma (1924 – 1985) was tried, jailed, house-arrested, his books banned, his house constantly raided by the police, who rough-handed both adults and children, confiscating any found manuscript. This was in the 1950s and 60s during the height of apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile he'd grown up in District Six, an inner-city area of Cape Town, where he was born. And he later had to go into exile with his wife and children in 1966. This kind of life is rich but heavy material for fiction. Alex understands this. His 1967 collection A Walk in the Night and Other Stories is fiction that handles its material well.

“A Walk in the Night,” the first story, which, published in 1962, is also the oldest and the longest, is itself a novella and “other stories" are six short stories, usually six or seven pages long. They all recount stories of poor Coloured people, mostly Blacks, mostly living in the dregs of Cape Town that was District Six. These people live in dirty tenements reeking of urine and death. But they also wear gorgeous gowns and make advances at each other at cafés. Well, you get the point: poverty, discrimination, capitalism, etc.

But Alex La Guma approaches apartheid and racism and capitalism calculatedly. Surely we see grumpy Black crowd speak back at racist policemen and young Black johns curse the cops and Lorenzo rant about being poor. Actually Mikey's anger towards the white “juba” who “pushed him out” of his factory job believably motivates him to kill Uncle Doughty, an old white retired actor who lives in the Black neighbourhood, in a Black tenement, thereby setting off the title story major conflict. But what we mostly see is how the system has affected the lives of these people. How, for the system, they live in fear, frustrations and poverty. Alex's stories are the more poignant for this balance. What we have is a people existing as a fact of life and not the political fact of a people solely poised against an oppressive system. They fight the system. But they live their lives.

A Walk in the Night is realism. Alex understands the cause and effect principle of life-like fiction writing. Again take Mikey's murder of Doughty. We hear “the feeling of rage, frustration and violence swollen within him like a boil,” which is “knotted with pain," bubble beneath the surface of the prose. And we know this internal conflict will soon spill over. So that when it does we don’t doubt it. This is unexpected predictability. We see what will happen but don't know we do. This makes the title long short story concise and the briefer stories complete. The fact that the plots are believably set up and set off makes this so. The six-page “At the Portagee's,” short as it is, is an example. The American writer Lydia Davis warns not to mistake volume for verbosity or brevity for conciseness. For her a short poem can be verbose and a long novel concise. Of course she credits the concise and the complete. A Walk in the Night is what she means.

Reinforcing this life-likeness is Alex's descriptive power. His descriptions are almost exact to a fault. They are so immersive they spellbind the readers. Not surprising. The man is excited about the act of writing. You could just feel that. In “Tattoo Marks and Nails,” someone believes “...you could reach out before your face, grab a handful of heat, fling it at the wall, and it would stick.” You could do the same to his sentences. They’re that palpable. His writing is vivid and vigorous and visceral. That stuff revs up with verve. But he's also passionate about the stories he's telling. This is obvious in his sympathy and respect for the people he writes about.

But Alex, who was also a painter and a comic artist, describes like an animator. He colours small details as if to cover up the fact that this is fiction. Joe's “trousers had gone at the cuffs and knees, the rents held together with pins and pieces of string, and so stained and spotted that the original colour could not be guessed at.” The descriptions can even be so true they come off as funny but never scornful. Frank Lorenzo for example has “an air of harassment about him, of too much hard work and unpaid bills and sour babies.” Actually descriptions are one source of humour in the book. Beside characters like Ahmed the Turk who speaks exaggeratedly, that is. He's the one who talks about the heat you could catch and stick to the wall or put on a biscuit to make a toast. Or Chinaboy, who copes with poverty through poverty-themed jokes.

Like his descriptions Alex's secret tying together of the stories is impressive. A sleight of hand. The collection is not a stories-in-a-novel, which is a novel where standalone short stories are deliberately woven into a whole. Still Alex can sometimes link a story to another, loosely, lightly, lovely. Forget the setting, which connects the title story to some of the shorter stories. Added pleasure it is to find a story related to another through the same joke the different characters crack. Or through the similarity between the names Willieboy and Willie. I bet these will qualify as those small pleasures of reading Paul Auster talks about.

Moreover Alex’s depiction of the poor and the oppressed, the scenes of their lives, the music of their emotions, the poetry of their thoughts, which earned him the nick South African Charles Dickens, is cinematic. His sweeping, bird-eye illustrations of buildings and shops and night signs feel like long takes in a movie. Through these literary wide and long shots he makes his neighbourhood suck in his readers. He lowers his readers into the mood and tone of District Six. And he makes them more present. And this established atmosphere suggests what we think will happen when a story is unresolved. “Tattoo Marks and Nails" is an example. “Blankets,” too.

But the resonance with cinema goes beyond camera-like descriptions. Consider “A Walk in the Night,” which is about a walk Mikey takes the evening of the day he was sacked. We cut from characters to characters and back again. This technique builds to the story's soulful end, which consists of snapshots of some vital characters resuming their lives after a long night, the story closing like the release of a long-held breath. For people like Mikey and Willieboy that night is surely the longest of their lives. But it could be the reader's too. Especially if the book is read in the night. Like the characters who survive the night, you, the reader, must have felt discomfort, a pricking at your heart, throughout the story, and relief only at the end. That's one sign of a good piece of art.

Alex writes with style and grace but also with honesty and humanity. He maintains a healthy remove from his subject. Teju Cole talks about the gift of being a stranger everywhere. Alex possesses this. He settles into a familiar environment, where he was born and bred, but describes things and places and people as if seeing them for the first time. This measured distance cools off his writing. Allows him to be humourous without being scornful. Adding dignity to those he writes about. He has humour. But humanity, too. The people from his book wear raggy jeans and greasy windbreakers and eat at cafés and go on dates and go to the cinema and go to the bar and rock long, luminous blue gowns on tall, shiny, Black bodies and sleep in dark congested rooms overflowing with babies and smoke cigars and drink cheap wine on credit and gather for food discarded fish at the harbour and, chased by white police men, skip over roof and get knifed and get shot and get beaten by abusive parents and call nonentities johns and jubas and baskets and hook-up and stand up for their kind and go to jail and argue football and politics and burgle and cry and joke and kill and live and die.

That's honesty. Alex's is fiction that, though by definition false, is true. Ghetto and countryside fiction that isn't at all a jest. Nor poverty porn. Graceful, truthful, respectful. His characters are people you'd meet and speak to if you go back to 1950s and 60s District Six, Cape Town, South Africa. They are alive for life for they are firstly and lastly humans. Full stop. Now District Six was razed and rebuilt as a “whites-only" neighbourhood in 1966. Thousands of coloured people were “removed.” And the area was renamed. Well, this mission failed: the place is now mostly unoccupied and desolate. Thank God for fiction like Alex's.