Border crossing

Dear Gabriel

So I’m writing an experimental piece about love across the colour line, set in pre-apartheid South Africa. And to make it even more difficult for myself it’s going to involve love between two men. Do you think these kinds of relationships actually happened? Would it be inevitable that the white person would be the one holding all the cards?

Thanks

Andrew

Dear Andrew

Well it’s funny you raise this because not so long ago I came across a little novel on this very topic at my local bookstore. It was on sale and I thought the subject matter was interesting, but I doubted that it would do justice to such a tricky theme. So I put it away for a rainy day. Well was I in for a surprise. It’s called Shadow Game and it’s written by Michael Power. Published in the early 1970’s and set in the sixties, it was banned in South Africa for many years.

What’s refreshing about the novel is that it weaves in politics as the inevitable backdrop to the forbiddenness of the relationship between a slightly older black man and his younger white boyfriend, but in a way which is always ominous but never foregrounded.

So yes I do think these relationships happened but for me what makes them interesting is that they reflected so many challenging themes: race of course but also class, power, culture, and gender norms. As it happens, in Shadow Game although the black man has the sexual and emotional power in the relationship, the white man has social, political and economic power (and in fact his pursuit of his partner suggests the confidence and even arrogance he had by virtue of his skin colour). Inevitably it ends in tears because the apartheid machinery took the black man to prison (where he committed suicide) and the white man to the UK where he fled to avoid prosecution.

Relationships are hard, gay relationships face extra challenges and mixed race or cross cultural relationships add another layer of complexity. Would the white man hold all the cards? Well yes and no. In a sociological sense, yes, but their personal and inner worlds might be more complex: you would have to be really determined to make such a relationship work and in all the intrigue around difference and “otherness” there would have to be common ground. And resilience to deal with social disapproval and the covertness that such a relationship would inevitably entail.

Humans transgress all the time – what would make your piece interesting is if it make us connect with the characters so that their transgression transcends their social and political context. Good luck!

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