Whiteman
by Tony D’Souza
reviewed by Ben Oswest
{Boswestblog is back! - after a three-month absence. Thanks for readers’ patience. More to come…}
An edited version of this review originally ran in the 4 February 2007 Sunday Independent.
To the outsiders who have tried their luck in Africa, when it comes time to write a novel about it, the first struggle is with political realism. Should their story be set in the actual African country where they did their deeds, or, more delicately, in a territory that bears all the clues, but remains nameless, or masquerades under a pseudonym? The artless title of Tony D’Souza’s first novel reveals his choice: Whiteman is an clear declaration in favour of reality.
The story of the white man in question is accordingly set unambiguously in Côte D’Ivoire, on the cusp of its civil war between current President Laurent Gbagbo’s Christian south and the resource-starved, rebellious Muslim north. (Our own President, Thabo Mbeki, was recently relieved of his duties as a mediator there.) The events are centred around the large, Muslim-dominated town of Séguéla, near the unofficial border between south and north, and its tributary villages, and the fact that the main character’s movements can be tracked with a good map of West Africa is a beguiling experience for a reader, given the amount of other fiction set south of the Saraha that is parched of real names and places. We are seemingly off to a good start.
D’Souza is an American, Chicago-born, with an interesting personal history, involving youthful treks across Alaska and India, and a three-year stint with the Peace Corps in the same country, doubtless, where his main character toils, under the auspices of the fictional NGO Potable Water International. There, it seems, he went as far “nativeâ€? as a white man can go without actually starting a family and forging blood links – a process the result of which, essentially, is an opera, featuring a hero torn by opposing loyalties, and a string of everyday acts with grandly inflated significance and colour.
Every opera needs its librettist, but D’Souza favours a non-linear approach – call him a vignettist. Whiteman comprises the best tales from the life of the young American, Jack Diaz, a.k.a. Adama Diomandé (the Muslim name his villagers give him), a.k.a. the white Worodougou (what other blacks call him), working for PWI in Côte D’Ivoire. He does everything but what the NGO originally expected of him: buys a gun and learns to hunt the forest francolin; keeps a whore in Abidjan; clears bush and raises crops; becomes romantically involved with, then engaged to, a Fulani girl; employs one of the fifty ways to leave her (he hops on the bus – or, rather, the logging truck); adopts tribal and Muslim ways and turns in his heart against Christian Ivorians and un-Africanized Westerners; starts an AIDS education programme; and careers around on his mobylette (scooter), from village to town, in and out of danger zones as war gathers, exulting in his special life.
The stories are well-crafted, imparting a lush sense of what this life was like both in “Iron Ageâ€? Muslim Africa, as D’Souza calls it – the Africa of the sleepy bush village, rigid but quaint in its conventions, without electricity or running water, and only a reed mat to sleep on while spiders crawl in the thatch above one’s head – and the region’s sprawling, teeming urban centres like Abidjan. As a portrait of Côte D’Ivoire from a certain limited perspective, then, the book is a success.
As a work of fiction, however, Whiteman must be judged a failure. It’s clear from the start that D’Souza’s main debt as a writer is to that other Chicagoan, Hemingway, but his efforts to emulate prose’s master-distiller only land him the rank of epigone, nothing higher. (Some of his sentences are strong candidates for “the worst Hemingway imitationâ€? prize awarded annually in California: “They [the francolins]… seemed everything a chicken would have been if it could be what it once wasâ€?. And so on.) In other words, D’Souza conflates fiction and journalism.
This was perhaps inevitable, given his book’s autobiographical origins, and is not necessarily fatal in itself. But the equanimity of D’Souza’s prose is coupled with a far more grievous misstep when it comes to making art with claims on Africa: equanimity in his African characters. The black men and women in Whiteman, while not devoid of agency, accept fate with hypnotic stolidity. Navigating hardship or bad luck, they are zombies, practically indistinguishable, lacking inner lives. It’s not just D’Souza’s prose that’s flat here: it’s his imagination, too, which, for all his experience as a white African, and all his efforts to record Africa as it is, seems finally to have clung to preconceived, romantic notions about Africans themselves. His Ivorians are noble savages to a man.
To quote the critic, the difference between fiction and journalism is that the latter is meant to be read only once. In fairness to D’Souza, he occasionally acknowledges his imagination’s defeat – as when, early on, he compares his relationship with Africa to a man’s with an unchained, charging baboon. Such a high rate of self-absorbtion has its advantages – we learn how deeply Africa can touch the white man, at least – but is ultimately poisonous to the realism that D’Souza’s prose indicates he craves to render. The stories might be set in political reality, but they’re the sentimental constructions of an epigone writer who became an epigone African. Read them once, then shelve the book with the travel writing.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Hey Ben, off-topic I know, but congratulations on the launch of BookSA and sorry I couldn’t make it. It’s creating quite a big buzz and here’s to it growing bigger and bigger.