1Analysing the prominent place occupied by childhood reminiscences in modern autobiographies, social anthropologist, Marianne Gullestad, explains that, partly as a result of the influence of Freudian theory on contemporary perceptions of early development, childhood has come to be seen today as ‘the ’natural’ foundation of the adult self.’1 Yet the paradox with which much autobiographical writing confronts us is that, for the author who embarks on a narrative construction of her childhood, the tendency is to produce a highly selective, frequently stylised (and therefore denatured) distillation of memories that is much more a reflection of the adult she has become than a pure evocation of the childhood experience out of which her identity has been forged. As social scientist, Charlotte Heinritz, points out,

The author of an autobiography never just ‘tells stories about his life.’ It is an important characteristic of this genre that the author of an autobiography tries to understand–and to demonstrate–who he or she is and how he became what he is.... The election of memories and their literal creation do always–or at least to a degree– follow the author’s intentions of self-presentation.2

2A similar view is endorsed in Georges Gusdorf’s study of life writing, Auto-bio-graphie, ‘Qu’elle en ait ou non l’intention avouée, l’écriture du moi est opérative; elle consacre une intervention du sujet sur lui-même, non pas un simple constat mais une tentative d’élucidation.’3 And J. M. Coetzee, himself no negligible authority on autobiographical writing, has likewise observed that ‘autobiography is very much like history: a way of explaining the present in terms of its origins.’4

3It is this ’take’ on the motivating principle behind autobiographical writing that I have used as my point of departure in approaching the childhood self constructed by Coetzee in Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. To validate my reading of the text I have turned, wherever possible, to statements the author has made about his life and self-writing in essays and interviews that pre-date the memoir.

4It must be noted that when Boyhood was first published in 1997, a certain perplexity was evident in critics’ responses to it. How exactly was the text be treated? Was it a novel or the first volume of the author’s life history? Though readers are led to infer the autobiographical nature of the document from the fact that the main protagonist is named John Coetzee, and that all the verifiable, factual data relating to the boy’s experience correspond to real elements in the author’s early life, there is no external evidence–either in the paratext accompanying the work or in statements made about Boyhood by Coetzee himself–that unequivocally confirms or disproves the hypothesis that this enigmatic text constitutes an autobiographical undertaking on the part of the author. Coetzee’s own characteristic evasiveness when asked whether his book should be regarded as an authentic account of his early life, or simply his latest work of fiction, did nothing to dispel the ambiguity surrounding the precise nature of the document he had produced.

5In a previous paper5 I was mainly concerned with the problems posed by the relinquishment of the use of the first person singular in a narrative which, in all other respects, appears to recount the author’s own boyhood. In the present reading, leaving such technical considerations aside, I shall proceed from the premise that–third person narration notwithstanding–Boyhood is indeed intended as a bone fide memoir.

6Written in the first years of the post-Apartheid era, a period of immense emotional upheaval, self-appraisal and psychological reorientation for all South Africans, Boyhood represents a tacit recognition on Coetzee’s part that the time has come at last to attempt a truthful account of himself, of his own private history, his emotional and psychological development as an Afrikaner under the heinous regime that has henceforth been consigned to the annals of South Africa’s colonial past. The question that is of particular interest to me, however, is what ’intention of self-presentation’, what organising principle may be observed in the selection of childhood snapshots that this hitherto resolutely impenetrable author has plucked from the family album to illustrate the story of his early life? For one of the problems about self-writing is that not all the facts of one’s history can be given. ‘All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall in with your evolving purpose.’6

7For certain writers, Gusdorf points out,

L’Autos de l’autobiographie, le principe de l’identité personnelle, définit un abcès de fixation pour une conscience inquiète de se noter elle-même positivement ou négativement; dans l’un et l’autre cas, excès ou défaut, suffisance ou insuffisance, l’Ego occupe le centre du théâtre d’ombres de la représentation.
(Auto-bio-graphie, 237)

8A judgement with which Coetzee himself thoroughly concurs. ‘Autobiography’, he admits, ‘talking about oneself at length, requires a huge egoism’ (‘Fictions of the Truth’). His own memoir certainly proves the point, since despite the misleading abstraction of the main title, Boyhood, and contrary to the expectations of a more impersonal, social chronicle solicited by the sub-title, Scenes from Provincial Life, the focus of the narrative is the developing ego of the young John Coetzee, ‘the only story’ that this intense child ‘will admit, the story of himself.’7

9Of the several factors that are signalled as having had a potentially defining influence on the tormented self-image around which the memoir revolves, I propose to focus only on those which throw most light on what Coetzee presents as his damaged identity as a white South African. The first is the boy’s experience of growing up in a racially segregated world. The second is the complex and profoundly ambiguous relationship that Coetzee has with his own ‘caste’–the Afrikaners.

10Taking the first of these two points, I shall examine what Boyhood shows us (or sometimes fails to show us) of the interface between the author’s childhood self and the ‘non-white’ peoples of South Africa.

11Their reliance on native labour within the intimate space of their home environment gives the Coetzees direct–if limited– knowledge of the colonised population. Assuring the smooth running of the Coetzee farm, Voëlfontein, Coloured domestics and agricultural workers are an integral feature of the social landscape in which John moves on his regular visits to his

uncle’s domain in the Karoo. At home in Worcester, on the other hand, there is only Eddie, the Coloured house-boy and then only for a short period of time. Just a few months older than John, Eddie serves as an occasional playmate for his employers’ son, teaching the white child the important boyhood skill of riding a bicycle, even entering into close physical contact with him in their wrestling matches on the lawn. (75)

12As the text reveals, however, this intimacy is a spurious one, for the hermetic psychological barriers generated by the racially segregated world of South Africa remain firmly in place, preventing John from seeing non-whites other than in terms of their impenetrable alterity. Mysterious, opaque, unknowable, they are primarily objects of fascination for him.

He burns with curiosity about the lives they live. Do they wear vests and underpants like white people? Do they each have a bed? Do they sleep naked or in their work-clothes or do they have pyjamas? Do they eat proper meals sitting at table with knives and forks?
(85)

13Because of the exotic otherness he ascribes to them, Africans come to have a strong erotic aura in John’s imagination–hence the frisson of sexual excitement aroused in him by the sight of a Coloured boy who just happens to pass by him in the street.

He is wearing pants so short that they sit tightly across his neat buttocks and leave his slim clay-brown thighs almost naked.... There are hundreds of boys like him, thousands, thousands of girls too in short frocks that show off their slim legs.... Why do children like this, boys and girls under no compulsion to go to school, free to roam far from the watching eyes of parents, whose bodies are their own to do with as they please–why do they not come together in a feast of sexual delight? (60)

14One surprising aspect of Coetzee’s account of black-white relations is that it contains no echo of the belligerent racism that characterised white discourse (referred to elsewhere by the author as the ‘rant’ and the ‘self-righteousness’ of the Afrikaner right)8 under the Apartheid regime. We are left simply to deduce the oppressiveness of such ranting in the South Africa of the 50s from the relief John is described as feeling whenever dominant attitudes are challenged by the recalcitrant behaviour occasionally displayed by members of his family.

15His mother’s naive confidence in the ability of Coloured people to fix things is welcomed by John as a positive sign, one that distinguishes her more open mentality from the inflexible mindset of her peers: ‘... it is so different from what everyone believes, so eccentric, that despite himself he finds it endearing. He would rather that his mother expected wonders of Coloured people than expected nothing of them at all’ (37). When she refers to a Native as a ’wise old man’ he interprets her remark to mean that ‘It is possible to respect Natives’ and for John, ‘It is a great relief to hear that, to have it confirmed’ (65). The fact that the Coloured people who work on his uncle’s farm are not treated in the same way that Coloureds are treated in Worcester affords a similar satisfaction: ‘he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk’ (84).

16Here, then, we can begin to see the definite outline of a purpose, the pattern that, as Coetzee himself says, is either discovered ’by dint of introspection’ or created ‘in the process of recollecting the past, selecting details, bringing them together, writing them down’ (’Fictions of the Truth’). For what all of the above incidents serve to show are firstly, that the racist vision on which white South African society was founded was a source of acute psychic discomfort to Coetzee’s boyhood self, and secondly, that, from an early age, he found solace in any manifestation of resistance to Apartheid ideology.

17Overt, verbal expressions of white racism are surprisingly absent from these recollections of an Afrikaner boyhood. Moreover, the only signs the text provides of the institutionalised practice of racial oppression in South Africa are indirectly evidenced via the extensive empirical knowledge John displays of the function performed by the native in the colonial economy. Among the grim socio-economic realities with which the ten-year-old proves himself to be acquainted are the facts that urbanised blacks not only live separated from their families and exiled from their culture but are also condemned to a life-time of heavy labour and abject poverty (61-2); that non-whites have no intrinsic human value for whites; that even black adults have to use the respectful third person form of address to speak to him, a mere boy (86); that any cup which a native has drunk from must be destroyed or, at the very least–as his own mother’s example demonstrates–washed out with bleach (157). He also clearly understands that African children of ten years old will soon have to leave school and go to work (72); that some of them, like Eddie, the family servant, have already been working for several years by the time they are his age; that child workers such as these are routinely beaten when they fail to satisfy their white employers (74); that the home circumstances they are likely to be sent back to are bleak and insalubrious (76); and that for a Coloured boy, such as the one he sees in the street, the mere fact of his colour means:

... that he has no money, lives in an obscure hovel, goes hungry; it means that if [John’s] mother were to call out ’Boy!’ and wave, as she is quite capable of doing, this boy would have to stop in his tracks. And come and do whatever she might tell him to (carry her shopping basket, for instance), and at the end of it get a tickey in his cupped hands and be grateful for it. (61)

18What John’s opinion might be of the surfeit of ‘cruelty and violence’ the adult Coetzee claims to have witnessed as a child (’Interview: Retrospect’, 394) is another of the problematical zones of silence that frequently punctuate this troublingly elliptical work. The author does, on the other hand, provide multiple textual cues signalling the psychological damage that being a member of a brutally oppressive society wreaks on the developing identity of a sensitive pre-adolescent. John Coetzee’s childhood is, the memoir suggests, deformed by the weight of collective guilt that, as the descendant of Afrikaners, he feels compelled to assume for the ’crime’ of apartheid that has been perpetrated against South Africa.9

19His very apprehension of the world appears to have been entirely warped by the diffuse but all-pervasive culpability that stems from the position of privilege he enjoys in a society he perceives as profoundly unjust. Interestingly, John’s way of seeing is typical of the caricatural, manichean vision with which, in the analyses of Fanon and Memmi,10 the settler traditionally views the colonial world, the difference in his case being that the values attributed to the polarised human groups that inhabit the space of the colony are completely inverted. The Coloured boy he catches sight of in the street strikes him, for instance, as being ‘light as a deer and innocent while he [John] is dark and heavy and guilty.’ (61)

20Since Africans are automatically identified, in his mind, with innocence and virtue, merely to think of them provokes an instantaneous, painful chafing at his conscience. As when he imagines the disapproval that would undoubtedly be voiced by the grocer’s black delivery boy should the latter find out that John and his brother have been throwing eggs at the neighbours’ house.

’How can you do that when children are hungry?’ he would say in his bad Afrikaans; and there would be no answer.... Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs... but in this country there are judges who will judge by the standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.
(64, italics added)

21Or when he speculates about how Eddie will feel about him later on in life, once the Coloured boy has come to recognise the inescapable poverty and squalor to which his racial status condemns him, ‘One thing he knows for sure: Eddie will have no pity on him.’ (77) John’s conscience is so deeply scored by the scathing moral judgements that he feels are being passed upon him by non-whites, that even when he sees no trace on the their faces of ‘the hatred he is prepared to acknowledge he and [his race] deserve, ’ (72) their presence alone is experienced as an accusation. Thus when he sees a group of Coloured children looking in through the café window watching him and his chums tucking into birthday treats, the sudden reminder that he and his friends have ‘so much money while [the Coloured children] are penniless, ’ (72) is sufficient to mar his pleasure in the occasion.

22Yet there is a nagging ambivalence in the narration of this episode. Are we to understand that John’s response–‘his heart... is hurt’ (73)–to the sight of destitute Africans is one of straightforward empathy with the victims of racial discrimination? Or does the boy’s reaction, ‘They are spoiling my birthday, it is not fair, it hurts my heart to see them, ’ (73) express an altogether more complex and less worthy sentiment–notably the colonial subject’s petulant resentment of the fact that, in the colony, even the most innocent enjoyments are poisoned by feelings of guilt?

23What we cannot doubt, on the other hand, is that the sense of guilt from which John suffers is rendered all the more acute by his understanding of the primordial truth that confronts all colonising peoples. Namely, that in contrast with the mythologised version of the past proposed by colonial history books, white colonisers can claim no moral legitimacy for the dominant position they occupy in lands that they took by force from indigenous populations. In South Africa, John recognises, ‘Not only do [the Coloureds] come with the land, the land comes with them, is theirs, has always been.’ (62, italics added) His grandfather may well have been the ’purchaser and legal owner’ (84) of the Coetzee family farm, but what counts in the boy’s eyes is the fact that Outa Jaap, ancestor of the present Coloured servants, ‘was part of the farm... came with it, knew more about it, about sheep, veld, weather than the newcomer would ever know.’ (84, italics added) Even the place of the hired man on the farm is seen by John as having greater validity than that of his own family who have been settlers in the Karoo for decades:

Freek belongs more securely than the Coetzees do–if not to Voëlfontein, then to the Karoo. The Karoo is Freek’s country, his home; the Coetzees, drinking tea and gossiping on the farmhouse stoep, are like swallows, seasonal, here today, gone tomorrow, or even like sparrows, chirping, light-footed, short-lived. (87)

24Highlighting the ephemeral, quintessentially extraneous nature of the Coetzees, defining them, in opposition to the Coloureds, as a migrant rather than an endemic species in South Africa, are discursive strategies which reverse the conventions of colonialist literature in which the native is relegated to a bit part on the periphery of the colonial narrative while the settler’s pivotal importance is repeatedly foregrounded. It also exposes one of the generic but habitually repressed features of the colonial subject’s identity–his perception of himself as an outsider.

25The episodes in this memoir which evoke John Coetzee’s contact with the non-white populations of South Africa may be said, then, to have this in common–that they serve as vehicles for a certain image of the author as a member of the unfortunate category of colonial subject which Albert Memmi refers to as ‘le colonisateur qui se refuse’.11 Someone who is, psychologically at least, if not materially or in terms of social status, a victim of the apartheid system.

26Like many colonial subjects, the young Coetzee is pre-disposed to de-stabilising feelings of marginality, superfluousness, ontological insecurity. However, in choosing to align himself with the position of the ’colonisateur qui se refuse’, he compounds what is already a major problem of identity by putting himself in a situation of irremediable antagonism with his ethnic group.

27Though Coetzee’s paternal ancestry is pure Afrikaans and his maternal grand-parents have ‘not a drop of English blood in their veins, ’ (106) both his parents–for reasons that are not elucidated in the narrative–speak English at home. With the result that, not only does John come top of his class in English, he also ‘thinks of himself as English’ (124) and considers himself to be loyal to ‘England and everything England stands for’ (129). At the same time, however, he is conscious that his Englishness is not of the same order as the genuine article since, in order to qualify as being ‘truly English, ’ there are ‘tests to face, some of which he will not pass’ (129, italics added). But–and here is the significance of this brief parenthesis– if John is shown to live in dread of being publicly exposed as one of the ‘false English boys’ (69) in the English class he attends at high school, it is not due to any anticipated aggressiveness on the part of the Anglo-Saxons themselves, rather it is because of the terrifying consequence such exposure would entail–namely that of being ‘cast among’ (125) Afrikaners. If ever such a misfortune were to befall him, this bigoted and rancorous people would, he is certain, instantly recognise his otherness and ‘crush him, kill the spirit in him’ (125).

28The acute sense of vulnerability which Coetzee’s boyhood self experiences in relation to the Afrikaner community is explained in greater detail in one of the interviews the adult author granted to David Atwell in 1991-92. Here too, interestingly, the narration of autobiographical experience is conducted via the distancing medium of the third person singular.

A sense of being alien goes far back in his memories. But to certain intensifications of that sense I, writing in 1991, can put a date. His years in rural Worcester (1948-1951) as a child from an Afrikaans background attending English-medium classes, at a time of raging Afrikaner nationalism, a time when laws were being concocted to prevent people of Afrikaans descent from bringing up their children to speak English, provoke in him uneasy dreams of being hunted down and accused; by the age of twelve he has a well-developed sense of social marginality.
(’Interview: Retrospect, ’ 393)

29The basis for John’s perception expressed in the opening pages of Boyhood that his is an ‘unnatural and shameful family, ’ (6) is revealed in the bitterly ironic observation that, unlike conventional Afrikaner households, his home is one in which ‘not only are children not beaten but older people are addressed by their first names and no one goes to church and shoes are worn every day.’ (6) The underlying cause of this ’abnormality’ is shown to lie in the civilising influence that John’s English-speaking mother has introduced into the family milieu through her eccentric determination to protect her sons from the crudest and most brutalising aspects of the Afrikaner way of life. It is because of her insistence that he wear shoes, for instance, that, in contrast with the callused soles of the rest of his white classmates, his feet have the ignominious distinction of being soft and prone to blister.12 Conversely, the ’normal’ world from which John is exiled as a result of this subversive maternal influence is personified by his father who is ‘normal in every way, ’ (8) and in particular by his father’s family13 which is represented in the narrative as being a veritable repository of normative Afrikaner values.

30The fact that he is not only different from but an anathema to the embattled, choleric tribe from which he is descended takes a heavy toll on John, causing, the author insistently suggests, pathogenic consequences for the evolution of the child’s developing self. For if the text contains neither commentary on nor explicit reference to the psychological impact on John Coetzee of his perceived rejection by such a powerful and aggressively judgemental culture, the wounds sustained by the child are nonetheless made evident through the neurotic behavioural strategies that he is seen to adopt.

31Afraid of the violent disapproval that he knows his otherness would excite should it come to the attention of his fellow Afrikaners, John concentrates his energy outside the home on trying to conceal his difference. He is involved in a permanent struggle to avoid making the fatal slip that will reveal his deviant identity and thus deliver him to the wrath of his ’merciless’ judges. Listening to his paternal uncles reminiscing nostalgically about the beatings they received as youngsters, he ‘makes himself as inconspicuous as possible’ (9). Terrorised by the sadistic culture of bullying and corporal punishment at school, he sits in ‘the most obscure row, so that he will not be noticed’ (13).

32In his study of self and society, Anthony Giddens makes the point that,

All human beings, in all cultures preserve a distinction between their self identities and the ’performances’ they put on in specific social contexts. But in some circumstances the individual might come to feel that the whole flow of his activities is put on or false.14

33The tactics John employs in order to survive in the threatening presence of Afrikaners induce just such a feeling of consummate falseness. Forced by his terror15 of exposure, to contain his ’real’ self within the boundaries of his secret inner life, the child is overwhelmed by the ‘burden of imposture’ (13) such duplicity imposes. The fracture his identity suffers as a result of the conflicting pressures to which it is subjected is what lies behind John’s schizophrenic sense that ‘he is damaged.... that something is slowly tearing inside him all the time: a wall, a membrane’ (9).

34Despite the elaborate precautions taken by the boy to protect his inner self, he constantly feels that self to be at risk when in the company of others. As he sees it, he is like ‘one of those spiders that live in a hole in the ground with a trapdoor. Always the spider has to be scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding.’ (28) A fact which perhaps accounts for the surprising dearth of references to childhood friends in this memoir of pre-adolescence, and explains why the main recreational activities the author describes himself as indulging in as a boy are of such a peculiarly solitary almost autistic nature.

35As the recurrent imagery of alienation insistently spells out, moreover, the price John pays for failing to conform to Afrikaner norms is his sensation of absolute exclusion. As the narrator says, ‘He is on his own. From no quarter can he expect support.’16 (13) Hence the game of cricket–a game he plays with febrile intensity–is intuitively recognised by the boy as being a perfect paradigm of his isolated and embattled self. When he is at the wicket, he knows ‘he is on trial, one against eleven’ (53) and ‘the secret that he manages to cover up elsewhere is relentlessly probed and exposed.’ (54) Which is why, for him, ‘Cricket is not a game. It is the truth of life.’ (54)

36Significantly, though the narrative contains several incidents which confirm the appropriateness of the ’namby-pamby’ image John’s father and schoolmates have of him, and though the narrator recounts numerous episodes which reveal a clear contradiction between the heroic values of steadfastness and valour the boy aspires to17 and the ’cravenness’ of his instinctive tendency to pretend, rather than assert his real identity, there is, the adult author seeks to persuade us, a core of integrity in his younger self. However deceitful he may be in relation to the outside world, John is, the narrator/author explicitly affirms, doggedly faithful to his own inner truth.

If he stopped lying he would have to... do everything that normal boys do. In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what would be the point in living?... He lies but he does not lie to himself. (35)

37More importantly, there is a plethora of evidence in this memoir urging us towards the understanding that John Coetzee is by no means the passive object of his exclusion from the Afrikaner ranks. Armed with a battery of lapidary moral and aesthetic judgements on the ethnic community to which, in principle, he belongs, John gives (almost) as good as he gets, repeatedly expressing the same visceral revulsion towards Afrikaners as that which Afrikaans society apparently manifests towards him. He is contemptuous of the circumlocutory nature of Afrikaans speech which he likens to the language of ‘a whipped slave, ’ (49) finds Afrikaans songs so unbearable that ‘he wants to scream and shout and make farting noises during the singing, ’ (70) and utterly rejects the entire panoply of Afrikaner heroes, from the leaders of the Great Trek whom he compares dismissively to ‘the teachers in high school or... Afrikaners on the radio: angry and obdurate and full of menaces and talk about God, ’ (66) to Dr. Malan, architect of the Apartheid state, ‘a round, bald face... without understanding or mercy [whose] gullet pulses like a frog’s.’ (70) Afrikaners as John sees them are characterised by

a surliness, an intransigence and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force...–that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. They wield their language like a club against their enemies. On the streets it is best to avoid groups of them; even singly they have a truculent, menacing air. (124-5)

38On the basis of such evidence, and bearing in mind the historical context in which Boyhood was conceived, one might reasonably suppose that the motive force behind this memoir is, then, a desire on the author’s part to disassociate himself, finally from the moral taint of his Afrikaner origins. But that would be too simplistic a reading of Coetzee’s intention. Like the complex, extremely nuanced, ethical stances taken up by some of the characters in his fiction, there is nothing at all clear cut and unequivocal in the finished portrait the author delivers of the way his childhood self relates to what he has referred to elsewhere as ‘the closed hereditary caste [which] [e]veryone... with a white skin is born into’ and from which it is impossible to resign.18 The young John Coetzee of Boyhood may well lash out against the ugly, callous, intolerant world of Afrikaners, but he cannot ultimately disentangle himself from the web of emotional associations and historical complicity in which it holds him (‘Interview: South African Writers’, 343).

39Emerging contrapuntally against the powerful leitmotiv of the self as both outcast and dissenter from the dominant Apartheid culture of South Africa, is a theme of quite a different tonality. It is at the heart of the long lyrical interlude in which the author evokes his childhood experience on the Coetzee farm–an episode in which the child is seen at least to court–if not definitively surrender to–the embrace of an identity that he so vehemently repudiates elsewhere.

40In this slim autobiographical work in which the average chapter length is around eight pages, Chapter 11, the chapter that deals with Voëlfontein, is in all respects exceptional. Twenty-four pages long, its volume alone designates it as having an important load-bearing role in the architecture of the memoir. With ten chapters preceding it and a further eight that follow, it also occupies a central place in the composition of the work. On either side of it, like the outer panels of a tryptich, are the twin dystopian images of John Coetzee’s everyday experience in the South African Republic. In the first chapters, it is the bleak, isolated, treeless, wind-blown, dust-filled, insect-infested housing estate in Worcester which provides the physical backdrop to the boy’s life. The latter part of the memoir describes his young adolescent years in the soulless, built-up, suburban sprawl of Cape Town where, on waste land opposite the family’s newly-built house with its rubble-strewn garden, ‘the police find a dead baby in a brown paper packet’ (134)

41Between the two, forming a bucolic centrepiece that stands out in dramatic contrast to the alienated urban landscapes in which normal life is lived, is the child’s utopian vision of life on the family farm. As the text instructs us, all of the family farms are important to John since ‘Through the farms he is rooted in the past; through the farms he has substance.’19 (22) Voëlfontein is, then, unmistakably identified by the author as constituting a major element in the base matter, the ’substance’ from which J.M. Coetzee’s identity is wrought.

42To a great extent, this pastoral interlude contains not only a distillation of some of the thematic preoccupations that dominate settler literatures generally, it is also a compendium of many of the particular features that the author himself considers to be characteristic of the genre of South African literature known as the plaasroman.

The variety of freedom associated in Afrikaans literature with the farm harks back, certainly, to memories of carefree childhood, but also in the course of historical time, and particularly from the 1920s onwards, to a lost ideal, economic independence, to the idea of the farm as a ‘koninkrykie’ (little kingdom), where a man can be his own master... and, by extension, to the enduring dream of a separate state, a ‘Free State’ where the Afrikaner will at last be left in peace to run his affairs in his own way.20

43Coetzee’s observation that, in the plaasroman, ‘The farm rather than nature, however regionally defined, is conceived as the sacral place where the soul can expand in freedom’ (‘Reading the South African Landscape’, 175), can be directly applied to his own repeated use in Boyhood of metaphors that explicitly affirm the hallowed character of Voëlfontein–a place of miracles, no less, in John’s reverential eyes,

... like the miracle of the meat that hangs in the dark of the storeroom and does not rot, like the miracle of the pumpkins that lie on the roof in the blazing sun and stay fresh. On the farm, it seems, there is no decay. (83)

44Voëlfontein, ‘exists from eternity to eternity, ’ (96) everything that ‘can find sustenance in [its]arid earth is thereby blessed’ (90). In celebration of its sacral nature the boy ‘does pilgrimage’ (97) every year to the site of the original farmhouse. But it is the land itself, the natural, physical environment in which the farm is located that constitutes the real site of worship, ‘Once out in the veld far from the house, he bends down and rubs his palms in the dust as if washing them. It is ritual. He is making up a ritual’ (96).

45Exactly what it is that John is ’worshipping’ through his ritual is not explicitly articulated by the author. Yet there are strong textual hints suggesting that what is sacred about Voëlfontein for John is the sense of belonging–and thus of identity–this tribal territory affords him.

The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is belong. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. (95)

46Interestingly, though the settler’s paradisial union with his birth country is something about which all colonial literatures fantasise, the fastidious precision with which John’s relationship with the farm is defined in this passage, seems designed to demarcate Coetzee’s position from that typically adopted in colonial cultures, and align him, instead, with a way of seeing the land more normally associated with indigenous peoples. The distinction the author obliquely evokes is that which, for instance, Australian Aboriginal author Ruby Langford describes as being ‘the difference between white people saying “I own this land” and blacks saying “We belong to this land”.’21

47Equally importantly, it is thanks to the rare and ecstatic feeling of oneness with the world experienced at Voëlfontein that the child comes closest to healing the rift that exists between him and his father’s family and thereby resolving the problem of his estrangement from his Afrikaner roots. If he had to choose between his Uncle Son, the present owner of Voëlfontein, and his own father as a father, he would, he decides, choose Son, ‘even though that would mean he would be irrecoverably Afrikaans and would have to spend years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans boarding school, as all farm-children do, before he would be allowed to come back to the farm’.22

48The vision of edenic bliss that the child glimpses at Voëlfontein offers Coetzee the occasion for an outpouring of lyrical feeling for his country that is without parallel in the rest of his spare and sober writings:

Bird-fountain; he loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountains, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling in for the night. (80)

49Though it is to the child that such rhapsodic declarations are attributed, it is, without doubt, the voice of the adult Coetzee that we hear in this passage. Ironically, the passionate attachment for the Karoo it speaks of bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the white Afrikaner’s love of South Africa, as described by the author himself with withering scorn in his Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech:

At the heart of the unfreedom of the hereditary masters of South Africa is a failure of love. To be blunt: their love is not enough today and has not been enough since they arrived on the continent; furthermore, their talk, their excessive talk, about how they love South Africa has consistently been directed toward the land, that is toward what is least likely to respond to love: mountains and deserts, birds and animals and flowers.23

50Yet whatever characteristics John may unconsciously share with his Afrikaner kin and whatever compromises he is prepared to make in order to be allowed to stay on the farm, the boy knows in his deep-down self that, as far as the Coetzee clan is concerned, he will always be a stranger at Voëlfontein. ‘The farm is not his home; he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest.’24 (79)

51Neither genuinely South African nor truly Afrikaans, J. M. Coetzee’s ambiguous identity constitutes the primary source of the powerful feeling of existential homelessness which dominates this self-history. It is also what generates the sense of grotesque abnormality that surfaces repeatedly in the shockingly ugly imagery the author uses to evoke the inner self that is kept locked up inside him like ‘one of those deformed, stunted, mongol children with hoarse voices and slavering lips’. (112) Rationally, the author recognises that he cannot personally be held responsible for the isolated, emotionally-crippled being he feels himself to be. As he has said elsewhere,

The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life.
(‘Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech (1987)’, 98)

52At the emotional level, on the other hand, the pain resulting from his ’deformity’, the frustration of knowing that its causes are irremediable, combine to produce an unhealthy self-obsession in the author. It is the inward-turning reflex of the suffering human being so convincingly portrayed by Coetzee in his earlier novel Age of Iron. As the South Africa of the late 80s spirals into a vortex of racial violence, the novel’s heroine can only think of the cancer that is spreading through her body.

The country smoulders, yet with the best will in the world I can only half attend. My true attention is all inward, upon the thing, the word, the word for the thing inching through my body. An ignominious occupation, and in times like these ridiculous too, as a banker with his clothes on fire is a joke while a burning beggar is not. Yet I cannot help myself. ’Look at me! ’ I want to cry to Florence–’I too am burning!’25

53It is these words that Elisabeth Curren says she wants to shout out in the final line of this passage that, I think, offer an important clue as to the ‘tentative d’élucidation’ embedded in Coetzee’s memoir. For if we scrutinise this narrative of childhood for the ‘intention of self-presentation’ that lies behind it, what emerges most powerfully is a sustained cry of protest and revolt against the impossible historical position in which Coetzee’s identity as a white South African has placed him inescapably from his birth.

54As the author’s still-sensitive early injuries have been fingered and put into words, the ’evolving purpose’ that Coetzee seems to have discovered in writing his childhood history is an aggressive urge to confront his readers, and particularly his critics, with the disfiguring wounds caused by his ineluctable white Afrikaner heritage.

55At a certain point in her physical and moral agony, Elisabeth Curren is overwhelmed by the desire ‘... to bring out a scar, a hurt, to force it upon them, to make them see it with their own eyes: a scar, any scar, the scar of all this suffering, but in the end my scar since our own scars are the only scars we can carry with us’ (98).

56It is, I contend, the same powerful impulse that motivates the author of Boyhood. For what the subtext of this narrative insistently communicates is that the scars inflicted by Apartheid, like those left by colonialism generally, are not exclusively to be found on one side of the racial divide. As the image of the burning banker clearly indicates, Coetzee is well aware that the kind of existential suffering to which he bears witness is unlikely to attract a great deal of sympathy. Nevertheless, in his repeated focus on the tormented areas of his boyhood experience, the author seems intent on showing that there exist other ways of being damaged by Apartheid than those which we are accustomed to seeing. Nelson Mandela’s declaration notwithstanding26, Coetzee’s testimony demands that we recognise that there is more than one kind of wound in South Africa for which no healing can be envisaged.