In: Critical Arts. Durban: (1990) Vol.5 No.2 pp.112-120      Review essay: Lewis Nkosi: Mating Birds. A Novel. New York: Harper & Row 1987 „She lay there, heavy, slack, motionless, roasting in the sun, the damp hair clinging to the nape of her neck. [...] Exposed, isolated, she was alone there - or so it seemed - inhabiting a marginal world between the despised, segregated blacks and the indifferent, privileged whites who looked upon us Africans as interlopers on a beach that many felt should have been completely set aside for them." (7) The gaze of Sibiya, the main character of Nkosi's novel, constitutes a motionless object: a „white" woman lying between the sections of a segregated South African beach. Thus the initial moment of a text exploring the gaze and its relation to knowledge and power. By shifting the reader's attention from the predictable plot - love across the colour-bar and the inevitable destruction of a human being by the apartheid legal system - to the apparently minor visual gestures of his protagonists, Nkosi questions the suppositions that underlie one of the favorite liberal themes. The gaze seems to control an „object" .But this control is negated by the written warning, a notice-board behind the woman: „BATHING AREA - FOR WHITES ONLY!" The one who controls by his gaze becomes the one controlled by the writing on the notice board. The written word takes on a special significance in the course of the novel: it defines property relations; who as woman can belong to whom as man; the law as written word produces death in the central court scenes; and conversely, the writing of Sibiya's life-story in prison is a means of resisting a deadly law, transforming whatever time is left in this condemned life into a monument, a communication which comes too late. Almost throughout the novel, Sibiya and Veronica Slater communicate only through visual gestures. The woman's posture on the beach and her gestures suggest to him that she is available. She is alone, exposed, prostrated, occupying a no-man's-land between the „black" and „white" sections of the beach. Although only a small stream separates them from each other physically, the legal warning inhibits their communication to movements of limbs and bodies. It is the contradiction between her body language which disregards the legal sign, and the warning, which is upheld irrespective of the woman's behaviour, that threatens to destroy Sibiya's mastery over his life. The warning on the notice-board disqualifies the validity of his gaze. The gaze, however, has already upset the power relation between „black" and „white" .During his first encounter with the „white" woman a shift takes place in the hierarchical structures; „male" over „female" contradicts „white" over „black" .While Sibiya occupies a position of male superiority in relation to the female object, the legal fact that she is „white" further heightens but at the same time undermines his power. Caught between the language of the bodies and the written language of the law, between the power of his sexual attractiveness and the taboo which destroys the power of his body, Sibiya finds himself in a double bind, to which he responds with blind anger. His rage is not merely triggered off by the suggestion of racial inequality inherent in the warning, but also because it interrupts the illusory moment of his power over the „white" woman, his „victory" arising from the peculiar inversion of the power structures.   The woman's body in front of the „Whites Only"-sign arouses another emotion besides rage in Sibiya: „suddenly as I gazed at her prostrate form I felt a feverish, almost uncontrollable desire for the girl." (7) It is this desire, which is never far removed from his anger, that draws Sibiya back to the beach daily. It is the lure of the forbidden, that attracts Sibiya to the woman. He defies the law, which tells him „where his eyes belong" .The forbidden gaze reveals what the law tries to conceal, which by the way is not the near-nakedness of the body, but the common humanity: „I was compelled by something in the girl's eyes that was ludicrously simple, open, naked, and undemanding, a sort of acknowledgement of myself as a person inhabiting the same planet as herself." (9) This moment of mutual recognition cannot be carried over into any social relationship beyond the minimal one which develops across the boundary stream on the beach. But even this minimal recognition of each other's humanity threatens the social hierarchies and thus in turn the lives of the person who dares to desecrate the unattainable by his gaze. It is not only the heat which dazes Sibiya: „After a minute, when I was sufficiently calm, I stood up. Got up, staggered. I was slightly dizzy from the glare of the sun. I found that I couldn't see properly and a severe headache was coming on. Rapidly, not wishing to look back immediately, I began to walk away (9) It is as though Sibiya saw something so deeply hidden from his rational gaze, that he can only regain his composure by distancing himself from it. The „forbidden" gaze is framed by the self, which in turn has been organized by social discourse. Because there is no linguistic frame for the familiarity of the „white" woman's gaze, it is suppressed. Yet, the trace of the repressed leaves a stigma on Sibiya's psyche: „Looked away but too late to make any difference; for having looked and seen what was not meant for my eyes to see, I became marked forever with the sign of Cain." (9)   In retrospect Sibiya views his response to Veronica Slater in an existential light, rather than a political or a psychological framework, although he alludes to both: „Though now I have had sufficient time to review the events that led to the encounter, I am certain what I felt for her was not exactly sexual desire for a body that I must have known I could never possess, the race laws being what they are in South Africa; no, it was something more, something vaster, sadder, more profound than simple desire. Mingled with that feeling was another emotion: anger." (7) At first, this profound anger is directed at Veronica Slater personally, who appears as the cause of his misery: „Yes, I felt anger for that girl. A sudden, all-consuming fury and blinding rage. She lay there in my path like a jibe, a monstrous provocation, and yet she was not really aware of my presence. [...] Her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open as though ground to dust by a nameless, tameless lust, she was asleep, mindless of the suffering she caused (9) Sibiya later modifies this stance by assigning a merely symbolic, apersonal guilt to Veronica Slater: „this English girl has simply been an instrument in whom is revealed in its most flagrant form the rot and corruption of a society that has cut itself off entirely from the rest of humanity (180) Finally, the woman's status as object is reaffirmed and the victim of her seduction returns to a morally superior position. Sibiya sees himself as secular Christ. He sacrifices his life for the „attainment of the forbidden fruit, a hunger and thirst enjoyed more in its contemplation than in its satisfaction." (183) Knowledge gained through suffering, is „[his] crown of thorns" .(179) Sibiya assumes the same melancholy attitude which he criticizes in the Swiss psychologist, Dr. Dufré: „All the same, I cannot help reflecting sourly that even in misfortune the Europeans must lay claim to some form of superior woe. [...] Theirs, it is claimed with barely concealed satisfaction, is a great struggle, surpassing anything yet known to man, and if they should die of this rapidly worsening disease, they at least take satisfaction in the fact that we can never know the exact dimensions of their anguish." (69) In his story Sibiya adorns himself with the most superior woe of mankind: execution as the victim and saviour of a corrupt society.   Thus he inserts himself in a discourse, which denies him power: as the victim who is superior. Power is an ordering of discourse, which allows the individual to achieve social recognition, even if it allots the individual an inferior position in law and in the distribution of material goods. It is impersonal, a machine. The individual dare not face its insertion in this machine, as such a confrontation would destroy the axioms upon which it bases its strategies. One such strategy is the achievement of social recognition by acting according to norms. It starts at an early age when the child tries to secure its parents's love in order to secure its own identity. In this respect Sibiya's mother plays a central role in the novel. Sibiya is the son of the youngest and favourite wife of the ageing head of a Zulu polygamous household. During his childhood, Sibiya hardly has any personal contact with his father: „During his last days with us, the old man had become a mere shadow of whose existence we were all dimly aware, but whose hard substance it became harder and harder to grasp." (48) He is an impersonation of traditional Zulu values, of a „firm but benevolent authoritarianism" .(48) But he remains shadowy. By contrast, Sibiya's memory of his mother is far more vivid. Though without direct power in Zulu society herself, she uses her position as favourite wife to achieve her ambition of a successful career for Sibiya; even after her own position as the favourite is undermined by the death of her husband, and when she has to provide a living for herself and her son in the city, she does not renounce her dreams for her favourite son. Her ambitions entail a complete break with Zulu tradition: she desires her son to be „white", to achieve through schooling a position „above" the father and „above" traditional Zulu society; a position usurped by the „white" colonialist. Neither she nor her son understand that admission to this society is on the basis of skin colour alone. The hope held out by the missionary schools to provide an entrance into this „superior" society will be dashed: „She conjured up vast empires to be conquered with nothing more powerful than a pen and a tutored mind. Respect, a life of ease, and influence were the likely prizes." (49) The pen will only serve her son to write his prison diary.   The son adopts these ambitions partly to please his mother now, but also as a long-term strategy to outdo his father, the rival of the mother's affection. The son proves his worth by performing an „impossible" task so as to achieve the highest prize. The prize, however, is illusory: to subvert the usurper's authority, and thus and at the same time, the father's authority who submitted to the ursurper. Illusory, because the power relation established by the colonial state cannot be subverted by the individual. The secret of the state and the secret of the father's power cannot be conflated. The lure of the colonial power and the impossibility of subverting it, is well known to the father, who formulates the law in a warning which the son chooses to ignore: „Never lust after a white woman, my child. With her painted lips and soft, shining skin, a white woman is a bait put there to destroy our men." (6) Is it perhaps, because the father is unable to articulate the taboo of the „white" woman with the structure of oppression, the sexual attraction with the ambiguous promise of cooptation? Nkosi deals with the particular South African experience of Oedipus without locating it - except superficially - in any political power struggle. The „bait" which „hooks" Sibiya is not only a seductively beautiful woman, but the promise that was made upon his subjection by discourse. For the promise of this recognition as an individual, he forfeits desire. Yet desire is a major motor for the subject in discourse. The contradiction between desire and the order of language is clearly illustrated in one of Sibiya's dreams: In a setting which resembles a Zulu court, he stands naked „on a pedestal before a huge assemblage of courtiers and armed guards" (119), while the king's daughter dances provocatively in front of him. It is a test of his self-control: „at the very first sign of physical lust my head will go to the chopping block. I am meant to hold firm, resist all desire [...], which is the basis of all wicked deeds and earthly sorrow." (120) Sibiya is confronted with the threat of dismemberment: either he subordinates his desire to the king's or he acts it out and dies. Social power is castration. This is precisely why it cannot be seized by an individual: the phallus as castrated organises the identity of the subject in an act of submission before the social violence which organises his position in society. To be able to act, subjects desire their subjection to existing power structures. Simultaneously, they bend these structures as much as possible to their advantage: they desire the law, and they desire to be exempt from the law.   Sibiya attempts to overcome the social taboos individually by circumventing language. Neither he nor Veronica Slater ever talk, except in a fleeting moment, when they collide at the entrance to the kiosk. Even the consumation of their love is mute. Thus everything that happens is imbued with the quality of the phantasmatic. In this realm the oedipal and the racialist images of South Africa melt into each other, hopelessly entangled. But the racial taboo, which makes the „white" woman on the beach inaccessible only appears as a repetition of the incest taboo. Sibiya, however, uses it as an „impossible" way of overcoming the incest taboo. While he rejects the racialist laws of South Africa, he uses them to enhance the desirability of the woman: while she becomes the tabooed woman of the phantasma, she is accessible precisely because she is not the mother (who is black). Nkosi's liberal affirmation of the basic human right of association collides with his extensive treatment of oedipal features in Sibiya's story. The paradox of Sibiya's desire/obsession is revealed in his dream of returning to „the SOURCE of [his] greatest delight and transport." (122) Traces of this dream recur in Sibiya's description of the love-scene with Veronica Slater: „Now a breath from her skin [...] brought back to me all the forgotten memories of dank, cloistered childhood odors, the milky smell of my mother's breasts, the warm damp odor of crumpled bedclothes." (174) Conversely, the sound of advancing neighbours echoes the dream image of the soldiers at the Zulu court standing ready to behead him at the slightest indication of desire: „I could hear [...] the sullen wavering rhythms of dancers approaching the bungalow in hesitant steps like the footsteps of a weary soldiery." (176)   The muteness of their love game at the beach in its ambiguity of assertion and denial and its contradiction of closest intimacy and alienation allows both partners to deny at any moment that anything has happened between them: „Veronica and I could use no words beyond the primitive language of looks and gestures, beyond the surreptitious grunts and murmurs when desire became too insupportable. In short, we could not declare ourselves." (112) Anonymity and silence ensures, at least temporarily, that an illegal relationship remains undetected. The muteness also ensures the anonymity of the relationship. Neither assigns a name to the other. The name signifies the kinship-group to which an individual is tied by mutual obligations, which in a limited way mediate the authority structures of the larger society. In this sense, the incest-taboo could be seen as the prototype of social taboos. Sibiya attempts to sidestep these taboos by rejecting language. An unreal situation occurs: Whereas he negates the sign of individuality, the name, he seeks to establish the token of identity of the desired object through non-verbal gestures. Insisting that his love is an individualized love, even if it does not know the name of the beloved, Sibiya does not escape the „unmitigated tragedy", „the necessity to love another human being »in an individualized sense« [...] »When it is urgent and demanding, love is both a threat and an impossible prison[.]«" (109f) But could language give a greater certainty of being loved than the unmistakable bodily signs can? Even if it were a mere fantasy, Sibiya insists that he knows: „She waited for my arrival each day as keenly as I looked forward to hers. It was in her eyes, it was all over her face. A pact is what we had entered into, a silent conspiracy." (72)   While this „game" heightenes the players' desire for each other, it also increases their respective stakes in it. Sibiya ignores the difference between play and reality: „I felt, perhaps unjustly, that I had claims upon her as strong as, if not stronger than, those of any other man." (134) Sibiya gambles his life on this unspoken and untried assumption. He does not know to what extent she will honour the unspoken signs of love. Not even the consumation of the sexual act (still mute) gives such a guarantee: the relationship between the two remains without the basis of the (spoken or written) contract, which is acknowledged by society, and which finally establishes a bond on the basis of erotic attraction, which the individual can trust: it can be reclaimed in a court as a binding vow. As such a recognition is an impossibility - at least within the South African situation - Sibiya devises another solution, which is, however, deadly. Just as Veronica leaves open the door while she undresses and goes to bed - a signal which Sibiya interprets as an invitation - so Sibiya himself does not close the door: an invitation for others to witness his „conquest" of a „white" woman. He needs those witnesses, even if his detection in the embrace will mean his death, because what he desires is the conquest not only of his father, but of all authority: despite the deadly injunction the subject has acquired what was forbidden. Of course he looses his gamble: conditioned by racial stereotyping his witnesses do not see a conquest, merely a rape, and when Veronica Slater finally speaks, she confirms this view rather than his. Even she cannot speak the unthinkable (whatever her feelings may have been in the moment of embrace). He becomes a subject, but only the subject of rape. His imaginary escape from identity and his transgression of the taboo ends in his recapture by legal discourse.   The true story, the story which society accepts, appears in the written record of the court. Against this writing Sibiya sets his own writing, which attempts to rectify the other record. Not that he can hope to subvert the consequences of this public writing by his private narrative. But even the much less ambitious task which he sets himself is doomed to failure: without the corroborating evidence of Veronica Slater his evidence is entirely at the mercy of the reader's credulity. The truth about their relationship remains hidden, as long as Veronica denies its existence: Only she „could have supplied the missing links in my faulty and, no doubt, hopelessly affected memory." (169) Her „alternating boldness and fear" (111) characterize the liberal, who is never anything but a bait, dangling the hope of personhood before the credulous, but never keeping her promise. Although she claims to be free of prejudice, she ultimately rejects the „black", whose desire might jeopardise her privileges. For her, the only escape is denial: admitting her lust would mean endless ostracism, and would problably not help Sibiya. This reduplicates the double bind in the family: Although the mother seems to oppose the father's law, she ultimately reinforces it. The child who finds his love denied both by the law of the father and by the fear of the mother begins to doubt his own version of the story: in order to understand what has happened to him and in order to heal his person, he would need that truth which is denied him. Thus his memory becomes the place of ruptures and faults, which he is unable to account for. This faulty memory in turn reopens the question of law and justice: how can anyone trust justice, if it is built on such shifting ground, if the truth necessarily eludes the investigation. His narrative cannot change history, yet it does question the postulates upon which history constructs reality.   What has been repressed, returns. In returning it threatens what has been constituted by the forgetting caused by repression: the subject. The trauma which produced the fundamental split in the subject in its return puts the subject itself into question. When Sibiya intrudes into Veronica's bathroom, „the most private area of her private life, [he feels] both bonded and free, conscious also of a horrible kind of duality [within him]." (135) The centre of the space of his desire therefore is at the same time the prison which he can never escape, because it is identical with his desire: „The bathroom walls [...] assumed the aspect of a dreary white-washed prison." (135) The phallus is always castrated, desire is always a bar to its fulfilment. The price for the „perception of the fathomless depths of [his] desire" (135) is ultimately death, the failure of all vision. In order to regain control over his sight, Sibiya diverts his gaze to Veronica's lingerie, which „hung like a conquerer's flags on the rail" .(135) The shift from the object of desire to its parts marks the limit of the indivual's „coherent" self-analysis: madness and/or death. Like the gaze of the fetishist which is fixed on the last object it grazed before it confronted the symbol of castration, Sibiya's vision fails after it encounters what is supposed to hide the „shame" from his view. From now on the gaze can no longer constitute any visual coherence, and when Sibiya looks into one of the mirrors he sees a „stranger's face [...] reflected there" .(136) The fear of loosing his identity shocks Sibiya into avoiding Veronica temporarily.   In the trial the one who controlled the object of his desire with his gaze in turn becomes the object of the gaze of the public. In the show-case is a „black" rapist, whose presence there has to justify the South African race laws in the eyes of the international media. The „humane" gaze of the international community, which prompts the police to treat their victim as a folk hero, in itself very dubious, as its own desire is both the scandal of racist laws and a spectular case of rape, is contrasted by the gaze of the „white" South African public. They come to watch Sibiya at his physical exercises in prison. Peering through the grill, they avoid any close contact with the „criminal" .Desire is seen as a contagious disease, that nevertheless fascinates. The women seem to be particularly respectful of its dangers: „gloved and hatted, their faces sometimes veiled [...] against what I can only assume they regard as the presence of a contagious disease", (13) they stand behind their men. Thrilled by the close proximity to desire and death, they nevertheless keep a safe (voyeuristic) distance. It is as if the immanence of death lifted the veil off desire. Yet desire, like death, is intangible. What the spectators see, accords with their fantasies. The men project their desire of sexual potency onto the prisoner, only to condemn it. The difference between them and the convict is, however, marked by the symbol of their condemnation: „Sometimes the men will spit on the ground and shout imprecations as they leave. »Dirty black bastard! I wish they'd hang you twice over for what you did.«" (13) But it is only the demarcation of the grille of the prison which seperates this ordinary man from all those other ordinary men, whom they both suspect of equally evil intentions and yet entrust with the ordering of their most intimate sphere: „In my prison uniform I remind my white visitors too much of their garden boys and house servants." (13) In this sense Sibiya is seperated from his fellow men and women by their hypocrisy: „Above all, I have tried to explain as much to myself as to the hordes of anonymous readers - my hypocritical brothers and sisters - who will read, judge, and accuse me with how I came to feature in what has become the most celebrated case of »indecent assault and rape« in the annals of South African crime." (24f)   Ironically, Nkosi reinforces the racial distinctions which he has unmasked as hypocrisy in one of the novel's major scenes. Again, the scene is structured around the gaze, this time the gaze of the „superior" „White": Before he goes to school for the first time Sibiya comes across a „white" family, shopping at Mzimba. For the first time he encounters the power of the „white" man. This power is manifested in the reactions of the crowd of Zulu shoppers. When the „white" man arrives, the crowd withdraws to make room. Not that the man is a high official, he is simply „white" .His authority is based on the terror associated with his skin colour. The nature of this terror is dramatized by the gaze: „Never have I seen eyes like that before. Gray and dully impassive, without any light or radiance in them, they seemed to have no pupils and no centre; they were like two flat buttons in a doll's face. When the white man moved them, they seemed to change shape again. Now they looked like marbles, he simply gazed through you with those opaque marbles that resembled the eyes of a blind man." (56) As he moves through the crowd, feared by all present, the „white" man's authority undermines the father's authority, which Sibiya has learned to respect.   The symbolic order of „black" and „white" is seemingly reversed in the next incident with the „white" girl. Her role in the novel could be compared to that of his mother. In both cases the female subverts the law of the father: The mother uses her position as favourite wife to invert the father's traditional value system; the „white" girl ignores her father's authority by expressing sympathy for Sibiya. Frightened by the „white" man's gaze, the boy backs away, only to be pushed in front of the dreaded family. He falls in an awkward posture before the two girls, „like a man genuflecting in prayer" (56). One of the girls sees him, „her blue eyes pools of wonder and speculation, almost like a startled expression of a person recognizing someone she knew or remembered vaguely." (57) Prompted by her recognition, she takes off a glove to lift Sibiya to his feet. Her gesture is so unexpected, „that a moment of wordless panic like a sudden seizure of the heart overtook [him]." (56) It seems to contradict the father's warning („white" women are bait) and the „white" man's authority. Simultaneously, the vague realization that the law lies, is repressed in the face of the Zulus' response: „From the Zulus came the low murmur of discontent like the hum of bees, a kind of whispered curse, an intake of breath accompanied by fear and horror at the touch of white skin upon black skin." (58) Their behaviour seems to question the validity of Sibiya's experience. In this scene, the narrator dramatizes the difference between „black" and „white" skin. Ironically, he reinforces racialism in a novel, which vehemently condemns it. The friendly gesture across the abyss points out the abyss as much as the common humanity which the reader might see as bridging it in this simple gesture.   The psychological framework of the novel comes into contradiction with its political aims not only at this point, but this dramatization foregrounds the rupture in the underlying conception (or lack of it). Whereas Nkosi acknowledges the imaginary mediation of these levels - these moments stand out as „epiphanies" -, he equates them too easily. Nkosi deployment of stereotypes are a case in point. The novel's characters personify different stock types of apartheid society: Kakmekaar, the prosecutor; Van Niekerk, the history professor and Veronica Slater, the devious temptress. The exaggeration of their characteristics serves a satirical function. Their very typification, on the other hand imbues them with an ahistorical nature and makes them mere tokens of the phantasma of Sibiya. Such abstraction is justified where the personages of the novel merely participate as players in a universal ritual which predetermines their roles. Nkosi seems to argue, that the individual is powerless against this ritual: „When I am gone, there will be others, young blacks who will not see too many suns before they, too, are cut down, before the noose is cast around their necks and the knot is tightened." (181) Although he started out with the South African apartheid-system, Nkosi's pessimism extends to the structure of human laws in general, which are built on repression. The South African race laws intertwine with all human laws, represented by the father. For the individual, the only „escape" from this insupportable situation is death.   From this existentialist position both psychology, represented by Dr. Dufré, and political solidarity seem useless. Although the former can provide an analysis of human laws, it cannot alter them. Sibiya describes the analyst- patient-relation as an alienating one: „a man already condemned to die cannot feel at ease in the presence of another whose life is yet unclouded by the possibilities of imminent death, whose only passion is the excavation of the charred seams of the unconscious." (41) While Sibiya is depicted as taking part in political activities in his university days, these are described perfunctorily, and are forgotten entirely while the phantasmatic affair with Veronica Slater lasts, and play no role in his musings in the prison. Nkosi seems to disregard the possibility of changing a society by political means, while he apparently makes a most impassioned plea against a politically rotten system. Although his treatment of the theme subverts nearly all of the clichés of the liberal novel, it never transcends its centering of the subject, be it as victim or as hero. Nkosi's novel lacks the analytical differentiation which its political subject matter demands. In effect, he is locked in a vicious circle: whereas he rejects apartheid outright, he inadvertently reintroduces it in his general critique of the law. The irony arises out of his ahistorical stance: there is no position outside history, except madness and death.