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By a stroke of the pen, India became a source of 'slaves'

October 04, 2009 Edition 1

Lindy Stiebel

Revenge of Kali

by: Aziz Hassim

STE Publishers

Review: Lindy Stiebel

At the recent Words on Water festival in Durban, which brought together writers from India and South Africa for two days of discussion and readings, one session was themed Plantation Literature.

Aziz Hassim's second novel, Revenge of Kali, was one of the featured novels which can be seen as the newest addition to South African-Indian writing focusing on the system of indentured labour and its heritage in this country.

Perhaps next year's 150th anniversary of the arrival in 1860 of the first ship carrying indentured labourers from India is one reason for a recent wave of novels featuring this period.

Others in the same genre published last year are Fiona Khan's Reeds of Wrath and Rubendra Govender's Sugar Cane Boy. Both writers are Durban-based.

Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding, by contrast, deals with "passenger" Indian immigrants to South Africa, part of the same wave of migration but significantly "free", merchants not labourers.

Hassim's searing fictionalised account of the lives of indentured labourers on the Natal sugar cane farms begins the book.

The author is unequivocal in his indictment of this cruel form of "slavery", as he described it in a speech at the book's packed Durban launch held at the NuMetro Supernova - owned, appropriately enough, by the Moosa family, who appear in the Grey Street section of his novel: "It was a brilliant contrivance, brilliantly executed. By a stroke of the pen, India replaced Africa as the source of slave labour".

However, the different twist to this novel is that it shows oppression was not all one-way traffic: this is a story about, again in Hassim's own words, "what Indians did to each other". Thus the role of the hated Indian sirdars in maintaining discipline and the pace of daily cane-cutting quotas on the farms is not skirted. Nor is this uncomfortable truth evaded in the book's progress through four generations of the descendants of Ellapen, one of the original indentured labourers.

When the setting moves in parts two and three to The Duchene and Grey Street areas of Durban respectively, oppression is shown as being complex and multiple - of one caste towards another, of one belief system set up against another, of rich landlords evicting poorer tenants, of the strong against the weak, and of men against women in domestic violence.

Hence, the title's reference to Kali. Here she is the avenging goddess "ensuring justice for the powerless". It is a justice promised by the rain-soaked ending: rain that washes away, rain that causes the cane to grow, a torrent of water that allows a logjam to break through.

Despite the book's dark and weighty themes, this is an eminently readable novel with plenty of pace and, above all, a wonderfully authentic evocation of place.

Revenge of Kali is a deeply Durban book. Just listen to this De Certeau-like example of an urban stroll: "Careful now - take a left into Ajax Lane and you will be lost in a maze of alleys and dead-ends; unless you happen to bump into the cantankerous Mr Akoon who, depending on his mood, will take you by the hand and lead you out of the labyrinth and deposit you safely back onto Old Dutch Road - 100 feet from the ill-famed Etna Lane, the home-base of the notorious Duchene Gang".

It's the street world of Benjamin's flaneur, Dickensian in its twists and turns, its low life. In this respect, Revenge of Kali, the second in a trilogy in progress, follows on from Hassim's debut novel, The Lotus People (2003), which won the 2001 Sanlam award for an unpublished novel. The Lotus People also had as its locus "Indian" Durban, particularly Grey Street where Hassim spent his years as a "laaitie". The blurb says that in this debut novel Hassim wished to record a past he is convinced has disappeared forever.

In his localised construction of urban space, Hassim is becoming to Durban what Vladislavic is to Johannesburg, albeit in a more popular register.

Hassim's prose is peppered with words from the street and everyday speech - Thiru, the central character in Revenge of Kali and a descendant of great-grandfather Ellapen, is variously referred to as a "bro", "boet", "scoten", "laaitie", "charou who eats the vadeh and murku" made by his Tamil-speaking granny, or "parti".

The glossary with its mélange of Afrikaans, Hindi, Tamil, Gujerati and Zulu words thoughtfully provided at the end bears witness to the melting pot that was the "old"' Grey Street of years gone by and, indeed, of the world of indenture which had to adapt so rapidly to a South Africa of competing cultures.

This, then, is Revenge of Kali's strength - it has an authentic voice set in a densely visualised place telling a South African story of survival in hard times, generation after generation. That the past needs to find expression in tales such as these is made evident in the evocative chiding of Thiru by the spirits of his forefathers whom he seeks out: "Come kanna. What took you so long!"