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language: English
country: South Africa
year: 2016
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 9.4.26-17.4.26
I don’t know if he is safe to talk to. I don’t know who masters his politics.
Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges reminds me in some respects of Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum, in that it is a speculative novel of a dystopian South Africa, grappling with the history of Apartheid. where Ntshanga focuses on a capitalist hellscape near-future, Wood — a white writer and former anti-Apartheid activist — instead sets his narrative in an alternate timeline, one where the Soviet Union was not dismantled (though its end seems to be approaching) and — implicitly as a result of the continuation of the Cold War — Apartheid persisted into the 2010s.
the novel follows two characters: Martin van Deventer, an Afrikaner psychologist in a state institution that seems to work primarily with Black and Indian patients, and Sibusiso Mchunu, a Zulu university student who is institutionalized following the murder of one of his friends by police during an anti-Apartheid demonstration. the novel alternates between their perspectives, with the exception of the final (two-sentence) chapter, sometimes overlapping, as their stories unfold in parallel. Martin and Sibusiso are brought together by a device developed by Martin and one of his (Afrikaner) friends, a box that allows for a kind of mind-reading, which Martin illegally tests on Sibusiso (notionally with the latter’s consent, but in an institutional context Sibusiso’s consent is, I think, only dubiously meaningful). this test throws both of their lives into chaos: Martin finds himself pursued by the state intelligence agency, which wants to use the device to root out resistance to Apartheid; Sibusiso, meanwhile, is recruited by uMkhonto weSizwe to steal the device so that it can be shared with the ANC’s Chinese allies, who have plans to mass-produce it.
the novel’s plot rests, fundamentally, on a deeply idealist conception of political resistance, the idea that the basis of Apartheid is a lack of empathy. the transformation that Sibusiso sets in motion is the mass distribution of a gamified version of Martin’s device to encourage white South Africans to understand Black suffering; this, the novel suggests, will be the straw that finally breaks the back of the beleaguered camel of the Apartheid state — though, to Wood’s credit, economic factors are acknowledged as significant as well. this aspect of the plot is less interesting to me, frankly, than its shifting of perspectives and the way it’s thinking about what it would mean for Apartheid to persist into the age of the internet. some of this is the impact of technologies we tend to take for granted — camera phones are banned, for example, to prevent videos of protests and state brutality from circulating on the internet (provided they can make it past the state’s firewalls) — and some of this is about the texture of everyday life.
the perspectives are really the highlight of this. the portrayal of Martin clearly draws in part on Wood’s own experience as a clinical psychologist, and Azanian Bridges is critical of the institutions of psychology in general and, especially, of the intersection of these institutions with systems of oppression. the problem of Sibusiso’s consent stands out in particular here: when Martin and his co-inventor are discussing the prospect of testing the device, they explicitly acknowledge that no experiment with it will ever make it past an ethics board. Martin’s coworker points out the obvious solution:
“You work in a place where people are readily available, Marty; I think you can do this — even if it’s off the record, as it were.”
“You serious?”
His cheeks are even tighter and I know that look well — he used to wear it when he took his ball home at school, if the game didn’t go his way.
This time though, he is offering me the ball, although he seems to let go with reluctance.
“What’s stopping us?” he shrugs, “The Yanks got away with Tuskegee. This is a whole lot better than that; I’m pretty sure the link with brain tumours is spurious.”
Martin’s arc over the course of the novel is a coming into political consciousness: he has thought of himself as a liberal, committed to a “colorblind” equality (“The word ‘black’ sticks to my tongue like glue, but Sibusiso has given me enough cues he wants me to verbalize colour, although I still worry it polarizes us…”), but the events of the novel force him to reckon with the fact that liberal platitudes are not enough in the face of structural inequality. to his credit, he does seem to be developing a more radical social consciousness, though he has to be strong-armed into joining the ANC; to the novel’s credit, it doesn’t wrap everything up in a neat little bow: Martin at the end of the novel is still a well-meaning liberal white guy, even if his encounters with state power have begun to push him further. the process will take more than the few months the novel spans.
Sibusiso’s arc, too, is about coming into political consciousness, though he has less distance to travel than Martin does. in Sibusiso’s case, it’s a movement from passive support for anti-Apartheid struggle, through grappling with his trauma from the police attack that opens the novel, towards, first, the prospect of active involvement in revolutionary struggle and then, all too abruptly, the crushing force of state repression. both Sibusiso’s and Martin’s chapters are narrated in first person, and I thought Sibusiso’s mix of youthful earnestness and grimly portrayed trauma more compelling than Martin’s. I do think I would say that the book addresses itself, to a non-trivial extent, to white readers, but I also think that Sibusiso’s perspective does more than evoke white pity (not least because he has flaws of his own). the novel is in part about the jarring disconnect between Martin‘s and Sibusiso’s experiences, the ways race has conditioned every aspect of their lives, no matter how much Martin would like to overlook this.
when I say “the jarring disconnect” I mean the thing I most wanted to talk about in relation to this book, which is that at several points Wood narrates scenes — Martin and Sibusiso’s counseling sessions at the hospital — from both perspectives, and the two perspectives are different! the broad strokes are usually the same, but the details are not, particularly around dialogue but sometimes in terms of sequences of actions. I am obsessed with this choice, because it casts doubt on both narrations. whose account of their first use of the device is accurate? is either one accurate? how much can we trust Martin’s narration when he is — by his own narration of, ostensibly, Sibusiso’s words — “a little more racist than you think, but a little less racist than I… worried”? is that supposed statement simply self-congratulation, since what Sibusiso reports saying is simply “[t]hat your first name is Martin and you need a woman”? is Sibusiso concealing things in his narration, things he might not want to acknowledge?
Wood doesn’t answer these questions, and the tension that this disconnect creates looms over and adds depth to the entire novel, in a way that makes sense in the context of a book that’s about mind-reading and the power — or not — of empathy. I think there are perhaps two readings of Sibusiso’s question to Martin when he first proposes they use the device: “Why are my words alone not enough?”
this question, I think, should throw into question the seemingly idealist politics of the novel, for all that its conclusion seems to end by reaffirming them: why, Azanian Bridges asks, are the words of the oppressed not enough? why must they — metaphorically or literally — bare their souls in order to win the sympathy of their oppressors? and, perhaps more pointedly, why are Sibusiso’s words alone not enough? why do you need to read a white writer’s book — we should remember that the only South African literature Nobel prize winners are Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, both white — to empathize with the suffering of Black people? to the extent that Martin’s perspective is autobiographical — though Wood was not an Afrikaner afaik — I think the book wants, at least in part, to undermine itself/not to take the position of representational authority claimed by writers like Gordimer and Coetzee.
it’s an unsettling — in a good way — read. I have some minor critiques — a lot of comma splices, occasionally jumpy pacing — but I’m really glad I was able to pick this up.
moods: dark, hopeful, polemic