Johan Liebenberg

Someone wrote that art is the mediator between life and the reader, or something like that. I read it so long ago, I can’t remember the exact words but it may well have been Thomas Mann who wrote it. It is through reading the novels that we begin to see the familiar in a new way, in a way that often surprises us. The student in Disgrace and Mrs Noerdien are magnificent creatures that come alive in the pages of a novel. As Hemingway wrote somewhere: a book written from the imagination is more real than if the events really happened. (I feel I have misquoted him terribly so I will have to try to find the correct quotation.)

Was I thinking of these wonderful characters when, this past week, I was on the point of phoning Shireen and asking her, or her partner Zainuk, if they knew of a young beautiful Malay girl I could photograph. The idea is that Shireen or Zainuk will be taking me around the Cape Malay Quarter, or the Bokaap as it is commonly known, to photograph some houses bought by ‘outsiders’, many of them British I believe. I have not yet asked them, perhaps feeling a little timid about such a request, but I have this image of a door slightly ajar, or perhaps halfway, and a girl staring back at the camera from inside the doorway. She has oval cheeks, and like Coetzee’s Mrs Noerdien, this girl is gazelle-eyed, the softness of her oval face hinting at the soft, curves of her body which is mostly hidden beneath her loose cotton cloak.
Perhaps, on the other hand, I am trying to recreate an incident that happened to me about 15 years ago:
“In 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was taking some photographs for an article on the Bo-Kaap, a gorgeous enclave at the upper end of Cape Town, also known as the ‘Malay Quarters’. I was feeling timid. A new dispensation had come into being, a black government had been elected in the first democratically elected elections. What would happen now? What was I doing here? A ‘whitey’ (as we were known by people of colour) in the Malay Quarters. Taking photographs was also not the most desireable thing to be doing. I had always, in some atavistic manner, thought that taking a photograph of someone means you are ‘stealing’ the soul of a person. In fact, in some countries in the Far East this belief still prevails, I heard. I expected to be shown the way out of the area soon enough and had prepared myself mentally to beat a hasty retreat.”
“Instead the opposite happened.”
“As I stood in one of the little narrow street, fussing with the settings of the Nikon, a lady in a headscarf appeared at the top floor of a narrow, little house on the opposite side of the road and with a friendly greeting, she invited me to come upstairs. “Come and have some tea,” she said. “Tea?” I could scarcely believe my ears. Was this really happening? Had in this big, anonymous city a complete stranger just invited me up for tea? I was not mistaken. Upstairs the woman, in her early forties, had laid out tea things neatly on the rectangular table in the centre of the room. She went away and returned a minute later with a plate of cakes and biscuits, including Malay doughnuts, a specialty of the Bo-Kaap, which is a sweet cake dipped in coconut sprinkles. She sat down in an easy chair opposite in the sparsely furnished sitting room, which, through its large window, offered a breathtaking view over the city. As we sat talking with my telling her about the article I was doing, a young girl of 17 or so appeared in the doorway, clutching a two-year old baby on her hip. The girl looked past me at her mother. The woman, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, introduced the girl as her daughter and the child on her hip, she said, was her youngest daughter. Like her mother, the teenage girl’s oval face was framed by a cotton headscarf. When I raised my camera and asked her if I could take a photograph of her, she averted her face and quickly vanished from sight. “She’s shy,” the mother said, filling our cups once more.“
This is the way my article on the People of the Malay Quarters starts. I wonder if I am trying to recreate the image of that unknown girl who vanished the moment I tried to photograph her.
The point is, really, that Coetzee created someone in Mrs Noerdien that is unforgettable. I have wondered why his description is so effective and I have come to the conclusion that it is because by now, through his previous novels, we have come to know him. We have temporarily adopted his world view, his view of beauty, his who sensibility and we know by now that more is to come. We suspect, or at least I do, to be a little intoxicated with Mrs Noerdien, and also to fall in love with her as one tends to do with most female heroines in novels.