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National Longing, Natural Belonging 

ise of postcoloniality, a nation should incorporate even the most minor of minorities into its purview. however, Dangor does not conceive of a simple one-on-one relationship between text and nation. instead, his work is suffused with a revolutionary momentum that not only reflects the nation but also anticipates and corrects its homogenizing impulses.

“national allegory,” to use Frederic Jameson’s term, in Kafka’s Curse does not merely mirror the political landscape, it also offers a vision of the per-fect composition of the nation: one that bestows belonging upon outsiders and Others by enabling them to become the nation.²

Dangor allegorizes indians-as-nation and their consequent empower-ment through an elaborately conceived network of images that reveals how the intersection of apartheid and indianness confuses the categories of postcoloniality and transnationalism. each and every aspect of the text’s symbolic configuration represents or foreshadows aspects of the public and political domain, both in terms of South africa in general and the indian community in particular. Symbolic morphology thus enables a useful reflection on some of the issues central to this book, such as the east-South model of diaspora, assimilation versus cultural specificity, the instability of South african identity, racial mixing, the africanization of indians, the indianization of South africa, and particularly the assertion of national belonging and the claiming of citizenry. yet Dangor examines these issues differently from the other indian writers we have encoun-tered in this project.

For example, Kafka’s Curse reflects on the trajectory of diaspora from not only india to South africa but also within South africa itself. This internal migration is represented through the protagonist’s move from the nonwhite townships to the white suburbs. The blurred racial lines in Dangor’s text further reveal an alternative history of indian immigration to South africa—that of slavery rather than of indenture or trade—thus rede-fining indianness itself. indian identity in Kafka’s Curse is an intensely hybrid state of being that has intermingled with other races to such an extent that its “essence” has been forever lost. The africanization of indi-ans encountered in Kafka’s Curse is not a superficial blackness assumed for political expediency, but is located at the heart of one’s biological being and created through extended cross-racial fertilization. Dangor’s version of indianness extends to the seventeenth century, when indians first arrived in the Cape as slaves, unlike the indentured version of indianness that originates in natal from 1860 onward.

as stated earlier, Kafka’s Curse is underpinned by dense imagery that allegorizes the state of transition that characterized South africa in

the early 1990s.³ The transition period spans the years between 1990 and 1994, when South africans were celebrating the fall of apartheid but still awaiting universal franchise. as nearly everyone who has written on Kafka’s Curse has pointed out, the thematic schema of the novel is dominated by the motifs of “racial mixture” (Sastry 276), metamorphosis, transgression, and border crossing.⁴ in its relentless documentation of the possibility of movement, Kafka’s Curse reveals the untenable natures of taxonomies that depend on strict boundaries. racial movement then reflects the changing political scenario of the transition period.

Dangor also uses intricate imagery to assert indian belonging in South africa. Dominant suggestions of rootedness and finding place include architecture, sculpture, birds, dust, and trees.⁵ The dual emphasis on movement and place is not contradictory; rather, movement and place assert the same political agenda. Flux suggests that national, diasporic, and individual identity operates on a continuum and is always subject to change. belonging intimates that the indian community has come of age in South africa by nearing the end of the process of identity formation through the acquisition of South african citizenry.

Kafka’s Curse represents not only the obvious shift in political sensi-bility, but also the less obvious shift in genre. apartheid-era indian writ-ing is formally characterized by the proliferation of the short story and stylistically marked by gritty realism. Postapartheid indian writing favors the novel as the dominant mode of literary expression and expands its thematic parameters outside of the story of political oppression. Kafka’s Curse, as short story cycle/novel and as social document/magical realist fantasy, encapsulates the characteristics of both apartheid and postapart-heid fiction and bursts the boundaries of genre, theme, and ideology. Fic-tion then provides a specular gateway to macropolitics as the transiFic-tion period reveals literary sensibilities from both eras. Writing from the inter-regnum also shows us the impossibility of drawing lines between two supposedly discrete historical moments as each will always be inflected in the other.⁶

Dangor’s impossible-to-categorize text consists of four linked stories and a novella, which appears right in the middle of the stories. The text invites us to collect the pieces as a whole even as each “story” stands comfortably on its own. however, the richness of Kafka’s Curse emerges only after we configure the text in its entirety. even though it is important to emphasize that this text is a sequence of short stories, it also aspires toward the textual cogency a novel promises. here i foreground Jameson’s claim that “all Third World texts are necessarily . . . national allegories”

National Longing, Natural Belonging 

(69) and Timothy brennan’s assertion that “it was the novel that histori-cally accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one yet many’

of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (“national longing” 44). The narrative unity of Kafka’s Curse represents a desire for a larger national unity. The novel incorporates national allegory into the heart of its com-positional structure to claim that the postcolonial nation must include all that has been excluded, oppressed, and marginalized into its imagi-nary. Thus, it is no coincidence that the indian community finds voice at the very same historical juncture in which the democratic nation comes into being. later chapters will demonstrate that indians have the most agency and authority during the nation’s nascence. as the boundaries of the new nation solidify, they also become more exclusionary, fortifying the discourses of Otherness and Self-Sameness that writers such as Dangor deconstruct so skillfully.

Despite this sense of alienation that persists even in the rainbow nation, Dangor’s novel represents a community coming of age. indians attaining majority in South africa does not mean an external recognition of importance, but rather an internal awareness of a minority’s rootedness in and centrality to the new South africa. by showing how a text that is so invested in the specificity of indianness can also allegorize the South african nation, Dangor reveals that indians not only participate in the project of nation-making but also are the nation.

While Dangor’s work focuses mostly on the “Coloured” experience under apartheid, Kafka’s Curse articulates the particularity of indo-islamic anxieties in the transition period and the abiding interconnect-edness of races.⁷ The title alludes to Franz Kafka’s “metamorphosis,” in which a man wakes up one day and finds himself changed into a beetle.

at one level this novel—i am going to refer to it as such for the sake of convenience—is about a South african muslim, Omar Khan, who trans-forms himself into Oscar Kahn, as Jewishness was a socially acceptable ethnicity in apartheid South africa.⁸ but Kafka’s Curse also meditates on the nature of South african indian identity, especially muslim identity, in postapartheid South africa and on what it means to occupy an alternative space, not only in the black-and-white world of South african race rela-tions but also in a nation whose religious identity operates largely within the parameters of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The title of the first story, “moving to the Suburbs,” deftly allegorizes the various kinds of racial movement articulated in Kafka’s Curse. “moving to the suburbs” suggests not just moving from slum to arcadia but also, at

once, an overdetermined transformation from dispossession to privilege, black to white, islam to Judaism. as loren Kruger argues, “Omar’s pass-ing into Oscar’s territory is thus registered less in racial impersonation than in spatial and social dis- and re-location. . . . he moves from Khan to Kahn, township to suburb, coloured ancestry to Jewish pedigree, and perhaps also from muslim probity to Judeo-Christian laxity (from malik’s point of view)” (“black” 128). “moving to the suburbs” also references the east-West diaspora that indians must reject. if east-West migration suggests a movement from the hurly-burly of the third world to the mani-cured spaces of the first world, Omar’s migration from the nonwhite town-ships to the white suburbs reinforces the east-West model of diaspora.

however, the novel seeks an alternative trajectory of diasporic exchange:

one that not only reconfigures migration across an east-South axis but also explodes the idea of geographic coordinates by demonstrating that all South africans are marked by the alterity and flux usually associated with diasporic populations.

Omar’s metamorphosis into Oscar is not just for material gain, social standing, or for victory in love. The answer lies somewhere in between.

he reflects on the tragedy of miscegenation and passing:

i cannot claim that anna [his white english wife] brought this upon me, that for the love of her i broke the bonds of my beginnings and defied the ancient injunction not to desert the pride or clan, not to leave the village of rickety houses or climb out of the womb of our nation. . . . The fact is that i met anna long after i changed my name from Omar to Oscar and, by reordering one letter of the alphabet, had changed the name of my father from Khan to Kahn. The ease, the casual sleight of hand with which you could change an entire history seems lost on those who are punishing me now. (32)

This is a summation of the paradox of maintaining islamic purity in South africa. Oscar is breaking “bonds of beginnings” that have already been bro-ken by the first acts of migration: the great movement of indians as slaves, indentured labor, and traders. The purity of islamic identity, then, has already been irredeemably compromised. “The pride and the clan” have always already been abandoned. Dangor points to the untenable desire to maintain purity in diaspora, even if that diaspora took shape under colonialism and apartheid, systems that were nourished on the idea of absolute purity. in showing that all it takes is a rearrangement of letters to transform Omar Khan to Oscar Kahn, Dangor reveals the transmutability

National Longing, Natural Belonging 

of racial and historical categories and the easy slippage of one mode of existence to another.

although islamic indianness is the dominant identity that is staged, and desperately maintained, in this novel, Oscar is “a mixture, Javanese and Dutch and indian and God knows what else, they would discover.

he was the lovely hybrid whom anna had fallen in love with, perhaps because of his hybridity” (14). indianness is hatched and rehatched in South africa to such an extent that it can never recuperate its purity. yet Afrindian identity is articulated in another way here. if the term sug-gests the coupling of african and indian, Dangor expands the constitutive parameters of the term to include Coloureds (as the Javanese would have been categorized) and whites (the Dutch). Dangor also moves away from the rhetoric of identification that characterized the apartheid period as well as his own earlier work. While he foregrounds the impurity of indian-ness, in remembering Coloureds and whites as South africans, he refuses to invoke the umbrella category of black as shorthand for all dispossessed South africans. in highlighting the allegorical resonances of text as nation, Dangor reminds us that the transfer of power from white rule to black rule should not mean a transfer from one binary mode of racial thinking to another for in-betweenness must be incorporated into the body of the nation.

in-betweenness lies at the heart of Oscar’s tragedy: “no, the antago-nism was not between good and evil or between black and white. i’m still not sure why they became the poles between which i had to choose.

i chose neither, of course, and that is when all this began” (50). Occu-pying an alternative place in the black-and-white map of South african race relations, indianness is afflicted by a similar tragedy of unbelonging.

Significantly, the night his illness begins, Oscar says he “was besieged by voices, cajoling voices, screaming, tormenting, vilifying, voices of unspeakable grief, maddening, beautiful. it took all my will-power . . . to keep me from rushing out into the darkness in search for their source, gurgling like a throat that had been cut” (54–55). Oscar has just revisited the township for the first time since his renegade conversion in order to attend his mother’s funeral; the return to roots causes his haunting and then his strange sickness. We have already encountered indians as disem-bodied spirits in Deena Padayachee’s story “Ghosts,” where the repressed return to stage their claim to South african belonging. Similarly, Omar’s discarded indian past will haunt Oscar until he recognizes its claims upon his sense of self. it is also significant that indianness is described as “gur-gling like a throat that had been cut.” The violent erasure of the history of

indians in the national register has reduced the articulation of indianness to bloody babble.

national allegory is also configured through the chronological parame-ters of Oscar’s existence: 1948–1996. Oscar is born the year that apartheid was institutionalized as political praxis; he dies two years after the end of the transition era, when an anC government was firmly entrenched in the hallways of power. The violence inflicted on the psyche of nonwhite peo-ple who pass as white in order to purchase social capital manifests itself as a physical unnamable sickness. however, because Omar’s dates render him an allegory for South africa, Dangor suggests that South africa itself has been passing as white for nearly fifty years and is now afflicted by the unnamable, incurable illness that racial passing necessarily entails.

The year 1996 also brought the first census in democratic South africa. a census enumerates the inhabitants of a geographic space for demographic purposes. in other words, it makes a nation count all its citizens. The auditory resonances of census (“sense us”) are particularly germane to South african indians, who have been historically clamor-ing to be “sensed” by the nation makers. Oscar’s death in 1996 can be seen as the coming of age of the indian community as Indians. indians who pass as white can no longer be numerically calibrated in the nation’s composition. Significantly, when Oscar’s brother malik comes to collect his body, he finds nothing there except some fine powder. Oscar’s clothes are folded on a chair: “a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, the soft white kofiya, very similar to the one he wore himself” (67). as the evocation of the kofiya (islamic headgear) suggests, in death Oscar has reclaimed his islamic indianness even as islamic indianness reclaims him by death.⁹

in the South africa of this novel, Jewishness is conflated with white-ness and becomes a form of social and racial mobility: “This oppressive country had next-to-nazis in government, yet had a place a begrudged place but a place nevertheless for Jews. Can you believe it? For that eternally persecuted race? because they were white” (33).¹⁰ Whiteness absorbs Oscar so completely that he becomes inured to the racial practice of apartheid. he hops onto a whites-only bus without thinking twice about whom the bus leaves behind, becoming, as he says, “completely acclima-tized” (34). however, boundary crossing is much more tentative than the social privilege attributed to it above suggests. Oscar marries a white girl of old natal stock and is constantly uneasy lest “some manner or man-nerism, a mispronounced word, a plural verb in the wrong place, some inherent fault-line in the crust of my being” gives him away (48). When Oscar’s mother dies and he returns to his childhood home for the funeral

National Longing, Natural Belonging 

ceremonies, he slips into the islamic rites of passage with extreme ease.

Significantly, he remarks as his brother waits to drive him home that he is headed to his “banishment” (54). here lies the crux of Oscar’s tragedy.

The transgression of racial categories engenders not so much empower-ment as much as the neurosis of exile. Oscar’s israel is not the Jewish holy land but the little community of muslims in South africa.

Kafka’s Curse thus locates indians such as Oscar in a “double dias-pora” (bharucha 67).¹¹ if the migration of subcontinentals to South africa yields a model of diaspora unfurling across an east-South axis, the inter-nal migration within South africa—this time across an east-West axis inside an east-South paradigm—reproduces in Omar/Oscar the anxiet-ies of assimilation, loss of culture, and transplantation that the state of diaspora traditionally generates.¹² vilashini Cooppan points out that the

“question of just how snugly South africa fits into postcolonial paradigms is a vexed one” (348). apartheid, in other words, troubles discourses of postcoloniality and transnationalism, its unique scaffolding necessitating a unique theoretical discourse. The need for a different hermeneutic lens with which to view the postcoloniality of South africa is further enhanced by the indian diaspora. The idea of an internal diaspora, for example, exacerbates the usual diasporic anxieties of place and belonging, thus requiring a new methodological approach—one that recognizes the dual boundary crossing that someone such as Omar undertakes.

The flux and instability that Oscar embodies are paradoxically rein-forced by the rhetoric of belonging and finding place. images of systematic construction fortify the nexus between indianness and rootedness. ian baucom argues that “englishness has consistently been defined through appeals to the identity-endowing properties of place. . . . [T]hese mate-rial places have been understood to literally shape the identities of the subjects inhabiting or passing through them” (4). Dangor uses places—

including images of buildings, sculpture, and trees—to inscribe indian identity into the South african land.

Significantly, Oscar first meets anna in Durban’s famous indian local-ity, Grey Street, “Grey” appropriately conjuring up the indeterminate space between black and white that indians inhabit.¹³ an architect by profes-sion, Oscar is sent to Durban to design a “huge tower with a revolving restaurant . . . near Grey Street. alongside muslim minarets and hindu temples and holy roman Cathedrals would rise this phallus. apartheid with its balls up” (44–45). The presence of islam and hinduism in Durban

Significantly, Oscar first meets anna in Durban’s famous indian local-ity, Grey Street, “Grey” appropriately conjuring up the indeterminate space between black and white that indians inhabit.¹³ an architect by profes-sion, Oscar is sent to Durban to design a “huge tower with a revolving restaurant . . . near Grey Street. alongside muslim minarets and hindu temples and holy roman Cathedrals would rise this phallus. apartheid with its balls up” (44–45). The presence of islam and hinduism in Durban