Review: Abel Phelps. 2004. Sunshine and Shadows: A Collection of South African Short Stories. Echoing Green Press

Margaret Lenta   

The Publisher’s Note which introduces this volume of short stories points out that it is divided into two groups, the first eight stories set in the rural Eastern Cape and the southern Free State in early twentieth century South Africa (three of them in the post-Anglo-Boer War period), and the second group of eleven in urban settings, except for one, which is set on an archeological dig in Jordan. The Publisher describes these stories as “seen through innocent eyes”, and innocence is indeed their leading characteristic. The late Guy Butler, who writes a brief introduction, calls them “[b]lessedly unportentous”, and goes on to prefer the stories in which the author makes no moral point.

It is certainly true that though these stories are undated as to the period in which they were written (they appeared first in print in 1991 and were reissued in 2004) they seem in their sensibility to predate the ante- and post-apartheid literary debates. This is especially true of those which have a rural setting, and which seem to echo to some extent the subject matter of Bosman’s stories. Both versions of “The Cable Bridge”, which tell of a Boer farmer’s wife jealousy of the pretty young sister-in-law quartered on her household during the Anglo-Boer War, offer a sense of both women which could be Bosman’s. “A Gift of Milk” has an understanding of the way in which bereavement, at least amongst the generous, can produce a sympathetic understanding which may compensate for the antagonisms generated by war, reminding the reader of Bosman’s “The Rooinek”. The embittered recluse of Phelps’s “Oom Kallie”, unable to cope with the world outside the small section of the greater farm to which he has been confined all his life, is at least related to the protagonist of “The Clay Pit” and other stories in which Bosman looks at the trauma which can accrue from a lifetime of isolation in a rural area.

Any volume of stories written or conceived of by a sensibility formed before the mid-1980s in South Africa is likely to run into trouble when presented to the reader in the present day. South Africa has changed, and we have changed with it. A story like “The Yellow Horses” which explicitly sites itself in the past, in which men racially different and therefore holding themselves remote from each other in their lifestyles can nevertheless come together in their love for horses now seems a ‘yes, well?” experience to the reader, too conscious of what this narrow band of understanding has to omit. The story “The Kite”, which shows a rural Zulu boy’s understanding of his world as permanently enriched by his attendance on a sick white child who wants to fly his kites and who after a few days moves on to more interesting toys, seems to me another “yes, well?”. The questions which it leaves unanswered, about that rural, servile understanding of the world and how it is likely to alter, seem more interesting than those which it answers.

It is unreasonable to expect this volume to be anything other than what its author in his time made it, but it is equally unreasonable to expect the reader of our day unquestioningly to inhabit the different time space in which its stories, materially or ideologically, are set. Bosman’s stories, narrated or focalised through men whose perspectives on life are evidently limited to those of the white, Afrikaans, rural group, can now be understood as ironic and revealing of the perspectives of contemporaneous South Africans. Bosman’s long propensity to set his stories in an area where he had spent a few months of his life implied his belief that South Africa as a nation-state could well, at that stage of history, be represented by the Marico. Phelps does not seem equally clear, even in his rural stories, about the status, individually representative or typical, of his stories.

His urban stories offer a viewpoint which is, without seeming to be aware of it, revelatory of an understanding of women which began to decline in the late sixties and early seventies and which is now almost inaccessible except through history. This is equally true of race: “The Headwork” reveals with little interpretative comment a Coloured man’s acceptance that he must alter his appearance to accommodate the prejudices of his day. These are people accepting their own humiliation. Now, thank God, people fight against it.

Can we enjoy these stories today because they are “innocent” and make, for the most part, moral points to which readers of the past were accustomed? The answer must be “well, yes” – they can be part of our understanding of the past, but certainly not of our present