South African Identity, by Ceridwen Dovey

(View entire post here)

People often seem surprised that Blood Kin isn't set in South Africa, where I was born and grew up (with stints in Australia because of my father's anti-apartheid activities). There does seem to be a tradition of a debut novel (especially by a young author) being quasi-autobiographical, particularly if that author lived through politically tumultuous times in his/her childhood. I started writing Blood Kin when I had just moved back to South Africa after ten years living away from the country, and I remember feeling that the only way I could say anything about the experience of growing up there as a white in the 1980s, in the thick of apartheid, was in the form of a fable, with no cultural markers and no explicit geographical setting.

This form let me explore themes that are particularly South African (guilt, complicity, cycles of power abuse) without being hamstrung by the politics of representation, especially as a young white writer who - despite my parents' opposition to apartheid - was still a beneficiary of that regime, through the free health care and schooling that was provided to all whites.

But I'm not sure that I fully deserve to be described as a "South African author." I've had joint South African and Australian citizenship since I was two. I no longer live in South Africa and I don't know when I will again in the future. My parents live in Sydney; my sister in London. I now belong to the South African diaspora rather than to South Africa.

My flatmates in New York are both South African and we often get caught up in the vortex of the defining debate of diasporic South Africans: should we stay or should we go? Should we return home or get a second, safer citizenship in the first world? We are the new generation of soutpiels - an old derogatory Afrikaans term for rednecks, who have one foot in South Africa, one foot in another country overseas (usually England), and their nether regions dangling in the salty ocean.

The next South African national election is coming up at the end of April. I track South African politics, worried about the country's failing infrastructure, the documented corruption, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. But I try never to let these feelings of alarm justify in an oversimplified or smug way my own decision to leave; I try not to fall into the habit of this particular diaspora, where justifying one's own position (and the year one left - pre-1994 equals good South African; post-1994 equals bad South African, which makes me half of each) is a kind of anxious pastime. I try never to ignore the good news about the country.

We are a strange kind of diaspora - not the same as others formed by people who fled their countries of origin as victims, feeling justified, vindicated, morally secure in their reasons for leaving. The South African diaspora feels the double sting of loss and guilt, the twinned anxieties of losing all that is familiar and not being sure if we're even justified in feeling bereft at having lost it.

Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin, Penguin, Penguin Books