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Rhumba: Proctor’s ‘bare-boned music’

Launch of Rhumba by Elaine Proctor, 9 May 2012, The Book Lounge, Cape Town.

ANNEL PIETERSE

Rhumba by Elaine Proctor

A real winter chill has settled in for the season and a rogue ship is seeking sanctuary in False Bay as we make our way to The Book Lounge for the launch of Elaine Proctor's first novel, Rhumba. Elaine is a South African, based in London. Better known in the world of film, she is a documentary filmmaker and scriptwriter. Rhumba is her first novel. Tonight, Elaine is in conversation with Sarah Nuttall, leading cultural commentator and critic and, as Book Lounge owner Mervyn discloses in his introduction, one of the judges of the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2012. Rhumba has been longlisted for the Fiction Award. No pressure, Elaine.

Nuttall opens the discussion by inviting Proctor to tell us briefly about the book. Proctor first outlines the three major impulses that inspired the story. She notes that, growing up in South Africa, she had a great hunger to explore the continent. Unable at that time to pursue this desire through travel, she “read [her] way through Africa”, and found that the stories about the Congo were the most inspired and intriguing because of their extremity: “At nineteen years, I recognised a lot of those feelings”, she states. The second major impulse that underpins the novel is the question of slavery. Proctor notes that she had seen some work on trafficked women, but no work on their dependents, “the people they were no longer there for once they had been taken”. She recounts how, traveling through Tuscany she once passed an African woman sitting in an alcove hewn into the rock-face next to the road. Dressed provocatively, she was clearly a prostitute, and as Proctor recalls, “there was something anachronistic and tragic about her. The question of who she was, and why she had been left behind, stuck with me.” The third influence on the development of the story was Proctor’s introduction to rhumba music: “I had heard and begun to love rhumba music for its joyous, declamatory nature, and began to think about the hard lives of the people who make this music happen.”

These three combining influences inspired her story of Flambeau, a ten-year old Congolese boy who has been sent by his mother to live with relatives in London, with the promise that she will soon join him. Illegal immigrants wishing to enter the UK are compelled to work through human traffickers, and it is through these channels that Flambeau and his mother both must go. As is often the case, Flambeau is neglected by his relatives, and longs for the coming of his mother. The story opens on the day that she is expected to arrive, and Flambeau prepares for her arrival with care. He waits and waits but she does not come. Determined to find her, Flambeau befriends fellow immigrant Knight, a sapeur and petty-gangster, and the story traces its way through their friendship, and their respective relationships with Knight’s girlfriend Eleanor, a Scottish woman. In order to find Flambeau’s mother, Bijou, Knight must enter the world of human traffickers, an act that threatens his own safety and that of Flambeau.

Nuttall picks up on the performance of self and consumer culture in the novel: “There is a jarring moment in the narrative, where the child states that when his mother comes, he will take her to the Dolce and Gabbana store. This comment thus alludes to the effects of consumer culture. Why introduce this image of the sapeur, the petty gangster?”

Proctor explains that sapeurs are a phenomenon, a subculture among the Congolese. Inspired by Congolese musician Papa Wamba, sapeurs are “people who worship the cloth”, who display “an intention of self that has nothing to do with actuality”. She refers the audience to Charles Baudelaire’s conception of the Dandy’s delight in clothes and material elegance as symbolising the superiority of their hearts and minds, in a performance of identity that comes out of a sense of extreme disconnection. She notes that when Flambeau has to choose between his aunt, who is failing him, and the sapeur, Knight, who looks as though he is going places, Flambeau ultimately chooses the sapeur. Thus, Flambeau becomes a baby sapeur, a sapeur in training, and for a while he feels liberated from the constraints of his life. Ultimately, however, he realises that the freedom suggested by the self-styling of the sapeur is an illusion.

Linking this point back to her own interest in the self-stylisation of Johannesburg youth, Nuttall mentions the culture of “conspicuous consumption and destruction” among township youth, where young people will save up to buy brand name products specifically in order to destroy these products by burning their expensive designer clothes and sometime also money.

Thinking about Johannesburg as a “township metropolis”, Nuttall posits that people dress beautifully in order to counter a history of degradation of space. She suggests that the key to reading Johannesburg at the moment lies in understanding that “the body is the house”. People will walk in spaces that are not beautiful, but be beautifully dressed. Nuttall defines this as a “politics of body” versus a “politics of house”.

With the audience now up to speed on the general gist of the story, Nuttall proceeds to steer the conversation to more specific issues. “I’m going to throw a lot of ideas at you and I want you to come back at me in as forceful a way as you can”, she tells Proctor in characteristically forthright fashion. Eish, Elaine, I think, rather you than me. But Elaine looks calm and poised, and assures the audience that she will not flinch from an engagement.

“Coming back to the music”, Nuttall suggests that one of the difficulties in writing about Africans from London is that it depends on capturing a lot of detail. “How does the rhumba’s play of flesh and meat, sexual joy, and explicitness of dancing feature in the novel?” Additionally, Nuttall reminds the audience that the rhumba is a West African music form, and she wonders how one might have brought the places of West Africa more effectively into the novel. She also notes that human-trafficking and destitute children are standard tropes when writing about immigrants in London, and wonders to what extent the book troubles or complicates these tropes. Reflecting on the fact that the novel reads like a film, Nuttall wryly admits that she “might be one of the few people who thinks this is a good thing”, and wonders to what extent Proctor was conscious of the filmic influence on the novel’s form. For Nuttall, a possible critique of the use of this form is that it tends to be somewhat truncated, leading to one-dimensional characters, and she mentions that in her reading, the white Scottish woman seems to be the most rounded character.

Gamely, Proctor picks up the thread. She agrees that rhumba music is “full of its journey. It began in the Congo, then traveled all over the place.” She describes the music as having blood in it: “Blood, sexuality, life, appetite, greed, all these things are present in the immigrant community in Britain.” She suggests that, as an immigrant in Britain, you are under great pressure to perform you “Englishness”, to repress those elements that define you as not English. The rhumba therefore offers these immigrants an opportunity to “transform themselves into rock stars of a Congolese kind” over weekends, when they get together to dance.

Proctor pauses for a moment, then impresses upon the audience: “It wasn’t only me who wrote the story, there were powers greater than myself at work. Through music comes a tremendous weight of knowledge and experience, which I attempted to communicate through my fingertips in some of the words that I wrote down.”

Disagreeing with Nuttall’s reading of Eleanor as the most rounded, most interesting character, Proctor suggests that what drove her writing was her attempt to learn the Congo and the immigrant community as deeply as she could, and then in a “cheeky and possibly impossible connection” weave in what she knew of South Africa, “knew in [her] own bones”, having grown up here during the height of apartheid, and knowing “how dark things can be, and people can be, and still find a space for love”.

“Yes”, says Nuttall, “I noticed that your Congolese immigrants say ‘eish’”. Nuttall’s possibly skeptic tone prompts an audience member to chip in and corroborate that Congolese immigrants in London do, indeed, use this proudly South African term. “Thank God they say ‘eish’”, laughs Proctor.

Still, Nuttall queries the cost in taking an African life and writing about it. She points out that the novel was written with a British reader in mind, and mentions that London reviewers are saying “great novel”, while South African reviewers are more reserved, and find that the novel might be hampered by an outside perspective that does not quite do justice to the African lives it tries to trace. Nuttall suggests that the worry with portraying Congolese characters in London is that they have to carry their own history in order to be intelligible to readers in London. “You as an author have to perform for us certain gestures towards the African characters. A bifurcation happens in the way in which London seems authentic, but the African characters do not.”

For Proctor, however, it is exactly this bifurcation that forms the crux of the relationships in the book. The novel is about the moment of intersection between Eleanor and the Congolese man and child, “full of blood and muscle”. She suggests that film is often associated with this language of “blood and muscle”, while literary language is often more subtle, and that she “was going for a language of density and physicality” in order to describe this moment of encounter, of intersection.

“Nonetheless”, Nuttall pushes, “when mama eventually appears, it’s rather an anti-climax. She is scantily clad, servicing truck drivers. In your rendering, which obviously draws on your vision of the woman next to the road, mama remains inanimate.”

Proctor interrupts. Disagreeing with Nuttall, she describes Flambeau’s mother as “ruined from this beautiful, capable woman who was once a teacher”. Referring to one of the last scenes in the novel, she describes how Flambeau, having found his mother, must call her back from the edge of the ocean, as she is about to give herself over to it. “He knows she cannot live with herself, and he calls out to her. Then there is a cut (film language!) to the point of view of a truck driver, who sees these two figures, dancing the rhumba on the beach.” The novel ends on this image of the intimate dance between mother and son, an action that suggests the slow recuperation of the mother’s body in the face of the abuses she has suffered as a victim of human trafficking.

The session concludes with Proctor reading from the first chapter of the novel, an extract that seems to underscore the presence of the body in the language of the book. I am struck by the extensive use of sound, as she describes Flambeau’s hunting of a turtledove on the roof of a city building. Watching him hunt, the character Eleanor listens as he sings to the dove to charm it and is herself charmed: “It was bare-boned music.”

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