My Father, My Monster by McIntosh Polela, Jacana, 2011.

Walter Benjamin describes the act of storytelling as “the locus classicus of the theory of forgetting”. It appears a contrarian statement in view of the way stories are drawn from memory, and how they function as repositories for those things we might otherwise lose, forget, or fail to imagine. And yet, a cursory glance at the South African auto/biographical ley-line would affirm that Benjamin’s formulation holds true. Literature provides certain liberties, albeit well-fenced liberties, for talking about the monsters that lurk under the national bed. And if the philoprogenitive thing that is South African literature can be said to have a leitmotif, then the telling of individual stories certainly has a good shot at being that animating theme. The stories we tell about our private lives, especially those stories that involve the violence and brutality that shaped or distort our lives, allow us to banish the subjects we bring forward, and what is that, if not forgetting?

It’s no surprise, then, that we know the routines, the rhythms, contrasts, and evocations of this house of horrors. Chronicling cruelty seems to be a recurring preoccupation whenever South Africans of a certain age take up the pen. Paging through any number of this country’s noteworthy memoirs and novels, spanning a century or so, reveals that flogging, beating, burning, near-drowning and other forms of violence have always formed part of the oneiric consciousness of this nation. Violence is the country’s idée fixe, and if someone were to someday produce a catalogue raisonné of South African autobiographical works, it would undoubtedly also be a catalogue of corporal punishment.

It’s like being in a literary house of horrors, where the bogeymen change names but the fears are largely the same. The story is always personal, but the narrative journey undertaken is along a national road. To be sure, being able to narrativise one’s trauma has a styptic effect as the TRC process has instructively demonstrated. Breaking the silence to give an account of oneself is not only representing one’s reality, but helping to process the traumatic, to contain and control it. Imposing a plot, as stories tend to do, is imposing order of a certain kind, which is usually helpful when dealing with the disordered lot that is memory.

So it proves with McIntosh Polela’s book, My Father, My Monster. The title is assertive, terse, and it refers to the work’s abiding preoccupation. It’s a rather melodramatic title for a memoir which, in the words of Maureen Isaacson, “bleeds off the page” but that is a minor complaint passed over easily in the reading of these pages. Polela’s is a narrative where the constant unseen threat of the monster – the monster of the title, of course – looms large. The book squares its shoulders and attempts to excise the monster responsible for the privations that blighted McIntosh’s childhood. Some 250 pages later, it accomplishes that. Amongst the tiresome academic-led preoccupation with what young people do in cities and ageing people do in their faubourgs, a preoccupation that causes the low-fat literature that is syringed into our reading conscience in increasing doses, My Father, My Monster is altogether more delicate in its use of trajectories, journeys and pathways. It enlists the readerly desire for a well-plotted bildungsroman, and then proceeds to set its protagonist against diabolical odds in order to heighten the suspense.

Polela writes about his life as it has come to be with an eye for the smaller details and gestures that turn testimony into evocative truth-telling. McIntosh begins his tale of self just after he and his sister Zinhle have been transported from Durban to a village in the shadow of the Drakensberg to stay with their grandmother. This is a forlorn but fairly familiar happening in the South African way of life. But the idyllic rural setting soon reveals itself to be an impoverished, desolate and violent nightmare-world. The early childhood world of doting parents and Coca Cola gives way to stony horrors and traumatic violence in a society where violence seems to be the only form of contact. Taken in by their extended family, the two defenceless children are subject to countless horrors from those who wield authority over them. McIntosh rues that he is not able to protect his young sister, and the guilt he feels over his powerlessness returns again and again as he realises that their parents have abandoned them to this hellish existence. The Rousseauian turn to the rural proves to be a ghastly ordeal for McIntosh and Zinhle, in a community where children are treated as bothersome burdens and love does not appear to exist in any meaningful quantity. Contrary to the notion of the village scene as overflowing with ubuntu, the siblings find themselves in a space where meagre living has turned almost all around them into feral beings.

Instead, there is violence aplenty: “[E]very misdemeanour, no matter how small, was met with a severe whipping. The beatings were disproportionate to our offences,” Polela declares before going on to describe cruelties that might have spilled from the old Germanic children’s tales: adults mercilessly beat the children at the slightest of provocations, throwing “cans at our heads, firewood, even burning wood plucked from the fire”. Their fellow-children are quite beastly in their cruelties.

One night our tormentors made my sister strip half naked and lie on a reed mat. One of the children sprayed insect poison over her bare back and lit a match repeatedly, which exploded into balls of purple fire. Zinhle was incredibly brave. She didn’t cry at the time, so I thought they weren’t hurting her. Only when she showed me her burns the next day and shared the pain of their torment did she cry. I cried too.

There is something quite obscene in the tenor of this violence, something excessive in the violence that resists being absorbed into meaning – which is, surely, the very definition of the monstrous. It is a horrifyingly real world in which children are stripped of anything that might call itself innocence and McIntosh and his sister cannot recover their former lives. They must fend for themselves and attempt to escape the brutal poverty of their bleak surroundings.

And all the while, as the story develops before us, there is the rustle of the unresolved threatening to break through: what has happened to their mother? Why do their relatives cast dark aspersions regarding their father? This dark undercurrent, the spectre of gendered abuse, is the unnameable thing that constantly weighs on McIntosh as he goes through the journey from backwater Pevensey to academic success and from there to success and acclaim in the media field. The author’s anxiety over the unresolved narrative of his mother’s disappearance is palpably expressed over the 43 sections that make up the work. In his search for the story behind his mother’s disappearance from their lives, and his subsequent struggle to come to terms with what he discovers, we witness how he forges himself into a new person, a dialectic twist where the sheer scale of the obstacles to be surmounted means that the achievement of the ‘normal’.

McIntosh’s father is the loathsome evil presence hovering behind the memoir, and the work’s other trajectory is McIntosh’s struggle to come to terms with his father’s violence. My Father, My Monster surges through its chapters to the point of son’s confrontation with father. This should be the satisfying resolution that McIntosh (and the reader looking over McIntosh’s shoulder) demand. But we observe – and this is perhaps the ultimate horror – that when his father makes his appearance he is the picture of civility. At their meetings he discusses, ridiculously, the importance of success and material prosperity with McIntosh as though their relationship were not incurably addled by his actions. The father’s morally bereft, almost psychopathic nature forces the son to look within himself for the closure he seeks.

For all of this horror, it is a relief to note that the adult McIntosh is more than the sum of his abuses. The work is as much about those who have assisted him on his journey of self as those who have hindered him. McIntosh shapes his narrative with an admirable concision of style, and a suppleness that allows him to access both the mordant and the triumphant with equal ease. The retrospective voice is kept to a minimum, which lessens the sense that the story told is shaped to reveal trite, “inspirational” things about the public figure that authored it. The result is that reading My Father, My Monster becomes a free-flowing event, a testament to the elegant prose of its author.

The intersection between subjective violence – the violence meted out by individuals acting in their own capacity – and the wider necrotic seam of social violence, to which the subjective is both symptom and agent, is eloquently played out in this work. McIntosh’s seething awareness is that the women in his life – his mother first, and then his sister – are victimised by a system that allows men to act with impunity. He contextualises the behaviour of the brutal men and suppressed, cornered women he comes across, without diluting the thuggish force of their violence. In this regard, My Father, My Monster is of a piece with those other galleries of the self by writers like Troy Blacklaws, Zakes Mda, or Michiel Heyns. In novels or memoirs by those authors, we have variously encountered murderous children, despotic adults, culturally entrenched violence, and so on. Here, McIntosh crystallises the cultural mores of the people around him into a narrative that grapples with patriarchal societies and the ways in which they contribute to gender(ed) violence. McIntosh speaks of being inducted into the rituals and rites of rural masculinity – he connects the details of rural life into constellations of meaning around gender roles and the ways in which women are either excluded or subject to systematic abuse. In doing so, he undermines the glib simplicity behind pro-community statements like motho ke motho ka batho: the reality is somewhat more complex than that.

We’re aware that the author takes some risk in writing this sort of narrative. He candidly details his weapon-making activities and his role in the political violence that shook South Africa in the early 1990s. To thrust experience out of one’s own brain and on to the page takes a great deal of bravery. In his attempt to bring about healing, McIntosh brings forward much which has been suppressed. To speak in this way is of course to risk alienating oneself from those one has depicted, and during a reading of his work at the Centre of the Book in Cape Town, McIntosh spoke of how he had been asked many times if he wasn’t going against his culture and traditions in publicising his family’s secrets. If My Father, My Monster shows anything, it is that placing the personal outside the boundaries of what can be talked about discourages interventions and preserves invisible practices of domination. McIntosh puts faces to the dry sociological data about broken families, rupturing the veil of silence around both culturally sanctioned abuse and other forms of violence that adhere to the failed nuclear family structure. For this, he must be commended.

Writing this narrative was a journey for McIntosh Polela, an attempt to, as he puts it, “to join the dots, dig up the truth and put the puzzle pieces together”. He, or more accurately his publisher, is keen to stress the truth-telling of this work, its status as testimony. That may be so, but with its taut plotting, withheld revelations of dark secrets, and novel-esque turning points, it certainly has a lot of the creative about it. To say that is not to damn it, but simply to declare that My Father, My Monster is something more than just a brutal life story, generously told. Verisimilitude is what readers want, or have been told they want, and so this most banal of literary impulses is thrust forward. The legend “A True Story”, with which the title page is vandalised, will definitely generate more sales as people seek to put a story of success and pain to the enigmatic fellow they see on their television screens every now and again. My Father, My Monster will certainly reward the programmatic sort of reading encouraged by its publishers, but these guidelines are de trop in their attempt to steer the reader in understanding what this book is about. The thematic explorations that this work wittingly or unwittingly opens up for discussion, around violence and its effects on gendered bodies, the ways in which gender and orthodoxy structure one’s ability to give account – these are just some of the interesting avenues in what is, as one reader put it, a journey of narratives and a narrative of journeys.