A Dry White Season

 I finished reading André Brink's classic 1979 novel A Dry White Season today. My admiration for it grew the deeper into it I read. At its opening, the book seems set to be made of rather unpromising materials. But it gathers to a peak of enormous emotional power by its final pages. 

Brink's book is obviously a classic story about politics and injustice, apartheid and authoritarianism. 

But it is also, just as obviously, a story about loneliness—the existential loneliness that comes from realizing that one is ultimately alone in the universe—that one can never really know another human being. 

This, indeed, is an oft-repeated refrain in the novel: the narrator's loneliness at discovering that he never really knew his friend Ben Du Toit, despite years of acquaintance. Ben's loneliness at realizing he never really knew his wife across decades of marriage. 

The loneliness of being hunted by an authoritarian state that has labeled you a traitor. 

The loneliness of seeing even one's family and closest supporters turn against one as the "contagion" of persecution spreads. 

And, finally, the loneliness of realizing that one cannot—despite the best intentions—bridge the gap of racism in a bigoted society. 

Despite gestures of fraternity and love, the narrator discovers at last that he stands alone—

... a stranger and afraid 

In a world I never made 

As A.E. Housman immortally described the human predicament.

And how am I to face the odds 

Of man's bedevilment and God's? 

Ben Du Toit is certainly bedeviled from both directions. Afrikaner society turns its back on him. The police spy on him and hunt him and put bombs in his mailbox. His pastor tries to talk him out of his misguided quest for redemption and justice. 

"Vengeance belongs to God, not to us," the pastor intones. Ergo, let the question of guilt and innocence lie.  "I find something hard in you which I never knew before," he adds. 

To which Ben replies: "How well did you really know me, Dominee?" That same refrain again—no one ever really knows another. 

Ben says it of his wife too: "Realising for the first time what a total stranger she was. And if she was a stranger to me, the woman I had lived with for so many years, how could I presume ever to understand anything else?"

In a passage that will read as "very 2020" to modern American readers—even though it was penned almost fifty years ago—and which may even elicit eyerolls from people sick of hearing it—but only because we know it is true and inescapable—Brink writes: 

"I am white. And because I'm white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favoured by the very circumstances I abhor."

"I thought it was possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. But I grasped so little really [...]"

"How dare I presume to say," he says of a Black acquaintance and co-conspirator: "He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more." 

[...] 'Twas but another bubble burst

Upon the curdling draught of life,

—As Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote, in a poem that epitomizes the central theme of Brink's book:

My silent patience mine again.

As who, of forms that crowd unknown

Within a distant mirror's shade,

Deems such an one himself, and makes

Some sign; but when the image shakes

No whit, he finds his thought betray'd,

And must seek elsewhere for his own.

Each of us seeks its kin and re-discovers, after the appearance of recognition in another, that after all, we are alone. 

Our quests for love, for justice, for friendship, are efforts to bridge an unbridgeable gulf. Ben Du Toit is driven out of white Afrikaner society, deprived of family, home, and livelihood because he takes a stand on a basic point of justice; but then, when he seeks comradeship in Soweto—he is attacked and stoned there too. 

"Even if I'm hated, and ostracised, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me," he observes; "[...] Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and [...]  affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?" 

In one heartrending passage, his friend Stanley offers a vision of the long-postponed day of racial brotherhood. "I won't have to dodge your neighbours' fucking dogs [...] We'll walk out here in broad daylight together, man. [...] Arm in arm, I tell you."

But immediately after that, the narrator notes: "It was the last time they saw each other." Stanley is forced to flee the country shortly thereafter. 

"Alone," Ben concludes, "Alone to the very end. I. Stanley. Melanie. Every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?"

Even if we are condemned to be ships that pass in the night, perhaps our yearning and stumbling efforts to reach out for one another during the moment of passage is the one place we can find meaning. 

As Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote—in one of those eerie poems of his that refer to some mysterious and unnamed guilt or fate, and which seem inexorably if indirectly related somehow to his existential plight as a Black man in a white supremacist society: 

My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing;

For I would hail and check that ship of ships.

I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,

My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips,

And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.

[...]

O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,

O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!

Is there no hope for me? Is there no way

That I may sight and check that speeding bark

Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?

And is there still no hope for us today, in our own white supremacist society, with its steadily eroding voting rights and civil rights—the gains wrung in blood by yesterday's generations—with all these things being divested from us one by one—

With the hopes for racial justice that seemed so live just a couple years ago vanishing amidst a heaving far-right backlash? 

Was 2020 our brief moment to brush hands with the other passengers, and now it is already gone—"passing, passing" out of sight?