Queer Carrots! Shaun de Waal on Shadow Game, End and Porcupine
Michael Power’s Shadow Game, written during the era of the apartheid sex laws, is a novel old enough to be counted a “modern classic”. Barbara Adair’s End and Jane Bennett’s Porcupine were minted this year, a sexually uncloistered year during which gay people married and adopted children.
Shaun de Waal spins an orange thread to run between the three. Queer, innit?
His squeezing of the books on to a glass plate for inspection under the “queer lit” lens brings that modern-classic conundrum to the fore, the one which asks whether it’s fair to queerify a text, just because of who wrote it. De Waal doesn’t go there, preferring to count queerness as read. Here’s his very interesting queer take:
If you wanted a quick sense of how far queer literature has come in South Africa in the past 30 years, you could do worse than compare Michael Power’s novel Shadow Game (Penguin), first published in 1972, with two recent queer works, Barbara Adair’s End (Jacana) and Jane Bennett’s Porcupine (Kwela). I say “queer” because it’s worth considering works such as Adair’s that go beyond an easily identifiable “gay” or “lesbian” sensibility and into an area of gender indeterminacy that is the end-point of the emergence of such sexual and gender identities.
Power’s novel was first published under a pseudonym in Britain and promptly banned in South Africa. It has been resurrected by Stephen Gray, himself an important figure in South Africa’s queer literary history, for Penguin’s Modern Classics series (and given a lovely cover). It tells of the love affair between a white man, a publicist for a big corporation called The Organisation, clearly not a million miles distant from Anglo American, and a black radio personality. Of course such liaisons were illegal in South Africa: doubly so, because interracial relationships were restricted under the Immorality Act, and homosexual love was simply out of bounds.
Book Details
- Shadow Game by Michael Power
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EAN: 9780143185567
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- End by Barbara Adair
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EAN: 9781770093058
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- Porcupine by Jane Bennett
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EAN: 9780795702655
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Apr
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