Red Dust
By Gillian Slovo
Norton, 340 pages, $25.95
Two prisoners are questioned separately. If they both reveal nothing to their captors, they will both be sentenced to a year in jail. If they both talk, they will both be sentenced to 10 years in jail. If one remains silent and the other talks, the squealer will be freed while the silent one is executed. Each must therefore gauge self- and communal interest before determining a response.
This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. It’s an interesting intellectual game, but in certain places and times the game is less abstract. One such place is South Africa, the setting for Gillian Slovo’s new novel, “Red Dust.”
Near the start of the book, we hear about a similar situation that occurred approximately 15 years earlier, in May 1985, during the national turmoil that finally led to the end of apartheid. Black activists Steve Sizela and Alex Mpondo were being questioned — tortured to inform on each other — in an abandoned farmhouse. Their questioners, Police Officer Dirk Hendricks and Police Chief Pieter Muller, did not play by the rules: Though at least one of the prisoners broke under pressure, the interrogation continued until Sizela was buried in an unmarked grave.
Yet a more apt and ironic twist on the dilemma emerges in the present, as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission confronts the nation’s awful legacy. According to the commission’s mandate, amnesty will be offered upon full confession and, presumably, contrition. Hendricks has applied for amnesty, but Muller would prefer the past to remain secret. Here we have nothing less than torturer’s dilemma, because what each says or does not say will bear directly on the other’s fate.
Adding to the complexity is star witness Alex Mpondo, now a powerful member of Parliament with his own reasons for wishing to keep the past under wraps. His reluctance to testify baffles his attorney, Sarah Brabant, who, like everyone else in “Red Dust,” is wrestling with her own inner demons.
Brabant is in happily self-imposed exile in New York when her dying mentor, Ben Hoffman, calls her home to assist him at the trial. Despite wanting nothing more than complete separation from this place that produces in her a “horrible composite of shame and fear,” she “owed him too much to contemplate refusal.” She arrives at the “bleached landscape shimmering in the heat haze, a vast, brown, ill-defined stretch of scrub and earth.”
The physical ambiguity of the territory that gives Slovo’s book its title echoes the morally ambiguous territory Brabant finds herself in when she discovers that revealing the truth may lead to more emotional disrepair than the crime itself. What to do when events connect “[l]ike a series of tripwires radiating out” is the dilemma for Brabant, also a prisoner of South Africa’s unresolved history.
Every serious novel has moral issues at its core, but most do not wear them as explicitly as “Red Dust.” Indeed, when such issues are brought to the foreground, the result is usually a didactic work in which perfectly legitimate questions efface the natures of the characters who embody them.
Gillian Slovo, however, is as kind to her characters as they are hard on themselves. She portrays the grief of Sizela’s parents, who only wish to know where their son is buried; the semi-Oedipal relationship between Brabant and Hoffman; and the estrangement that Hendricks and Muller must feel when they suddenly find themselves the accused instead of the enforcers of a harsh law. Slovo understands Mpondo’s deep worries and beautifully describes “[f]ear . . . flickering in his chest, . . . climbing up through his throat, crackling at his nerve ends, setting his eyelids quivering.” It’s complicated stuff, and Slovo gives it its due, whether she’s describing the characters’ actions, their natures or the collective soul of Smitsrivier, “a town where men walked slow.”
“Red Dust” is part compelling courthouse drama, part intimate character portrait and predominantly a meditation on how to deal with an intolerable past. Though there is a reasonable desire to punish the guilty, one can’t easily do that without throwing a country back into the morass from which it emerged, because the guilty, quite as reasonably, wish to remain free. Elsewhere on an imperfect Earth-East Germany, Uruguay, Rwanda-it has proven simply impossible to imprison half a populace complicit in a vast crime against the other half. Thus some countries have issued blanket amnesties with an aim to moving toward a better future, while others have drawn lines between the designers of large-scale evil and the small-fry executors. South Africa’s flawed yet perhaps necessary decision to institute its Truth and Reconciliation Commission was clearly a concession to realpolitik and the sense that nation building was more vital than retribution.
Slovo portrays this “dance of the past, this baroque blending of court ceremonial, street party and revivalist meeting” with penetrating honesty and sympathy. She knows that in the context of an ostensibly neutral proceeding that is really a ritualized drama, her characters must serve as “designated freaks, . . . their job to make everybody else look and feel good.” It’s a hard job, but does anyone have to do it? No one can say for certain, and Slovo is strong enough to avoid pat answers.
Instead, she allows Brabant, her surrogate who “thinks not of what should be, but only of what is possible,” to understand that if people “think justice is complicated, well, they should know that the truth is even more elusive.” Coming near the end of “Red Dust,” that’s a sad and hard last thought for a sad and hard book.
