my traitors heart by Rian Malan

Author:Rian Malan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WALLS

Man is a great wall builder The Berlin Wall The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem But the wall most impregnable Has a moat flowing with frigbt around his heart A wall without windows for the spirit to breeze through A wall without a door for love to walk in.

OSWALD MTSHALI, Soweto poet THE MURDER VICTIM this time was an Afrikaner traditionalist, an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church and a supporter of Dr. Andries Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, which stood for a return to the granitic, unyielding apartheid of the Verwoerd and Vorster eras. He made the mistake of driving into a township on a bad day and had an accident in a hailstorm of stones. He was white. A black mob hauled him out of his wrecked pickup and trampled him to death.

In the aftermath, I knocked on the door of the dead man’s home and found myself facing his widow. She was young and slender and pale with grief. After her children were in bed, I asked her to tell me about her husband. She said she couldn’t.

She said her family would not like it. She hinted at some terrible secret, something too dark and painful to be aired in public. I pressed her, though, and she finally relented.

She said her husband was brain dead when he reached the hospital, and that doctors told her there was no hope for him.

They wanted to turn off the life-support systems and use his organs to give life to others. She thought that that was a good idea, so she gave her blessing. The machines were turned off, and her husband was allowed to die.

And then his heart was transplanted-into a black man. The widow saw no wrong in that at all, because she was not one to hate, but the family in the countryside… It tormented them, tortured them. They could not eat or sleep for the thought of their white son’s heart beating on inside a black body. They simply could not bear it. Tbey wanted the heart back. They wanted the widow to hire a lawyer and sue the hospital to force the doctors to slice that black man’s chest open and return their son’s heart to them, so that it could be buried with the rest of him. That is why she could not talk to me.

It was not a dispute to be aired in public.

And so I left, mesmerized by the appalling power of the story I’d just heard. Tbey wanted the heart back. The shelves of my flat were lined with books about apartheid, dozens and dozens of books about apartheid, all dismissing the idea of race as a biological misnomer, rooted in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“To speak of race,” sniffed the journal Critical Inquiry, ‘is to speak … generally in metaphor.” That about summed up the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom was incapable of interpreting the widow’s tale. I found it hard to see her story as a metaphor for anything.

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