Hear Me Alone
Thando Mgqolozana
Jacana
Thando Mgqolozana’s debut novel, A Man Who Is Not A Man, broke tradition by interrogating the Xhosa ritual of circumcision.
It attracted controversy from self-described traditionalists, but garnered positive reviews. At first glance, Hear Me Alone also promises a degree of controversy because it rewrites the biblical narrative of the Nativity and, as Maureen Isaacson notes, presents “a startling, visceral challenge to the original Christology”.
It takes a while to work out the religious dissonances of Mgqolozana’s Judea, which are interesting, provocative, sometimes amusing.
The patriarchal God of the Bible is replaced by a different prime divinity, the Virgin, not to be confused with the Virgin Mary. Despite the associations raised by the original, Mgqolozana’s Virgin seems to be male. The first point of contact between human beings and divinity is the “hear me alone”.
This figure appears to be a daemon – a semi-divine but often troubling aspect of the self, as opposed to a demon – or perhaps a guardian angel.
A more senior hear me alone, named Gabria, takes on the mantle of the Archangel Gabriel to announce the imminent births of the Baptist and the Lamb, though in more irreverent terms.
The narrator, Epher, is a young man who falls in love with Bellewa Miriam, counterpart to the biblical Mary in the Bible, and that is where all the intriguing complications of the tale lie.
There are complications, however, in the identity of Epher. He is a youth, and indeed is known as “boy Epher”. Despite his tender age, he is a surgeon: he is called on to complete the delivery of a baby that has gone wrong, which he does successfully. Yet he has also been trained by the Teachers of the Law, which points to rabbinical training. Then he mentions in passing that he is a census taker, an official of the Roman Empire.
It is a pity to jam so many occupations into Epher because contradictions like this are easily avoidable.
There are other avoidable weaknesses. There is a frustrating lack of clarity in the narrative itself. Mgqolozana struggles to stitch together unambiguous passages of action. Events are often disjointed and at worst I found their relationship inexplicable. I was often left scratching my head at the many non sequiturs to be found in dialogue, while a brief conversation might be interrupted by lengthy and unfocused digressions on several topics.
At a critical moment – a divinely arranged earthquake which frees Epher and his companion from prison – he reacts by becoming constipated.
The language cries out for editing: Epher “returned to the wake” instead of waking up, he “looked inside” Bellewa Miriam’s face, and he takes a bath with “cooked water”.
Mgqolozana needs to think more carefully about characterisation, structure, action and dialogue. However, the vitality of his imagination is such that – with effective editing – his lively and engaging material could have emerged in much stronger form.
l Barris is a writer, critic and researcher, and works at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. His novel Life Underwater will be released by Kwela Books next year. Find out more about his writing at www.kenbarris.com- Cape Times