Joonnie
by Rayda Jacobs
(Jacana, R148)
Joonie’s life is characterised by a sense of being in the middle. Her father was so desperate for a boy, he christened her Junaid. The nickname by which she goes is a feminine contraction and a pointer to her birthday in June.
It’s not only that she is midway between gender roles – attractive but boyish – but she is also coloured. Running parallel to the soap opera plot is a very obvious socio-political study about coloured identity and a sense of displacement.
Rayda Jacobs is an accomplished author. But her latest belongs to that tired genre of post-apartheid pseudo-memoir. It is a necessary genre of semi-fiction, aimed at preserving memories. But it has become an overdone category.
I do not accuse Jacobs of the above because returning to the past in a genre like this will always be done. What I do feel justified in accusing her of is producing an instance of this genre which is, on the whole, unchallenging and generic.
Joonie’s life is characterised by sexual trauma. She is almost molested by an uncle, hit upon by a teacher and felt up by an irreverent reverend – all this before she turns 18. These traumas have a profound effect on her character. She becomes wily and manipulative, but she is conscientious and self-aware. Early on, the novel explores the stigma of multiracial relationships in 1978 South Africa: Joonie’s brief and confused romance with a white boy, which ends in her surrendering her virginity against a fridge and ending up pregnant.
The boy disappears and this leads to Joonie’s most ambitious rebellion yet. She blackmails the reverend and plans to live with an aunt in the US, raising her child on foreign soil.
As a protagonist, Joonie draws a mixed reaction from the reader. Are we supposed to sympathise or disapprove – or both at once? Sometimes, impatience is the only response to a brash and youthful character who makes odd, life-changing decisions off the cuff, particularly when she commits mistakes we would have hoped her adventurous adolescence would have helped prepare her for.
Perhaps this is a more subjective criticism, but the dialogue doesn’t appear to have quite the ear for social reality, coming off a little wooden and unconvincing.
Occasionally it flares up, allowing for insight like this, spoken by Joonie’s aunt: “You know how our people are. Suddenly they can’t speak Afrikaans anymore. It’s as if by disowning the language, you can disown the place you come from.”
This sense of where a character comes from is central to this novel, which offers a character study into a young girl’s life-changing episodes. The experience is an uncomplicated one, sometimes depressing, sometimes heart-warming, but the final impression is a middle-of-the-road account of growing up. - Daily News