I’m still sat at my desk trying to write my op-ed for The New York Times. That’s what the English say, isn’t it? I was sat at my desk . . . I was stood in the corner. In South Africa, we are more likely to say I was sitting at my desk . . . I was standing in the corner. Is it cultural appropriation for me to use the English form?
I laugh immoderately at the idea.
Cultural appropriation only becomes relevant where there is a current or historical imbalance of power between the two cultures—where the culture that is doing the borrowing is mainstream and the culture that is being plundered is marginalised. As a white South African, I can borrow the cultural spoils of Britain as much as I like and suffer no penalty other than to be considered pretentious.
A flash of light ignites my brain, and the room is filled with the chorus of a thousand angels.
Would that not be a fruitful line for me to tug in my op-ed for the NYT? Cultural appropriation?
John Coetzee has appropriated my story, one that was mine to tell. He seized it with his greedy, patriarchal fingers and snatched it from me. He has profited from it, both in monetary terms and in the career capital that has accrued to him.
In terms of race and class we are on an equal footing, but in every other respect he is my senior. He is older than me. He was a professor in the English Department while I was a junior lecturer. He is a man and I am a woman. There are not many things you can claim for yourself once you have been raped, but surely the right to tell your own story is one of them?
Yes. I can work with this.
I must whip up the outrage sufficiently so that anyone who points out that we could both tell the story is drowned out. Or dismissed as a cis-het, heteronormative, privileged, patriarchal misogynist.
The trouble with writing an op-ed for The New York Times is that you can’t be emotional. This isn’t Jezebel or Bitch Media. The NYT expects facts and reasoned argument, those trappings of normative oppression. The NYT is the very home of respectability politics. If I don’t play by the rules, I won’t be let in the door.
Being let in the door is important to me. John Coetzee can ignore me in every other forum, but if my story makes it to the NYT, he will be forced to pay attention.
* * *
L. BASCOMBE: How was your date with the vegan?
ME: I already told you.
L. BASCOMBE: No, you told me the fantasy version. I’d like to hear what really happened.
ME: Aren’t you interested in why I felt the need to create such an elaborate fantasy scenario? Isn’t that more of a window into my psyche than a real-world date?
L. BASCOMBE: I think it’s clear to both of us. The only way you can contemplate moving forward in a sexual relationship is if you frame it in a familiar narrative—perhaps one you grew up with as a child. I’m guessing that you read a lot of romance novels as a teenager. After what you have been through, you find the traditional seduction scenario hard to stomach, so you turn it on its head with you as the experienced seducer and the vegan as the ingénue whose innocence is being pillaged.
ME: I suppose you’re right.
L. BASCOMBE: I’m more interested in what really happened. If it had been a happy experience you would have been content to dwell on it, rather than to erase it with fantasy.
ME: It was underwhelming. I think that’s the right word. And I’m afraid he found it so, too. I fear he won’t want to see me again because it was such a lacklustre evening.
L. BASCOMBE: So, it was boring? You didn’t click? You didn’t have much to say to each other?
ME: All of the above.
L. BASCOMBE: Then why would you want to see him again? So you can spend another boring evening together? Why go back for more?
ME: It was my fault that we had so little to say to each other. I need to try harder. I need to be better.
L. BASCOMBE: Why wasn’t it his fault?
ME: Why do I have to explain this to you? He’s a vegan. He is the best-looking person I have ever seen off a movie screen. He has a great Instagram account. It’s grainy and raw and real. He knows people who work in television. Obviously it’s my fault. How could it be otherwise?
L. BASCOMBE: Perhaps he is just dull.
ME: Then why does he have so many followers? Why does he hang out with cool, beautiful people? I have a small life. He has a large life. Finis.
L. BASCOMBE: In your quest for another dull evening, have you contacted him again?
ME: No. I don’t want to seem clingy.
* * *
I finished my op-ed for The New York Times and sent it off. Moira read it and thought it was very good. I expect to hear from them soon.
While I wait, I fork peaches out of the tin into my mouth and do line edits for publishers. After an unprecedented spell of going out, I slip back into staying home. It is easily done. There is not a ripple on the surface of the pond to indicate that I ever left it.
But I get a call from the insurance company. This means I have to go out again.
“This is Jono from Very High Premiums Insurance. Am I speaking to Lucy Lurie?”
“You are.”
“I am processing the householder’s insurance claim for Mr. David Lurie. I see you signed the form detailing items lost in the fire. I wonder if I could speak to you about that?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’d prefer to do this in person. I can come to your house if that would be convenient. Or any other location.”
“Let’s meet for coffee.”
We arrange a time and a place. My sins have found me out. I am going to be questioned about nineteenth-century stinkwood dressers. I will be revealed as a liar.
I phone my father to tell him about this development. He won’t be happy. Anything that might delay or diminish the payout causes him distress.
He is quiet as he absorbs the disappointment. “I was expecting this.”
I don’t think he was, but he likes to maintain the illusion of control.
“Yes, it was only a matter of time. They are simply being conscientious. There is a lot of money at stake, and they want to be sure of dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s.”
“What must I do? What must I say?”
“Stick to the truth. The inventory you compiled was accurate. You can personally vouch for each piece of furniture. Don’t change your story. Don’t elaborate.”
But that’s not the truth, Daddy.
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t get flustered, girl. You lose your nerve too easily.”
“I won’t. I’ll stay strong.”
* * *
Jono from Very High Premiums Insurance wears a grey suit with grey socks and grey shoes. His face is shiny with youth. His hair has been brushed and gelled to cling to the shape of the skull. He shakes my hand and makes eye contact like they taught him in business school.
“Miss Lurie. Good to meet you. Jono from Very High Premiums. Would you like tea or coffee?”
I ask for tea and sit on the edge of my chair. It is a classic marker of guilt, but I can’t help it. I feel guilty because I am guilty.
“Just a few issues to run through.” He consults a clipboard and cross-references it with something on his laptop screen. “Your father said that his collection of antique furniture was amassed over many years. Can you tell me about that?”
“Of course. Some of it was given to my mother and father as a wedding present by my mother’s family. They were farmers in the Worcester district for generations, and had an impressive collection of furniture. My parents were also in the habit of frequenting auction sales and flea markets on weekends. I believe much of their furniture was sourced in that way.”
My mother loved trawling second-hand shops and flea markets. My father hated it. When she died, he got rid of most of what she had collected. I remind myself that I don’t remember exactly what he sold and what he kept. I was twenty at the time. I was at university. I didn’t pay attention.
He keeps his gaze fixed on the clipboard. “On the night of the incident, can you remember whose idea it was to start the fire?”
The question snatches the breath from my lungs. I am a landed fish, begging to be thrown back into the water. Jono keeps his eyes on the clipboard. The Dale Carnegie school of eye contact has been abandoned.
Is this what he wanted? To question me about that night?
“Do you remember, Miss Lurie? Do you remember who decided to start the fire?”
“We didn’t know that a fire had been started until it was almost upon us. My father came to tell me to get up—to get out because the house was on fire. Smoke was already billowing into the sitting room. I wanted to grab a few things, but he told me to leave everything and get out. I didn’t hear them—the intruders—discussing it. I didn’t know they were thinking of such a thing.”
“Right.” His eyes flick up to meet mine for a second, and then he looks down again, tapping his mouse. “Whose idea was it to rape you? You must remember that?”
There is a rushing sound in my head, as though the blood that usually washes around in there has receded. It is low tide in my brain.
“I don’t know who any of my attackers were. I can’t say to you that this one decided this, and that other one demurred. There were six of them, and they were speaking isiXhosa. That’s all I know.”
“Would you recognise them if you saw them again?”
“Yes, but there’s no chance of ever seeing them again. It’s been two years. No arrests have been made. The case has gone cold. I am not sure it was ever warm.”
“Can you remember whether they discussed raping you? Did one of them suggest it and the rest fall in line, or how did it work?”
“It seemed to be their plan from the start. Their only concern was whether there was enough time. They argued about that. They lined up and waited their turn. Then they left. They must have started the fire on their way out.”
“And they took cash?”
“A small amount, yes. They took what was in my bag and in my father’s wallet.” I have already told this to the police. More than once.
“What do you think their purpose was in coming into the house that night?”
“To rape me.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind. “To rob us. And to start the fire.”
Jono from Very High Premiums drains his coffee cup and stands up. “Thank you, Miss Lurie. That was helpful. Very helpful indeed.”
Only after he has gone, does it strike that those were very strange questions for an insurance investigator to ask.
This has happened before. There are people who want to talk to me about what I went through. They want me to describe it to them, to answer their questions. They will keep asking, circling ever closer to the act itself, until I call a halt. I have to set limits. I have to decide so far and no further. Otherwise they will keep asking.
Back home, my father is on the phone almost before I walk in the door. I am pleased to be in a position to reassure him.
“What did he want? What did he ask you?”
“You can relax. He seemed uninterested in the furniture. He asked me a few questions about how and where you had collected it over the years, and that was it.”
I hear my father releasing a puff of breath. “Good. That’s good.”
“He seemed happy with my answers.”
“Good work, my girl.”
His praise makes me glow.
“Did he ask you anything else? Anything that wasn’t about the furniture?”
I hesitate. If my father knows that the insurance investigator was taking a prurient interest in what happened to me, his approval will evaporate.
“No,” I say. “That was all. It was a short meeting.”
* * *
The New York Times has turned me down.
So now my op-ed for the NYT is just an op-ed. Or rather, it is something I once wrote that will never see the outside of my computer.
“Send it to HuffPost,” suggests Moira. “They will publish literally anything.”
“That’s the problem. John Coetzee will be able to ignore a website that publishes literally anything. He wouldn’t have been able to ignore The New York Times.”
“Okay, but you could publish it in more than one place. Let’s say, HuffPost, Salon and Jezebel. The three of them together would be the equivalent of one op-ed in the NYT, wouldn’t they?”
I’m not sure they would. “Three left-wing websites with a reputation for wild-eyed feminism? Won’t that work like homeopathy? The more of them I published my story in, the weaker my argument would become.”
“I see what you mean. John Coetzee exists on a plane of importance that can afford to ignore websites. They are moths battering themselves against the invincibility of his flame. It’s the same with Jonathan Franzen.”
I told you Moira was a star-fucker. The big-man trope of modern publishing has hooked her and reeled her in. Her cheeks flush and her eyes glow as she imagines battering herself to flinders against the flame of John Coetzee’s magnificence.
“You know, you could go even more low-brow than Jezebel and Bitch Media,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the kind of publishing that has no gatekeepers. The kind that will never turn you down, edit you, question your decisions, or invite you to reflect before pressing send.”
“You mean . . . vanity publishing?”
Moira laughs. “You are such a product of the academic establishment, Lucy. It’s not called that any more. No, I’m talking about putting your story out there as a blog and launching a social media campaign to publicise it.”
“So, John Coetzee, who would pay no attention to HuffPost, is supposed to be alarmed by my bloggings and tweetings?”
“He would be if they gained traction. No one is immune to a Twitter storm. Not presidents, not royalty, not celebrities, not academics. It’s the rolling stone that gathers all moss. Twitter storms have ruined lives. How do you think #MeToo got its momentum?”
“I’m not interested in starting a lynch mob. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life, not even John Coetzee’s.”
“Yes, but listen.” Moira’s voice is honey. She is Mephistopheles to my Faust. “You won’t be ruining anyone’s life. That’s an extreme example. You are trying to raise awareness of the masculinist tendency to co-opt women’s narratives. He won the Man Booker Prize off the back of your pain, Lucy.”
He did indeed. He won the Man Booker. Because of my pain. It was my story to tell, and he co-opted it. I need to lean in and reclaim my narrative.
“How?” I say. “How do I do it?”
Mephistopheles smiles and touches my shoulder. I smell brimstone.
“Should I publish my op-ed as a blog, and then tweet the link?”
This suggestion finds no favour. Mephistopheles’ pointed teeth disappear. “That is not an avalanche. That is a stone dropped into a pond. It will disappear without trace. You can do better.”
“Tell me, daemon. I place myself in your hands.”
“Break the op-ed into several smaller pieces. Make them more emotive. Think Caitlin Moran, not Gayatri Spivak. As you publish each one, share the link across all your social media platforms, with emphasis on Twitter.”
“I have a Twitter account, but it’s a dusty and defunct thing with maybe thirty followers. You can’t start an avalanche on flat ground.”
“That doesn’t matter. You are going to tag specific people and organisations in your tweets. So your first tweet might read, ‘I was gang-raped while my father was forced to watch. RT to spread awareness @WomenMedia.’ They are a powerful organisation. If they do retweet it, it will reach twenty-five thousand people.”
My stomach roils at the prospect of turning my experience into a True Confessions headline.
Moira upbraids me for my squeamishness. “How do you expect to put pressure on Coetzee if you’re not willing to get your story out there? It won’t all be True Confessions headlines. You will change your register depending on your audience. So, for @FeministWarrior99, for example, you might tweet, ‘Patriarchy punished me twice for my rape. Please RT.’ And so forth.”
Bleakness rolls over me, blanketing my senses, and numbing my limbs. I don’t know if I can do this. The thought enervates me. But the alternative is equally unattractive. To continue huddling in my little house, scooping syrupy peaches from the tin, washing erratically, eking out a living from my proofreading. Unable to wrench my life onto a different track because the one it is on is a groove so deep and dark that I can’t see a way out.
I need, as they say, to move on.
* * *
I start that same night by turning the first part of my assault into a six-hundred-word blog post that takes the story up to the point where my assailants seized me and made it clear that rape was on their mind. I write it from the premise that a housebreaking is different for a woman than it is for a man. The threat of sexual assault is always present.
I tweet the link, I Facebook it, I share it on Instagram and Snapchat. I preface it with a thoughtful paragraph about how the only way to make sense of what happened to me is to raise awareness of how rape survivors (yes, for this cause, I can bring myself to use the term) need to reclaim their own stories. It is shared across all social media platforms, perhaps fifteen times.
The next day, I write the next instalment—taking the story as far as the moment my eyes locked with my father’s over the heaving shoulder of my assailant. This time, as well as sharing the link generally, I target it at specific media organisations and people of influence in the women’s rights arena—influencers, I believe they are called. Radio hosts, TV personalities, Twitter stars. It is shared about twenty times by ordinary mortals, and once by a radio-show host with a Twitter following of fifty thousand people.
On the third day, I write about how my attackers finally left, and how my father tried to get me into a bath. Then we realised that the house was on fire and barely escaped with our lives. This time I target the story at the True Confessions crowd—YOU magazine, Huisgenoot, Drum, and websites like AllAboutWomen.com. I call my piece “They raped me and burned my house down.” Today the shares and retweets reach over fifty. I get a direct message from a magazine asking if they can run my story in their next issue. There is a certain amount of hand-wringing online about how my father did the wrong thing by trying to get me into a bath, but also about how understandable it was that he wanted to clean and comfort me.
On the fourth day, I write about the secondary victimisation I experienced at the hands of the authorities—the tests and examinations, the questions. There is nothing new in this. It is in the very nature of rape that the evidence collection process will be intrusive and unpleasant. I make it new by writing with great physical immediacy.
I know it’s good even as I write it. You get that feeling sometimes. The words pour out of you in a gush of goodness. It feels adroit.
This time, I target the post at mildly feminist bloggers and websites. A blogger with a following of seventy-five thousand people tweets my link with an endorsement saying that it’s “an important read.” This causes my individual page views to sky-rocket.
I leave it for a few days and watch as the page views for my earlier posts start to climb and climb. The feminist blogger asks if she can feature me on her page. She sends me some questions by email, and I send the answers back the same day. She expresses surprise at my diligence. She doesn’t know I’m on a crusade, and that she is one of the horses I am riding into battle.
The next part is harder to write. I trip over those caveats that troubled me earlier—my awareness that fiction is fiction, and that everything is fair game to the writer. I stick to identity politics. As a man, Coetzee had no right to appropriate my story for his own ends. Fortunately, the political purpose that my story served in his novel is genuinely dubious. I have valid grounds for complaint.
It is bad enough that my rape was appropriated by a male writer, but he used it to construct an unsound messiah-redemption narrative for South Africa too.
I break the last part of my story into two parts—a description of how Coetzee misappropriated my story, and then how it garnered him fame, fortune and literary prizes. He waxed fat and successful. I shrank until my life became a tin of tuna and a blanket over my knees. It would wring the hardest of hearts. Clearly, his success was directly responsible for my failure. Cause and effect.
I decide to go international with this part of my story. The South African media is not big enough to contain the breadth and depth of my grievance. I tweet the literary magazines and the book-review sections of newspapers like The Guardian, the Independent, The Irish Times, and the Los Angeles Times. I tweet left-wing and feminist websites like Salon, Bitch Media, Jezebel, and the Daily Beast.
It’s at this point that I hit a wall. No retweets, no comments, no response whatsoever. The local media lapped up my story. The international media doesn’t care.
I manage to locate John Coetzee’s literary agent on Twitter.
She is a charming, fey creature in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl mould. She tweets full-length mirror selfies of her eccentric charity-shop outfits each morning. She recently acquired a photogenic kitten, named it George Michael, and created a troubled-rock-star persona for it.
I tweet her my blogs in chronological order with enquiring comments like, “Whose story is it to tell?” and “Monetising women’s pain?”
This gets under her skin because she retweets them with her own comments, like “Troubling . . .” and “Thought-provoking . . .”
It catches fire. The agent’s tweets—with my blogs attached—are retweeted thousands of times. In the space of twelve hours, five news websites run op-ed pieces questioning the propriety of what Coetzee did. Many attempts are made to reach him for comment, but he remains silent. His agent, who sowed the wind with her tweets, now reaps the whirlwind of being fired from representing him.
The next morning, an enterprising journalist tracks him down at his favourite coffee shop in Adelaide. This provokes him into an unwise outburst. “I made that bitch famous,” he says, Kanye-style. But what is acceptable in rap culture sounds tone-deaf coming from the mouth of white South African privilege.
Public sentiment turns against Coetzee. He becomes the poster boy for misogyny. His brand is damaged, and no one wants to be associated with it. At first, it is his more minor awards that get taken away from him—middleweight literary prizes that have little resonance in the court of public opinion. Then copycat fever catches hold, and no one wants to be the last to take their award away.
When the Man Booker committee caves and announces that they are rescinding their prize, The New York Times runs a story on it. I get a request from the managing editor to write an op-ed about the whole thing. An op-ed for The New York Times.
Coetzee was nominally in hiding before. Now he goes into hiding for real. It used to be an open secret that he lived in Adelaide. His agent always knew how to get hold of him. He would pop up at selected literary festivals and other glittering events celebrating the elite of the Anglo-American literary world. He could always be persuaded to give a talk if the event were sufficiently five-star.
Now his agent doesn’t know where he is because he doesn’t have an agent any more. There are sightings of him in the Cape Town area. Unconfirmed reports say he is living rough in the Bo-Kaap.
As John Coetzee’s star wanes, so mine waxes. I recover from my agoraphobia and start dressing normally. I get my job back at the university, and within a few years I have tenure. On the same day that I receive my letter of tenure, I finally succumb to Eugene’s repeated entreaties to marry him. We have two children—a girl and a boy.
When I turn thirty-eight, I achieve the necessary mental balance to write my own novel about my experience. It is the ultimate act of taking back one’s power, of reclaiming one’s narrative. The Man Booker committee votes unanimously to give me the prize that year, and when they do, they explain that it is not just any award they are giving me; it is Coetzee’s award.
* * *
Would it make me happy to see Coetzee living homeless in the Bo-Kaap? Would I want his award to be taken away from him and given to me?
The answer is yes to both questions.
But that isn’t a part of myself I want to encourage. If, as the inspirational memes would have it, we all have two dogs living inside us—the noble wolf and the snapping cur—we can choose which one to feed. I choose to feed the wolf and starve the cur.
I won’t embark on Moira’s social media campaign. Not because I think it has no prospects of success, but because I think it has too many.
It is tempting to bring one’s enemies low like this. Instead of internalising your anger and letting it consume you, you leak it onto social media—a corrosive force that consumes all in its wake.
I am not going to do that. Not because I am a good person, but because the disgust-hangover would be too awful, and I am already sufficiently disgusted with myself every day.