[1944-]
Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was educated at the universities of Witwatersrand and Natal. He worked as a journalist in Durban before leaving for London in 1975. In 1971 he and Mike Kirkwood had privately printed their collection Whitewashes, but Hope’s first major publication of poetry was Cape Drives (1974). This volume focuses on the ambiguous position of the white, English-speaking minority in South Africa and includes ‘The Flight of the White South Africans’, an elegy to Hope’s native land and to the people he would be leaving behind. Hope received the Thomas Pringle Prize in 1972 and the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1974.
Cape Drives was followed by In the Country of the Black Pig (1981) and the long poem Englishmen (1985). By this time, Hope had developed a reputation for his deft mixture of the comic and tragic, and for his ability to expose the absurdity of the South African racial system without trivializing it. His first novel, A Separate Development (1980), received the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was temporarily banned in South Africa. In 1985 Hope won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction for Kruger’s Alp (1984), a darkly humorous allegory that parodies Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to examine the abuses of power in South Africa. His 1986 novel, The Hottentot Room, provides a bleak vision of exile, as South African expatriates and a German-Jewish refugee whose former husband was a Nazi face corruption and moral dilemmas in a London club. Hope’s last work to directly address South African issues is the autobiographical White Boy Running (1988), in which he acknowledges that the concept of going ‘overseas’ was preferable to his growing disenchantment, ‘akin to losing a form of religious faith’, with South Africa. His novel Serenity House (1992) is a satire of modern life in England and the United States, merging the unlikely settings of Florida’s Magic Kingdom, Poland’s Auschwitz and a home for the elderly in London’s Highgate. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1992. Hope is also the author of My Chocolate Redeemer (1989) and the travel commentary Moscow! Moscow! (1990), which won a PEN Award.
Hope’s work has been included in a number of anthologies and he has been published in many magazines and journals, among them the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and London Magazine, In addition to his novels and poems, he has written travel commentary, children’s books and plays for radio and television. Hope is a regular reviewer for the BBC and various newspapers and periodicals, and he lectures and reads internationally for the British Council. His latest novel, Darkest England, was published in 1996.
In the following extract from Hope’s comic novel Darkest England, David Mungo Booi, a native of black Africa, is chosen by a conclave of elders to explore England as a site suitable for settlement and to assess if the natives are friendly and agreeable. In this satire of the literature of exploration, the violence of modern British life, as well as the absurdity of its many rituals, is seen through the eyes of Hope’s fictional hero.
It was an awesome journey, that expedition into the heart of London. As you travel you might be like the even tinier creatures who live on a water-spider, floating haphazardly down a stream. You feel you are in the world as it was in its primeval beginnings. Every so often we would stop at stations and a group of young warriors, male and female, would board in a kind of explosion, a whirl of white limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling.
I was delighted to have a chance to note the peculiar characteristics of the natives as we rolled slowly southward. The females are notable for the small development of the mammary organs. Few have small waists. Both sexes pierce their ears. Some of the young warriors cut their hair, as do those of the peace tribe, so that it commands their heads like an axe-blade, which they colour with a variety of strong hues. Often they employ scarification, and amongst the most popular of the clan-marks is a stippled line along the temporal lobes from the external edges of the eyebrows to the middle of the cheeks or the lower jaws.
With each stop, a fresh invasion. The chants went up anew, and I felt as if prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? Their cries were incomprehensible. My friend interpreted for me, saying that some commented on the failures of the French, or the deformities of foreigners generally.
I should not be in the least bit afeared, as this was a perfectly normal practice – bands of sport lovers travelling abroad to support their country.
Love of country among these young men was unashamed, as they repeatedly chanted the beloved name of their sceptred isle, which they pronounced with a curious double beat, accentuating both syllables, ENG-LAND! ENG-LAND! Many carried flags. Not only was the proud standard waved at every opportunity, but many of them had made clothes of the national emblem and wore it as a shirt, or as a scarf or even as trousers. Some flew the flag on the tips of their stout black boots, or had tattooed tiny flaglets on each knuckle. One fine young buck, clearly a super-patriot, had emblazoned the beloved red, white and blue on his shaven skull, and the precious emblem flew wonderfully against the granite gleam of bone. Another had taken matters a step further and, perhaps because he was a great singer, he bellowed out ‘God Save the Queen’ in a rough baritone, showing, as he did so, that each of his teeth had been stained red, white and blue. This display of what we might call dental patriotism impressed me deeply.
None the less, I had to confide in my mentor that the sight left me secretly appalled, as a sane man would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in the madhouse.
On catching sight of me, they became very excited. Some leaped from their seats, lifting their arms and scratching in their armpits as if troubled by furious itching; some threw monkey nuts in an artillery barrage of shells, ending with a large banana which struck me on the forehead to the accompaniment of loud cheers. They howled, they leapt and spun and made horrid faces. Ugly? Yes, it was ugly enough, but I felt in me a faint response to the terrible frankness of that noise. It was something that we, so far from the night of the First Ages, find so hard to comprehend, that someone from another part of the world should be traditionally saluted with fruit and nuts.
Good Farebrother, seeing my perplexity, assured me that it was all quite normal, really, a regular occurrence, I should not mistake ceremonial displays of aggression for anything more than healthy high spirits. It was not a war they were preparing for, but a sporting ritual. Certainly I need have no fear for myself, since bloodshed was something they generally preferred to pursue abroad, and, wishing to reassure me of this, he now waved and smiled at the young people.
Perhaps this was not helpful, for the crowd began to take a closer interest in my episcopal companion. One young brave, his hair closely shaved, who had until then been preoccupied with the task of carving his name, DARREN, into the seats with a sharpened screwdriver, now tapped the ex-Bishop on the chest and, indicating his lovely purple frock, demanded to know if he were the Pope. The question accompanied by a large wink at his mates, indicating, I felt sure, that here was a sign of that fabled English humour.
The good Farebrother responded equally gaily with a gentle smile that he was Not Guilty! That, to the contrary, he was Church of England, Eng-Land!, giving to the name of his country just the same double emphasis as the young warriors had done, showing that he was emphatically of their kind.
Unfortunately, the joke did not now, as I had expected, lead to general laughter and good humour all round. Not at all. Hearing the word ‘Pope’, the others began chorusing their desire to perform sexual intercourse with the Pope, whom I took to be some person who inspired deep physical desire in Englishmen. That the young fellows were aroused seemed clear. Calling repeatedly for carnal relations with this Pope person, they grunted, whistled, stamped their feet and brandished their colours; I saw flags in the air, flags in their hair, flags on their fingers and flags on their toes. In this way they arrived at such a state of sexual excitation that some began tearing up the seats and throwing them across the carriage; others began pelting us with coins, and all the time they gave out this curious greeting or salute, perhaps an unconscious expression of their physical erections; that is to say, they lifted stiff arms before their chests and pointed their fingers into the air, as if to suggest the direction from which they expected this longed-for Pope to appear.
I was fascinated. Why, I asked my friend, were these people so filled with desire for the Pope? Did they love him?
On the contrary, came the astonishing reply. They hated him.
Then why did they wish to lie with him?
I had misunderstood the subtleties of the language, said the Bishop, rising from his seat as the missiles rained down on us, and urging me towards the door. The good old Anglo-Saxon expression used did, indeed, refer to coitus, but it was also synonymous with the desire to destroy.
Alas, we were forced to abandon this fascinating etymological discussion, for several coins had struck the Bishop about the head and he was bleeding into his white collar. Seizing my hand, he pulled me into the safety of the corridor, and we beat a retreat to the far end of the train, and locked ourselves in a lavatory.
It was later – oh, so much later – that I remembered, too late, my suitcase and its gifts for the Sovereign. I comforted myself a little with the hope that they might at least be bestowed, by these seeming admirers, on His Majesty the Pope.
And very much later, when I told the good Bishop of my loss, he consoled me by saying that the star-stones at least were safe in his keeping.
We spent the rest of the journey to the capital in the lavatory. I did my best to staunch his bleeding, while he told me how very shocked he had been by such behaviour on what he called his home turf. Sad was a word he used. As well as setback. And scandal. It was also really most unusual. Normally these young people reserved that sort of behaviour for trips abroad.
But they had seemed to be enjoying themselves, I suggested.
This saddened him further. I must be careful not to give way to unwarranted cynicism. We had been exposed to the hooligan element, a tiny hard core of thugs, who were not representative of the great mass of ordinary, decent sports lovers. These sorts of people not only brought the national pastime into disrepute but dragged the country down to a level one was more accustomed to expecting from less civilized people. Still, we must look on the bright side. I had been taught several useful lessons about the patriotism of the young. Having seen what fate awaited the Pope, I could imagine the treatment I would receive if these young patriots took against me. My training in Little Musing had given me the outlines of the camouflage needed if ever I was to travel safely in England. Now the time had come to put a London gloss on the good work.