Green Planets (29 page)

This chapter argues that the field of South African speculative fiction presents a rich, uncultivated area of study that allows for the exploration of a range of themes relevant to the South African condition, including (but by no means restricted to) issues of gendered and racialized inequity. It examines how South African speculative narratives not only explore the construction of identity in a deeply divided and rapidly changing society, but also the ways in which human beings place themselves in relation to nature and nonhumans and form notions of “ecological” belonging.

These crises of self and place are taken up in South African speculative fiction, most notably through the use of the altered body and the post-apocalyptic wasteland. These tropes are of course well established in Western European and North American
SF
as well. In the South African speculative texts to be examined in this chapter, the symbolic
novum
of the altered body (in the form of the alien, clone, or cyborg) is utilized in order to comment on racial and gendered relations in South Africa, and related manifestations of alienation and displacement. These texts interrogate the notion of a nuanced and complex identity and its relation to a myriad of hierarchized other(s), proposing afresh the slipperiness of the boundaries between self and seemingly “alien” other.

These encounters with alterity are played out against the backdrop of ecological catastrophe, pointing to an engagement with ecological concerns, particularly the dire threat to Earth's ecosystem as a result of the massive impact of global warming, pollution, the human population's overexploitation of natural resources, and ruthless experimentation with weapons of mass destruction. Identity formation in post-apartheid South Africa is a multifaceted, entangled process, influenced not only by a traumatic history of oppression but also by increased exposure to globalizing supranational factors. In an era of genetic engineering, plastic surgery, and rapid advances in technology and science, questions regarding what constitutes a human being have become ever more complex. What's more, the idea of environmental belonging, the positioning of the self in relation to the natural world, is inevitably problematic for a nation still very much burdened by a violent past characterized by racial segregation, land disputes, forced removals, and the restriction of movement across the land in the form of pass laws. Within a South African context, the notion of belonging to a particular environment or ecosystem is inevitably interwoven with questions regarding the adequate distribution and conservation of natural resources. Lawrence Buell asserts that “for half a century science fiction has taken a keen, if not consistent interest in ecology, in planetary endangerment, in environmental ethics, in humankind's relation to the nonhuman world.”
⁹
Although the trope of an ecologically endangered futuristic landscape is a key feature of post-apartheid South African speculative fiction, the ecological message is often subordinate to the human drama that unfolds on the page. This chapter examines the ways in which the altered bodies presented in Jane Rosenthal's futuristic novel
Souvenir
and Neill Blomkamp's
SF
film
District 9
attempt to establish a sense of self eroded by dislocation, problematizing the notion of belonging to a specific place or ecology, but ultimately envisioning new and fruitful ways of connecting with both human and nonhuman others.

CLONES IN THE KAROO: JANE ROSENTHAL'S
SOUVENIR

Set in late twenty-first-century South Africa, Jane Rosenthal's futuristic novel
Souvenir
is primarily concerned with the fragmentary nature of the female experience, a splintering that is expressed through the symbolic
novum
of the clone. Rosenthal's young protagonist, Souvenir Petersen, or Souvie, is a “barbiclone”—one of “various types cloned from the ideal women of the early years of the century, whether blonde, oriental or dark.”
¹⁰
Viewed by some as little more than a cloned sex slave and domestic worker, the extraordinarily beautiful, blond Souvenir attempts to escape the discriminatory treatment of others by seeking solitude on a journey across a vastly altered, ecologically threatened Karoo landscape.

Rosenthal draws on scientific postulation, specifically Andy McCaffrey's article “Antarctica's ‘Deep Impact' Threat,” in order to explore the possible ramifications for South Africa if West Antarctica's ice sheet were to melt.
¹¹
Souvenir's futuristic South Africa is geographically and climatologically altered by storms and tsunamis caused by exactly this ecological catastrophe. The region is plagued by “turbulent weather and heavy rain … something that had to be endured while the icebergs passed by, sometimes taking several weeks” (139), and Souvie wryly notes that “the science of weather prediction had long been in disarray, and the only thing that could safely be predicted was that it was hot and would get hotter” (12).

Souvenir
can be read as a recasting of the popular genre of the Karoo travelogue. Souvie's expedition is as much a journey of scientific endeavor (she travels with an itinerant lepidopterist) as a quest for self-discovery—not only a means of coming to terms with her own contradictory feelings regarding her clone status, but also an attempt to inscribe herself in the history of her adoptive family, the Petersens. The novel is interspersed with diary entries by Aunt Jem, Souvie's adoptive father's aunt “from the days when everyone had families,” a farmer and artist who, seventy years prior to Souvie's tale, made a similar passage across the Karoo (18). A kind of freelance gardener, Aunt Jem traveled the Karoo, leaving behind rosebush hedges and avenues on several farms in the area. Guided by the journal, Souvenir retraces the footsteps of her nonbiological aunt, finding in what remains of Jem's rosebushes and hedges a connection not only to a family, but also to an otherwise hostile and unpredictable landscape.

In “Whales, Clones and Two Ecological Novels,” Wendy Woodward suggests that Obed Will Obenbara, the lepidopterist who later becomes Souvenir's
husband, “exhibits nostalgia for the days of colonial exploration and scientific amateurism in the best meaning of the word, as one who loves what he does.”
¹²
In Rosenthal's words, “Obed Will sees himself as a gentleman-adventurer of scientific bent…. modelled on explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that tribe of Europeans—Dutch, French and English—who came to Africa. He felt he was dressed in the manner of Le Vaillant or Lichtenstein” (35).

Parallels can be drawn between Woodward's reading of Obed Will as intrepid explorer, interested only in the pursuit of knowledge, and the reputation of François Le Vaillant, the eighteenth-century French ornithologist on whom Obed Will Obenbara models himself, as gentlemanly scholar. Le Vaillant undertook two journeys across the Cape Colony between 1781 and 1784, the first of which took him through the Karoo. Large parts of Le Vaillant's accounts of these journeys (published as two volumes in 1790 and 1795 respectively) are considered to be embroidered. Similarly, his magnum opus, the six-volume
Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique
(1796–1810) is riddled with inconsistencies and mere fabrications. Stewart Crehan comes to Le Vaillant's defense, arguing that the “insatiable curiosity which we find in Le Vaillant … is not the same as a repressive, egocentric desire for control…. His visit to South Africa as a student of natural history was motivated not by acquisitiveness but by a desire to discover new information.”
¹³

In some ways, Le Vaillant's fabulous accounts of the animals and inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope (and specifically the Karoo) in the late eighteenth century can be seen as the precursor to Rosenthal's fantastic travel narrative. As much as the entertaining nature of Le Vaillant's penchant for exaggeration belies the more sinister expansionist agendas of his colonial counterparts, Rosenthal's account of Obed Will's encounters with fabulous composite creatures such as the “badass” (a genetic mutation that is part donkey and part baboon) is rooted in suspicion regarding modern-day advances in genetic engineering and the possibility of the ruthless exploitation of such technology for profit. Obed Will's mapping of the butterfly population of the Karoo, and Souvenir's retracing of the journey documented in Aunt Jem's botanical journal (an artifact similar to Le Vaillant's illustrated map of his voyages) are indeed attempts at claiming ownership over a place, inscribing the Karoo with their presence. However, much like claims surrounding the intrepid Le Vaillant's benign exploration, these characters' attempts to write themselves into the landscape are presented as a nonthreatening desire to belong. Obed Will's nostalgia for a world still untouched by humankind is reminiscent of Coetzee's Michael K's wish for a
piece of land, existing outside the violent grasp of history, where he can live lightly off the land:

Obed Will knew that this old, almost pre-colonial world was long gone. Yet whenever he thought this he immediately felt a desire to deny or contradict it, arise in him. Somewhere there must be pockets, small corners, tops of mountains, difficult and inaccessible ravines, dry inhospitable canyons where there were no traces of the present, where no one had ever lived or farmed, not even the Khoikhoi. Obed Will, suffering from a surfeit of the crowded present in city life, longed for that past wilderness. (35–36)

This nonacquisitive approach to belonging to a specific place is proposed in Neil Evernden's “Beyond Ecology.” Evernden suggests that the “act of naming” can be a fruitful process through which one may learn to see oneself as imbedded in the physical environment, as part of a complex network of life forms:

The act of naming may itself be a part of the process of establishing a sense of place. This is fairly easy to understand in a personal sense, that is, giving personal names to special components of a place, but it also may apply in the case of generic names. Perhaps the naturalist, with his penchant for learning the names of everything, is establishing a global place, making the world his home, just as the “primitive” hunter did on the territory of his tribe.
¹⁴

Rosenthal's nostalgia for the spirit of exploration and scientific endeavor of South Africa's settler past is extended to the character of Souvenir, who is herself described by her adoptive mother, Mara, as being “in a way … a relic of the settler past” (19). As a clone, she represents a scientific frontier, and specifically one that has come to define the twenty-first century as much as the space race defined the twentieth century—what Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy refer to as “the quest for the genome.”
¹⁵

In the case of
Souvenir
, anxieties surrounding the issue of cloning are employed in order to explore, as Adam Roberts puts it, “what it is like to have the label ‘different' imposed on a person by some normalising system.”
¹⁶
Souvenir's femaleness is ultimately the site of her difference. Her blond hair, blue eyes, long legs, and ample breasts mark her not only as female, but as über-female, the perfect specimen in terms of the Western ideal of feminine beauty. However, these features are also what mark her as a clone, genetically engineered to conform
to such an idealized vision of femininity. Souvenir, at once a representation of ideal femaleness and an
unnatural
product of genetic manipulation, recalls Donna Haraway's theories regarding the fragmentary nature of femaleness in “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Rosenthal's barbiclone is the embodiment of Haraway's “fabricated hybrid” or “cyborg.”
¹⁷
Souvenir is indeed a “postmodern collective,” a kind of simulacrum that no longer has an original. She is haunted in her dreams by a mysterious connection to other clones who share her
DNA
, experiencing memories that she does not recognize as her own.

Throughout the novel, Souvenir must negotiate not only her own unease about her clone status, but also the suspicion and prejudices of others. Although Souvenir is assured that people from the rural areas are more tolerant of cloned individuals, some tension is evident almost immediately after her arrival on the Karoo farm, Springfontein. Here she meets ten-year-old twins Uzi and Clara, whose perfectly formed features cause her to wonder whether they are cloned children or “Dollybabies” (7). The term “dollybaby” is a reference to Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, but can also be read as referring to the doll-like features of the children. Here the association with a doll or plaything reinforces the view of barbiclones as submissive sex toys and servants expressed in the novel. The children's mother, Magda, immediately insists that the twins are naturally born children, and Souvenir is disturbed by her defensive attitude.

However, this small confrontation is relatively insignificant in comparison to accounts of other, more vicious, prejudices against Souvenir as barbiclone. It soon becomes apparent that barbiclones are often adopted solely as “indispensable sextoys and household skivvies” (6). In this sense, the barbiclone is representative of not only the fragmented nature of female experience, but by extension also of the sexual exploitation of women. Rosenthal is critical of the ways in which women are held hostage by unattainable versions of feminine beauty perpetuated by Western-centered mass media: that double-edged sword that proclaims a woman unattractive if she does not conform to the pinup ideal, and frivolous, incompetent, unintelligent, and sexually available if she does.

The romance that blossoms between Souvie and Obed Will Obenbara—the two are eventually married, and Souvie becomes pregnant despite the fact that she is a clone—sits uncomfortably given the novel's commitment to the representation of alterity. It may be argued that Souvenir has to relinquish a measure of difference, that is, take on the traditional role of mother and wife, in order to find true contentment. Rosenthal attempts to resolve this tension by drawing
on an established trope in South African literature: the Karoo as timeless landscape, which, belonging to no one, belongs to everyone. By establishing the Karoo as the one place that an unorthodox family of hybrids—a barbiclone mother, Nigerian father, and three “café au lait” daughters (triply marked as different through their race, gender, and genetic legacy)—can call home, Rosenthal does not propagate the abdication of difference in order to belong, but rather the desire to belong despite difference (177).