Uncommon realities
Un/common Ground
Allan Kolski Horwitz; Illustrations by Patrick Rorke
2003, Botsotso Publishing
pages
Reviewed by Gary Cummiskey
This collection of 10 stories is South African poet Allan Kolski Horwitz's debut volume of fiction. While the plots in Un/common Ground are fairly wide-ranging and deal with scenarios as diverse as failed relationships, racial murders, futuristic utopian societies and zombies in contemporary Johannesburg, there is in Horwitz's work a fascination with the sadism, savagery and irrationality that lurks beneath humanity's somewhat flimsy pretences of civilisation. Horwitz's unveiling of this savagery often takes on a nightmarish hallucinatory aspect, and some of the stories are reminiscent of the work of Paul Bowles.
The first story, 'Gemors', (Afrikaans for 'rubbish') explores the drug-induced hallucinations of Daniel, a junkie who has been thrown out of his girlfriend's flat in Joubert Park, an inner-city area of Johannesburg. While newspaper posters seem to reflect his predicament ('VOLCANO IN JOUBERT PARK: MAN BLOWN UP BY
| ‘There is in Horwitz's work a fascination with the sadism, savagery and irrationality that lurks beneath humanity's somewhat flimsy pretences of civilisation’ |
The hallucinatory atmosphere appears also in 'Fellow Travellers', with threats and insinuations of car hijacking, violence, sexual molestation and madness. All the incidents and anxieties portrayed in the story can be recognised as being rooted in contemporary South African social reality, but the reader is soon drawn into the principle character's journey into uncertainty and delirium. 'Fellow Travellers' is, in my opinion, the strongest story in the collection.
The most bizarre and disturbing story in the collection is undoubtedly 'The Basement', which starts off as a gruesome, realistic tale of rape and muti murder in Hillbrow, but soon leads off into a nightmare twilight world of corrupt policemen and the creation of zombies being programmed to commit crimes.
The contrastingly far more realistic 'Human', concerned with racial murders by a white supremacist during the period 1990-1994, is also particularly strong and the murderer's psychopathic detachment from his victims is chilling:
After firing there was something so tender about her face. Collapsing silently, folding into herself, something so gentle about the young black girl he had shot ... she so vibrant, so willowy, swaying with the bullet's force.
Some of the stories touch on the forging of a new identity in contemporary South Africa, and the dichotomy of personal and political values in a post-revolutionary social environment is central to stories such as 'The Desk' and 'Appetites'.
Other stories deal more specifically with human relationships, such as 'Atonement', 'Time after Time' and 'Lioness', a story which also concludes with an episode of hallucinatory violence.
However, the final and longest story, 'The Atlantean Chronicles', presented in the form of the notes, poems and papers of a 26th century scholar accused of murdering his wife, was completely lost on me and I regard it as the least successful in the book.
Overall, however, ‘Un/common Ground’ is a collection of unusual stories that take us on journeys to and from outwardly opposing, contradictory worlds: the known and the unknown, repression and freedom, security and instability, reality and delirium, unity and separation.
More importantly, though, the stories help to question our accepted notions of reality, disturbing our passivity and requiring a re-evaluation of our often all-too-complacent belief systems.
Gary Cummiskey is a poet and publisher, he lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is active in promoting new writing
