I Remember Self–Censorship in Apartheid South Africa

I remember being told not to repeat to other kids what I heard my parents say about the government. I remember my parents ordering me to rewrite my letters to relatives and to remove anything that wasn’t purely personal because they were sure, probably with justification, that our letters were being read by the government. I was a child and I was parroting my parents’ political opinions, but I had yet to learn what they already knew: that in a police state, one can speak one’s mind inside the home but not outside it and not to strangers, nor write it in letters.

In Nazi Germany, the Heil Hitler salute was officially termed “the German greeting.” The bitter joke among Germans was the real German greeting was the cautious swiveling of the head to side to side to make sure no one was listening before speaking frankly to a friend. I remember listening to my father and a neighbor he didn’t yet know as they engaged in a verbal dance, a careful sounding out, moving from neutral subjects to ever more political ones, gauging each other’s true politics before they both began criticizing the government. That was the South African greeting.

And now I’m seeing the same thing here in America. It’s not new, of course. There was plenty of violent retribution for unpopular speech/behavior/political positions during Colonial times. During the Revolution, Loyalists were harassed, chased from their homes, even murdered. Abolitionists were murdered in the antebellum South, and the same has happened to civil rights proponents into modern times. Then there were the Red Scare, the McMartin Preschool/Satanic ritual abuse hysteria, and so on.

Perhaps the current evil will die out, as most of the above did. But look at the destruction that those evils caused before they vanished. Surely Trump can’t last much longer, and I hope that he won’t be followed by another figure with the same insane appeal to the worst among us. But we can’t be sure of that, can we? Such “leaders” keep popping up. Even if Trumpism ends with Trump, the damage he has done will take a long time to repair, if it can be repaired.

In the meantime, our media and social platforms, increasingly owned by plutocrats who deem it in their interest to support Trump, are shifting rapidly to the right. The result isn’t censorship in the strict sense because it’s not being done by the government. Instead, it’s a pervasive and powerful form of self–censorship.

The end result is what I saw as a boy in Apartheid South Africa: a silence born of fear.

The Writer and His Novel—a Troubled Marriage

Forty or more years ago, I tried to write a short autobiographical novel stemming from what was then a fairly recent episode in my life. I didn't get far with the book, partly because I didn't have the hang of writing mainstream fiction and partly because writing about something that was still raw turned out to be far more emotionally difficult than I had expected. (I had thought that writing the story would be therapeutic. It wasn't.) It also didn't feel like a novel—more like a fictionalized diary entry.

I put it aside and went back to genre fiction. Plot–driven fiction was much easier. But I kept coming back to that autobiographical novel, and also fiddling with some other autobiographical fiction. At some point, I merged all the autobiographical stuff together, and the result was something very novel like but also very incomplete and uneven—different parts that didn't go together well. Dropped it again. Came back to it later. Rinse and repeat.

With each cycle, the novel got bigger and better but still very emotionally stressful to work on. Also with each cycle, the plot extended more into the past and the future, and the book spread sideways in the sense of adding more secondary characters and subplots. The calendar had caught up with the book’s timeline, so that the parts that had originally been set in the near future were now set in the recent past. Oops. The near future I had envisioned hadn’t happened, requiring plot revisions. On and on it went.

I kept putting the novel, now called Chains, aside in favor of plot-driven novels I could actually finish in a reasonable amount of time. But I always felt guilty, and increasingly silly and annoyed with myself. Chains kept poking at me.

When I started Chains, I was in early middle age or late whatever comes right before middle age. Now I'm into old age, and I feel really silly that I haven't finished the book. Each year, I've told myself that I'd have it done by my birthday, or at least by the end of the year. Each year, I failed to do that.

On the bright side, Chains has become not only much bigger than I originally intended but also much more serious, deeper, and layered than it was at the start. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

My birthday was last week, and Chains wasn’t done by then. It probably won't be done by the end of this year, either, but after working at the book more steadily this year than I have in a long time, I'm finally hopeful that it will at least be a real first draft by the end of the year. It has reached the point that it reads like a novel, albeit with gaps and inconsistencies, instead of like of a collection of stuff that doesn't fit together.

That was anticlimactic, wasn't it? Perhaps I shouldn't have posted anything until I had a finalish first draft. But I didn't want to wait.

At this point, the ms. is over 230,000 words. It could end up around 250-260,000 words. That's more than twice as long as anything I've written before. It will quite literally be my magnum opus.

I used the phrase “troubled marriage” in the title of this piece because it occurred to me today that my relationship with Chains has some similarity to a troubled marriage. Sometimes I’ve felt that the book is unrewarding drudgery, and at those times I’ve thought about giving up on it and starting anew, looking for that magical new book/relationship that I imagine would fulfill all my needs. Sometimes, two spouses/partners can’t stand to look at each other, to hear each other’s voices, or even to be in the same house. The arguments can be awful. Their eyes may wander, noticing others. They wonder if those others would be better matches, or at least more exciting ones. But then there are the deliriously wonderful reconciliations! They tell themselves that all is well after all. We can do this! We can make it! Until the next falling out, and the cycle repeats. That’s me and Chains.

All right, old book/girl. Give me a hug and a kiss, and let’s try again, eh? Of course, once you’re finally published, then you’re old news and my eye will be wandering again.