Where the Cool Warrichi Flows By Jim Allen, Victoria: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2003, 144 pages, hardcover, $33.00. Reviewed by Bruce Johnson in the June 2004 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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These deceptively straightforward short stories do honour to a major literary tradition that is represented by writers as diverse as Proust and WG Sebald: to seek the meaning in and of memory, and also the memory of remembering:What my sister Dell and I have set out to do is to recover a lost world -- in fact two worlds: one, arising out of memories of our childhood on the farm, Marite, in the Eastern Transvaal in South Africa from the time of the Great Depression till the beginning of the Second World War; the other, including the South African ('Boer War'), 1900-1902 but reaching back in time to the early 1880s. Jim Allen gives us the words, and Dell Hall the pictures. Both dispense with the kinds of rhetoric designed to inform us that the teller is more interesting than the tale. Both respect the story. They 'let the object speak':Upstream from the ram lies a small pool. The water is very clear. The drowned leaves and bedded pebbles make an irregular underwater pattern, and a screen of water plants filters the water drops oozing down over decomposed granite and moss on the vertical face opposite. ... The replenishing water runs in over the roots of ncosi trees with a soft, drumming tinkle. This is easy to read only because it is difficult to write. It is easy to 'generate text' -- as I once heard 'writing' called. But that is not the same as 'writing', which requires masochistic editing and self-effacement. It means not getting in the way, and maybe not getting your own way. Here, both the prose and the illustrations are pared back to the sharpest edge, stripped of self-consciously artistic effect. In this lies their art: a deep respect for the integrity of memory, and a conviction that it does not need to be embroidered with heroic prose to disclose its gravid life. History gets written in terms of broad and magisterial sweep, but the past, the thing we actually lived in, is awakened in flashes of quotidian detail. The trick is to find the right ones, the ones that resonate, to realise that something as innocuous as an illustrated advertisement for Assegai Cloudy Mixture tobacco, 'is worth a second look', clear, unembellished. That it is itself, a story.
Even the dialogue is stripped back to the format of play-script. There is a particular aptness in this, because so much of what is being remembered is voices. Sound is important in this collection. The author remembers what he has heard. It is a collection of stories which are largely about the telling of stories, the sound of a voice in a dining room, a shop, out on the veld. There is a reproduction of a page of their father's notebooks, which helped to reconstruct the narrative, and it has the same intensely vivid specificity, a visible voice. In retrieving their 'lost world', the writer and illustrator locate much of it in the sound of things. It is striking how many of the illustrations represent people or animals making sounds. It is in the acoustic rather than the visual order that temporality, the fleetingness of things, is proclaimed, and yet through which the past remains most vivid in the mind. The past reverberates in the remembered voice of someone long dead, the gong that summons, the buzz and clatter that anchor us in a particular place and time.
The writer listens to the past, and hears others listening to that rural soundscape that has ceased to exist in urban societies. R Murray Schafer has called this kind of soundscape 'high fidelity', meaning that its components can be clearly distinguished, as constellations of meaning. Dogs setting up a collective howl, the shrieking of birds, the barely audible susurration of a breeze, and the meaningfulness of silence itself to the hunter at night, as he tells his story to the young later-to-be-chroniclers:'But I don't mind telling you, it can be queer. Out of the corner of your eye you see the shadows shifting. You think there's something creeping up behind.'
The children have stopped pulling grass stems to suck. Their jaws are hanging slack. 'Ha!' says Oom. 'Suddenly everything went dead quiet. Now that was queer. We waited. After a time a sort of flush came up over the sky. Then, birds. And a small breeze got up. But now we could see our gunsights, so we spread out and looked for the spoor.' We could make a case that this is a postmodernist work, but that would be to demean it. The argument would involve words like 'structuralist narratology', but that would, in the words of Duke Ellington, 'stink the place up'. I mention the 'pm' word because, for some, that is what is needed to alert them to the sophistication of the apparent artlessness of the narrative. Stories within stories, voices inside other voices, an adult remembering the child he was, hearing adults remember their own youth. Unlike the traditional historian who retrospectively constructs order, these stories recognise that the past we lived in and try to recapture is a meandering story that strays in inexplicable but necessary directions, and which often withholds coherence. Like Tristram Shandy, the story constantly goes somewhere we hadn't intended. Uncle Oom, the main teller of tales, recalls an attempt to pull a dead hippo out of a river: 'Then suddenly the carcass tipped and he went in headfirst among the sharks'.
'But Uncle, they weren't sharks, really?'
'Not a bit of it -- they were Sabie River crocks. The worst in the world. I was thinking of a story I read by a feller called Melville, where they cut up a whale -- a slippery job, with sharks everywhere.'
There is something thrilling about this lurch, a kind of air pocket in the narrative. But it is not 'smart' writing, for effect. It is someone remembering a story told to him as a child, and leaving in the bit that made no sense, because he wants the past to speak for itself. That's why I believe his story, because it preserves the strange and impassive untidiness of things. One of the stories -- virtually an aside, a story inside a story -- describes the wholesale theft of an actual army barracks, a crime so improbable that the victims never report it. The story-teller's sardonic conclusion, 'There's no place like home -- if you can find it', might be an epigraph for this whole fascinating collection. Citation - Bruce Johnson. 'Review: Where the Cool Warrichi Flows by Jim Allen' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - The seven short stories included in this delightful book recall incidents from Jim Allen's childhood spent in a mixed-race community in South Arfica's rural Transvaal where his father opened a trading store. Born in 1925, Allen later studied English, Afrikaans, Latin and Greek at Witwatersrand University and English at Oxford. After migrating to Australia in 1962 he taught at the University of New South Wales. He dedicates his book to the three groups of people - Shangaan, Afrikaans and English-speaking - whose friendships and conflicts moulded him. What my sister Dell and I have set out to do is to recover a lost world - in fact, two worlds: one, arising out of memories of our childhood on the farm, Marite, in the Eastern Transvaal in South Africa from the time of the Great Depression till the beginning of the Second World War: the other, including the South African War ('Boer War'), 1900-1902, but reaching back in time to the early 1880s before my parents were born, a time when my great uncle, E. L. (Lil) Banger, adventured up northward from Durban, fired a shot at the Pietermaritzburg town hall clock to test his first rifle, and began his life as a hunter and trader, eventually buying the farm Marite for half-a-crown a morgen in 1908. In 1921 my father, R. C. Allen, joined his uncle at Marite as a partner in his native trading store. They used a purple letterhead figuring a handsome bushbuck ram reclining, and the words BANGER AND ALLEN. They also had an antique Remington typewriter.
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