Nearly ten years ago, at the age of 26, Thando Mgqolozana published his debut novel, A Man who is not a Man.
By all measures, this slim little book is phenomenal. In time, it will be recognised for what it is, namely, one of the most perceptive, if also one of the most eloquent statements on the tragic state of hegemonic notions of masculinity in the world today.
The power of the plot and its measured cadence lies in its direct, beguilingly simple and fearless narrative.
To plunder an overused English expression; this is not a book about the room, it is a book about the elephant in the room. It starts with the elephant, stays with the elephant and ends with the elephant.
The book focuses, on what is supposed to be one of the most significant epicentres of masculinity and male sexuality – the penis. Except that in this case, the penis has a name, a face, a history and a story – a story told in the most captivating and entertaining, if also tragic ways.Contrast this approach to the Freudian theory of penis envy. In terms of this theory, children are supposed to have a love-hate relationship with the penis of their father. This, as an inevitable part of their journey to sexual awareness and adulthood.
Few scholars have done more than the founder of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, in cementing the long-held theory of Western philosophy, in terms of which the penis was considered the marker not only of masculinity, but also of humanity. For this reason, centuries earlier, the renowned philosopher Aristotle regarded women as somewhat deficient in relation to males.
But there is no need to overlay this review with too much theory and philosophy since A Man who is not a Man is after all, only a novel, right?
It is the fictional story of Lumkile Chris Vumindaba, narrator and protagonist. Between Vumindaba and his readers, there are no secrets, or so the author tries to make it seem. The very opening line of the prologue demolishes the wall between the private and the public, the intimate and the not-so-intimate, the couth and the uncouth, the seemly and the unseemly.
“This story is about how I came to have an abnormal penis”. Thus begins the story of our “failed man”.
From the prologue, we are plunged straight into a hospital ward where Vumindaba is lying half-conscious, with his smelly and rotting male organ, under the care of female nurses.
Using brilliant flashback techniques, the author shepherds the readers back to Vumindaba’s day of arrival in hospital, and further back to the life he once had before the injuring of his penis.
That life was split between the Eastern Cape where Vumindaba’s mother sort of lived and Cape Town where his estranged and erratic father lived.
As if his orphan-like existence was not enough, most of the male figures in Vumindaba’s life, on both sides of the family, were pathetic and unreliable souls. His grandfather was, for example, an alcoholic who was too drunk to attend the sending off ceremony of his grandson when the youngster left for “the mountain” aka circumcision school.
Vumindaba lived with neither of his parents for any considerable length of time. As a consequence, he had no tangible relationship with either parent. This left young Vumindaba on his own, seeking solace from peers, drugs, crime and a girl named Yanda.
But nothing that Vumindaba had seen or done in his short life had prepared him for the difficulties he was to encounter at circumcision school. Not even his anticipation of, and excitement about going to circumcision school could help mitigate his calamitous experience there.
Without a mentor on the necessary post-operative hygiene protocols, “surrounded” by absent and ineffectual male role models, and without the support of his grandfather, the recently-circumcised Vumindaba soon runs into all manner of problems at circumcision school.
Within a few days, the glands of his penis start to “drip down like melting ice cream”. Pieces of flesh fall off it.
Throughout the book, Mgqolozana invites the reader, again and again, to feel and smell and take a close look at the decomposing penis of the protagonist.
Such invitations are mediated through evocative descriptions of aches, moans, smells and existential doubts expressed by the protagonist himself.
Soon, there is no option but to put Vumindaba through the ultimate act of shame – prematurely uprooting him from circumcision school and sending him off to the place where all “failed men” go, namely, the “house of ruin” otherwise known as a hospital.
There are several unhelpful ways of reading this book. One of them is to read it as a conventional story about the “exotic other” – a story that is only and exclusively about AmaXhosa and their stubborn and dangerous initiation rites.
Indeed, the setting of the story is a Xhosa initiation school, the characters are Xhosa and so is the cultural milieu.
But we must do more than merely “other” the story, its characters and its issues. We must do better than force-fit the story into a small ethnic box. As a rite of passage en route to coming of age and to manhood, the initiation school has many dynamic equivalents in many contemporary cultures.
Another unhelpful way of reading the story is to frame it within the familiar trope of Africa versus the West, traditional culture versus science, modernity vs medievalism. “Othering” strategies such as these are problematic not only because they are condescending, but also because they are one more strategy of refusing to deal with the problems of compulsive and toxic masculinities in many contemporary societies today.
Mgqolozana may have tried to provide a happy ending to the book. But he failed. Maybe he never intended to succeed in the first place.
Vumindaba’s penis ends up growing back its lost flesh. But can Vumindaba grow back his lost innocence, damaged psyche, his sense of manhood and his humanity?
Vumindaba notes that the damage done was not merely physical, but also took the form of a “mental and emotional train smash”.
The latter was the real assault on his humanity and consequently on his manhood.
While Vumindaba’s artificial search for ideal manhood may have led him to a tragic loss of it, it also led him to regaining his humanity in the process.
“I’ve come to realise that far from having failed as a man, my experience has allowed me a deeper understanding of what manhood is really about. It has made me more human, not less”.
This being a work of fiction, the ultimate question we must ask is whether the fictional story captivates, provokes, entertains and fires up the imagination. Never mind that the story speaks of truths far stranger than fiction! But all these questions, can be answered firmly in the affirmative.
Tinyiko Maluleke is a research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria. This is an extended review of A man who is not a man (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)..