ENG15o1

The scene on Mandela Bridge points to the incommensurable: the contrast between the bridge, with its concrete presence, its abundance of symbolic meaning, and its surroundings, conspicuously evacuated of any clear historical meaning. Thinks the narrator, “To my mind, no man should hold the power of life and death over others. But to his mind, there are perhaps compelling reasons to murder strangers in cold blood” (Mohall 2013, 27). This sardonic moral relativism registers the receding of the overarching allegory of freedom fighter redemption and its replacement by an entrepreneurial dog-eat-dog order in which right is purely an expression of force. the narrator’s mugging, on this very icon of aspirational post-apartheid meaning, thus crystallizes the post-revolutionary loss of political focus. Indeed, Mandela Bridge merely foregrounds the loss of the very emancipatory meta-narrative it was intended to embody. It thus marks the end of a post-apartheid form of social cohesion anchored by the shared horror of the TRC and the emergence of an entropic social order. But this is not the last we see of Mandela Bridge. With its symbolic baggage of unity and the notion of a rainbow nation, it becomes a motif of the protagonist’s wanderings through the city, a place from which his disappointed philosophizing finds an anchor. Against the backdrop of Mandela Bridge, a time bearing the imprints of thwarted revolutionary desire. In its juxtaposition with the remnants of futures past, time becomes ruined rather than merely empty. Mandela Bridge, as it is figured in this text, could be considered a concrete, geographically embedded structure of disappointment. In its reverential, melancholic handling of so prominent a piece of urban furniture as Mandela Bridge, Small Things marks its distance from the dominant wave of post-apartheid Johannesburg fiction. It is a text far less invested in imagining forms of the new that might emerge from the debris of the post-apartheid city, less willing to detach itself from the promises of the past. Rather, it is filled with lingering desires and attachments that cannot be severed. This holds, too, at the level of the novel’s central romantic plot. Small Things is a story of disappointment both personal and political: the pallid reality of a democratic South Africa is mirrored by the pallid reality of the narrator’s unrequited passion for Desiree, first ignited in his Sophia town youth, finally consummated two decades later upon the narrator’s release from prison. “Chee” and “Desiree”: the names are signifiers, respectively, of revolutionary desire and the object of that desire. Like the democratic nation that was yearned for, the narrator does eventually attain Desiree. But the anticipated bliss of the narrator’s reunion with his object of desire, after 18 years of imprisonment, is marred by the discovery that he is “courting a stone” (Mohall 2013, 37).