The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood
by Glen Retief
St. Martin’s Press. 275 page, $24.99
THE HISTORY of gay male literature in South Africa is select, and almost entirely white. To this reviewer, the grace and insight of its finest exemplar, Mark Behr’s novel Embrace, is now equaled by The Jack Bank (2000), Glen Retief’s first book. It is a fine attempt to do a number of impossible things: for Retief to explain to himself the origins of his own sexual attraction to nonwhite men; to account for his political maturation in the last days of apartheid; and to come to terms with the crude, bullying, yet also vital and exciting culture of the white Boers who surrounded Retief’s English-speaking family and populated his childhood.
Tensions between South African whites, with their radically different origins and cultures, are rarely addressed today, perhaps an inevitable consequence of ANC-era rule. Yet to neglect the many ways in which South Africa has inherited a century and a half of Anglo-Boer enmity and mutual incomprehension is to neglect the essence of South Africa’s plight today—and also its opportunity. Despite his evidently refined political antennae, Retief grapples with the subject in diverting, well-written vignettes drawn from his childhood and adolescence. If his circumstances today—settled with his partner in Pennsylvania and teaching creative writing at a university—are fundamentally explained by the tribulations and hurts of Retief’s early years, he manages to resist both the Scylla of hindsight and the Charybdis of sentimentality. Smartly, he ends the memoir just where he must—at the point when, having studied at Cape Town University and witnessed the last gasps of the apartheid regime, he senses how the country, reformed or otherwise, is not for him, and applies to win a green card in the U.S. To a modest degree, Retief was experiencing the cultural drought that one is likely to feel in any post-colonial city far from North America or Europe. What is striking is how Retief yokes this sense of cultural poverty to his country’s innate, unquestioning masculinity and confident roughness, and even its disposition to coercion and bullying. “The impulse grows,” Retief writes. “Leave this whole mess behind. There are places on earth where, whether through wisdom, good fortune, or merely the capacity to export their aggression elsewhere, deposits of brutality won’t earn this kind of compound interest. An existence where dividends are paid in money, art, books, or whatever you want them in—not in electric shocks or jacks.” What Retief longs for may sound like the permission to be different—to be thoughtful, to be other, even to be a sissy. Yet his bottom line is something that would go without saying in most of today’s America: the right to befriend people of other races, to live with them, even to make love to them. Retief brilliantly shows how victims everywhere collude with their oppressors, compromise themselves, and lose sight of the ideals that made them different. This essential human fact has myriad manifestations. Take the oppression into closetry of the Cold War U.S. during the McCarthy era, for starters (particularly in arch-bully and closet case Roy Cohn). A near-identical oppressiveness casts a huge and complex shadow on South Africa. Retief’s examples chill the blood, since his need to escape is no deer-in-headlights moment, no failure of will or commitment. It is certainly born of fear—not the fear of being attacked, but the fear of becoming the attacker. Among the most poignant moments is the account of Retief himself becoming prefect and bully, taking to beating other boys willingly: “the triumph in my muscles and sinews is sensual, physical.” His father worked in the Kruger National Park—still among the country’s top attractions. It would have been a good job, well-paid and stable, except for one thing: his Catholic, English-speaking family had to grow up in a Boer outback among people whose cultural traditions and religious beliefs ensured that all of the Retiefs stood out. Young Glen looks, from images reproduced here, as if he was a slight, open, unguarded boy at first—not qualities that could survive his move to boarding school at age twelve. The ancient tradition of hierarchical humiliation with which English public schools have long (correctly) been associated raises its head within minutes. Retief and his twelve-year-old peers are compelled by their prefect to expose themselves and jump up and down near the showers. The sexual subtext is not hard to fathom. The post-pubertal boy abuser reveals his hard-on, a manifestation of his power, certainly, but possibly caused by more complex motives. Retief, however, sees his first ever erect penis and experiences a (prepubescent) hard-on for a very different reason. From then on, he is trapped: the moment has betrayed a secret. That secret gives his first and most potent tormenter, John, an awful power. “Fricking wastes of white skin,” he says of any and all of the younger boys John thinks weak, announcing the connection between racism and homophobic bullying. Then follow the finger jack tortures, the hazing, the crude electric shocks administered to boys’ privates, and the ultimate humiliation: the order to impersonate Swazi and Swangani maids in carrying out a superior’s orders. Retief’s father had warned him to toughen up; all would be well at school, provided he never showed weakness. But his son’s failure to evade victimization becomes a talisman of probity. Retief grasps quickly how the Nationalist state relied on bullying in order to create the next generation of racists and bullies: “that great cycle of apartheid violence,” he calls it, “the apparatus whereby white boys are bullied when they are young so that later they will know how to beat blacks into continued submission.” Occasionally Retief might appear to risk overstating his case, as when he compares schoolboy bullying to Abu Ghraib and Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies. But the degree of abuse is never the point. Any boy’s preparedness to abuse another, The Jack Bank shows, is capable of causing injury. Retief also provides details of his younger sister’s sexual abuse by her (Boer) grandfather. It confirms the pattern of abuse, coupled with a brutalizing, coercive secrecy. But there’s something about Retief’s handling of it that risks censoriousness on the one hand, invasiveness on the other. It may be fashionable today to consider that memoirs should “tell all,” but discretion and concealment are potent tools, as the best memoirists have understood. The positive message The Jack Bank delivers lies not in Retief’s own escape from South Africa so much as in the fact that, in the throes of anti-apartheid activities, he comes to understand how the power of bullies is intrinsically chimerical. The “jack bank” (a Byzantine way by which adolescent school prefects could evade the strictures of their schoolmasters and go on persecuting their victims) becomes a synecdoche of brutality in all its forms: though it “feeds upon itself, like a bush fire … it also contains the seeds of its own destruction.” This understanding liberates him. Retief’s last virtue is his disarming honesty. He is not just a victim but, later in life, someone capable of acting with naïveté shading into thoughtlessness. Finding himself deeply in love with a “Colored” factory worker, Mark, he impulsively leaves a bunch of flowers at Mark’s workplace—and immediately risks getting his lover fired. The relationship collapses. Part of the author may still fear being trapped in the first incident that frames his victimhood. Whenever he feels vulnerable, Retief recalls the “overgrown twelve-year-old boy stepping forward to receive a beating.” Nonetheless, if The Jack Bank performs some degree of catharsis for its author, it offers so much more to the interested reader. It is not a book to forget, and you can expect to be deeply moved. Richard Canning’s edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory is forthcoming from Penguin Classics. He lived in Cape Town from 1997 to 1998.
