1. discuss The Representation Of Violence In `the House Gun` And `tsotsi` (2205)

I will explore the presentation of violence in two post-apartheid South African works, Nadine Gordimer s 1998 novel The House Gun and Gavin Hood s 2005 film Tsotsi. I will present how both works examine societally ingrained violence and racist denominations whilst arguing the differing sentiments of Gordimer and Hood which are shown with their individual conceptualisations of race and violence. I argue violence is represented as a consequence of the Othering of the Black South African population and discuss how this has led to the violent nature of characters such as Tsotsi, a Black man from the township who represents the marginalised Other of the colonized , but also the violence of characters such as Duncan who represent the coloniser Self to this Other (Mar n 154).

Tsotsi is a film adaptation of Athol Fugard s anti-apartheid novel set in the 1950s which follows the personal journey of a young Black gang leader from the Johannesburg township Soweto, who is nicknamed Tsotsi (tsotsi is slang for a streetwise criminal from the South African townships ) (Dovey 94). The 2005 film recontextualises Tsotsi s road to redemption within a post-apartheid context, including references to the new Black middle class and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the film, Tsotsi hijacks the car of a wealthy young Black mother and a violent scene erupts resulting in Tsotsi shooting her in the legs. It is later revealed that this violent act paralyses her, and unbeknownst to Tsotsi, the car that he has hijacked is still carrying her baby in the backseat. Tsotsi s background is a tragic and violent one, we learn that his father was aggressive and that his mother suffered from AIDS leading the son s homelessness. The baby that is accidently kidnapped, the son of a wealthy Black family, comes to symbolise the person he could have been if his beginnings in life had been happier and allowed for more opportunities. This connection to the infant softens him and thus begins Tsotsi s inner journey to becoming a better man .

The House Gun follows the trial of Duncan Lindgard, a young white architect who has murdered his housemate and former lover Carl after catching him having sexual intercourse with Natalie, Duncan s girlfriend. In his violent act, Duncan used a gun that is shared between his housemates to protect them from criminals, and this plot detail functions as a critique of the often-violent spheres of the social enactments that lay within post-apartheid society. The narrative primarily follows the everyday lives of Duncan s white, liberal, middle-class parents, Harald and Claudia Lindgard, as they navigate the consequences of their son s actions. They are forced to challenge their shallow-buried prejudices as they become reliant on Hamilton Motsamai, a Black lawyer who would have been their inferior in the recent history of apartheid. Motsamai is now the family s only hope now that violence has transgressed from being the Lindgard s abstract fear of the Other into a morbid reality of their own quotidian lives.

Although both works and their differing representations of violence reveal the complexities of South Africa, critics have observed that on the surface, neither of the works seem to overtly explore themes of race. In The House Gun for example, the choice to chronicle the violent crime of a white man who kills another white man suggests that racial conflict is absent from this novel (Mar n 157). However, such conflict permeates its pages (Mar n 157] emphasis added), as the racial prejudices of a liberal white couple are revealed in the aftermath of their son s violent act which was enabled by a house gun that happened to be there due to paranoia of the Other (Gordimer, THG 267).

Alternatively, in Tsotsi there is an absence of a visible white masculine character other than the minor character of a white policeman (Ellepen 252). The narrative plot focuses on the Black, highly racialised space of the township and Tsotsi s victims are members of the emerging Black middle class in South Africa. However, Jordache A. Ellepen argues that white masculinity permeates through the gaze of the camera as the film assumes an outsider s perspective (152 emphasis added). This pattern of language describing race as permeating these two works suggests that post-apartheid films and novels cannot represent violence without emphasising racial conflict as a legacy of apartheid. However, I believe that while Gordimer s text is a politically conscious commentary, portraying the violent climate as the product of the knowledge structures curated by apartheid s racial hierarchies, Hood s representation often feels less deliberate.

The white masculinity that permeates through the gaze of the camera in Tsotsi refers to the bird s-eye-view angles that film the township space which assumes a voyeuristic gaze (Ellepen 252). Furthermore, Tsotsi is mostly represented indoors and when he is in an outside environment, he is usually committing crimes (Ellepen 252). In addition to Ellepen s observations, I argue that this presentation of Tsotsi and the township is a result of white director Hood s position as an outsider to Tsotsi s world and his ethnographic background of working on educational films centring on the space of the township. The director s racial identity and privileged university education distances him from the limited opportunity, poverty and violence of the space of the township. This, however, has not stopped the white director from defensively insisting I know this world when discussing the townships (Hood 46). When challenged on his alienness to a space that he has not been subjugated into, he positions himself as an insider as a result of his victimhood (himself and his family have been mugged at gunpoint) and because he has a history of filming there (Hood 46). Although it is true that the violent climate of post-apartheid South Africa affects both white and Black South Africans, illustrated in the downfall of Duncan and his parents in The House Gun, Hood s unwillingness to acknowledge the subjectivity of his privilege is problematic and perhaps affects the representation of violence in the film. Many critics that have argued that the film lacks a meaningful exploration of the social and political context of violence in post-apartheid South Africa, further suggesting the limitations of the film (Bernard 555-558 Dovey 158 Wasserman 186).

In The House Gun, the representation of violence through Duncan s trial raises various questions about individual and collective responsibility. For example, an element of the strategy adopted by Motsamai in defence of Duncan s crime is to claim that the murder was the consequence of a dangerously violent society rather than the result of a dangerously violent individual. Motsamai argues that this climate bears some serious responsibility for the act the accused committed, yes because of this climate, the gun was there. The gun was lying around in the living room, like a housecat on a table, like an ashtray (Gordimer, THG 271). Thus, violence here is represented as an inescapable fact of life in South Africa, compared to a loved pet or an everyday habit, affecting all classes and races and all types of people both good and bad . Motsamai puts forward the case that acts such as murder have become an inevitable consequence of the normalisation of violence in South Africa.

The nature of violence is further explored in the novel, as Duncan s case of violence is presented as one of many, in a society in which a daily tally of deaths was as routine as a weather report (Gordimer, THG 49). This brutal depiction of South African life is contextualised within the painful legacy of apartheid as the narrative voice highlights that state violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it and because of this [p]eople had forgotten there was any other way (Gordimer THG 50). This sentiment is also expressed in Gordimer s Living in Hope and History in which she states that apartheid s racist laws have caused morbid mutations, in favour of violence, in our behaviour. We must recognize this (144), in this essay and in the novel Gordimer presents South Africa s climate of violence as a result of a racist apartheid state.

As if in response to Gordimer s assertions that [p]eople had forgotten there was any other way (THG 50), in the film Tsotsi, protagonist Tsotsi s journey to redemption can be read as the young man realising that there is another way. Despite the various scenes of graphic violence carried out by Tsotsi in the film, Tsotsi gradually becomes a more compassionate and less violent character as the narrative develops. In the film s final scenes, he returns the baby to his parents and consequently allows himself to be arrested by the police.

Although the film was hugely successful and critically acclaimed, some critics have suggested that the optimism of the film and its ending is sentimentalist, unrealistic or lacking in political meaning (Barnard 555, Wasserman 186). Barnard assesses the film adaption of the novel and states that while the original Tsotsi has a metafictional and critical edge, the film version is quite unproblematically (or I guess I would prefer to say problematically) a Bildungsroman and one review postulates that [p]erhaps updating the story to post-apartheid South Africa has diluted it of its emotional and political power (Bernard 555-556 Spencer). In response to reviews such as Spencer s, I argue that as Gordimer makes evident in The House Gun, a post-apartheid work can have emotional and political power through a representation of violence that addresses the legacy of apartheid within South African society. In which case, perhaps it is the film s proposed Bildungsroman form, tracking the moral growth of the protagonist, that distracts from a strong political message.

Hood s response to being questioned on critiques that the film s ending is overly sentimental is that, But in essence it s a fable (47), revealing that Hood defines the film s purpose as conveying a moral message. It is then pertinent that Gordimer quotes Elena Bonner who states, Moral concepts are lovely, but the key is governing things by law (Hope and History 145). The film s final scene suggests that Tsotsi has overcome violence and achieved moral redemption by returning the baby and sacrificing his freedom. I argue this focus on Tsotsi as an agent of change within a society that has clearly failed him economically and socially is problematic. The film s conclusion fails to interrogate the state laws that have led to his violent way of life and adopts a condescending and paternalistic tone that suggests that hope lies in this one man simply choosing love over hate.

Gordimer rejects the type of sentimentalism that I have argued is shown in Tsotsi with the observation Love one another or perish. But can you love me while I have a full stomach and you are hungry? (Hope and History 145) and she quotes American economist John Kenneth who states that [o]ut of poverty comes conflict (Hope and History 145). In reference to these articulations on the causes of violence I ask of Tsotsi is a fable or a bildungsroman the appropriate mode to capture the story of a marginalised individual within a nation with a history of state violence? Bernard states that the film declines to racialize (or even politicize) the vast distinction between rich and poor through choosing not to overtly represent whiteness in the film and Lindiwe Dovey observes that a focus on the soul without a simultaneous focus on material conditions is not sufficient (Bernard 558, Dovey 158). Thus, for Bernard, Dovey and Gordimer, a neoliberal representation of violence of this kind that does not clearly attribute responsibility to the state is neither meaningful nor accurate (Bernard 555-558 Dovey 158 Hope and History 139-145).

In the closing scene of the film, the baby s father John Dube tells the armed police surrounding Tsotsi to lower their weapons. John addresses Tsotsi as Brother and a series of close-ups highlight an emotional understanding between the two men. The compassion shown by John in this powerful scene reveals the complexity of social relations in a violent South Africa with a racist history. However, the final shot of Tsotsi obeying the white police officer who commands him to put his hands up, suggests that in Hood s representation of violence, Tsotsi must surrender to the white man in order to transform his identity from violent tsotsi to submissive prisoner . In his poem, Mongane Walley Serote asks:

So we shall have buried apartheid

How shall we look at each other then,

What shall we look like

When that sunrise comes

I ask my people

For we have said

South Africa belongs to all

who live in it. (qtd. in Gordimer, Hope and History 139)

The final image of the film depicts the passivity of a young man to whom South Africa does not seem to belong, and in my opinion the film is too ambiguous in its political commentary to explain why this is the case and how it can be changed.

The audience is left to question what will happen to Tsotsi, although one can easily speculate that despite his moral redemption as a poor young Black orphan from the township he will receive little to no legal support and most probably serve the maximum sentence for his crimes. Alternatively, in The House Gun, Duncan has the familial support and privileged background to grant him access to talented lawyer Motsamai, a character who like the Dube family, represents the new Black middle class of South Africa. Duncan s privilege allows him the relatively minimal sentence of seven years and protects him from the Death Penalty, which is only deemed unconstitutional after Duncan s sentencing. Yet, as the novel emphasises, in post-apartheid South Africa, white privilege can no longer render white South Africans as completely immune to the violent consequences of the State s actions. Gordimer depicts the deterioration of Duncan s parents Harold and Claudia, who despite their liberalism have previously failed to actively challenge the atrocities of apartheid and are ironically now forced to confront the violent realities of South African society. During apartheid, they have benefitted from the subjugation of Black people in their country and now cannot hope to live in peace within a postapartheid context. Their material wealth cannot protect them, as the material injustice that Black people have endured has now manifested into a violent climate that affects everyone, regardless of colour or creed.

It is this very material injustice the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, which has led to a white fear of the Other that is symbolised by the house gun, a now common staple of the middle-class white home and Duncan s fatal weapon-of-choice. Although the Death Penalty, a legacy of the apartheid state, is abolished within the time frame of the novel, Harald knows that Duncan shall have this will to his death surrounding him as long as he lives. The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it (Gordimer, THG 241). In a sense, through his violent act Duncan will now experience life as a person who is vulnerable by definition, feared, Othered and thought of as inherently evil or dangerous by the public. In this light, Duncan will now experience something outside of his privilege that is akin to the malediction that Black people have been subjected to by the racist state of apartheid. Whilst Duncan s curse is upon him even if the law does not exact it (Gordimer, THG 241), the thousands of Black civilians killed by whites throughout twentieth-century South African history is evidence of the malediction upon them that was exacted by the law. In The House Gun, violence is portrayed as having the capacity to mutate the status of a family, the Lindgards now belong to the other side of privilege and are experiencing the pain and vulnerability that comes with this new identity (Gordimer THG 127). The House Gun s depiction of Duncan s trial therefore raises the powerfully political questions What happens when your own history comes back to haunt you, when the structures you have put in place for your own protection are shown to be the source of your own destruction? (Kossew). In this manner I agree with critics who have concluded that the novel expresses the tense interconnectedness of the public and private (Brink, Medalie 632). Violence is thus represented in the novel as related to the wider, painful context of postapartheid South Africa.

In The House Gun, the theme of violence is explored through the lives of white-middle class characters and represented as a pervading force whose victims are no longer exclusively the Black demographic. However, the violent climate of the nation is still emphasised as the result of the brutality afflicted against Black South Africans in the past. In Tsotsi, violence is presented as the daily reality of Black men like Tsotsi, but it is simplistically suggested that this cycle of violence can be broken through individual growth. I believe Gordimer s novel successfully captures the complicated nature of violence in South Africa in relation to the State. In my opinion, Tsotsi is less affective in depicting the legacies of apartheid but does create a space within the cinematic sphere to present the violent and complex nature of South African life for the Black community.