Norman Rush - Mating

Individual plots are roughly 150 by 100 feet, generous, but they feel crammed — what with two rondavels and a privy on each, plus chicken coops, animal pens, beehives, solar ovens, food dryers, composters, salad gardens, truck gardens, tub plantings, ornamental flowerbeds, maybe a parked dung cart or so. Plots are laid out in arcs along the ways, with dooryards facing, for neighborliness. There is something I am resisting about Tsau. Is there too much symmetry? I asked myself at first, but then asked Too much symmetry for whom? When you go into a real village everything is laid out otherwise, stragglingly, derelict compounds mixed in with thriving ones, stumps of rondavels next to flourishing setups. Materially Tsau is middleclass. I don’t know what my question is, unless this is it: There are thousands of villages in places as remote as this, villages which are hideous, unsanitary, demeaning, but people are living in them about as cheerfully as the people here, which means what? Am I half identifying with the feeling that there should be more gratitude being manifested toward Denoon and the benefactions he organized to get all this going? This is totally reactionary. Also these women have come from gothic personal situations. I have heard the stories of the lives these women lived, and they have made me weep. This shows my confusion as of then. I think what was bothering me had to do with political economy more than anything else. There was a question of amortization in the air that had to be settled before I could believe in Tsau. Enormous funds had gone into the setting up of the place. Tsau was no self-help settlement, not with slab concrete floors as level as ponds in every rondavel. This was not a perfect yet cheap idea working itself out. This was enlightened surplus capital coming in to lift a whole subclass of people up onto a pedestal and saying Go. What I was thinking over and over was This is all very well — but. Tsau was charity, or a species of it, which Denoon had to turn into something generically different or it was hardly worth doing. He needed more enthusiasm than I felt he was being given. I was very divided. You can only give what you can give. If you know in your heart something is in essence or origin charity you act differently toward it than if it’s utterly your own creation. On the other hand, couldn’t people see how extraordinary this could all turn out to be — in fact already was? I was in both camps at the same time. How happy should I myself be, was of course the unstated associated question. How happy should I be in Tsau? If I was holding that the average person should be more rapturous in this place, then all the eternal questions of what an average person is, what culture has to do with that, came flocking back, id est anthropology came flooding back. What I really needed was to ventilate with Denoon on all this. But where was he? We were having brief, stiff public encounters and no more. Days were passing. The Tswana think you can routinely see ghosts for a second or two out of the corner of your eye. Denoon was ghostly to me. He was at the edges of my vision, always going somewhere else.

The sexual atmosphere of this place is normal, I think. But how can it be? You do see something covert and baffled in the faces of the men occasionally, which may relate. I would expect Tsau to be like what I imagine convents to be, in short, hells of incessant sexual stimulation and fixation, on the analysis that a convent is an institution devoted to an injunction reducible to Whatever you do, don’t think about an elephant, the analog to the elephant being sex. The relative scarcity of men here should guarantee that, at least for the queens, you would think. I suppose there must be some sexual partnering going on between some of the women. I get the feeling that the only one here not sexually placid is me. I have fantasies in which I am hanging on Nelson’s body like a langur, feeling inside his shirt. I think about his legs and the back of his head, the two main things of his I see as he skirts me and retreats from my vicinity with great celerity. Why is my meeting with the mother committee always being postponed? Why is nothing reaching me from him? Everything was too slow. I hate trendlessness. I began dissecting the question of why Denoon was facilitating my being there. I could hardly attribute it to love, at that stage, or even protolove, or, given the snail’s pace at which everything was occurring, to an opportunistic interest in me sexually. There were self-evident reasons, given his role in Tsau, for his not being sexually involved with members of the local nubility. And somehow he had managed himself sexually to his own satisfaction. I was not inclined to flatter myself that it was the unique charms concatenated in me that had wrecked whatever sexual equilibrium he had been enjoying previously. I asked myself what was the marxian, that is, selfish, interpretation of his apparently wanting me there? Light broke. It was obvious. Denoon wanted to know what he had wrought at Tsau. What was Tsau, really? I was an almost ideal vehicle through which he could find out. He would have had to be unaware of his own inner dynamic here, which meant that the little mating dance I was reading into our meetings in Gabs had been unconsciously allowed by him to ripen into whatever I had the force to bring it to. I was his ideal observer, and once I had been so persistent and brazen as to turn up in Tsau, there would be no way he would want me sent off. As I suddenly saw it, his problem was how to know truly what Tsau was. He was so immersed in the project and so identified with it that his own reading of it would be suspect, to start with. As for the actual beneficiaries of Tsau, there was a divide to cross. Having the language would help only so much. There was the gulf of gender, there was race, there was a culture tending toward evasion and defensive courtesy, and there was the fact that the people of Tsau would be insane to rock the boat: behind them was destitution, cruelty, hunger. Ultimately when professional project evaluators managed to force their way into Tsau, they would be looking for flaws and would be bringing with them the understandable bias of orthodox developmentalists against something like Tsau being a success. Nelson would not be being paranoid to feel this. He was celebrated in his field but not popular. So although he could never have consciously orchestrated my getting to Tsau without contaminating my ability to see things disinterestedly, my arrival must have seemed perfect. Everyone has a demon of pride. His was feeling deprived, and here was someone who could be helpful, who had taken the trouble to cross the desert to get to him, no less. There could, of course, be other motives supporting this one, I told myself to make myself feel a little better. But my insight seemed plausible and made me redouble my efforts to get everything down and achieve an intelligent sense of what Tsau was as a synergy. This felt like an assignment, and that felt comfortable. In any case it was what I had to work with. I find it difficult to probe people in re what they may find unsatisfactory about Tsau. It makes me look ungrateful. But there are certain perceptible areas of tenderness. There seems to be no congregational religious activity of any kind. The Bible study that’s done is very ad hoc and people are slightly furtive about it. Botswana is very Christianized, and very Zionist Christianized: so what is this about? I gather that Denoon is regarded as the village atheist. He is known for his jeremiads against religion, which seem to be regarded as just another of the odd, lakhoa things he likes to do. There do seem to be misgivings over the rule that housing be tribally mixed. Six of the thirteen Tswana tribes are represented here, plus the handful of Baherero. The mixing of tribes in the wards and neighborhoods is for the most part defended as a good thing, and people tend to claim that feelings on it were much stronger earlier on. I’m not so sure. Tomorrow I finally meet the mother committee and get a chance to see how the deception I seem to be embarked on is going over. I hadn’t actually written the word deception in my book, naturally. My surrogate for that was excursus in some places and gavotte in others. Before my past cleverness makes these entries impenetrable to me, I need to make a glossary — either that or forget the whole thing. I am already guessing at what I meant, here and there.