A powerful and poignant testimony

GWEN PODBREY

 Lost and Found in Johannesburg by Mark Gevisser (Jonathan Ball, R236)

 It was travel writer Paul Theroux who wrote: “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” Leave-takings and homecomings are indeed disruptive experiences, but – as Mark Gevisser reveals in his new work – they are also enriching.

A child of Johannesburg, the city was where he came of age, and where the privileges of a white, Jewish childhood were offset by the searing injustices around him.

Growing up in the seventies, Gevisser eschewed the company of peers, instead turning inwards. His favourite preoccupation – one that would become compulsive – was sparked by “Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg”, a cartographic guide to the landmarks and byways of the city.

Dispatching imaginary emissaries to its various sections, and plotting the route they should follow, he acquired an expert knowledge of its streets, parks and “grey” areas, the demi-monde where individuals of all races and sexual orientations fed off their own spiritual economy, flouting the prevailing racial and homophobic laws.

Balancing the often contradictory influences of a politically liberal home, European Yiddishkeit, apartheid South Africa and the stress (and, at that stage, shame) of homosexuality, the young Gevisser needed stability: fixed points, both internal and geographic, which he found in the cafés, libraries and shops around his suburb.

These spaces remained in him after he had left the country to work and study abroad, where – despite his best efforts at integration – the place which had weaned him stayed imbedded in his DNA.

Returning to South Africa at the time of its liberation, Gevisser found a different, vibrant and often menacing energy pervading the city. Seeing areas he had known intimately, altered almost beyond recognition, he was overwhelmed by loss and nostalgia.

As both a Johannesburger and a Jew, his past had been ransacked and his identity violated. Even the dead had been made obsolete. In the old Jewish Cemetery in Braamfontein, long-deceased family lay in the soil on which they’d first set foot almost a century before, completely forgotten.

Once bustling, heady areas like Hillbrow, and affluent suburbs like Killarney, had been overtaken by shifting demographics and, frequently, dereliction. To add to these blows, Gevisser experienced first-hand the realities of the new South Africa, as a victim of a traumatic robbery in which close friends were also sexually assaulted. The shocks of homecoming were compounded by PTSD.

Eventually, however, a greater revelation came to him: that, despite Johannesburg’s many changes, he could again believe in it and its future. Having mourned the former selves he’d once invested in the city, he could finally jubilate at discovering them still very much alive.

Gevisser occasionally lapses into self-indulgent reminiscence, and there is an element of overshare about his sexual awakening. Nevertheless, the book remains a beautiful, almost elegiac homage to his home town. It is about the convergence of personal and political history; about dispossession and belonging; and about coming out, coming back and coming full circle. A poignant and powerful testimony.