![]() The question becomes one of official permission, as well as the interpretation for the differing audiences. Macbeth informs the other teachers that they will not only present the play at their own school (which is Coloured) but also before an audience of whites. The conflict develops because of the racial segregation of audiences in South Africa (at least at the time when the story was published). Hence, the principal is Macbeth, and so on down the line. What provides the story with its comic dimension is Rive's decision to refer to all of his characters by their names in the current production. At Retreat Secondary School (where the motto is "Advance, Retreat"), the principal himself performs in the annual Shakespeare production, always playing the lead no matter what the play happens to be. Nowhere else in the collection is Rive able to move so great a distance from his characters and still retain perspective. The humor of the title story of the volume, "Advance, Retreat," places it in a class by itself. The sudden reversal at the end of the story is not only hauntingly moving but unexpectedly convincing. When her visits abruptly end (because of an unpredictable coincidence), the teacher's sense of rage and frustration is overwhelming. "He seemed to welcome and dread her visits at the same time." It isn't long before he buys extra groceries for her, regarding the African woman as an extension of himself. Though he is repelled by her looks, the teacher is oddly attracted to her. The woman begins to make a weekly appearance at his door. Somewhat reluctantly, he gives her a parcel of foodstuffs, only to discover a week later that his generosity is tested again. One night when he sits alone reading, an African woman knocks on his door and begs for food. The main character of "The Visits" is a Coloured teacher, bored by his students' essays as well as by the African poetry he is expected to appreciate. ![]() You hated me, Ma, hated me, because I was yourself." Mavis cries to herself, "Don't you understand that you are black and your bloody children are white! Jim and Rosie and Sonny are white! And you made me like you. Like her mother, Mavis is an uncomfortable reminder to the other siblings that their origins are not exclusively Caucasian, that their flight from the world of color can never be complete. It's all a kind of show, a public demonstration of emotion, juxtaposed with the unspoken litany of the darker child, a girl named Mavis, who doesn't fit in with the others. The woman's husband and children are present, singing mournfully and shedding crocodile tears as their contribution to the official closure of the woman's life. "Resurrection" describes the events during a wake for a Coloured woman. Yet at least three of the stories in the volume are flawless, as fine as those of any other South African writer since World War II. Several of them, such as "The Bench," written a quarter of a century ago, are seriously dated and oddly reminiscent of the fiction by black Americans at the turn of this century (Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar). The short stories in "Advance, Retreat" are set almost entirely in and around Cape Town, where Rive lived most of his life. South Africa is no place at all for these racially mixed children, yet (in another sense) what could be more representative of the South African tragedy than people who are neither African nor white? Instead, the world that Rive documented so tirelessly abounds in claustrophobic images of entrapment and menace, of being caught between two millstones and slowly ground to nothing. Amalgamation with either Africans or Europeans was impossible (if nothing else, apartheid has always institutionalized a very effective pecking order). Richard Rive - like a couple of million other South Africans - bore the humiliations and the absurdities of Coloured classification, an abyss from which there was no escape. The African says to him, " 'Wait till we get you uppity Coloureds. ![]() The main character, who is Coloured, is threatened by an African youth while riding on a bus. Toward the beginning of "Emergency" (Richard Rive's novel of the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa in 1960) a minor incident occurs that embellishes the predominant theme of most of Rive's creative work.
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