The Gay & Lesbian Review

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36 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE
HIGHLYACCLAIMED when it
was published in the UK in
2002, Bitter Eden is a novel by
a South African writer named
Tatamkhulu Afrika (his chosen name
means “Grandfather Africa”). The author
died shortly after the book, which was
written years before, was finally pub-
lished. Only now is the book making its way to American read-
ers with a new U.S. edition. Based on the author’s own
experience as a prisoner of war in Northern Africa during
World War II, Bitter Eden tells the story of three men negoti-
ating their emerging sexuality in an inhospitable time and
under the bleakest of circumstances.
Tom, a young man from South Africa, meets Douglas, a fel-
low POW from England, and agrees to become his “mate,” a
word fraught with a great deal of emotion as well as conse-
quence. Tom, who narrates the story, is initially reluctant to have
anything to do with the flamboyant Douglas, especially in a
space as confined as a POW camp, given the realities of day-to-
day survival. Writes the narrator: “What does put me off are his
movements: the little almost dancing steps he takes even when,
supposedly, he is standing still, the delicate, frenetic gestures of
his hands, the almost womanliness of him that threatens to
touch—and touch—and touch—and I have already told of my
feelings concerning that.” Right from the start, then, the narra-
tor writes of his desire to “abort a relationship upon which
[Douglas] seems ferociously intent.” That the two men do wind
up becoming friends has as much to do with Tom’s reluctant at-
traction to Douglas and his ambivalence about his own sexual-
ity as it does with Douglas’ persistence.
Some readers may be put off by the harshness of the lan-
guage, as well as the brutality of the conditions the novel de-
picts. But these were brutal times and an era in which
expressions of tenderness or affection between men were
strictly limited. As novelist André Aciman points out, “the
word love is never mentioned” in the novel. However, it is all
the more powerful for never being uttered,
and makes every gesture of tenderness and
affection stand out like a dandelion in a
coal field.
Complicating Tom’s developing rela-
tionship with Douglas is the entrance of
another prisoner of war, another Brit
named Danny. Unlike Douglas, Danny is
fully the masculine ideal: “His hair is black, springy, tightly
curled, capping his head like a Renaissance cherub’s or an old
Greek bust of a beautiful boy…Lower down is the body of a
man who works at it—the breasts at the apex before mas-
culinity becomes womanishness, the nipples pert and clear, the
hair in the armpits tufting and lush, as lush a body-hair flow-
ing with the flat belly down into the generous crotch, the tautly
powerful thighs.” Bedding down beside Tom one cold winter
night, Danny’s appearance instantly causes a disruption in the
uneasy relationship between Tom and Douglas:
“Is this worrying you?”
I play it dumb. “Is what worrying me?”
“Me lying here with nothing on.”
Danny quickly adds: “Don’t get any wrong ideas. I’m married
though no kid yet ... and nobody gets to touch me down there.
... Only my wife.”
After wrestling with whether to befriend Douglas, the nar-
rator is forced to take stock of what he’s feeling night after
night as he and Danny bed down beside him naked and they
hold each other for warmth. Not surprisingly, Douglas be-
comes jealous of Tom and Danny’s new intimacy. The jeal-
ousy he soon displays, as well as his (incorrect) assumption
about their sexual intimacy, provides an effective foil to Tom,
as well as a goad for him to decide what it is, in fact, he feels
toward Danny. The narrator writes: “A misshapen moon is
now low in the sky. I do not know if it is rising or setting, sud-
denly do not even know where we are, never having been fur-
ther than where we lost the war.” Now that Tom has begun to
have feelings for another man, he’s totally uncertain how to
process these feelings—or how to express them to Danny.
Prisoners of Culture
1980—if it had reflected a genuine self-confidence—thenAIDS
wouldn’t have so easily called up visions of banishment, of lib-
eration tumbling down.
The crisis led to what came next, namely, gay fury and or-
ganization. AIDS decimated the community, and the commu-
nity, much to everyone’s surprise, got up and fought back. This
chapter of AIDS history, of Larry Kramer and ACT UP, is the
most familiar. By 1987 Strub had established a successful di-
rect-mail business that raised money for nonprofit corporations.
ACT UP recruited him to lead its fundraising efforts. Pushing
thirty, he felt a little “old” compared to many of the organiza-
tion’s activists. Also, he still entertained ambitions to run for of-
fice. But he had a pressing personal reason to join: he’d been
showing AIDS symptoms for some time, and was starting to get
sick. Strub had found a way to fuse his private life with a pub-
lic-service calling. He pursued it with impressive determina-
tion, founding POZ magazine in 1994 [the same year in which
this magazine began], a glossy periodical for people living with
HIV. Today he runs the Sero Project, which combats AIDS
stigma and criminalization.
Body Counts contains a number of celebrity cameos, in-
cluding Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Yoko Ono. It also
includes some very interesting photographs. The Vidal anec-
dote is especially fun, an instance of Strub’s amusing deadpan
humor. This book is downright uplifting; reading it will do you
good.
DALE W. BOYER
Bitter Eden
by Tatamkhulu Afrika
Picador. 232 pages, $25.
Dale W. Boyer is a writer based in Chicago.