Swapping the stage for the page, Nakhane Touré’s debut novel Piggy Boy’s Blues reveals a brave new literary voice, writws Kwanele Sisibo.
Piggy Boy’s Blues, musician Nakhane Touré’s debut novel, reads like fragments of a recurring dream. Characters flash in and out of the story like apparitions; they daydream to block out deeply scarring violations and the story unfolds in short, sharp, sometimes nonlinear episodes.
Essentially a tragedy centred on the disastrous consequences of a man’s return to his Eastern Cape hometown of Alice, the work is carried by Touré’s poetic, sensuous prose rather than by attention to storytelling mainstays such as a narrative arc.
Such an arc is palpably present, but it is hard as a reader not to get more swept up in the sensitively rendered sexual tension rather than in the fate of the story’s three main characters.
Touré’s focus on the psychological and emotional fabric of his characters at times recalls the work of K Sello Duiker, who Touré credits as “having opened up the gates for me to walk through”.
“I spent a lot of time removing characters that sounded like me to make it more [a] fictional thing,” says Touré of the crafting of the book, which was seven years in the making.
“My friends and family and I are very close but one can never fully understand other people’s emotions, so at the end of the day the only emotions I can pull from are mine.”
Touré, whose debut release Brave Confusion won a 2014 South African Music award for best alternative album, says the novel began long before his music career took off, while he was studying literature at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Given the context of the book’s publication, with South Africans preoccupied with decolonising everything, it is hard not to see the book as Touré’s own brave contribution to that debate.
See full report by Kwanele Sisibo in Mail & Guardian
PHOTO CREDIT: Delwyn Verasamy
