The author of Native Nostalgia looks carefully at a few moments in JM Coetzee’s Boyhood that could point, Dlamini speculates, to the moment when Coetzee discovered the writer within:
THERE is a scene in JM Coetzee’s memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, where the young narrator visits Aunt Annie, his great-aunt and godmother, at the Volkshospitaal in Cape Town.
Aunt Annie, old, wrinkled and ugly, has broken a hip and the narrator, his mother and the narrator’s brother have travelled from Worcester to Cape Town to “make arrangements for” the aunt.
This passage describes the scene : “Because she is his godmother she believes she has a special relationship with him. She does not seem to sense the disgust he feels for her, wrinkled and ugly in the hospital bed, the disgust he feels for this whole ward full of ugly women. He tries to keep his disgust from showing; his heart burns with shame.”
The narrator, his brother and mother leave the hospital to spend the night in Aunt Annie’s flat and “the prospect fills him with doom”. But what is a boy to do except go with his mother? He does not like Aunt Annie’s apartment. It has no fridge and the “toilet bowl is brown with dirt”. “Why have we got to stay here?” he asks. “Because,” says his mother.
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