July's People

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1981

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Biblical Symbolism

The novel’s themes of societal upheaval, sudden transformations, and personal rebirth draw on imagery that analogizes its action to passages from scripture and/or liturgical rite, underscoring its momentous, almost miraculously life-changing events. The brutal civil war that upends South African society, ending centuries of white rule and emptying the cities of their Caucasian populations, has the (uncanny) suddenness and devastation of an apocalypse or the Biblical flood. Looking back on her family’s frantic exodus from a burning Johannesburg, Maureen reflects that “it was all a miracle; and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror” (11).

Shepherding the Smaleses’ narrow escape, their Black servant, July, steps into the role of a Noah or Moses, guiding them through a hostile wasteland to shelter: the remote, pastoral enclave where his extended family lives. Maureen spends “three days and nights hidden on the floor of the [escape] vehicle” (3), alluding to the biblical figures of Jonah and Lazarus, both of whom lay “buried” for that exact span of time: Jonah in the belly of a whale, Lazarus in his grave. Maureen’s salvation, then, is a symbolic resurrection into a new life—albeit one partly of “horror,” which upends her world and even her understanding of her past life. The “transformations” that flow from this epochal upheaval include troubling revelations about herself, which drive her to slough off the remnants of her old life to begin anew and see things (and herself) as they truly are. Following an argument with Bam about the delusions of their shared past, she bares her naked body to a symbolic baptism of rain: “Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see” (48).

At the novel’s end, after a devastating fight with July strips away the last illusions of her past generosity and egalitarianism, the baptism imagery recurs, this time in the form of a river, as Maureen flees toward a helicopter that symbolizes either a savior or an angel of death: She “moves out into the water like some member of a baptismal sect to be born again” (159). Her fate is in a sense irrelevant: Her leap of faith into the water is her final lunge toward her destiny—a sort of saintliness that renounces all ties to the world, including family, ego, comforting illusions, and maybe life itself. As she noted earlier, the suffering and transformation of saints have always been steeped in both “horror” and the miraculous.

Language

In the patchwork postcolonial landscape of July’s People, the use of language symbolizes privilege or, more often, the lack of it. In most contexts, language confers power, but in South Africa’s white-ruled society, multilingualism (that is, the ability to speak both white and Black languages) is most closely associated with those relatively low on the social scale (e.g., Black people like July, who must learn English to work for white people in the city, or white clerks in the pass offices and labor bureaus, who study Zulu or other native languages to conduct their brief, over-the-counter dealings with Black people).

Maureen’s father, a semi-prestigious “shift boss” at a mine, met his workers halfway, ordering them about in Fanagalo, a “bastard black lingua franca” that many found demeaning (45). However, Maureen herself and her affluent husband, Bam, speak no African languages: They never had to learn any since their work and lofty social milieu excluded most Black people, other than servants. In his dealings with them, July speaks a stylized argot of careful self-abnegation: a stilted service-dialect sufficient to take orders but not express feelings. His classroom English exudes a tactful “fatalism,” an implicit surrender to divine (or white) will. In the lopsided color divide of July’s People, a shared language, instead of joining hearts and minds, mostly enables subjugation—whether through Black people learning English or Afrikaans to obey white people’s orders or through white functionaries studying native tongues to micromanage Black lives.

In any asymmetrical society, ignorance is a luxury, like a big house on a hill. Late in the novel, July laughs at the questions the Smaleses ask about things that they never expressed any interest in before, “as a black had the necessity to understand, take on, the white people’s laws and ways” (112). Desperate for survival after their fall from privilege, Bam wishes he had learned an African language, even Fanagalo, which would now confer more “practicality” than the French he once boasted of knowing. In a telling moment, Bam cautions Maureen not to go “fishing” into their motives for not learning any African languages, which might have helped them relate better to the Black people they claim to esteem.

As July gradually asserts his growing power over his former masters, his way of speaking to them subtly changes. For instance, instead of asking permission to enter their home, he assumes it: “You say I can come inside?” (52). Just as Maureen strips off her clothes in an early scene, symbolically sloughing away the constrictions of the past, July, in his climactic quarrel with her, discards his ingratiating pidgin English, renouncing his lengthy self-abasement to her arrogant whims. By refusing to speak her first language—the language of hegemony—July tells her all she needs to know, and at last she understands “everything.”

The Bakkie, the Gun, and Other Possessions

In the violent interregnum of July’s People, the bakkie, the gun, and other possessions—mass-produced adjuncts of a confident, white-dominated power structure—symbolize lost or appropriated power. July soon commandeers the Smaleses’ “jaunty,” “dyed blonde” bakkie, a four-wheel-drive vehicle that once facilitated Bam’s hunting trips and empowered both his freedom and his masculine prerogatives, becoming the first casualty of its white owners’ increasing impotence in the post-apartheid world. Bam reacts to its disappearance with a panicked display of faux masculinity, strutting aimlessly through the village with a “swollen” penis—a clear analogue for what (on a Freudian level) he has lost. The truck quickly becomes a bone of contention between the white couple and their Black servant, who, in his newly liberated nation, now enjoys many freedoms that no longer are theirs while possessing ultimate power over them.

A less important possession symbolizing shattered white control is Maureen’s broken watch. She must learn to approximate the time of day by the position of the sun. Not long after, an unknown villager steals Bam’s factory-tooled shotgun, “something more perfect than anything in the settlement” (76), precipitating the Smaleses’ final descent into hopelessness and paranoia. Sensing the final erosion of their power and self-determination, Maureen throws herself on the mercy of a deux ex machina—a looming helicopter—an ambiguous totem of mechanical power that might well mean her destruction but promises freedom either way.

Complicating this symbology is the redundant nature of the Smaleses’ physical loss of their possessions: In this new world, these things no longer confer genuine power to them. The bakkie is useless to them since they can’t drive it anywhere without being seen; their shotgun, as July observes, offers no viable defense against armed invaders; and a working timepiece is meaningless in this remote community, where nothing is regulated by clocks or schedules. The radio that Bam brought (in lieu of medicine or other essentials) mostly torments them since many of the radio stations have been destroyed, and the fuzzy, likely unreliable news bulletins report only scattered chaos. At the novel’s start, possessions are closely associated with the white people’s world, to the exclusion of Black people’s: Bam helps the villagers repair their rudimentary tools, and July proves himself hopeless as an auto mechanic: “He had never been any good with mechanical things” (99). Soon, however, things change: July learns to drive the bakkie, and his friend Daniel presumably appropriates the Smaleses’ shotgun to join the freedom fighters, where it will be a military asset, not just an empty token of Bam’s macho self-regard. Thus, as white power fades, the Smaleses’ possessions lose their meaning and purpose except as symbols of what they’ve lost. In the new South Africa, however, the possessions regain their power in the hands of the Black Africans, who are ascendent.