Analysis Of Mark Gevisser's 'Bitter Fruit'

In Bitter Fruit the character of Mikey physically represents the barrier of the past to the present. While he did not experience apartheid violence, he is a child of rape performed under the regime. His body is a literal figure of violence. When Mikey discovers his history, he recognizes that “he can no longer think of the future without confronting his past” (Dangor 131). Rather than attempting to reconcile the two, Mikey is influenced by his golden rule “look to the future, always” and decided like Marion’s parents, to annihilate his past (Dangor 131). For the crime of his conception, he shoots his father. In killing his mother’s rapist, he is obliterating the hold of the past rather than accepting it. Rather than uniting anyone, he

Due to white privilege, apartheid did not harm all equally and the legacy remains embedded in the nation. In Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Mark Gevisser works through his own privilege is attempting to understand the violence surrounding his hometown of Johannesburg. Violence in South Africa increased following apartheid due to the legacy it left behind on the nation. Gevisser explores the implications behind this in acknowledging his personal trauma (an attack on him and two friends), which occurred under the African Nation Congress. While he recognizes it is not on the same level as trauma faced by colored and blacks under the apartheid government. Still Mark is able to reconcile the past and the present by asserting that there exists “a strand of South Africaness that links my identity, if not my experiences to theirs” (Gevisser 37). It is through the separation of identity and experience that he is able to unite past and present, individual and collective, into a single body of South Africa. Where Bitter Fruit and Playing in the Light present the varying barriers to a united national body, Gevisser’s memoir is one of total