Portrait With Keys
We’re in Johannesburg now, and I just finished Portrait with Keys, Ivan Vladislavic’s quirky and sharply observed take on this city.
Vladislavic is basically the Jane Jacobs of modern Johannesburg – no detail of urban life is too small to dissect, no change too minor to carry significance. He writes of the malls that sprung up optimistically across the city decades ago, only to decline and become shuttered, haunted places. He observes the city’s metal being stolen systematically for scrap resale – brass numbers pried from front doors, manholes taken from city streets, statues sawed apart and hauled away from public parks one piece at a time. He recounts a conversation with his brother about Ponte Tower’s garish corporate topper, how it looks like the whole city’s sponsored by Vodacom.
At the beginning of Portrait With Keys, Vladislavic shares what he says is a frequently remarked-upon fact about Johannesburg – that it’s that rare major city without a river, lake, or ocean to explain its location. Instead, it's a city built by economics. I have a Texan colleague who says the same thing about Dallas, another city I recently visited for the first time. She prefers cities like Austin or San Antonio that have founding stories to ground them, and says that, in its absence, a city can feel somehow craven or rootless. I don’t think Vladislavic would disagree; his Johannesburg is one which is eternally building upon and devouring itself. It feels temporal and unknowable. And yet, we can form attachments to even these kinds of cities.
I love to get a sense of a place by walking it, and Johannesburg – all of South Africa, in fact – is incredibly frustrating in this respect. It’s a city in which people who have things hide them behind walls, and people who have nothing live on display. Privacy, it seems, is for the rich, and the rich take full advantage of it.
Vladislavic shares my love of discovery on foot, and so he despairs how this city enables people to move through it without ever having to step on a public street. In modern Johannesburg, many citizens walk from their homes and into vehicles from behind the protection of walls, travel the labyrinthine streets at SUV-level remove, pass through a series of security gates, and emerge again in similarly privatized landscapes. In this city, many people carry janitor-sized keys rings for all the security doors and locks in their lives, and the walls they build take on almost poetic proportions:
“Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defenses multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes. In the wealthier suburbs the pattern is to knock things flat and start all over. Around here people must make the most of what they’ve already got, and therefore the walls tend to grow by increments. A stone wall is heightened with prefab panels, a prefab wall is heightened with steel palisades, the palisades are topped with razor wire. Wooden pickets on top of brick, ornate wrought-iron panels on top of plaster, blade wire on top of split poles. These piggyback walls are nearly always ugly. But sometimes the whole ensemble achieves a degree of elaboration that becomes beautiful again.”
Vladislavic isn’t immune to this phenomenon – he too has a wall, he too secures his steering wheel with a lock, he even begrudgingly hires a security guard to watch his friends’ cars when he has them over for dinner parties. But he also fights the impulse to hide himself away. For example, he writes of his walk from car to library: “I should resist this scurrying about underground, this mole-like secretiveness. I like the walk, nevermind the broken paving stones and the hawkers’ clutter. I want to approach the library up a city street like an ordinary citizen, passing from the company of people into the company of books.”
What goes unexamined in Portrait With Keys is the source of the fear. Crime, race, oppression, and apartheid – the main themes of My Traitor's Heart – get short shrift here. I often wished for more of Vladislavic's thoughts about why things are the way they are in this city, and how they might be different someday.
Ultimately, the Johannesburg of his imagination is, if not easily lovable, at least endlessly fascinating. I'm finding this place to be fascinating too, and have even managed to stumble upon pockets of it where the street life is vibrant, eclectic, and not at all forbidding. Much of this city is behind lock and key, but not all of it is.