Brian Fulela: “Desire, Place and Adolescence: Some Coordinates in Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood”

Sifiso Mzobe’s debut novel, Young Blood, hurtles headlong into the trials of its protagonist, Sipho, a seventeen-year old high school drop-out. The reader is immediately immersed in the tale of a young Black boy’s initiation into adulthood on the streets of Durban, its suburbs, townships and shantytowns. Like many of his generation who are caught up in an almost theistic pursuit of the accoutrements of consumer culture, Sipho desires the wealth and jouissance that accrues to those who have acquired financial wealth. Against the wishes of his parents and extended family, he drops out of school. The return of his childhood friend Musa – who has attained precisely the ‘good life’ that Sipho so desires – leads him away from the paternal authority and protection of his father’s bush mechanic’s workshop into the violent world of organized crime and corruption. Sipho’s interactions with an array of characters from this world engulf him deeper and deeper until he is involved in schemes including car theft and hijacking, and drug trafficking. It is through these that he is able to briefly enjoy the high life of conspicuous consumption. All thoughts of a free lunch, of continued enjoyment without consequences are shattered when one of Sipho’s crew is killed in a botched car hijacking. While driving a stolen car, Sipho narrowly escapes arrest – for a litany of charges ranging from car theft to attempted murder – by bribing the policemen who pull him over. With the fruits of his criminal activity exhausted, his associates either under arrest, in hiding or dead, the (redeemed?) protagonist registers for and takes classes at a technical college towards certification as a mechanic. This paper will argue for the interpretive value of a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. It intends to a focus on how the play and economy of desire is outworked in the novel’s representation of the field of Black male subjectivity and the geographies of the post-apartheid city of Durban.