By its very nature a memoir implies that, by reading it, you will get to know more about the author. Lost and found in Johannesburg is a different kind of memoir to what a reader would expect. This memoir focuses on the history of the city rather than the man, looking at how the two grow up together.
Gevisser opens the book with this story of a once safe haven for him and his friends being forever destroyed by what we later read is an attack. It does however take more than half the book to return to this story. The layout of the memoir is difficult to understand, given the reader is burdened with this initial snippet of impending violence while reading about the apartheid struggle and the varying politics surrounding Gevisser’s life. Much later into the book, Gevisser describes in horrific raw detail the emotional scars left by this attack and how he managed to move past it and try and look at his city in a new way.
Gevisser uses the childhood game “dispatcher” as a lens into a segregated Johannesburg. He used to play the game in the back seat of his father’s Mercedes Benz in the family garage in Hurlingham for hours on end. Using his parents’ street-guide, the Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg, Gevisser would send “imaginary couriers” all through the streets on the map of Johannesburg within the Holmden’s Register, learning the different areas and how to get there. Later Gevisser realised the segregation apartheid brought to most aspects of life in Johannesburg at that time, including this map, where vast expanses of the city were excluded.
The reader is more than halfway through the book when she hears of the first personal and intimate event in Gevisser’s life: the planning of his wedding to his partner of many years. But even this story has no intimate revelations. A swift wedding ceremony is carried out, it seems, to complete immigration paperwork. Gevisser’s description of the wedding focuses mostly on the registrar’s attempt to convince Gevisser to be more enthusiastic. The registrar eventually says:
“Do you think you are a second-class citizen just because you are gay? You have full rights in this new South Africa. You have the right to make a fuss. I think you need to go home and have a very serious chat with your partner.”
This prompted Gevisser and “C” to bring two witnesses and have rings for their service, which they were not going to do initially. Gevisser writes that he was humbled by being “lectured by a young black woman about [his] rights”. Later Gevisser gives an account of how he and his partner would be able to imagine the empty venue they married in filled with images of the loved ones that were not present. It leaves a reader questioning why one would leave such an idea in the imagination. Why not invite the friends and people you love, to create real memories? This is explained in part but with no real conclusion for the reader.
Gevisser’s husband is referred to as “C”, through the book. It’s interesting that the author’s hid his husband’s identity since, a few years prior to the memoir being written, Gevisser, publicly named his husband in newspaper articles and interviews. The stories from the newspapers are excluded from this memoir entirely.
Mark Gevisser
There are also references to Gevisser’s sexual self-discovery, as the reader is told of trips to renowned gay book stores in Hillbrow and his affair with a colleague, but none that leave the reader knowing the author better. Snapshots of these intimate moments leave the reader wanting more.
Gevisser started working for the Mail & Guardian and “sought out assignments that took [him] to… East Rand townships as political violence enveloped them, through to creepy intelligence sources on plots outside Boksburg; from brothels on the outer fringes of Randburg to gay shebeens in Kwa Thema.”
“I spent days at hospitals in Tembisa; evenings at drag shows in Ennerdale,” he says.
This too leaves the reader intrigued as to the details of these events, but they are rewarded only with another reference to a map book Gevisser read in the back of his parent’s Mercedes Benz as a child.
Gevisser has lived a life of privilege within a wholesome Jewish home, as is evident in his deliberation about whether to attend Yale or UCT. When he does choose UCT, it only temporarily impresses him:
“The world I had discovered upon leaving home [for UCT] seemed big enough, for the moment, to satisfy my dispatching desires, and suddenly those vapour trails disintegrating into the blue of distance at the edges of my sky did not seem so compelling.”
In his short time at UCT, Gevisser had unearthed information on Piet Koornhof. Gevisser became part of the Varsity Seven after publishing a report in the student newspaper, Varsity, which resulted in him being charged by the university with breaking the off-the-record rules. More on this story would have been fantastic. Certainly given the importance of the event, not only in a tiny part of history but also as a deciding factor in Gevisser’s attendance at Yale. Interested readers would have to extensively google this important scoop of a budding journalist, as his memoir doesn’t reveal much more than the public already knows.
You are left wondering why Gevisser avoids revealing more personal accounts of his life. Instead he includes the family history, the story of Johannesburg, a look at gay life in Hillbrow, but all of them seem to mask Gevisser’s more personal experiences. It seems a missed opportunity to share more than maps, books and politics.
As a consolation, Gevisser’s talent as a writer is evident throughout. He tells a story very well, even if it isn’t about himself.
Gevisser opens the book with this story of a once safe haven for him and his friends being forever destroyed by what we later read is an attack. It does however take more than half the book to return to this story. The layout of the memoir is difficult to understand, given the reader is burdened with this initial snippet of impending violence while reading about the apartheid struggle and the varying politics surrounding Gevisser’s life. Much later into the book, Gevisser describes in horrific raw detail the emotional scars left by this attack and how he managed to move past it and try and look at his city in a new way.
Gevisser uses the childhood game “dispatcher” as a lens into a segregated Johannesburg. He used to play the game in the back seat of his father’s Mercedes Benz in the family garage in Hurlingham for hours on end. Using his parents’ street-guide, the Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg, Gevisser would send “imaginary couriers” all through the streets on the map of Johannesburg within the Holmden’s Register, learning the different areas and how to get there. Later Gevisser realised the segregation apartheid brought to most aspects of life in Johannesburg at that time, including this map, where vast expanses of the city were excluded.
The reader is more than halfway through the book when she hears of the first personal and intimate event in Gevisser’s life: the planning of his wedding to his partner of many years. But even this story has no intimate revelations. A swift wedding ceremony is carried out, it seems, to complete immigration paperwork. Gevisser’s description of the wedding focuses mostly on the registrar’s attempt to convince Gevisser to be more enthusiastic. The registrar eventually says:
“Do you think you are a second-class citizen just because you are gay? You have full rights in this new South Africa. You have the right to make a fuss. I think you need to go home and have a very serious chat with your partner.”
This prompted Gevisser and “C” to bring two witnesses and have rings for their service, which they were not going to do initially. Gevisser writes that he was humbled by being “lectured by a young black woman about [his] rights”. Later Gevisser gives an account of how he and his partner would be able to imagine the empty venue they married in filled with images of the loved ones that were not present. It leaves a reader questioning why one would leave such an idea in the imagination. Why not invite the friends and people you love, to create real memories? This is explained in part but with no real conclusion for the reader.
Gevisser’s husband is referred to as “C”, through the book. It’s interesting that the author’s hid his husband’s identity since, a few years prior to the memoir being written, Gevisser, publicly named his husband in newspaper articles and interviews. The stories from the newspapers are excluded from this memoir entirely.
Mark Gevisser
There are also references to Gevisser’s sexual self-discovery, as the reader is told of trips to renowned gay book stores in Hillbrow and his affair with a colleague, but none that leave the reader knowing the author better. Snapshots of these intimate moments leave the reader wanting more.
Gevisser started working for the Mail & Guardian and “sought out assignments that took [him] to… East Rand townships as political violence enveloped them, through to creepy intelligence sources on plots outside Boksburg; from brothels on the outer fringes of Randburg to gay shebeens in Kwa Thema.”
“I spent days at hospitals in Tembisa; evenings at drag shows in Ennerdale,” he says.
This too leaves the reader intrigued as to the details of these events, but they are rewarded only with another reference to a map book Gevisser read in the back of his parent’s Mercedes Benz as a child.
Gevisser has lived a life of privilege within a wholesome Jewish home, as is evident in his deliberation about whether to attend Yale or UCT. When he does choose UCT, it only temporarily impresses him:
“The world I had discovered upon leaving home [for UCT] seemed big enough, for the moment, to satisfy my dispatching desires, and suddenly those vapour trails disintegrating into the blue of distance at the edges of my sky did not seem so compelling.”
In his short time at UCT, Gevisser had unearthed information on Piet Koornhof. Gevisser became part of the Varsity Seven after publishing a report in the student newspaper, Varsity, which resulted in him being charged by the university with breaking the off-the-record rules. More on this story would have been fantastic. Certainly given the importance of the event, not only in a tiny part of history but also as a deciding factor in Gevisser’s attendance at Yale. Interested readers would have to extensively google this important scoop of a budding journalist, as his memoir doesn’t reveal much more than the public already knows.
You are left wondering why Gevisser avoids revealing more personal accounts of his life. Instead he includes the family history, the story of Johannesburg, a look at gay life in Hillbrow, but all of them seem to mask Gevisser’s more personal experiences. It seems a missed opportunity to share more than maps, books and politics.
As a consolation, Gevisser’s talent as a writer is evident throughout. He tells a story very well, even if it isn’t about himself.