A father is born: More selfie than self portrait

Given the prevalence of social media, this obsession with propagating a curated image of oneself appears to have seeped into other aspects of our lives, and our creative endeavours.

In literature the memoir, once the preserve of writers or individuals of considerable achievement, and usually only published toward the end of one’s life, have become more prevalent. The best memoirs reveal at least as much, if not more, about the author’s peers and the society they lived in than about the author themselves, but memoir seems to have now become a genre all to itself.

The self-portrait and memoir are relevant and established aspects of artistic self-reflection, but in an increasingly self-obsessed age, their original intentions have in many if not most cases, been corroded by a narcissism that mistakes plain revelation for creativity.

It’s a corrosion Tumiso Mashaba’s A Father is Born makes little effort to escape.

Mashaba writes about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his own father as he grew up on the East Rand in the 80s, his teenage elder brother’s suicide, the death of his first child, and how he realised he was repeating generational patterns as he raised his second child.

Because we are a gregarious and curious species, we generally find other people interesting. We want to know in what ways we are similar or different, and how they have responded to circumstance. But our interest is maintained by the telling, which is where humour, and a seasoning of self-deprecation, or humility at least, and contextual awareness becomes crucial as it allows us to see reflections of our own humanity within the tale.

Given masculine toxicity and gender-based violence in South Africa, combined with the prevalence of absent fathers, A Father is Born began with promise: a personal window into how a father can impact a child’s confidence and outlook, and how becoming a father can alter perceptions. But from about a third to halfway in, the memoir became increasingly less reflective and resultantly less interesting, particularly as the writing itself is rather banal.

For instance, Mashaba writes how he was so busy recording his first child’s birth for Facebook he wasn’t really present at her birth, the momentous occasion mediated through a lens. There is no interrogation of this very contemporary phenomena; what it means in how we live and experience our life, how it might affect our children, or why he was motivated to want to post something so personal to strangers. This is particularly pertinent because Mashaba works in media, as a producer.

Granted, it requires a certain bravery to reveal that your father was so authoritarian that as a child you would wet yourself when he roared at you, or that you had an affair after you and your wife-to-be lost your first child. But then again, is that brave, or attention-seeking? When it comes to private lives, there can be a certain grace in reticence, in allusion rather than disclosure. There’s no allure in a self-penned tell-all.

Furthermore, and call me old-fashioned, but writing a memoir in your thirties, especially as your first literary effort, seems rather self-important. One might at least try sublimate your experience into a novel.

In the end A Father is Born resembled speaking to the person at a party who at first seems refreshingly candid and engaging but within a drink or two, morphs into a self-involved windbag who doesn’t let you get a word in edgeways.

Disappointment set in as the promise of a self-portrait was displaced by the shallowness of a selfie.