Got No Secrets
Danila Botha
Tightrope Books (2010), 141 pages, $18.95

Some writers are comfortable in a style the way that certain people are comfortable in their clothes. This is not to say that the chosen style is superior; rather, these writers wear their style without self-consciousness or preening. Their work is generally successful because it know its mind.

Danila Botha, author of the appropriately titled Got No Secrets, is one of those writers. With a ferocious punk energy, this first story collection turns over the secret soil of its characters’ hearts: young women struggling with drug habits, abusive relationships, and a tendency toward masochism and other compulsive behaviors. Punk rock haircuts, tattoos, and sexual promiscuity abound.

Here’s a sample passage:

I get that apartment and share it with Tina. I don’t officially drop out, I just stop going to class. I do it until I flunk out, and no one’s around to make me feel guilty. Tina’s strung out so often it’s like living alone. I look at her: bone thin where she once had boobs and hips, black mascara running down her face, her once perfect hair peroxide blond with roots. I wonder if she knows she’s a junkie. She has all these sexy clothes, but she doesn’t even get dressed anymore. She just uses and poses for our webcam. She inserts anything. I once saw her stick a stiletto heel up there.

A big part of readability is rhythm. Botha has a natural sense of rhythm’s nuances – when to linger on a detail or scene and when to breeze past in explication. Couple that with prose that doesn’t call attention to itself – either with self-consciously quirky detail (McSweeney’s), precocious and precious word choice (Nabokov), syntactical clutter (Pynchon), or affected lack of affect (Carver) – and you’ve got stories that, excuse the personification, read themselves. Though I am a painfully slow reader, I finished these twenty-pagers in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee.

At times the language is flat, but you barely notice. “Bone thin” and “peroxide blonde” in the above passage feel stock. Similarly, I wonder why a writer so interested in rubbing our faces in the dirt would employ a euphemism like “up there.” After watching this story’s narrator puke, use ecstasy, have sex with a stranger, and expose herself on webcam, this delicacy about genitalia feels prissy. But under the spell of Botha’s self-assuredness, we read right past it. It is only the critic in me that notices, and only then out of a sense of occupational duty.

Botha is a Canadian by way of South Africa, and she is at her most successful – for this American reader, at least – when she explores her South African roots. Here’s another passage, from the collection’s most successful piece, “Heroin Heights:”

The streets are lined with one-star hotels, street meat vendors, and magoshas getting ready to hlahla any guy desperate enough to pay them. Our apartment is on Claim Street, near Kotze, across the street from the infamous Protea Hotel. It’s legendary for the number of jijis, underage girls, that are there all the time…They all wear the same gold or purple eyeshadow, red lipstick, and black fishnets or torn tights…When they bend over you can see everything. No underwear.

This passage maintains the same naturalness of phrasing as the first. But it is superior in its specificity and rhetorical relationship to the reader. Perhaps the details would seem overly familiar if I were South African, but I am not, and I am guessing most of Botha’s audience is not either. Additionally, the narrator of this story is a young girl with kidney disease, and as we watch her mother struggle to pay for her daughter’s dialysis, our sympathy swells more easily than it does for the more self-afflicted characters of the other pieces. One of this collection’s biggest flaws, its lack of perspective and authorial distance, is absent here. I have no idea how autobiographical these stories are, but all but one are narrated by young females who live in either Canada or South Africa, and Botha seems to expect us to take their plights as seriously as they do. This is noble, but a little distancing irony – or at least some sense of how these women’s parents and boyfriends view them – might have gone a long way. “Heroin Heights” achieves this distance by situating its narrator in the larger social struggles of Johannesburg.

But this lack of distance is also the collection’s strength, a result of its stylistic ingenuousness. If at times this leads to repetitiveness (most of these stories are not just in first person, but also in present tense), a lack of structure (stories seem to begin and end without reason), or a borderline melodrama (nurses who cut themselves, women who can’t get over boyfriends of years prior), it also makes for an immersive read. Botha does well to sink us in subjectivity, but if she can offer a more objective look at that subjectivity’s context, while not losing sight of her essential Botha-ness, her stories will resonate more full and wide.

The United States Needs a Trade Policy

by William Trent Pancoast

The Roman Empire fell because it had too many slaves and not enough taxpayers (so goes one explanation of the Fall). Isn’t the United States in a similar situation? Our goods are made cheaply by workers (Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, etc.) enslaved by corporations and we no longer have the robust tax base of fairly compensated American workers making the products we need to buy.

Slavery is illegal in this country. Yet we allow corporations making products with slave labor to ship their goods here unquestioned. In South America little girls are locked in maquiladora compounds sewing brand-name-label clothing. In China, in the steel mill that fabricated the new San Francisco bridge, the workday is sixteen hours long and the pay less than a dollar an hour. In India, small children help manufacture the goods we buy. Why are we letting these morally-tainted products into our country without scrutiny through trade policies and regulations?

The twin evil of the above lack of labor standards is the lack of environmental regulations among our trading partners. There are basic laws in the United States that prohibit corporations from dumping waste and polluting our air, land, and water. Corporations have run from these American laws to countries that have no environmental regulations. Remember the Olympics in China? The smog was so thick that all manufacturing was shut down long before the games were to begin. Chinese rivers are toxic from the industrial waste that corporations dump in them. Why should we let goods manufactured in countries with no environmental regulations into our country unquestioned?

Without good-paying industrial jobs, the United States will eventually lose its middle class. The tax base will continue to erode. Our infrastructure will decline further. The wealthy, and especially corporations, have made it clear that they do not intend to help out with the tax burden, either in the short term or long term.

Do we need tariffs on goods manufactured by slaves in toxic environmental conditions and imported to our country? Maybe. Do we need to reign in the global exploitation of labor and the environment by corporations. Yes, for sure. Corporations need to start behaving. They need to be held accountable for their actions worldwide and pay their fair share of taxes.

There is a lot of yammering going on in Washington about our economy and the decline of our way of life. Our representatives talk about creating jobs, but it goes unsaid that many of our manufacturing jobs now reside in third world countries and that getting these jobs back is what we need to do. They have apparently thrown in the towel, willing to let corporations despoil both the lives of foreign workers and the world’s environment, and at the same time use the United States for the consumer (until the money runs out) dumping grounds for these tainted products.

We need a trade policy in this country. It needed to be started 30 years ago, but today will work. Corporations need to improve their behavior, and they will never do it voluntarily. Our elected representatives in Washington need to start acting like they form a government. Formulating a trade policy would be a good place to start.

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William Trent Pancoast‘s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Night Train, The Righteyeddeer, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, US News & World Report, and numerous labor publications.  Labeled a “blue collar writer” by the Wall Street Journal in 1986 because of his working class writings, Pancoast recently retired from the auto industry after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio.