Autocratic Fatherhood, Violent Sexuality, and Critique in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples

The recurrence of the theme of sexual violence in recent South African fiction has elevated sexual violence to a symbol of apartheid’s legacy of patriarchy. Although texts that feature sexual violence are often analysed as allegories of the legacy of apartheid’s patriarchal control and racial domination, I argue that texts like Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples de-allegorise and/or de-politicise sexual violence. Rather than read The Smell of Apples as an exculpatory narrative of white South Africa’s complicity in apartheid’s atrocities, I argue that Behr’s depiction of sexual violence in a space where the child is supposed to be safe and by a perpetrator who is known to the victim and from whom the victim expects protection complicates the South African rape narrative. Thus, I contend that Behr crafts an ingenious and nuanced register for his witness-protagonist to subvert the muzzling power of the rapist-father to disclose the horror of sexual abuse for both victim and witness.