Camouflage

Puttin' on the Fatigues

Camouflage isn't just a fashion statement. It's also useful for hiding because of how it blends into the environment. Ask any paintballer—it works like a charm until they get splattered with brightly colored paint.

Peekay uses a sort of camouflage to help him survive in his various environments. At the first boarding school he has to blend in to stay alive, never sticking his neck out for fear of it getting chopped off. He hides the fact that he's English (as well as he can); he also never speaks up in class, because he doesn't want to stand out by being the smart kid (even though he is). But by the time Peekay gets to his second year he has to do some quick thinking to get by:

The camouflage was intact and I'd moved up into the next evolutionary stage. From knowing how to hide my brains I had now learned to use them. Granpa Chook and I were one step further away from the sea. (3.45)

When Peekay gets home, he rethinks his strategy. He thinks about the way that his Nanny didn't use camouflage:

Why did you have to wear camouflage all the time? The only person I had ever known who didn't need any camouflage was Nanny. She laughed and cried and wondered and loved and never told a thing the way it wasn't. (8.97)

Being a little more open with himself (instead of hiding his smarts and who he is) will become a new approach for Peekay, but he doesn't lose his camouflage all the way yet. He still has to figure out a way to get by in the prison with his contraband project, for example, which requires a little bit of camouflage. He's also still an English kid amongst Afrikaners, but instead of hiding it he just doesn't make as big deal of it.

The Big Reveal

Instead of hiding his smarts like he did to blend in at boarding school, Peekay shines in class once he moves to Barberton:

I quickly earned a reputation, rather unjustly, for being clever. Doc had persuaded me to drop my camouflage and not to play dumb. (10.2)

As we can see, Doc is someone who helps Peekay feel comfortable with himself, reminding us showing how important Peekay's friends are in shaping him.

Another place where camouflage is important is the prison. Geel Piet is a master of blending in:

I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible. One of the shadows. (11.2)

In fact, it is when Geel Piet sticks out too much and catches Borman's attention that he pays with his life.

A New Kind of Hiding

As Peekay grows he takes on a new type of camouflage: being the very best. That might seem kind of like the opposite, but really, Peekay still sees it as a way of hiding. Even though he's not blending in with the group, he's so outstanding that no one even sees his weaknesses:

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched on a whole heap of other responses a fourteen-year-old can't really work out. [...] While I didn't think of it as camouflage I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark. (17.57)

Rather than staying at the back of the class or the middle of the pack to stay safe, now Peekay decides to leave everyone in his dust. But it's still a strategy for survival; he's never just living:

In the years to follow, winning would become the ultimate camouflage as I trained to be a spiritual terrorist. (17.74)

When Peekay goes to the mines, it's to find his true self, not the one that he's hidden all these years to survive the various systems he encounters.

My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin and emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential. (23.93)