Irked by folks who grumble that there is nothing to do in Joburg, Laurice Taitz decided to set them straight. She certainly has plenty to say right now, and talking books is high on her list.
Two recent blog posts alight on a debate that South African readers and writers are currently discussing in numbers. Or that is my personal experience at least, engaging with writers and editors as I sally around the country meeting bookish folks. But both arguments sound a little grumpy and I don’t entirely agree with her.
Laurice’s post Indian-nish and Indian-ness bewails the dearth of literature with a clearly established South African flavour. She writes: “It left me thinking I would be hard-pressed to come up with a list of 10 books that carry a sense of South African-ness. There are whispers of it in JM Coetzee’s early work, and in Patricia Schonstein-Pinnock’s Skyline, Fred Khumalo’s Bitches’ Brew and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to My Hillbow but a few titles do not a canon make.” Can’t find 10 books? I can think of 10 author’s that fit the bill: Consuelo Roland, Ivan Vladislavic, Susan Mann, Marlene van Niekerk, Niq Mhlongo, Ingrid Winterbach, Aryan Kaganof, Zakes Mda, Imraan Coovadia and Nadine Gordimer immediately come to mind. I’m not sure I quite get the point:
I spent Wednesday night at The Hyatt Hotel in Rosebank eating “Indian-ish” food at radio talk show host Jenny Cryws-Williams’ book club surrounded by lots of wine-quaffing and martini-drinking (mostly) women. (Note to the Hyatt: I am not sure you should be serving “Indian-ish” food.) The guest speaker was Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat based in Pretoria who wrote the novel Q&A, a runaway bestseller that has been translated into more than 30 languages and is being made into a film. He has just released his second book, Six Suspects and is already considering offers for the film rights.
Then, in her post Writers in trouble, or just living in troubled times she reflects on the recent Sunday Times Literary Awards and says: “South African writing is flourishing with more novels being published than ever before and yet having followed its rise I can’t help feeling disappointed in its “un-Africaness”, it’s seeming dislocation from place and time, its lack of experimentation with form.”
Indeed we are seeing more and more “un-Africaness” (is that in concert with or in contrast to “Indian-ish”?) in local titles – think Michiel Heyns, Sarah Lotz, and recent JM Coetzee; and we’re seeing books like Alex Smith’s Drinking from the Dragon’s Well that treat home and away in ways that expand upon and and contextualise both:
The Sunday Times book awards were held at Summer Place on Saturday night. I used to be an organiser and now have joined the ranks of the guests — which I have to say is infinitely more pleasant as I didn’t have to sweat any of the detail. The theme of the night was “Writers in Troubled Times” and it left me wondering why South Africa’s writers seem so dislocated from the place, mostly unable or unwilling to engage with this country or to attempt to define some part of it.
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August 5th, 2008 @13:48 #
I think her complaint about the food is that it is Indian-NISH, and therefore not Indian or SA-Indian enough. She could be wrong in that what she thinks is Indian-NISH might quite be Indian-Indian, and therefore unfamiliar to a palate used to SA-Indian. Hard to say. She should describe the food or make it plain, etc.
I take some of her criticism about the literature, but yes, serious gaps, and it can hardly be said that early Coetzee only has 'whispers' of South Africanness, etc. Makes one think what she means by South Africanness.
I take her broad points about post-independence literature, though, although, of course, Kelwyn Sole points out in a recent essay that poetry is where most of the post-independence critique has been taking place, rather than in prose.
August 5th, 2008 @14:05 #
Your comments are interesting and provocative, Laurice, and set me thinking about how different a global landscape post-independence Zimbabwe was born into, compared to South Africa. The grand narratives of nation and state still held some validity and writers - like the Zimbabwean authors you mention and others in other African countries certainly engaged with them. I think that South AFrican writers now are trying to cope with a very different framing of stories and politics. Our (or mine) sense of the world is very fragmented, the notions of the state is no longer an easy literary home to turn to for an authorative and containing moral structure and the problems of poverty and urban/rural dislocation seem to have so many permutations, so many globalised issues over which we feel powerless, the little people cats-pawed by fate. I remember thinking that when I read Kiran Desai’s lovely, moving book last year. There is fluffy genre literature, yes, but there is also an increasing amount of literature that tries to engage with the urban realities of South AFrica - often using very individualises responses, and points of view. This turnign away from the grander post-colonial narrative forms can be read as political in itself. One of the curious things about South Africa is both how distinct it is, and how indistinct as yet another developing nation scrabbling to make it in a brutal, global economy. Perhaps the taking up of conventional forms, of what the Americans call ‘genre literature’ is an unconscious experiment with finding places in which we fit. I write in a genre myself - and it was one I chose because it woudl allow me to parachute my writing into a violent, urban present. I am half way through my third book now and I find it curious to work through what works about the form of a crime novel - an investigation of a specific crime, a specific set of damaged ‘little people’ - and which parts of the form do not work. those i adapt and change. But there is also something comforting about fitting this fractured country into a form that works in other places too. When I interview people and do my research and then try and fit that into the particular (admittedly jaundiced and violent) view I have on the place where I live, I am always struck the intimacy of people’s experience of fear and violence and love. the shaping of our history is there but it is a challenge (for me at any rate) to try and show how that works out in one life, one body, one experience.
August 5th, 2008 @14:43 #
i like her ideas on Indian writing a lot - i mostly read post-colonial writers. but the debate needs an addition, it is short-sighted.
in my opinion (and i have only recently formed this opinion) we are not strictly a post-colonial country. we had a bit of a hiccup in that transition (40 odd years is more like asphixiation_). and so we find our questions are not about who am / are we / after the colonisers left us/ were kicked out,
but who are we when there are so many pieces of us lying around. so the writing is disparate, and a distinctive style is only being formed, and it is being formed in a post-post modern environment when teh self is mroe important than state. (thank god, hahah. no communist jokes please).
so in our writing we examine where/ how/ why it fits in to our own lives (it being South Africa) and therefore use a model that will fit in with our own writing. hence, Margie, your structure of the crime novel to understand South Africa (probably largely due to your feelings on the violence of crime and probably dismay at the lack of cohesion within actual reality) asks you to make sense of it through a personal choice of medium, a framework that makes sense. the crime novel is perfect for that. and Rustum you probably have questions about the concept of South Africa and so turn to poetry where large ideas can be crystallised.
which makes the whole idea of SOuth African-ness v dated and to my ear, rather nationalist. my south-africanness is personal, and i have only come to accept this because my friends and i have had to agree on something, so we have to agree that our opinions on this topic are (deeply) personal.
ultimately, our own term will be formed, because even tho the mighty UK had a hand in our development, the "legacy of... " came after that and no other country has had the same pattern as us. Think of magic realism's roots with Latin America and soon there will be a title that unites us, making people who like titles happy so that we can all be disseminated and taught back to each other in the future :)
i am rather excited
August 5th, 2008 @15:21 #
Yes, I agree Kathryn. It is all in flux given SA's late step into the postcolonial world (or as Benita Parry insisted, the late-colonial world). Also, we all know how elusive the great [insert national identity] novel is, but I think the original blogger, Laurice Taitz, is talking more about lines of authenticity - irrespective of reach and genre - and she is also commenting on political content (general lack thereof), which I think is an interesting point of cultural analysis, thus my reference to the Kelwyn Sole essay: if you are looking for strong critiques of new-South Africa, look to poetry, rather than prose. One of Sole's larger points is that, in terms of cultural analysis and political art, prose seems blind to larger political problems in SA, content, as you say, with exploring the individual's place in the nation-building story.
What I take from his essay is that, if one only looked at prose in South Africa, one would come away with a sense that there is no trenchant critique of the ANC government, while in poetry such critique obtains (Sole's survey of the field is, as always, magisterial; the essay is called "‘THE DEEP THOUGHTS THE ONE IN NEED FALLS INTO’: Quotidian experience and the perspectives of poetry in post-liberation South Africa"; I have a draft version so I have no idea where it was published).
Which of course brings us to SA's exhaustion with political art, but that is another debate.
August 5th, 2008 @15:55 #
Not sure why, but this about Iris Murdoch just came to mind, quoted from Peter J Conradi's Iris Murdoch: A Life
"The Troubles were the one topic that could move her to tears of anger and distress. "One's heart is broken over Ireland," she once wrote.
In October 1979, in her journal, she noted approvingly a letter from the writer Honor Tracy, who, though Catholic, wrote: "The amount of sheer humbug is breath-taking, and when you think what it has lost in lives and cripplings and blindings. But you know all this." Murdoch was able henceforth wildly to lose her temper about Ireland. After they had argued about Ireland in 1983, she wrote to one old friend, the philosopher Mary Midgley, to defend Paisley, who, said Murdoch, "sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12-15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul I'm afraid." She now evinced the laager-mentality of the Ulster Protestant who, she felt, had no hinterland, unlike Northern Irish Catholics. No occasion is recorded on which she allowed that the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had, in 1968, distinct and legitimate grievances.
Ireland became "unthinkable". It was certainly unwriteable. She tried in early drafts of The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) to confront within it an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant, but the story took off in a different direction. Labour policy on Northern Ireland was a leading cause in her voting Tory in the 1980s. In 1982 she remarked, "It's a terrible thing to be Irish." In The Sea, The Sea (1978) the Northern Irish character Peregrine Arbelow, before his death at the hands of an unidentified sniper, says that "being Irish is so 'awful' that even being Scottish is better". In July 1985, after gaining an honorary DLitt at Trinity College Dublin, Murdoch wrote, "I am always disturbed by visiting Ireland - demonic island, so charming & so mad". Yet, though she lived in England for most of her life, she saw herself as part of the literary and intellectual tradition that produced Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Goldsmith, Yeats and Bowen - all of whom, as Foster argues, epitomised Irish modes of expression while living in England and "regretting Ireland".
In 1978 Murdoch stated, "My Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense... People sometimes say to me rudely, 'Oh! You're not Irish at all!' But of course I'm Irish. I'm profoundly Irish and I've been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers."
I feel profoundly South African, although I feel free to write about whatever and wherever I choose... also the experience of dislocation is so common ... profoundly African, in fact.
August 5th, 2008 @16:43 #
Alex, yes, from a writer's perspective, I couldn't agree more, and that is certainly how I see myself: I have certainly not let my writing be governed by a national story. When national topics appear, they appear because I want to write about.
But I want to make a distinction between the above and what one sees when one looks at national culture (i.e. cultural trends in the nation). And I think this distinction often gets blurred when one talks about these matters.
September 30th, 2008 @07:51 #
"At the risk of cementing my status as one of the seven dwarves I am venturing back into an argument I started a few weeks..." ago.http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/somethingtodo/2008/09/30/junot-diaz-gets-my-vote/#more-75