Wednesday’s evening’s Book Lounge launch of Breyten Breytenbach’s Notes from the Middle World, a collection of controversial essays, was a riveting affair.
The conversation with poet Rustum Kozain – who was lauded as the leading cultural commentator following his recent deconstruction of Richard Poplak’s take on Die Antwoord – covered a broad reach of supremely pertinent topics, framed by trenchant and far-reaching questions.
In a fitting opening the author issued a generous acknowledgement that resonated through the substantial crowd: “This kind of bookstore is so precious and so wonderful. There are so few of them left in the world.”
Kozain, who has been reading Breytenbach’s books since he was a 14-year-old, claimed some anxiety about interviewing the author that so many South Africans love to hate. Breytenbach conceded a measure of nervousness of his own, but having noticed in the audience the advocate who’d saved him from many more years in jail back in the days, he was not concerned that anything too dire was imminent.
Kozain’s response to the essays and his questions reflected a deeply considered and empathic reading of the collection. He noted that this work could be viewed as the literature of witness, representing “multiple cries of despair and rage against the panoply of cultural stupidities, locally and internationally”. He asked, “What is the force that drives you to bear witness when you are exhausted by the overwhelming stupidities that confound you? Is it intellectual honesty or a personal drive to self-confession about the nature of bearing witness?”
Breytenbach noted that this book was not only about what is happening in South Africa, although many sense it as such. “I’m wanting to not write about South Africa now; I sensed I’ve reached a point of satiation where I’m just picking at a scab. In my case, I’m not sure I have much to contribute any more.”
He talked about his sense of being a writer in the contemporary world. “I grew up in a time where I was heavily influenced by those who were engaged in the what was happening in the world: Paris in the ’60s was hugely wonderful. Things were still alive, there was international solidarity and intelligent discourse. I had a long list of literary ancestors I hoped to live up to: Fanon, Camus. But I walked into many stupid situations, got involved with politics, and that’s never really gone away.”
He observed that the country is “nowhere close to what we could be and that rankles the most”. He urged writers to keep reinventing themselves, to keep exploring the interface between belonging and not belonging, to continue to reassert the “moral imagination” as they explore the ideological blindness that refuses to incorporate poor people under the current dispensation.
“Writers need to continue exploring the fine line between ethics and morals. We must establish the difference between politically correct and sloganised writing so that the words we write possess soul. We have to write with emotional gravity; with moral and ethical responsibility. What’s the use of the mind – that immensely powerful entity – if you can’t even change it?”
Watch four video clips from the occasion:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umG67cHP1I[/youtube]
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Facebook gallery
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Hello Nigeria! has been the sense on the ground since word broke of Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s dismissal of a photography exhibition at Constitution Hill as “pornographic” and “immoral”.
Penny Siopis voiced her dismay. Bongi Bhengu, curator of the exhibition held in August last year, and photographer Zanele Muholi, have responded to the schizophrenogenic insult.
Xingwana’s disingenuous response inspires little optimism. She claims, “I was not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies’ in the images were of men or women”. Oh, sister, did they pluck out your eyes? Are you also the victim of hate crimes? What will it take for you to look?
One can’t help wondering what her budgeteers have told her about the forthcoming slew of South African authors attending the London Book Fair, some of them on her coin.
Special to BOOK SA, Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist, unpacks the Minister’s recent utterances, pondering the meaning of the Xingwana’s stance for practitioners of the written word – particularly those in the LGBTI community:
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One name came to mind as I read the article in The Times: Eudy Simelane.
For a government minister to accuse women who love women of being destructive to nation building is dangerous discrimination. Discriminatus: to be in a state of separation. Set apart…Need I say more?
And I seem to recall the only too recent linking of intimacy with immorality and nationalism. Will the Minister strike a special squad? Why, it could be called the Immorality Squad.
Perhaps a key procedural question is: Can a government minister be so cavalier about a nation’s hard won Constitution? Surely such cavalier disregard is unconstitutional, which is to say dismissive of the foundation of rule and law that is a nation’s highest aspiration. A Constitution is, or we hope it is, where the idea of nation resides and is imagined, in the articles of law that protect us all from each other and even from ourselves (as when we are moved by any unexamined discriminatory impulse). Is there not an oath that a minister swears?
Can a government minister, a leader of an elected government, elected according to the provisions of a Constitution, be dismissive of her/his Constitution? If the answer is yes then everyone, but everyone, must be afraid. If the answer is no, we are talking about unconstitutional declarations.
Pornographic? How quickly that word came up. And how revealing. Perhaps the meaning of pornography that comes immediately to mind is that which refers to the explicit display of sexual subjects to explicitly arouse the viewer sexually, and for the personal gain of the pornographer. This is clearly not the case in these photographs. They are moving, yes, in very, very different ways from what the Minister clearly thought.
This is a very touchy subject, but one issue about pornography is the way that it renders feminine and feminized subjects as the passive, mindless players in a script that cares nothing for them as people. Zaneli Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo produce caring, respectful, mindful images that are critically aesthetic. I don’t have to rehearse a long history of portrayals of bodies that have nothing to do with pornography even if they show the erotic (the erotic is not divorced from the aesthetic in the portraits I am thinking of, and that is why they are not reductive and pornographic).
Porno: from prostitute. Graphos: to write. To depict (only) the body vacated of all interiority that is not relevant to sex.
The images that Muholi and Mntambo create are explicitly caring of their subjects. They show love. And sexuality. Not simply sex. There is a difference. With due respect to the Minister, to reduce someone to sexual object alone is to misread.
While we are all invited to be viewers, as the artist is herself, not all viewers see pornographically. The risk that the artist and her subjects take is that she and they cannot predict or control the fact that some viewers only see women’s bodies as displayed for pleasure no matter what the artistic intent is, or that some viewers would only see the erotic and not the aesthetic.
Discrimination is pornographic in the extended usage of the term. The extended meaning pornography that is so often overlooked is the pornography of violence. Discrimination is violence because, outspoken, it has a purpose. Its purpose is to illicit or stimulate reaction and further discrimination. In the Minister’s case, such outspoken statements are clearly able to ’stimulate’ action even at a bureaucratic level as, according to The Times, some of the Minister’s remarks imply.
The Times reported the Minister as demanding to know why the exhibition “was not censored and why her department had contributed R300,000 to it” (let all of the participants be warned-there is no freedom of association, they are all implicated and that is the real unraveling power of discrimination; it cannot stop at one group, it can only begin to look at anyone associated with that group). Discrimination is pornographic because it incites social, political, unconstitutional violence.
And in a context in which homophobia has already targeted women who love women, the Minister’s statements are not simply unfortunate. They are downright dangerous. I say this name here and we should all inhale and have a moment’s silence: Eudy Simelane.
South Africa is preparing for the World Cup Soccer. Whether one is a fan of soccer or not, or a sports minded person or not, soccer has been described (by Achille Mbembe for one) as a sport that cuts across race, class, ethnic and, to some extent, gender boundaries. Bafana Bafana is hailed as a team that brings positive attention to South Africa.
Eudy Simelane’s team, Banyana Banyana, has represented South Africa internationally and South Africans were very happy to cheer them on and send them off under the flag. They play as South Africans, members of the nation that their parents worked to bring into being, and that they are proud to represent. Eudy Simelane played as a South African, as someone who helped bring positive attention to the nation in Cyprus, in Holland and they have their eye set on Germany 2011.
A visit to Banyana Banyana’s facebook shows such statements as “Go play with pride for our motherland” and “do us proud” or “go make South Africa proud and lets do our best.” This is the language of inclusion. It is exactly the expression of “social cohesion and nation building.” Or is this not the kind of social cohesion and nation building that the Minister envisages?
Let me stress that I am not suggesting that all of the women in Banyana Banyana love as Eudy Simelane did. I was drawing attention to her participation in this team’s achievements, which, for the team’s considerable fan base, reflect positively upon the nation. And I was drawing attention to the fact that her team members accepted and valued her for the fully rounded, fully contributing person that she was.
But, in truth, it should not be necessary to marshal Eudy Simelane’s role in Banyana Banyana’s achievements as evidence in order to counter the implication that someone like her could/should be discriminated against or singled out as being an improper citizen or, worse, be accused of being a presence that threatens social and national cohesion.
If this were true, there could be no single nation existing on the face of this planet because gays and lesbians are a fact. We are here. We contribute. We believe. We serve our communities, our nations. We love each other. We love in complex ways. We love with all our hearts and minds, with our bodies. We pay the price for love. We cannot, ever, take our love for granted. And we therefore are very, very mindful and careful about squander. Love can never be squandered. Never. The squandering of love is hateful because hate fills the place where love should be.
It might not be the Minister’s intention to incite violence, but the cold and deadly fact is that her statements would be welcome among those who seek to justify their violence. They already believe themselves sanctioned by all the hoary, spurious biology about gays and lesbians.
I am tired of being scapegoated. But my weariness is a privileged, lucky distance from what happened to Eudy Simelane. It is a distance that should not be a privilege or luck. It should be the right it is. A Constitution says that. And the Minister is sworn to uphold the Constitution. A Minister is sworn to put into practice the ideals that have liberated a country and leave them to be dead letters of law.
Why am I still being so over polite about this business? Is the Minister ashamed of South Africa’s Constitution? Shame on the Minister. Shame.
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In a second piece special to BOOK SA, poet and academic Gabeba Baderoon writes “On Looking and Not Looking”, an open letter responding to the Minister’s comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition:
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On Looking and Not Looking
by Gabeba Baderoon
Dear Minister Xingwana,
To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art.
Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation.
Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography.
Minister, where does this language come from?
When you turn to such justifications for your actions, it is our duty as artists, writers, feminists and citizens to point out how revealingly close your words are to those of the apartheid censors.
Artists and governments have always had a contentious relationship. Artists can reach into the minds of people and change them. That is a power that states are wary of and want to regulate. But to constrict art is to erase the capacity for imagining what does not yet exist. We need that capacity because our world is imperfect and we need brilliant, epiphanic initiatives if we are to succeed in changing it. Art generates epiphanies.
So let us name what happened in that brief glance, that instantaneous assessment, that abrupt walking out, and the explanations from your office that followed. Let us name it and its dangers.
The name is censorship, and the dangers are reactionary ideas about art and the fueling of homophobia.
Fortunately, there is another language for thinking about art and artists.
Minister, what would you have seen if you had stayed and viewed the works of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi alongside all the other artists in the Innovative Women exhibition and talked about them with other visitors?
You would have seen works that use the language of allusion, intimacy, beauty and pleasure.
During your brief glance, you may have mistaken the intimacy in Muholi’s images for pornography and the erudite allusions in Mntambo’s work for carelessness about sexual violence, but that mistake can only be sustained if you don’t truly look at their art. If you stood in front of Muholi’s photographs, you would see lesbian lives outside of the narratives of violation and pornography through which they are more commonly presented to us. You would see how her work opens up a discussion about visibility itself.
For lesbians, visibility carries an immense cost – the feminist writer Pumla Gqola calls this a “hyper-visibility” that has been used to violate lesbian lives through a sensationalistic focus on suffering that has simultaneously made it possible to ignore that suffering. Muholi’s images confront such hyper-visibility and reclaim a space for the women in her photographs away from denigration and hostility and toward presence, pleasure and wholeness. Her work show us there is no category of human being whom it is safe to despise and whose hurt it is expedient to ignore.
And once the photos existed and came into public view, other good followed. Some of the best new South African writing on art, citizenship and belonging has been sparked by Muholi’s work, including essays by Desiree Lewis, Pumla Gqola and Gabi Ngcobo. You might be pleased to know, Minister, that this new direction has also been traced by a vanguard of the African continent’s finest feminist scholars, among them Sylvia Tamale, Patricia McFadden and Charmaine Pereira.
No artist is afraid of being a dissident to conventional thinking. That is their role. Mntambo, Muholi and other artists continuously spark our creative, ethical and political responses, but also our personal and affective ones. We envisage ourselves anew after their art enters our imaginations. If we see someone’s wholeness, can we continue to ignore their violation? The most radical possibility of art is to generate change – and in the process create a more inclusive notion of community.
Minister, perhaps unintentionally, your words have generated a great deal of alarm in the world of the arts and among those of us who strongly support the rights of gays and lesbians. We wonder if we are entering “our George Bush years,” as Gender Commissioner Yvette Abrahams asserted on hearing your comments.
I would like to imagine a different possibility, Minister. I want to imagine you will come back to the images you walked away from, and look deeply at what you thought you didn’t want to see. I imagine you rethinking received ideas about art and pornography (the great poet and activist Audre Lorde gives us some beautifully nuanced insights on this) and arriving at a hard-earned transformation.
I think of you reflecting on your responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s best impulses in art and culture – which is not to limit but to enable such work. Then perhaps this experience of looking again at the thing you didn’t want to see will have brought you closer to the best and most expansive possibilities of art.
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Should you feel disconsolate, dear reader, don’t do what I did. Avoid the comments from Joe Public on these articles, lest you find yourself compelled to vomit with grief.
We must ask once again: Minister, where does this language come from? Where indeed?
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Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini
Alert! SA born author Justin Cartwright has been named as one of three judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize, the £60 000 “alternative nobel” that’s awarded every two years. Chinua Achebe received the inaugural Man Booker International in 2007.
Here’s the press release from the Man Booker:
Press release
The judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize are announced today, Wednesday 3 March, 2010. Chaired by writer, academic and rare-book dealer Dr. Rick Gekoski, this eminent panel consists of publisher, writer and critic, Carmen Callil, and award-winning novelist, Justin Cartwright. Described by the Observer as “an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel”, the Prize has rapidly established itself as a leading accolade in the world literature arena.
Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the prize, comments:
“The three judges of the 2011 Man Booker International Prize are drawn from the world of letters around the globe. Between them they have a lifetime’s experience as writers, editors, publishers, academics and scholars, as well as readers, and will bring considerable knowledge, enthusiasm and a high standard of excellence to the task before them.”
The Man Booker International Prize recognizes one writer for his or her achievement in fiction. Worth £60,000 to the winner, the prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers. Alice Munro won the 2009 prize, Chinua Achebe the 2007 prize and Ismail Kadaré the inaugural prize in 2005. In addition, there is a separate award for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000.
The judges’ list of finalists, approximately fifteen writers under serious consideration for the prize, will be announced in spring 2011. The winner of the next Man Booker International Prize will be announced in early summer 2011. The prize will be presented at an awards ceremony in July 2011.
The prize is sponsored by Man Group plc, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.
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An excellent piece of personal-history reportage, set in 1962, brought to you by Guernicamag.com:
Casey McCormick caught up with Fiona Ingram to chat about her book, 
