Alert! Don’t Africans get it by now? Never trust a Naipaul. Not under any circumstances, not even if you’re Winnie Mandela, and if the Naipaul in question is merely a Naipaul by marriage, being the wife of the big fish, VS.
You’ll recall that the literary Naipauls visited South Africa in July last year – VS to conduct research on a new book, and Nadira, presumably, to clear a path for the great man in whatsoever direction he should step.
Turns out the Lady Naipaul had more in mind than accompaniment, however, but had also packed her gossip’s hat. She’s now published a kiss-and-tell account of an afternoon at the Soweto mansion of the “mystifying Winnie Mandela” that quotes the latter extensively, and none too flatteringly, about former president Nelson Mandela.
Did the Naipauls rock up at Winnie’s door the same day that they visited the Hector Pieterson memorial (as pictured above)? It would seem likely – the one’s a stone’s throw from the other. What’s less certain is whether their wide-ranging convo with the mother of the nation – which traversed the Stompie murder, the TRC, Nelson’s Nobel peace prize, and more – was on or off the record. Given VS’s initial reluctance to make the visit, as reported by his wife, one suspects that it might not have been strictly “on”. In which case, there’s suddenly much surplus egg for the conditioning of Winnie’s “uncreased brown face [which has] lost the softness”.
Africans, never trust a Naipaul – not even if they’re married to a living legend like you:
Winnie brought up his name very casually, as if it was of no real value to her: not any more.
“This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family. You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died. Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle, and there were others in the leadership too, like poor Steve Biko, who died of the beatings, horribly all alone. Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out,” she said, looking to the writer. He said nothing but listened.
It is hard to knock a living legend. Only a wife, a lover or a mistress has that privilege. Only they are privy to the intimate inner man, I thought.
“Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded.”
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:
**
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.
**
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:
**
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.
**
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! What the heck is going on with the Google Books settlement (news – settlement homepage)?? It’s complicated. Let me ’splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
We last reported on the ongoing digitization/copyright saga in September, when SA legal eagle Bertus Preller advised authors not to opt out of the settlement, because doing so would limit their options further down the line.
It’s now further down said line, but everything remains, George Clooney-style, up in the air – largely because the deal that Google hammered out with the USA’s Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers to compensate writers whose books were digitized without their consent is under legal challenge from several quarters. As Softpedia.com puts it:
All the tension built up in the Google Books case over the years is not going to be dispelled as the judge presiding has delayed a ruling claiming that the matter is too complex and he wanted to hear the opinions and complaints of all the parties involved in the issue. As such, the settlement deal between Google and publishers is still in limbo as Judge Denny Chin is holding on making a decision.
The USA’s National Writers Union is one party pressing judge Chin to scrap the settlement and force Google to negotiate anew. They issued this press release related to the current hearing:
The National Writers Union today asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to reject the amended settlement agreement of the lawsuit by the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google Inc.
“The proposed settlement is fundamentally flawed, is unfair to writers and violates copyright law,” said Larry Goldbetter, president of the National Writers Union. “The settlement would allow Google to use copyright-protected work unless authors ‘opt out’ of the agreement, even though established copyright law protects an author’s work without requiring the writer to
negotiate with or notify Google.
“The NWU also contends that the Authors Guild represents only a small fraction of the writers in America and the Court should recognize that thousands of authors and numerous writers’ organizations have said that the Guild doesn’t and can’t adequately represent their interests,” he said.
Goldbetter said that NWU member and renowned science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin presented a petition urging the Court to reject the proposed settlement. In the petition, signed by 367 authors, Le Guin wrote, “We cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right to it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control.”
One of the NWU’s representatives, Susan E Davis, was at the hearing; she circulated an email afterwards that gave the positions of several of the parties, focusing on those against the settlement. Her notes make for interesting reading, so we reproduce them here in full:
Judge Denny Chin announced at the beginning that he was not going to rule on the case today and that he had observed recurrent themes on both sides of the question. It was hard to tell from his questions what his postion was on the settlement.
The 5-minute statements were divided into three groups: supporting (5), opposing (22), and parties to the settlement (3), showing, not surpisingly, very strong, diverse oppostion to GBS.
Supporting GBS (spoke first): Of the five in support: Howard University Law School applauded the GBS because it would “even the playing field and provide access to millions of books.” Sony thought it would increase competitiion re e-books (it has an e-reader). The National Federation for the Blind liked the fact that the GBS would provide access to millions of books that the blind do not currently have access to. The University of Michigan Library, representing the other big 10 libraries and those at Chicago and Stanford, supported the GBS as being “vital to academic research” and broadening the “scholarly record.”
Opposing GBS: I’m going to group together and summarize some of the 16 comments that I heard.
1. Ron Lazebnik, who represented the NWU, ASJA and SFWWA, did a credible job representing writers’ interests. He characterized the GBS as a legal case that had morphed into a business plan that endanged writers’ rights. He made two major points: (1) He noted that because 4,400 authors and publishers had opted out of the GBS with a total of 1.1 million books the majority of those opting out must be publishers. But that was a problem because it meant that publishers were interested in asserting their rights to out-of-print books. But the fact is that rights to out-of-print books tradtionally belong to authors, not publishers, which presented a problem for writers. (2) He pointed out that most out-of-print books were published before 1987 when e-rights were not specified in book contracts. Therefore the right to publish e-books belongs solely to authors and not to publishers. So the provision in the GBS which calls for a split in royalities for e-books between authors and publishers is totally unreasonable and unfair to authors, who must have total control of their e-rights.
2. Amazon talked about how the GBS was unlawful because it defied copyright law when it did not solicit authors’ permission to scan in advance. Lawyer Cox made the point that the major change needed was that the opt-out feature needed to be an opt-in feature. (He also noted invasion of privacy issues related to Google Buzz.) A number of others called for changing the GBS to an opt-in situation.
3. The Open Book Alliance (of which the NWU is a member) called the GBS an anti-trust conspiracy if Google is allowed to have monopoly control over 170 million books which it has scanned or intends to scan.
4. Microsoft argued that only Congress is mandated by the constitution to change copyright law, that Google had engaged in the most massive case of infringement in history, and that it opposed the GBS because it gave Google the exclusive right to digititize every book published since 1923. (Other speakers noted that Microsoft had followed customary copyright procedures of obtaining authors’ permission before digitizing their work.) Consumer Watchdog, which stressed the court doesn’t have the right to change copyright law, only Congress does, said the issues in the GBS should be dealt with in a public debate such as that in Congressional hearings.
5. Pam Samuelson, representing academic authors, talked to the need of follow the “open access model” for dealing with orphan works. She too stressed the need for Congress to make laws governing the digitization of out-of-print books and said accepting the GBS would set a dangerous precident.
6. A number of foreign governments opposed the GBS — Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Sweden, and New Zealand — opposed the GBS because it defied copyright provisions of the Berne Convention and various World Trade Organization provisions widely respected by those and other countries. The speaker warned that if the GBS was accepted, the U.S. risked being sued by the WTO. The Japan PEN Club opposed the GBS because it did not protect writers’ freedom of expression and right to control their own work.
7. A number of lawyers spoke on behalf of themselves as writers or of groups of individual writers and characterized the GBS as deeply unfair to writers for a number of reasons: (1) inadequate notice to writers, (2) not in keeping with class-action law because of inadequate notice, and (3) “woefully inadequate compensation” for insert authors and stressed that “named authors have not fairly represented other authors” (a real dig at the Authors Guild).
8. A lawyer representing a publisher spoke about how Google had not given the publisher a list of the publisher’s books it had digitized, but had expected the publisher to assemble such a list in order to send a notice to its authors. The lawyer complained that that put a huge, unanticipated financial burden on the publisher to supply such notice.
8. Other speakers stressed that the GBS was not in the public interest because it did not protect reader privacy or confidentiality.
9. AT&T said the GBS gave Google a monopoly and it was interested in “robust competition.”
And that was only half of the testimony!
Susan E. Davis
Book Division Co-Chair
New York Chapter Vice Chair
The upshot of all the backing-and-forthing, it would seem – and please don’t take this as legal advice, because we ain’t lawyers at BOOK SA – is that authors should continue to sit tight until Chin has made a ruling. That is, if you haven’t opted-out of the Google Books settlement yet, per Preller’s 2009 notes, then you should probably continue to not do so, until the world has a better idea of whether the settlement will survive this legal challenge intact, or require serious re-negotiation. So it looks like there’s still plenty of time for dilly-dallying.
Your comments on all things Google Books welcome below.
Alert! According to CubaVeritas, Nadine Gordimer, who is attending the Havana International Book Fair, has waded into Cuban-American politics by issuing a statement on the “Cuban Five” – a group of spies who infiltrated Cuban exile groups in the USA, were arrested by the FBI, and are serving out life sentences in stateside maximum security prisons.
Gordimer has lauded the Cuban Five for “fighting terrorism” – her statement makes the point that the Cuban exile groups are “responsible for numerous violent actions… [that have] resulted in 3,478 dead and have left 2,099 people permanently disabled” – and has decried the “psychological and moral torture” that the group has suffered “in the hands of US legal authorities”. Her declaration reinforces calls by others to grant visas to the wives of of the Five.
Here is Gordimer’s statement in full, as reported by Cuba Veritas:
Yesterday, Tuesday February 16, I met with relatives of the five Cuban political prisoners held in US jails for over 11 years. I have had firsthand experience of the drama these families are suffering. I was given the following information as confirmation of what I already had obtained.
On June 16th and 17th, 1998, the Cuban government invited two important FBI officials to hand them documents with evidences on dangerous activities done by several persons residing in Florida and seriously implicated in terrorist actions against Cuba. Up until now, none of them have been questioned by US authorities despite the evidence placed in the hands of the FBI.
Three months later, on September 12th, 1998, the FBI arrested five Cubans: Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and René González. Crime committed? That of infiltrating, at the risk of their own lives, the Cuban exile groups responsible for numerous violent actions which have put an end to the lives of many innocent people. Since 1959, terrorist actions against the Cuban people have resulted in 3,478 dead and have left 2,099 people permanently disabled.
After a legal process, presenting several legal violations, the five Cubans were sentenced, collectively, to four life sentences plus 77 years, for fighting terrorism. For over 11 years now, they have been imprisoned in 5 different maximum security prisons.
These five Cubans have been the victims of cruel and inhumane treatment. From day one of their arrests until February 3rd, 2000, i.e. for over 17 months, they have been in solitary confinement, with no contact with other prisoners or even guards.
On May 27th, 2005, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention denounced the “arbitrary” detention of the Cuban five, stating that it was a violation of international norms and demanded a new trial.
On August 9th 2005, three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, with 80 years of accumulated experience, unanimously decided to declare the original verdict null and requested a new trial.
On September 28th, 2005, the US government asked the full Court of Appeals, made up by twelve judges, to reconsider the decision of August 8th, 2005, a very uncommon action, according to US legal experts.
On August 9th, 2006, after strong political pressures, the Atlanta Court of Appeals reversed the decision by the three judges and sent the case once again to a panel.
On August 20th, 2007, the defense launched a new appeal process. In 2008, a panel formed by three judges from the Atlanta Court of Appeals ratified the guilty verdict for the five Cubans, confirming the sentences imposed against Gerardo and Rene and annulled the sentences for Ramon, Antonio and Fernando because they were considered incorrect, thus sending the cases of these three Cubans to the Miami District Court for re-sentencing.
On that occasion the Appeals Court in full acknowledged there was no evidence whatsoever on the obtainment or transmission of secret information or of a national defense nature.
In 2009, the US Supreme Court, based on a request by the Obama Administration, rejected the possibility of revising the case.
The statements made by the relatives of the five Cubans give proof of the psychological and moral torture they have been suffering in the hands of US legal authorities. Olga Salanueva, wife of René González, as well as Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo Hernández, have not been yet authorized to visit their love ones. On June 25th, 2002, Adriana Pérez was finally granted a US visa to visit her husband in Los Angeles. But upon her arrival in the United States, she was detained by the FBI, interrogated for 11 hours and then expelled to Cuba without seeing Gerardo. Adriana has not been able to see Gerardo for over 11 years and Olga has not seen Rene for over 10 years. Such a cruel act is unacceptable.
Now, after meeting the relatives of the five Cubans I have been able to assess the dignity and staunchness of the mothers and wives who have suffered, with striking strength of character this inhumane abuse for over a decade now.
I would like to add my voice to the petition for justice for these five innocent Cubans. I request President Obama for their immediate release. I appeal to citizens from all over the world: it is time to put an end to the torment these five Cubans and their relatives are suffering.
Nadine Gordiner
Havana, February 17th, 2010.
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Alert! Here’s something to make you smile on a Monday afternoon. Maybe. JM Coetzee recently took part in the Adelaide Writers’ Week Down Under, where he was tasked with introducing several writers, including Britain’s Geoff Dyer (who’s not, gentle reader, to be confused with the Aussie painter Geoffrey Dyer).
